12-04-2014, 10:08 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Oct 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
What if the travel mode of these drives was quite easy to disrupt? Then, it seems like dropping to 'real' speeds would be enforced by the opposing fleet rather than a cooperative effort, nicely separating 'combat' from 'travel'. It would also (with your rules about decelerating without constant reactionless-drive acceleration) mean that a missile volley launched at travel speeds would be more or less stopped dead when it entered the combat envelope of it's target, preventing that too.
In theory an engagement could happen where nobody engaged their disruptors, but since that would mean ceding the speed advantage to the enemy it seems unlikely to happen. |
12-04-2014, 11:48 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
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Of course, this does bring to mind what could be a rather effective screening method for carriers - send out a bunch of unmanned/remotely piloted interdiction vessels (small craft with semi-reactionless drives) to surround your vessel at a given distance. Any enemy that comes within 5,000 yards of the interdiction ships instantly loses its pseudovelocity. So, if you've got your interdiction ships flying 10,000 yards away from you, incoming missiles/fighters/whatever may find themselves halted a full 15,000 yards away. Even a Move 100/500 missile (the fastest "craft" currently available) is going to take around 32 seconds to cross that distance, buying an extra 20 seconds of PD fire (assuming you have PD that can actually hit that far away, of course). This implies a counter-strategy of sending an initial wave (or more) of fighters/missiles to blow up the interdiction ships so that your main force doesn't get slowed early. Could be interesting. Of course, what will probably work better, as stealth in space is not exactly easy, is to do away with the idea of ablative interdiction ships and instead to launch your own fighters to intercept whatever you detect being inbound. A 4-drive fighter (probably typical for a superiority fighter) can boost at 36G, allowing it to reach that 10,000 yard distance in a little over 7 seconds. I'll probably have a smaller, cheaper version of the drive available that doesn't generate any velocity - pseudo or real - but serves only to produce an interdiction field, for use in satellites and space colonies. There are actually advantages to both sides if they don't engage their disruptors - a quick flyby is probably less likely to result in casualties than a dogfight, and a foe that is moving faster than 500 yards per second - a little under 0.3 mps - wouldn't be able to use a blaster without hitting itself (as it is going faster than its bolt). I think I prefer if the targets don't actually have a choice (synchronizing is really only a hack to allow a fleet to travel together). |
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12-04-2014, 06:09 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2014
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
Perhaps the "energy field" is also the defense field. You'd want to highly encrypt or modulate on an agreed upon pseudo random set of frequencies so that you could sync with friends but not foes (to whom you would be defenseless).
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12-04-2014, 10:18 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
Old Space Opera, as opposed to New Space Opera, usually had no computers as we know them today. Most of the things we use computers for now, they used people.
For example, in one of the Lensmen books, they built a flagship mainly for command and control. It had a large room with a 3d map of the surrounding space, and people used long sticks to move the small ship "tokens" that represented the fleet and the bad guys. The hellbores (ship heavy blasters that actually took ammo) had people taking the old stuff out and putting the new ones in. Each gun, or maybe each cluster of guns, was individually aimed and fired. This means that the quality and number of people under your command was as important as the hardware. A well trained crew that worked well together could be the difference between success or failure. This also means that something which might take us only a single operation might take these people several. For example, to plot a course change, one had to take data from several sources, calculate a new course, and then manually input the new course. This wouldn't apply during a dogfight when the fighter pilots flew by the seat of their pants, but it would apply to missiles which would be difficult to automate and would require somebody controlling them. The computers they had would be more like giant calculators and the big ones would require specialists. The end result is that the skills of the PCs would matter much more in a fight than one with normal ultra tech devices. A high skill might make it possible for a skilled pilot in a junkyard fighter be able to have a chance against the newer fighters.
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A little learning is a dangerous thing. Warning: Invertebrate Punnster - Spinelessly Unable to Resist a Pun Dangerous Thoughts, my blog about GURPS and life. |
12-04-2014, 10:52 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
If you don't like the capacity of capacitors, then design new ones. When I designed a space opera game I had most ships use accumulators with a really huge capacity.
