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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 19:27:42 GMT
you can run your drone off a tether which can only be physically disrupted. So instead of arguing over drones versus espatiers, we could use remote vehicles instead, right? That has the complex momentary decision making that comes with direct human control while retaining the expendability of a drone. The human espatiers might only be a few meters behind the breaching drone to handcuff the crew the breaching drone discovered.. The drone operator who is wearing VR goggles and whatever controller is quite a bit further back. Of course depending upon the history of boarding they might only use humans because the risk is such that human loss is unlikely. The whole point of the breaching drone is to save one guy from death and it is a bit demoralizing if your decision is to try and kill a drone and die swiftly to the counterpunch or just surrender. Nobody really cares if you broke their drone. Compare that to actually killing a boarding human. More than that the boarders can be more aggressive because the equipment is most likely to die rather than losing well trained men and writing letters to the bereaved family. Shoot my drone? You die. Your family will be crying and my financial officer will only be slightly annoyed. Again the boarded crew only has two choices left, surrender or die, they cannot escape.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 18:02:42 GMT
The problem with all Drones (drone fighters, boarders etc) Drones can be Hacked. Drone Control signals can be jammed/hacked. It won't do you much good to send your antipersonnel drone force aboard an enemy ship, if some tech savvy enemy breaks into your Drone Control system and turns them on you... or jams that control signal to make the drones completely useless. Why do you think we don't already have Drone Bombers/Fighters in real life? Can the Taliban/Isis hack them? No. But Russia/China/Iran etc sure can hack or jam drones. The Iranians have already proven they can do it. Drones are not the end-all be-all weapons system that you guys seem to think they are. Encryption won't be hacked and if you're exploring only a dozen decks or less you can run your drone off a tether which can only be physically disrupted. You can have more than one drone and if they are violently impeding your drone you can always perforate the offending deck with k-slugs through the thin walls. We've already got the target ship disabled, this is just clearing and subduing the already captive crew module. Unless the crew is fanatical they're probably going to surrender and they've already had a few minutes to hours to attempt to destroy the sensitive information from their computers. They probably won't be able to do anything about that fancy synthetic aperture radar and the computers on external modules especially if those modules don't have power or are otherwise damaged to prevent zeroize commands. It is kind of hard to blank the hard drive to your main computer when you've lost power and the computer has hyper velocity holes and deformation that jams the equipment trays in the closed position.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 17:28:24 GMT
Mission duration for a ship can be figured as a function of deltav and acceleration. Those 50 kms dv mpd ships with milligravity thrust are obviously going to be out "on patrol" much longer. This assumption is still rough, since a low dv ship can sit in a stable orbit indefinitely, but it still gives us an as-designed value as a basis for mission longevity. Also, for damage control, look at the doctrine that every submariner is a firefighter first. By training all crew members in rudimentary damage control, an incident or post-battle damage can be managed with only a few dedicated repairmen leading a whole-crew effort. I'm with you in spirit, I like the way you are thinking and what you have to say, just the last part loses me. You need all hands on deck, but you need guys who can field strip every part on the ships too, at least for ships that are designed to go on for 6 months plus. On earth, if you have to, in an emergency, a sub or carrier in trouble can get men and supplies to them within a day or even less by air. In COADE, depending on the situation, a damaged ship could be stuck out there with no help for quite a while. So I don't see trying to get rid too many of the techs. To me they may be more essential than some of the command staff. I guess my real question is... 1. We get rid of missile techs, gunners, fly by wire pilots, and train techs to do all those jobs when needed. 2. On short duration mission ships, you get less crew, maybe cut out almost everyone except a skeleton crew.What more do you want to cut? I think we don't need system specialized techs for many systems. Where the tech works a partial shift of routine maintenance and is otherwise on standby for when needed. The main power reactor tech and a general ship-engineering tech makes sense for three 8 hour shifts. But do you need more reactor techs for more reactors? Even heterogeneous reactors will have similar principles with only different operating limitations. Then you've got railgun techs who likely can be multiple system trained to service all railguns and probably would be somewhat competent on other weapon systems. Not to mention black box technologies that are not crew serviced. Drone is broken? Well it is dead weight until next port call. Some modules will have spare parts that are either kept on hand or on-demand manufactured at the machine shop from bulk stock. Replacing parts on a module is a trained skill but it might not be a specialty. Looking at crew a different way we can abstract a crewmember to not only be the fleshbag, but also the mass and volume of spare parts and equipment support that each module requires. So the game's two technicians might only be one technician who has two big and heavy toolboxes. There's the fact that a 200 gram chemical rocket uses the same amount of crew time as a 5-ton NTR. It'd be nice to scale those somewhat. The same with weapons; a 200kw laser system used solely for automated antimissile use needs little oversight, while a 10-stage missile-launching coilgun with a huge capacitor bank could need a lot more babysitting. The NTR actually uses more crew due to the reactor. Chemical rockets are .2, NTR are .7 crew. The crew reqirements of drones and missiles is based on the crew requirements of each module on the system on the drone/missile.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 16:29:12 GMT
The 13MW 3mm Sniper Coilgun is painful.
