Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

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Siber
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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Siber »

I'm not going to dig into everything else at the moment, but I am curious where the 10m barrel length figure is coming from. I understood the weapon to be fixed mounts because if it's size, and the smallest ship that carries a heavy mass driver is almost 300m. Was there word of god on this somewhere that I missed?

It probably doesn't make much difference in the final mathing because the forces involved in accelerating a projectile even over that length are still going to be bonkers, but I am still curious.
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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Mjolnir »

MBehave wrote:The peak field strengths required ARE alike, or actually less for the fusion chamber.
Except you have to apply those fields with a field topology suitable for bottling and directing plasma across a chamber with about a million times the volume, containing an explosion generating immense amounts of heat and neutrons. These things are nothing alike in their technological requirements.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
MBehave wrote:icekatze
Laser beam with a differing intensity between the core and the edge has a gradient of force when that beam interacts with particles.
So... what does this have to do with gradient pressure not being a theory? Why does it matter if it is a theory or not? I still don't know which law you're referring to.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by icekatze »

hi hi
Siber wrote:I'm not going to dig into everything else at the moment, but I am curious where the 10m barrel length figure is coming from.
I'm not sure if there's a hard number anywhere, but it seems that the barrels on the railguns are pretty short compared to the whole ship, based on the image of the America that Arioch made.

At those sizes, and those power levels, I have a feeling that those mass drivers are meticulously maintained to avoid sudden, unplanned failure of the firing chamber. I would expect that they'd be considered very state of the art by today's standards, and probably not at all cost effective as expendable munitions themselves.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Siber »

The barrels could run most of the length of that wing structure, which is a lot bigger than 10m long. I'd eyeball it at 50-70% of the length of the ship. Since we've got profile views of the ships I tried matching the sideview features and came up with close to 54%, so on a 320m ship lets call it 170m for round numbers.
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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

That's what I would have assumed too, but the barrels in the wing structure are the torpedo tubes. The turret on the side of the wing structure with two barrels on the fore turret and one barrel on the aft turret are the mass drivers.

I know the properties of the mass drivers have come up before as being suspect. I'm not an electromagnets expert, but after playing a bit of Children of a Dead Earth, I might have decided on a mass driver that fired x400 1kg rounds instead of x1 400kg round.

For stuff like that, I just have to accept that the numbers in the insider were never meant to be exacting.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by MBehave »

They are stated as turrets not spinal mount.
Many Terran vessels house weapons in turrets with multiple mounts; in the entries below, "04x2" indicates four twin turrets, with a total of 8 weapon mounts.
The big turrets are the lasers, the little side turret is the heavy dual and single mass drivers.
Look at turret size on profile.
Image
The large turrets go into the entire 320m length over 30 times

Image
Siber wrote:I'm not going to dig into everything else at the moment, but I am curious where the 10m barrel length figure is coming from. I understood the weapon to be fixed mounts because if it's size, and the smallest ship that carries a heavy mass driver is almost 300m. Was there word of god on this somewhere that I missed?

It probably doesn't make much difference in the final mathing because the forces involved in accelerating a projectile even over that length are still going to be bonkers, but I am still curious.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Siber »

Fair enough, I assumed they were the circular structures on the front of the wings, but I suppose those are probably missile launchers if anything. Shoulda looked at the loadout more closely. 10m is probably in the right neighborhood for those.
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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Voitan »

I still believe if Humans want to leapfrog in competition in war, they have to redefine the way it is waged. Flexing their creativity in ways that no sane person would consider, simply because no one has tried it yet. Risking possible worse scenarios than the one they face, simply because they might not win a war of extinction, so in desperation try a solution that makes war all the more frightening when it eventually propagates to other alien civilizations. Such as making hyperspace jumps purposefully more dangerous to their enemies, or anyone in a targeted star system.

