Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Demarquis: Not necessarily true. Given things like time to acceleration to those velocities is still very much a factor. There is a big difference between an hour of acceleration to speed vs a second of acceleration to speed. Also last I checked modern battleships have been traditionally pretty fast craft not the slow lumbering dreadnoughts of the eras that proceeded them.

Then there is the problem of trying to have a fight at really high velocities in the first place. Unless two ships are running perfectly parallel or in circles the number of differing angles of approach relative to each other at those kinds of velocities leaves you almost no room at to detect, track, and fire on a ship to begin with. The faster even one ship is moving the more complicated that gets. Stern chase might be a possible but head to head will be next to impossible it would be an eye blink and gone. Even small changes in angles and velocities could have drastic results in the distances those velocities would cover. For reference 10% C is about 29,97 km/s. That is fast enough to cover more then the diameter of the earth twice in a second flat.

Immy:

Yes there are materials and methods to protect a ship in space we have gone over it dozens of times in this thread and in fact some of it is amazingly simple. No your not going to be one shotting everything especially large compartmentalized vessels with actual protection. Not only are you ignoring scale but context to massive extent in manner that can only be considered horrendously sloppy.

More mass for armor, whipple shields, active defenses, heavier weapons, and room for compartmentalization significantly improves survivability. Again something we have gone over repeatedly in the thread including discussions you were a part of. The amount of energy you would need to guarantee one shot anything sizeable is pretty high on the energy scale and you are quite very unlikely to be achieving it with fighter.

I don't know what weird universe you are basing this off the wall statement on but simply being a larger vessel alone has notable impact on improved survivability not less. It takes more effort and energy to cause enough damage to outright destroy something of more mass then something of less mass. Unlike much smaller craft such as fighters large ships have more room to distribute their important equipment and use compartmentalization to further improve survivability. Fighters would be a far more significant threat to other fighters and small craft then anything sizeable. Large ships are far more viable by leaps and bounds then fighters. Oh and it would take a lot less effort to one shot the fighters then a larger ship. You know just in case you missed that painfully obvious point.

Even if we go with your absurd and unrealistic notion of anything one can shot even a large ship that still leaves your carrier and their craft pretty boned. They have to maintain movement relative to their fighter groups for said fighter groups to be retrievable in their more limited fuel window. Someone else could just spam a large batch of missiles, kinetics, or even possibly powerful lasers and do the job at range and leave a bunch of small craft to die the a slow death in the void. Again we have covered this repeatedly. For the same mass a ship that has to return has half the range of a missile or a guided kinetic of the same mass that doesn't. Again mass considerations are king and that puts fighters pretty far down the list of effective platforms.

You don't even have to use missiles you can just as easily use your mass for a wide variety of other weapons and their needed components and unlike a fighter would have a much easier to maintain logistics chain by leaps and bounds. I don't think you actually understand how complicated it is to run an aircraft carrier and carrier based craft and how much mass goes into things like hanger space, munitions, fuels, spares, launch and recover facilities, and everything else in-between. Here is a hint. The mass requirement is not small and is the lions share of the mass of an aircraft carrier to begin with.

Oh and if your going by "swarm tactics" projectile swarms guided and otherwise have been a thing for a long time now. Missiles and guided kinetics could just as easily be fired in said swarms and guided to target by a wide variety of means and again could easily outrange any fighter aircraft.

No one mentioned battleships Immy that is all you putting words into someone else mouth. Frankly that sounds like a personal problem on your end. Last I checked there are a lot more ship variety then battleships that are not mounting or even reliant on fighters. I mean it isn't like there haven't been multiple varieties of ship types that carry weapons easily capable of out ranging even carrier based craft. We also covered something similar in the Navy thread how carrier based craft are far from being the tip of spear and instead it is longer ranged strikes from other naval and air craft that aren't carrier born fighters. Funny you seem to have forgotten things like simple details, gee that sounds really familiar Immy.

Before you try to sloppily insult not one but two people try making a better argument next time.

Echo: It is still sci-fi. Show me where it wasn't. Going back over the conversation the discussion is entirely appropriate and last I checked Sci-fi includes realistic depictions and context of Immy's posts suggest that is the tack she is on.

edited 17th Sep '16 2:09:09 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I just get the feeling that whenever we start a discussion of any sci-fi tech topic we always seem to curve back around to realism. And then people start arguing over whether or not something is real or if it will be.

I just see it tend to happen a lot.