Sure my armor stops the first 3-4 rounds but that little bugger keeps hitting the same armor panel.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 16:22:11 GMT
Ironically the new ignore range rules make conventional guns a lot more valuable.
That is if you can survive long enough for the chemically accelerated slugs to cross the gap.
A slightly modified nuke turreted gun can be pretty amazing.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 16:17:06 GMT
I think this kind of thing is more likely for a modern space force though. Just pennant numbers and stripes. The Legend of Galactic Heroes ships are mostly mass produced. There isn't much incentive to decorate number 6,234 of 10,000. That said the hull finish will affect which frequencies the hull will be most visible at that. Radiators can overwhelm the hull reflection/emission but with a matte black hull you can be rid of most of the visible spectrum and only have infrared and whatever the radiators emit. and the radiator colours and amount of boron I'm seeing suggest hyperoptimisation. The stock ships appear atrociously unoptimised because they're more realistic in terms of safety and the expected masses and shielding required out of things that won't decay or chemically react like sodium, fluorine, lithium-6, etc. After the gun update, the only thing they're missing performance-wise is pointed noses and armour more advanced than monolithic slabs of RCC, and maybe all the lasers being frequency quadrupled but that's a bit boring. If I saw a trailer with tukuro's ships I wouldn't have taken the game's claims of realism as seriously, but if they just had basic stripes or designs like covering the ends or midsection in gold, nameplates, and a layer of paint over the whipple shield it would be fine. I very much like that stock ships tend to use aluminum, silicon and other very common and accessible elements. Boron is a fairly rare material and while warships would want to use the best materials available there is still going to be rationing of strategically important elements. Same with Lithium which is common enough, but calcium and magnesium are much more common.
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Post by Easy on Mar 5, 2017 15:57:55 GMT
Boarding implies there is something of value to be recovered from the ship. First we need to reduce the ship's acceleration to zero or near enough zero so it can't get away and neutralize enough of the weapons so our boarding craft can approach.
Shooting the crew module indiscriminately doesn't help our goals of recovering the crew or recovering equipment that is adjacent to the crew.
Remote controlled gundrones that can hover through the semi-depressurized corridors to find and subdue emergency-mask wearing crew makes a lot of sense. You might even be able to use simple tether umbilical for the drones due to the relative small size of the crew module. Once your drones have explored and controlled for threats the more perishable marines can finish the job.
If the crew really doesn't want to be taken alive, well, they can be accommodated or shocked into submission.
A few months ago in the USA a bomb squad drone with a antipersonnel mine was used to kill a shooter who was in a defensive position. So we're already there.
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Post by Easy on Mar 4, 2017 15:47:22 GMT
I think we can assume the remote control and crew modules have laser ring gyroscopes or fiber optic gyroscopes and accelerometer that provide very accurate inertial guidance. A distributed sensor network to provide targeting info seems valid too.
So a small missile that has been told to intercept a target would know its own orbital parameters in 3d space and probably wouldn't be fooled about where it was. If it was receiving a target info feed it probably can dead reckon to something close by. The accuracy will depend on the nonzero sensor drift. So missiles shouldn't go dumb even with a 0.01°/hour bias uncertainty.
In regards to CoDE we'd need to figure out how to make it interesting in regards to lasers. If it just gets blinded and destroyed instantly, well what was the point of that? There are also synthetic aperture technologies which can make it even more complex.
