Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

In a space force how spread out would you recommend making your missiles? Would you have swarms of individual AI controlled missiles maneuvering directed by a human control ship? Maybe have small clusters of missiles together (eg. AI controlled multi shot missile ships)?

In space there can be large relative velocities and it might not be very effective to rely on surviving an impact from a kinetic weapon. If a large ship with many missiles takes a hit it will be destroyed including whatever weapons it's carrying. In a swarm situation if your task force takes a hit you only lose 1 missile.

What do you guys think about dispersing the different functions of a ship? Several redundant long range sensor vessels travel separate to the missile ships, supplying information to the task force. The countermeasure suite and weapons to intercept enemy projectiles also travel in separate vessels. If they are all combined into a single ship, a single strike can destroy or disable everything that the ship was carrying. If a sensor ship gets hit you will just lose a sensor, if the sensor section of a larger ship is hit you might lose not just the sensor, but any missiles that the ship was carrying, it's countermeasure suite and any other modules it's carrying.

The swarm i'm using in my story can also can confuse sensors. An enemy may fire upon a heat signature that represents a single swarm but may end up missing completely as shots travel harmlessly between ships. Instead of having to open up a large ship to refit it, functions can be changed by exchanging individual swarm ships between swarms or even budding off smaller swarms if needed.

Tactical: You have remember all of those guns even the one on the A-10 are mechanically limited to burst fire. They are not intended to barf out their ammo load in one long spurt. Even the A-10's total carried ammo wouldn't last all that long like that either. Short of the kidn of ammo stowage you could find on larger ships your not going to stowing a lot of ammo in terms of mass regardless of what system you use.

As for 3D printing I see several problems or issues to overcome with it. The already mentioned mass of the manufacturing device and mass of the base materials. However it doesn't end there. If you have a multi-component cartridge like we use now you need to carry even more raw material mass and a more complex fabricator. You have to make the projectile, any special components for the projectile such as what makes it AP, API, HEI, HEAT etc. Then you need the propellant and casing. Then you need to assemble it somehow. Even if you build it all together from the ground up it still requires a more complex fabrication unit. The more ammo types you have the more complex your fabrication machinery needs to be. You also wind up carrying increasingly more raw material.

Ok so now we have the ammo so how do you get it to the gun? Linkless feeds like we use on several varieties of auto-cannons and on craft like the A-10 have an internal magazine that feeds the ammo into a handling system which passes it onto the weapon. Now how do you work that into working with your printer? Does it just take it from a small ready storage of completed rounds? Does it feed directly off the printer? Is the printer just filling up an internal magazine of some sort? You need equipment to pass the completed ammo from the fabrication system to the weapon system and/or ammo stowage systems somehow.

It makes some limited sense if your say printing out ammo for an EM gun as you don't need a lot of extra stuff like casings and propellants. Even then you still need the handling systems and extra material if you want do anything beyond making a solid kinetic slug of some sort.

The next question is how fast can you make the ammo and how large a batch can it make in that time frame? The smaller the batches the faster you need the printer to go. The smaller the fabricator the smaller batches get for a given size of projectile as the size and mass of the projectile goes up. Of course even if you have one that makes large batches but takes minutes and could have a lot of mass. You want something somewhere in between.

Finally does this make sense for the type of ammo used with the weapon system? Like I noted above EM projectiles are a lot easier to work with then a chemically propelled projectile is.

I just remembered that the guns in Mass Effect were basically really aggressive 3D printers. Feed the weapon a block of feed stock, and it would tear off pieces of it to propel at the target.

If by aggressive 3D printing you mean just cutting off a chunk of the feed stock and that was it. Mass Effect didn't do a lot of deep thought on their weapons or projectiles. Like projectile mass was frankly silly.

Literally shooting projectiles weighting as much as a grain of sand.

Even if you shoot it at high velocities, the air drag and poor momentum would make it insanely ineffective beyond a short ranges.

Angelus: Oh it is much worse then that. The weapons use a technology that can negate mass and then accelerate the projectiles to super sonic velocities. Think about that for a moment. They can negate the mass of any round the weapon fired which negates recoil. You could easily fire projectiles with larger masses at those same velocities. The only downside would be higher ammo consumption.

I don't know about you but being able to bang out 200-400 grain rounds up to high super sonic velocities sounds a shit load better then something with the mass of a grain of sand. The size of sand the largest grain of sand at 2mm even made of tungsten would only have a mass of .083 grams or 1.28 grains. You get more mass out of a common bb gun pellet. For the record the bb gun pellet has a max diameter of 4.5mm made of tungsten you get .9542 grams or 14.7 grain projectile.

