The Practicality of various futuristic weapons.

[HorseMonster]

I think I'm starting to see what Anna was getting at.

[Noctis]

I think I'm starting to see what Anna was getting at.

Either actually state something that has a point or don't post.

[HorseMonster]

My point there was that your previous statement was asserting an absurdly unwarranted conclusion. The conclusion being that I was for some reason talking about space fighters in spite of the following points:

1) At no point in the topic did anyone ever mention space fighters
2) Space fighters aren't relevant to this topic
3) Space combat in mass effect rarely ever features fighters
4) Ships in mass effect are armed with large, fixed mounting kinetic energy weapons that can accelerate projectiles to relativistic speeds using electromagnetic forces and these weapons are used in favour of directed energy weapons because they inflict more damage.

Seriously, how do you get "Oh, he must be talking about space fighters when he says what I am saying echos mass effect." when spacecraft in that universe ar armed with weapons exactly like those you described for exactly the reasons you gave. Clearly I musn't be talking about the huge, glaring similarity, I must be talking about something totally unrelated.

[Noctis]

You seem to have missed my point there. I invoked mass effect because it's what all the kids these days get their erroneous ideas about what a "realistic" depiction of space combat is, and that the content of your post echos that.

And I don't know why you're telling me about railguns, I know what a railgun is.

That is what you said. The part that made me think you were talking about the whole dog fight thing is this one.

"all the kids these days get their erroneous ideas about what a "realistic" depiction of space combat is"

Now, to my knowledge, the only scene in mass effect that shows actual ship combat is at the very end, fighting the giant robotic cuttlefish. I've never actually read the novels worth of specs that the game gives you, and the only "mass effect" technology I know of is the relays. So when you talk about an erroneous interpretation of space combat I assumed you were talking about the whole "watch my space ship do flips and shit." ending cinematic.

Even still, you talk about it being erroneous. Whats erroneous about the idea of a supersized railgun? I may be missing something, since I never read what you're talking about, so sorry if I'm misinterpreting you.

[Talhydras]

This is a fun little fact that's actually at the core of space combat, and entirely relevant to most of the eye-searingly awful tangents here.

Let us assume, for a moment, that there are two people trying to shoot each other at the separation of one light second. One person is off by a single arcsecond in his aiming. An arcsecond, just for reference, is one 3600th of a degree, or under one millionth of a full circle.

Assuming that is his only error, his shot whizzes about a mile off to one side of the target. And a lightsecond is close range.

HURBA BURBA WURBA BUT ITS NOT MISSILES HAVE SUCH LOW DELTA VEE AND COILGUNS CAN ONLY ACCELERATE TO WHATEVER KM/SEC SO A LIGHT SECOND IS SUPER LONG RANGE

shut the fuck up. Lasers are about to rock your god damn world, yo. Let us assume we have a nice big radiator, a nice big powerplant, and a really baller cyclotron to spin electrons to where they're spitting out 80-odd kEV photons, square in the x-ray wavelength. To be precise our wavelength is 0.014 nanometers. We pass that shit through a forty meter diameter lens, and proceed to go rock someone's face off. Let's calculate the divergence angle first; theta = 1.22 * wavelength/reflector radius. A quick trip through google calculator gives us 8.54E-13 radians is our divergence angle. Interesting. We can now use this for ranging.

Let's assume we're firing an 8 TW laser pulse. Cause we're badasses and we got power to burn. Beam intensity at target is given by a slightly more complicated formula, but here it is: Target intensity = Aperture intensity / (pi * (distance to target * tan (divergence angle / 2)^2). At one light second, our target is feeling 155 million terawatts/meter^2. Obviously our spot size is a lot smaller than a square meter, but whatever we're illuminating is fucked.

Let's try it at a light minute. Still 43000 terawatts per square meter.

A light hour? 12 terawatts per square meter. We're still hurting people on Jupiter with this laser.

A light day? 20816 megawatts per square meter. Yup, that's still bad for you.

A light month? 20 megawatts per square meter.

Pluto at its furthest from the sun is 7 light hours away. With a 40m lens focusing lased xrays, you could write your name on any planet in the solar system. And sure, the hardware for that weapon sounds big; power supply, heat dumps, cyclotron, bigass lens, and aiming systems, but something a mile long (like a star destroyer or the battlestar galactica or any number of spaceships in fiction) could mount one no problem.

