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Milo and POTUS posted:Is it fast like a squid in a polyethylene bag
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Aug 16, 2018 16:41
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feedmegin posted:If, say, you want to get to strategic location/resource/starbase X that's 10,000,000 km away and you're accelerating at 1G, while your opponent is accelerating at 5G from an equal distance away, you are going to have a bad time. Space is Big and I rather disagree that 1G is going to be 'decently fast' given the scale of the solar system if your opponent can do a lot better than that. In that case, the 1G craft would just need to accelerate five times as long as the 5G craft. The real issue for long trips would be the specific impulse of your engines and fuel capacity, not TWR.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:42
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feedmegin posted:If, say, you want to get to strategic location/resource/starbase X that's 10,000,000 km away and you're accelerating at 1G, while your opponent is accelerating at 5G from an equal distance away, you are going to have a bad time. Space is Big and I rather disagree that 1G is going to be 'decently fast' given the scale of the solar system if your opponent can do a lot better than that. Sure, but getting somewhere first implies that there is some very specific reason why you have to have something physically at that location first, and once you start going down that rabbit hole most of the answers as to why you have to be there first end up strongly correlating with these ships having humans on board for the urgency to make sense; otherwise why not send a IPBM and be done with it? Why not send an interceptor missile to the ship you're racing? Having large dedicated warships also being completely autonomous drones starts looking more and more like an exception searching for a problem than a general case solution to an issue that already applies to comparable mission sets on Earth for Sea, Air, and ground. Also because I suspect at the end of the day if these ships end up being significant consumers of GDP the pencil pushers might be clenching their abacuses tightly at the idea of these things simply being one stray rock away from having no ability to correct course away from a much larger stray rock if the navigation AI fails and misidentifies its data. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:just look at cars and poo poo - two decades ago, sub-7 second zero to sixty was a pretty drat fast car. now the toyota camry does that. people are going to make poo poo go faster and faster as tech evolves and there aint no speed limits in space Actually that speed limit is 300,000 meters per second. 
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Aug 16, 2018 16:44
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feedmegin posted:High maneuverability may not be so useful in space, but high acceleration certainly is, precisely because of long ranges; an unmanned spacecraft can get to where it wants to go a lot more quickly if it doesn't have to worry about crushing flesh bodies in the process. As shown repeatedly on the Expanse come to think of it. High acceleration doesn't really mean much, precisely because distances are so long and you're fuel-limited. The number of situations in which high acceleration is more important than high specific impulse are few, and involve either lifting off of a planetary surface or taking advantage of the Oberth effect; high acceleration doesn't get you where you want to go a lot more quickly, because you can't burn long enough at those high accelerations to make much of a difference. The Expanse has magic fusion engines that aren't fuel-limited, they can burn for as long as they want. That's different from an actual rocket engine where you're going to spend most of your time coasting; whether you get up to your coasting velocity really quickly or really slowly doesn't make that much of a difference relative to the enormous length of your journey.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:47
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Phanatic posted:The Expanse has magic fusion engines that aren't fuel-limited, they can burn for as long as they want. That's different from an actual rocket engine where you're going to spend most of your time coasting; whether you get up to your coasting velocity really quickly or really slowly doesn't make that much of a difference relative to the enormous length of your journey. I mean, I think we're assuming some sort of future magic drive system anyway, aren't we? With our current tech we aren't going to be having cool space battles in deep space anyway because there's no economically justifiable reason to be out there in the first place.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:54
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Studies show that only 10% of autonomous space drones fire their lasers in combat.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:56
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The main challenge of theorycrafting space combat is explaining why space combat doesn't instantly lapse into population centres being annihilated by uninterceptable strategic weaponry. It might be unsafe to be on a crewed warship, but it's suicidal to be sitting on a planet or any kind of fixed orbital installation.