If you assume they fire them at the highest point of supersonic speeds, over 8km/s, you get a gun that hits at most at about 3,000 Joules for the big grain of sand projectile. The 4.5mm BB sized projectile hits at about 34,000 Joules. That is the difference between a full sized battle rifle and anti-material weapon. Even with the larger projectile you would still have a gun capable of firing thousands of shots out of all but the smallest examples and those would still have hundreds of rounds.

Mass Effects small arms are as bad as Halos big guns.

edited 9th Dec '16 8:33:15 PM by TuefelHundenIV

So basically if they had our regularly sized bullets but going just as fast it'd be far more effective?

Mass Effect small arms don't fire projectiles the mass of a grain of sand, they fire projectiles the size of a grain of sand. Civilizations in the Mass Effect 'verse routinely use Mass Effect fields to create extremely dense materials via high-gravity compaction. Dollars to doughnuts, those ammo blocks that bullets are shaved off if are some kind of Mass Effect field-compressed ultra-dense tungsten-uranium alloy.

edited 9th Dec '16 10:41:34 PM by Gault

Gault: They do not compact their ammo. They literally just shave off a piece of dense metal. Again even with the density of straight up tungsten their impact is whimpy. You literally cannot magically make an alloy of tungsten and uranium more dense then they already are. If anything that would be less dense then straight up tungsten. Not even using pure Osmium would make up for it. To beat out the simple expedient of a slightly larger projectile the 2mm would need a several hundred mg per cubic mm. Osmium tops out at 22.59 mg per cubic mm. There is nothing to suggest the weapons are hitting as hard .50 caliber weapons and instead behave like shots from a normal gun. There is also nothing point out they are making their ammo out of material that dense.

Even at 4.5mm made out of tungsten anything but the smaller weapons would easily have thousands of rounds of ammo for a single ammo block.

Tactical: The basic ball round for the 5.56mm NATO at 62 grains or about 4 grams would hit with about 144,000 joules. That would be like having your own personal large bore auto-cannon to shoot people with. You are getting more punch in terms of joules then even the fricken 30mm round fired by the Gau-8 Avenger found on the A-10. That is almost literally like shooting someone with the 40mm Bofors 3P round in impact only mode. The 4.5mm at that velocity hits about as hard as NTW-20 heavy anti-material rifle firing either the smaller 20mm or the 14.5mm round.

For the curious something with the same mass as the 800 grain .50 BMG round fired at those kinds of velocities. Would be like shooting someone with a cannon.

With the Mass Effect weapons tech they should be able to turn their guns into horrifyingly destructive weapons instead they deliberately dial them down to the equivalent of pop guns.

edited 9th Dec '16 11:42:59 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Ammo printing would only really work in two situations:

• You can repurpose general printing machines to it and you really need the ammo right now.
• You have power to spare, and the materials of the ammo in raw form take up sufficiently less space than the finished product that you aren't losing anything by putting the printer in there.

So assuming the fighter is deployed in a naval battle in LOE, how would it get resupplied? Supply drones?

You're gonna have to think long term here.

Not commenting on Mass Effect since I haven't played it or read about its weapon concepts, but that's not necessarily true. Electron-degenerate matter can be about 500,000 times as dense as (normal)tungsten.

With ludicrously advanced technology, I could see a sphere of the stuff being actively contained just behind the gun, and when firing, whatever contains it is loosened at the spot pointing to the gun for a moment, letting a tiny piece detach and launch itself from the pressure, before being captured and further accelerated.

If the projectile doesn't explode too soon, penetration ability should be off the charts.

edited 10th Dec '16 4:51:06 AM by ManInGray

Man In Gray: I stand corrected. However looking at the related information. The machine that could produce even a grams worth would be impressive all on its own. Never mind enough to be used casually as ammunition. Mass Effect isn't up to manipulations at the level of stars or gas giants to create something like that.

A solid block of the material would be prohibitively heavy.

edited 10th Dec '16 6:00:23 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Also, there's no mention anywhere of Mass Effect small arms firing any form of exotic ammo, so it seems Teufel has the right of it here. At least in terms of projectile mass. Though it is noted that their bullets move so fast it creates a plasma channel. This is even accurately depicted in Mass Effect 1, but in none of the other games. Gunshots in ME 1 look like energy weapons, suspiciously straight bolts of lightning.

Guns in Mass Effect were described as shaving off projectiles with the size of a grain of sand or smaller shaved from a metal bar stored inside the gun and accelerated to very high velocities thanks to the mass effect field reducing the mass of the projectile on the barrel, though conservation of momentum and energy should dictate that they'd lose all that velocity and energy when the projectile exits the barrel as the field is no longer reducing its mass.

