Alternate Weapons of War thread...

[NothingNow]

Some stuff cooked up for NS. basically more attempts to turn a Centurion into a Bolo mk1 equivalent.

With a 120mm L/70 Gun and 30mm DP radar directed autocannon.

Numbered from the top:
(All)155mm L/55 Smoothbore gun
(1): 8 tube Surface to Air/Anti Tank missile system and combined weapons station, including a 40mm Grenade Launcher and rifle caliber MG.
(2) A twin 120mm AMOS Mortar system.
(3) A 30mm DP radar directed autocannon.

EDIT: I can't shake the feeling that #1 is rather under armed.

 

[Devilmaypoop]

It's nice looking, but incredibly implausible. What's the difference between a light railgunand a light massdriver? WHat does a "long range" missile tube mean? And how exactly did we manage to build such a spacecraft within 2 decades?


The first one was okay, as far as science goes...this one breaks all barriers and goes right into ridiculous territory.

1) Fusion engines would never allow a spaceship to reach .7 c, and sure as hell not by 2034.
2) Again, why are you differentiating between railguns and mass drivers? Railguns ARE Mass Drivers.
3) What the hell does this equation mean?

4) Tritanium is a fictional element.
5) As is quartium.

So, I guess the drawing is nice in and off itself-but it is extremely implausible, to say the least. No way we could throw up something that big by 2034.

1) Well it depends with kind of mechanic it has. Lets say the humans reverse engineered their's from a crashed alien derelict they found on earth around 2012. Just to make it less inplausible, there were massive advances in technology thanks to that alien ship they found. By long range missile tubes I mean very long range missiles, multiple times the range of conventional weapons.

But yeah, maybe 0.7c is a bit too much, and considering the reverse engineered one wouldnt be the same grade as the original alien drive, I'd say around 0.2c or something?

2) What Habsburg said. I intended that railguns would be more or less like machineguns compared to Mass drivers, and would be used against fighters, or very small frigates/destroyers, or as point defence. Mass drivers would fire extremely dense and large rounds at massive speeds against larger ships.

3) Sorry to confuse, I meant it as between 160 and 220 for maximum crew plus the marines.

4) - 5) So? There is alot of fictional stuff here, and the humans presumably mined them from other solar systems with alot of unknown elements.

Well thanks for the compliment.

 

[Locke]

It's badly phrased yes, but he means "A Crew of 160 to 220, plus 20 to 30 marines"

No need to get quite so in your face about it. It's easily 'translated' as it were.

Thanks for the clarification, it was not my intent to sound like I was "up in his face". Or my face.

Depends on the rate of acceleration and exactly how the mechanism works.
Though I'd say an antimatter rocket engine would be a better bet.


Presumably, Mass Drivers indicate coilgun or gauss gun type magnetic accelerator weapons. Whereas Railguns are, well, rail type.


And? There can be fictional elements and materials in fiction.

Well, unless he desires to inject even more handwavium into the universe, then sure, I guess.
I'm not saying "science good, fiction bad!" here, yeesh. He asked for comments. I posted my thoughts, which was that while it was well-drawn, it wasn't plausible. He's got people building aircraft carrier sized spaceships, and using conventional rockets to achieve relativistic speeds in 2 decades. That requires quite a stretching of the imagination. Not to mention tritanium was ripped off from Star Trek.

1) Well it depends with kind of mechanic it has. Lets say the humans reverse engineered their's from a crashed alien derelict they found on earth around 2012. Just to make it less inplausible, there were massive advances in technology thanks to that alien ship they found. By long range missile tubes I mean very long range missiles, multiple times the range of conventional weapons.

Yes, I am aware what "long range" means. My point is, what exactly are you referring to when you say "range"? You do realize that weapons in space have an infinite range, right?

But yeah, maybe 0.7c is a bit too much, and considering the reverse engineered one wouldnt be the same grade as the original alien drive, I'd say around 0.2c or something?

Achieving anything near relativistic speeds using covnentional rockets, while still staying in this solar system, seems completely ASB to me.

2) What Habsburg said. I intended that railguns would be more or less like machineguns compared to Mass drivers, and would be used against fighters, or very small frigates/destroyers, or as point defence. Mass drivers would fire extremely dense and large rounds at massive speeds against larger ships.

Wouldn't lasers work better than railguns? Railgun projectiles are extremely slow, and any spacecraft could easily avoid them or destroy them with lasers. A warship using lasers could much more easily destroy enemy ships-and the enemy wouldn't even be able to detect it, much less shoot it down.

