Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Werra]

Which side is the one that would be deploying these shields? Because neither the Loroi or the Umiak look like they'd benefit from it.

The Loroi need open fields of fire and keep their ships mobile. So directional barriers floating around don't seem great. Their enemies also use a large amount of AOE weapons, which would take out a lot of these shields naturally.

The Umiak already field torpedoes and gunboats to absorb shots and would need to advance through their own shields. Because of their torpedo focus, Loroi ships also carry a lot of lasers still. Guns that seem to fire very fast and which could clear up a field of such shields very quickly at almost no cost at practically any range, since these shields are paper thin.

[Krulle]

Well, the material of a shield doesn't disappear, it only changes its state of aggregation.

And even as a gaseous nebulae, it'll dissipate any focused beam trying to transverse it.

[Arioch]

Due to the nature of jump drives, combat only occurs in star systems.

Such nebulae are typically not possible in solar systems. The star-forming regions in which such nebulae are common normally present a barrier to jump drive.

[Werra]

Well, the material of a shield doesn't disappear, it only changes its state of aggregation.

And even as a gaseous nebulae, it'll dissipate any focused beam trying to transverse it.

The material must be extremely thin to cover as much space as possibly. If a bit of nebula was enough for cover, you'd think it would be easier to just release clouds of water and skip the solid stage.

Also, aren't ships in Outsider very fast and constantly dodging? How large would a barrier need to be to provide decent cover? Even at 1 gram/m² that would be quite a lot of mass to fire and forget.

[kfcroc18]

Hello, I maybe a little late on this but regarding weapons in sci-fi both ship mounted, and handheld. Why are energy weapons always seen as better than slug throwers?

[dragoongfa]

Hello, I maybe a little late on this but regarding weapons in sci-fi both ship mounted, and handheld. Why are energy weapons always seen as better than slug throwers?

It all comes down to projectile speed, energy weapons travel at, or almost, the speed of light. There is no forewarning or dodging a beam weapon since you cannot see it coming. This mostly applies in ship to ship combat; a railgun can never accelerate a slug at such a speed and as such it can only be used in extreme short ranges (a few thousand kilometers at best). When ships can accelerate at a few dozen Gs on every direction at will then there is no way for them to be hit by a solid slug.

In hand held weapons there are two schools of thought on how things will go, the most 'widespread' one is that energy weapons will eventually supplant projectile weapons due to their inherent benefits in terms of ammo and nullification of ballistics. This only of course if said weapons become cheap enough to field as personal weapons.
The second school is that projectile weaponry will maintain their supremacy even in high tech settings because of their ammo. In particular the ease ammo can be modified to fulfill an extremely wide array of roles, especially if certain technologies become robust and miniaturized enough. The Boltgun from 40k is an extremely crude example of an advanced gyrojet projectile weapon whose ammo is modified for a variety of uses.
I personally predict that gyrojets will return with a vengeance the next few decades, more mature and with the ability to lock on targets even when out of direct line of sight by using networked communications to identify and neutralize targets from afar. Add a few specialized forms of ammunition and one will look at phasers and blasters and just laugh at their face.

[kfcroc18]

Hello, I maybe a little late on this but regarding weapons in sci-fi both ship mounted, and handheld. Why are energy weapons always seen as better than slug throwers?

It all comes down to projectile speed, energy weapons travel at, or almost, the speed of light. There is no forewarning or dodging a beam weapon since you cannot see it coming. This mostly applies in ship to ship combat; a railgun can never accelerate a slug at such a speed and as such it can only be used in extreme short ranges (a few thousand kilometers at best). When ships can accelerate at a few dozen Gs on every direction at will then there is no way for them to be hit by a solid slug.

I disagree, energy weapons may travel at the speed of light, but they are short legged due to thermal blooming. whereas with railguns all you need to do is to lead the target, and the slugs may even ignore any shields.

As for the handheld weapons, you probably will want to keep them as simple as possible (fixing a bolter is most likely a more involved processes than fixing a AK-47) otherwise I agree with your projections.

[Krulle]

You can lead the aim, but when the opponent does random walk his accelerations in different directions, that's going to be a difficult feature. Add in the several seconds difference between you seeing him at spot X, and the slug arriving at predicted spot Y, and the enemy will be quite somewhere else than predicted if accelerations are in the dozens, let alone hundreds of g.