The ones used for space ships were expensive because the crystals were purer than the ones used in civilian devices. Even still, an accumulator in a floater (a contra grav car) was about the size of a can of Coke and the floater could circle the globe a couple of times on a full charge. I measured the charge in Power Point (PP) - Weeks. To recharge one fully, it takes a lot more power than it can hold because as the charge builds up, it is more difficult to put more charge in. Basically it took the total PP-W to change the accumulator to 1/2 its value. Continue like this until as full as you want it. Example, I'll fill a small accumulator of 8 PP-W. To fill the first half (4 PP-W), it takes 8 PP-W of energy. To fill the half the remaining space (2 PP-W) takes another 8 PP-W. To fill the next half of the remainder (1 PP-W) takes yet another 8 PP-W, and to simplify things, the rest takes 16 PP-W. So it basically takes 5 times the power capacity to charge one of my accumulators fully. I did this because of time rather than expense, though it would cost money also usually. I did this because I liked the idea of having energy weapons that shot thousands of rounds. While most ships did contain a small fission reactor for recharging the main accumulator if they couldn't get back to civilization, it would take a LONG time to do the recharge. Just an idea.
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A little learning is a dangerous thing. Warning: Invertebrate Punnster - Spinelessly Unable to Resist a Pun Dangerous Thoughts, my blog about GURPS and life. |
12-05-2014, 08:51 AM | #16 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
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However, another problem (ugh) I've run into is an extension of the interdiction concept from my previous post. As it stands, the best way to deal with an incoming fleet of fighters is to send out a single tiny missile as soon as you detect them. You'll drop their pseudovelocity to null, giving you ample time to escape. The counter to this would be for the fighters to carry a bunch of antimissile missiles so they can stop the missiles using the same trick, then skirt the perimeter of the missile's combat range to keep up their velocity. This could easily devolve into massive swarms of missiles on either side, and I don't want that. I think I've come up with a solution, which basically comes down to drive mass. First off, I should note that vessels that are synched and within combat range of each other count as a single unit - coming within 5,000 yards of one vessel in such a fleet slows all of them, but the drive mass of all of them are added together. For reactionless drives, they are automatically slowed if hostile drive mass is within 1/10th or 10x that of the vessel/fleet. For larger disparities, the larger vessel/fleet can choose to interdict or not. For semi-reactionless drives, any reactionless drive will automatically interdict, while hostile semi-reactionless drives follow the above guidelines. All interdiction is mutual. So a missile swarm cannot interdict a group of fighters unless said missile swarm is massive - typical fighters probably have 3 drives, while missiles essentially have 10, so total missile mass must equal 1/30th total fighter mass. A single SM+5 fighter would require around 15 missiles (typical missiles are 16 cm) to interdict. That same fighter could interdict up to 10 equivalent fighters (a space superiority fighter, with 4 drives, could interdict up to 13 or so typical fighters) or a carrier/capital ship of any size. *The "hypercosmology" of the setting is that our plane/universe/whatever exists between two others, hyperspace and subspace. Ships can transition to hyperspace, which is full of a gas-like medium called aether (technically, the Hyperspacial Medium), which is what the drives interact with. It correlates perfectly well to our universe (to the extent that large bodies have a "shadow" in hyperspace), except that something like every inch in hyperspace corresponds to something like a mile in real space (I still need to work out what the ratio is). Subspace has the opposite relationship, but don't want to transition a ship there - nor would you want to, as all experiments indicated matter that goes there is outright ripped apart and energy is absorbed and dissipated about as quickly (which makes it ideal for generating a shield). Quote:
Quote:
*My current thought is that an HEDM cell holds 10 PPh, and can discharge up to 60 PP at a time - enough for 3 drives and some change for weaponry (note shields are actually self-sustaining, but leaving them on too long can cause overheating issues). It costs 50K for an SM+5 cell (that is, price is +1 SM relative to fuel cells). Each fuel tank of HEDM provides a further 20 PPh, and refueling an HEDM cell costs half as much a refilling an HEDM fuel tank. However, the blasters in the setting are a lot more energy-hungry than typical SS beam weapons, due in large part to their much higher RoF - an equal-weight capacitor will power an RoF 1 weapon for only 200 shots. That means each such weapon requires 18 PP to operate, just like a drive (I swear, this actually wasn't planned, it just worked out this way). For something equivalent to an X-Wing, which is a space superiority fighter, you'd probably have 4 drives, 2 HEDM cells, and 4/3 blasters - that is, a Medium Battery with 3 blasters, and a mixed battery of 1 Medium Battery blaster and a missile launcher. |
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12-07-2014, 01:54 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
What happens when a ship mounts
a Semi-Reactionless and a Reactionless drive? What happens if you turn both on at the same time? |
12-07-2014, 09:42 PM | #18 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2009
