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Post by srbrant on Oct 21, 2017 3:50:12 GMT
Turn it around and you have a silent drive - similar to the neutrino drive but even harder to detect I got it! Staged drones with claws on their ends. They home in on an enemy ship, dig into the hull and fire their rockets to send it spinning out of control. Outlaw Star wouldn't be the same anime if you replaced the crew by silicon chips, though... I LOVE OUTLAW STAR! In fact, there's a semi-feline race in my story known as the Eltarl. They're very different from their Ctarl inspiration, mind you.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 17:19:45 GMT
Look, enough with the FTL squabbling - let's talk about the main issue of this thing: mass.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 13:32:43 GMT
I got it! Staged drones with claws on their ends. They home in on an enemy ship, dig into the hull and fire their rockets to send it spinning out of control.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 13:29:10 GMT
"...The stuff I'm working on is something that's realistic but at the same time and of equal measure something that will inspire engineers, physicists and scientists." -sbrant. I am pretty sure that he want's to make a (semi?)hard sci-fi story. Still, saying that just because you have hyperdrives you can't have limited resourcers is a bit silly. You can plausibly work around the issue by handwaving hyperdrive tech as using some method that doesn't require practically infinite amounts of energy unlike the current understanding of hyper drives. After that you can have fusion torches and hyperdrives in the same setting while remaining internally consistent. And as I've said before, MANY TIMES, the futuristic setting means that some liberties can be taken but just enough so that I don't become a war criminal against science.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 5:53:13 GMT
Dark matter cannons? (shrugs) Sounds about as practical as a confetti gun. As I had anticipated.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 5:48:42 GMT
Here's a kind of ship for my novel Kemono that I've been struggling with a bit. A true mothership: a cruise liner, a tugboat and an oil tanker in one in nautical terms. It's a massive spacecraft that refuels the ships docked to it in addition to carrying them through hyperspace (I need to find a better word for that.) The personnel in the docked ships make their way inside and mingle within its internal habitat, corridors and rooms snaking around gigantic tanks of reaction mass. I named it after the Heighliners of Dune and Robert Heinlein to create...
THE HEINLEINER.
But here's where there's a problem and it's an obvious one: the sheer mass of the thing. It's meant to tow up to six (or even more) smaller ships between one and twenty-five kilotons and although the setting's technological level allows for drastically increased Delta-V and fuel efficiency, there's still the issue of how adding more reaction mass gives it less and less acceleration time because of the increase in mass. And even without the mass issue, there's how to prevent interreflection when you have two ships docked right together.
The reason these things exist in the story is to come to the rescue of ships that have run out of reaction mass or to act as a base of operations around worlds with little or no infrastructure. And if you can't find a fueling station or a colony within reach, you may have to send out a distress signal...which is the equivalent of shouting "I'm rich and defenseless" in the middle of Chicago.
Thoughts?
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Post by srbrant on Oct 20, 2017 5:29:04 GMT
Dark matter cannons? (shrugs)
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Post by srbrant on Oct 13, 2017 15:48:27 GMT
Oh yeah, the energy release at the end. I've actually been considering Alcubierre cannons for my story. Would warp bubble cannons rip apart targets on the sub-atomic level because of extreme tidal forces? It's not the warp bubble, it's the energy it releases at the end of transit.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 12, 2017 13:15:07 GMT
Ludicrous weapon idea: Alcubierre drives as WMD Warp into your enemy's star system to vaporize the destination, and potentially burning that whole star system Oh yeah, the energy release at the end. I've actually been considering Alcubierre cannons for my story.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 12, 2017 12:22:40 GMT
Ship taser. Electrically charged harpoon that pierces the hull and sends a massive surge that disables electronics. Why not EMP bombs It says "ludicrous weapon ideas."
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Post by srbrant on Oct 12, 2017 9:59:16 GMT
Ship taser. Electrically charged harpoon that pierces the hull and sends a massive surge that disables electronics.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 10, 2017 18:54:02 GMT
Extendable MELEE weapons. Yeah, you heard me. Like a collapsable, micron-thick sheet of some sort of advanced nano-material that extends to three times the length of the ship and when it flies close by the enemy, it slices it in two! I don't know how strong that handwavium stick is, but it'll most likely bend and tear apart the instant it hit the hull of the enemy ship. It's plausible at least.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 10, 2017 17:43:23 GMT
Extendable MELEE weapons.
Yeah, you heard me. Like a collapsable, micron-thick sheet of some sort of advanced nano-material that extends to three times the length of the ship and when it flies close by the enemy, it slices it in two!
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Post by srbrant on Oct 9, 2017 20:21:34 GMT
Boarder drones. They lodge themselves into a ship's hull and then unleash several robotic drones to tear it apart from the inside out.
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Post by srbrant on Oct 9, 2017 2:14:13 GMT
Relax, it's time-dilation. All warp cores are carefully designed so that the travel time within hyperspace is synced with the passage of time in real space by default. (For example, 15 hours in hyperspace means 15 hours have passed in the rest of the world.) How do your warp cores work exactly? Because within a warp bubble you are at rest, no time-dilation whatsoever. So you either travel over 4 years to Alpha Centauri from the crew's perspective or your Warp core is FTL, which means that you are time travelling. Hard to think of a non-technobabble explanation for that one, seeing how it's superluminal travel. Best I have is "transdimensional synchronization."
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