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Aug 16, 2018 16:59
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Fangz posted:would tank destroyer doctrine work in space The open top would give an advantage for observation.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:02
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Fangz posted:The main challenge of theorycrafting space combat is explaining why space combat doesn't instantly lapse into population centres being annihilated by uninterceptable strategic weaponry. It might be unsafe to be on a crewed warship, but it's suicidal to be sitting on a planet or any kind of fixed orbital installation. Oh that's easy, for the same reason that while risky and scary, nobody thinks a conflict between NATO and Russia would instantly lapse into population centers being annihilated by nukes. Escalation is not inevitable and often undesirable, people will fight over what they perceive to be critical strategic interests but won't necessarily go 'all in' if they see themselves losing.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:02
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Fangz posted:The main challenge of theorycrafting space combat is explaining why space combat doesn't instantly lapse into population centres being annihilated by uninterceptable strategic weaponry. It might be unsafe to be on a crewed warship, but it's suicidal to be sitting on a planet or any kind of fixed orbital installation. This, but I don't want to waste ammo so I'll just redirect an asteroid to impact the surface of a planet. Should do the trick. Worked for the Krogan in ME.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:04
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Phanatic posted:High acceleration doesn't really mean much, precisely because distances are so long and you're fuel-limited. The number of situations in which high acceleration is more important than high specific impulse are few, and involve either lifting off of a planetary surface or taking advantage of the Oberth effect; high acceleration doesn't get you where you want to go a lot more quickly, because you can't burn long enough at those high accelerations to make much of a difference. IIRC the Expanse fusion engines *do* have fuel, it just happens to never run out because they refuel regularly enough that it's never as much as an issue as say restocking on munitions or food. In real life and what The Expanse is probably basing their engines on, are Megnetoplasmadynamic thrusters whose primary practical issue (energy requirements) would be solved with plausible future developments in energy generation. These engines also have the advantage of High Thrust and High Impulse so they can pull double duty. Edit: Alchenar posted:Oh that's easy, for the same reason that while risky and scary, nobody thinks a conflict between NATO and Russia would instantly lapse into population centers being annihilated by nukes. Escalation is not inevitable and often undesirable, people will fight over what they perceive to be critical strategic interests but won't necessarily go 'all in' if they see themselves losing. This also works against your earlier argument since drones aren't likely to be able to intelligently follow the ROE/controlled escalation/deescalation and practically are basically grey goo single use WMD's. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 17:08
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feedmegin posted:I mean, I think we're assuming some sort of future magic drive system anyway, aren't we? With our current tech we aren't going to be having cool space battles in deep space anyway because there's no economically justifiable reason to be out there in the first place. There's a world of difference between the chemical rockets we use today and magic. There are all kinds of real technology that we can develop and have at least a decent idea of how to do so, were we so inclined and it can be reasonable to discuss what warfare in space would be like, given those. Nuclear thermal rockets, pulsed nuclear propulsion, light/laser/magsails, plasma propulsion, nuclear salt-water rockets, etc. But the engines in the Expanse that use so little fuel and can develop so much thrust are basically magic and you might just as well be talking about warp drive, they are literally non-physical and discussing what warfare in space would be like given those is like talking about cartoons. Raenir Salazar posted:IIRC the Expanse fusion engines *do* have fuel, it just happens to never run out because they refuel regularly enough that it's never as much as an issue as say restocking on munitions or food. They never run out because the author wanted a magic engine so that sustaining high accelerations for indefinite periods of time was possible without having to worry about fuel as a plot point. They are not physically realizable engines. They're essentially a nuclear thermal rocket with a magic fusion engine as the heat source. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 17:09
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Ice Fist posted:This, but I don't want to waste ammo so I'll just redirect an asteroid to impact the surface of a planet. Should do the trick. Worked for the Krogan in ME. Depends on the assumptions of your fuel source versus the price of your weapons. quote:Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:10
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Phanatic posted:There's a world of difference between the chemical rockets we use today and magic. There are all kinds of real technology that we can develop and have at least a decent idea of how to do so, were we so inclined and it can be reasonable to discuss what warfare in space would be like, given those. Nuclear thermal rockets, pulsed nuclear propulsion, light/laser/magsails, plasma propulsion, nuclear salt-water rockets, etc. But the engines in the Expanse that use so little fuel and can develop so much thrust are basically magic and you might just as well be talking about warp drive, they are literally non-physical and discussing what warfare in space would be like given those is like talking about cartoons. Yeah the Epstein drive is as much a violation of Real Space Physics as push-button gravity but the option is soooo much time spent on fuel logistics instead of narrative. Revelation Space does this too, hard sci fi with no FTL, use of time dilation as plot device, written by a former ESA astronomer, but still has magic infinite fuel engines sent back in time from the future.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:13
