Gateworld Virtual Fleet 4.0 - Discussion thread

[Gormagon]

So there are a lot of propulsion systems there, could you pick...four or five that are your favorite or you believe to be the most reasonable? For use in a semi hardcore scifi for example.

[Gormagon]

Like, for drone craft, small shuttles, transport shuttles, and large cruisers and transports both civilian and military.

[thekillman]

So there are a lot of propulsion systems there, could you pick...four or five that are your favorite or you believe to be the most reasonable? For use in a semi hardcore scifi for example.

Like, for drone craft, small shuttles, transport shuttles, and large cruisers and transports both civilian and military.

i can identify two major problems: the rocket equation and tech development.

The rocket equation results in a rather staggering solution, namely that if you use humans (and they can only withstand perhaps 10g acceleration max) a Dreadnaught will be as maneuverable as a tiny fighter.

The rocket equation -in short- gives you a mass ratio, which is the remass : payload mass ratio. For low tech, you're looking at a ratio of 10 (so 10kg remass for 1kg of actual ship). For the more moderate systems, you're looking at perhaps 4-5. how big the actual ship is doesn't matter. a 10-ton fighter will be some 9 tons fuel and accelerate at 10g. A 1000 000 ton dreadnaught will have 900 000 tonnes of remass and accelerate at 10g. The engine type is dependent not per se on size (though limitations do apply) but rather on the purpose.

There are basically 3 factors:

*available time
*available tech
*distance

The less time you have, the more DeltaV you need and the quicker you get to nuclear power.
the tech is more of an off-limits kind than a tech level. Uranium and similar fissionables are likely to be under strict regulations, and fusion ships will require a substantial technology and money investment.
the distance is a factor that's not entirely a "real" factor, but more here for practical reasons. If you need to go far, some options like chemical just become riddled with problems.

Note: in the list, an important note is the T/W ratio. it's the thrust to weight ratio (only important when launching from a planet) and if it's below 1, it certainly won't get you off the planet. In space, you'll be fine.

For simple, cheap commercial craft, you're not going to get much fancy stuff:

Laser-assisted propulsion is only really feasible if the nations of your planet are happy with having a multi-gigawatt or even terawatt laser array in space. that's mostly a diplomacy issue. Once you have it, though, it can make for some really cheap yet poweful craft, as you only have to bring some propellant while having quite a bit of power available to propel your ship. Of course the infrastructure requirements mean it's not useful off-the-grid so to speak, and distances are limited by the kind of installation you want.

Chemical hydrogen-based rockets are very useful if you have plenty of water, it's cheap and readily available. useful for relatively short bursts of high thrust (e.g. like putting stuff in space, though earth-space is halfway to anywhere in the solar system).

Ion engines are weak and you're gonna need to be patient when using it. Compared to stuff like chemical, the amount of remass you need is an absolute laugh and the efficiency is through the roof. Scaling such engines is the biggest problem, so it's mostly useful for relatively small ships.

plasma is probably your best best when you need high-performance engines, though the available power is the biggest limiting factor and might require the use of nuclear reactors. for the non-nuclear option, it limits the thrust but it's still substantially above chemical in terms of performance.




For military uses, nuclear really becomes an option. A basic solid-core, closed-cycle nuclear engine is almost certainly going to be a highly popular type of engine to move large amounts of military cargo and for general large-scale transport. It's the kind that can move huge dreadnaughts around (although naval analogies are kind of absurd). Note that stuff like the above still does apply for military uses. however, if we're talking a 1km or so long ship, anything short of nuclear is already thrown out the window because it simply won't do.

Fusion is an option that's good for fuel purposes but suffers an achilles heel. For about 50 or so years now, we've been trying to make it work and even now we won't get a commercial one until at least 2050. that's a LONG time. Fusion is an extremely high-tech power source that relies on a reaction that needs to be actively maintained. for safety it's ideal. this is probably something for the expensive ships only, and even then i think a major maintenance station always needs to be close. Fission basically screams reliability and (relative) low-tech. yes it can go supercritical, but if the core is a problem, eject it.


