Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
For a squishy in space their life support system is what will be giving off the more direct heat. The body will hopefully be contained inside of something to keep them alive.
Who watches the watchmen?
Lost in Space
I figured people had done the math on this, and I was right
. There are a lot of estimates for this sort of thing, but a naked human body, of typical proportions, starting at normal body temperature would radiate 845 watts, taking about 10.5 hours to freeze completely through if they died upon exposure to vacuum. Of course, the body would continue to radiate heat until it reached equilibrium with the background.
This ignores heating from sunlight. A body at the same distance from the Sun as the Earth could receive anywhere from 500 to 1000 watts of thermal energy from solar radiation depending on the body's albedo. It is entirely possible for an object floating in space to heat up rather than cool down; this is a major reason why spacecraft are designed to be very reflective.
Anyway, the point is that a naked human drifting in space would be visible to any nearby thermal sensors for quite a while.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 11th 2019 at 2:39:12 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
lol I know this sounds like overkill, but is the heat radiated enough for a missile lock on?
Yes. Literally any amount of heat is fine for a missile lock, the problem isn’t the amount of heat but rather getting the missile to follow the right heat source and to not get confused by background emissions.
They should have sent a poet.
Lost in Space
Right. For example, if there is a planet nearby, the missile might go after that instead. Or if it's fired towards the Sun, it'll go on a futile little chase.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 11th 2019 at 11:33:13 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Modern missiles aren't anywhere near that stupid though. I think there was some company that was developing it would follow based on visual sensory information, not heat sources.
New Survey coming this weekend!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
IR heads locking onto the sun was actually a common issue with early heatseekers. If it’s a problem in atmosphere I’m sure it’ll be even more of a problem in space, though modern heatseekers are fairly clever.
Thats Israel’s Python-5. It has an electro-optical seeker that provides an additional layer of discrimination on top of the IR seeker.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
It basically boils down to how good your IR/Thermal sensors are in terms of how much detailed information they can gather and how well the onboard data computer can process that information. Just like with radar the introduction of increasingly compact and digitized computational systems notably improved IR seekers. The more data it can collect and the more noise it can process out the more effective it will be. It will have longer detection ranges, be harder to spoof, and will be less affected by intensely "bright" or hot objects. Missiles and other projectiles are far more limited than what you put on a ship or planetoid because their space and mass are at an even greater premium than fighter craft.
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 12th 2019 at 8:29:17 AM
Who watches the watchmen?
eventually AI will advance to the point that they will interogate their targets.
[Missile] Password please
[Crewmember on targeted vessel] Wait, is the first letter capitalized?? I cant re-
[Missile ] BOOM
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Lol.
Alternatively...
[Missile] Password please.
[Crewmember] Ah crap, I forgot the password.
[Missile] Correct answer.
- Missile veers away*
Edited by MajorTom on Jan 12th 2019 at 8:07:54 AM
That would work out as Ac,Iftp
But don't forget the capitals!
The password is RYCBAR123
On the Atomic Rockets seal of approval list. A Game with Space Fighters in it.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Looks fun but I don't have enough eye roll for their claims.
Who watches the watchmen?
Looks pretty cool. Might have to check it out. Good space combat games are always fun, the movement can be hard to get right though so we’ll see how they do.
Like with air combat games the trick is to not let a commitment to realism get in the way of punchy gameplay.
They should have sent a poet.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
I would go for something along the lines of War Thunder's arcade mode. It has a good balance of realism and fun.
Who watches the watchmen?
Seems they got a balance. Just adhering to more real rules than fake rules.
War Thunder isn’t bad. It helps that WW2 air combat is much more manageable from a gaming point of view.
It wouldn’t be too fun to play a modern air combat game and spend your whole match looking into a fire control readout without ever actually seeing a single enemy aircraft.
It’s a fine line to tread. The existence of space fighters is a pretty big conceit to begin with, much less maneuvering combat at visual range.
Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 7th 2019 at 7:06:37 AM
They should have sent a poet.
