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Post by apophys on Jan 11, 2017 1:30:06 GMT
15 seconds is still more than many reasonable hull armors can get you, so I'd say it served its purpose. If you're facing lasers, you either have lasers yourself or you're an expendable munition. I like the idea of liquid armor sandwiched in between an outer and inner plate. The laser would have to expend energy to change the liquid's state to gas... and it could be pressurized to flow toward a breach. For example... propellant? Place the whole spaceship inside its fuel tank! May or may not be effective; unsure whether or not lasers can part the Red Sea of liquid by drilling though fast enough. Also would probably cause very unpleasant rotation by venting propellant through what is effectively an unplanned thruster.
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Post by tukuro on Jan 12, 2017 16:11:05 GMT
15 seconds is still more than many reasonable hull armors can get you, so I'd say it served its purpose. If you're facing lasers, you either have lasers yourself or you're an expendable munition. I like the idea of liquid armor sandwiched in between an outer and inner plate. The laser would have to expend energy to change the liquid's state to gas... and it could be pressurized to flow toward a breach. For example... propellant? Place the whole spaceship inside its fuel tank! May or may not be effective; unsure whether or not lasers can part the Red Sea of liquid by drilling though fast enough. Also would probably cause very unpleasant rotation by venting propellant through what is effectively an unplanned thruster. What about running an opaque coolant fluid through a transparent hull? (E.g. quartz)
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Post by caiaphas on Jan 12, 2017 17:03:08 GMT
15 seconds is still more than many reasonable hull armors can get you, so I'd say it served its purpose. If you're facing lasers, you either have lasers yourself or you're an expendable munition. I like the idea of liquid armor sandwiched in between an outer and inner plate. The laser would have to expend energy to change the liquid's state to gas... and it could be pressurized to flow toward a breach. For example... propellant? Place the whole spaceship inside its fuel tank! May or may not be effective; unsure whether or not lasers can part the Red Sea of liquid by drilling though fast enough. Also would probably cause very unpleasant rotation by venting propellant through what is effectively an unplanned thruster. What about running an opaque coolant fluid through a transparent hull? (E.g. quartz) There was another thread about that, wasn't there?
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 12, 2017 18:40:53 GMT
For example... propellant? :P Ships that are firing control thrusters to evade and stabilise themselves anyway may benefit from some laser resistance as a convenient side-effect, especially if the plumes produced are dense enough to be visible. If it has any significant effect, the question then becomes what propellant to choose to produce both sufficient disruption and delta-v.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 13, 2017 13:36:40 GMT
That's the thing- unless you can get the hell out of there in a hurry, and even something ridiculous like 30 g's of acceleration might not be enough, they can wait 15 seconds to hit you again. They won't have to of course if the crew is in a highly compressed layer of chunky jelly at the aft end of the crew compartment. my coilguns move at 7.26km/s 7.26x15=108.9km 15 seconds extra life buys my coilguns shots 108.9km and 15 more seconds to be fireing
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Post by Easy on Jan 13, 2017 16:37:35 GMT
That's the thing- unless you can get the hell out of there in a hurry, and even something ridiculous like 30 g's of acceleration might not be enough, they can wait 15 seconds to hit you again. They won't have to of course if the crew is in a highly compressed layer of chunky jelly at the aft end of the crew compartment. Perfect is not the enemy of good. Sometimes the answer is that you're gonna die no matter what you do. Hopefully if you're getting shot at you can shoot back and the overall encounter will be short. Lethality will also dictate engagement time. If ships have a 90% kill probability on each other in less than a minute, 90% of the time the ships won't be in engagement range for longer than a minute. I'm abstracting weapon travel time so don't focus on numbers. Expendable Drones/Missiles seem to be the superior option to defensive capship armor anyways. Of course spending a Gigacredit on drones that cannot be recovered still means you're down a gigacredit of funds/materials/manufacturing time. If fuel is cheap enough it might be worth it to have drone recovery ships so we can reuse our expensive munitions. bit of a tangent there, but if gas/dust/sand/gel as an armor stopgap saves lives and saves ships, it might be worth the expense.
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Post by lawson on Jan 13, 2017 17:08:26 GMT
Actually, I think refractive/reflective dust might work well as a per-deployed defense. The dust has two advantages versus fixed armor that can be exploited. First, it can be concentrated in the direction the laser comes from. Second, it can be deployed well forward of the ship out of the laser's focus. This does tightly constrain the path of the defended ship.
Overall, I think a better compromise is to forward deploy shadow shield drones. I.e. a transparent diffuser or Whipple shield that can be deployed several thousand meters ahead of the ship to block enemy fire. The shields would be made survivable with massive redundancy in propulsion, sensing, and control.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 13, 2017 21:44:28 GMT
Actually, I think refractive/reflective dust might work well as a per-deployed defense. The dust has two advantages versus fixed armor that can be exploited. First, it can be concentrated in the direction the laser comes from. Second, it can be deployed well forward of the ship out of the laser's focus. This does tightly constrain the path of the defended ship. Overall, I think a better compromise is to forward deploy shadow shield drones. I.e. a transparent diffuser or Whipple shield that can be deployed several thousand meters ahead of the ship to block enemy fire. The shields would be made survivable with massive redundancy in propulsion, sensing, and control. At that point, why not slap weapons on them and keep your capship out of combat entirely? Sure the enemy always gets a vote, but there are no submarines in space. Range (through either lasers, drones or missiles) is king.
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Post by Enderminion on Jan 14, 2017 4:04:03 GMT
Would a missile loaded with a flak bomb with a small bursting charge and large amount of relfextive flak material be able to block lasers?
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Post by theholyinquisition on Jan 14, 2017 4:22:34 GMT
No.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 14, 2017 5:40:35 GMT
Would a missile loaded with a flak bomb with a small bursting charge and large amount of relfextive flak material be able to block lasers? IRL probably not (or at least not in a mass-effective way), in game not at all, as flak fragments get deleted after a few seconds (in order to keep or computers from lagging to death).
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Post by michalo on Jan 14, 2017 11:08:43 GMT
Pockets of armor containing gas might be useful. When a laser burns a hole in the armor, the gas rushes out, attenuating the beam and carrying away heat from the armor. Using this technique, you could fill Whipple shields or use it as a last defense against laser damage. In this way it's sort of like reactive armor. Of course, the enemy could just wait for all the gas to escape and then fire again, in which case you're dead. When you vaporize solid you get much more gas, and vaporizing itself require a lot of energy - this is the way ablative shields work. Also, you probably need ridiculously thick armor (i think something like >> 10m), because gases are, hmm, quite transparent.
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Post by The Astronomer on Jan 14, 2017 11:12:34 GMT
Why don't you develop some kind of reflective surfaces?
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Post by RiftandRend on Jan 14, 2017 12:05:03 GMT
Pockets of armor containing gas might be useful. When a laser burns a hole in the armor, the gas rushes out, attenuating the beam and carrying away heat from the armor. Using this technique, you could fill Whipple shields or use it as a last defense against laser damage. In this way it's sort of like reactive armor. Of course, the enemy could just wait for all the gas to escape and then fire again, in which case you're dead. When you vaporize solid you get much more gas, and vaporizing itself require a lot of energy - this is the way ablative shields work. Also, you probably need ridiculously thick armor (i think something like >> 10m), because gases are, hmm, quite transparent. Ahh, thanks.
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Post by David367th on Jan 14, 2017 13:47:50 GMT
Why don't you develop some kind of reflective surfaces? If you didn't take heat into effect, pure polished silver would be extremely reflective. When you do heat it up however (like from a high intensity laser hitting it) its reflectiveness starts to decrease.
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