[Spaceships] VLS missile cells?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Or am I misunderstanding how external clamps work?

No, you're okay on External Clamps but you may not appreciate how much of a combat vehicle's cost can go into armor and stealth. There might not be much point to having a warship with no stealth. I detect you before you detect me is a crucial advantage.

Especially for a missile boat because a ship that hasn't detected the launching ship has to detect the missiles themselves. Tracking is automatic for missile launches from a detected ship.

As to real world advantages they are ROF and expectations of short but very intense combats with the ability to be reloaded from an external source at your leisure if you survive.

Note also that VLS exports all the crewpeople who are involved with loading as well as the loading machinery. Those are probably all the advantages needed to explain RW popularity.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

No, you're okay on External Clamps but you may not appreciate how much of a combat vehicle's cost can go into armor and stealth. There might not be much point to having a warship with no stealth. I detect you before you detect me is a crucial advantage.

There is no stealth in space.

:)

Sorry, I had to get my little jab in there. That's where I have given my allegiance in the Religious War over space stealth. But as a better explanation...

I keep toying with two very different models for a space setting. One involves a pseudovelocity warp drive with subwarp capability, as described near the end of this discussion, and in such a setting a certain amount of stealth is reasonable. It won't make you undetectable- you will always be found eventually- but it might lengthen detection times. The same holds true in most settings with reactionless drives. Because in these settings you don't have terawatt drive plumes giving you away.

But in any setting using a nuclear or antimatter drive, no, there is no stealth. Such is the other setting that I toy with.

I'm the kind of guy who uses the Exposed Radiators design switch...

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

There is no stealth in space.

:)

There is no invisibilty. I detect you before you detect me is always possible. Even the +2 mod Spaceships gives to being behind the other ship can be a crucial advantage.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There is no invisibilty. I detect you before you detect me is always possible. Even the +2 mod Spaceships gives to being behind the other ship can be a crucial advantage.

Any interesting reaction drive (meaning non-geriatric travel times) would be automatically detected at any combat range in Spaceships, which IIRC the longest is 200,000 miles. I mean, that's not even the distance to the moon! (If we're talking real-world, here, not RAW.)

But this issue has been debated at far, far greater length than we are going to get into here. Suffice to say that any interesting reaction drive is always going to be instantly detected. And, once detected, tracking that warm object against the cold sky is trivial, even if the drive is now off. Just having a human-habitable environment means that your very, very warm ship is detected at over an AU. Hell, it's practically incandescent.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Any reaction drive as I have described would be automatically detected at any combat range in Spaceships,)

"I detect you" and "You detect me" are just numbers and it's always possible for one number to be larger than another. Also, there is no maximum range for missiles.

So I detect you first, then stay out of your detection range but I launch a missile at you that's much smaller than a ship and coasting when it comes into your detection range of it is a perfectly valid tactic and usable millions of km away.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

"I detect you" and "You detect me" are just numbers and it's always possible for one number to be larger than another. Also, there is no maximum range for missiles.

So I detect you first, then stay out of your detection range but I launch a missile at you that's much smaller than a ship and coasting when it comes into your detection range of it is a perfectly valid tactic and usable millions of km away.

There is no "detection range", just like there is no "maximum range" for a ballistic weapon. It's just a matter of how fast you can do a sky survey to the resolution required. And if you are further away to make detection harder, then your missile also has further to go. If your missile is that far away and needs to get to me on a reasonable timescale, it needs a drive that's just as visible as the ship. A ship which, I remind you, is detectable at multiple AU, and thus will have sensors already pointed in its general direction. And that missile will be warm against the background of space, too.

Voyager 1 puts out a pathetic 20 watts and is 18 billion kilometers away, and yet Green Bank can detect it in about one second flat. That's less than a household light bulb. At 18 billion km.

This is one reason I said that some stealth might be reasonable in some settings. You have to not have megawatt drive plumes, for starters. But when you're very far away and doing 1000G in a subwarp ship you might get missed in the sky survey for long enough to do something. But really, you're still a very hot object in a very cold sky.

And if all you're talking about is fighting in very cluttered environments then some stealth might be possible, too. Hiding in ground clutter, or amongst many other ships, habitats, or other thermal sources. So if you are in a very highly developed system you can pull some tricks. Like cooling your ship by venting coolant. This leaves a large cloud of hot gas which is itself easily detectable, but even though it is detected it might be misinterpreted as some sort of industrial activity if there are mines on every other asteroid in the system.

You can hide behind things like moons or planets, but not forever. And in any reasonably developed system there will be sensors scattered all over and you can't hide from them all- at least one will likely have a view of you no matter where you are.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

There is no "detection range", just like there is no "maximum range" for a ballistic weapon. It's just a matter of how fast you can do a sky survey. And if you are further away to make detection harder, then your missile also has further to go. If your missile is that far away and needs to get to me on a reasonable timescale, it needs a drive that's just as visible as the ship. A ship which, I remind you, is detectable at multiple AU, and thus will have sensors already pointed in its general direction. And that missile will be warm against the background of space, too.

All of the above points are false but I'm tired of arguing with you. You"re obviously going to proclaim the opposite of anything I say.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

All of the above points are false but I'm tired of arguing with you. You"re obviously going to proclaim the opposite of anything I say.