4) - 5) So? There is alot of fictional stuff here, and the humans presumably mined them from other solar systems with alot of unknown elements.

So I'm guessing that the alien ship crash lands in 2012, by 2015 we have several hundred spaceships and space colonies in the solar system, by 2020 we've colonized or terraformed nearby star systems, and then in 2034 the aliens come, right?

 

[Mr. BoJangles]

Some stuff cooked up for NS. basically more attempts to turn a Centurion into a Bolo mk1 equivalent.

With a 120mm L/70 Gun and 30mm DP radar directed autocannon.


Numbered from the top:
(All)155mm L/55 Smoothbore gun
(1): 8 tube Surface to Air/Anti Tank missile system and combined weapons station, including a 40mm Grenade Launcher and rifle caliber MG.
(2) A twin 120mm AMOS Mortar system.
(3) A 30mm DP radar directed autocannon.

EDIT: I can't shake the feeling that #1 is rather under armed.

MAKE ROOM FOR THE OVERLORD... TANK!

 

[Hapsburg]

You do realize that weapons in space have an infinite range, right?

Nominally. But there comes a point where the distance is great enough that the enemy can just manoeuvre the fuck out of the firing path, or properly use countermeasures. So, contrary to the oft-bleated "infinite range" crap, there is a finite effective range for any weapon.

Wouldn't lasers work better than railguns?

No; there are serious limits on the power and range of lasers, even in space. Diffraction severely cripples it as a very-long range antiship weapon. Lasers are better suited for CIWS duty. MACs firing a projectile at relativistic velocities would fare much better; think about it- at those speeds, the target would have roughly the same reaction time as if it were a laser beam, so it probably won't "miss". And you can bolt on an engine and computer and make the projectile a "smart" warhead in case it does miss.

 

[Devilmaypoop]

Not to mention tritanium was ripped off from Star Trek.

Achieving anything near relativistic speeds using covnentional rockets, while still staying in this solar system, seems completely ASB to me.

Wouldn't lasers work better than railguns? Railgun projectiles are extremely slow, and any spacecraft could easily avoid them or destroy them with lasers. A warship using lasers could much more easily destroy enemy ships-and the enemy wouldn't even be able to detect it, much less shoot it down.

So I'm guessing that the alien ship crash lands in 2012, by 2015 we have several hundred spaceships and space colonies in the solar system, by 2020 we've colonized or terraformed nearby star systems, and then in 2034 the aliens come, right?

Actually I ripped it off Stargate

To my knowledge railgun rounds were quite fast, or I'm just confusing stuff.
From what I gathered, even the US navy has tested a railgun and fired a 3.2 kg projectile at 2.4 kilometers per second. Sounds fast to me..

Gotta rethink my science here Maybe the timeline was a bit too fast too.

 

[Hapsburg]

From what I gathered, even the US navy has tested a railgun and fired a 3.2 kg projectile at 2.4 kilometers per second. Sounds fast to me.

It's approaching hypervelocity, yeah. But a space-based magnetic weapon would probably be able to achieve much faster muzzle velocities.

Gotta rethink my science here

To say the least. Read the Atomic Rockets website. Thoroughly.

Maybe the timeline was a bit too fast too.

Extremely so. I could see the developments you described occurring the 2230's. But not the 2030's.

 

[Devilmaypoop]

To say the least. Read the Atomic Rockets website. Thoroughly.

Cheers for the site, I'll try a more realistic approach on this. Atleast the designs were somewhat plausible, I hope

 

[Hapsburg]

Cheers for the site, I'll try a more realistic approach on this. Atleast the designs were somewhat plausible, I hope

Yeah, the design's plausible. Just that some of the numbers, like the service dates and the acceleration, are quite ludicrous.

Don't worry- most people either under- or over-estimate things when it comes to space. I had to train myself to get it right, and my first starship ideas were wildly retarded. Atomic Rockets fixed that right quick.

Speaking of which, I'll repost the picture of one of my most recent starship designs, which I'd like to think is fairly realistic for the technology level involved. This one, I've revised nearly half a dozen times; scale is one pixel per meter.

Information and description here on my dA page.

