10-20-2019, 02:08 AM | #11 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
It is worth considering whether the entire interior of the ship will even have the same alignment. You could, for example, replace stairwells with passageways that have gravity flipped 90 degrees.
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10-20-2019, 02:56 AM | #12 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
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It means gravity is subject to inversion from battle damage on the lower decks, so you mostly put big heavy things, like engines, on those decks, and design them to work with either direction of gravity. The weapons in the nose are also subject to inversion, so you need to design them the same way. People and all the clutter they generate are on the middle higher decks, so that the gravity won't go out there unless the ship is catastrophically damaged.
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10-20-2019, 04:47 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
Is there a utility in having main personnel and control spaces in gimbals? You could put the gravity plates inside the gimballed room, and they would freely rotate to be normal to whatever thrust vector or external gravity well you have.
It would give the ship a collection-of-spheres-and-domes aesthetic. The other thing to consider is having spherical shells of gravity plate for each crew space, so that they could cancel out acceleration vectors that skew from the normal.
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10-20-2019, 09:20 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
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Minimizing surface area is useful primarily for economizing on physical armor. If shields are a thing or ships aren't heavily armored (which is the case with most reaction-drive settings, even superscience ones), more surface area actually helps with placing weapons, sensors, radiators, etc. |
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10-20-2019, 12:18 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
They are, however, appreciably superior for resisting pressure; which matters more depends on the details of your drives.
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10-20-2019, 03:13 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
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But it just looks like added complexity with the g-disks, when you could instead just line everything up with the axis of thrust.
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10-20-2019, 08:45 PM | #17 | ||||||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
Thanks for the suggestions folks. You are really helping me to work through my ideas and giving good ideas for clever architecture with this setup.
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On the other hand, I'm not sure if turning/twisting the entire ship for evasive maneuvers is actually an effective dodge. It certainly is for projectile fire. With beams you need to be dodging the tracking, not the shot, so that could be very dps intensive. Quote:
That said, I do think I'm convinced I need to either line up the ship's gravity with the primary thrust or use a rather slow drive. I'm not convinced that the ship needs to be a long thin cylinder with the engines at one end. Quote:
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The ideas might have some merit in high performance fighters.
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10-21-2019, 03:05 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
Just to explore the idea a little:
With the gravity plates, gravity can be set arbitrarily, so there's no reason for it to be the same direction across the whole ship. You might have the command bridge with naval setting, so they can walk around and look out the front of the bridge (said gimballing optional). The problem with rocket-orientation is that you have to lie on your back to see where you're going- unless everything is done by instruments only. The drive section at the rear might be rocket-down, so that equipment is attached to the thrust-down direction of the ship. A shell of gravity plates could be used to help lifting heavy equipment around. Long axial corridors would be gravity radially down toward the ship's axis, as it would be a long dangerous fall with gravity axially down the corridor. Set strength to 0.2 G so that crew can quickly moon-hop along to their destinations. I'm not sure how you'd handle transition sections between orthogonal G-zones, though they might be 0G for easy body rotation to orient to the G-vector for where you're headed. And so on. Note that crew should be secured during combat and maneuvres, just as you don't let your airline passengers walk around during turbulence. The question is how big are the grav plates? How heavy? How much energy do they use? i.e. What are the economics of installing and running them? Can they be put anywhere and everywhere, or does their design limit how they can be used? And how switchable and responsive are they? If they're effectively instantaneous, then they can be basically inertial dampeners.
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10-21-2019, 10:13 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
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More seriously, you don't do either while undergoing combat maneuvering but the lower you set your acceleration the longer the periods you have to use it for effective travel. If you had only minutes of multi-G burns for Hohman transfer orbit insertion you just strap everyone in for the duration. When the duration is hours or even days you really don't want to have your artificial gravity and acceleration going in different directions. Probably the main reason you have artifical gravity is that zero-G plumbing doesn't work very well. You'll want to design for long durations of every day life ass your default condition. You can get hrough minutes of acceleration and space battles with strapping in and keeping a stiff upper lip but hours and days of ordinary living should be as ordinary as you can manage. As for Dodging you don't do that with the main drive for big ships anyway. You can't turn the hsip fast enough to bring main propulsion intot eh line you want. You have to use relatively large attitude thrusters that are scattered all over your hull.
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10-21-2019, 03:25 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Spaceship Weapons and Gravity Layout
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Huge transparent windows to look out of all around present too great a vulnerability, because they are very difficult to armour and to protect with meteroid shielding. Putting the command room on the surface makes it hard for radiation shielding; you want people in the guts of the ship, surrounded by machines and tankage. The human eyeball is not sensitive enougb and doesn't have enough resolving power to be a useful sensor of small, dark things at great distances. And finally, the direction of the thrust vector is the direction the ship accelerates towards, not necessary the direction it moves towards. Thrustwards is forwards when you're accelerating, but the opposite when you a decelerating, besides which for a lot of maneuvres you'll accelerate at some angle up to a right angle to your direction of movement in the frame of reference of nearby illuminated objects. When you are doing a fast flypast you can orient any part of your surface that you choose also your vector of relative movement. When you arrive at a "place" you end your manoeuvres with a decelerate with respect to the destination, i.e. main engine forwards. To see where you were going with naked eyes you would lie face down, not on your back. There is no gravity, so there is no "upwards". There is no atmosphere or ocean, so there is no "forwards". What direction you are going is a matter of "in what frame of reference?": in the ship's frame it isn't moving. Everything, including your destination and port of origin, is moving in all sorts of directions at speeds of several kilometres per second, while you are by definition stationary. The only direction that is significant is your thrust axis.
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