Advice Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[Galla-]

Back to kinetic kill munitions, I think it's silly when anyone suggests they can accelerate anything of significant mass (Re: Not a subatomic particle) to within a crab fart of light speed on something as compact as a space ship. Yeah sure, I know, free-form RP all points are valid, but do you guys consider how much energy it would take to contain and accelerate something the size of a grain of sand to the speed of light? I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be done but there is a lot of handwavium involved in accelerating a projectile to .99c. I'm just saying when I use k-kill tech, my shit is accelerated to about 2-3% lightspeed, tops. Even ships over a km long wouldn't have an acceleration ladder capable of more (Handwavium sold seperately), not to mention the stupendously large reactors needed for power of an Admiral Ackbar magnitude.

RKVs really only begin at .85 c or so. Anything less is truly criminal.

Just strap a giant antimatter drive onto a crowbar, point at planet. RKVs are the nukes of FT and shouldn't be thrown around lightly tbh.

[Kreanoltha]

To be honest, I use KKVs as my main ship to ship weapons and I just say that the rounds are fast enough to be effective at a couple of light seconds and heavy enough to be extremely powerful. I also acknowledge that the cannons involve a certain amount of Handwavium which works fine for me since my nation is fairly slushtech.

If you're engaging at more than one light second with mass drivers, you have to deal with targeting lag, information lag, and missing every shot. Better to use lasers/masers missiles or fighters at such extreme ranges. I use fighters specifically for long range engagement, since they can provide their own targeting telemetry once in range of the vessel, and dont have to rely on a firing solution from the mothership who is having to deal with information lag.

Handwave it for Rule of Cool. Slinging ferrotungsten rounds at relativistic speeds is cool.

[Adastri]

Would it be feasible to have half a population working and living on various spaceships, and the other half working on occupied planets for agriculture, manufacturing etc.?

[The Akasha Colony]

Would it be feasible to have half a population working and living on various spaceships, and the other half working on occupied planets for agriculture, manufacturing etc.?

Define 'feasible.' It's certainly possible, but what would those people on those spaceships be doing, if all the agriculture and manufacturing is planetside? Ultimately, it'll depend on a nation's specific situation, economy, culture, biology, etc to define whether or not that large a percentage would want to live in space.

[Ularn]

To be honest, I use KKVs as my main ship to ship weapons and I just say that the rounds are fast enough to be effective at a couple of light seconds and heavy enough to be extremely powerful. I also acknowledge that the cannons involve a certain amount of Handwavium which works fine for me since my nation is fairly slushtech.

If you're engaging at more than one light second with mass drivers, you have to deal with targeting lag, information lag, and missing every shot. Better to use lasers/masers missiles or fighters at such extreme ranges.

So build some simple sensors and thrusters into your KKV to allow it to make minor course corrections en-route to the target. Strictly speaking, it's a missile now, but it's behaviour is still that of a more accurate KKV.

I use fighters specifically for long range engagement, since they can provide their own targeting telemetry once in range of the vessel, and dont have to rely on a firing solution from the mothership who is having to deal with information lag.

Neither do missiles.

[Spirit of Hope]

I use fighters specifically for long range engagement, since they can provide their own targeting telemetry once in range of the vessel, and dont have to rely on a firing solution from the mothership who is having to deal with information lag.

Neither do missiles.

Plus missiles don't need a pilot, which is why I use a lot of missiles at range, then lasers for closer fighting.

[Arthropoda Ingens]

Back to kinetic kill munitions, I think it's silly when anyone suggests they can accelerate anything of significant mass (Re: Not a subatomic particle) to within a crab fart of light speed on something as compact as a space ship. Yeah sure, I know, free-form RP all points are valid, but do you guys consider how much energy it would take to contain and accelerate something the size of a grain of sand to the speed of light? I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be done but there is a lot of handwavium involved in accelerating a projectile to .99c. I'm just saying when I use k-kill tech, my shit is accelerated to about 2-3% lightspeed, tops. Even ships over a km long wouldn't have an acceleration ladder capable of more (Handwavium sold seperately), not to mention the stupendously large reactors needed for power of an Admiral Ackbar magnitude.