Lastly we have the Orion drive, which is basically the ultimate wet dream of space travel. If you can get around that tiny problem of having a ship in orbit with a nuclear arsenal powerful enough to carpet nuke a country. Making military guys nervous? certainly. but it's a dream in terms of displacing a crapton of payload at a very reasonable price. If we ever go interstellar, Orion is what they'll be looking at. Plus points in that if your ship gets nuked, the pusher plate will eat that nuclear explosion. and generally act as a really thick slab of armor. Of course, you're going to need a secondary engine to maneuver in a more crowded orbit.

By the way, that's a problem for every single nuclear engine. You'll want to have some form of non-nuclear propulsion for docking and stuff, because otherwise you'll be irradiating the station you're trying to dock with.



To directly answer your question:

Like, for drone craft, small shuttles, transport shuttles, and large cruisers and transports both civilian and military.

Drones, Shuttles, transport shuttles pretty much all fall in the same category. Chemical for a low-tech environment or cheap transfer if the fuel is there, ion or solar power for cheap transits. Plasma for faster fancytech solutions. For transports, Solid Core, closed-cycle nuclear thermal rockets if allowed (when you don't need to be near other ships all the time). For military uses, the above mentioned nuclear rocket or fusion if the tech is there.

maybe you could share the kind of ideas for ships you have (as a rough outline) so i can get some feeling for what you're trying to do?

[thekillman]

ok a new day and...

damn i write long posts :O

[Princess Awinita]

ok a new day and...

damn i write long posts :O

But they are most enjoyable

Now then, a question pertaining to ship sizes, what is the recommended size of a basic gunship sporting upwards of exactly 224 total guns of various types ? According to the user designing these ships, he has them exactly 2.5 miles in length. Personally I think that size is overkill for even a simple gunship, however he has merit to the design due to the sheer number of engines on the rig {four antimatter, six darkmatter, two nuclear, eight ion}. Is this correct ?

Honestly the largest any of my own craft get is around {at very best} 1.2KM or 1200 meters

[thekillman]

But they are most enjoyable

Now then, a question pertaining to ship sizes, what is the recommended size of a basic gunship sporting upwards of exactly 224 total guns of various types ? According to the user designing these ships, he has them exactly 2.5 miles in length. Personally I think that size is overkill for even a simple gunship, however he has merit to the design due to the sheer number of engines on the rig {four antimatter, six darkmatter, two nuclear, eight ion}. Is this correct ?

Honestly the largest any of my own craft get is around {at very best} 1.2KM or 1200 meters

Depends on what gun you use and what it's fighting.

Also those engines are ridiculous. Assuming we can somehow use dark matter -and it'll be useful since only 4% of our universe is the stuff we're made of- it's going to be vastly superior to Antimatter (hard to handle and stuff). Once you have antimatter, there's absolutely no point in having nuclear engines because it's like having an 1830's steam engine powering a Bugatti alongside it's 1000HP quad-turbocharged engine. And compared to all of the above, ion is just to cry about in a 2.5mile ship.


Also, what's that gunship even fighting?


Note that when it comes to laser weapons, less is more. There's no point in having 224 laser turrets. Use some 4-6 (for redundancy )laser sources and either use mirrors or fiber-optic methics to channel the laser. then, you can just use ~12 turrets and feed them the gloom and doom of your laser system. If one turret is shot off, no worries. Just channel the same power through ~11 turrets. You will never lose firepower until the source is destroyed and if they get to that, you've already drilled through the entire ship and you're screwed anyway.

Of course, the main use for multiple laser turrets is going to be redundancy, and quick targeting. Just pre-target a laser cannon and then the ship can rapidly switch between feeding turrets and fire at 224 targets in rapid succession, even applying different amounts of firepower to each target as needed.

(this only applies to laser tech).

[Gormagon]

Oh I am dissecting your most informative posts, but how do you feel about aneutronic reactors and the plasma focus fusion system?

[Princess Awinita]

Well, as I mentioned, the gunships and ships in question I was asking about aren't mine, they belong to another player, I wanted to see how logical those things are for their sheer amount of weaponss emplacements, size, and whatnot. I mean honestly this same guy has ships as large as 12KM in length at best. way overkill if you ask me. I mean, personally, anything larger than 8KM is pushing the limits of structural integrity by too much.

