Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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RedDwarfIV
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

GeoModder wrote:
RedDwarfIV wrote:Thing is, if you can make RADAR bounce off, then you've prevented the enemy from getting your range.
Parallax observation from different vantage points?
I hadn't thought of that. It might even give you the range fast than RADAR, since RADAR has to travel all the way back...

Good ingenuity.
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Mr Bojangles
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr Bojangles »

RedDwarfIV wrote:
GeoModder wrote:
RedDwarfIV wrote:Thing is, if you can make RADAR bounce off, then you've prevented the enemy from getting your range.
Parallax observation from different vantage points?
I hadn't thought of that. It might even give you the range fast than RADAR, since RADAR has to travel all the way back...

Good ingenuity.
Reduced radar signatures are always a good thing when you're being actively targeted. I don't think parallax range-finding would be any faster than straight radar pulses. Your ship still has to physically move between observation points and it will be much slower than light. That being said, it wouldn't be a bad technique for a starship captain to keep in their pocket.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

bojangles: unless you have to ships, or a ship and a sensor probe....at which point it IS viable, not faster than C velocity sensors by any stretch....but still workable....hmm, unless it's a pure passive optical analysis....in which case it actually could be faster than RADAR, due to single trip of the light instead of back and forth double trip of radar.

and on smaller radar cross section....sure, nice and all, but if the choice is between smaller RCS and armor, I personally would opt for armor, especially on large ships....because no matter how small RCS you have, modern radars can detect a single bird in flight at obscene ranges....a 100+meters ship does not have a smaller RCS then a bird.
honestly, the US navy figured out that stealth ships do not work in the fucking 80's when they tried out a pure stealth ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow the result was 'yup, not a single radar return on the thing, we still knew where the bloody hell it was due to radar SHADOW what should be behind it was not.' and that was in the 80's our radars are slightly better now, especially in interpreting the data which is what this was about.

ergo. two radars doing parallax range finding, will get both direction and range down well enough to shoot it, no problem.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

A Type 45 Daring class carries the BAE 'SAMPSON' RADAR system, which has a total range of about 400Km. It makes thirty revolutions per minute - but is made up of two vertical rotating planar arrays on a horizontal... turntable, I guess... which means no part of the sky is unobserved for more than a second. A combination of software and 'adaptive waveform control' makes the system immune to jamming. At 25Km, it can track a thousand cricket ball sized objects moving at Mach 3. Having all this in a single package makes it lighter than conventional RADAR systems, meaning you can devote superstructure to putting the device higher, where it will have a better view...

... hence explaining why Type 45 destroyers have that ugly tower on them behind the bridge.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Zakharra »

Mr Bojangles wrote:
RedDwarfIV wrote:
GeoModder wrote: Parallax observation from different vantage points?
I hadn't thought of that. It might even give you the range fast than RADAR, since RADAR has to travel all the way back...

Good ingenuity.
Reduced radar signatures are always a good thing when you're being actively targeted. I don't think parallax range-finding would be any faster than straight radar pulses. Your ship still has to physically move between observation points and it will be much slower than light. That being said, it wouldn't be a bad technique for a starship captain to keep in their pocket.
What about lidar? A laser based 'radar'. Our more traditional radar could and should be supplemented by other forms of range finding in space.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr Bojangles »

discord wrote:bojangles: unless you have to ships, or a ship and a sensor probe....at which point it IS viable, not faster than C velocity sensors by any stretch....but still workable....hmm, unless it's a pure passive optical analysis....in which case it actually could be faster than RADAR, due to single trip of the light instead of back and forth double trip of radar.
Those probes and other ships would still have to deal with lightspeed lag when trying to build a range solution. As we both said, it's something a captain could keep in reserve in a pinch. Now, direct observation, plus a laser rangefinder....
discord wrote:and on smaller radar cross section....sure, nice and all, but if the choice is between smaller RCS and armor, I personally would opt for armor, especially on large ships....because no matter how small RCS you have, modern radars can detect a single bird in flight at obscene ranges....a 100+meters ship does not have a smaller RCS then a bird.
honestly, the US navy figured out that stealth ships do not work in the fucking 80's when they tried out a pure stealth ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow the result was 'yup, not a single radar return on the thing, we still knew where the bloody hell it was due to radar SHADOW what should be behind it was not.' and that was in the 80's our radars are slightly better now, especially in interpreting the data which is what this was about.
Getting something the size of a 100+ meter ship to have the RCS of a bird is ridiculous and I hope no naval designer was honestly aiming for that. You really are probably better off with active ECM and CIWS for ship defense rather than passive stealth. Reducing RCS is a good thing, but not if it breaks everything else (pretty sure you know what ship class I'm talking about).

