Wyrdysm Games

If you want to have a reasonable idea of the effects of decompression, watch 2001 instead of BSG. But yes. Bullets that don't pierce your external armor can't pierce internal compartments. Explosive decompression is dramatic on submarines where the pressure gradient between the external deep sea env...

MODERATOR FIAT: I support this post. -Ara

yes no I this is

Thought I'd stick my nose in here, 'cause hey! I made a ship or two in my day. I really like the outline. I think it's very ambitious and has a lot of potential. If I squint and imagine the ship done more professionally, I think it would work very, very well. Here are my suggestions: 1) Table this i...

Sponge: This sort of thing could be used for a focusing element on a large x-ray laser turret, though the material you'd make it out of would probably have to be a large very precisely machined crystal. Additionally, x-ray mirrors exist , so I'm not sure what the cutoff energy level is that Campbel...

Normandy: Thermal conductivity is incredibly important to what you're saying (that when a laser hits a ship with a glass layer, apparently the entire hull gets heated evenly because magical gnomes move all that heat before any damage occurs). Like you said, it determines heat transfer from matter to...

Woah now Normandy, let's not get all hot and bothered just yet! I'll do you one better than reinforced carbon carbon and run the numbers for fullerite. It's about the same density (slightly higher at 1800 kg/m^3) boils at 4000K and with a thermal conductivity of 2 W/ (m K). In other words it is a fu...

Thanto: 10 MW xray FEL spot size 5mm has a temperature of nearly 60,000 kelvin.

Thanks for playing! Bye bye now.

Aralonia : I feel kind of dirty saying "he has a good point" when I'm referenced in his damn post, but the numbers he comes up with serve a good point. He used a saturn V to determine missile size IIRC, and milliarcseconds is indeed QUITE TINY. On the other hand, we don't have the resolvi...

Sponge: For my living this summer I aimed telescopes at objects four billion light years away. I'm not sure I centered the object totally perfectly, but given a template of the object the computer certainly could. Sure, it was a quasar and slightly bigger than a missile bus, but it was also quite f...

I dunno how impractical long distance is... my first post pointed out that light second range combat errors lead to missing by literally miles; that is a problem for engineers :D. More seriously though, consider the following situation. ...actually, do that at your discretion. It got a bit out of ha...

As soon as your "rockets" have multiple entry vehicles, complicated onboard computers capable of making tactical decisions without user input, counter countermeasures, fuel to accelerate for hours, armor to protect against whatever, light weapons, escorts, communications systems, and a war...

Bomb-pumped beams do have some attractive elements, but they manage to combine the weaknesses of missiles and lasers. The missile is slower than light and thus detectable and engagable with active defenses and you carry a much smaller primary lens and dramatically reduce range. You also only use a f...

The 8 TW doom laser would probably require mature fusion reactors to power and probably special crystals to do the diffraction focusing; those will require a lot of investment in nanoscale engineering. Power in space is not a big problem; piles of solar collectors closer to the sun than mercury coul...

Rocks have been running into things since the dawn of time, and lasers have been around for a minute. Free electron lasers in the x-ray frequencies are being built in Europe and many other places. Though the European xray FEL is firing waaay higher energy photons than the 88 kEV I was thinking of. I...