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Post by Easy on Mar 1, 2017 17:21:14 GMT
I don't know what you mean by a micro recon drone unless I know the radiator temperatures and wattage, the cross section and hull emissivity. I don't know what you mean about sensors without knowing the frequency band and aperture size, nor the limitations of the actual photoreceptors and exposure time. I expect sensor nets to be capable of basic military priorities and safe navigation of civilian traffic. So the sensors will be good enough by design. So let's determine the actual needs of this sensor system including the wide angle detectors and the higher resolution narrow angle used for identification and analysis. Just off the top of my head, the main limitation for the wide-angle detectors is going to be how much coolant you can pack onboard (I recall that this was an issue with WISE), since obviously if your mirror is warmer than the things you're looking for then you're not going to see a bloody thing in the infrared. That'll likely be most of the payload mass, unless you can stick them in easily-accessible orbits for maintenance purposes, which is a bad idea. Second major limitation that you'll be looking at is FOV, which'll determine the second major fraction of payload mass, the mirror size and aperture size. For the high-res "what-the-heck-was-that" satellites I figure you'd want to run with a mix of optical and infrared, optical to limit in-orbit maintenance, infrared in case some absolute bastard paints their ship in Vantablack. lampblack or a rough and dark hull is already going to have decent properties approaching a black body. You'll still get some reflection but more of the sunlight will be converted to heat. Assuming the coating is an insulator it would radiate at whatever solar irradiance it received. Hull heating will not be uniform as irradiance changes with angle of incidence. Again the goal is to describe mathmaticaly the minimum requirements of a sensor for each role. I accept that such a sensor can exist.
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Post by Easy on Mar 1, 2017 15:32:15 GMT
Micro recon drones are everywhere Easy it would be difficult to spot all of the recon drones and fix them and you would never be sure you nailed all of them, these drones backed up by 10+m telescopes in orbit around friendly bodies means that you can't stealth anywhere without all other factions and major mega-corps spotting you and selling that data to those who can't I don't know what you mean by a micro recon drone unless I know the radiator temperatures and wattage, the cross section and hull emissivity. I don't know what you mean about sensors without knowing the frequency band and aperture size, nor the limitations of the actual photoreceptors and exposure time. I expect sensor nets to be capable of basic military priorities and safe navigation of civilian traffic. So the sensors will be good enough by design. So let's determine the actual needs of this sensor system including the wide angle detectors and the higher resolution narrow angle used for identification and analysis.
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Post by Easy on Mar 1, 2017 15:02:24 GMT
For clarification I am not trying to have a stealth in space discussion. I am instead wanting to numerically express how observable CoDE ships are and what telescopes would be required to detect and track.
I hope to have a new equation ready for you tonight that lets you input a temperature and frequency band and output what percentage of that total wattage is within that band. The problem is the equations I have give the square meter power emitted a steradian per Hertz. Also I have to make it a CDF function to get the bands so I need time to remember my maths.
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Post by Easy on Mar 1, 2017 14:11:25 GMT
Post those needleships with enormous forward firepower with the new turret option.
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Post by Easy on Mar 1, 2017 13:12:45 GMT
I've lived 12 hours shifts 7 days a week for more than a year. I'm not saying it is ideal, but I am saying I've lived it. But even then a 3 crew gives one supervisor/senior and two shift workers. Yeah, but then you're one deep and out of luck if somebody gets sick or something. on a spaceship you are in very close proximity such that if one person gets sick, the rest of the crew might get sick too. Also you're sealed in a can so there is no way for new diseases to get on board.
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Post by Easy on Feb 28, 2017 23:24:39 GMT
I've lived 12 hours shifts 7 days a week for more than a year. I'm not saying it is ideal, but I am saying I've lived it.
But even then a 3 crew gives one supervisor/senior and two shift workers.
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Post by Easy on Feb 28, 2017 12:29:20 GMT
Small point in observability (sorry, not math related): the ship's spectrum is that of a ~1200K blackbody, which is actually quite far from ordinary around the sun (solar reflection is based on ~5700K visible, planetary blackbody is typically under 300K). Searching the surroundings for the 1200K - 2400K range would find very few other candidates (red giants are 3000K and above). But how easy is that really? The 5700K blackbody still emits in the infrared and near infrared range. Don't forget about red and brown dwarfs. Luhman 16 is the nearest brown dwarf at 2 Parsecs and an apparent magnitude of 8.87. I think it would be very interesting to run the numbers for what kind of telescope and sensor you would need. And then compare the required data processing in order to subtract the known starchart, when you have realistic diffraction limited and noisy data. Could you do it with a bunch of guys with really nice amateurs telescopes who know star charts really well? What ranges would the amateurs be effective? What about fancier computerized telescopes. Obviously we don't want exposure time to be too long since expired data is useless.
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