From ME 1 to ME 2 the weapons changed and supposedly ME 2 guns should be much stronger than ME 1 guns and thus requiring thermal clips to keep functioning instead of being endless bullet hoses limited by overheating mechanics.

Better not to think much about Mass Effect weapons because without the handwavium they don't make a lick of sense.

Gault: Well semi-exotic material. The polonium rounds are not exactly every day ammo and a rather cruel way to poison someone. The rest of the stuff though is pretty mundane. As for plasma trail. As long as you have atmosphere and the round compresses the air enough. At 8km/s I would be surprised if it wasn't leaving a plasma trail. That is faster then the Naval Rail Gun which leaves a giant fire ball when it fires and the blunt nosed projectile created a bright blue plasma trail over a short distance. Granted that was because it was a big flat faced slug not the aerodynamic projectile they have now. The gun still has a big ass fire ball when it fires though.

Speaking of the Rail Gun. Here is another video I haven't seen yet.

edited 10th Dec '16 7:25:00 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Depends on whether or not the original velocity stated for the Super-MAC's was .4c or a typo of 0.04c. (Later Halo statements more imply the latter.)

At least Halo tried to make human weapons and systems somewhat based in reality. Mass Effect can't even claim that.

Re: Space fighter weapons and 3d printing

There was a discussion a fair bit back about what to arm starfighters with and one of the conclusions was things like missiles were better meant for mobile more nimble targets such as other starfighters because space is at a premium and a starship would often likely be big enough to shrug off things that would easily destroy another starfighter. Meaning anti-ship missiles or weapons would have to be on the order of being ridiculously overarmed. As in beam cannons and Wave-Motion Gun technology, large caliber MAC systems, heavy autocannons (57mm or better) or tank-to-battleship-sized conventional guns and missiles which may or may not be working at absurd velocity, contain nuclear warheads or exotic stuff like Antimatter warheads. Anything less would just not pass muster.

edited 10th Dec '16 8:21:01 AM by MajorTom

So basically, if the pilot runs out of ammo he or she is SOL?

Tactical: Not necessarily true. It depends on how big your target is in terms of mass. You don't need quite as much punch to knock out a relatively small drone as you would a larger ship. For Children of a Dead Earth the key to the smaller calibers having any reliability in taking out a target is in part dependent on how small target area they can saturate with fire.

For example a single drone with a 23mm Gun even with a high rate of fire might not get the job done. Given the effective firing range for the weapon vs the target area and typical closing velocities in a pass it has only enough time for a few seconds of weapons fire before it is past the target. Even by the time it flips around to possibly make a second pass it has already traveled either to the edge of its effective range or past it and has to close again and attack the other side. It will run out of delta v before it can make another attack pass on the already damaged area provided the enemy hasn't rolled the ship to present undamaged armor.

One of the ways to overcome this is to add a second weapon to increase the number of hits in a single pass or to try and increase the rate of fire of a single weapon. The downside for the first option is more mass for everything. The downside for the 2nd is can actually decrease your accuracy overall and reduce your effective firing range. The third option is a bigger gun but that eats into your mass budget just as badly as additional guns.

The other option is more attackers. The final option is a mix of all of the above. Usually you want to attack in groups of 5 or more drones. This ensures you have enough guns targeting the area despite the effects of point defense and if you have enough ships you can target more then one part of the ship increasing your chances of taking it out on the first pass.

edited 10th Dec '16 9:53:00 AM by TuefelHundenIV

That brings up an interesting thought experiment from a strategic point of view. How many losses can your fighter wings take before your carrier becomes strategically useless? If your fighters are getting taken out and you don't have enough fighters for a tactical victory, do you just order the rest to come back to the carrier and you all bail out?

If you have insufficient craft and munitions to carry out a mission it is generally better to pull back unless this is a do or die situation.

The drones in Children of a Dead Earth are basically little more then fancy missiles and are completely disposable. So saying fuck it, launching them, and then beating feet if they get scragged isn't that big of an issue.

The scariest ships are either the drone carriers because they can spam quite a few drones or the "Silo Ships" Which can spam a crap ton of nuclear missiles.

@Mattm: Ive been arvuing in favor of that concept, on this site, for years.

And who was the one saying that spamming a fuck tone of disposable drones was going to be better then a battleship only to get blown off each time?

Oh right.

Drone ships? Does Children of the Dead Earth have anything that prevents jamming?

Automation probaly, jamming doesn't mater if the drones attack on there own.

Point them out a target and watch them go, just like a missile.