He says it is to be a Escort/Gunship role and my thought was 'more like a fireworks barge to me due to its size compared to all your other ships which most are six times larger'

[thekillman]

Oh I am dissecting your most informative posts, but how do you feel about aneutronic reactors and the plasma focus fusion system?

aneutronic fusion is something...well it depends on how we develop the technology. I personally believe it needs a strong incentive to become truly feasible in an easy, manageable way. Nobody would ever do it for the power, DT fusion is simply better across the spectrum. But it's feasible that the government would enforce (or strongly encourage, possibly via support) the use of Aneutronic reactors in spacecraft to reduce the deadly radiation being spewed out. In terms of reactor maintenance, this is the second main argument for Aneutronic fusion.

After all, a fusion reactor does need maintenance and mostly in it's reactor walls. This stems from the neutrons being produced in just about any fusion reaction. Aneutronic fusion lacks the main cause of reactor irradiation and would make for much less maintenance-heavy reactors.

it's not something you're going to see in a world where fusion has just met it's breakthrough. Mostly because as a fusion form, it's much, much harder to achieve and break-even would be even harder than for D-T fusion. We can't even break even current D-T fusion, so aneutronic reactors are at least a century away.



As to Z-pinch machines, i doubt it's something that can compete with a regular torus for raw power. Reading some of the applications, it's in almost-too-good-to-be-true territory. a quick skimming of some of the recent results shows that it's legitimate though. I would expect it to be used as a high-efficiency power source for smaller ships, where bulky Torus reactors won't do.



I would like to place a word of warning though: a Z-Pinch -if it works as advertised- would be a mighty powerful asset. a quick wikipedia search shows me it's also excellent as a neutron source, suggesting Z-pinch / Thorium hybrid reactors are a feasibility. It's useful for medical neutron and X-ray sources, detection applications and microelectronics production. Since it's also useful for nuclear weapons research, i'd expect it to be something thoroughly researched with plenty of backing available. so if you make Z-pinch machines a thing, be aware that it would have quite an impact on your fictional society.

Well, as I mentioned, the gunships and ships in question I was asking about aren't mine, they belong to another player, I wanted to see how logical those things are for their sheer amount of weaponss emplacements, size, and whatnot. I mean honestly this same guy has ships as large as 12KM in length at best. way overkill if you ask me. I mean, personally, anything larger than 8KM is pushing the limits of structural integrity by too much.

He says it is to be a Escort/Gunship role and my thought was 'more like a fireworks barge to me due to its size compared to all your other ships which most are six times larger'

Assumiing it's somewhat cylindrical in size, i would expect these ships to be absurdly good target practice. 224 guns sounds like a lot, but there's no way you can build it that way without either blind spots (or spots with significantly lower firepower) or a hugely ineffiicent firepower distribution (namely, if you spread it evenly across 360 degrees, it becomes absurdly vulnerable to a singe-direction attack compared to 224 guns in the same direction).

Given the absurd size of such a thing, the engines alone would be superweapons. (the kzinthi lesson). but most of all, there's not really a way this thing would be very maneuverable if it has such few (and apparently big) engines.

If an even slightly savvy enemy was fighting them, take the same Dark matter engines, build a ship some ~500 meters in length, fit it with four of the biggest weapons you can muster for that design along it's internal skeleton, fit the dark matter engines in an evenly spaced configuration (in every direction!) and start poking holes. there's not a chance in hell the enemy ship would ever have the capacity to roll (along any axis) to try and keep it's rapidly diminishing number of cannons on target.

Especially since a ship 13824 times smaller than the smallest ship, could also be produced in an equivalent number of ships.

E.g. a single 12 km capital ship would be facing 12 000 of the most maneuverable, hard-hitting ships they've ever faced.

(fitting engines to the back only really makes sense if you want to go fast in 1 direction. If you need to go far, get one of your 1.2 km ships to do the towing).




HUGE EDIT:

Ok just going over these numbers but *******... ok i think some fairly key element of size is missing here.