You mean I don't get free energy when I shout 'Kinetic Energy!' and link to Atomic Rocket while applying lotion to my dick?

:(

[SquareDisc City]

Back to kinetic kill munitions, I think it's silly when anyone suggests they can accelerate anything of significant mass (Re: Not a subatomic particle) to within a crab fart of light speed on something as compact as a space ship. Yeah sure, I know, free-form RP all points are valid, but do you guys consider how much energy it would take to contain and accelerate something the size of a grain of sand to the speed of light? I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be done but there is a lot of handwavium involved in accelerating a projectile to .99c. I'm just saying when I use k-kill tech, my shit is accelerated to about 2-3% lightspeed, tops. Even ships over a km long wouldn't have an acceleration ladder capable of more (Handwavium sold seperately), not to mention the stupendously large reactors needed for power of an Admiral Ackbar magnitude.

I don't see the issue. If I want to fire something that carries X joules of energy, why does it matter whether that something is a pulse of laser light, a stream of neutrons, or a piece of metal? It's the same minimum energy input in all cases, and for the same weapon geometry it's the same power requirement for the particles and the solid projectile.

And yes, I have considered how much energy it requires. Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

So build some simple sensors and thrusters into your KKV to allow it to make minor course corrections en-route to the target. Strictly speaking, it's a missile now, but it's behaviour is still that of a more accurate KKV.

ICly the reason the UPT doesn't do that is because the advantage of a gun (of any sort) over a missile is having lots of cheap ammo, but a guided shell as we call it would be much more expensive than an inert one and thus lose that advantage.

[Ularn]

Back to kinetic kill munitions, I think it's silly when anyone suggests they can accelerate anything of significant mass (Re: Not a subatomic particle) to within a crab fart of light speed on something as compact as a space ship. Yeah sure, I know, free-form RP all points are valid, but do you guys consider how much energy it would take to contain and accelerate something the size of a grain of sand to the speed of light? I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be done but there is a lot of handwavium involved in accelerating a projectile to .99c. I'm just saying when I use k-kill tech, my shit is accelerated to about 2-3% lightspeed, tops. Even ships over a km long wouldn't have an acceleration ladder capable of more (Handwavium sold seperately), not to mention the stupendously large reactors needed for power of an Admiral Ackbar magnitude.

I don't see the issue. If I want to fire something that carries X joules of energy, why does it matter whether that something is a pulse of laser light, a stream of neutrons, or a piece of metal? It's the same minimum energy input in all cases, and for the same weapon geometry it's the same power requirement for the particles and the solid projectile.

And yes, I have considered how much energy it requires. Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

If your ships are half antimatter they must make some really pretty explosions when you shake them.

So build some simple sensors and thrusters into your KKV to allow it to make minor course corrections en-route to the target. Strictly speaking, it's a missile now, but it's behaviour is still that of a more accurate KKV.

ICly the reason the UPT doesn't do that is because the advantage of a gun (of any sort) over a missile is having lots of cheap ammo, but a guided shell as we call it would be much more expensive than an inert one and thus lose that advantage.

Given that your accuracy with an unguided shell is going to be non-existent over ranges of less than even one light second, you'll be spending less per kill by using guided munitions than unguided. Let's be pessimistic and say that guided shells have a 5% accuracy rating at a range of one light second. An unguided shell is going to have accuracy of something like 1x10^-10% accuracy rating, and that's probably still being optimistic. It simply isn't possible to tell where the enemy will be with any degree of accuracy over that distance, so unless your unguided shells and the antimatter required to fuel their launch are worth Fifty-billion times less than a guided shell (or less; I'm not sure of my maths for that bit and, like I said, the costing was probably out a bit in favour of unguided munitions) then it's still cheaper to use guided munitions on a cost per hit basis.

[SquareDisc City]

If your ships are half antimatter they must make some really pretty explosions when you shake them.

Well, I have a not-very-rigorous confinement system, and also work on the basis that anything that penetrates far enough to get to the antimatter stores would be causing me major issues anyway.

Given that your accuracy with an unguided shell is going to be non-existent over ranges of less than even one light second

If it's going at .95c it'll be scarcely less accurate than a laser, and against a decent sized target that's not capable of insane acceleration quite adequate at few light-second ranges.