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Alchenar posted:Oh that's easy, for the same reason that while risky and scary, nobody thinks a conflict between NATO and Russia would instantly lapse into population centers being annihilated by nukes. Escalation is not inevitable and often undesirable, people will fight over what they perceive to be critical strategic interests but won't necessarily go 'all in' if they see themselves losing. Uh, I think quite a lot of people do, that's how the whole deterrence aspect of MAD works.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:17
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Nine of Eight posted:Depends on the assumptions of your fuel source versus the price of your weapons.  That's awesome. Just like the WH40k universe to discuss the financial efficiency of different forms of planetary bombardment.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:17
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Fangz posted:Uh, I think quite a lot of people do, that's how the whole deterrence aspect of MAD works. MAD means nuclear powers won't straight up threaten each other's territory or people. We will 100% engage in proxy wars or fight in a third party territory. You don't start annihilating cities just cause you lost a battle. Hell we lost Vietnam and never used nukes. You'd have the space battles in contested "neutral" territory.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:22
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The real future of space warfare is massive carriers politely passing by each other to plonk down invasion forces onto planets.WoodrowSkillson posted:thats how capital ship guns worked in mass effect, big rear end railguns that spanned the length of the hull. the whole idea is to get your guns on line and avoid the enemy's. Mass Effect had so much writing in the codex about space warfare, and it basically never mattered throughout the games because the ultimate weapon in the universe is a three-man squad of infantry. It also made the weird assumption that the ultimate future in uniforms was form-fitting spandex footie pajamas. Most alien races even had separate toes. But don't worry, there's only one or two bodytypes in the universe, so everything will always fit everybody else.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:23
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WoodrowSkillson posted:MAD means nuclear powers won't straight up threaten each other's territory or people. We will 100% engage in proxy wars or fight in a third party territory. You don't start annihilating cities just cause you lost a battle. Hell we lost Vietnam and never used nukes. But in space warfare, the line between conventional and strategic weaponry is necessarily much more blurry than on land. You can't just hand out the space equivalent of a discount T-62 with no consequence. There's no difference between just a tank battle and a counter-force strike on one side's launch silos, if your tanks *are* your launch silos. If you are in the situation of two fleets of warships shooting at each other, that's a very hot war. If Russia sunk an US carrier battlegroup, that would, in the minds of most, lead to nuclear war. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 17:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:The real future of space warfare is massive carriers politely passing by each other to plonk down invasion forces onto planets. It's actually a well thought out sci fi space battle system. No lasers or tractor beams, just big rear end railguns and missiles.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:26
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WoodrowSkillson posted:It's actually a well thought out sci fi space battle system. No lasers or tractor beams, just big rear end railguns and missiles.  well actually it did have lasers but they're mentioned as only being used as future CIWS. Im actually surprised they never did anything with the space battles, because there is A LOT about them in the codex that literally never comes up. Did you know every species has a unique doctrine that is described in detail? No because the only time it comes up is in the first game to explain why the humans have a big rear end fleet nearby instead of right at the Citadel.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:29
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zoux posted:On the topic of future war and automation, here's an insanely creepy 1987 cartoon version of There Will Come Soft Rains Reminds me of this other cool Soviet cartoon. this one is about a revenge plot orchestrated using autonomous tanks. Autonomous vehicles being the amazing sci-fi future of warfare in 1977 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnJbtbh4tDE
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Aug 16, 2018 17:33
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I'm pretty sure most of Mass Effect's worldbuilding is heavily inspired by Star Control, but they never felt comfortable about stepping out of their gameplay comfort zone of 3rd person shooter for anything important. So the writers were thinking a lot about spaceships, but could never let them matter. Star Control itself doesn't really give any attention to realism aside from letting players fool around with the gravity of cosmic bodies to do funky things with momentum.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:41
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I'm kind of hoping that the trend from large conscript armies and total war to professional volunteer militaries, through today's glamorous special forces, ultimately leads towards space age warfare decided by single combat between champions.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:48
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Phanatic posted:They never run out because the author wanted a magic engine so that sustaining high accelerations for indefinite periods of time was possible without having to worry about fuel as a plot point. They are not physically realizable engines. They're essentially a nuclear thermal rocket with a magic fusion engine as the heat source. They don't have infinite fuel, but they're vasty more efficient. Theres a subplot in one of the episodes that shows the inventor testing it out and seeing the tenfold efficiency gains. http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Epstein_Drive Obviously still handwaving the technology behind it, but not quite so egregious as just "magic infinite fuel!"
