Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

[fredgiblet]

My favorite in that vein: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVgbtqsmx54

[discord]

lasers and railguns? yes it's coming, and lasers are already around, railguns not quite there yet...kinda like fusion power, but it probably WILL work which is not certain about fusion any time soon....not talking about how to POWER these babies either, that is gonna be an issue.

forcefield? no, active countermeasures. CIWS in a very small package. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIWS

invisibility? again, no not quite, the basic science is sound, but the application is a bitch and a half, basically it's impossible....but you CAN make smart fabric with configurable color/patterns or active camo with cameras to project what is behind in front....still nowhere near as good as a proper ghillie suit, THOSE make you fucking undetectable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit

[GeoModder]

So, the ECS list is now up to hull number 215, with about 60 of that named.
Arioch, my question is, if the remaining unnamed hull numbers are all Cavadini tugs and McCracken medium transports (basically, does the TCA deploy 150+ non-military vessels) or if war/patrol ships smaller in size then the Hayes class are included as well?

[Arioch]

So, the ECS list is now up to hull number 215, with about 60 of that named.
Arioch, my question is, if the remaining unnamed hull numbers are all Cavadini tugs and McCracken medium transports (basically, does the TCA deploy 150+ non-military vessels) or if war/patrol ships smaller in size then the Hayes class are included as well?

The numbers include about 40 vessels that are no longer in service (mostly early exploration vessels and transports) as well as a variety of non-military government vessels that are not listed. Many are courier vessels and small VIP transports.

[RedDwarfIV]

Does the TCA have a Single Stage To Orbit spaceplane or shuttle?

If so, do you have any drawings?

[Arioch]

Does the TCA have a Single Stage To Orbit spaceplane or shuttle?

If so, do you have any drawings?

I'm sure they have a variety of such craft, but I don't have any drawings of the human small craft (as they won't appear in the comic).

[RedDwarfIV]

Ah.

If they don't have SABRE engines, then humanity is already doomed.

[Grayhome]

Arioch you said some time in the past that humanity does have shuttles, could those be modified into fighters/bombers/assault shuttles?

[Arioch]

Arioch you said some time in the past that humanities do have shuttles, could those be modified into fighters/bombers/assault shuttles?

In theory, but shuttles designed to carry passengers or cargo generally can't exceed 5 or 6 gees acceleration, and so these would be of very limited use in combat.

[TrashMan]

lasers and railguns? yes it's coming, and lasers are already around, railguns not quite there yet...kinda like fusion power, but it probably WILL work which is not certain about fusion any time soon....not talking about how to POWER these babies either, that is gonna be an issue.

Powering everything is an issue.

Unless you think beam weapons won't have massive power requirements. Especially given those magical fields that keep beam cohesion. So yeah...

[RedDwarfIV]

I'm going to assume the TCA don't have the technology yet, but if you can collect it, there's a lot of antimatter in the Van Allen belts.

And if the TCA were okay with ORION drives, they could have bomb-pumped gamma ray lasers.

[Nemo]

Define a lot? As I recall its about 150 nanograms of AM. E=mc^2 makes that roughly 4 kilowatt hours of energy.


I mean, its more than we can make dirtside, but not enough to be useful in this context.

[RedDwarfIV]

Yeah, but its always being replenished. Leave collecting stations in the belts and you'd probably get quite a lot after a while. Besides, the concenntration is higher in Earth's magnetic field, so it's easier to collect it here than at Jupiter.

[GeoModder]

... or near the Sun.

[ThatsNoMoon]

lasers and railguns? yes it's coming, and lasers are already around, railguns not quite there yet...kinda like fusion power, but it probably WILL work which is not certain about fusion any time soon....not talking about how to POWER these babies either, that is gonna be an issue.

Powering everything is an issue.

Unless you think beam weapons won't have massive power requirements. Especially given those magical fields that keep beam cohesion. So yeah...

