10-06-2019, 02:59 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
Well, a far enough starting point (like a light-year) and a slow enough acceleration (no more than 0.01g) might go undetected with the proper design, but it would be unlikely to get above 0.05c in a realistic setting. Anyway, destroying such a treasure would be beyond insanity, as it is a prize beyond compare. If it is a TL12 civilization, its productive capacity would be phenomenal (a SM+33 nanofactory could produce $3 quintillion worth of products per hour), and it could produce a SM+15 battleship every second with enough materials.
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10-06-2019, 06:57 PM | #12 | |||||||
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Niagara, Canada
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
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Ignoring orbital mechanics, with a diameter of 350 km, the station will diverge from its original course by its own width after about half an hour. I've already figured out that the cylinder's sensor array can auto-detect a SM+15 projectile 7 AU (or 58 light-minutes) away, and larger projectiles even further out... so we just might have a viable dodge system against simple near-c impactors. Of course, more complicated attacks would require more complicated defenses, but I'm pleased that the numbers work out for at least the simplest case. :) (Of course, after using this engine, the station would have to send out robo-miner craft to whatever other bodies in the solar system have the raw mass to refill the tanks, and the lasers might need to refill their capacitors, so it would be some time before a second course-change could be made, so a second impactor might be able to do what the first one didn't.) Quote:
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Say, does the SpaceShips system include any mention of laser-boosted lightsails, outside of SS7's laser rockets that use ablative plastic?
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Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat "Then again, maybe I'm wrong." Last edited by DataPacRat; 10-06-2019 at 07:11 PM. |
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10-06-2019, 07:12 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
SM+15 battleships are only a couple trillion, so I think you are low balling the production figures. Since the production figures in Spaceships 6 assumes daily rates rather than hourly rates, $3 quadrillion a day (nanofactories multiply by 20) equals 1,500 SM+15 battleships per day. The Star Forge has nothing on the level of production.
One of the odd things about such a station is that it could easily be mistaken as a metallic asteroid rubble pile when it is inactive due to its low density (it is the mass of a large asteroid like Euphrosyne 31). Without any anomalous energy readings, it might be ignored for decades or even centuries, as rubble piles are annoying to deal with, and its true nature might not be visible until someone goes to mine it. Heck, something like that could be floating in the Kuiper Belt and we would not know it until it went active. |
10-06-2019, 07:24 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
The general case of dodging is that you have to move by more than the diameter of your object, in less time than the object has to correct.
This will usually not be possible for a competently designed impactor, as it will likely have as good course correction as the target, except in the extreme relativistic range, where light speed lag causes problems for both the defender and the attacker. At 0.99c, in the reference frame of the target, it takes light 500s to cross 1 AU, and it takes the impactor 495s, so you have only 5s warning. This generally makes detection not very viable. However, the impactor has the same problem: you probably don't know the target's position with more accuracy than 'orbiting that planet', so if you've got 5 km/s delta-v available for course correction, you need to know the target's position something like 1,250s before impact, which means you need to be able to detect the target (and distinguish it from possible decoys) at 250AU. |
10-06-2019, 07:47 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
What about using the robotic miners as tugs?
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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn |
10-06-2019, 09:03 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
Place it in mutual orbit with a tethered counterweight. To dodge, reel out more tether.
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10-06-2019, 09:09 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
I don't see the difficulty. The scaling of Spaceships that allows you to build a sM+34 object just by moving your decimal point far to the right will let you build an engine to propel it too.
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Fred Brackin |
10-06-2019, 09:38 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Aug 2011
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
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10-06-2019, 09:43 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
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(If you don't mind being unsubtle, putting a big opaque cloud of satellite/statite objects around the system so the attacker can't see anything until they get very close is a possibility, but it sounds like security-through-obscurity is wanted here and being a blatant astronomical anomaly might hurt that.)
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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10-06-2019, 09:58 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?
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From a few light years away you might look like a gas giant. :)
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Fred Brackin |
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