NationStates

Feazanthia wrote:(he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it),

Feazanthia wrote:

You have to ask yourself - what advantage do they have over missiles or kinetic weapons of similar mass and cost?

What is to prevent your robots from being gutted by PD weapons before they get within a thousand kilometers of the target vessel, turning your expensive hardware into low velocity, really expensive kinetic dust?

What about shields?

They'd need sufficient velocity to avoid PD fire, but how do they slow down without being mostly propellant tanks, and how do they do it without being taken out by the PD fire they want to avoid in the first place?

In short - could it be done technically? Sure, probably. What you need to ask yourself is whether it's feasible. And to do that you need to analyze lethality divided by cost, and lethality divided by tonnage, and compare those to more mundane systems.


Edit: And don't forget that any starship worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum is going to have means to deal with both boarders and hull breaches. To even get to vulnerable crew sections and vent them, your robots are going to have to dig a lot. They'll need to dig even deeper to get at the real important hardware and personnel (he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it), all the while having to fend off armed naval personnel and any anti-boarding countermeasures the target may have installed, and that's after penetrating anywhere from several to several dozen layers of armor and hull.

Techno-Soviet is ranked 1st in the region and 326th in the world for Most Corrupt Governments.

Feazanthia wrote:You have to ask yourself - what advantage do they have over missiles or kinetic weapons of similar mass and cost?

Feazanthia wrote:What is to prevent your robots from being gutted by PD weapons before they get within a thousand kilometers of the target vessel, turning your expensive hardware into low velocity, really expensive kinetic dust?

What about shields?

Feazanthia wrote:They'd need sufficient velocity to avoid PD fire, but how do they slow down without being mostly propellant tanks, and how do they do it without being taken out by the PD fire they want to avoid in the first place?

Feazanthia wrote:In short - could it be done technically? Sure, probably. What you need to ask yourself is whether it's feasible. And to do that you need to analyze lethality divided by cost, and lethality divided by tonnage, and compare those to more mundane systems.

Feazanthia wrote:Edit: And don't forget that any starship worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum is going to have means to deal with both boarders and hull breaches. To even get to vulnerable crew sections and vent them, your robots are going to have to dig a lot. They'll need to dig even deeper to get at the real important hardware and personnel (he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it), all the while having to fend off armed naval personnel and any anti-boarding countermeasures the target may have installed, and that's after penetrating anywhere from several to several dozen layers of armor and hull.

Cyber Utopia wrote:I do have another question actually. I see most people have some sort of signature weapon, so I thought I'd come up with one. I was thinking of having small ships/big robots that fly towards an enemy vessel en masse and clamp themselves to it in blind spots, before making holes and allowing the vacuum of space to suck everything out.

Cyber Utopia wrote:Now, there's a lot of different armour types out there and a lot of are damn thick, so I was wondering what would be the best method of making the hole? Big drill or laser? Or something else I may not have considered?

Morningstar Coalition wrote:

Alright, first I'm gonna quote and respond to these out of order. I'm doing so because to a certain point I agree with Feaz here. He and I have similar views on technical accuracy in our RP. That said, I'm both able and willing to address and contemplate pure handwavium or SCIENCE! approaches to things. I'll even take an idea that sounds pure handwave or rule of cool, break that idea down, and lay it out just how that idea can be made practical.
In short, instead of telling you what you can and cannot have due to physics and science (as opposed to SCIENCE!), I am willing to tell you how you can make your fun ideas practical.

First off, let me start addressing Feaz's very important points...

Feazanthia wrote:You have to ask yourself - what advantage do they have over missiles or kinetic weapons of similar mass and cost?

Assuming I understand the basic concept of Cyber's nation right, his is a nation of cyborgs or transformer-style robots. If I am correct, then this alone suggests highly developed industrial and robotic sciences, to the point that they likely have industrial capacity more than sufficient to render objections of material costs very nearly negligible. Even the time and effort argument to cost can be mitigated to a massive degree by equally massive parallel industrial automation. When you have several thousand automated mining/refining plants, each feeding several thousand automated factories, you can pump out massive stockpiles of munitions. When you get to automation on this scale, then while the difference in "cost" is still there, the overall impact of that cost becomes less and less important to a military.

Feazanthia wrote:What is to prevent your robots from being gutted by PD weapons before they get within a thousand kilometers of the target vessel, turning your expensive hardware into low velocity, really expensive kinetic dust?

What about shields?

These are very important questions, and one which Cyber is going to have to address. Of course, these are also questions which must be answered for any weapons systems, not just "robots". Missiles must evade PD fire and penetrate shields. Even smaller munitions like mass driver shells can have problems with heavy PD and shields.