Stepping away from the physics for a moment, I claim this sort of weapon because I want to have diversity. All space combat being missiles may or may not be realistic, but it is certainly one-dimensional and that doesn't interest me.

[Ularn]

Given that your accuracy with an unguided shell is going to be non-existent over ranges of less than even one light second

If it's going at .95c it'll be scarcely less accurate than a laser, and against a decent sized target that's not capable of insane acceleration quite adequate at few light-second ranges.

Stepping away from the physics for a moment, I claim this sort of weapon because I want to have diversity. All space combat being missiles may or may not be realistic, but it is certainly one-dimensional and that doesn't interest me.

It won;t be more accurate though, because a laser is a constant beam. It can hit a target anywhere along its length; you have a one-dimensional margin for error and can wave the laser around to hit a target if you miss it at first. As long as the enemy's flightpath intersects with some part of the length of the laser's beam you'll get a hit.

For a kinetic to hit it must occupy the same space as its target at exactly the same time; you have no dimensions for error and if you miss you have to fire another shell which also has no margin for error. For this reason, your chance of hitting is far less than it is with a laser.

[The Akasha Colony]

If it's going at .95c it'll be scarcely less accurate than a laser, and against a decent sized target that's not capable of insane acceleration quite adequate at few light-second ranges.

Stepping away from the physics for a moment, I claim this sort of weapon because I want to have diversity. All space combat being missiles may or may not be realistic, but it is certainly one-dimensional and that doesn't interest me.

It won;t be more accurate though, because a laser is a constant beam. It can hit a target anywhere along its length; you have a one-dimensional margin for error and can wave the laser around to hit a target if you miss it at first. As long as the enemy's flightpath intersects with some part of the length of the laser's beam you'll get a hit.

For a kinetic to hit it must occupy the same space as its target at exactly the same time; you have no dimensions for error and if you miss you have to fire another shell which also has no margin for error. For this reason, your chance of hitting is far less than it is with a laser.

Your chances of hitting the target by 'waving' the laser around are no better than by hitting it directly. The same targeting lag will take effect, meaning that over the distances considered, the laser will be less a straight, linear beam, and more like the water coming out of a hose when waved around. Hence, it will lag behind its target just as much as it did when you first fired it assuming the range remains the same.

This also of course assumes that your lasers even fire multi-second bursts; there is no necessary reason why they should (or should not, technically). It could go either way, but long 'beams' are not an inherent part of a laser weapon, particularly once trying to cool the most powerful laser types, which could give you a firing time of a few milliseconds at full power before the cooling system needs to catch up (again, or not, depending on doctrinal and technological priorities).

[Feazanthia]

Antimatter containment is a finnicky thing. Your ship's power systems fluctuate for a fraction of a second, you lose containment.

[Sertian]

Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

Oh dear /GOD/. o.o Assuming you mean just 25% in antimatter and 25% in normal matter to be annihilated with, you're just asking for something to go horrendously wrong. One good hit that slams into the ship that takes out just one antimatter containment system is going to spark a chain reaction as that store blows up, taking out the stores next to it which blow up, and so on until the entire ship goes out like a roman candle.

How the heck do you convince people to get ON those ships?

[Our Most Resplendent Goddess Sen]

Back to kinetic kill munitions, I think it's silly when anyone suggests they can accelerate anything of significant mass (Re: Not a subatomic particle) to within a crab fart of light speed on something as compact as a space ship. Yeah sure, I know, free-form RP all points are valid, but do you guys consider how much energy it would take to contain and accelerate something the size of a grain of sand to the speed of light? I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be done but there is a lot of handwavium involved in accelerating a projectile to .99c. I'm just saying when I use k-kill tech, my shit is accelerated to about 2-3% lightspeed, tops. Even ships over a km long wouldn't have an acceleration ladder capable of more (Handwavium sold seperately), not to mention the stupendously large reactors needed for power of an Admiral Ackbar magnitude.

I don't see the issue. If I want to fire something that carries X joules of energy, why does it matter whether that something is a pulse of laser light, a stream of neutrons, or a piece of metal? It's the same minimum energy input in all cases, and for the same weapon geometry it's the same power requirement for the particles and the solid projectile.