As for seeing the radar shadow, I'm not sure if that would be possible with today's stealth. Modern stealth systems absorb radar signals and what isn't absorbed is deflected away from the source. The scanning ship/aircraft would see a reduced signature, but no hole or shadow. Now, if there was a detector on the other side of the target, it could very well see a hole in the source's radar beam.
discord wrote:ergo. two radars doing parallax range finding, will get both direction and range down well enough to shoot it, no problem.
True, but a bit redundant.
fredgiblet wrote:In the meantime the Russians are adding IRST to every fighter, which will drastically reduce the value of stealth even on the F-22 as it doesn't seem to have much if any concessions to IR stealth. The claimed capabilities of some of the IRST systems are very impressive, but just claimed for now. I think that we will find that stealth isn't as useful as we expect if we fight someone with a decent setup.
The US and various European powers are also developing and mounting IRST to aircraft. They're not really new, but likely a bit better than their predecessors from the 60s (yes, there's some sarcasm there). I am curious as to their accuracy and tracking capabilities. It's an arms race: armor vs. bullets; stealth vs. detection.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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The off-topic discussion about Zumwalt and related subjects has been moved here: http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... f=4&t=1002

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Out of interest, what made you decide to have Star Trek style artificial gravity when you've gone to a lot of pains to keep it hard sci-fi elsewhere? I imagine the Historians would be Sufficiently Advanced to have the tech [and could have given it to the Loroi], but the Earth ships in particular could have carried centrifuges.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

RedDwarfIV wrote:Out of interest, what made you decide to have Star Trek style artificial gravity when you've gone to a lot of pains to keep it hard sci-fi elsewhere? I imagine the Historians would be Sufficiently Advanced to have the tech [and could have given it to the Loroi], but the Earth ships in particular could have carried centrifuges.
It's mainly a question of visual aesthetics. The "centrifuge" design works in scenarios in which the ships have very low acceleration, but they don't look like they could structurally stand up to six gees. The rational alternative is a more compact design in which the whole ship rotates, and so it's shaped like a cylinder or a fat cigar. I spent a lot of time with the progenitor story to Outsider designing ships that didn't require artificial gravity, and by necessity they tended to look like office buildings or cigars. That was okay for a prose story, but it was still unsatisfying to me, and the story kept fluctuating between more and less hard science fiction versions. When I started working on Outsider and determined that it would be a comic, I decided that for a visual story, making things look cool would take priority over realistic function in design; it's a space opera story about blue space elves, after all. I think that since then I've been able to provide plausible explanations for how things work, but that's not the first consideration in the design process. Otherwise, I probably would never have been able to get started. If I had it to do over again, I would probably make the human ships lower-tech... but then we wouldn't have the current Bellarmine and America designs, which are some of the most popular illustrations I've ever done.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Ah. That does make a lot of sense.

I've designed spacecraft 'office style' inside that still kind of look like the Space is An Ocean type on the outside to combine hard sci-fi and aesthetics. Mine wouldn't let the crew keep working normally at up to six g accelleration like Outsider Terrans' vessels would though.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Murica »

Ok I think I may have thought of a way humanity might be useful. Are there any insurgency large enough to be a problem but not warranting dust off and nuke it from orbit strategy? If so you don't exactly need ships that are capable of fighting on the front line to help humanity might be able to move in and provide fire support with its less advanced fleet and occupation troops in order to free up Loroi or allied ships that way human forces could help free up loroi ships until the TCA manages to modernize

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Zakharra »

As far as I know, there are no insurgencies anymore and the Loroi and Umiak deal with them the same way now: with nuclear warheads. The front lines have been static for years, with a whole bunch of nuclear blasted systems between the Umiak and Loroi that are fought over.

One of the biggest problems with the human ships operating with the Loroi is that our ships are too slow. The ships of the Loroi and Umiak and their minions can accelerate at a speed of 30-40 G, Human ships might have a 10G acceleration curve, the missiles closer to a 15-20G. We're simply not anywhere near fast enough to be of any use for them. There's nothing humanity could threaten that they can't just outrun.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Indeed. At best, we might manage to fill a niche as 'those guys who gather rocks to fling at Umiak colonies'. Sending small task forces, headed by America and Victory classes with Mjolnir refits, off to the Umiak front lines, where they'd start working on an indirect assault - gather up asteroids, work out where a target will be at some point in the future, then fire.

Or even better, if the Umiak use cloudscoops, send them to destroy those. (Cloudscoops harvest hydrogen isotopes from gas giants.) If the Umiak use antimatter, then destroy their beltscoops. (My own term for a Van Allen Belt antimatter scoop.)

