Page 2 of 4

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2012 3:56 am
by Mjolnir
Widde84 wrote:Neutral particles are impossible to affect, since they ARE neutral. Also why it took so long to find the neutron. To accelerate them you need like gunpowder or something :) . Very difficult to make a beam out of it at all. Or you can do what they do today in labs or other places where they need neutrons and other neutral charges (nuclear reactors, creation of deuterium and tritium, etc.). They use a radioactive material that emmits neutron during decay. Not much speed to get from that.
Neutron beams are often produced by bombarding a target with a particle beam. Pick the materials, particles, and energies right and you get a reasonably directed spray of neutrons that you can turn on and off. Not particularly weaponizable, though.

Neutral particle beams don't have to be neutrons though...you just neutralize the particles after accelerating them. Two accelerators, one for electrons and one for nuclei, and some work to make most of them recombine before hitting the enemy screens. And of course, the problem with accelerating neutral particles only exists in the first place if you're using electromagnetic acceleration...even the humans in Outsider have gravity manipulation.

Widde84 wrote:But if we ignore that part.. :) Pros and cons of charged vs. neutral: Charged particles are easy (and cheap) to accelerate (ah, yes the ol' CRT... :mrgreen: )
Random link...
http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm

Widde84 wrote:Neutrons are generally unstable when alone and decay quite fast to a proton and an electron (beta decay).
Not that fast...about 15 minutes on average. With particle velocities a high fraction of c and ranges maxing out at a light second or so...

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2012 6:30 am
by Arioch
The reason I have things in that order is that it seems to me that at this tech level, the hard thing is not to create and accelerate the beam, but rather to keep it focused over long distances. We can create charged particle beams today, but they have very short range.

Since charged particles will tend to repel each other, a charged beam will be harder to keep focused over long distances than one in which the particles have a neutral charge.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2012 12:33 am
by Karst45
Arioch wrote:The reason I have things in that order is that it seems to me that at this tech level, the hard thing is not to create and accelerate the beam, but rather to keep it focused over long distances. We can create charged particle beams today, but they have very short range.

Since charged particles will tend to repel each other, a charged beam will be harder to keep focused over long distances than one in which the particles have a neutral charge.

But how would charged particules create more damage?

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2012 12:45 am
by Fotiadis_110
neutral particals CAN be deflected... all you have to do is INDUCE (read: not actually as easy as it might sound after all, but still possible) a charge on the neutron, it only has to be momentary, and if it 'occilates' between change forms even easier.

After all: Oxygen is neutral as a molecule, but has interesting behaviours as a liquid in reaction to magnetism.




I was trying to avoid necromancy of a really old thread, but i've worked out the problem the terrans face with their rail-guns :P and to avoid derailing this thread i'll stick my solution to the issue in this little doodad:
SpoilerShow
The secret lies in the 1/2*MV^2 = Ek and W = Fd equations

Basically, F = MA
Ek is proportional to M as well...
And force of a magnetic field is proportional to the current flowing :p
And because M is the same on both sides.... we can convert 'magnetism force' to 'accelleration' through a constant, and realise to get double velocity with half mass we are looking at either increasing the length of our machine by 2, which would double either the voltage or current requirements (P=IV and P is proportional to a) (double current is a 'paired railgun' with both a rear and forward rail, doubled voltage is a double length railgun), or trying to double the force exerted through yet MORE power requirements, with heat losses.
Poor humans.
If we want bullets fast enough we'd be entering combat with literal peashooting railguns to reach even decent fractions of C to hit hard enough to count... and they've already got armour designed to withstand moderate impacts in normal flight <_<

Edit: Charged partials hold more energy, which helps them to repel and do damage (think blowtorch vrs a compressed air blower)... but more to the point, a neutral particle beam has relatively low power, and still disperse as range increases. Meanwhile channelling charged particles into helices, they hold together better, leading to even MORE range (in theory-verse anyway).

