Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

IIRC in the Navy thread, someone pointed out that the majority of sink EX missiles and a lot of bombs are operating sans warheads. They have done controlled live warhead tests on various vessels before and the damage produced by live warhead strikes is pretty substantial.

There are some rather nasty and very large antishipping missiles aimed at supercarriers and various tests and studies would suggest they could likely take them out if not knock them out of combat operations completely.

RAND did one study where the pointed out a carrier would be knocked out of long term theatre operations by using long rod penetrators to perforate the deck and into interior spaces.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Apr 23rd 2019 at 5:54:53 AM

That was what they did with the USS America SINKEX, live ammo. The flight deck survived direct impact okay but hits to the side and underneath would've been quite the hazard.

Ultimately however, the ship survived the live ammo tests and was scuttled.

They also used live ammo on USS Racine last year and a couple others I've seen.

The main difference between SINKEX and real battle is most of the time in SINKEX the risk of secondaries is removed aka no fuel or ammo on the target ship.

If they carried it out like any other live warhead Sink Ex they fired, examined, patched, and kept firing until they were done or the ship broke so thoroughly it was useless for testing. Given the size of the ship, they could have easily spent a lot of time picking their shots and examining damage without immediate risk of sinking. Any patching or possibly visible damage would give clues as to how effective a potential threat would be so not letting it sink where it could be accessed and studied easily and instead of doing a controlled scuttle in very deep water.

As for the deck damage I doubt they were carrying out a test in the vein of RAND's example. They weren't talking little flechettes but dozens if not more of something closer to what the Abrams fires in terms of size. Carrier decks pierced clean through including in various key spots can easily cripple the ship's operations and further damage done by anything piercing below the flight deck.

Okay been thinking about Cybernetics, in my setting they come in 3 recognizable tiers with the most human looking ones being civilian which are sold to the public. This would also mean they are the most sold and modified variant.

Now due to augmented crime occurring from these, this would lead to a lot of legal issues.

What do you think would be some likely outcomes beyond registration?

Have you played or watched plays of Deus Ex: Human Revolution? It addresses this issue rather thoroughly.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 29th 2019 at 8:28:26 AM

Very much so. So interesting idea there.

Hey there folks, just wanted to check in and ask an odd sort of question. In a sci fi setting would you find it believable that a factions space Navy would abandon slower, more heavily armoured warships in favor of faster, lighter armored ships as a counter to an enemy who’s entire military thinking would surmised as “mobility at all costs” ?

My guess is that the enemy's weapon tech defeats most defenses so the only real defense is evasion.

Or you could need smaller, more mobile forces to respond to threats.

There is something to be said for ships with less mass overall in terms of energy required to get them moving and handling maneuvering.

Realistically in terms of weapon power and potential lethality, you reach practical limits in what you can use for armor and defensive measures and avoiding the hit becomes a better choice.

A very loose comparison would be fighter jets. There is a pretty hard limit on how much armor you can put on before it becomes very impractical as most modern weapons can plow through armors use don aircraft including lightweight anti-aircraft missiles. Evading hits becomes a more viable choice.

There are some weapons you just aren't really going be dodging as they would cross any meaningful distance almost instantly such as lasers or any weapon that moves at absurd velocities.

It would depend on what you choose to have the two sides do and use against each other. A missile oriented enemy with relatively speaking slow kinetic weapons could make evasion a viable option.

Question: Would these lesser armored ships be brimming with point defenses instead? (And/or Deflector Shields?) Otherwise I can see some silly Admiral or squadron commander going "There must something wrong with our ships today..." when they start brewing up.

I kind of have to agree with Tom here, even though armor itelf is pretty usless at the powers involved in space combat, defences are important.

There is a reason that battlecruisers kept being tried, and kept being abandoned.... no less then 3 times in history was the concept tried, and then abandoned once war broke out.

A fast ship with big guns sounds like a good idea on paper, until it explodes and you loose the very expensive ship and all the men on board.

Edited by Imca on May 5th 2019 at 1:58:31 AM

Mobility in space is tricky. Of course, if you have Star Trek levels of delta v, then choosing trajectories in space is a trivial decision, and your forces can pretty much go wherever they want, whenever they want. But more realistically, the shortest distance between any two points is generally not the most fuel efficient way to get there, and may not even be possible given local orbital dynamics. Nothing moves in a straight line in space, instead everything follows curved trajectories around gravitational objects. Instead of a line between one's origin and destination, think of a set of curved lines weaving around planets and the local star. These trajectories form a parabolic cone, spreading out from the point of origin and concentrating again on the destination. So "mobility" takes the form of having the capacity to follow a wider range of trajectories than your enemy can, given where each of you want to go.