 

[Zor]

(Terran Sphere) Novan Imperial Army Corporal Eleni Pavlos waits to make her move in an urban supression action in one of the old slums in Wikasgrad, New Florida. Rebel insurgencies are fairly common on New Florida, with the forces that she faces in this instance being part of the second lowest tier of rebel forces (the lowest being simple mobs). The elite of a New Florida rebellion are typically a set of quiet poker faced men and women, quiet and unassuming but capable of organizing forces and keeping them supplied. Then their are nondiscript elite fighters and officers, well organized and capable of preforming devestating lightning raids and then fading into the croud and full time partisans who have expert knowledge of the terrain. Then their are lower ranking agitators who publish media and make connections. Then they are various gangs and low income/low education youth movements that are loosely associated with the actual resistance through proxies. In exchange for drugs, weapons, loot and money and due to ideological rhetoric they will rise up and fight, generally causing chaos. This is usually done to provide a distraction while the elites preform some raid, hopefully killing a couple of police officers and Imperial soldiers in the process.

Here, corporal Pavlos waits with a couple of attrition infantry robots behind a building, listing to the affairs of a couple of Gang members fight. While they do hate the Imperial Authorities, they often also hate each other. Two of these gang members belong to two diferent gangs (as is identifable by their local type of home made decorative armor) are now this close to killing each other off. An overweight counterpart who might have some connections with the actual resistance movement tries to calm them down. He is armed with a Protectorate made gauss assault rifle which, unlike the usual machine shop made primitive chemical burners that are carried by rebels can pose a threat to a power armored soldier or an attrition robot. She waits to see how it goes, hoping that the rebels will do two thirds of the neutralization of this practicular trio.

 

[Prometheus_2300]

Hello, I got bored and drew this:

Model: Aurora class frigate
Crew: 70 - 90 + 10 Marines
Lenght: 90 meters
Propulsion: Fusion pulsed propulsion
FTL Drive: Node Drive (The massive ring on the back)
Armament: 4 long range Fusion missile tubes, 2 Light Railguns and 1 Light Massdriver. Capable of carrying 2 Phoenix class fighters.


Description: First Human built warship after the discovery of the node drive, and played an important role in the Defence of Earth in 2034 against the Hivers.

So, what do you guys think? Hopefully it isnt horrible

Isn't that a ship from Sword of the Stars? Overall it looks like the ship, but why are your pixels so big?

 

[Devilmaypoop]

Isn't that a ship from Sword of the Stars? Overall it looks like the ship, but why are your pixels so big?

I only took the Node Drive from Sword of the Stars, the ship is almost entirely different. Altough they share some small similarities. I had to zoom in and take a screenshot of it for it to be even seen.

 

[NothingNow]

MAKE ROOM FOR THE OVERLORD... TANK!

Meh. Twin main-gun tanks generally suck.

 

[Maxwell Edison II]

Yeah, the design's plausible. Just that some of the numbers, like the service dates and the acceleration, are quite ludicrous.

Don't worry- most people either under- or over-estimate things when it comes to space. I had to train myself to get it right, and my first starship ideas were wildly retarded. Atomic Rockets fixed that right quick.

Speaking of which, I'll repost the picture of one of my most recent starship designs, which I'd like to think is fairly realistic for the technology level involved. This one, I've revised nearly half a dozen times; scale is one pixel per meter.

Information and description here on my dA page.

O-r-ly?

Is this supposed to be realistic design? If so, where exactly is the realism? It appears to be filled with hand waved figures lifted from any number of forums and webpages where countless sci-fi fans with too much spare time and too little actual knowledge in physics fantasize about how many "kilotons" their favorite ships can dish out.

Other than that, I'm impressed by that tech, no heat dissipation problem to talk about (judging from the lack of radiators), and, if the exhaust velocity is 20kkm/s, the aeorgel-density materials are even more so. 120 000 TW at 10G means the ships weighs, at most, 125000 tons.

Concerning lasers, the diffraction problem is well, not much a problem. The diameter of the minimal are than can be targeted by a laser of a given wavelength is 1.22 * distance in M * wavelength in M / lens or mirror diameter in M.

For instance, if the concentration of the beam when fired is 20MW/m^2, the lens has a diameter of 5m, it fires blue-green light at 500nm and 2.5MW/m^2 is needed for a kill, then the kill-range of the laser will be 116000km. For a railgun projectile to be able to strike its target within a minute at that distance, it would have to travel at 1933.3km/s. Which will take several breakthroughs in electromagnetic acceleration technologies as it is presently unavoidable that any such projectile will absorb a fraction of the energy used to accelerate it. If it is to be fired at 1933.3km/s (which would still be quite easy to dodge), that fraction has to be very, very small.

Forget firing charged particle beams, they diverge ridiculously fast once they are no longer focused by an external magnetic field. In theory, they could be kept reasonably coherent if they were fired at 99,999% or so of the speed of light, but in reality, the faster something is being accelerated, the less efficient that acceleration is going to be.