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2012 3:53 am
by Mjolnir
Fotiadis_110 wrote:neutral particals CAN be deflected... all you have to do is INDUCE (read: not actually as easy as it might sound after all, but still possible) a charge on the neutron, it only has to be momentary, and if it 'occilates' between change forms even easier.
You can't induce a charge on a neutron and still have a neutron. Neutrons do almost certainly have a dipole moment which gives you some means of manipulating them electromagnetically, but it's so small that last I checked it hadn't been detected in actual experiments.

But again, even the Terrans have gravity manipulation and the ability to mangle space badly enough to make entire ships slip out of normal reality briefly and pop out light years away. If they needed neutron beams badly enough, they could use gravitic acceleration and focusing. Coming up with a usefully high intensity neutron source might be a bit of a problem though.

Fotiadis_110 wrote:After all: Oxygen is neutral as a molecule, but has interesting behaviours as a liquid in reaction to magnetism.
Such effects are a feature of large numbers of atoms together, and might not be relevant at the field strengths involved anyway...it's an effect of the way the magnetic dipoles of each atom interact with the external field as they align with or against it. Once all the atoms have aligned, the material is "saturated", and has little further effect on the magnetic field. And it's probably not particularly relevant when you're talking about a stream of atoms coming in at high velocity but low density...

Go further, and a strong enough magnetic field would probably pull electrons away, leaving at least partially charged ions. This would take probably quite excessive field strengths, though...far easier to wrap the ship in a bubble of plasma or thin armor that the beam has to get through. The beam might do so without losing much energy, but quite a lot of its particles will get ionized by collisions, making it possible to deflect/defocus the beam before it hits the inner armor.

Fotiadis_110 wrote:Edit: Charged partials hold more energy, which helps them to repel and do damage (think blowtorch vrs a compressed air blower)... but more to the point, a neutral particle beam has relatively low power, and still disperse as range increases. Meanwhile channelling charged particles into helices, they hold together better, leading to even MORE range (in theory-verse anyway).
A charged particle doesn't inherently have more energy, it's just much easier to accelerate electromagnetically...but that might be what you were trying to say.

Neutrons would have higher penetration, spreading their energy deep into the target, which means its harder to cause direct physical damage with them (but plenty of things won't like high neutron fluxes). Neutral atoms are going to fly apart into electrons and nuclei as soon as they hit.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 1:48 am
by Widde84
I just thought that using charged particles and develope some focusing is probably faster than developing a neutral particle weapon. Using gravity is probably meaningless since it has so little effect on such small objects... Ships are easy, they're large...
Mjolnir wrote:Neutral particle beams don't have to be neutrons though...you just neutralize the particles after accelerating them. Two accelerators, one for electrons and one for nuclei, and some work to make most of them recombine before hitting the enemy screens. And of course, the problem with accelerating neutral particles only exists in the first place if you're using electromagnetic acceleration...even the humans in Outsider have gravity manipulation.
What I thought too.. :D
The problem is when the nuclei and electrons combine they will most likely recombine as neutral atoms and one basically end up shooting inert gas at the target... (atomic laser..? :mrgreen: )

Some problems in accelerating neutral particles. It won't work using the electromagnetic force as we all know why.. :mrgreen:
Using the strong nuclear force? Won't work since the effective distance is between subatomic particles in the nuclei (photons is concidered to have an infinite half-life, which is why the EM force is concidered to have an infinite reach). Too short for a barrel or something.
Using the weak nuclear force? Dunno, what is it..? particle will decay..? Too short effective distance to...
Gravity? You'll need lots of it. You could use grav plating in the same manner as particle accelerators use electrically charged plates with holes. Problem is, probably need as much gravity as a planet or a black hole (overkill..?) to reach some sensible speeds, and you end up shooting away the entire cannon due to the gravitic stress and not just the particles (don't need big electric fields (that tear the surrounding apart) to accelerate charged particles). Even if you do have neutralizing plates around the cannon, it's still a lot more power... blabla.. (s**t, I really can't keep things short...)

