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Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 7:03 am
by Tamren
088 wrote:well i don't think the human weapons are quite so inferior after all both sides seam to use missiles a lot and you can achieve some truly massive damage with a mass driver if you use it properly. If the shots are moving fast enough they can have effects similar to a detonating nuclear device tho those speeds are very difficult to reach.
There was a stat sheet posted a long time ago that listed out the various weapons used by the warring parties and humans. Someone probably saved it. It had abstracted values, but humans didn't compare very favourably. Our weapons are not "weak" in a destructive sense. But everyone else has weapons that outrange us by a ridiculous margin. Barring exceptional circumstances we would never be in a position to use them.

@Battleraptor

A good start! :D

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 9:45 am
by BattleRaptor
Actually in the real world... The problem behind projectile weapons is mass/size of propellant.

A ship capable of accurately fireing 2 billion rounds a second of projectiles at 10% light speed of a energy equal to say 1kg of TNT per round could take on and take out a Loroi vessal from 4 light seconds.

Add a fleet of 100 vs a loroi fleet of 100 and they extend the engagement range to around 12 light seconds and efficently would improve because Mutiple loroi ships would be included in the Kill patten unless the Loroi wanted to take your entire fleet on 1 by 1.. which you win anyways.

and only one ton of ammo would provide trillions of rounds.

Any ship with the power and technogly to fire Particle cannons(which is actually a form of railgun) could do it.

Could you imagine being in the ships that detect trillions of tiny rounds comming there way.. only to laugh.. plug in evasive action to the computer.. and the computer spits back IT cant take any, the incomming wall and thats what it would be a wall of fire is to big for you to escape from and to dense for you to manuver around.
Its telling you in under 40 seconds you will die.. and nothing.. nothing at all you can do.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:01 am
by Wintermute
I cannot believe we are having this discussion again.

:|

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 2:19 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Didn't you hear? Everything old is new again. :lol:

When the terrans can build a ship with more than 2 billion railguns that fire at 10% c, and not cause overheating problems, or energy consumption problems, and have rails long enough to not vaporize the tiny projectiles without causing the ship to mass more than the entire Loroi fleet combined, and their opponents don't just vaporize a hole through the incoming projectiles with their beam weapons, or attack the ship from more than one direction, or have any armor at all to withstand the blast of 1 kg ((it took over 180kg to blast a non-crippling hole in the USS Cole, which did not have armor 3 generations more advanced)), or employ a wave loom device... Then maybe they'll have a problem.

It would probably be easier to put 2 billion blasters on a ship, but since even the biggest ships only have at most a couple dozen at a time, you'd need at least 50 million ships worth of production to pull something like that off.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:04 pm
by BattleRaptor
I dont surpose pointing out that the blasters in Outsiders are actually railguns?
and that they shoot particles with mass, not almost massless photons.
They need to not only accelerate it but to contain it.. which also causes problems the faster they accelerate it.
Which assuming 100% efficently means they only get half of the energy back as destructive force on target they put into it, assuming zero "Beam" diffusion.
OR that there is the wave loom which is effectively the same thing... a shotgun that spreads a massive beam across a very large section of space of particles which happen to have mass.. and do there damage because they have been accelerated to near light speed?
Imagine the same powerplants that provide to the power for such an inefficent weapon, being used on weapons which only REAL problem is energy consumption even today 2011, with the required Superconductors for such a rapid fire weapon exisiting today aswell, with the only problem being once again energy consumption to keep them near absoloute zero.
Yes lets take all the fantasmial beams and not blink.. but damn near have a a stroke if someone suggests "energy" weapons are not as superior as sci-fi makes them out to be.
Of course.. if you were to ask WHY they are superior considering there power requirements and inefficentcies..... they would talk about improvements in energy generation humans are bound to make... even thou it doesnt exist yet.

The diffrence between a nuclear propelled colbalt rod and a stone thrown by a neanderthal doesnt happen to be How it works, just the ammount of energy thats been PUT behind it.


Lets also due to the fact our arugment holds no water convert it to a strawman argument and suggest 2 billion rail guns need to be added to a ship since apparently humans lost the ablity to create rapidfire weapons sometime after developing real ones that could fire thousands of rounds a second up to hundred of thousands of rounds, to even MILLIONS OF ROUNDS.

200 years later traveling the stars and rapidfire weapons is a forgotten art apparently.

I would also point out that the 1kg of TNT and AN ammount of c-4 equal in energy to the TNT- the c4 shatters concreate and cuts steel, while the TNT only pits concreate and bends steel.