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
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However, aside from begging the question "how does it all look? Do the ships and people suddenly look gigantic when observed from the outside? Is it all obscured by a shimmery void?", this solution also requires that everything happening in combat-space correlates to real-space by a factor of X, which is limiting. Quote:
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12-08-2014, 12:51 PM | #19 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Space Opera Semi-Psuedovelocity Drives
Quote:
In theory, you'd handle the pseudovelocity gained from each separately - when a space transport is interdicted by a small (that is, not large enough to interdict the reactionless drive) fighter, you could have a case where the transport's semi-reactionless drive is interdicted, eliminating any pseudovelocity that came from it, but the reactionless drive isn't. In practice, they'd probably get hit by the largest book I had at hand. Quote:
... I've actually decided it's probably going to work out best if I make the drives into essentially boost drives (fluff-wise, they actually just have such high acceleration they can reach top speed in a fraction of a second). Otherwise, the tactical implications of interdicting a squadron of fighters basically mean that unless you manage to approach your target from directly in front of it, it can reliably escape you via interdiction - and I most certainly do not like this. This is going to require a total rehashing of the way they work, unfortunately. After a lot of work and thought, here's how I intend to have it work out. Both reactionless and semi-reactionless have two modes - travel and combat. Travel with reactionless has a top speed of 1000 mps per drive, which requires 90 PP per drive. Efficiency can be increased up to 5-fold by decreasing speed by the same factor, for a cruising speed of 200 mps per drive, requiring only 3.6 PP per drive. In-between speeds use in-between efficiencies - divide needed PP by the square of the reduction factor. Semi-reactionless is similar - top speed is 200 mps per drive and burns through 0.75 PP per drive, and cruising speed is 40 mps per drive and burns through 0.03 PP per drive. For every PPh of energy used, 1% of a fuel tank of hydrogen is expelled as reaction mass. If the vessel experiences a collision while moving at travel speeds (with pseudovelocity), treat it as though it had an actual velocity in yards per second equal to mps/20 (that is, at 1000 mps treat it as though it were moving at Move 50; and 40 mps, as though it were moving at Move 2). Things are simpler in combat - there's no change in efficiency. Rather, reactionless drives have Move 10/50 per drive and require 18 PP per drive, while semi-reactionless drives have Move 2/10 per drive and require 0.15 PP per drive (again, every PPh of energy corresponds to 1% of a fuel tank of hydrogen). Transferring between travel and combat speeds is handled via the interdiction scheme I outlined in previous posts. Use the vessel's collision velocity to determine what speed it starts out at (so a 4-drive fighter cruising at 800 mps starts at Move 40, a 10-drive missile going all out at 10,000 mps starts at Move 500, a 2-drive carrier moving at 40 mps starts at Move 2, and so forth). Lack of nuclear energy and genetic engineering is mostly the result of fear-mongering and a bit of history. For the first, many of the original colonists weren't very pronuclear to start with, and they got really paranoid and thought Earth had destroyed itself (with nukes, naturally) when they lost contact for a few decades early in the journey. Earth eventually reestablished contact, but was now under new management (due in part to a partial nuclear war) and demanded the fleet do the unthinkable and turn around, abandoning their colonization effort. Most of the colonists refused, but one of the generation ships decided* to turn around after all, and its crew tried to convince the others to do the same. Not wanting to turn around, a pilot from one of the other ships loaded up his own ship (which was used for mining asteroids and the like for raw materials) with a nuke and flew it into the "traitor," destroying both. Having lost an eighth of their potential population, it's no real surprise they gained such an aversion. For genetic engineering, there was already quite a movement against the practice on Earth (and thus within the original colonists), and the spacers are either opposed to it on religious grounds or due to fear of "unmaking" the human race and replacing it with something else. As for general lack of AI, I personally don't see intelligent/sapient/whatever AI as inevitable, so that combined with a bit of fear of it is enough to keep it at bay. Probably the most advanced AI available serves to control weapon turrets - which legally can only be equipped with ion cannons (which disrupt electronics without blowing up ships) and can typically only be used in space (as in atmosphere disabling an aircraft is likely to result in a fatal crash). *History is conflicted here; the above is the version put forth by the Earth Caliphate, its allies, and some of the secular nations. Some of the other nations tell a very different story, of a hijacked generation ship trying to ram the rest of the fleet and a brave pilot sacrificing himself by crashing into the ship's fusion plant. Most aren't certain which is true. Last edited by Varyon; 12-09-2014 at 08:03 AM. Reason: changed some numbers to line up a bit better |
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pseudovelocity, pseudovelocity drives, space opera, spaceships |
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