So the magnetic field produced by the beam current wouldn't be enough to keep the beam focused longer..? :?
We have ion drive? True, they don't care much about the long-range focusing there...
Dunno, just some physics hunch that charged particles might be better/easier than neutral particles... but neutral are cool to...

If you keep antimatter or exotic mater charged you can us that in particle and plasma weapons... :D
Was the jump drives in Outsider based on gravity..?

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:24 am
by Absalom
Widde84 wrote:
Mjolnir wrote:Neutral particle beams don't have to be neutrons though...you just neutralize the particles after accelerating them. Two accelerators, one for electrons and one for nuclei, and some work to make most of them recombine before hitting the enemy screens. And of course, the problem with accelerating neutral particles only exists in the first place if you're using electromagnetic acceleration...even the humans in Outsider have gravity manipulation.
What I thought too.. :D
The problem is when the nuclei and electrons combine they will most likely recombine as neutral atoms and one basically end up shooting inert gas at the target... (atomic laser..? :mrgreen: )
This "inert gas" is traveling so fast that it doesn't matter if it's inert or not, the impact simply WILL create Bremsstrahlung radiation, and that means that it's traveling fast enough to be used as a weapon in space. After that, it's just a question of hitting with enough to do some real damage.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:39 am
by Mjolnir
Widde84 wrote:I just thought that using charged particles and develope some focusing is probably faster than developing a neutral particle weapon. Using gravity is probably meaningless since it has so little effect on such small objects... Ships are easy, they're large...
Gravity has exactly the same effect on small objects as on large ones. Shipboard "gravity" might be something that is actually completely different which gives the same effect, but there's no indication of this.

Widde84 wrote:The problem is when the nuclei and electrons combine they will most likely recombine as neutral atoms and one basically end up shooting inert gas at the target... (atomic laser..? :mrgreen: )
That's not a problem, that's the objective. Neutral gas isn't going to do any less damage when it slams into the ship at relativistic velocities, but it's going to be a lot harder to deflect.

Widde84 wrote:Gravity? You'll need lots of it. You could use grav plating in the same manner as particle accelerators use electrically charged plates with holes. Problem is, probably need as much gravity as a planet or a black hole (overkill..?) to reach some sensible speeds, and you end up shooting away the entire cannon due to the gravitic stress and not just the particles (don't need big electric fields (that tear the surrounding apart) to accelerate charged particles). Even if you do have neutralizing plates around the cannon, it's still a lot more power... blabla.. (s**t, I really can't keep things short...)
Electromagnetic acceleration also places extreme stress on the machinery. No matter how you exert force on the particles being accelerated, the same force will be exerted on the machinery doing the acceleration.

Intense fields would be needed, but the same goes for electromagnetic fields. They only need to exist in a small volume, and we already know they don't need a planet to produce a planet-like gravitational effect. And for a present day comparison with magnetic fields...it would be quite difficult for us to generate a magnetic field strong enough to produce accelerations similar to Earth surface gravity on ferromagnetic objects within a volume comparable to a ship, and we're in the process of building railguns that promise to be useful weapons. They can fill substantial parts of a ship with a fairly uniform gravitational field...it's not implausible that they can produce stronger fields in small volumes, and there's no way to judge what the relative power requirements might be.

Widde84 wrote:Was the jump drives in Outsider based on gravity..?
They're influenced by gravitational radiation, I think it's safe to say that gravity's involved to some degree.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:41 pm
by junk
What I don't fully understand though, is why would you want a particle beam compared to a slug thrower that moves at something like .99C. You don't have to worry about dispersion, range is virtually unlimited thanks to that and the kinetic energy is so massive that that it should be strong enough as far as dumb munitions go.

As a mainstay weapon missiles seem like the obvious choice I guess. Though that might be due to me coming from Honorverse which is essentially medium soft sci fi filled with missile spam on missile spam. To the level of ships carrying missile drums behind them essentially.

