Sci-Fi Weapons: What are the possibilities?

[[Tycho?]]

How big a ship are you talking about here?

 

I did some rough equations on it, I made my ship be moving at 5000m/s, give it a maximum acceleration of 3m/s^2 (forwards or backwards) and 0.25m/s^2 left/right up/down. I think these numbers are quite reasonable, as a ship would have thrusters proportional to its mass. Personally I think they should be higher (for the acceleration)- for interplanetary distances the ship has to be able to move, a hulking giant is of little use in this kind of combat.

 

But anyway, assuming that from when the beam is fired, the ship can either decelerate at 3m/s^2, or accelerate at 3m/s^2, or be anywere in between, and originally moving at 5000m/s, and has 9.8 minutes, the ship could be anywhere in a 1200km line. With the 0.25m/s^2 side to side acceleration, that puts the ship in a cone around 580 000cubic km, assuming I did the math properly (this number seems a bit high, someone should indeed check it).

 

Even if I am wrong, or even if much smaller acceleration values are used, it would still be a volume of space signifigantly larger than any ship would be.

[Sayonara]

Why should capital ships be slow?

[Rasori]

Because if a capital ship is fast it has to be even bigger.

 

I suppose it's a bigger range than I thought, but I got the impression that you were talking about impossibly huge numbers. It's not all that important, really, if you can get transmissions from middlemen to tell you where to shoot. A targeting computer in a fighter wouldn't need to be all that complex to calculate where the ship could be. Of course, then you double the time because radio waves only travel the speed of light...

 

So basically, what it comes down to, is that space combat is never going to happen. I find that highly unlikely.

[Sayonara]

Because if a capital ship is fast it has to be even bigger.

Really? Why is that?

 

You haven't explained why big ships are slow, you've just implied the same arbitrary relationship between size and speed that I want the explanation for.

[[Tycho?]]

Because if a capital ship is fast it has to be even bigger.

 

I suppose it's a bigger range than I thought' date=' but I got the impression that you were talking about impossibly huge numbers. It's not all that important, really, if you can get transmissions from middlemen to tell you where to shoot. A targeting computer in a fighter wouldn't need to be all that complex to calculate where the ship could be. Of course, then you double the time because radio waves only travel the speed of light...

 

So basically, what it comes down to, is that space combat is never going to happen. I find that highly unlikely.[/quote']

 

Boy, thats a great conclusion you draw.

 

You are making these statements but not basing them on anything. Big ships are slow, for some reason. And now space combat itself is not going to happen. So nobody will ever fight in space? I find that highly unlikely, considering human history.

[Rasori]

I admitted that that was unlikely too, Tycho (did you not read my post? It was the last line).

 

If a big ship wants to go fast, it needs more room for engines and thus more room for fuel and even more room for more technicians to keep the added engines working. Then you need more room for life support and food (assuming you're using humans and not robotic labor as these technicians) and things keep piling on. Now then, if you're going to build this larger ship that'll end up having more surface area, well, don't we have to defend this surface area? More weapons. More mass. So yes, you can get a fast big ship, but it's extremely expensive and, due to inertia, isn't very practical for accelerating or stopping (making it very hard for it to manuever so it's easier to hit, even at massive ranges).

 

As for that conclusion, Tycho, if you understood my post (which I don't blame you for not, it was a bit confusing) then you'd see where I based it. Hitting a target would be nigh impossible for ships at the ranges we're suggesting because of all the possible places it could be. So the obvious replacement for guessing is placing a middleman to tell us of the target's maneuvers ahead of time. That's all fine and dandy, but transmissions can't (for the time being) travel faster than the speed of light, either. So you need to wait to receive the transmission to act on it, and then it's still another 10 minutes from then until you can see how badly you missed your target. So the middleman concept is out. Because information can't travel faster than the speed of light, there's no way space combat will ever happen unless we're talking about even smaller ranges than I originally said. You'd need to practically be in orbit around the same planetary object. Probably not much further away than the two outer reaches of the orbit of our moon.

 

Understand now?

[Sayonara]

If a big ship wants to go fast, it needs more room for engines and thus more room for fuel and even more room for more technicians to keep the added engines working. Then you need more room for life support and food (assuming you're using humans and not robotic labor as these technicians) and things keep piling on.

Or, to look at it another way, that's why it's big.

 

 

Now then, if you're going to build this larger ship that'll end up having more surface area, well, don't we have to defend this surface area? More weapons. More mass.

No strictly true - you simply need to engineer weapon systems with more effective firing arcs and faster refresh rates.

 

 

So yes, you can get a fast big ship, but it's extremely expensive and, due to inertia, isn't very practical for accelerating or stopping (making it very hard for it to manuever so it's easier to hit, even at massive ranges).

Inertia - now we're getting somewhere.

 

The rate of acceleration may affect maneuvering, but it won't be a deciding factor in how fast the ship is. Hence my original question. There is no reason why a big ship cannot be fast; only reasons why you might choose to build it on either side of an expense/speed trade-off point.

 

When you're talking about capital ships, you're necessarily discussing a massive resource investment and many lives. Making sweeping assumptions like "it'll be slow" could be disastrous.

[[Tycho?]]

I admitted that that was unlikely too' date=' Tycho (did you not read my post? It was the last line).