The cole was hit by a slow expanding explosive such as TNT or even fertilizer and the actual hull bent and fatgiued before giving way to the blast deflecting the majority of damage, had it been c-4 the hull would have been cut though, likely the keel snaped and many many more people would have died.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:15 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

50 million ships.... ((not counting cool-down times))

How it works is actually kind of important. It is the whole reason humans aren't using blasters or plasma foci.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:23 pm
by BattleRaptor
You know
400 years ago if you had asked a musketman if he thought it was possible to make a gun that could fire millions of rounds a second he would have called you crazy.

and if the internet had existed back then he would log on, goto a forum and then make snide remarks under the name of IceKatze.

:)

Of course I would love to hear your explanation on why advances in 200 years that went from few rounds a mintue to 80 rounds a mintue... to millions of rounds a second in 2011 in some bulletstorm versions...

Why Projectile weapons wont continue to improve at the same rate over the next 200 years....

But instead go back to single shot.

I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR IT.

I really really would.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:29 pm
by sunphoenix
Huh? Ahem... how about no snide comments either way?

50 million ships!!! Wow... even the Zentradai Grand Fleet was only 4.8 million strong... that boggles the mind!

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:36 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Ad Hominim, classy. ;)

You would need more than 20 billion railguns because of one thing: waste heat. Firing a projectile at 10%c is a whole different story than firing a bullet a thousand miles per hour.

Last I checked, metal storm holds the fastest fire rate on a gun via technicality, and even that only has millions of rounds per minute, with multiple barrels, and each projectile carries it's own propulsion mechanism, and it still has problems with the barrels being unable to withstand the pressure or friction, and no good reload mechanism to continue firing after just a few seconds. There, you wanted to hear it :)

1 kg of TNT worth of hypervelocity round would vaporize on the whipple shield portion of the armor and then scratch the second layer a bit, maybe. Especially given the relationship between kinetic energy and momentum at high velocities.

((Cant I just have a little bit of snide? Its not like I'm calling names or anything))

Edit: At the risk of sounding like a huge nerd, has anyone ever seen the old 80s sci-fi Earth Star Voyager? They have a pretty good example of how you might use a railgun effectively. Spoiler: (Trick the enemy into thinking you are surrendering, then fire as they are pulling up to dock)

Edit - Edit: Rather than just being a big ol meanie pants. Here's some concept art of a transitional Terran warship with some innovations from Loroi tech added in. Mjolnir has been dropped, they added some minor screens and "semi-reactionless field fins" on the back.
Image

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 5:56 pm
by Arioch
BattleRaptor wrote:and if the internet had existed back then he would log on, goto a forum and then make snide remarks under the name of IceKatze.
Please argue the point and not the person.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:04 pm
by BattleRaptor
Go look up REAL world railguns before you argue when you dont know anything about them.
One of the primary advantages of railguns is the round suffers NO FRICTION except agasint air in atmosphere.
They have other problems but friction isnt it..at least when they work properly.

Incidently some plans for railguns suggest oscilating the magnetic fields rapidly to superheat the projectile untill it turns into plasma and then accelerating the plasma, creating a ball of charged ions.. incidently damn close to outsider blasters except the accelerated plasma is self containing like ball lightning.. so its a ball rather then a beam.

Metal storm arrays fire millions of rounds a second.. infact technicly they could fire billions if you want to make a big enough array but as far as im aware no one has.
I stated that the Problem with projectile weapons competing with energy ones is lack of power, that for the same ammount of energy such as giving a terran ship a Loroi powerplant and you can in theory surpass energy weapons in effectiveness.

You have provided nothing to argue this.
you ignored it.
Instead aruging that the thought experiment isnt possible...
Its not surposed to be.. its a therorectical what IF.
If we were worried about complete realism we wouldnt be using the outsider universe as the location for it.

Now to give you a real world workable example of accelerating billions of projectiles in under a second and capable of doing it TODAY.

send up one ton blocks of manure.
Drop a 1 gigaton nuke directly behind it and detonate.

Have 100 of them... and you have yourself a expanding wall of deadly POOP.

I call them STINKS
SHIP TARGETED IRRIDATED NONGUIDED KINETIC SHIT.

and as silly as it is, it would work, but without being able to target them you would have to use thousands of tons of shit and nukes to cause any real damage to Ships a light second out and most likely be gaps not covered.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:19 pm
by bunnyboy
Thinking. 36 barreled prototype got 1.62 RPM. That means 750 rounds per barrel at second.