Obviously if you managed to break the laws of physics and have superluminal dumb munitions you would obviously want it. -- something that hits before it's detectable - amazing. Though considering the laws of physics that's a big no no currently.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:40 pm
by Arioch
junk wrote:What I don't fully understand though, is why would you want a particle beam compared to a slug thrower that moves at something like .99C.
If you had a system that could accelerate a slug to high fractions of lightspeed, that would be preferable. But that's pretty hard to do in a launcher compact enough to fit on a spaceship, and to keep your projectile from being sprayed into plasma by the terrific energies required to accelerate it to that velocity.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:46 pm
by Mjolnir
junk wrote:What I don't fully understand though, is why would you want a particle beam compared to a slug thrower that moves at something like .99C. You don't have to worry about dispersion, range is virtually unlimited thanks to that and the kinetic energy is so massive that that it should be strong enough as far as dumb munitions go.
Because it's vastly more difficult to sling a solid slug at 0.99c. Particle beams can easily reach that today, while we don't even have a speculative approach to accelerating solid projectiles to such speeds.

For one part of the problem, look at power requirements. Say your gun's 100m long, at constant acceleration your slug reaches the end in 670 ns. Say it's a 1 GJ shot...you must transfer 1 GJ in 670 ns, for a average power of 1.5 petawatts. Compare to a pulsed beam weapon of the same shot energy with a 1 ms long shot. Average power over a pulse: 0.001 petawatts. That's just looking at the average power, look at the starting and ending transients...the particle beam's pulse could ramp up to full power and bleed off excess power afterward over a time longer than the entire main pulse of the projectile gun.

Delivering large amounts of energy in a tiny amount of time is more difficult than increasing the power of a continuous beam. Even if you manage to transfer enough energy to the projectile without vaporizing it, light itself only travels 200 meters in 670 ns, you'll have leftover energy ringing through your system long after the projectile leaves, quite likely more energy than you transferred to the projectile in the first place.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:55 pm
by LegioCI
Why not take the gun out of the equation? Even the slowest Terran warships are scooting around at 4Gs of acceleration. Why not take a few rockets, strap them to big rocks with a bit of fuel, some point defense weapons, a big MAM-bomb, and a targeting system and launch them towards Umiak space? Sure, it'll take a few decades to get there, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect, especially if you turn the engines off once they reach an appropriate speed. Once they get in-system, you just aim aim it towards the target planet, detonate the MAM-bomb at the right distance and give one the planet a face-full of relativistic buckshot a la Charles Pellegrino's The Killing Star.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:34 pm
by Mjolnir
LegioCI wrote:Why not take the gun out of the equation? Even the slowest Terran warships are scooting around at 4Gs of acceleration. Why not take a few rockets, strap them to big rocks with a bit of fuel, some point defense weapons, a big MAM-bomb, and a targeting system and launch them towards Umiak space? Sure, it'll take a few decades to get there, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect, especially if you turn the engines off once they reach an appropriate speed. Once they get in-system, you just aim aim it towards the target planet, detonate the MAM-bomb at the right distance and give one the planet a face-full of relativistic buckshot a la Charles Pellegrino's The Killing Star.
To get there within a couple decades, you'd need to start from just a jump or two away, and that's if you include enough fuel to resupply a normal ship of the same size many times over. Just the fuel would make it an expensive piece of single-use hardware, and there'd be quite a bit of risk of losing it entirely before you get close enough to the target system to fire it off.

It also wouldn't be that undetectable. You're annihilating a considerable fraction of the ship's starting mass to accelerate it...the Umiak can probably detect and monitor ships maneuvering across interstellar distances, even if the data is years old. A prolonged burn with steadily increasing doppler blue shift up to a relative velocity approaching c would kind of stick out among normal ship maneuvers. Plus, given that the starting point is just a jump or two away from a valuable target, there's good odds that they'll have some sort of continuous monitoring in the system the weapon is launched from, or of Umiak vessels passing through the system while the weapon is still just starting its acceleration.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 9:11 pm
by Arioch
Umiak space is roughly 400 light years away. Even at a very high fraction of lightspeed (which is not really practical for the Humans at their tech level), no sub-light weapon is going to arrive in any meaningful time frame, and there's no way to recall such a weapon if the war ends or your side overruns the target system. I also don't see why a sublight weapon is inherently harder to intercept than a FTL weapon, especially when you will have decades in which to see it coming.

