The "Real Aerospace" Thread

[Ithekro]

Looks like a chrome propane tank.

[White]

Flying silos! It must be tornado season in Nebraska!

Mars Needs Maize!

[Krulle]

IF then the tornado was astonishingly gentle with the silos.
Not even one grain of corn spilled.

[Arioch]

[GeoModder]

But... there's a black outline at the tail's edge...

[Zarya]

we live in the future (audio on!)

[Arioch]

Flying VF-1J and VF-1S Valkryries.
Well... just barely.

[Sweforce]

Fake or real this is really funny but immensely more so if it is real and thus a joke in itself.

[Krulle]

Fake or real this is really funny but immensely more so if it is real and thus a joke in itself. :lol:

seems to be real:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/23021/is-this-attach-orbiter-here-note-black-side-down-sign-on-the-shuttle-carrie

[Arioch]

While this video is about how cameras track hypersonic objects, it contains an interesting compilation of railgun projectiles and more conventional tank rounds in flight.

What I find particularly interesting is how the shock waves create by the round are clearly visible in normal light.

[Krulle]

This technology of tracking very fast elements is also being developed more and more.
The first military systems are online in the hope they can find, track, and deliver targeting data to interceptor missiles for hypersonic rockets.

It's a question of how much sky you can scan though.
The processing capabilities are limited.

Visual systems also have the disadvantage of being reliant on weather conditions.

Still a very interesting video. I found the part about the ping-pong ball interesting, haven't seen that before.

[Arioch]

Good point. Since the beam side of the future weapons equations probably begins with lasers, fast-tracking mirrors are quite significant. And I think a mirror that can track a Mach 7 projectile probably has all the performance characteristics you'll need to focus a beam on an incoming target, even if it's a hypervelocity missile.

[Sweforce]

Good point. Since the beam side of the future weapons equations probably begins with lasers, fast-tracking mirrors are quite significant. And I think a mirror that can track a Mach 7 projectile probably has all the performance characteristics you'll need to focus a beam on an incoming target, even if it's a hypervelocity missile.

A reason to use beam weapon is the fact that they give absolutely no warning for point defense systems to react. Perhaps the damage can be mitigated by releasing some kind of mirroring materials but by the time you know that you should have used that option it is already to late. The beam travels at the speed of light and as such it cannot be detected before it hits. If the beem is focused enough, a beam fired in the vacuum of space cannot even be detected if it misses! As such, the best a hope is evasive actions as soon as there is a possibility of being fired upon and that will be a drain on the fuel reserves.

[elorran]

To add to the camera topic... insanely high speed camera capturing a pulse of light with a mirror included. And this was 2010-2011.
https://youtu.be/EtsXgODHMWk

[GeoModder]

The beam travels at the speed of light and as such it cannot be detected before it hits.

That's where quantum spooky action at a distance comes into play.

[Ithekro]

The question would be, do combat beam weapons of these races actually travel at the speed of light, or are they slower than that due to the particles they deliver to target? While the reduction in speed might be "negligible" it would be enough to detect the beams before impact. It would also mean that the longer distance fire would have longer to reach a target than a simple second of time. Not much longer since even at half the speed of light it still only take two seconds to reach out to 300 megameters.

[Arioch]

The question would be, do combat beam weapons of these races actually travel at the speed of light, or are they slower than that due to the particles they deliver to target? While the reduction in speed might be "negligible" it would be enough to detect the beams before impact. It would also mean that the longer distance fire would have longer to reach a target than a simple second of time. Not much longer since even at half the speed of light it still only take two seconds to reach out to 300 megameters.

Lasers, as you might imagine, travel at the speed of light.

Particle beams and plasma weapons travel at a high percentage of the speed of light, probably 90%+. Since the maximum range of such weapons is in the neighborhood of 1 light second, that does mean that you can see the weapon fire as much as a tenth of a second before it hits you. This is not very much time to do anything about it, especially since you won't know where the shot is going until pretty much the moment it arrives (the beam pulse will rapidly catch up to its image, appearing to move 10 x faster than light from the target's point of view). But even if your reaction time is perfect and you do everything you can do to change course (usually that means either going from full acceleration to zero, or vice versa), the maximum distance you can displace in .1 seconds with an acceleration of 30g is...

(s = 1/2at^2 = 1/2(30*9.8m/s^2)*(.1s^2) = 1.47 m)

...less than a meter and a half. However, whenever a warship is within the firing range of another, it is usually going to be performing continuous evasive maneuvers, erratically changing its acceleration and heading. At a range of 1 light second, there is at least a 2 second delay between the time the target's image left it and the time the shot arrives at the target, and so in this case the maximum displacement is...

(s = 1/2at^2 = 1/2(30*9.8m/s^2)*(2s^2) = 588 m)

Almost 600 meters, which is larger than most of the warships you're likely to face. And the slower than light the weapon pulse is, the more this number will increase. There are also things you can do both optically and electronically to try to introduce error into the fire control computation (probably chiefly by making yourself look brighter or dimmer, to throw off both the distance and acceleration calculations).

You might also see the weapon heat up several seconds before it actually fires, but I think the only thing this might be useful for is to tell you to begin evasive maneuvers if you weren't already.

So yes, you can occasionally make a beam shot miss through active maneuvers, but no, detecting the beam in flight before impact doesn't really help.

[Krulle]

Even today, materials exist which include ablative reflective shard materials (mostly glass beads).
These loose splinters of glass beads (or similar materials), which are then unconnected from the main ship, and scatter the beam light, thus reducing it's heat transfer capabilities drastically.
In gravity, they are not that helpful, as they simply fall down and thus are out of the path of incoming fire very shortly after having been released.
And in space, they'll become an issue for your own firing solutions (you don't want them to drift in front of your own weapons).
And a continuous acceleration/deceleration will soon mean, that a pretty large part of the firing angles you want to use will include these shards flying around.

So, it'll remain to see how effective these ablative armours will really be.

[Sweforce]

Tanks concentrate their armour at the front because that is where it is expected to get hit. A spaceship may have concentrated armor at part of it's structure and delibreatly turn that part towards the enemy. "Shields" for a spaceship can actually be a literal, physical shield perhaps mounted on a structure a bit away from the main hull pointed towards the enemy. To get around the shield you need to fire missiles and those can be countered with point defense systems.

[spacewhale]

Tanks concentrate their armour at the front because that is where it is expected to get hit. A spaceship may have concentrated armor at part of it's structure and delibreatly turn that part towards the enemy. "Shields" for a spaceship can actually be a literal, physical shield perhaps mounted on a structure a bit away from the main hull pointed towards the enemy. To get around the shield you need to fire missiles and those can be countered with point defense systems.

If the defense is biased towards one direction you can always attack from two (or more) directions at once. Probably easier to pull that off in vast empty space than on the ground. Protecting key functional areas would work in the general case. That said, an Orion pusher battleship would have that ablative shield plate built in (and be cool.).