And I don't know what weird universe you are dealing with that any single object can survive the energy of hundreds of nuclear bombs all concentrated into each and every shot that is hitting it.

I am not saying that fighters are more survivable, not in the least, I am saying that once you get to space scale speeds, the energy output you have is ridiculous, well within those amounts your talking about to gaurnte a one hit kill.

You get 6 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy by just imparting a 1.5 tone slug with enough velocity to get from earth to mars in the longest month of the year, at there closest distance, space is huge, and you don't seem to be realizing the scale you are dealing with here.

Space combat would be hyper lethal, and at that point why would you want a battleship, what benefit does spending 4.5 billion on an object that is just going to die in one shot, give me over the 18, 2.5 million dollar objects I could spend that same money on?

Bigger weapons? Its gonna die in one shot, I wont have time to use those, Better Damage control? Good luck stopping enough energy that the tzar bomba looks like a firecracker next to itself, more weapons? Agian, its gonna die in one shot you better volley those off pretty damn fast.

There is no way around this if you know even the slightest bit about how energy scales with speed, space combat WILL be oneshot, first strike warfare just like air-combat, not any thing like naval combat.

And last I checked we dont see bomber sized aircraft with hundreds of anti-air missiles as viable either.

Space is not something you can compare to the navy thread, because other then the terms, they behave more like aircraft then naval craft.

edited 17th Sep '16 2:59:07 PM by Imca

Immy: First the phrase "Space Velocity" is pretty much meaningless nonsense considering that velocity in space can be just about anything including a dead stop to ones that it would be almost impossible to achieve unless you are a particle. You are still talking grossly impractical and unrealistic considerations by leaps and bounds. In order to accelerate 1.5 ton slug, since you are saying slug I am assuming you mean something gun fired, to the approximate 20 km/s, the velocity needed to cover your described distance, you need quite a bit of energy.

I don't know what you are thinking but you are not going to be casually launching slugs with a mass of over a ton at that kind of velocity. To make matters worse the faster you need to accelerate said slug to those velocities the more the energy requirements start to spike and it goes up quite a bit very quickly. To accelerate a 1.5 ton slug from a dead standstill to a mere 11km/s in the .25 of a second typical of guns firing high velocity projectiles you need power on the order of many many thousands of MW. Even giving it a half second to accelerate it still needs rather drastic power requirements. To try and accelerate such a ridiculous projectile to your excessively round about way of just saying 20km/s would require power a whole order of magnitude higher at the same acceleration time frames to that velocity.

If your opponent is casually firing around 1.5 ton slugs at that kind of velocity you have much bigger worries then their clumsy attempts at long range accuracy with an unguided projectile. Especially given the fact they may be casually expending that much energy on a dumb fired projectile to begin with.

Such a weapon is hugely impractical especially for the kinetic energy return vs energy spent to achieve it. Kinetics have lousy trade offs for hard short term acceleration and energy at target impact. You could easily get a lot more punch from a nuclear warhead for the same weight and significantly less energy to launch it using lower velocity guns, rockets or missiles.

None of that takes into account complications of accuracy of an unguided projectile over distance or problems of matching vectors even at lower velocities over long distances. We did back of the napkin estimates for movement related a point of origin of even slow ships at distances measured in only 100,000km. That is a distance far shorter then the distance you described, and it would be quite likely for a dumb projectile to literally miss by miles even at 20km/s. That by the way would take the projectile 1 hour and 23 minutes to cross that distance. Even a ship moving at 1km/s second would be a long long ways away from the original point of travel and even casual changes of velocity in a new direction or vector is all it would take to make the projectile miss by a huge margin. Unless you are using guided projectiles or missiles your chances of hitting a moving target are almost nil at anything but shorter ranges. Even then at those ranges you have a lot bigger worries then someone who can casually expend that kind of energy to fire off a kinetic projectile that might not even hit the target.

Seriously what kind of insane weapon are you thinking of? Sure there have been some heavy projectiles fired in the past but they were moving at pretty low velocities compared to say orbital velocities. Like the Yamato's big 18" guns. They fired a projectile at a less then 1km/s. The energy to sling those around at their max velocity at the muzzle is pretty easy to do. But your not talking about that your talking about significantly higher velocities.

Immy my sense of scale is just fine yours is way out of wack by a huge margin. Space is huge and fuel is a limited commodity a point you have repeatedly failed to grasp the importance of. Which by the way is quite very important especially if you want try and start arguing about things like delta V in your flawed original claim to begin with.