If you go from 1200m (your ship) to his 120000m(his capital ship) then that's a factor 10 longer. Except, it's not 10x as big. Unless you're applying weirdly specific stretching, the ship will also be longer and wider. AKA.

A ship 10 as long will be 10*10*10 = 1000 times as big.

Please do realize that if you can make a ship 12km in length, you could also be building 1000 ships that are 1.2km in length. or 13824 ships 500m in length.

No matter how obscenely big those guns are... it's never worth it. With lasers, Lightsecond warfare is a possibility. Mind you, A lightsecond is 300 000km. At 300 000 kilometers a 500m ship would take up all of 0,344 arcseconds. That's the size of Ceres in the night sky.
(divide by 3600 to get degrees). The entire fleet at dense packing would be 40.4 arcseconds in the sky, or the size of jupiter (seen from earth).

Wikipedia gives 10 pixels per arc second

That means 1 ship would be ~3 pixels and the entire fleet be 404.

So unless this 12km behemoth has every single gun facing the front, it's only going to be able to bear a tiny portion of it's guns on your fleet whereas the entire 13000 ship fleet can bring every single gun to bear on it's enemy. Note that since the amount of engines was given from the smaller ship, a ship with a geometrical evenly distributed engine net would vastly outperform it in combat. Lastly, if we assume the bigger ship scales guns linearly, it would have 2240 guns. Every gun would need to hit 6 times to destroy the fleet. Except that means one-shotting every ship, at 100% accuracy. also, each ship in the fleet only needs to fire once to destroy every single turret (at 17% accuracy) to absolutely destroy it's fighting capacity.

Lastly, assuming the 500 meter ship can move 1 ship diameter (500m) in each direction. At T=1, the flagship detects a random ship in the fleet. It fires. But 1 second has already passed since detection, so the enemy ship can now be in a circle 1500m in diameter (500m of not moving, 500m in every direction maneuvering) or a target 9x as big. Assuming tje chance that any of the 2240 guns hits is 10%, well now it's 1.11%. Except that the weapon arrives a second later (namely at T=3) and was fired at the original position. Assuming the capital ship waits for a hit confirm, we're at T=4 when we know whether the weapon hit.

The enemy ship really accelerates in stead of moving. It has a confirmed position at T=1. It fires to the left. At T=2, it has moved -per the above) 500m to the left. It can accelerate up or down or left or right. It still has speed, so if it does nothing at T=3 it moves another 500m to the left. It can accelerate further and can be 1000m to the left. It can decelerate, sticking to it's position. It can move up or down, moving 500m. And it can combine an up/down movement with a left/right movement. So it can be in 3 500m circles left-right and another 3 500m circles up-down. This again means a 1500m target circle again.

Assuming the enemy ship has the engines at the back, it can probably thrust vector by 45 degrees. It then has to spend an imaginary "movement turn" rotating, countering the rotation action, then firing in a direction and then turning 180 degrees and then firing to slow down.

Suffice to say that it'll require entire computer farms to keep track of 13000 ships jittering in 3 dimensions while providing firing solutions to 2400 guns moving tenths of milimeters to track enemy ships. The guy better bring lasers to the battle as the heat of a barrel would be enough to distort such motion.

But your 13000 ships do not require halls filled with computers to keep track. Research into swarm behaviour shows that complex swarm motion comes from fairly simple rules that require no supercomputers to follow. Besides, the fleet could take up 3 dimensions in stead of 2, so they can have plenty more wiggling room between them. Not to mention that if the fleet is smart, they'd keep a minimum 10km distance between themselves to prevent collisions and reduce chance hits.

NOTE: since lasers can't be detected untill you're hit by them, it's not like the fleet can predict where each bolt will hit. It's pure guesswork that the next move won't cause a kill. But it's clear that such a battle is -for the capital ship- a vast uphill battle.

NOTE 2:

The above assumes a single capital ship shot is fatal. But assume that each gun is designed such that it can perfectly take out 1 enemy gun so the enemy ships are capturable. With a bit of smart design, the fleet can have ships with evenly distributed guns ensuring one hit won't take them all out. Even basic aspects like damage work massively in the fleet's favor.