So what was the point of this tangent? Range. If someone is willing to build a big fat lens and a big fat laser, if he can see you on a predictable course, he can shoot at you. You scale that lens up an order of magnitude or two and you'll be able to write your name on planets in other star systems.

To tie this in to the thread nicely; first and foremost with all FTL concerns aside space combat would be decided by who could project the most force accurately at the greatest distance. To that end massive linear cannon (your beloved railguns and coilguns) would tend towards firing at the highest speed possible little squishy pellets that maximally transferred force to the target's armor. A rock moving 3 km/sec packs its mass in boom, but you're much more likely to tag Buck Rogers with a bag full of birdshot at 10,000 km/sec than you are with Any Old Rock (tm).

Missiles too pale in comparison to the mighty laser; even assuming an onboard motor capable of accelerating at 1 km/sec^2 you'd need ages to get up to a fraction the speed of light, and all the while your missile's motor would be showing up on thermal surveys conducted in nearby star systems (making it easy to intercept with aforementioned lasers of hot photonic death).

There's numerous ways around getting fried by the lasers of hot photonic death, but most of them involve not being there or firing first. Assuming mature enough materials science to imagine linear accelerators smaller than CERN firing damaging payloads accurately at dodging tough targets, you can build a doom laser.

Once you have that, hire a bunch of astronomy students to write programs to hunt the skies for intruders. Plug it into a big fat power plant and a big fat radiator, and go nuts. No coilgun or missile can hope to compete with the lightspeed power on target of a massive free electron laser, if only due to interplanetary (or interstellar) debris deflecting the coilgun slug and the missile being interceptable.

In summary: Space war is probably boring and decided by the person who fires the most missiles (if we're talking low tech) or the biggest laser (anything else).

Edit: In conclusion, supersized railguns are a waste of time. Basically there are two real concerns in space combat; accuracy and range. If you can hit me accurately with harsh language from outside my retaliation range, you pretty much have me beat no matter what I can do because I can't hide and I probably can't run.

[Skarmory The PG]

3) Space combat in mass effect rarely ever features fighters

Untrue, for the record, but irrelevant to the point.

This was your assinine nitpicker post for today.

[unsunghero10]

It's not that fighters are rare, it's that politics rarely escalate to war and battles rarely get close enough.

Mass effect isn't the best comparison simply because of how its guns work.
The 'mass effect' brings slugs to speed nearly impossible in BSF and reality, making the time gap significantly shorter even in long range engagements. That, and it is harder to know what to dodge as some of these slugs have their own 'mass effect' that can bring down their mass to not appear on some types of scanners.

[Beta_krogoth]

I think Talhydras has just finished this thread. I think i agree with his well researched and well made arguement.

[HorseMonster]

That is what you said. The part that made me think you were talking about the whole dog fight thing is this one.

"all the kids these days get their erroneous ideas about what a "realistic" depiction of space combat is"

Now, to my knowledge, the only scene in mass effect that shows actual ship combat is at the very end, fighting the giant robotic cuttlefish. I've never actually read the novels worth of specs that the game gives you, and the only "mass effect" technology I know of is the relays. So when you talk about an erroneous interpretation of space combat I assumed you were talking about the whole "watch my space ship do flips and shit." ending cinematic.

Even still, you talk about it being erroneous. Whats erroneous about the idea of a supersized railgun? I may be missing something, since I never read what you're talking about, so sorry if I'm misinterpreting you.

Yes, you are misinterpreting, badly. But I think it would better benefit the entire world to just drop the entire thing right here.

[Noctis]

words

While this all makes perfect sense, and I did say that lasers would be the best ship based weapons, I have to point a few things out. Lets assume that we can make a Kinetic cannon who's projectile can alter it's course ever so slightly, using thrusters or even controlled explosives or whatever. Now, say I see some big alien bugger closing in from just past pluto. Well, I fire my laser and wait for a few hours to see if anything happened. The problem I can see is that, since I can see him, he can most likely see me. And if he sees me, there's a good chance he's going to change course erratically to dodge the things I'm throwing. If a RKV is capable of minor course correction, then their's a better chance that it could hit, since a laser can't change it's course.

Of course, with a laser you could probably just do many bursts and hope one hits. That or have several lasers and shotgun the bastard. Anyways.


