Argument Thread OOC Future Tech Only

[Cerberii]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

[Otagia]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

[Auman]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

You mean like the battleplates that your ally, Central Facehuggeria, was famous for? It's been done before, Cerberii... By people who have been around for awhile. Just don't wank them and it should be good.

[Mostrov]

and the fact that it would probably use far less energy then some kind of exotic technology such as plasma, allowing more to mounted and at larger calibre.

Have you any idea about how much energy a railgun wastes?

Undoubtedly less then concentrating enough energy into a laser to make into something that is large and powerful enough to actually effect my ship.

Also I'm guessing solid objects would be far harder to deflect then electromagnetic weapons.

How do you propose to deflect a laser that's easier than deflecting a lump of metal?

A 'shield' of charged particles around me ship, kept there magnetically, that refract the light. Also reflective armor.

I would think thats something akin to early 20th century battleships should be the predominate ships in FT warfare.

I doubt it. The battleship is based on the tactical and technological demands of sea warfare, very few of which translate into space.

For example, the battleship gains power by mounting a large number of large weapons. For some hypothetical spacebattleship, however, mounting nine main lasers, plus a variety of little point defense lasers, is a bad idea.

Except that large weapons had the advantage of being able to hit their enemies from a long distance, which small guns cannot, having not the power.

Fractions of lightspeed from 0.6 - 0.8 C are the optimum for these kinds of weapons due to advantages of relativistic effects and lower energy costs then say 0.95 C.

Given that anything over 3km/sec relative velocity will cause more damage than its mass in TNT, that might be considered an insane amount of overkill, with various side effects you haven't properly considered. For example, have you thought about the effect that the magnetic fields you're using to achieve that acceleration would have on your ship?

I was thinking some kind of chemical detonation to launch the shell on a supersonic speed then an extremely rapid use of magnets to accelerate to such a speed. However the magnets would be spaced around the barrel so that individually they don't have such a great magnetic field; but intercept in the centre of the barrel, driving the projectile forwards. Still I do see how this is an issue, however wouldn't similar problems apply with plasma and the like?

Except if you had a full 'broadside of projectiles fired at once, the ships in the 15th century where particularly susceptible to this, some such as the Mary Rose sinking consequently.

Which also puts your power consumption to insane levels, and has the incidental side effect of turning your crew into a fine paste on the sides of the cabin. If you want to achieve reasonable speeds, you need to spread out your acceleration, which is exactly the opposite of what a 'broadside' will do.

Why would I field humans on a crew considering they cannot target as quickly as a computer, neither could the withstand the enormous acceleration a shipboard AI could; after all more battles are being fought with automated technologies then ever before, for instance aerial drones. Also considering that space warfare is more three dimensional large speeds are required to out maneuver an enemy force rather then sit passively in a line-of-battle formation throwing shells at one another. I do presume we have more advanced technology then Fusion to generate power, otherwise FTL would be impossible in my opinion. My ideal for a ship would be on that travels to <0.5 C, then relies on the energy system required to accelerate to such a speed to power its weapons.

[Otagia]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

You mean like the battleplates that your ally, Central Facehuggeria, was famous for? It's been done before, Cerberii... By people who have been around for awhile. Just don't wank them and it should be good.

Those are Kanuckistani, actually. CF's supercaps were the Trinities. A bit smaller than Cuba, too: Manhattan, tops.

[Bryn Shander]

A 'shield' of charged particles around me ship, kept there magnetically, that refract the light. Also reflective armor.

That works both ways, bro. Prepare for a major case of "CAN'T SEE SHIT, CAPTAIN!"

[Balrogga]

I actually used the orbital trick in a battle, but the other way arround.

I sent out an order on a clear channel letting my foe know I was going to bombard the planet if he did not use his ships to block the fire. He chose to sacrifice his ships instead of his people. It allowed me to guarentee a strike by convincing him to let me hit his ships instead of his planet. Either way the trick allowed me to gain orbital superority. There were other circumstances involved, but those details are not important for this discussion.

[Bears Armed]

Why would I field humans on a crew considering they cannot target as quickly as a computer, neither could the withstand the enormous acceleration a shipboard AI could;

Loyalty? If the AI isn't intrinsically one of your people then maybe it won't be willing to risk its existence for their sake... and as far as the acceleration problem is concerned, considering the speeds involved, I'd assume the use of some kind of FT device (based on artifical gravity?) to compensate for this anyway...

I do presume we have more advanced technology then Fusion to generate power,

Such as?

[Bryn Shander]

I actually used the orbital trick in a battle, but the other way arround.