If Terran ships are going to be involved in the war, it can't be the same part as Loroi ships do. Loroi ships have their hands full patrolling the Steppes, and their speed is essential to keeping up with Umiak ships. Terrans would need to be employed in situations where they were going up against targets that were static, or of lower or comparable speed.

Cutting off their logistics might prove interesting, but as of yet we know very little about Umiak space. And in any case, Arioch has said that the Terrans will not be the deciding factor in the war.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Zakharra »

Well, Terran technology won't be a deciding factor, but Terran space opens up a whole new front deep behind current battle lines. It's likely Humanity's astrological position in the galaxy is what we have to offer. Especially with a tech base that is capable of being upgraded so it can support Loroi forces a long way from home.
Cutting off their logistics might prove interesting, but as of yet we know very little about Umiak space
I doubt Human ships would be used as commerce raiders. By the nature of the mission, any ships used for that have to be very fast ships so they don't get caught by Hegemony security forces. And have to be able to operate a long way from home.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Zakharra wrote:
Cutting off their logistics might prove interesting, but as of yet we know very little about Umiak space
I doubt Human ships would be used as commerce raiders. By the nature of the mission, any ships used for that have to be very fast ships so they don't get caught by Hegemony security forces. And have to be able to operate a long way from home.
I suppose so. Arioch did say that jumping into a system results in a lot of radiation, especially in the visible spectrum, IIRC. But the major targets would be static, such as (depending on Umiak tech levels) cloudscoops, beltscoops, orbital habitables, space stations, and spacedocks. These shouldn't be too difficult to find with passive sensors, at which point you plot a firing solution, and launch rocks. You then hope that the target will be in the predicted position when the rock reaches it.

If you do that to an important position, you might well force the enemy to withdraw some of their forces back to defend such positions. EG, the bombing of Tokyo in 1942 making Japan pull carriers back to defend the Home Islands, leaving their aquisitions open to American attack, and contributing to the Japanese loss at the Battle of Midway.

Possibly also communications and scanning satellites, both of which practically offer themselves to homing weapons with their broadcasts.


If the Terran forces were to come into engagement with Umiak forces, then they've done something wrong. If the rocks don't hit, well, at least the Terrans tried to get involved, and raids like that can be good for moral. That's something the Loroi are probably in need of, given how long they've spent fighting in a stalemate, and the grim neccesity of dealing with anyone who refuses to take sides.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

The problem is that any forces attacking the Umiak or the Loroi are going to have to get past their early warning systems. The Loroi's reliance on farseers makes humans very dangerous to them in that regard, but the Umiak almost certainly have enemy detection capabilities as well. They detect your ships as they are approaching important worlds, and intercept them before they can get there. Any really important system is probably going to have a few jumps worth of buffer space between it and an attacker.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

To continue to use the Tokyo raid as an example... the Japanese didn't expect that the Americans could strike so far into their territory. What you say is most likely true for important worlds near the conflict... but further into Umiak space?

Of course, I may be a little on the optimistic side here. The Umiak seem the type to have made their systems into fortresses before the war had even begun.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

By the time the Americans were raiding Tokyo, the Japanese military was already well on its way to losing the war. The Umiak may be fighting with the Loroi across a single front, but they are expanding along the rest of their borders, as evidenced by their conquering of the Orgus. Maybe the Terrans could get lucky and find the perfect backdoor, but it seems like it would be a one-shot deal. But more likely, the Terrans would have to go through Orgus space or some other client species first.

(If the Nitto Maru had been an Umiak ship and the Hornet a Terran ship, the Doolittle Raid might have gone a lot differently.)

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by saint of m »

What about something completely out of the ordinary?

In the first world war, the only way for the British to sink a U-boat is if it surfaces as that was the only time they could see them. The problem was, unless an emergancy or an idiot happened, they would only surfese near suvilian ships and not military ones.

SO the Brits decided to dress their men in drag, and have a little acting going around. From a distance they looked like women (that or the Germans had been out to sea too long) and since females were not allowed on Military ships at the time they surfaced. With the bait taken, the British ship shot the U boat to pieces.

This worked 70 times.

Why bring this up?

A little psychology here: The human brain takes short cuts as it doesn't want to think too hard on the little details. This is a sound system as if you take too long to analyze something that saber tooth tiger could have you for lunch. This is why the common trick "I love to go to Paris in the the spring" works as the human mind tends to gloss over the second "the" for much of the same reason.


As is, Terrains are the Brits in this scenario, and the Shells and Space Elves are the U-Boat crews. Is there a way for the terrains to take something the Umiak would just either ignore or take a look and think friendly untill a point blank photon torpedo rips them a new one?

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

PerhapThe Terrans could make their spacecraft look more insectile, paint them in Umiak camo, and masquerade as old spacecraft brought out of storage to shore up the war effort.

Then launch rocks.
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