Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

"They’re as safe as any other component."

No, they aren't. They are inherently a weakness to the integrity of the hull, which is why you include the minimum number, and only for important reasons (such as lacking the technology to install reliable cameras outside).

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 14th 2024 at 2:12:42 PM

In a setting where capital ship weapons fire tears huge gouges in the hull, the windows are probably not considered a significant enough weakness to make a huge difference. Like suggesting the open windows for the waist gunners in a WWII bomber made it easier for enemy fire to penetrate to the interior of the plane.

Technically, yes, but the rest of the aircraft exterior isn't exactly doing much more to protect the interior from that then the open windows are.

And the WWII bomber doesn't even get cool sci-fi forcefields to help protect it.

Enemy fire isn't the only danger to a ship's hull, and the normal stresses over time will weaken any openings there are. Any civilization advanced enough to have capital space ships firing over significant distances will have advanced remote camera technology, so the windows serve no purpose.

If there's a technology that allows a ship to fire big ass laser bolts that can tear a hole in whatever (probably pretty tough) material space ship hull's are made out of, directed EMP weapon that can fuck up cameras to the outside probably exists too.

Still don't make much sense to have so many windows unless it's a cruise ship, but still there's some use for one.

If your ship gets EMPed it's not going home today either, it's not any less fatal then a laser it just takes longer to kill you.

There is no way to fly a spaceship by hand, not even the apollo missions did it and that was the 70s, your talking about an enviroment where being even a quarter of a degree off means you can miss your target by millions of kilometers.

If you want a reminder of how hard spaceflight is, look up a list of nations that missed there moonshots.

And remind yourself that some of those are probes built with technology from literaly the last 5 years funded by national level governments trying to hit the closest celestial body to us by an order of magnitude.

And this is assuming the ship leaves you alone after you get EMPed, I know well that if I was the commander of the enemy ship I would confirm that kill with a missile, because even if you have non-electronic engine controls, there is no way to manually target point defense systems, nor are you using manual controls to out-maneuver my explosive.... best not to leave it to chance.

Point is an EMP hit is very much fatal, just slightly delayed.

Edited by Imca on Feb 16th 2024 at 5:07:23 AM

A good crew could plausibly repair the damage from an EMP, taking spare parts out of protected storage, flipping breakers, and reinstalling the OS from ROM. Of course, this still knocks a ship out of the fight and even with repairs the ship might not be combat effective.

US Military studies also said that most electronics only suffered temporary damage from an EMP any way so I am not so much disagreeing you can recover, so much as that emp hit is just as deadly as a laser blast and that the idea of manual backup controls isnt really going to do any thing except make you feel better psychologically

And honestly if you want to argue that that's fine psychological things do mater, but that's still not a reason to poke holes in your hull... we have had a method to see outside without compromising structural integrity since WW1... periscopes.

Tanks have them, subs have them, there tested and work well, pretty sure it shouldnt be that hard to rig one up that can cover a whole hemisphere too.

Edited by Imca on Feb 16th 2024 at 1:33:47 AM

Periscopes break and suffer issues of some sort all the time. It’s why tanks in open terrain would rather drive with the hatch open and use some good old fashioned binos to see distant targets or to navigate.

The periscope is only good for short term use under specific circumstances that keeps you buttoned up or submerged.

You don’t need a plethora of windows on any given spacecraft but a few to see where you’re going or to look around for something are a genuine benefit.

The “holes in your hull” argument is poppycock. If your structural integrity is so weak you can’t put in a window it’s not a craft worth building or manning. Even radiation concerns aren’t big enough. We flew men through the Van Allen belts to get to the Moon and they had windows. They didn’t come back a mutated mess or a bleeding sack of dying flesh or glowing in the dark. They came back fine.

The thing with EMP is that I'm thinking the damage will be somewhat less temporary in a spacecraft that isn't grounded and consequently has nowhere to dissipate the charge to.

Wouldn't the spacecraft benefit from floating ground?

Agian it's just a backup to what you really should be using, cameras and view screens.

The energy problems of an EMP are better thought of as a mass bitflipping event that makes communication impossible as well until it dissipates then the electrical arcing people tend to think.... it corrupts volatile memory and doesnt play well with radios, rather then direct circuit damage.

Though that does make me slightly curious, the experiments were done back when hardrives were a thing, would solid state drives be more vulnerable to disruption like other volatile sources?

Yes, but its tangential while electrical and magnetism are related it's less of an electrical shock and more of a magnetic wave.

...

And I dont think magnets really care about grounding in the first place.

Edited by Imca on Feb 15th 2024 at 8:46:41 PM

I assume by "hardrives" you mean "hard disk drives"?

Obviously windows in the hull don't necessarily compromise the integrity unacceptably or most airplanes would use a lot fewer of them. I'd be surprised if advances in material science combined with the prowess and thoroughness of Starfleet's famous engineers couldn't stay on top of any structural stress issues through routine inspections and maintenance cycles.

On the other hand, they did have to basically rebuild Kirk's Enterprise between TAS and the movies, so maybe those windows did cause a lot of hull integrity concerns.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out why Grounding is important for resisting an EMP. It's a wave with both crest and trough. Why would it leave a persistent electrical charge?

