Well after stubbornly calculating the power of a continous Mjolnir beam (4228 Gj every 4 minutes means about 17.6 Gj per second or 17.6 GW) and assuming the beam can accelerate the projectile out to about 40Mm (taken from the table) I got a final speed of about 1100Km/s, which is.... awful. Too slow, even if the projectile splits into submunitions to increase hit chance, it still takes 5 minutes to reach one light second!
Arioch wrote:
I think a Terran commander would be much better off firing his particle beams at the enemy rather than using them trying to enhance his mass drivers.
Too bad they seem pretty awful in range and practicality aswell (better than railguns but not enough).
pinheadh78 wrote:However the combatants would clearly see the TCA ship approaching as it entered the system and approached their fleets. They would simply need to make regular random course changes at high-Gs to avoid the projectiles. If the combatant viewed the TCA ship as hostile from the beginning they could simply skewer it with long-range plasma based weaponry while actively maneuvering.
I was thinking the Terran ships could lurk around the jump points in defensive formation and launch the projectiles from outside plasma-weapon range. I don't see us going on the offensive and jumping into their systems any time soon..... but all of that is moot now . The promising math has let me down
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Absalom wrote:
Looking at the Atomic Rockets page, has noone really suggested an AM Solid/(Gas or Plasma) hybrid?
My understanding is that while the Terrans know about antimatter, and can probably produce antimatter in lower quantities (harvest it from the magnetosphere or create it in large and inefficient factories), we are nowhere near using it in mass like the Loroi or Umiak, so I avoided AM possibilities. Also, those engines are pretty theoretical for now, and my experience tells me only the AM:Solid may have high thrust (and even then, it's hard to say if they can reach 20-30G of acceleration). I'm not even sure if we have a practical way of storing said antimatter, even in 2160. It may be worth considering, and here are some links if you're interested
:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=19198
http://news.discovery.com/space/private ... 120523.htm
Alright, before I throw in the towel , the last two solutions I propose are NSWR-driven missiles or bomb-pumped lasers (X-ray or gamma-ray) used as specialized warheads. May not even be missiles but specialized railgun projectiles (as you don't need to strap an engine to the atomic/laser warhead in order to propel it, and is much easier to harden as projectile weight is less of an issue since the battleship propels it instead of it propelling itself). Blow it outside the range of alien ships, and try to fry them (if one light sec is their limit, then try blowing them at 1.2 or 1.1). Spam missiles (I assume such warheads would be easier to construct in mass 160 years from now; they're pretty low tech aswell) and try to give 'em hell.
NSWR (nuclear salt water rocket) would be a really desperate idea . Extreme thrust, extreme specific impulse.....and extreme danger if the fuel tanks get damaged by even a feather. Maybe some sort of self-sealing geometry and specialized catastrophe-proof design may alleviate this, but it's still risky I think. Also, since the enemy appears to have decent (Umiak) to excellent (Loroi) point defenses you'd need a good deal of them and I have trouble thinking how cheap they may be. Sure they're low tech enough for Terran industry to produce, but they're both big (I'd say about 35 tonnes for minimum sized missile) and use uranium as fuel, so they might be expensive. Hard to tell, but worth considering perhaps.