Furthermore, if the enemy starts to build super large guns to pierce your armor and destroy your ship, the best response is to resort to Swarm Warfare, as each hit will then be massive overkill.

[Gormagon]

Yeah with the exception of mobile industrial/base ship type vessel I do not believe super large warships to be feasible, even before I saw those numbers. I would rather have a lot more smaller ships that can be in multiple areas.

How do you feel about Niling D-sinks? (Quantum capacitors)

[thekillman]

Whats a niling d sink? Its barely googleable

[Gormagon]

A zero sized sink hole in space-time that can be filled with energy. In theory, and as long as the quantum field is strong enough, any amount of power can be contained within one. When in use they generate EM pulses as a side effect.

"They are described as a black cylinder, one meter in diameter and eighty centimeters high. They are seen as the ultimate storage devices, and very few people used them as they didn't need the amount of power they produced. CST use them as a backup power source to their wormhole generators."

[thekillman]

A zero sized sink hole in space-time that can be filled with energy. In theory, and as long as the quantum field is strong enough, any amount of power can be contained within one. When in use they generate EM pulses as a side effect.

"They are described as a black cylinder, one meter in diameter and eighty centimeters high. They are seen as the ultimate storage devices, and very few people used them as they didn't need the amount of power they produced. CST use them as a backup power source to their wormhole generators."

ha ha sorry that i laugh, but this is the only thing i could find on the subject myself. It also tells me absolutely nothing. I mean, a "zero sized" hole? that's impossible. It's going to be a slave to Planck.


It does hugely remind me of Orion's Arm's Void Bubbles. Let me google.

Ah yea:



This is roughly what that would be.

It would require extensive metric (= spacetime) engineering that i think is far, FAR beyond what we're capable of right now.

[Gormagon]

But would a similar system be a plausible power source, like a super battery? It is from this really cool book series called Pandoras Star.

Oh also, plasma fields and magnetic shields for space ships, possibilities, problems, potential benefits? Such as sensor interference, damage to crew, power requirements, heat, protection value, ect.

[thekillman]

But would a similar system be a plausible power source, like a super battery? It is from this really cool book series called Pandoras Star.

I don't really know what to say about something i barely understand. A Zero-sized hole is impossible, and dumping a ton of energy in a really small space is what makes black holes. It just sounds like pure 100% undiluted sci fi to me.


Black holes on the other hand, of the right type, CAN be hugely powerful, hugely effective storage devices. You'd need a black hole with charge (so fire an electron gun into it), and preferably spin. With charge, you can confine a black hole without fancy tech. with spin, you can use it as the ultimate flywheel. And with the right mass, it wouldn't be emitting all that much energy so the lifetime is assured too.

Making such a black hole would require quite a civilization, yet at the same time isn't so far out in the realm of Sci Fi that it's impossible. it would require solar panels a few hundred km on each side, about 1 000 000km out from the sun would gather the neccesary energy in a year. If fed to a spherically aligned gamma laser array with about 1.24 TeV energy, a black hole could be made. It would be a few attometers large so if you touched it, there wouldn't even be a noticeable hole in your hand. On the other hand, it's outputting 10-1000 petawatts of energy so if you stood within an arm's length, you'd be annihilated by a micro-sun.

The technological requirements themselves are not absurd, but basically you'd need Neumann robot capacity (self-replicating robots). A robotic facility around Mercury mining the planet and building solar panels, handling robots, mining robots and factories would do the trick.

Oh also, plasma fields and magnetic shields for space ships, possibilities, problems, potential benefits? Such as sensor interference, damage to crew, power requirements, heat, protection value, ect.

Students figure out how to make star wars deflector

However the standard objection holds true. If it works, it'll always work both ways. It's also almost certainly useless to kinetic weaponry. Ideal versus lasers (since the plasma can't really be "damaged") since the lasers just bounce off. horrible since you can't see past the plasma shield with anything EM-based like radar or telescopes.

Furthermore, it's fairly comparable to smearing a fusion reactor around your ship in terms of the magnets required, so it's going to take a massive power supply just to run your shield. Superconductors don't solve this problems, superconducting magnets are a necessity just to be able to run such a shield.