I sent out an order on a clear channel letting my foe know I was going to bombard the planet if he did not use his ships to block the fire. He chose to sacrifice his ships instead of his people. It allowed me to guarentee a strike by convincing him to let me hit his ships instead of his planet. Either way the trick allowed me to gain orbital superority. There were other circumstances involved, but those details are not important for this discussion.

Fleet General Lyboc was here. Your tactics are shit tier.

[Otagia]

Why would I field humans on a crew considering they cannot target as quickly as a computer, neither could the withstand the enormous acceleration a shipboard AI could;

Loyalty? If the AI isn't intrinsically one of your people then maybe it won't be willing to risk its existence for their sake... and as far as the acceleration problem is concerned, considering the speeds involved, I'd assume the use of some kind of FT device (based on artifical gravity?) to compensate for this anyway...

Easily solved by making the AI intrinsically one of your people. That, or giving them roughly the intelligence of your average dog.

I do presume we have more advanced technology then Fusion to generate power,

Such as?

A few things come to mind: Antimatter (yes, I know, dangerous), direct matter-to-energy conversion (often handwavium, but singularity reactors work here), gridfire, ZPMs, nilling D-sinks, etc.

[Balrogga]

I actually used the orbital trick in a battle, but the other way arround.

I sent out an order on a clear channel letting my foe know I was going to bombard the planet if he did not use his ships to block the fire. He chose to sacrifice his ships instead of his people. It allowed me to guarentee a strike by convincing him to let me hit his ships instead of his planet. Either way the trick allowed me to gain orbital superority. There were other circumstances involved, but those details are not important for this discussion.

Fleet General Lyboc was here. Your tactics are shit tier.

Honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about. You were never in that Thread or part of that particular RP group of players.

I hope this is not a troll. If it is please take it out of my Thread. If not please explain your statement.

[Mostrov]

I would also like to add in response to UNIverseVERSE that the projectiles being propelled here are miniscule in size making them hard to detect and respond. For instance how are you going to dodge a bullet sized project with the same energy imparted into it as an atomic bomb?

[The Kafers]

You won't; you'll vaporize it.

KKV's should be big enough to resist incineration, which would be the most effective means of dealing with them; if they travel at relativistic speeds, they will need shielding or an ablative coating to resist impact with the interstellar medium or - worse still - the fine collection of dust grains, ice particles, and micrometeorites that swirl around in most solar systems.

[UNIverseVERSE]

Undoubtedly less then concentrating enough energy into a laser to make into something that is large and powerful enough to actually effect my ship.

There's surprisingly little between them, actually. Especially if you're talking about relativistic rail or coil guns.

A 'shield' of charged particles around me ship, kept there magnetically, that refract the light. Also reflective armor.

The first is magic handwavium, because you'll only have your magnets on the inside of the field, which makes it rather tricky to keep the particles stable during any sort of maneuver. So a combination of a few missiles and a laser strike would deal with you -- the first force evasion, which scatters the shield, and the second kills you. The second doesn't work, because at the laser energies that are being referred to, the imperfections in the mirror will result in it being near-instantly vapourised.

Except that large weapons had the advantage of being able to hit their enemies from a long distance, which small guns cannot, having not the power.

Which would be why you then read the next paragraph of that same post, where I suggest that the optimum method involves deploying one even larger laser, which will easily be able to outrange any of the smaller weapons on a typical turreted ship.

I was thinking some kind of chemical detonation to launch the shell on a supersonic speed then an extremely rapid use of magnets to accelerate to such a speed. However the magnets would be spaced around the barrel so that individually they don't have such a great magnetic field; but intercept in the centre of the barrel, driving the projectile forwards. Still I do see how this is an issue, however wouldn't similar problems apply with plasma and the like?

Which would be why I wasn't claiming plasma weapons were even vaguely realistic either.

Why would I field humans on a crew considering they cannot target as quickly as a computer, neither could the withstand the enormous acceleration a shipboard AI could; after all more battles are being fought with automated technologies then ever before, for instance aerial drones. Also considering that space warfare is more three dimensional large speeds are required to out maneuver an enemy force rather then sit passively in a line-of-battle formation throwing shells at one another. I do presume we have more advanced technology then Fusion to generate power, otherwise FTL would be impossible in my opinion. My ideal for a ship would be on that travels to <0.5 C, then relies on the energy system required to accelerate to such a speed to power its weapons.

Presuming sufficiently strong AI.

Furthermore, I'd idly observe that outmaneuver is essentially impossible in space. The ship you're trying to outmaneuver can simply turn, and do so much faster than you can swing around behind them. Furthermore, because you're busy burning your main engines to achieve this, they know exactly where you are, and can work on trying to blind you with a laser or the like. Finally, because you have limited delta-V, you might well run out partway through your flanking maneuver, and drift slowly off to infinity, which isn't a very useful place to fight from.