Feazanthia wrote:They'd need sufficient velocity to avoid PD fire, but how do they slow down without being mostly propellant tanks, and how do they do it without being taken out by the PD fire they want to avoid in the first place?

This is where I am going to irritate Feaz by deviating from strict RL physics/science. His objection here is dependent on a strict adherence to newtonian physics in spaceflight and drive types. Unfortunately for Feaz, and fortunately for Cyber, NS is a universe where Newton is not absolute (nor is Einstein). If you want to give smallcraft (fighters, mecha, unmanned robots, whatever) maximum maneuverability, and don't want to worry about running out of propellant... Then gravitic drives, or any other kind of reactionless drive is your answer.

What is a reactionless drive? In very simple terms, it is a drive system which allows you to change an object/craft's inertia without using the reaction of equal and opposite force (Throw something out the back of the ship, the ship moves forward). Most fictional reactionless drives use gravity in some fashion to change the ship's inertia, and how this is achieved is where we get to the realm of Hanwavium_Or_SCIENCE! (HoS), because we know of no way to do this with RL physics. Please note that reactionless drives still have to battle with momentum, so often these still resemble reaction drives, at least in their acceleration/deceleration profiles. The main advantage to reactionless is that the machine does not require any reaction mass, it only requires power. Thus your ship only requires whatever fuel the powerplant runs off of.
On the other hand, if you are willing to delve even deeper into HoS, there is the inertialess drive. This fictional machine uses unknown principles (Remember, it's a purely HoS device) to nullify the inertia of the craft (or else change that value to an imaginary value). With zero (or imaginary number) inertia, an object can use any other kind of propulsion (Reaction or reactionless) to accelerate at almost infinite rates (or at least whatever the absolute max acceleration is for that drive). With an inertialess drive, you could use a fire extinguisher to stop a Star Destroyer on a dime (exaggerated claim, please do not actually try this).

Either of these HoS drives could allow you to design robot attackers that can zip around the battlefield and get in close to targets (long as you obey the normal rules of freeform RP of course) while avoiding PD fire. You'll probably still need to use other weapons to take down or penetrate shield systems, but once the ship's armor/hull is vulnerable, you're golden.

Feazanthia wrote:In short - could it be done technically? Sure, probably. What you need to ask yourself is whether it's feasible. And to do that you need to analyze lethality divided by cost, and lethality divided by tonnage, and compare those to more mundane systems.

What you should have said here instead of feasible, is "Is this practical and cost-effective?"

Feazanthia wrote:Edit: And don't forget that any starship worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum is going to have means to deal with both boarders and hull breaches. To even get to vulnerable crew sections and vent them, your robots are going to have to dig a lot. They'll need to dig even deeper to get at the real important hardware and personnel (he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it), all the while having to fend off armed naval personnel and any anti-boarding countermeasures the target may have installed, and that's after penetrating anywhere from several to several dozen layers of armor and hull.

Feaz is pretty much right on the money here.
Mind you, not everyone designs their ships "sensibly", and even those that do design "sensibly" usually have different ideas of sensible, as well as different priorities.
I agree, any ship that puts it's command center anywhere near the outer hull deserves to have it shot off.
Another thing to beware of is funny people who routinely decompress their own ships as a preparation for combat. These kind of people pump their atmosphere into armored tanks deep inside the ship, to prevent explosive decompression as a result of battle damage.
Other people design massively redundant compartmentalization into their ships, allowing areas as small as a single room to isolate themselves from the rest of the ship with pressure doors in ever hatch, every vent/duct, every crawlspace, etc.
And then there are those that fill their ships with lots of stuff (soldiers, robots, weapons, ect) to fight off enemy boarders.
If your intent is to just punch a hole and wait for the decompression to suck everyone out, then both of the above will render your weapon useless. If your intent is to punch holes so you can get aboard, then this third thing will become a problem (not an impossible problem, but still a problem).

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Cyber Utopia wrote:I do have another question actually. I see most people have some sort of signature weapon, so I thought I'd come up with one. I was thinking of having small ships/big robots that fly towards an enemy vessel en masse and clamp themselves to it in blind spots, before making holes and allowing the vacuum of space to suck everything out.

Underlined the part I am addressing. If the weapon is designed to be most effective against targets that have blind spots (which suggests that the weapon cannot do well when it is seen), then your people are going to get their asses handed to them if they come across enemies which have no blind spots.

Cyber Utopia wrote:Now, there's a lot of different armour types out there and a lot of are damn thick, so I was wondering what would be the best method of making the hole? Big drill or laser? Or something else I may not have considered?