Space combat could be hyper lethal but again that whole context thing is rather important and your lack of sense of scale and exaggerations don't change that.

Again no one said anything about battleships that is you again putting words into mouths. That is just sloppy. If you wanted to try and have a slug that heavy as a gun fired projectile as a weapon you would need a pretty damn big ship just to house the weapon, run the heat management, and the power plant to begin with. You really didn't think this through.

No it is unlikely to die in one shot given the fact your wunder waffen is unlikely to be a weapon of even low end practical use in the first place and I hate to tell you kinetic energy does not cleanly convert to blast or the actual equivalent of a nuclear weapons effects. Especially taking into considerations things like distance play a huge role in your chances to hit the broad of a barn never mind a moving space ship and your projectile can still easily just punch straight through and not get a guaranteed one shot.

The only one making sloppy naval comparisons is you Immy, especially with you constantly being the only one to mention battleships. Even Tom mentions them quite a bit less then your earlier insult implies and Tom has a far more practical view then what you just posited. Which is frankly unrealistic to a huge margin.

You have a grossly unrealistic view of the energies and efforts of the weapons you yourself described to just fire them never mind hit anything at anything but short range and ironically to even field your "doom weapon" you would need a large ship in the first place to house everything. that isn't even touching on the possibility of firing said gun rapidly which by the way power requirements go up even more the shorter the time you need to re-fire. You completely fail to grasp the importance of something as simple as limits of limited commodities such as fuel. Your lack of sense of scale is overt by your failure to understand just exactly what kind of energies you are talking about and what it takes to get them, the sense of velocity of a moving target vs aim points of anything but guided weapons, and limitations placed on long distance engagements of what you would probably call "Space is Big" distances.

edited 17th Sep '16 4:40:47 PM by TuefelHundenIV

@Echoing Silence: Yeah, that's true. Part of that is the challenge of incorporating hard science into sci-fi, something that isn't done often enough. But we can have a conversation about, say, space fighters, as long as the person who introduced the topic is careful to say that it's soft-science (another common topic is mecha, which strangely seems to get a pass on the hard science from the very people who most like to argue about it).

For soft sci-fi there are so many fun fighters out there. The Star Fury, Star Vipers form Galactica, Hammer Head from SAAB, star wars has some pretty cool and interesting star fighters.

@Imca: consider, also, that a missile's velocity can be used against it. I just need to launch a relatively slow missile in the path of your 1.5t monster to destroy it safely away from me. Anti-missile missiles do not need to be big, so I can use several at a time for extra safety and still have enough to kill more missiles than you can throw at me.

If I have good lasers, I can also cook the guidance systems of your single big missile and let it coast safely past me. Putting all your eggs in the same 1.5t basket is a bad idea all around.

IMO, the best kinetic projectiles are as small as you can make them while retaining adequate guidance capabilities, plus some armor slapped on the front. That way you actually stand a chance at overwhelming DEW defenses, and the numerical advantage of anti-missile missiles is negated since they can't be much smaller.

I'm pretty sure the engineers and construction workers on a Space Navy would likely work on Circular Reasoning. They'd design the ship's hull to withstand the weapons it dishes out, but design the weapons to penetrate and destroy the ships armor.

Good points. Active protection systems can do a lot to reduce various threats. It would be a lot scarrier if say said 1.5 ton projectile was a bus for a guided projectile swarm but even then the cost in power to accelerate that much mass quickly is kind of prohibitive.

That's one of the weapons in one of the 4-6 possible configurations I have for a starfighter known as the Corsair. A 105mm spinal railgun that fires extremely fast projectiles very accurately. Getting hit by said projectile pretty much ruins your day if you're not a starship or Landcruiser. The first level you would play for this (because the setting is intended to be a video game) would have an Antepiece where you and upwards of a half dozen plus fellow fighters all salvo some of these shots into an unaware (or rather engaged with something else) enemy cruiser for devastating effect. The fluff mentions that the Corsair would only carry like 6-12 rounds in reserve but who is going to care if you fired off 35 of 12 shots in the entire level. So long as it delivers awesome results right?

edited 17th Sep '16 6:34:15 PM by MajorTom

Tom; So something like this?

Better than that.

That anime...

There is no Suspensionof Disbelief strong enough for me to stomach that thing.

Yeah it is a bit of massive Japanese Alt History Nationalism chest thumping.