Particle beams and projectile weapons both have much higher recoil forces than lasers; this is less of an issue with particle beams (due to the relatively very small amount of mass accelerated), but with massive projectiles it is very much a problem. The total impulse delivered to the ship is going to be quite considerable (and thus will fling your ship backwards without correction).

A related (and perhaps more important) issue is the time over which that impulse is applied. Consider a projectile being fired from a ten-kilometer (fairly long, most likely requiring a spinal mount) mass driver at half the speed of light: the average speed throughout the barrel will be half of the muzzle velocity, or a quarter of light speed. We can find the time over which the force is applied quite easily: 10km/75000kms=0.0001333... s, or a whole 133 microseconds. Any structure capable of taking such high forces delivered over such a short amount of time will, even using unobtanium carbide structural members, most likely need to be hilariously strong.

Also, the projectile in our hypothetical mass driver experiences roughly 115 billion gravities of acceleration, or about half again that experienced by an object sitting on the surface of the heaviest neutron stars. Even assuming that your projectile doesn't violently explode (it will, since the force is only acting along one axis), you would presumably not be able to accelerate it via magnetism once it collapses into an incredibly thin disk of neutron-degenerate matter.

Note: half the speed of light is before relativistic effects start to became major. If you're accelerating your projectiles to .95c (as your later posts indicate), then relativistic effects will be hilariously dominant and make everything several times worse in pretty much every way.

And yes, I have considered how much energy it requires. Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

If roughly half your ship is antimatter, and the other half is regular matter to react with the antimatter, then where dose your actual ship fit into the picture?

So build some simple sensors and thrusters into your KKV to allow it to make minor course corrections en-route to the target. Strictly speaking, it's a missile now, but it's behaviour is still that of a more accurate KKV.

ICly the reason the UPT doesn't do that is because the advantage of a gun (of any sort) over a missile is having lots of cheap ammo, but a guided shell as we call it would be much more expensive than an inert one and thus lose that advantage.

Considering that your projectiles will need some sort of spectacularly, faptastically powerful inertial dampener to survive being fired, I'm not sure that "cheapness" is a good justification.

[YellowApple]

Would it be feasible to have half a population working and living on various spaceships, and the other half working on occupied planets for agriculture, manufacturing etc.?

With enough handwavium anything's possible.

But yes, it's totally feasible, though it's dependent on your population and your technology. I personally RP with the vast majority of my population either in aerospace cities (in the atmospheres of planets, mostly Earth) and in space (both in my capital and in various expeditionary fleets). The population on planets/moons/etc is generally only there for mining raw materials or trading with native populations. However, I have a comparatively small population relative to other FT nations here on NS (3 billion or so is a far cry from the several hundred billion - or even several trillion - some players go with), so your mileage may vary.

[The Akasha Colony]

Antimatter containment is a finnicky thing. Your ship's power systems fluctuate for a fraction of a second, you lose containment.

Not with fullerenes. And inb4 self-contained storage systems (even Star Trek has them).

Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

Oh dear /GOD/. o.o Assuming you mean just 25% in antimatter and 25% in normal matter to be annihilated with, you're just asking for something to go horrendously wrong. One good hit that slams into the ship that takes out just one antimatter containment system is going to spark a chain reaction as that store blows up, taking out the stores next to it which blow up, and so on until the entire ship goes out like a roman candle.

How the heck do you convince people to get ON those ships?

There aren't many on them to begin with, but given the above, and the fact that if the enemy's fire is already penetrating all the way to the fuel bunkers, you're screwed anyway, it should not be a major concern. As we've shown for centuries, people seem to have no real problem crewing ships were one good shot to the magazines or bunkers takes the whole thing down with all hands to a watery/fiery grave.

And no, I'm not SquareDisc on another account, but I've seen it come up before.

And yes, I have considered how much energy it requires. Which is why I give roughly half my ships' mass over to antimatter fuel, and make the superconducting cables several metres thick to carry the requisite currents.

If roughly half your ship is antimatter, and the other half is regular matter to react with the antimatter, then where dose your actual ship fit into the picture?

The antimatter fuel includes the containment fullerenes, so once freed the antimatter can presumably react with the matter that once contained it.