In one Sci-Fi series I read, the slugthrowers doubled as emergency accelerators, accelerating the ship in an opposite direction of the shot (does anyone read "Druuge" here? [*]).
Which the author used to evade larger incoming kinetic projectiles that would actually hit (despite random walking the ships).
But then, in that setting, the slugthrowers were able to load grams or tons of slugweight within split-seconds, and thus create lightweigt shots, or heavy evasion accelerations. Which in real life would mean you're carrying massive tons of non-mission-critical mass with you, accelerated and braked from system to system until you used it in a fight.
Expensively unrealistic.
And that's before you consider the technology you'd need for such a slug loading system, and the adaptability of energy usage and rail load distribution of the rail gun.


[*]I don't remember the written series, and the Druuge are from a PC game.

[Mk_C]

The material must be extremely thin to cover as much space as possibly. If a bit of nebula was enough for cover, you'd think it would be easier to just release clouds of water and skip the solid stage.

Also, aren't ships in Outsider very fast and constantly dodging? How large would a barrier need to be to provide decent cover? Even at 1 gram/m² that would be quite a lot of mass to fire and forget.

Are we finally talking smoke screens in space?

Because I thought about them. A LOT.

I disagree, energy weapons may travel at the speed of light, but they are short legged due to thermal blooming

Is it really applicable to particle beams and plasma accelerators? I'd think that capacity to maintain either in a focused beam across great distances would be much more of an issue than anything else.

whereas with railguns all you need to do is to lead the target, and the slugs may even ignore any shields.

As Krulle has already pointed out, you can no longer lead a target when it can perform several evasion maneuvers through the projectiles time of flight - at this point it's not leading, it's guessing.

I personally predict that gyrojets will return with a vengeance the next few decades, more mature and with the ability to lock on targets even when out of direct line of sight by using networked communications to identify and neutralize targets from afar. Add a few specialized forms of ammunition and one will look at phasers and blasters and just laugh at their face.

In approximately how many decades may I contact you with a screencap of this post and the Bell of Shame?

[kfcroc18]

whereas with railguns all you need to do is to lead the target, and the slugs may even ignore any shields.

As Krulle has already pointed out, you can no longer lead a target when it can perform several evasion maneuvers through the projectiles time of flight - at this point it's not leading, it's guessing.

Maneuvering in space is not that easy, you have to factor in the mass of your ship, the size of your RCS thrusters, how far way the projectile is, how fast it is moving, as well as if your ship is full of people who break if too many Gs hit them. You may have no choice but to take the hit.

[boldilocks]

whereas with railguns all you need to do is to lead the target, and the slugs may even ignore any shields.

As Krulle has already pointed out, you can no longer lead a target when it can perform several evasion maneuvers through the projectiles time of flight - at this point it's not leading, it's guessing.

Maneuvering in space is not that easy, you have to factor in the mass of your ship, the size of your RCS thrusters, how far way the projectile is, how fast it is moving, as well as if your ship is full of people who break if too many Gs hit them. You may have no choice but to take the hit.

Hitting a mobile target at 100.000+ kilometer ranges with slow moving projectiles is not that easy, either. One micro-adjustment to your enemy's vector and your shot just missed by a mile.

[Mk_C]

Maneuvering in space is not that easy, you have to factor in the mass of your ship, the size of your RCS thrusters, how far way the projectile is, how fast it is moving, as well as if your ship is full of people who break if too many Gs hit them. You may have no choice but to take the hit.

Well, in settings where maneuverability and effective combat distances for space ships are sufficiently limited - slug-throwers are portrayed as a perfectly fine solution: with examples which are too many to count, from Fire Trace on the harder side to 40k on straight out space opera. It would rather be hard for me to name an example of a noteworthy space 4X vidya that doesn't follow the Holy Trinity of Beams-Missilies-Mass Drivers.

Outsider, however, has:
1. Typical combat ranges being in the area from tens of thousands kilometres to light seconds due to effective ranges of missiles, particle beams and plasma foci.
2. Ships that can perform double-digit gee maneuvers on a whim, and compensate the g-forces effects with inertia dampers.
With all that implies, such as mass drivers only being effective at ranges that are fractional compared to what alternatives can achieve. Meaning whatever tries to rush into said range will probably be bonked a lot before it can reach it - meaning you can rush like this only with something extremely expandable, like a missile.