What were we talking about? Oh right, Windows. If you want windows you don't necessarily need to compromise the armor. Just install a small external pod on the outer hull. The crew can use it to relax when off duty and the ship will be just fine no matter how much the pod gets shot up. Crew might be pissed though.

As for detection, you're not going to see much with just the Mk. 1 Eyeball so either get some cybernetics or a really impressive telescope to go along with the periscope.

I think two things are being conflated here. Windows are, by their nature, a weakpoint in any construction. Any sort of spaceship is going to minimize them (unless the entire hull is transparent, somehow). Any sort of warship is going to want to have as few of them as possible.

Which brings me to the real problem of windows on spacecraft: there really isn't anything to see. It's useless for combat. It also seems extremely unlike to me that you'd want them for maintenance: anything worth maintaining is going to be behind armor or inside the hull. Not to mention any engines will probably be behind gargantuan fueltanks and shadowshields, and also anyone capable of seeing the engines will die from radiation exposure.

Problems like EMPS are going to mess everything up, regardless of cameras or whatnot. An airlock has electronic components too, after all. A major problem with spacecraft is that they are incredibly vulnerable. If something is going to seriously harm the craft, odds are that you just... die.

It’s the same thing as hitting with a lightning bolt. A sudden increase in electrical charge. A surge.

If it has nowhere for that excess to go, you have to have redundancies and failsafes like a surge protector or tripping the circuit breaker.

Even then that’s not always the answer.

If you put excess electrical charge into a closed ungrounded circuit, it heats it up potentially leading to permanent or greater damage to the system. It doesn’t take a lot of heat or excess charge to fry a circuit board or even melt the solder holding one together.

Without grounding, the only way for excess charge to be reduced is ambient radiation. That often takes far too long to rely upon. For example, run your arm on a carpet or something and give it a nice case of static cling, feeling and all. Now time how long it takes for your arm hairs to stop attracting to things or standing up on their own without touching anything to ground or discharge it.

It takes a long long while.

EMP is basically static charge on steroids just like power surges from lightning.

Edited by MajorTom on Feb 16th 2024 at 6:44:52 AM

After looking into it it seems that there are multiple types of EMP. Some have an electric charge, some do not. Almost all of them can be shielded against using fuses, breakers, and faraday cages. Can we get more specific about the EMP? Is it caused by a nuke or a star?

Nuke was the one brought up.

Well more specificly a directed magnetic weapon which nukes are the only way we know how to make one.

Edited by Imca on Feb 17th 2024 at 12:18:21 AM

^^ EMP effects like from a nuke or the Carrington Event are essentially the same mechanism. Excess radiation ionizing atmosphere or other matter creating a massive electrical imbalance that needs to go somewhere that then interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to provide the circuit that allows it to do its thing as we know it.

Without a form of shielding or defense (circuit breaker, Faraday enclosure, etc), unprotected electronics can easily be destroyed.

Vacuum tube circuitry is surprisingly resistant to it however.

Wouldn't a long term space craft, by necessity thanks to solar flares, the odd cosmic rays, planets with strong magneto-spheres and all the kinds of weird pace stuff, be hardened against EMP and intense magnetic fields by default?

I'd wager that an EMP strong enough to fry a military space craft, would give it far more worrying things like being close enough to the blast or enemy weapons for them to do full damage against them.

One thing to keep in mind is that the danger from cosmic rays and strong planetary magnetic fields - which accelerate particles to relativistic speeds - isn't just EMP.

Rather the problem is that such particles hitting armour or the hull of a spacecraft can induce the formation of secondary particles that penetrate the spacecraft. Problematic among the secondary particles are in particular neutrons, which can't be trapped by magnetic fields, and muons, which can penetrate even kilometre thick rock. Neutrons and muons can alter the data on computer chips or fry them altogether.

So you might need a copper mesh or conductive plates even on civilian vessels. Maybe even some insulation between the hull and the living and working spaces. Actually, you'd want insulation anyway just to manage the heat but in this case the connectors between hull and internal modules would need to be non-conductive.

I wouldn't worry too much about neutrons flipping bits, though. A neutron doesn't carry an electric charge so it would need to trigger radioactive decay first and hitting common Silicon-28 would just turn it into Silicon-29. You'd need a far less likely reaction.

That being said, neutrons react far more with lighter elements like Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon, and Oxygen. Stuff we're made out of.

Most of the time however free neutrons colliding with those isotopes either creates no big deal and a slightly heavier atomic weight or a radioisotope that all but instantly decays without generating much additional radiation.

For example a free neutron collides with a Hydrogen-3 atom, it creates the incredibly unstable Hydrogen-4 isotope, which more or less suffers immediate beta decay and turns into Helium-4. The radiation output is a free electron which may or may not be captured by the host atom.

In effect, a negligible effect.

It doesn’t always behave this way true.

Computer chips do mind this kind of radiation^note Especially the recoil from neutron impact - even secondary neutrons can pack sufficient punch to knock many other atoms out of position. And they tend to contain elements such as arsenic, gallium etc. which become other elements upon neutron absorption. And the examples make clear that one cosmic ray can be sufficient for an error., as numerous real world concerns and the various countermeasures needed attest to.

To say that the effect is "negligible" is not quite accurate even with Solar System-based systems, never mind these with more active particle radiation.