Post by Kerr on Nov 15, 2017 14:41:47 GMT
Nov 11, 2017 7:38:55 GMT Kerr said:
Exactly how does a longer accelerator cut into energy density? I though an accelerator has linear performances.Would you be so kind and explain how pellet guns make combat fun contrary to lasers? At these technological levels you are either shooting your photon lances or multi-megameter/s projectiles. Neither of them seem to support fun combat.
A gyrotron needs only a 1 meter long accelerator to produce electrons energetic enough for microwave wavelengths. It has a mass of 1 ton and an output of 1MW.
A FEL needs a 100 meter long accelerator to produce electrons energetic enough for X-ray wavelengths. It has a mass for 100 tons and an output of 1MW.
The FEL, due to having a much bigger electron accelerator component, ends up having a lower power density.
This is assuming that the accelerator components are field limited (realistic) rather than power limited (simplistic).
Pellets can be dodged by harder accelerating spaceships. Shooting angles matter even more, because you now have a relative velocity and lateral acceleration component. Lasers instantly hit you. Pellets are interceptable and encourage complex armor schemes. Lasers tend to do continuous damage that dumb down armor to a simple matter of mass, especially at closer ranges where the laser intensities are extreme. Lasers can also be transmitted over long distances by Laser Weapon Webs, while pellet guns need one dedicated space warship per gun.
With laser-dominated warfare, you'll have a battlefield composed of remotely controlled, remotely propelled and remotely powered mirror drones at the end of an interplanetary laser weapon web. They'll burn down each other through attrition and war boils down to the military output of each combatant. With kinetics-dominated warfare, you'll have a battlefield full of warships maneuvering hard to dodge incoming fire while lining up predictive shots on targets. For a lot of authors, being able to apply convenient WWII dogfight analogies to that sort of fighting is a big plus.
why would a longer accelerator have the same output as an smaller one? Let's say the accelerator uses Superconducting RF Cavities, each cavity can be powered equally and transfer that energy with very high efficiency to the electron beam, an 1m accelerator might consist out of 10 SRF's each having 100kW of power, resulting in 1MW Output. The 100m accelerator consisting out of the same 0.1m 100kW Cavities will output 100MW of power.
And it then comes down to who has more dakka, an fighter with an 1m long Pellet gun can shoot out projectiles at 328km/s, an 100m long pellet gun can launch its out at 3286km/s, the one with the longer pellet gun has higher range and the ones with more pellet guns have a higher firerate. dodging might be compensated by having sandblaster pellet guns, each pellet is capable of destroying sensors and damaging weapons, radiators, rocket nozzles.
A human pilot is still not that great, with a mass of nearly a ton you could have an pretty good computer even with todays tech, that computer might not have the same processing power of the human brain, but it is magnitudes faster than a human, can accelerate harder and it doesn't have to waste most of its processing power, and computer designed for a single task will nearly always beat a human. But not many want to read about the adventures of Dron-E the tactical pellet assault fighter.