But... before we even get there, how are you even targeting the weapon? Humanity doesn't even know which systems are held by the Umiak, much less what the systems look like or which planets are inhabited.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 12:47 am
by LegioCI
Fuel isn't a huge concern, considering that most of the RKV's journey would be coasting along after an initial burn got it up to .75-.9c, after which it could go almost completely dark, only running enough power to keep the targeting computers and burning it's engines just enough to keep it on course. It's fuel needs after the initial burn would be minimal as well, requiring no fuel for a return journey and only relatively small amounts for maneuvering to keep itself on target.

Also, the distance/time problem could be a hurdle, but even then we can switch targets. There are probably a number of worlds that the Umiak use closer to the front, as supply or repair bases and such. Perhaps we could fire off a few rocks at them? There's also the idea of strapping crude FTL drives to the rocks and attempting jumps that you probably wouldn't risk a crewed ship with. If 10ly is the outside limit of a "safe" jump, (Commercial Airlines have a 1-in-5million chance of a fatal accident; can we assume that the same odds are involved with FTL?) how far could you jump a craft if you only needed, say, a 1-in-1,000 chance of an incident? 1-in-100?

We're playing the odds now, but is it feasible to fire an unmanned, RKV 100lys into Umiak space if you're willing to allow for a 1% chance that it'll doink off spacetime?

Once we've got that, then we worry about targeting. If we can get a decent idea of where the Umiak homeworld, and can jump the RKV in close enough, then it can do a lot of the work for us. If we can get it within, say, 10lys of the Umiak homeworld, all it has to do is check the stars, the Umiak homeworld is likely going to have huge amounts of EMF traffic, so we tell the RKV to look for EMF in the appropriate ranges. After that it just has to look for planets of sufficient mass around stars of the right type that are emitting enough EMF in the right bands- at that point if we aren't targeting Empire, we're at the very least hitting something important.

Now we're getting to fun bits. First off, the strategic paradigm of the Umiak-Loroi War is likely based around control of safe jump-vectors, which means that Umiak probably aren't watching all of the sky, just the likely FTL approach vectors; This is the RKV's opening. Because it isn't using FTL for it's suicide run it can come from any star within 15-20lys, and it can potentially come from a direction the Umiak aren't bothering to watch. (and because it's only actively burning it's engines for the first year or so of the flight to Empire it's pretty stealthy anyway.) Once it starts it's final run, it's not an easy thing for the Umiak to deal with. Even if they're able to destroy it, all they've done is turned it into a cloud of relativistic gravel, something it was going to do to itself anyway.

Of course, this is a very high-risk, high-reward idea. Any one of those things could turn completely untrue, perhaps it's unfeasible to jump the RKV far enough, maybe we can't find Empire even if we're in range, maybe the Umiak are paranoid about their core homeworlds and do watch the entire sky. In any of these cases, humanity is out a mineral-depleted asteroid, some out-dated thrusters, and an FTL drive. Not exactly a huge cost for the potential to splash Empire or another one the Umiak's homeworlds.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 6:17 am
by Tanner
Large objects hurdleing into your planets are probably a topic for advanced races even without human interference. So my guess is that, depending on the star system configuration all advanced races will probably deploy some kind of asteroid defence and recognition grid. Just to sleep well.

Natural occuring asteroids are probably harder to detect against the background noise than a directed attack with "fleets" of kinetic weapons.

But then: If you are willing to wait the the immense time span between attack and defence it might be feasible to build stealth-missiles and just fire them conventionally. At that speed a well built missile would have a devasting impact on a planet not militarized, not rugged planet - and can be stealthed by conventional means of decreasing radiation signature/refraction of incomming radiation.

But waiting 400 plus years just to spell silent doom to planets you haven't really charted and must hit with relative pinpoint accuracy is hardly something you want to rely on.
After all, a weapon your enemy won't fear for whatever reason is not really helping out any wargoals you might have.