For 200 years from today, I think 2 000 round per barrel on second is ok.
Put 10 x 10 barrels on together.
Now 8 barrergroups are put together in circle to one guntower, which has one cooling & computing system.
One battlestation/turret 3 has guntowers.
The ship has 22 turrets.
Which makes 66 million launch in 5 seconds.
Now, any launched round is actually warhead, containing 20 000 shrapnels.

That makes 1 320 billion projectiles. And that would be scary. :shock: Even if it is only capaple to scrape the painting.

==============================================
Edit: I just decided that I will never start a war against BattleRaptor. I couldn't never get my shapeships clean enough again after that kind of inhuman weapon.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:50 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Railguns have friction and heat, and even if they didn't have rail to projectile friction, they would then have arcing, which would vaporize things.
The rails and projectiles must be built from strong conductive materials; the rails need to survive the violence of an accelerating projectile, and heating due to the large currents and friction involved. The recoil force exerted on the rails is equal and opposite to the force propelling the projectile.
Reply to Electromagnetic Force Law Controversy
Massive amounts of heat are created by the electricity flowing through the rails, as well as by the friction of the projectile leaving the device. The heat created by this friction itself can cause thermal expansion of the rails and projectile, further increasing the frictional heat. This causes three main problems: melting of equipment, decreased safety of personnel, and detection by enemy forces. As briefly discussed above, the stresses involved in firing this sort of device require an extremely heat-resistant material. Otherwise the rails, barrel, and all equipment attached would melt or be irreparably damaged.
In practice the rails are, with most designs of railgun, subject to erosion due to each launch; and projectiles can be subject to some degree of ablation also, and this can limit railgun life, in some cases severely.
powerlabs.org

Unless it is contained by some kind of handwaved super-science -like the Umiak and Loroi's plasma focus are- plasma balls are not self contained. They will continue to expand until they are a relatively harmless cloud of charged particles that will likely be stopped by an electromagnetic screen.

Metal Storm's 36 barrel prototype only ever shot 180 rounds. 5 rounds per barrel. You would need 200 thousand barrels to actually fire a million rounds. That is why the million rounds per minute firing rate is a technicality.

The analogy of metal storm weapons is more applicable to a torpedo swarm. You could dump as many torpedoes as you want out the side of your ship in just a few seconds, but like metal storm, they need to have their own propulsion. It has been said that given the state of point defense weaponry, the Umiak are the only race with the industrial capacity to make that work offensively.

Power is very important on space ships yes, but I have not argued the power requirement aspect because it is simply not important to this discussion. 10%c is still a snails pace compared to beam weapons, and even if you assumed equal power outputs, physics doesn't take favorites when it comes to theoretical limitations.

If you will recall, I did run the thought experiment for the sake of argument. After crunching the numbers, I came up with a ship that was as massive as 50 million of its opponents. Sure, it was an interesting what if, but it didn't seem to practical from the perspective of the Terrans that exist in Outsider, a work of reasonably self-consistent fiction.

Send up 1 ton blocks of manure, detonate gigaton nukes directly behind it, watch as the enemy fleet moves out of the way. Space is big, really, really big. (I wouldn't know where to begin calculating the momentum loss from self collision in a manure storm)

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 7:23 pm
by bunnyboy
icekatze wrote:Metal Storm's 36 barrel prototype only ever shot 180 rounds. 5 rounds per barrel. You would need 200 thousand barrels to actually fire a million rounds. That is why the million rounds per minute firing rate is a technicality.
ok. I got little numberblind. :lol: In my numbers, even if 1 round is only 5 cm long (surely not enough to contain 20000 shrapnels & propellant), the barrel length, would be 500 meter.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 8:54 pm
by Karst45
BattleRaptor wrote: Of course I would love to hear your explanation on why advances in 200 years that went from few rounds a mintue to 80 rounds a mintue... to millions of rounds a second in 2011 in some bulletstorm versions...
The 1 million BPS gun is actually a 36 barrel firing 5 bullet each, there is no saying how long it could fire. in anyway it is not firing one millions bullet per second, it has the potential to it but feeding ammo and overheating might cause it to stop firing before it reach 1 millions bullets.