Actually thinking on that concept, could be a reason the SOIA empire collapsed. No FTL travel alone could bring a dark age upon space civilizations that are reliant on it, and/or perhaps some weapon that exacerbated the psychological effects of Hyperspace may have brought on a pandemic of insanity across the empire.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Here is an idea why not say go with a freaking bio weapon that you spray insecticide or someshit on Umaki worlds and by pass all this fleet based combat. We all know this war's factions won't tolerate the existence of each other lets up the conflit to out right genocide. Make a few drone ships with the weapon show up in system and blast the shit out of the enemy home worlds.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Arioch »

CrimsonFALKE wrote:Here is an idea why not say go with a freaking bio weapon that you spray insecticide or someshit on Umaki worlds and by pass all this fleet based combat. We all know this war's factions won't tolerate the existence of each other lets up the conflit to out right genocide. Make a few drone ships with the weapon show up in system and blast the shit out of the enemy home worlds.
If they could have done that, they already would have. There is no access to enemy populated worlds.

The border is guarded. Drone ships are not immune to being destroyed by defending fleets. Those worlds which are near enough to the front to be within range of such strikes have long ago already been evacuated or depopulated. Those worlds which are deep enough within their own territory are not reachable by the enemy; at least, not without a major offensive to push the front that far.

It's very easy at this tech level to destroy the population of a planet. You don't need to use bioweapons.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by CrimsonFALKE »

Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Here is an idea why not say go with a freaking bio weapon that you spray insecticide or someshit on Umaki worlds and by pass all this fleet based combat. We all know this war's factions won't tolerate the existence of each other lets up the conflit to out right genocide. Make a few drone ships with the weapon show up in system and blast the shit out of the enemy home worlds.
If they could have done that, they already would have. There is no access to enemy populated worlds.

The border is guarded. Drone ships are not immune to being destroyed by defending fleets. Those worlds which are near enough to the front to be within range of such strikes have long ago already been evacuated or depopulated. Those worlds which are deep enough within their own territory are not reachable by the enemy; at least, not without a major offensive to push the front that far.

It's very easy at this tech level to destroy the population of a planet. You don't need to use bioweapons.
Well is there any chance to use drones to boost Loroi numbers or are drones to cowardly for Loroi taste

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Arioch »

CrimsonFALKE wrote:Well is there any chance to use drones to boost Loroi numbers or are drones to cowardly for Loroi taste
An unmanned starship would not be less expensive to construct than a manned starship, (it might be more expensive, due to the automated systems that would need to replace the crew's function), and it would be less capable in combat. The Loroi are at times experiencing shortages of trained crews, but not to the point where it would make economic sense to construct unmanned ships.

If unmanned warships could fight as effectively and more cheaply than manned ships, then all the ships would be unmanned. Since both sides use crews, it seems reasonable to suppose that they do so for a practical reason.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Incinerator »

Hello!

So, I've mostly been lurking for a while, but thought I would weigh in on the problems with automated drones.
First, drones need to be controlled by something. Either by a platform in-system, or by another ship that is in formation with them.

Having a ship controlling other ships avoids communications latency, but is essentially 'putting all of your eggs in one basket' as far as the utility of those drone ships goes. If the controlling ship is disabled or destroyed, you've just lost those drone ships too. This might not be a terrible problem at first, but once your enemy figures out what you're doing, they're going to start targeting your controller ships first. This could be mitigated by having multiple such controller ships in a given formation and having automatic 'hand-off' of control to other controllers if one is disabled, but there is only so much computational capacity you can fit into a ship.

A remote platform that is far away from a battle avoids a direct threat scenario, but that distance now works against you in the form of communications lag. Since neither of the major combatants appear to possess FTL communications*, you're stuck at light speed. At anything further than 75,000 km away, the drone control system is going to have an effective reaction time inferior to that of a human crew member. Enemy crewed ships would fly circles around your drone starships.

Both of these approaches are also vulnerable to electronic warfare and signal spoofing.

I didn't address AI-controlled ships here, as that leaves the definition of 'drone' and is more 'crewed by a supercomputer'. I think there might be some resistance in both militaries to that idea, especially if they have a hint of what the Historians are capable of.


* The Loroi farsensing ability seems to be an exception, but from what I can tell it's only one-way and thus not useful for this purpose.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Arioch »

All of the above is true, but it's not just a question of control and decision making. Starships are extremely complex collections of systems that need monitoring, calibrating, maintenance and repair. Automation can take care of some of this, but there are times (especially in combat) when things go wrong and solutions to unexpected problems need to be figured out and implemented on the fly, and sometimes manually. At this tech level, living operators can do this more effectively and more cheaply than the equivalent mechanical systems.

