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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 24, 2016 0:51:52 GMT
I believe that's from the dissociation of the propellant at the extreme temperatures - you'll notice the effect is particularly pronounced with things like hydrocarbons, and requires certain minimum temperatures to appear.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 22, 2016 1:01:00 GMT
Lol "more or less" eh? Last time I checked Aurora's sensor model consists of drawing a circle around a point "maneuvering" on a 2d plane, there are aliens and fantasy tech, and there's no real attempt to do any kind of physical simulation at all. It's the CMANO of space sims, except where CMANO is a glorified Harpoon database made by people with security clearances, Aurora appears to be an inventory management database that has been hacked to "simulate" some bored software engineer's science-fantasy headcanon universe . Neither one contains a genuine systems-level simulation of the platforms being represented. CoaDE does. Both CMANO and Aurora resolve events with hard-threshold die rolls, where the thresholds are chosen by the designer's intuition. CoaDE resolves events with models from IEEE papers, cited in game. I really find no value in looking to Aurora for lessons on what CoaDE should be doing. If we're going to compare CoaDE to "playing" database-sims, we should really be comparing it to Rule the Waves (RtW), which is a FAR more playable sim than either CMANO or Aurora and FAR more accurately represents the actual challenges involved in implementing the kinds of strategies you're talking about. For those of you who haven't played RtW, the player is basically the Fleet Admiral of one of the major powers of the turn-of-the-20th-century world, who starts with an (optionally) historically-informed budget, research base, and legacy fleet, and proceeds through a career from ~1900-1930, if you don't get fired before then. The period is therefore the golden age of battleships and the craft you'll be dealing with range from early submarines and torpedo motorboats to super-dreadnoughts- here's the ship design dialog to give an idea of how it works: -snip- So, the "all missile fleet" idea is conceptually equivalent in RtW to going after a torpedo-heavy fleet that performs hit-and-run torpedo barrages, and is probably trained to do so at night (otherwise your fleet is going to get gunned to death by someone who's trained in night gunnery and has a BC or two to blockade you with). The player might choose Japan as an appropriate starting power, as they have slight advantages in night attack training and torpedo research. If you go ahead and pursue such a strategy, what you very quickly find is the following: ahh historyteaches us that 90% of all naval losses during WW2 were caused by torpedoes, aircraft and mines... also Behold! The ignominious deaths of the battleships! I think you can literally count the number of ships destroyed by enemy cannon fire during WW2 on one hand if your simulation does not match reality, its obviously not a good simulation Point of order: Rule the Waves simulates the naval races of the 1900-1925 period. I leave counting the gunfire to torpedo, mines and air-power ratio of losses in WW1 or the Russo-Japanese War as an exercise for the reader.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 21, 2016 16:09:50 GMT
This is exactly what I thought after reading about the EM Drive, ECat. The thing that everyone else also said was impossbile. Maybe it really works too. I would advise caution rather than optimism. But it isn't helpful to simply dismiss the EM drive as impossible because it doesn't conform to your understanding of physics or assumptions about the drive. It's possible that something genuinely interesting is going on, but the theories proposed by the EM Drive's inventors are somewhere between crank and con-man, and even assuming there's some genuinely physics-interesting stuff going on (rather than an experimental setup that's highly prone to different types of instrument error), that doesn't mean the EM Drive itself will actually be useful. In fact, given the implications of the claims, some extremely strong evidence needs to be presented to raise it above "this almost certainly doesn't work", and the evidence has been very weak at best. It's perfectly helpful to dismiss the core EM Drive claims because they don't conform to physics as we understand them (and we understand physics pretty good), for the exact same reason we (correctly) dismiss perpetual motion machines. The fact that if it works as described it's just a sufficiently large scale kinetic energy capture setup away from a PMM certainly doesn't hurt.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 20, 2016 21:00:27 GMT
One limiting factor on the EM Drive, as far as I understand NASA's paper, is the efficiency of the drive itself. There is no way that this drive magically converts 100% of its power input into thrust with no thermal inefficiency. I foresee practical upper limits on the amount of power which can be pumped into these things without melting them, even with a high-tech radiator system. We even have 1.3 gigawatt nuclear reactors already (http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature-largest-nuclear-power-plants-world/). But we haven't put one into space yet, and it seems impossible in the current political climate to do something like orbit a gigawatt nuclear power plant. We already know how mass-inhibiting the radiator system for a 1-gigawatt nuclear reactor is in this game's universe. That doesn't really help with the physics problem, though. If P-In produces T-Out without needing to haul propellant, conservation of energy is dead, because of that damned squared term in kinetic energy. The faster relative to a thing the object is going, the more energy it 'gains' from every additional m/s, so if power in produces m/s, sooner or later you'll get a net positive.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 20, 2016 20:55:49 GMT
Are we talking an Abrahamic omnipotent here, or the kind of diety that might also be called a very powerful spirit or hero - the kind that has limited characteristics and is capable of failure?