Well, gee thanks for straightening me out, that everything I said is wrong, and leaving it at that. That's not very convincing, but I guess it does suck when people argue with you. And when what you say is false then, yes, I actually will proclaim the opposite of it.

Here, I'll repost this:

Originally Posted by Acrosome

Voyager 1 puts out a pathetic 20 watts and is 18 billion kilometers away, and yet Green Bank can detect it in about one second flat. That's less than a household light bulb. At 18 billion km.

I will point out that modern NASA life support requires about 7kW per crew member.

Here is some other stuff from the websites where this gets argued:

If your drive output is measured in terawatts it can be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor. That is not hyperbole- it is an accurate statement.

Further, with some very reasonable assumptions it would only take about 4 hours to do a complete 41,000 square degree sky survey for magnitude 12 objects.

The maximum range at which a warm object can be detected currently is:

R = 13.4 * sqrt(A) * T^2
R is in km. A is surface area in square meters, T is temperature in Kelvin. So a 1 square meter target at room temperature is spotted at more than 81,000 km. A human being would be spotted at 55,000 km. Now, let's assume a ship about the size of a modern submarine, and the crew is shivering away at 0C. Well, detection distance is almost 40,000,000 km. With 2020 technology. And if you have a reactor it's probably running at about 800K- that's 8.5 million km for a 1 square meter target.

It is important to bear in mind that all of those estimates assume that no reaction drive is firing. It's just based upon a target that is at an arguably habitable temperature.

Apollo 11's pathetically weak chemical drive plume from it's trans-Moon injection was easily photographed from Earth with 1969 technology.

So, if two ships magically popped into existence 1000 miles from one another, sure, whomever through sheer luck detects the other first may have an advantage, depending upon weapon time-of-flight. But more likely that's a mutual detection and mutual annihilation situation. And in any remotely real situation they would detect one another one hell of a distance off, long before engaging.

As I said, this has been argued at much greater length than we will do here. I'm convinced by the "no stealth in space" arguments, with a possible exception for hydrogen- or helium-steamers, which are very niche applications and take years to get anywhere. Freezing your crew or having no crew, with a ship refrigerated to near 3K might be possible... assuming that your computer uses little power and you don't use a drive. So for instance an unmanned satellite might be stealthy. And I'll give a certain allowance for cluttered environments. Or if for instance you are fighting inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, I guess. So stealth may be possible, but it isn't feasible- it always comes with too many limitations.

But there is no sense in getting bent about it. It's a complex argument, full of counter- and counter-counter-arguments, etc., endlessly. You can certainly posit utterly unrealistic things to make stealth possible- cloaking devices, etc.- in which case good for you. (No, I'm not accusing you of that. I'm just mentioning it as a possibility.) Likewise, powerful drives that have no signatures. When we argue within reality-based limitations, though, there is no stealth in space beyond some very limited situations.

But if you are not convinced, fine. Shake hands.

Later.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Ok. But if you're just going to quote RAW at me then it doesn't matter anyway, because Spaceships doesn't care about how many plumbing fixtures pass through your hull (and armor). So 20 VLS cells doesn't matter.

I'm not saying this is an invalid way to design something, I'm just pointing out that it may modify how things are handled. That said, I'm perfectly fine with having VLS-type launchers that are fully protected by your ship's armor without any downsides; at best, targeting Chinks in Armor when specifically targeting the relevant battery might be a bit easier (to the tune of +1 or +2).

Originally Posted by acrosome

Unless I misunderstand the rules, that's not the answer. With external clamps, the clamp itself has a mass of 5%. It doesn't account for whatever you clamp to it. So, the moment you try to haul something with the clamp you are stuck doing some back-of-the-envelope math to figure out your acceleration, delta-V, and other characteristics.

Well, yes. Honestly, with any sort of design like this, as soon as you add additional mass, you'll need to recalculate those things - unless the added mass is insufficient to influence them, of course. In the latter case, you certainly don't need a full 5% of your ship's mass in external clamps, just 5% of the mass of whatever you're attaching (external clamps need only be scaled to the size of the smaller object).

Also, I think - but will have to check my books - the external clamp system isn't meant to be just one big honkin' clamp, but rather a large number of them. A 1000-ton ship with a full-size external clamp can attach at least 33 (and a third) 30-ton shipping containers - or at least that's how I'd handle it.

Originally Posted by acrosome

There is no "detection range", just like there is no "maximum range" for a ballistic weapon. It's just a matter of how fast you can do a sky survey to the resolution required. And if you are further away to make detection harder, then your missile also has further to go. If your missile is that far away and needs to get to me on a reasonable timescale, it needs a drive that's just as visible as the ship. A ship which, I remind you, is detectable at multiple AU, and thus will have sensors already pointed in its general direction. And that missile will be warm against the background of space, too.

I think the idea is that there is a range at which a vessel with some degree of stealth is undetectable (to a comparably-sized vessel doing a standard scan, at least), while a vessel without any decent stealth coating or whatever would be detectable at the same range. So, the first vessel could fire missiles at the second with impunity. As you note, however, the missiles are likely to be detected from well far enough away to be easily intercepted, even if the launching ship is hidden (although the vectors of the missiles might make it easier to predict where the attacking vessel is).