If you use it as a measure of diplomatical engagement with the umiak the umiak might just prepare for that kind of attack or even preemptively retialate to gather enough intel to make the defence reasonable unexpensive. But maybe mankind will side with Umiaks and is looking for a way to destroy the loroi race? At least they can display their mind-reading-blocking abilities then :)

About the ftl idea:
As far as i visualized it, when you enter hyperspace with your bubble, you have "hyperspace momentum" which pushes you father away from real-space. If that force isn't counteracted you will remain in hyperspace forever (at least in real time... maybe you get flushed back when the underlying space as "reticuled" by matter ceases to exist?)
So for FTL drives to work you desperately need a "heavy" target to attract you back into real space-time. Plotting a vector without any heavy objects in the way will not only be risky it will fail every time. Also FTL incursions into star systems can be tracked in an unexpensive way if not obstructed by other radiation i guess.


Another idea i want to promote.
Use of short range ftl drives for the use in capital ship missiles.
It might be possible (with enough finesse in ftl engineering) to just phase out a missile and vector it to the next largest enemy mass concentration on the battlefield either deploying a conventional warhead or kinetic energy, bypassing any point defence systems on their way.

What about even smaller scale "hyper-ballistic" weapons... if the computation power and technical prowess are reasonable high it might be possible to create hand held hyper-space ammunition allowing to negate ground armor and heavy planetside fortifications by just re-entering real space-time at approbriate distances.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 12:17 pm
by junk
Keep in mind that outsider verse oes have fairly steep limitations to FTL as far as we know. And as a result is only really feasible for ships of a certain size. And making jumps far enough away from a system's gravity to be able to hit it with relatively finesse.

Hyper munitions and similar are beyond that scope. Obviously some other universes do have similar means of course. The necron of wh40k and their phase technology is a notable example.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 3:56 pm
by LegioCI
Ah, Tanner, you are a kindred soul in the art of taking nominally peaceful technology and using it for war and destruction, unfortunately "microjumps" don't work. Because any particular FTL jump is still influenced by gravity, it first has to defeat the escape velocity of the star, or else it will get dragged back into the gravity well of said star.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2012 11:12 pm
by TrashMan
Ya know what? Humans don't need new weapons. What they need is precise jumping.

If human ships could jump in next to enemy ships (thus negating the range disadvantage), their "obsolete" railguins/coilguns become the most terrifying ship killer. At least according to the insider charts, the thing is only outmatched in sheer damage by the Wave-loom.

Re: Random Discussion on Weapon Systems

Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2012 1:52 am
by Fotiadis_110
If humans could achieve tactical jumping, they'd have the equivalent of a super weapon.
After all, what's to stop you throwing out NUKES for close in bombardment?

What is there to stop you hurling neutron bombs at planets to erase the living population, and the soldiers who guard it?

In fact it would be SO overpowered, the Loroi would ask for it and be given on threat of glassing earth, and be far more terrifying at combat than they are now.
Jump behind the Umiak before they hit effective range, then chase and shoot them from behind as they hurtle on forwards.

And railguns are effective weapons, they just are far to slow to be able to hit anything at range, and the sheer 'dakka' you'd need to fill up enough area of space they can manoeuvre within by the time your shots get there, you would need to be in a different reality with ships the size of small moons just to have sufficent mass to throw around.
And lets not forget, in space, energy is cheap, you can just throw out a large solar panel... on the other hand, MASS is expensive because it makes every single manoeuvre that much slower, needing that much more energy, and that much more propellant to get from A to B.
And given the situation we are in relies on high mobility and maximum range of weapons, it's safe to say that a turtle will easily be left behind by a swallow who flies off and glasses your planet while your still stumbling around the jump zone.

Actually WH40k vrs outsider... I think outsider wins due to glassing of homeworlds, because I don't think their weapons are strong enough to do enough damage to the empires star-ships, but nothing the empire has could hit a outsider class ship except through random chance. <_<