Power is easy, it's dumping the waste heat that's hard. Damn near unsolvably so. D:

For combat purposes, Railguns are somewhat more functional than LASER technology at this point.
The LASER systems deployed are exclusively anti-missile systems due to the severe limitations of current designs. Some people will tell you it's because using them on living beings would be a war crime, and while that is technically true the real reason is that they are terribly inefficient at anything else.
Meanwhile, prototype naval Railguns have tested out with firing energies of 33MJ per shot. That classes it as anti-heavy-armor, but they can be built to any lower specs. It's also possible to design and build systems with variable muzzle energy.

[discord]

moon: yes, works under laboratory conditions, problem are and will be fire rates, barrel lifespan, energy budget and finally munitions for quite a while.

lets just take energy budget, take the 33MJ example and compare fire rate of the 16" guns on the iowa class(nine guns twice per minute, which can mean three shots the first minute, but lets stick with 2/minute equals 18 shots/minute) 33x18=594, taking conversion losses and such into account, you would need one of the two main reactors on a aircraft carrier just to power the guns and equal fire rate(but not damage output) to the obsolete scrapped ship from WW2.

there is a reason i often say that railguns will bring back the BB, but right now, the ancient BB from WW2 is still superior.

[GeoModder]

Just wondering, but wouldn't one hit from a 33mj railgun projectile equal several if not dozens of 16 inch granate hits? Higher energy transfer to the target and all that.
OTOH, a railgun probably becomes a line of sight weapon fairly quickly, so not really usable for targets over a planetary horizon...

[Hālian]

Well, if you're going over the horizon, you have to take gravity-induced curvature into effect.

[fredgiblet]

Just wondering, but wouldn't one hit from a 33mj railgun projectile equal several if not dozens of 16 inch granate hits? Higher energy transfer to the target and all that.
OTOH, a railgun probably becomes a line of sight weapon fairly quickly, so not really usable for targets over a planetary horizon...

According to the Navy it will work quite well as long range bombardment. That's part of the reason they're going for them, you can have long-range bombardment capabilities that euqla to the old battleship rifles in a smaller package.

[ThatsNoMoon]

moon: yes, works under laboratory conditions, problem are and will be fire rates, barrel lifespan, energy budget and finally munitions for quite a while.

lets just take energy budget, take the 33MJ example and compare fire rate of the 16" guns on the iowa class(nine guns twice per minute, which can mean three shots the first minute, but lets stick with 2/minute equals 18 shots/minute) 33x18=594, taking conversion losses and such into account, you would need one of the two main reactors on a aircraft carrier just to power the guns and equal fire rate(but not damage output) to the obsolete scrapped ship from WW2.

there is a reason i often say that railguns will bring back the BB, but right now, the ancient BB from WW2 is still superior.

Your numbers are off.
18 shots at 33MJ a piece would equal 594MJ, but that's over the course of a minute. Using a power buffer, such as an array of capacitors, would make the average power draw for your 9-gun array would be 9.9MW. The largest naval reactor in use at the moment is 165 MWe, and as you would not deploy an electrically-powered weapon on a ship class with weak power source it suggests your calculations assume the railguns have a total system efficiency of about 6%.

Of course you're also assuming that the guns have the same ballistic properties and would be used the same way. That is not accurate.
The 16"/50 Mark 7 had a muzzle velocity of up to 820m/s.
The prototype railgun in question has a muzzle velocity of approximately 2722m/s.
The 16" guns fired explosive munitions in banks for saturation, and because they were imprecise as a result of both the physics involved and the targeting systems in use.
Kinetic impactors are not fired for saturation, nor are modern targeting systems so crude.
The 16" guns had a maximum range of 38km.
Near-deployment railguns have an effective range of 160km.

Then there's other practical concerns. Rounds for railguns take up only a tiny fraction as much space as chemically-propelled rounds, meaning that far more can be carried in the same space. Kinetic impactors, unlike chemical propelled munitions, also pose no risk to the crew in the event of a fire or other emergency.


The 33MJ round is only fit for laboratories at the moment, but the US navy intends to put a mach 5 (~1701m/s) railgun into a testing deployment in 2016.