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Aug 16, 2018 17:49
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Rockopolis posted:I'm kind of hoping that the trend from large conscript armies and total war to professional volunteer militaries, through today's glamorous special forces, ultimately leads towards space age warfare decided by single combat between champions. So history is a circle trending back towards David vs Goliath? SlothfulCobra posted:I'm pretty sure most of Mass Effect's worldbuilding is heavily inspired by Star Control, but they never felt comfortable about stepping out of their gameplay comfort zone of 3rd person shooter for anything important. So the writers were thinking a lot about spaceships, but could never let them matter. I strongly suspect they wanted to, during the design phase of the game, wanted something like in the Call of Duty games where you switch gears and play something mechanically different, like when you're operating an airplane or a tank for a mission or two.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:It also made the weird assumption that the ultimate future in uniforms was form-fitting spandex footie pajamas. Most alien races even had separate toes. But don't worry, there's only one or two bodytypes in the universe, so everything will always fit everybody else. That's because it was SPACE-spandex.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:53
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feedmegin posted:I mean, I think we're assuming some sort of future magic drive system anyway, aren't we? With our current tech we aren't going to be having cool space battles in deep space anyway because there's no economically justifiable reason to be out there in the first place.
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Aug 16, 2018 17:54
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SlothfulCobra posted:I'm pretty sure most of Mass Effect's worldbuilding is heavily inspired by Star Control, but they never felt comfortable about stepping out of their gameplay comfort zone of 3rd person shooter for anything important. So the writers were thinking a lot about spaceships, but could never let them matter. I can tell you that a lot of it also comes from the 'Heechee' series by Fredrick Pohl I've only read to the end of "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" but by the end of that I was all "are you loving kidding me"
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Aug 16, 2018 18:38
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Rockopolis posted:I'm kind of hoping that the trend from large conscript armies and total war to professional volunteer militaries, through today's glamorous special forces, ultimately leads towards space age warfare decided by single combat between champions. Robot Jox
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Aug 16, 2018 18:39
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zoux posted:Here's a more modern take on the theme (also from a Russian!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiuVInSnTZs
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Aug 16, 2018 18:49
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Ice Fist posted:
Ironically the best WH40K novels are the infantry-action Gaunt's Ghosts books, and they all have to come up with reasons to actually bother to land infantry on a planet instead of just doing what you'd actually do: drop poo poo on your targets. Like, they worry about artillery and air support when they total control over space. Saint Celestine posted:They don't have infinite fuel, but they're vasty more efficient. Theres a subplot in one of the episodes that shows the inventor testing it out and seeing the tenfold efficiency gains. They can fly as far and as fast as they want, the limitations on the engine performance are plot-based, not fuel-based. You know how in the TV show they pretty much just ignore geometric relationships and how long it would take ships to get from one place to another? Like there's one episode where Alex pilots the Rocinante on this complicated (and unpowered) sequence of maneuvers around the Galilean moons. In reality, those orbits would have taken him months, but it's compressed in the show to a period of a few hours. I don't just mean that they compress it in on-screen time, I mean the whole thing takes place in a few in-universe hours. Everything in the show travels at the speed of plot. The engine fuel is like that in the books. The ship always has enough fuel to do what they need to do without really worrying about fuel. Yes, the engine burns some finite amount of fuel in-universe, but so far as the reader and the plot are concerned it's effectively magic infinite fuel.
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Aug 16, 2018 18:59
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Phanatic posted:Ironically the best WH40K novels are the infantry-action Gaunt's Ghosts books, and they all have to come up with reasons to actually bother to land infantry on a planet instead of just doing what you'd actually do: drop poo poo on your targets. Like, they worry about artillery and air support when they total control over space. There's a difference though between a work of fiction saying something is magic, and using it like magic versus taking something with properties that are plausible but sometimes used in ways that seem like magic out of plot convenience. A good example is Star Trek's warp drive or Mass Effects relays, these are probably impossible, so they are basically magic which results in the "Soft Science fiction" designation somewhere in the middle of the scale all the way to Science Fantasy with Star Wars which has the Force which is Actually Magic; versus something like the Epstein Drives where they use a system/technology that is actually possible but just handwave and scale up the efficiency gains until it's useful for the plot the story wants to tell. Edit: Suppose a TV show based in the Middle Ages brings out Greek Fire or a really large catapult that flings rocks much further than we believe historically they should be able to; they don't become Magic Trebuchets or Magic Medieval Napalm.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:15
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Phanatic posted:Ironically the best WH40K novels are the infantry-action Gaunt's Ghosts books, and they all have to come up with reasons to actually bother to land infantry on a planet instead of just doing what you'd actually do: drop poo poo on your targets. Like, they worry about artillery and air support when they total control over space. The best WH40K novels are the Ciaphas Cain books because they're taking the piss out of the setting.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:17
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I suspect one of you secretly works at the White House, and are scribbling down notes for the Space Force. Modern space warfare is going to be comparatively unimpressive. All the participants will shoot down each other's satellites, making Earth's orbit a minefield of debris for generations, and also ruining the day of everyone still playing Pokemon Go.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:20
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Fangz posted:The main challenge of theorycrafting space combat is explaining why space combat doesn't instantly lapse into population centres being annihilated by uninterceptable strategic weaponry. It might be unsafe to be on a crewed warship, but it's suicidal to be sitting on a planet or any kind of fixed orbital installation. The German SF-series Perry Rhodan played around with that a couple times. In an earlier arc, bio-mechanical horrors called Dolans fight their way through the allied fleet and manage to do tons of damage to Earth, even though both sides have ludicrously strong energy shields. Multiple cities are obliterated and the Sahara gets a new canyon from a stray shot. A later arc has Pluto desintegrating by the forces unleashed by a space battle on the outskirts of the solar system. Then there were crazed super-weapons like the Hyperinmestron, which uses techno-babble to induce artificial Supernovae. Since PR is oddly pacifistic, this weapon is only used in a giant bluff and then dismantled forever. Apart from that, whenever something major happens, planets are getting hosed up left and right. And a arc from just a couple years ago introduced a species that just went gently caress warships and instead threatened everyone with giant FTL-torpedoes. You either submitted, or they would shoot a single, giant and inescapable missile at your planet and blow it up. Luckily they were pacifists sitting around a lot waiting for people to just give up, so the protagonists had ample time to solve this problem. 