All this talk about high-velocity kinetics reminds me of an idea I had.

I used to think that you couldn't stop high velocity railgun slugs or what have you from striking your spaceship at all due to the projectile being a simple piece of inert metal with no kind of active emissions at all and a negligible radar cross-section- unlike missiles, which can be tracked and taken out with point-defenses.

But, couldn't projectiles moving that fast be diffused at least in part by smart flak? Compute the enemy's targeting solution for their HV kinetic guns, then have turrets on your own ship that fire canisters filled ball-bearings electronically fused to detonate at a certain distance, spreading a tight cloud directly in the path of the projectile.

The ball-bearings don't even need to be moving very fast at all. Because of relativity, no reference frame is preferred. If the railgun slug is coming in at tens of kilometers a second and the cloud of B Bs is standing relatively still, they will still impact the railgun slug as if they were the ones moving at tens of kilometers per second, ablating it to nothing or at the very least shredding a good portion of it's mass and reducing it's penetration/killing power drastically.

I mention this because I have never seen anything even remotely like this in anything sci-fi, which leads me to believe it might be impractical. And yet, this appears to be a cheap and elegant solution. Is it?

edited 17th Sep '16 9:45:57 PM by Gault

Gault: That would be incredibly hard to pull off to hit the projectile. The window to hit it would be very small. Unless you are talking large projectiles you might have a pretty hard time hitting them. Instead something more along the lines of the Navy Rail gun or even a 120mm SABOT round it is like trying to hit a hyper-sonic garden hose with a hypersonic marble. The Sabot round is a few feet in length and about 30mm in diameter. The Navy rail gun round is comparable in diameter to the 5" guns and also just a couple feet in length. In theory yes you could do it but it would rather difficult to do. If you could say use something with more surface area like a sheet or mesh of some sort it might be easier to put it in the path of the projectile and it would just enough density to cause a possible deflection. Either way it is no easy task.

The Russians claimed they could totally swat a high velocity APFSDS DU shot with their their Arena system. Momentum though would likely still carry it through at those short ranges.

edited 18th Sep '16 12:03:45 AM by TuefelHundenIV

What you are suggesting sounds a bit like a radar controled giant shotgun. Its not a bad idea, esp since no incoming munition could ever be completely invisible to radar. But consider that a radar controlled rapid fire cannon would be even better. If you miss with the shot round then you could waste the entire shot, but if the first few rounds from the rapid fire cannon miss, its relatively simple to walk them toward the target.

Does walking fire make any sense in microgravity? You're firing in a straight line, just aim and shoot.

Well, its an inexact analogy, perhaps. I simply meant you could correct your fire if the first rounds miss.

The US Army is designing a new offensive/frag grenade after 40 years That is right ladies and gents the good old M-67 Grenade has been around that long.

The new grenade will have some sort of method for changing it from blast effect to blast and frag. This will either be an interesting technological technique or it will just be a blast grenade that you can add a fragmentation sleeve to. Oh and it will be properly ambidextrous.

edited 21st Sep '16 5:09:13 PM by TuefelHundenIV

That sounds good.

Now as for other things, somehow the 1911 design has been around for over 100 years, and belt fed machine guns longer.

When a design works, it really works.

In my story, most planets have a mostly invisible sphere of nanomachines used mainly to ensure communication and other online services are available around the world. I initially made it so that the characters would have wifi on a camping trip. I was discussing this with Flanker a few months back and he pointed out that the military could use the same Nanonet to communicate with anyone in the field as well and that, assuming they were EMP hardened, the enemy couldn't possibly destroy all the nanomachines acting as transmitters and receivers.

He also said that they could be used to detect stealth craft since they'd be putting out so much electronic noise that any blind spot where an aircraft was trying to be stealthy would end up standing out like a sore thumb. And that if the nanomachines were used as radar emitters they could also detect low flying aircraft and helicopters hiding behind stuff.

I was wondering if anyone here could think of any other practical uses for this system that we hadn't already thought of.

Surveying in general if they have some sort radar ability, SAR, recon in general especially SIGINT, possibly as part of a weather monitoring system. It depends on the levels of sophistication of the nanos. IF they can act like a VDA at least the E/O Sensor part they could even act as orbital telescopes of a sort.

If there's enough of them, they'd provide some protection from the sun.

Isn't that a bad thing if they can block out the sun?

Also why is it that testing robots have so much swagger?

edited 22nd Sep '16 5:15:20 AM by EchoingSilence