[Ithekro]

Combat ranges for the warring factions here (Loroi and Umiak) seem to start getting into effective ranges around 90 Megameters between ships. While the Loroi can engage up to 300 and 400 Megameters distance (and 600 Mm with the Wave Loom), the amount of damage is greatly reduced....plus the likeihood of hitting the target goes down a bit, (I imagine), once you are over a light-second distance.

Earth's big impact weapon, their mass drivers, while technically having unlimited range (physics), their effective range against 30g capable starships appears to be in the 2 to 4 Megameter range. Or 2,000 to 4,000 kilometers.

[kfcroc18]

Ok, you have a point with regards to combat ranges but what about shields, energy weapons being stopped by energy shields makes more since, than a physical slug that maybe as big as a SUV being stopped by an energy shield as thin paper. Slug throwers may ignore shields completely, so they will still have use.

[Ithekro]

Railgun do ignore shields. Its just the difficulty of actually hitting anything that pretty much renders them useless in regular combat.
(In Space Battleship Yamato 2199 the Earth built Yamato uses fusion shells from its shock cannon barrels as a backup when the energy to the weapons are cut off. They are used to great effect in a hyperspace like dimension where their beam weapons are useless. Barbarians using shells to take out an enemy flagship at close range.)

[kfcroc18]

What about indirect fire. energy weapons are line of sight weapons but slug throwers you can shoot them at planets gravity well the slugs can then sling shot around and assuming your targeting computer is good enough hit the target from behind.

[dragoongfa]

What about indirect fire. energy weapons are line of sight weapons but slug throwers you can shoot them at planets gravity well the slugs can then sling shot around and assuming your targeting computer is good enough hit the target from behind.

Any space warship worth its salt will have a sensor suite capable enough to see the round coming light seconds away, a fleet which has its sensors networked would probably be able to see it coming from the other side of the system.

There is also the problem of targeting since the biggest bitch in space combat as we can realistically envision it is light speed and the information lag it entails. The image you are seeing does not represent the position which the target holds at the moment you are witnessing it. A light second of distance alone is more than enough time for a ship to see a slug coming and comfortably alter its course to dodge anything that you might throw at them. Several light minutes or hours of distance? Your targeting solution is guesswork since you can only guess at their course, speed and intentions at the best of times.

[danuis]

Hello, I maybe a little late on this but regarding weapons in sci-fi both ship mounted, and handheld. Why are energy weapons always seen as better than slug throwers?

Remember that slugs are slow. A light second is ~299,999km or so with change. How fast are the slugs going? Missiles? Compare that with a particle cannon or a laser cannon. Even without inertia dampeners, a chemical ship or fission ship or antimatter ship with metallic hydrogen RCS or w/e just has to poof one direction and the slug misses by tens or hundreds of meters. It could even be inches, but it does not matter: a miss is a miss.

To make a kinetic slug or missile fly fast enough to compete with energy weapons is rarely worth the hassle: hypervelocity, at 1?-14% .c, to relativistic, 15% of .c+ That's just around 42km per second, so even a low relativistic weapon needs 6, 7 seconds to cross a light second. Plenty of time to spot it and dodge.

The Loroi and Clicks have agile ships with beefyish hulls and shields. They have a lot of d/v and the luxury to use it with control we can't even dream of, but even our tech level could produce dancing death spheres janking to and fro. In either case you're just basically shooting the air full of slugs, hoping to hit, or can go for finesse and use energy weapons. Slugs might be good in close quarters with slow moving targets, targets without a lot of d/v to use, in orbit, or other such scenarios, while a energy weapon can do all of that and 'snipe' across larger distances.

The thermal blooming is accounted for in Outsider, they have 'ranges' beyond which the weapon dissipates to the equivalent of a wind, to a sneeze, to a whiff, lasers fizzle out before a light second, particle weapons far before that but still in the hundreds or thousands of KMs and that's still space aplenty. Laser weapons are the long-range and point-defense, particle weapons are medium range to short range boxing gloves.

[GeoModder]

What about indirect fire. energy weapons are line of sight weapons but slug throwers you can shoot them at planets gravity well the slugs can then sling shot around and assuming your targeting computer is good enough hit the target from behind.

That must be a slug with relative slow velocity then, otherwise it will zip through your typical planetary gravity well without much of a curve in its trajectory.

[kfcroc18]

What if the slug were stealth? I don't see why not.