The only thing I was ever trying to say is that lasers have less destructive force then a Kinetic weapon for equal energy expenditure, simply because of the mechanics of the weapon. A laser with a square meter lens will destroy a square meter or so of ground with it's shot. A square meter RKV can obliterate a few cities and plunge a planet into a dusty darkness.

So if I want to shoot a ship out of the sky or assassinate a single person (along with everyone else in a square meter) a laser is the way to go. If I want to cause an extinction level amount of destruction TO A PLANET then a RKV is a good way to go.

[Anna]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED NOCTIS!?

You start this retarded thread with an entirely retarded premise, make nothing but retarded posts, get the retarded fully slapped out of you by Talhydras, then come back with twice the retardation and you QUOTE HIS WHOLE MASSIVE POST.

Ugh.

Edit:
Oh hay I just read the first post instead of ignoring it and oh what fun I've found.

Anna decided to simply insult me and lock the thread rather then allow me to argue a point, so I've come here.

I split your crap 'cause it was filling up Arca's thread with retarded nonsense. If I hadn't done it, Arca would have.

Now, we were debating the practicality of Kinetic based weapons verse directed energy weapons. I was arguing for the kinetic weapons, while Anna seemed to prefer Energy weapons, specifically NPB's or Neutral Particle beams. I argued that any energy based weapon will use more energy then a Kinetic weapon. He responded as such

There was no argument on practicality. I only argued your stance on realism. You were claiming that 1-ton slugs being fired at almost light speed is more realistic than directed energy weapons. Which is ridiculous.

Well, while the ad hom is uncalled for

You really need to look up your logical fallacies, shit-face, because an insult isn't automatically an ad hominem attack.

See, if I said you were wrong because you were retarded, then it'd be an ad-hominem. But I said you were wrong, pointed out how, and then called you a retard. Not an ad hominem at all.

[Siber]

With that proposed laser, after 11 total seconds of firing you've put out 21 kilotons of hurt, as much as the blast over Nagasaki. Sure, an RKV can nail a planet and fuck it all to hell, but so can this laser, it just doesn't happen all at once. You can stick around and fry cities one by one at leisure. Or get a bunch of buddies or multiple lasers and cook the whole planet faster.

A square meter lens and a square meter projectile.... well for one projectiles would probably be measured in volume or mass, not area, and even that aside that's a really weird comparison. And a square meter lens doesn't say the beam spot is under a square meter, you could probably spread the beam if it was advantageous to do so, and in any case dumping almost 2 kilotons of energy into a square meter every second seems likely to cause blast effects that'd be fun for everyone.

For a projectile to hit a maneuvering target at range you typically have to have as much maneuvering ability as the target, at least, in order to have a chance to hit it. That's typically known as a missile, not a bullet.

[Noctis]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED NOCTIS!?

You start this retarded thread with an entirely retarded premise, make nothing but retarded posts, get the retarded fully slapped out of you by Talhydras, then come back with twice the retardation and you QUOTE HIS WHOLE MASSIVE POST.

Ugh.

So you're honestly going to say that building a massive laser and shining it at a planet for literally days, perhaps weeks, is the best course of action? Especially when I can get the same effects in a few minutes by strapping thrusters to a few big asteroids and flying them into the planet?

Maybe I'm a little sceptical considering every great scifi author I've read, along with a rather forceful physics professor I had, has always preferred Kinetic bombardment as opposed to laser bombardment. I'm more inclined to believe Heinlein then Halo.

[Anna]

So you're honestly going to say that building a massive laser and shining it at a planet for literally days, perhaps weeks, is as effective as throwing a few stones?

You seem to have some misconceptions about how powerful a laser would be if it had the same amount of power to fuel it that a railgun would require to fire a 1ton slug at nearly light speeds.

So you're honestly going to say that building a massive laser and shining it at a planet for literally days, perhaps weeks, is the best course of action? Especially when I can get the same effects in a few minutes by strapping thrusters to a few big asteroids and flying them into the planet?

Nice ninja edit. Funny how this is the first time you've said anything in the thread about hurling fucking asteroids. If you'd said something about that sooner you wouldn't have gotten many argument, dipshit.

[Noctis]

I actually did mention it. And the edit was because I realised I wasn't being clear.

Might simply be easier to have drones catch meteors and hurl them into things. You don't need to be going super fast of you're already super huge.