Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Then you can look at the other side of the coin. If you need specific more traditional manufacturing abilities, 3D printing can make the parts that make up the traditional manufacture. Machines making machines to make more machines.

That honestly makes the most sense to me.

So go for Machines that make more machines. The Printer itself would construct basic components used to eventually assemble other parts while the Scrap metal from the ship (base hull plating) would be used to construct shelter.

Several smaller prints make the small components and the larger ones makes the large ones and use the small components to assemble everything.

Isn't there a video of a 3D printer made of lego organized in an assembly line around youtube anyway?

A hybrid set up of the two would likely work rather well. The big bulk production for things like large paneling and the 3d printers for precision parts.

I remember seeing something about a 3d printer made out of legos somewhere.

edited 8th Feb '16 6:13:56 PM by TuefelHundenIV

What would be some reasonable ways to BS up hard light?

Like how could you describe it working, in a way that would not make any one with half a brain for science cringe.

edited 9th Feb '16 11:26:32 AM by Imca

A special kind of dust that binds together if you expose it to magnetic or electrical fields.Kind of like iron filings but more precise and rigid.

Is it possible to project a magnetic field though like in a hologram?

I do actually like that idea though.

So, new idea.

Godstrike cannon. It's a energy projector so powerful that it literally takes months for it to dissipate in space. In other words, if a military officer fired the cannon on Thanksgiving, the projector wouldn't diffuse until New Years Day, and anything caught in between gets vaporized. Only on dreadnoughts or flagships, and used as a last resort.

Too OP?

Considering it cant be fired star to star even with that disapation rate, not really.

Go look up the Real Life section of Hard Light. We've done it already.

edited 9th Feb '16 7:20:16 PM by MajorTom

Not quite the same, I am looking more for the "holograms you can touch" kind of angle.

Immy: If you check out the real life section under that trope it includes an example.

Cyber Spine Real time neural reading. Very nifty.

IIRC the only touchable holograms projects I've read about involved a mix of light and sound, with the light projecting the object and the sound being responsible for providing some sort of haptic feeling.

Now for hard light like the Covenant and Forerunner liked to use everywhere in Halo, I find a bit hard to get a scientific foundation for those.

There is also Mass Effect 1 approach, where you had a glove or implants with accelerometers to measure and provide a feel on the hologram keyboards and panels, well that until it got entirely replaced for the pseudo hard light hard surfaces made of tiny particles suspended solid in a mass effect field.

I'm pretty sure the haptic displays in the later games still worked the same way as those in the first game. The only actual "Hard Light" at hand was the Omniblade and related things.

Omini blades were made of matter as well.

Flash fabricated diamond, I think they said. The visual aspect is actually a hologram so it's easier to keep track of.

Yep. Neat sort of handwave.

Ah right, it's not hard light, just illuminated for safety.

Someone should mod ME 3 so that all of the Omniblades also feature sirens and flashing spinny industrial warning lights.

To be fair, it's not that bright and is out only for a moment anyway. That and most omni-blades tend to have electricity or fire attached which would give them away anyway.

On a completely different note, I think I figured out anti- space ship napalm. The trick is to use mostly oxidizers and catalysts and use the ship it'self for fuel. Granted, there's still an issue of pressure being non-existent but even partial penetration into the armor would help contain the reaction.

How exactly do you use the ship for fuel? It had better be one hell of a reaction like a fluorine fire given the variety of materials you can find in a ship.

^^ Stuff like this?

You don't need to use all of the ship materials, just most of them. Very few materials are completely immune to fluorine and almost none of them make good structural materials. Fluoride crystals come to mind but they tend to be both brittle and not very hard.

Probably the only material that would be immune would be metals that were pre-exposed to fluorine. Mind you this is a dangerous process since you'd need to first refine some fluorine first and I doubt any fleet would go through the expense unless they though that oxidizing weapons would be used in every battle.

Then again, if you are expecting oxidation or indeed any corrosive chemical attack, fluoride treating metal components is actually pretty useful.

I swear I recall one of the few substances that resist it was Teflon partly because it was composed of fluorine and carbon and has amazingly resilient bonds. It can be used to help store it but god help you if it is contaminated because if it gets going it burns so hot it pretty much torches everything.

Scratch that. Teflon is for Hydrofluoric acid.

edited 10th Feb '16 8:30:27 PM by TuefelHundenIV

^ Water + Fluorine fire = Hydrofluoric acid vapors.

Hmm....that makes me wonder how they make Teflon then...