 

If a big ship wants to go fast, it needs more room for engines and thus more room for fuel and even more room for more technicians to keep the added engines working. Then you need more room for life support and food (assuming you're using humans and not robotic labor as these technicians) and things keep piling on. Now then, if you're going to build this larger ship that'll end up having more surface area, well, don't we have to defend this surface area? More weapons. More mass. So yes, you can get a fast big ship, but it's extremely expensive and, due to inertia, isn't very practical for accelerating or stopping (making it very hard for it to manuever so it's easier to hit, even at massive ranges).

 

As for that conclusion, Tycho, if you understood my post (which I don't blame you for not, it was a bit confusing) then you'd see where I based it. Hitting a target would be nigh impossible for ships at the ranges we're suggesting because of all the possible places it could be. So the obvious replacement for guessing is placing a middleman to tell us of the target's maneuvers ahead of time. That's all fine and dandy, but transmissions can't (for the time being) travel faster than the speed of light, either. So you need to wait to receive the transmission to act on it, and then it's still another 10 minutes from then until you can see how badly you missed your target. So the middleman concept is out. Because information can't travel faster than the speed of light, there's no way space combat will ever happen unless we're talking about even smaller ranges than I originally said. You'd need to practically be in orbit around the same planetary object. Probably not much further away than the two outer reaches of the orbit of our moon.

 

Understand now?[/quote']

 

I misread the end of your last post, you said

So basically, what it comes down to, is that space combat is never going to happen. I find that highly unlikely.

When you said you found it highly unlikely, I thought you were still reffering to space combat, sorry about that.

 

9.8 light minutes is indeed a huge distance to be fighting over. Not necessarly impossible though. Bloodhound outlined earlier a method to guess possible locations of your target, and simply you shoot at as many of them as you can, hope that you get a hit. Your accuracy depends on the quality of your lasers, your telescopes, on distance, and on the size and acceleration potential of the target. To hope to do damage at over 1 AU you would need a huge laser. It would probably be close to impossible. But then, what other options are there? The only one is a missile which you can see coming, plus it would have to have enourmous range to hit the target. Lasers are pretty much the only thing for these huge ranges, despite their limitations.

 

And I do understand, but I still must disagree on some points. Mass need not necessarly spiral out of control. Depends on engine efficiency, what is used for fuel, the crew that is required to run the ship, use of robotics, and other engineerings questions.

[-Demosthenes-]

antimatter warheads

What is anti matter?

[Edward]

Ok I think yu guys are right saying that space combat with energy wepons at large distances is virtually impossible there are just too many variables to consider. But there is lots of room for homing wepons.

[Tesseract]

What is anti matter?

Just like normal matter but the atoms are made of anti-electrons,protons,neutrons. Theyd be good weapons because when the antiparticles interact with the normal particles they annihilate each other. If we could somehow contain the antimatter and fire it in a homing missle we could destroy a ship. Actually we really dont need very much antimatter because the electrons and positrons destroy each other and create photons, a huge amount of photons that can be spotted by lasers and fired at.

[[Tycho?]]

What is anti matter?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-matter

[Sayonara]

Ok I think yu guys are right saying that space combat with energy wepons at large distances is virtually impossible there are just too many variables to consider. But there is lots of room for homing wepons.

Energy weapons would be fairly ideal for intercepting, confusing and/or detonating homing weapons.

[britwithtea]

what about foucsed em feilds for anit infantry? - sitimulating the pain receptors, no bullet, no bang, no flash.

[mustang292]

I can assure you that the U.S. Government is working on "Sci-Fi" weapons. I happened by an Estate sale where a CIA agent had died. I went to the basement and found tons of files. I packed as many as I could into a chest and took them upstairs to see if they would let me buy them. Yep! I have about 250 or so files some marked "Laser and other Buck Rogers Type Weapons". Pictures Too! Most of it marked Top Secret. I've had them for years now, and still haven't gone through all of it. It's alot of info. Crazy stuff. They have been working on this stuff for a long time.

[-Demosthenes-]

Don't expect mustang to come back to the forums...now they know where the files went...

[Hellbender]

For Halo fans, here is a link explaining how covenant plasma weaponry is supposed to work: http://library.psyjnir.net/?id=72

[-Demosthenes-]

This information was obtained by Cortana, a UNSC AI, while she was in direct contact with a Covenant ship's data core. It is reasonable to assume this information is accurate.

She's really helped progress in science!

[Guest KennyJC]

The possibilities could possibly be endless. What if it were possible to create a weapon that could destroy the universe as we know it.

 

So far it hasn't been done though... as we're still here.

[Guest azurithxeon]

My friend had an idea. A sword that contained, at it's tip, atoms with opposite charges. Somehow blowing all positivly charged and negative charged atoms apart.

 

Won't work, as the particles at the tip would reflect the other particles of the sword just before the tip, thus the sword would be unefective.

(The sword would affect itself and the wielder just as much as the victim.)

 

The possibilities could possibly be endless. What if it were possible to create a weapon that could destroy the universe as we know it.

So far it hasn't been done though... as we're still here.

 

The ultimate weapon! It's called a "Red Button". Cause you tell them not to press it, and what do they do? They push the "Red Button". Kabloo-ey. No more universe.

 

This thread is a weapon of mass stupidity.

[Sayonara]

The ultimate weapon! It's called a "Red Button". Cause you tell them not to press it, and what do they do? They push the "Red Button". Kabloo-ey. No more universe.

In much the same way, in fact, that our glorious leaders destroyed the world by pressing their own red buttons

 

[acr=Mutually Assured Destruction]MAD[/acr] deterrents work.

 

 

This thread is a weapon of mass stupidity.

No it isn't. At worst it's a thread of variable usefulness.