The other factor to consider is that spacecraft drives pretty much fall somewhere along a spectrum from "high acceleration and low efficiency" to "high efficiency but low acceleration". Acceleration is what you use to evade an approaching enemy or his missiles, or conversely what you use to catch them. But efficiency is what gets you from one end of the solar system to the other with enough delta v left over to conduct a battle (ie, they give you a wider range of trajectories to pick from). So there are several sets of tradeoffs to consider.

The tl/dr is that small fast accelerating ships are better at tactical manuvering, but worse at long range patrol. So it comes down to what kind of mobility do you want, and what mix of ships best serves your strategic objectives?

Edited by DeMarquis on May 5th 2019 at 9:30:12 AM

Considering that high efficiency and high output usually requires entirely different engine designs, would it make more sense to mount both on a ship or have an auxiliary add on that you drop off before battle?

You're still fighting the same overall bottlenecks only now you are hauling around more mass.

Initially yes. You need to use your high efficiency, low power "Travel Engines" to cart about your low efficiency, high power "Combat Engines" unless you want to fight without combat engines.

The question is whether or not you want to fight while still carrying those Travel Engines or set them aside momentarily.

At the end though your still just moving the bottleneck around as you still have to haul the mass in the first place before any mass can be shed. Then you have to spend time and delta-V to go collect anything reusable if you detach anything.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on May 6th 2019 at 5:39:13 AM

Its a reasonable argument in favor of carrier ships- the larger carrier equipped with a high efficiency, long range drive design, carrying a fleet of smaller higher performance tactical attack craft (I do not say "fighters", because that would be technically inaccurate), screened by in-between escorts working perimeter defense.

Three times? I'm aware of the battlecruiser concept being done twice. First time before the First World War and while David Beatty's battlecruisers performed as they were designed against Hipper's cruisers at the Falklands (admirably), they performed miserably at Jutland. Post-war most surviving battlecruisers were converted or upgraded to the new idea of "fast battleship" (for example Kongou) but they still had design and protection deficiencies compared to purpose-built fast battleships like USS Iowa.

Which then brings up the second case. By the later years of World War Two some of the cruiser designs like the Baltimore class were getting so well armed and armored (and retaining their speed) the only things that could go toe to toe with them one on one were either (usually older) battleships, submarines or aircraft. Thus we started looking at a resurgence of the battlecruiser concept to potentially counter them only this time they'd be called things like "large cruisers" such as USS Alaska to avoid having the record and reputation of previous battlecruisers sully the concept.

I know they fell out of favor almost immediately because Technology Marches On in the forms of jet aircraft, guided/standoff munitions and nuclear warheads.

There's also the possibility of fielding an Auxiliary vessel designed to attach to a warship for travel and detach before combat. The advantage is that the Auxiliary could travel to the warship after combat rather than have the warship chase down the Auxiliary.

The disadvantage is that the auxiliary could get shot.

So, I'm pretty sure, a lot of you have played Halo or at least watched a video of it at some point no? Having been on real naval vessels, is it just me, or should the UNSC ships be a LOT more claustrophobic? Especially for a warship? Lots of corridors with no rhyme or purpose, huge open spaces in the hangar bays, instead of using them in the most practical way possible. Why are there long extremely wide ramps in areas where no vehicles are even a quarter of that size, so even two way traffic makes that nonsensical.

The Pillar of Autumn is the worst offender here, in the last level of the original game.

Warthog running through an entire ship from bow to bow?

like....what?

Well the ship is 1.17 km long on the outside canonically. The inside of it somehow measures more than twice that long.

Even then, the Pillar of Autumn is bad design gone overboard. There's no cohesiveness, or functionality. Just mindless corridors for the sake of it.

Okay for gameplay, I suppose. But from a worldbuilding standpoint, it's utterly dreadful.

I feel like that's a pretty common feature in sci-fi video game design though, for better or for worse.

^ Not just games. Do the hangar bays aboard Imperial starships and space stations have to be that big?