Alrighty then. I'm just speaking from my own experience here, but I've found that the best combination of simplicity and capability for burning/cutting/boring through enemy armor and hull is a high-density plasma torch. Take a reserve of compressed hydrogen along, heat it up to within the temperature of a star, and focus it into a nice cutting plume and even advanced HoS materials are still going to have a hard time keeping you out.
Remember that without HoS, plasma is a point-blank range weapon only.
If you don't want to use plasma torches, there's always the HoS option of some kind of molecular disruptor, or energy conversion, or antimatter breaching charges.

Morningstar uses devices simply called breaching charges. These are self-contained devices resembling the explosive "strips" SWAT teams use to blast holes in walls and doors. The top side is an armored plate that focuses the heat and blast from successive waves of explosives, mono-wire reels, and finally plasma torches.
There's a more advanced version called "coring charges". These resemble something I saw in the opening scenes of the second Triple X (XXX: State of the Union) movie. In the movie, agents placed these disc-shaped devices on the ground, which then used explosives to "tunnel" down into the ground to reach a hidden bunker underground. I'm still OOCly designing the coring charges for Morningstar, but they are intended to work much the same way. Slap them to the hull of a ship, then wait as they bore their way into the ship.
Course, this is all dependent on the other player allowing me to board his ship in the first place. So always remember that the rules of freeform trump each and every weapon system you can ever come up with.

Other people design massively redundant compartmentalization into their ships, allowing areas as small as a single room to isolate themselves from the rest of the ship with pressure doors in ever hatch, every vent/duct, every crawlspace, etc.

Feazanthia wrote:Also remember that while one player may decide that Sir Isaace Newton is not the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space, another player might.

For instance. My general strategy for dealing with boarders is to disable inertial dampeners in the affected section (if I use them at all) and kick up the acceleration, rendering most organic material into dense paste against the bulkhead regardless of armor. If someone tries to claim that handwavium and SCIENCE renders another person's (IMO more realistic) tactic irrelevant, they've effectively handed themselves an IWIN button. IGNORE cannons and cries of godmod go from there.

Then again you know my feelings towards reactionless drives. And again, if you can get something like a burrowing drone in close to a ship, you can get something much much deadlier there.

Techno-Soviet wrote:

Other people design massively redundant compartmentalization into their ships, allowing areas as small as a single room to isolate themselves from the rest of the ship with pressure doors in ever hatch, every vent/duct, every crawlspace, etc.

Also, give every sailor a selective semi-automatic/pump-action 16 gauge shotgun as a sidearm, that can fire high explosive and incendiary loads, as well as standard shot and slug loads.

o/

Feazanthia wrote:Also remember that while one player may decide that Sir Isaace Newton is not the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space, another player might.

For instance. My general strategy for dealing with boarders is to disable inertial dampeners in the affected section (if I use them at all) and kick up the acceleration, rendering most organic material into dense paste against the bulkhead regardless of armor. If someone tries to claim that handwavium and SCIENCE renders another person's (IMO more realistic) tactic irrelevant, they've effectively handed themselves an IWIN button. IGNORE cannons and cries of godmod go from there.

Then again you know my feelings towards reactionless drives. And again, if you can get something like a burrowing drone in close to a ship, you can get something much much deadlier there.

Feazanthia wrote:(he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it)

Clamparapa wrote:

Feazanthia wrote:(he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it)

Oh my, there quite a few flaws when it comes to sci-fi series and bridges. A notable one is a bridge of glass. That's right: glass.

North Mack wrote:

Clamparapa wrote:

Feazanthia wrote:(he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it)

Oh my, there quite a few flaws when it comes to sci-fi series and bridges. A notable one is a bridge of glass. That's right: glass.

Plasteel. Or any other variant thereof. Who says everything that is transparent is made of glass? Hell, we already have things like Aluminium oxynitride in modern tech. With the advancement of technologies odds say we'll only come up with stronger and better variants.

Clamparapa wrote:

North Mack wrote:

Clamparapa wrote:

Feazanthia wrote:(he who puts his bridge outside the primary hull is doomed to get A-wings flown into it)

Oh my, there quite a few flaws when it comes to sci-fi series and bridges. A notable one is a bridge of glass. That's right: glass.

Plasteel. Or any other variant thereof. Who says everything that is transparent is made of glass? Hell, we already have things like Aluminium oxynitride in modern tech. With the advancement of technologies odds say we'll only come up with stronger and better variants.

Bah, I remember watching anime shows and the clear stuff shattering like glass. :\

Solar Communes wrote:Five easy steps to have gravity in space without handwaving inertia or creating a Minovsky.