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Aug 16, 2018 19:42
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Phanatic posted:Ironically the best WH40K novels are the infantry-action Gaunt's Ghosts books, and they all have to come up with reasons to actually bother to land infantry on a planet instead of just doing what you'd actually do: drop poo poo on your targets. Like, they worry about artillery and air support when they total control over space. Everything in the show is shortened though. It kinda has to be
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Aug 16, 2018 20:34
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Raenir Salazar posted:A good example is Star Trek's warp drive or Mass Effects relays, these are probably impossible, so they are basically magic which results in the "Soft Science fiction" designation somewhere in the middle of the scale all the way to Science Fantasy with Star Wars which has the Force which is Actually Magic; versus something like the Epstein Drives where they use a system/technology that is actually possible but just handwave and scale up the efficiency gains until it's useful for the plot the story wants to tell. It's not, though. We know how fusion works. We know how kinetics work. The Epstein Drive is every bit as impossible and non-physical as warp drive is, it doesn't become a technology that's actually possible just because you call it fusion instead of warp drive. The book has the Rocinante accelerating at up to *30G*. Roci probably masses a couple thousand tons. That's 700 meganewtons right there. Starting at a speed of zero, it could get up to solar escape velocity in just 35 minutes. Over that period of time, the average speed would be 308kps, which means the average power output of that drive is 0.2 *petawatts*. That's about 10 times the power consumption of the entire human population today. It's a few times higher than the power produced by an entire Earthful of plants and phytoplankton photosynthesizing. It's the power output of a cat-5 hurricane. And the Roci's engine is *small* in-universe. These fusion reactors also manage to put out that kind of power without sterilizing everything nearby with neutrons or using bigass tanks of propellant.. And they blow up like hydrogen bombs if you shoot them. And in the first book, a single crate of "fuel pellets" is enough to power the Roci for 30 years. There is no real-world fusion technology that can work that way. No fusion reaction can generate that kind of power output with so little input. The energy density is more akin to direct matter/antimatter annihilation than it is to fusing atoms. It is not just fusion handwaved to be really efficient. It is a magical engine technology, which the authors created because they wanted a setting in which the solar system was routinely accessible to humankind but interstellar travel was beyond its reach. This is no different than Gene Roddenberry making a magic warp drive because he wanted a setting in which interstellar travel was routinely accessible to humankind and crossing the solar system is like walking across the street. The details of the drive are non-physical, they just gave it a name like "fusion" because they wanted a realistic-seeming technology. But it's magic. Milo and POTUS posted:Everything in the show is shortened though. It kinda has to be Oh, no argument. I love the show and there's nothing wrong with stuff traveling at the speed of plot (Although even the showrunner apologized for that specific bit, it was *really* egregious and they could have handled it differently), just like there's nothing wrong about magic engines in your sci-fi. my dad posted:The best WH40K novels are the Ciaphas Cain books because they're taking the piss out of the setting. That's a lot of piss. What's left after it's gone?
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Aug 16, 2018 21:34
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Don Gato posted:
Even the big super alien's seeming lasers are actually railguns - just instead of firing solid slugs like everyone else, they fire jets of molten liquid metal.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:40
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Military Future Mk. II: The economics of throwing rocks at your enemies
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Aug 16, 2018 21:47
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