Fotiadis_110 wrote:
To your point about heat dissipation: your weapon systems would definitely share multiple heat sinking systems, but in all cases, your ship is going to glow in IR. Maybe even visibly, if you don't properly manage it. As you say, no matter the weapon system, heat will be a major problem in space. A novel means I came across was the droplet system in Mass Effect. Heat was dumped into liquid sodium or lithium heat sinks, which was then sprayed as a fine mist out of the front of the ship to be collected again at the rear. This had the effect of exponentially increasing the radiative surface area for cooling, without the drawback of having to use massive radiator panels.
Thing is, the energy requirements and waste issues of energy based weapons are likely even worse than mass drivers for the same kind of firepower.
In fact you can probably spit out a dozen shots of mass driver for the energy requirements of a single shot of plasma.
As for the droplet cooling system: it sounds awsome, but the issue then comes down to 'how hard is it to replace lost mass?'
While you capture remaining droplets, evaporative losses occur when exposed to low pressure envrionments.
Massive surface area simply makes the issue larger, not to mention hot things have a higher vapour pressure leading to increased losses.
I'd go for a plasma-based system in that case, since you can get more area and higher temperatures (thus higher thermal emissions), in combination with a way to round up some of the escaped coolant. As an added bonus, the emitted energy/active coolant mass ratios can potentially get fairly high, so replacing lost coolant is easier than it normally would be.
Unfortunately, bootstrapping the heat into your coolant plasma would be somewhat complicated (specifically, in the ferrofluid to plasma transition), and would certainly add to your total waste heat.
Muttley wrote:JMS made use of mass drivers as a heinous weapon, banned by all civilised spacefaring races, for planetary bombardment
from spacecraft. He carefully did not answer any of the obvious questions:
- Where did the mass come from? If you're hauling mass to a bombarding fleet, would it not be more effective to haul mass that can evade defenses and go bang once it gets there? After all if you have a stardrive you should be able to make a derivative bomb (it's usually easier than making a stable stardrive, after all) and stick it in a stealthy, manouvering delivery system. The advantage of bombarding with rocks from orbit is that you gain energy from the gravity well - but the missiles are more or less ballistic, and present easy intercept options.
Why was the Narn homeworld unable to intercept the falling rocks?
As I best recall, by that point the Centauri had already defeated the defenses of the Narn homeworld. They weren't using those mass-drivers as precision weapons, they were using them as weapons of mass destruction on par with nukes. Which is also why they had been banned.
In that situation, I would just get the mass from in-system asteroids, so you don't even need to move it very far.
As for their stardrive, it was specifically a short-cut drive, so no extra speed when you 'come out'. Also, the starddrives themselves (and the generators to power them) were mostly pretty big, which is why they had those gates all over the place, those let smaller ships in and out of their jumpspace. You could certainly build an FTL ramship in that setting, but there wouldn't be much reason to, and a jumpship bomb probably wouldn't have as impressive energy yields (and would be much more expensive).
manticore7 wrote:I know Crest/Banner of the Stars seemed to make use of these weapons (by the way was I the only one who found the Ahb kind of annoying?) but that was an Anime series so I guess that is a bad example.
Actually, it was a series that assumed that science wouldn't open up new weapons possibilities, so it's a bad example. Their mass-drivers were basically a kilometer or so long, and overpowered, and basically the peak of what's maybe perhaps possible.
As for the Abh, that's what happens when the writing is that clumsy. They mostly steamrolled everyone else by way of authorial fiat.
javcs wrote:Remember, mass drivers have fundamentally crap for effective range, unless you're going to get up into some combination of stupid high round velocities, stupid huge ship (target) sizes, and stupid low ship accelerations.
Already suggested those last two.
Suederwind wrote:No. 1: Why should this massdrivers fire slugs? Wouldn´t it be better to fire some kind of 600t anti aircraft shell which shrapnels could at least do some damage instead of a total miss? You have to make some kind of ammunition if your massdriver is on a ship or spacestation, so why not use something more sophisticated?
I assume that any main-battery mass-driver would feature a variety of rounds, including e.g. forward-observer rounds and terminal-guidance rounds.
fredgiblet wrote:This didn't work very well in blue-water naval fights because the flight time here isn't very long, the ability to detect incoming shells was poor and the reaction time was poor. You can make it the same in space by making the ships slow and lumbering, but that's at the expense of being able to have them do any sort of interesting maneuvering.
If you want interesting maneuvers, then add escorts and various assault drones
. If you're going to use FTL (and wide-ranging space-borne societies) then don't shy away from "space is big".
