Argument Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[Telvira]

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

sig-worthy

[Cyber Utopia]

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.

Cheers for the response, the idea was more about ease of RP for me (and Rule of Cool) as I don't understand the technicalities behind things such as kinetic weapons. I mean, I have a rough grasp on how they work, but when it comes to stuff like velocity and different strengths of weapon I get lost. Because of that a weapon based more around creativity than science is something I'd prefer, but obviously I still want it to be at least semi-feasible. I'll give it some thought and stick to standard FT fare for now.

[Techno-Soviet]

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

You may now refer to me as the "The Money Grubbing Whoredom of the Soviet Technocracy".

Discuss.

[Morningstar Coalition]

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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).

---

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.

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.

[Cyber Utopia]

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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).

---

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.

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.

Thank you very much for the feedback MC. I think I'm going to go with them, but not as a main weapon. The flaws you pointed out mean they'll be more useful as a tool for harrassment than something that will effectively take things out. My original aim had been to decompress ships with them, but they might be of more use as breaching devices if a lot of people use the countermeasures you mentioned.

[Techno-Soviet]

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]

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.

[Cyber Utopia]

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.

Like I said, I'd probably use them to harrass ships rather than as a main weapon. And it all depends on who I'm RPing with. If I was RPing with you for instance, I'd try to adhere more to standard science. I'm not someone who likes to 'win' either, so having my tactics fail epicly is worth a change to the story's pace.

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/

\o couldn't leave ye hangin'.

[Mini Miehm]

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.

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]

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?"

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.

[Kilrany]

If I recall, one method to get around the whole increasing gravity on your ship in one area was used in the Andromeda TV series a lot, AG harnesses or something, but it's no less handwave then having inertial dampners to begin. I really don't see much of a reason against them though.

At the same time I am of the opinion that the only time you're ever going to board an enemy ship is when it's so badly crippled as to likely have been nearly obliterated, as it would have to be unable to move at all under it's own power, lest it be able to rotate itself to allow whatever still functioning weapons it might have a line of fire on your approach, assuming it still has sensors to see you coming on the other side, as the least of your worries, heh. Either way it's going to come down to the one you're trying to board letting it happen in an RP sense.

[Clamparapa]

(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]

(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.

[Feazanthia]

Earlier in the thread it was discussed. Basically, it's 400,000x safer and more effective to just false-color and extrapolate sensor images onto screens or holograms or somesuch, as if you're looking out a window two things will happen. Either you can't see anything because the target is so far away as to be nigh invisible, or you can't see anything because a nearby nuclear explosion, near-miss XASER, or looking in the general vicinity of your average star just incinerated your corneas.

Ships might have observation decks if they have large crews, or if they need to navigate by the stars due to navigation being destroyed, but if the latter happens you're right and truly fucked.


And no. Not everyone uses artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Even those with access to the technology. Why? Unnecessary drains on energy.

[Clamparapa]

(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. :\

[North Mack]

(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. :\

Eh, they probably deserved it.

I think I'll be using a delicious setup of Twin plates of Plasteel North Mack Variant (Haven't coined my unique name for it yet. Alumiplate? Duraplexi? Fuck if I know) set up to tint adjust based on outside conditions, quick locking blast shield between the two (just in case, why not) and capable of overlaying computer outputs marking various items or simply being used as a workstation if needed. Obviously shatterproof, to avoid the "OH SHIT MY FACE IS SHREDDED BY THOUSANDS OF RAZORS" scenario.

Why? Because we can.

[Solar Communes]

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

[Balrogga]

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.

[Arthropoda Ingens]

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

> Implying that 9.81 m/s^2 are more than snail's pace in 99.9% of NS spacedyness

> Implying that the 0.01% of NS spacedyness where 9.81 m/s^2 aren't snail's pace have sufficient delta v to do this

[Solar Communes]

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

I just gave an example of an effective method of creating natural g-force during flight.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/craft.html

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3u.html

You don't need to break proven and tested laws of science given enough economy of scale and development in a scientifically plausible universe to have something able of simulating gravity.