Also for you explaination. yes weapon do evolve so do defense/armor. at some point you could shoot as much ammo as you would like none would do any damage. That why you go for more powerful weapon and ammo. They may also be more expensive. making you forget about shooting as much ammo as you can in favor of a more precise slower firing weapon.
icekatze wrote:Edit: At the risk of sounding like a huge nerd, has anyone ever seen the old 80s sci-fi Earth Star Voyager? They have a pretty good example of how you might use a railgun effectively. Spoiler: (Trick the enemy into thinking you are surrendering, then fire as they are pulling up to dock)
It seem unlikely in outsider. they prefer to blast thing then ask question later or never :) (as you could see with the bellarmine demise)
icekatze wrote:Edit - Edit: Rather than just being a big ol meanie pants. Here's some concept art of a transitional Terran warship with some innovations from Loroi tech added in. Mjolnir has been dropped, they added some minor screens and "semi-reaction less field fins" on the back.
Image
I like the design. bulky like the human ship but still with loroi feature. i would have make it longer as the bell is kind of "nail" looking.

still on the working but you get a general idea of the shape. turret will be set on top, hangar door under (front an back)
SpoilerShow
Image
BattleRaptor wrote: send up one ton blocks of manure.
Drop a 1 gigaton nuke directly behind it and detonate.

Have 100 of them... and you have yourself a expanding wall of deadly POOP.


Even if you replaced the Manure with something more solid that could cause damage to the ship, it highly inefficient. Think of the price of 100 nuke + the propelled material and that only to attempt to damage a single ship. And don't tell this could cover enough area to take out the entire fleet. It it would the umiak would already have done that. Even their AM missile are useless and are mainly used as distraction.


Space is vast quite vast. considering we fire at 300 000m (cause closer than that they already are shooting us. and a bullet attain 10%c 30 000m/s it would take 10 second for the bullets to reach the target.
During that time lets say the ship have a 20g acceleration and he moving only on it plane (not away nor toward the ship.
You would need to spray an area of (assuming i have the right formula; (AT)² / 2 were A is constant acceleration in M/s T is the time in second, that give the "r" (1920km) of a circle so 3,1416x1920²=a shitload of km... can someone check my formula an calcul?)

anyway ill wait until my calcul are check cause that give more than 30 million kilometer to cover. must have messed up with a coma somewere. but it still way too much space to cover with bullet. and that make it quite expensive way to use.


if you just focus on the "stealth" of the weapon and it deadly kinetic power, you can load up a AM charge in it and make so that it can change trajectory at the end. giving a little more of a hard time avoiding the projectile, but just a little.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 9:10 pm
by BattleRaptor
Heat is not friction.
We have both electrical and thermal superconductors that exist today
We also have frictionless materials today
We also have damn near 100% efficent thermoelectric converters.
Lets assume in 200 years they have gone from short lifespans in the lab into mainstream production.

ball lightning
Not only is self contained plasma being developed for containing radation in nuclear reactors and it having been created in the lab repeatedly since the 1970s, but its also seeing development into anti missile weapons where its accelerated to 200km/s in atmosphere in one test.

Then its the MARAUDER project.
Self contained Plasmoids were created that reached over 3,000 kilometers a second by 1995. Then after a battery of successful tests everything was immedately classified by the US airforce and so no one knows just what has been done with it since.
You can however look it up and find the information about it before it disappeared.

However I am sure that they would love to hear what they have been doing is impossible and that it is magic and they should stop bothering to try to do it.

Im going to stop talking to you now, Im not getting paid to correct your mistaken beliefs, so I dont see any point spending more time on it.

Karst45
You MISSED the entire section where I said IT would be highly inefficent and you WOULD have to use shitloads(Pun intended) and it would still have gaps.

Talking to people about stuff they quite clearly cant understand is always frustrating.
So I will stop.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 9:13 pm
by Karst45
BattleRaptor wrote: Talking to people about stuff they quite clearly cant understand is always frustrating.
So I will stop.
Nice way to say we are all idiot and that you are the superior mind.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:01 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers and/or material elements sliding against each other. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat. So while friction itself is not heat, when you have friction, you necessarily have heat as well.

Edit: I did some digging, and there are some practical mass driver designs being kicked around using superconducting magnets, but there are some limitations. I saw one example of a lunar mass driver that would use a 1km long track to accelerate a 20kg vehicle up to 10.5km/s with a conversion efficiency of 80%. Not quite 10%c, but impressive none the less.

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 1:17 am
by 088
awesome render man and your probably right about most of that X3
i'm not sure the humans would really go for a catamaran design tho.

and im sorry everyone for starting a nerd fight over the effectiveness of rail guns X3

Re: Concept Fanart of Future Terran Ship Designs

Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 2:24 am
by icekatze
hi hi

For my part in all of that, I apologize. It seems that I am not very good at this.