I would also like to add in response to UNIverseVERSE that the projectiles being propelled here are miniscule in size making them hard to detect and respond. For instance how are you going to dodge a bullet sized project with the same energy imparted into it as an atomic bomb?

You're either too far away to have a decent guaranteed hit, or you're going to be within the effective range of a large laser.

Alternately, I observe that on impact, said projectile is either going to penetrate, or vapourise into plasma. If it does the first, it'll do so when it hits the whipple shield around my ship, meaning the only damage to the actual ship will be scorching the paintwork. If it does the second, I end up with a bullet sized hole through my ship, which can be patched rather easily, and thus isn't an issue.

[The Kafers]

If it does the second, I end up with a bullet sized hole through my ship, which can be patched rather easily, and thus isn't an issue.

No, the energy of the bullet will cause it to vaporize on impact, which means that its remnants will expand rapidly at relativistic speeds once they have breached your hull. The hull materials encountered along the way will also undergo hypersonic spalling in the process.

Think about what gunshot wounds look like in the human body; they're not neat little holes, but conically expanding zones of destruction. Now multiply that a billion fold.

Goodbye, starship.

---

Actually, it's a common misconception here that FTL is the "Big Wank" in FT. That's not at all true: To begin with, as many people here already know (although it's not widely believed, so I urge all of you to look at the literature if you're one of the skeptics), Einstein's Theory of General Relativity does not completely rule out FTL; you simply can't exceed the speed of light with respect to your own inertial frame of reference. Over the last fifteen years people have come up with all kinds of ingenious ways to exploit this, and they're all consistent with GR; the reasons why they're not generally accepted as valid workarounds has nothing to do with relativity (I cite Miguel Alcubierre's Warp Drive as a perfect example of this: It has many critics, but none claim that it's forbidden because of anything in Einstein's theory).

No, the reasons why these workarounds are usually rejected has to do with energy: They all require vast quantities of it, far beyond anything we know how to generate, not to mention manipulating that energy to bend space-time in ways be don't even begin to understand.

If you can find a copy of it, read The Starflight Handbook, by Eugene V. Mallove and Gregory L. Matloff. The book talks about STL interstellar travel, and one of the first things it does is hammer home the absurd amounts of energy even STL voyages would require. Even if all the nations of the world joined together to build a STL starship, fueling it with antimatter, the effort would break us. Projecting energy output forward into the future, it will be many centuries before we will have the capacity to send even a single STL starship out into the heavens, and the technology to produce that much power globally (using that word very loosely) is far beyond our current understanding.

So I would argue that the real "Big Wank" is power.

"Antimatter" is not an answer to this problem. It doesn't exist in nature: You have to manufacture it. How do you do that? With power. Where do you get the power? People have suggested some pretty amazing mechanisms for doing that (vast orbital solar arrays, covering entire planets [like Mercury] or planetoids [like the Moon] with solar panels), etc., but even such megastructures would require years to produce viable amounts of the stuff. No, antimatter is not a power source; it's an energy storage system. Where is the power going to come from?

Everyone who plays here in FT handwaves the power requirements away, and there are no exceptions to that rule. If you disagree, thinking yourself such an exception, you'd better read the literature - because I guarantee you have no idea how much power you need to do the things you claim your people can do.

[Arthropoda Ingens]

"Antimatter" is not an answer to this problem. It doesn't exist in nature: You have to manufacture it. How do you do that? With power. Where do you get the power? People have suggested some pretty amazing mechanisms for doing that (vast orbital solar arrays, covering entire planets [like Mercury] or planetoids [like the Moon] with solar panels), etc., but even such megastructures would require years to produce viable amounts of the stuff. No, antimatter is not a power source; it's an energy storage system. Where is the power going to come from?

IC, I solve this problem by way of my reactors consisting of teenage boys fantasizing about spaceships and hot women on these spaceships, and then using the heat generated by friction to suit all my needs.

[Kilrany]

Given that everything, regardless of how plausible it may be in science is a hand-wave anyway when it comes to NS, given we're dealing with imaginary everything with no quatifiable numbers to work with like one 'might' have with say a WWII RP where you know that X amount of armour grade steel sloped to Y degree with provide Z amount of protection, I would personally disagree with your opinion that power is the 'big wank' of NS. I say this because I am of the opinion that power doesn't actually grant you any advantage over your adversary, because it doesn't matter what kind of weapon system you use, be it energy based, rail-gun, missiles, etc ... they will only do as much damage to your enemy as they are willing to let them, assuming they let them hit. Shields and armour last as long as the other player chooses to let them. Which naturally can be problematic if there is little desire to compromise in each player.