[SquareDisc City]

By telling them the sheer firepower will bring certain victory over enemies who are too scared to properly fuel their ships

On a more serious note, the confinement's antilead fullerene which is less critically-dependent on power and the stores have their own mini-reactors to make them self powering in the event they lose external power. I also would have some sort of countermeasures against detonations and chain reactions, though I haven't worked out the details and am not sure how good they'd be. (Trying to direct the blast out the entry hole from the impactor springs to mind.) Also, extensive automation and the offloading of maintenance functions to dedicated construction ships means crews are very small indeed, in keeping with my idea that these things are not giant ships in space but giant planes in space.

And yes, the 50% counts both the antimatter and the matter it annihilates with, and the excess matter due to antilead fullerene not being stoichiometric.

I hadn't thought of the forces involved causing the projectile to disintegrate - but if I use something like electromagnetism then won't it act directly on each atom in the projectile pulling them all the same way and thus no disintegration? The forces are phenomenal, but with the theoretical strength of CNTs (brushes effect of defects under the rug) coupled with sheer bulk of structure they can be handled. And yes the ship will go backwards, but so what? It's got engines.

Aaaand Akasha roundly Ninjasks me!

[Spirit of Hope]

First in really hard FT Fullerene wouldn't work all that well, but since we all have hand wavium thats fine.

You still don't get rid of the containment problem, if one hit sets off even a tiny bit of Fullerene you have a really bad chain reaction on your hand. Fullerene also isn't the best way for storing antimatter depending on the propulsion system you are using.

I use anti matter, but thats only for missiles drive systems. Their kinetic kill weapons but this gives them a little more punch.

[The Akasha Colony]

First in really hard FT Fullerene wouldn't work all that well, but since we all have hand wavium thats fine.

You still don't get rid of the containment problem, if one hit sets off even a tiny bit of Fullerene you have a really bad chain reaction on your hand. Fullerene also isn't the best way for storing antimatter depending on the propulsion system you are using.

I use anti matter, but thats only for missiles drive systems. Their kinetic kill weapons but this gives them a little more punch.

I was already under the impression that Pokemon don't really work that well under really hard FT...

[Zepplin Manufacturers]

While you can make your containment proof against simple power loss, and while you can indeed harden it ...if you need to store AM in any reasonably density or quantity if you do get a run away (and if anything is going to do that a weapon strike could) no amount of blow out panels, shock points, crumple zones, towed fuel pods or well placed liquid storage tanks will do a great deal of good.

AM gives you great if filthy power output per mass ..the downside is it gives you great but filthy power output per mass. Trying to avoid the downside is all well and good but your still flying a damn bottle rocket and I frankly ICly wouldn't let you remotely near docking to a civilian structure.

[Vadia]

So I'm thinking about opening a spot later on in the timeline, where my MT nation would be FT. Where exactly would that spot be datewise, if I were 20 years behind the back. What would be a good starting point? Could I realistically colonize a moon in the outer section of the Sol System?

[Arthropoda Ingens]

Particle beams and projectile weapons both have much higher recoil forces than lasers[...]

Actually, somewhere in this or the argument, the math was done a while ago - the difference in recoil between lasers and particle beams is basically negligible.

[Trailers]

Ularn, I would love to see how even a rocket assisted guided munition could analyze incoming data, adjust it's course and then make that course correction when moving at %95 the speed of light.

Second, how much overkill do you people really need. I mean Jesus Christ the amount of energy you're dickpumping into your ordinance means you have giant testicle ships, filled with muscle bound sailors no doubt, which are absolutely bristling with planet crackers.

I just surrender to all of you now. Clearly my technology cannot compete with your light speed balls of neutron depleted tungsturanium.


I'm not trying to tell you how to play, I just think weapons should be within logical limits.

[Trailers]

So I'm thinking about opening a spot later on in the timeline, where my MT nation would be FT. Where exactly would that spot be datewise, if I were 20 years behind the back. What would be a good starting point? Could I realistically colonize a moon in the outer section of the Sol System?

Hell man it can be anywhere you want it to be. Say the blugblatter beasts of Omicron Lyrae crashlanded on your planet, and you reverse engineered their splort technology, giving you a five decade advancement in propulsion overnight. It's up to you.