Here's their official explanation of Fighters:
The large thrusters are used for most of your maneuvers due to their greater acceleration, while the RCS is better for fine precise burns or re-orienting your ship. Generally speaking, if a ship wants to stop fast, it’ll just reverse its heading (whether via onboard gyroscopes or the onboard RCS) and burn with the big one, though there are some ships like the Pegasus that have major retro-thrusters and don’t have to bother turning at all. That’s not to say you couldn’t use your RCS for braking if you’re so inclined, it just takes longer due to the lower thrust.
As for why manned fighters are used at all, out of universe you can probably guess the reason – Burnside’s zeroth law: people emphasize more with people than hardware, and we wanted to increase immersion. In-universe, there are three reasons.
Firstly, the universe is dominated by corporations which don’t really place much value on human life, and between this and the starfighters lacking onboard life support (the pilot counts on his spacesuit), there’s not as much difference between manned and unmanned ships as would be expected. That’s not to deny the difference in potential performance due to limitations imposed by said sack of meat in the seat, but we’re coming to that.
Secondly, EMP technology and distance-hacking is in very wide use in-setting, neither of which is a concern to a flesh and bones pilot, so at the very least said sack of meat can serve as a failsafe. However, there are counters for this too, which leads us to the next and final point.
Thirdly, while you could just throw missile after missile, the longer the missile has to cross the less likely it is to make it to the target between the target’s ability to move and time available for the missiles to be stopped by countermeasures or point defense systems. There’s a lot more involved than this, though: ships have a much easier time outrunning missiles because most missiles in setting use chemical drives, whereas the ships use solid and gas core nuclear drives. What this means is that the missiles have much higher acceleration and are nearly impossible to outrun at close range, but the ships’ exponentially greater fuel efficiency lets them run for much longer and burn out the missiles in longer pursuits. You could make a missile with a nuclear drive, but that’s a lot of money to throw away for an expendable munition, and at that point you’ve already got the basis of a drone or starfighter - just strap on a power system, ammo rack and gun, and now you’ve got a working platform that can be recovered.
Edited by TacticalFox88 on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:14:17 AM
New Survey coming this weekend!
Starfighter Inc sounds really interesting, but they are PC only, and that's a deal breaker for me.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Their in-universe reasons are lazy, nonsensical, and flimsy.
A corporation may not care about people but not having to pay them is even better. There is a good reason automation gets a lot of corporate backing. It reduces their overhead by a large degree. That and it is far easier to harden machines against hazards and spoofing than it is people. They can easily outperform humans to boot. So yeah the machines come out ahead by leaps and bounds in any metric a corporation could want.
The second reason is even thinner and frankly stupid. EMP is still a concern for people as it can harm humans, proven in various medical experiments, but the ships need electronics to run and distance hacking is just handwave garbage and again a concern for humans as we are highly reliant on equipment for anything not readily visible to our normal limits of natural sight. I seriously doubt their claims of research as they apparently don't understand how even real-world fighter craft work.
Third just as garbage as the exact limitations of point defense and having to cross space equally applies to fighters and if you can make mini fighters with thrusters you can make an array of missiles.
Yeah, hard science my ass. Mor like middling at best. They would have been better off with them they saying they were basing some of their material off of real world concepts but deliberately going soft to make it work and make the game fun. Being honest is a better policy.
Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Feb 8th 2019 at 5:46:56 AM
Who watches the watchmen?
Of all the excuses I expected for them justifying space fighters, greedy corporations was damn near the bottom
😂
Considering no space sim can be perfectly accurate and fun at the same time. This is probably the stretch they need to justify it, the fighters are still following real world physics and I find that pretty damn interesting.
Very easily. On a FLIR camera, you can spot somebody sticking out like a bare ass in the middle of a glacier from 5 km away. (Hopefully they AREN'T sticking their bare ass out at you when you turn the camera that way.)
Edited by MajorTom on Jan 11th 2019 at 7:03:28 AM