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Post by chasergrey on Oct 25, 2016 23:52:47 GMT
I've been re-reading James S.A. Corey's The Expanse series in anticipation of the second season and new novel this winter. It's an awesome space opera that puts quite a bit of effort into getting the science right, and also features some really interesting space combat. So naturally, I've been thinking about what would be needed for a COADE Expanse mod. So I created this thread to share my thoughts, and also gauge how much interest there might be in an Expanse mod. - Ships in The Expanse use an "Epstein drive" with a near-magical combination of high thrust and decent fuel use. Fusion torch drive, uses water as a reaction mass. Small ships can do days at 4g, with dash performance up to 9. Bigger ships are slower, but still fast enough to need crash couches as standard equipment. [Honestly, if anything sinks the mod, I think this is probably going to be it. You can make a black box engine with that kind of performance, sure- but it's definitely not going to play anything like stock COADE, and I'm not sure what will happen with ships that can accelerate that fast.]
- The main antiship weapons are "torpedoes" (read: missiles) with "plasma" warheads. Assuming we can get an Epstein drive working, missiles with high-yield nukes should be a good enough approximation.
- The other weapons in the setting are rapid-fire point-defense cannons, plus railguns as a ship-killer if you can't afford torpedoes. No problems there.
- Laser weapons aren't really a thing- the few times they come up, it's been somebody repurposing a long-range comm laser rather than having a purpose-built death ray. Why is not really gone into.
- Stealth ships exist in the setting. We're just going to ignore that one. Likewise the occasional boarding actions.
- There are a number of scenarios I can of from the books. A good test one might be the last stand of the Donnager from Leviathan Wakes- Martian battleship against a small number of fast-moving torpedo armed ships.
That's what I've got so far. Thoughts? Interest?
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Post by thorneel on Oct 26, 2016 0:18:01 GMT
Plasma torpedoes evokes Casaba Howitzer warheads, would fit well, I'd think. (For those wondering, those are nuclear shaped charges that turns a block of tungsten into plasma in an attempt to curb some of the Inverse Square Law ineffectiveness of nukes at a distance) They would enable ENPP (Orion) drives, but who need those when you have Epstein? Still, they may be complicated to model. How are black box weapons working? The Epstein Drive is engineering magic (though not physics-free magic), so no risk breaking the engine here. The problem with stealth ships is that it means extraordinarily powerful heat sinks, which would probably influence ship design, and heat sinks aren't in game so far... I fear that you will break the universe, though: what if torpedoes end up dominating everything? Or even interplanetary nuclear missiles? What about relativistic impactors? Nonetheless this could be pretty fun. |
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Post by cuddlefish on Oct 26, 2016 0:33:23 GMT
Well, at present people have gotten (no modding required) explosively formed penetrators propelled by nuclear warheads to do some incredible damage - it's unknown how much is accurate and how much is bugged, but it certainly produces dramatic results. Meters of armor pierced through with reckless abandon.
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Post by chasergrey on Oct 26, 2016 4:05:53 GMT
Well, torpedoes do pretty much dominate warfare in the Expanse, at least from what we've seen, with a single hit being Very Bad News for even the largest ship. Mostly ships concentrate on not getting hit, with point defense, EW, and maneuverability. Nuke-propelled penetrators might be a good way to look at doing that. (And interestingly, IPBMs come up in the first book. They're basically doomsday weapons, same as modern ICBMs, but somewhat more selective than rock-dropping. Or that's the theory anyway.)
The stealth ships, though, are almost certainly a no go. No stealth in space is one of the core engine assumptions. If I address it at all it would probably be as part of scenario setup- i.e. "The enemy starts really close to you, because stealth, but now they're close enough that you can detect them." Corey does do enough of a nod to real science that the stealth ships are only stealthy if they don't do much, so once a tactical battle begins it really doesn't have to figure in much.
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Post by simkoning on Oct 29, 2016 22:23:16 GMT
The books describe the Epstein drive as being some combination of magnetic confinement fusion (they have magnetic bottles) and inertial confinement fusion (they fuse fuel pellets with lasers). The closest thing that I am aware of are fusion pulse rockets which are similar to project Orion but use fusion fuel pellets (deuterium and helium 3) ignited 250 times a second and funneled by a magnetic field instead of fission bombs and a pusher plate. They're powerful enough to get a ship to anywhere in the solar system within months, which is in line with a fusion pulse rocket.
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