Because the former actually needing a weapon is rather incoherent as a concept. The latter, though? Tech is a crutch, when you're running on thematic grounds like an immortal divinity, go with what fits your aesthetic, it'll work. Personally, if I was a divine and had call to do violence, I'd stick to the classics. Lightning bolts cast with an overhand throw, a glare of wrath so terrible and absolute that the object thereof burns away in moments, that sort of thing.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 20, 2016 15:04:04 GMT
So... do they think we have special frames, or that we don't have conservation of energy? Because that squared term in kinetic energy is a bit of a problem.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 18, 2016 18:53:26 GMT
That's how I understand it to work, yes.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 18, 2016 13:54:38 GMT
I think the consensus was that amorphous Carbon (and Boron) were both intending to represent big chaotic tangled messes of nanotubes?
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 18, 2016 6:47:42 GMT
Are you using multiple engine types? If so, remember that it starts the game with both engines enabled, and so the delta-V you'll get is based on simultaneous burns of them both. If you've got a high efficiency engine and a separate high thrust engine, toggling the latter off when you aren't using it should get you the full dV.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 16, 2016 12:09:11 GMT
Just a quick query - you do have it on Homing mode in its orders, right? 'Drones' default to Broadside, which has the behavior you're describing as the intended mode - is it still behaving that way in Homing configuration?
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 15, 2016 14:35:59 GMT
Technical education does nothing to instill virtue. Most of the architects of the worst atrocities of the last hundred years have been highly educated. There are all kinds of people with graduate degrees and no moral compass, there are all kinds of people with graduate degrees and fanatical commitments to particular socio-political formations (visit your local econ department). I don't really see a difference between what's happening in CoaDE and recent history. Agreed. Though in current society it's impossible to get a purely technical education. The best public college in my country has a 1 year general education course before focusing on technical education, for instance. Propaganda machine and war needs would probably void this kind've thing though. Just hard to put myself in a to-be soldier. Is conscription a thing? The requirements just seem so high... How many people are actually in the military anyway in CoaDE? Perhaps all this is offset by the actual amount of people in the military being so low that you can actually get enough of the right amount of people The logistics of interplanetary travel with reaction drives mean there's likely to be a massive quantity of militarily essential but potentially (depending on how one's state is structured) civilian infrastructure for every bit of actual 'tooth' in your battle-groups. All your ships need to have propellant, ammunition, food, and the rest on hand to be combat effective, and the way you distribute that is visible to your enemy thanks to the space environment, so you better have some solid logistics going on. You had better believe their intelligence analysts are going to be counting every freighter, scrutinizing every engine firing down to the RCS pulses, and generally doing their best to map out your transfers of materiel in painstaking detail, so they can know before they commit to anything exactly what you'll be able to mobilize in response. That means lots of manpower and capital for supplying the fleet. That means needing to keep credible rapid reaction forces to cover any and all linchpins in your supply chain, and expanding that chain to keep them supplied. That means redundant depots and distribution networks, so that you have (and indeed visibly have) the capability to supply not just one but two or three different action plans in response to enemy maneuvers, so they can't work around the flaws of any one. As an instrument for projecting political power, rather than outright combat, fleets are an immense undertaking, but one able to dictate terms of policy to their enemy without even having to leave port - just because we all know they CAN. Somewhat like USN carrier battle groups in that regard, or the classic 'fleet in being'.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 15, 2016 11:37:33 GMT
What're a few kilowatts of neutrons between friends, though?
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 15, 2016 9:16:22 GMT
The big time I can think of when large scale troop-transfers were significant was the early stages of the Diadokhoi wars - Alexander's successors all relied on the same body of highly experienced Macedonian infantry, the force he had used to conquer so vast an area in the first place.
They weren't a renewable resource - but they also had a sense of camaraderie with their counterparts under the opposing general, and weren't strongly tied to any of the states beyond whatever loyalty they had to the person of their ruler. In battle, the losing phalanx would often (though by no means always) surrender (signalled in combat by raising their pikes to vertical) and change sides as a bloc - sometimes as the conclusion of a battle, other times before battle can be joined if they decide the other general is a safer bet than their own.
It's not an uncommon sci-fi trope for Spacers to have their own distinctive culture and mutual respect - and often to be somewhat jaded and pragmatic with regards to the political ideologies of other (usually portrayed as lesser) people. In that instance, I could very much see surrender or coat-turning as a common endgame for battles - for example, if terminal-approach point defense is comparatively ineffective, it might become custom that a fleet outmaneuvered by the opposing missile salvo and unable to break it with their counter-missiles would offer surrender, having been fairly beaten by their adversaries and there being little desire on the other side for a whole lot of good men and women to die in the void out of bloody-minded spite.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 14, 2016 22:11:37 GMT
Though I have to admit - the idea of using thrusters of something with a WILD refractive index to foul up an inbound laser would be amazingly funny if by some miracle the physics on it actually worked.
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 14, 2016 20:53:17 GMT
I think that would best be done after touching up the RCS mechanics so ships are more economical with their attitude thrusters - we have enough reasons to always Gimbal as it is.
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