1) Design all your spacecrafts with a vertical layout of decks, as if they were the floors of a building, rather than as if they were decks of a seaborne ship.

2) Place the main engines in a perpendicular orientation of thrust to the decks

3) Travel at 1g acceleration most times.

4) ???

5) Profit

Arthropoda Ingens wrote:> Implying that Solar Communes cares about pedantic generalizations and detracting from the main subject of the previous quoted post

Balrogga wrote:Personally I like having a bridge sticking up out in plain sight.

Balrogga wrote:It draws attacks to it while the real bridge is buried in the center where it is safe.

Feazanthia wrote:Also remember that while one player may decide that Sir Isaace Newton is not the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space, another player might.

For instance. My general strategy for dealing with boarders is to disable inertial dampeners in the affected section (if I use them at all) and kick up the acceleration, rendering most organic material into dense paste against the bulkhead regardless of armor. If someone tries to claim that handwavium and SCIENCE renders another person's (IMO more realistic) tactic irrelevant, they've effectively handed themselves an IWIN button. IGNORE cannons and cries of godmod go from there.

Then again you know my feelings towards reactionless drives. And again, if you can get something like a burrowing drone in close to a ship, you can get something much much deadlier there.

Mini Miehm wrote:But what of my ACS, who have inertial compensators built into their suits? An early model survived something like a couple hundred gees for some ridiculously short fraction of a second, and kept the squishy bits inside the suit alive. Kinda. The description given indicates that he wasn't dead. Barely. Which, honestly, nuff said. He wasn't dead. Assuming you stick away from wanktacular accel rates, all you'll do is suck their batteries down marginally faster.

OMGeverynameistaken wrote:As was mentioned the last time this was brought up, doesn't pretty much everybody here use some sort of artificial gravity? Why much about with inertial dampers and accelerating and suchlike when you can just say, "Mr. Jenkins, compartment 3, turn the gravity in there up to 11 like a good chap. Tea, anybody?"

OMGeverynameistaken wrote:Boarding would only really be useful against small vessels, and maybe civilian space stations where large, open, areas would make such tactics unfeasible (at least to an opponent who minds killing a bunch of civvies to get your guys.) There's also the problem of disabled/surrendered enemy vessels, which might also present opportunity for boarding.

More or less the ONLY way to take an enemy capital ship would be to get to the bridge before they could issue a command to instakill your boarders. You'd probably have to simultaneously get engineering to prevent the chief engineer from venting the warp core into the ventilation system.

Solar Communes wrote:Five easy steps to have gravity in space without handwaving inertia or creating a Minovsky.

Solar Communes wrote:1) Design all your spacecrafts with a vertical layout of decks, as if they were the floors of a building, rather than as if they were decks of a seaborne ship.

For quite a while I was waffling between having my ship's decks laid out like a torus (Babylon 5 syle, rotational, with outwards as down), or building-style (aft is down). I finally settled on aft-down decks. It's rather useful layout even if you don't use reaction drive acceleration for pseudo-gravity.

You forgot to mention rotating your ships around center axis (with decks laid out to accommodate this) to get rotational pseudo-gravity.

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Balrogga wrote:Personally I like having a bridge sticking up out in plain sight. It draws attacks to it while the real bridge is buried in the center where it is safe. False targets take attacks away from vital areas and redirects it to a useless target. This allows the useless target to be blown to hell instead of your hull and if you wanted you could play dead to let the attacker get in close for a point blank attack if they think they took out your command gridge and believes they can capture the rest of your vessel intact.

Morningstar Coalition wrote:

OMGeverynameistaken wrote:Boarding would only really be useful against small vessels, and maybe civilian space stations where large, open, areas would make such tactics unfeasible (at least to an opponent who minds killing a bunch of civvies to get your guys.) There's also the problem of disabled/surrendered enemy vessels, which might also present opportunity for boarding.

More or less the ONLY way to take an enemy capital ship would be to get to the bridge before they could issue a command to instakill your boarders. You'd probably have to simultaneously get engineering to prevent the chief engineer from venting the warp core into the ventilation system.

This is also assuming that both players are only in it to be the victor of the engagement. If both players are playing good give and take with the story, we'd probably see more of the actual fighting to control the corridors (maybe shooting the gravity control equipment to disable it, or even knocking out power), or control those important places you just mentioned.
Now if we're talking from purely IC point of view, there could be any number of reasons why a ship couldn't just dial up the gravity in a specific location: Maybe it requires power urgently needed for shields/weapons? Perhaps the technology isn't able to create gravity fields smaller than a large portion of the ship? Maybe it requires massive computation power, which can't easily be spared?

Again, it comes back to the players cooperating to tell the story.