Thought my opinion on FTL being one of the biggest problems has significantly lessened of late, I still believe it to be one of those that can cause more problems then it's worth, and should never be used in weaponized form unless there's an understanding between players, no different then when it comes to nuclear weapons in MT, it's too easy to have an RP killed. Granted this is less a problem from a technological standpoint, and more a problem faced with just poor RP'ers.

I would like to mention though that your comment on comparing a bullet penetrating a person's body to that of a starship is rather flawed. Yes, the effect of a bullet causes significant harm to people, but the effect does not carry to the near the same degree in mechanical objects. Tanks make for a good example. In WWII the round from many large German guns could punch clean through a Sherman tank, generally this would be fatal for the crew because of spalling as you mentioned, but depending on what the shell hit on the way through said tank, you could just pop more crewmen in there and carry on, or conduct minor repairs. I naturally don't discount the threat from such a round, but it would not necessarily mean instant death for a starship.

[The Romulan Republic]

Presuming sufficiently strong AI.

Sufficiently strong to do the job but sufficiently weak not to develop a mind and will of its own?

[The Romulan Republic]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

[Rethan]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

Depends on the ship. If it's made in the manner of a Star Trek vessel and hence ignores all sensible forms of engineering, it will have no redundant systems and all you'd have to do is damage the engines or reactor and it'll explode. That's why I hate using Star Trek as a baseline for any sort of tech.

[Ilharessa]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

A handgrenade tossed into the engine room might do the trick nicely.

[Rethan]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

A handgrenade tossed into the engine room might do the trick nicely.

Only if your nation fails at any form of sensible engineering.

[The Romulan Republic]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

A handgrenade tossed into the engine room might do the trick nicely.

Only if your nation fails at any form of sensible engineering.

And only if you have shit security.

[The Kafers]

In WWII the round from many large German guns could punch clean through a Sherman tank, generally this would be fatal for the crew because of spalling as you mentioned, but depending on what the shell hit on the way through said tank, you could just pop more crewmen in there and carry on, or conduct minor repairs. I naturally don't discount the threat from such a round, but it would not necessarily mean instant death for a starship.

With relativistic KKV's, you're operating on a whole different scale (greater, in fact, by several orders of magnitude). Spalling due to the impact of such a round would be similar in effect to having a large plasma weapon go off inside your ship due to the vast amounts of energy the hull fragments would possess from simple collision with such a fast moving "bullet". That means that far more than flesh would be destroyed by the expanding cloud of superheated plasma erupting from such a penetration.

Mind you, I still think that KKV's should be larger than bullet sized, partly because this makes them less prone to vaporization en route to target and partly because this increases the likelihood of a large percentage of the kinetic material remaining inside the vessel as opposed to shooting straight through it. Something closer in size to a modern auto-cannon round would be just fine; in no case would the round need to be much larger than a modern antitank round (120mm).

[Ilharessa]

What would you say to someone who built a ship the size of Cuba ?

"Easy target?"

On a ship that size, would it even matter? Short of crashing a good sized asteroid into it, I'm not sure what weapon could take out.

A handgrenade tossed into the engine room might do the trick nicely.

Only if your nation fails at any form of sensible engineering.

Maybe. One of the problems I've seen with a lot of FT ships is the ideas of "sensible engineering" and "practical engineering" are often at odds.

If I wanted to build a ship sensibly, it wouldn't even have an engine room; engineering itself would be divided into several sections, each one quickly sealed off from the others in cases of emergency and each one with about five to seven emergency countermeasurers and another eight backup systems for engine containment. You'd pretty much have to do the equivolent of unleashing a small black hole or small sun inside the engineering section to take it all out at once.

Practically? I may not necessary have access to the necessary power requirements or access to materials to move or build a ship with as much space as this one may take up, and I may not necessarily be able to crew it with an engineering team of sufficient size with all of the necessary skills. Those simple technological limits would force a smaller, more centralized engine room with a smaller crew and, as a side-effect of the limited space, far less emergency countermeasures and redundancies. While it's not a sensible design, and one prone to be far easier to take out with a handgrenade, it's a practical design and thus quite likely to exist in a lot of ships.

Edit: I accidentally left out this part.

Practical designs have a habit of becoming traditional designs. Sometimes, even long after the practicality of them has faded. As such, it's a safer bet for a lot of strategists to assume a singular engine room than to assume a more sensible design, since it's far more likely they'll be using a traditional design that's descended from a practical design than not. Thus, it's quite possible a ship of that size would have an engine room perfectly succeptable to a handgrenade.