That's not to say that there aren't robots aiding the living crews in these ships; there are. But the tasks that robots tend to be worst at are things that nobody expected to happen.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Sweforce »

Arioch wrote:
CrimsonFALKE wrote:Well is there any chance to use drones to boost Loroi numbers or are drones to cowardly for Loroi taste
An unmanned starship would not be less expensive to construct than a manned starship, (it might be more expensive, due to the automated systems that would need to replace the crew's function), and it would be less capable in combat. The Loroi are at times experiencing shortages of trained crews, but not to the point where it would make economic sense to construct unmanned ships.

If unmanned warships could fight as effectively and more cheaply than manned ships, then all the ships would be unmanned. Since both sides use crews, it seems reasonable to suppose that they do so for a practical reason.
But the technology for automated ships are there so I suspect that there could be some niche uses for such ships even thou combat are unlikely, that is unless you want to create a fire ship to physically ram an enemy installation. However, doing that can probably be done with any ship simply be programming the autopilot to behave like a missile. Hiding a fleet from faar seers however could perhaps allow for a build up in an area to remain unnoticed until, perhaps the entire fleet jumps into a system to revive actual crews.

Still I suspect that automated ships are most likely to be civilian freight ships. I had this idea of a manned lead ship in convoy with the rest of the ships being unmanned with technicians from the lead ship visiting them when the need arise. A perfect unmanned ship would be designed very differently with no need to fit crew facilities inside it. It always amazes me when looking at the animated Star Wars Clone Wars series how the separatists ships not only have a crew of robots, they even run with a breathable atmosphere onboard! A robotic ship should have nothing of that.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Arioch »

A starship in Outsider -- even an unarmed one -- is a very expensive piece of hardware. Ramming things with starships is not a very cost-effective use of resources. Kinetic energy of a collision increases with the square of velocity but only linearly with mass (KE=1/2mv^2), so at high velocities, you're much better off letting missiles do the ramming -- they're easier to hit targets with, they accelerate at greater rates and so can achieve higher velocities and therefore much greater damage with a smaller mass -- and they're cheap enough to be expendable.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Sweforce »

Arioch wrote:A starship in Outsider -- even an unarmed one -- is a very expensive piece of hardware. Ramming things with starships is not a very cost-effective use of resources. Kinetic energy of a collision increases with the square of velocity but only linearly with mass (KE=1/2mv^2), so at high velocities, you're much better off letting missiles do the ramming -- they're easier to hit targets with, they accelerate at greater rates and so can achieve higher velocities and therefore much greater damage with a smaller mass -- and they're cheap enough to be expendable.
I suspected as much. A fire ship in a modern setting is unlikely thou the British actually pulled it of during WW2 to take out a repair dock in France in order to deny this resources to the krigsmarine. The ship was an already obsolete destroyer, packed with explosives and manned by commandos. They rammed the dock, stepped of the ship and begun causing mayhem in the area before retreating. The explosives detonated on a timer later destroying the dock. Apperantly the germans believed that the ship was only there to block access to the dock rather then destroying it. In an Outsider setting I suspect that the way to go would rather be to boobytrap a derelict to explode in hope of taking out at least an enemy salvage crew and whatever shuttlecraft that brought them there.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Zarya »

At a Loroi/Umiak tech level I could still imagine anti-matter based fireships capable of taking out entire planets / fleets / solar systems. The idea would still be that a fireship needs to survive long enough, for example by looking "innocent & harmless", to reach the position where it can inflict serious damage or wipe out the opponent. With 16/17th Century technology fireships have been succesfully applied, but it never was an easy to deploy weapon.

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Re: Terran Nuclear Tech (split from Terran Q&A)

Post by Arioch »

No ship at this tech level is innocent or harmless; they're all potential weapons. Any unidentified ship approaching a dock or other vulnerable target would be fired upon by the defenders. The only way this ruse could work is during peacetime, or to somehow disguise the ship as a friendly. Given TL10+ Friend or Foe ID systems, this would be difficult to pull off. You would essentially have to have a captured ship, but even then you would need to somehow explain how this ship suddenly appeared from enemy territory.

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