[Vocenae]

What about those of us that have designed ships using DOGA not expecting to like the ships they make and putting exposed bridges on them, only to end up liking said ships and if they take away the exposed bridges the ships don't look right?

Also, would any of you accept a super heavy capital ship whose 'super weapon' consist of project a super luminal corridor that allows it to fire one to three MAC-style slugs at distant targets every three hours? It's basically for orbital installation busting and is tied directly to the ship's drive core, which means that either it either fires one heavy shot or three lighter shots in succession but in doing so renders the ship unable to perform FTL until the core recharges. All the targeting mechanisms are slaved to the firing mechanism so once something is targetted the weapon fires so unless a ship is standing still or the operator is capable of leading the target, there's a good chance it would miss. Since most of my nation relies on a single alien FTL hub device that generates faster versions of a Krasnikov Tube (though the galactic ones are more like funnels, there's no exit terminal in the Milky Way so the further you get from the main terminal, the slower you go and have to rely on more 'conventional FTL drives. Also there's no time travel involved.), I figured having a weapon that imitates it might be 'distinctive' of the ISR. Or IStaR if you prefer.

I dunno, just the comment about eeryone having their own sort of special weapon got me thinking, and since I never planned to use one this is the first thing that popped into my head and then I toned it down to try to give it some weaknesses, hence why it's only really feasible as a weapon against stations. Figured I'd toss it to the crowd while I'm sitting in a produce truck eight hours from home waiting for the people to get here to unload this hunk of scrap. Battery is about to die so I won't be able to respond for about ten hours, I'll just be able to view from my phone.

[Ozymos]

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

Well thank fuck for that, I was beginning to think I was the only one wh-

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

[Axis Nova]

If you want a superweapon you could just stick a giant subspace vuvuzela on the front of your ship. It wouldn't actually kill anyone, but it would make them want to die, which is almost as good.

[Morningstar Coalition]

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.

This sounds a lot like the "Turn the gravity up to 200 please" tactic for counter-boarding ops. One of my favorite gravity mind-fucks was where an enemy boarding team was walking down a corridor towards a T-junction. As they stepped into the intersection, the first troops realized that not only was the gravity oriented 90 degrees down the side passage (all of fifty meters "down"), but that the artificial gravity had been turned up to 50 g's. That was fun.

In any case Feaz, something to keep in mind is that counter-attacks (like your acceleration, or my gravity traps) are subject to almost the same requirements of cooperation as initial attacks. So if you simply declare that your acceleration trick instantly kills all enemy boarders, this is almost as bad of a Godmode move as someone who declares their boarding teams moving in and killing everyone on board.

The Godmode, IWIN, and Ignore doors all swing both ways.

---

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.

This is pretty much what I was talking about Feaz. It's one thing to state that your ship (after getting boarded) turns off it's accel compensation and revs up to 50g's, it's quite another to automatically assume this means unavoidable death for those hapless boarding teams.

---

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?"

Not everyone uses gravity control aboard their ships (Feaz's Kiith were one such who did not, as were the Jannarii).

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.

---

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.

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.

---

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.

Red Talons had a blast doing this once when he was fighting a Star Wars themed nation back on Jolt. The enemy tried targeting the obvious target that looked like a command bridge. Ended up slagging the recreation and observation deck.

---

Vocenae, decided not to quote your post this time.
Personally, as long as this FTL-gun isn't an insta-hit, insta-kill weapon, I personally would be willing to go along with it. Above all the tech arguments, is the requirement that you're not just using this toy to pull an iWIN. As long as there is OOCly a reasonable chance of the shot missing, or the target not being vaped, or something else that keeps it from being an iWIN button, I think a lot of players here would be willing to work with it.

[New Amerik]

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.

Could always use the good old Scottish way of explaining it: "She jus' can' take any more o' it, Captain! Any more an' she'll blow!"

Hey...that could be a dilemma....kill the enemy boarders, or have your ship not be potentially blown up in a creative and destructive way?