Missiles? Forget them. Yes they have unlimited range (unless they're so weak that they get stuck in gravity-wells) but they lack unlimited delta-v, and travel hideously slow in comparison to lasers. If you really love massive railguns and battleships firing at each other at close range, then I'd suggest handwaving in something like a "laser shield" that turns 100% reflective at all frequencies, thereby making lasers worthless. Otherwise it's just a plot-hole that lasers exist in-universe but are not used for some mysterious reason.

This is, of course, meant as constructive criticism. We're all in here to improve, right?

 

[Hapsburg]

Other than that, I'm impressed by that tech, no heat dissipation problem to talk about (judging from the lack of radiators)

Just because they aren't external doesn't mean there aren't radiators. They're droplet type.
In any case- I didn't just make up numbers; and it insults me deeply when you claim that kind of bullshit. You don't know me.

120 000 TW at 10G means the ships weighs, at most, 125000 tons.

Are you talking about my ship or his throughout most of your post? Because most of the stuff you're talking about has nothing to do with mine.

 

[TyranicusMaximus]

Just because they aren't external doesn't mean there aren't radiators. They're droplet type.
In any case- I didn't just make up numbers; and it insults me deeply when you claim that kind of bullshit. You don't know me.


Are you talking about my ship or his throughout most of your post? Because most of the stuff you're talking about has nothing to do with mine.

That kind of post hurts my feelings. We've never operated that kind of vehicle, ever, and certainly not with the technology of the far future.

That kind of know-it-allism is really really annoying.

EDIT: I'm talking about Maxwell's post, not yours.

 

[Maxwell Edison II]

That kind of post hurts my feelings. We've never operated that kind of vehicle, ever, and certainly not with the technology of the far future.

That kind of know-it-allism is really really annoying.

EDIT: I'm talking about Maxwell's post, not yours.

I wouldn't have fleshed out my criticism like I did if it weren't for Habsburg claiming

I had to train myself to get it right, and my first starship ideas were wildly retarded. Atomic Rockets fixed that right quick.

There is nothing wrong with softness in science fiction, many many wonderful classics (like Dune, the Foundation, Star Wars, Babylon 5) are not even trying to "respect science as we know it" (a.k.a to be hard SF), but the difference is, they're not claiming to be either.

I recently had to re-do a great many meticulous calculations due to "skipping" the fact that a coolant to cool something has to be, well, cool, hence radiators will operate over a range of temperatures. I simply used the rho * T^4 equation and put T as the hypothetical temperature the radiators could manage. This error killed hundreds of thousands of people on my largest space stations, so I have every right in the world to be grumpy.

I certainly do not "know it all". But, as any person with some degree of knowledge in most fields of science, I do believe I can at least guesstimate how likely it is that particular theorized technologies will show up in a given time-frame. One thing is certain, though, no matter what odd direction the scientific fields of the future will take, nature does seem almost obsessed with internal consistency...

I tend to point out what I consider to be logical errors. It's sort of what I do. Others do the same to me, of course, just not very often in here due to the relative lack of hard-SF buffs. Thats how my scenarios and ideas gradually evolve into something better, and if I in turn can help others, I'll do so. It will (naturally) be up to each person to decide if s/he'll listen to my criticism or not.

 

[walpurgis]

2) Again, why are you differentiating between railguns and mass drivers? Railguns ARE Mass Drivers.

*Otaku mode: on*
It seems to me that Railguns are mass drivers but not all mass drivers are railguns. A mass driver refers to anything that launches an object (not necessarily a weapon) by means other than conventional chemical or compressed air propulsion. A mass driver could be a railgun, a coilgun, a mass-effect field launcher, an inertial-effect launcher, etc, etc...
*Otaku mode: off*

*deep breath*
God, Im such a nerd...

 

[Maxwell Edison II]

Originally, "mass driver" meant a electromagnetic accelerator using a "re-usable" bucket, for the purpose of launching things that aren't magnetic, such as Al/Ti from Moon Base Alpha, or perhaps even people if the track is long enough.

In space warfare, I would call a huge siege weapon "mass driver" while a small point-defense/anti ship weapon would go under the name "railgun".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjIlqrAfbbg

The Centauri made good use of them...or wait, was that not real?

 

[Laqueesha]

A lot of alternate weapons of war (aircraft, naval ships, MBTs, etc) from the late 21st century here: http://www.kitsune.addr.com/Rifts/Rifts-Pre-Rifts-Vehicles.htm

MAKE ROOM FOR THE OVERLORD. TANK!

I AM BIG.