07-11-2019, 09:48 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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Alternatively you can allow those energies but make the ships out of something stronger than it is physically possible for matter to be - either superscience materials that ignore that fact, or the force fields.
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07-11-2019, 10:07 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
I, admittedly, haven't read the other threads. I've only done a little space combat, but I have a couple of ideas.
1) There was a scene in The Expanse before a battle where they all got into vac suits and drained all the air from the ship. They did this preemptively knowing that they were going to have hull breaches when they got hit. If this is standard procedure, then to kill the crew you would have to either hit them or target the fuel. Either way, it wouldn't be too hard to disable a ship and board with the majority of the crew still alive. 2) Give a HT check to the ship to avoid catastrophic explosions. Sure, the system is still toast, but surely techniques are possible to mitigate explosions. We use them in modern cars and power plants, so why not in space. Or maybe to redirect the force of the explosion into space? That way, maybe the ship takes on some spin, but doesn't get destroyed. If this is a known in-universe problem, then maybe the engineers in-universe have a solution which boils down to a roll. 3) "We have to eject the warp core before she blows captain!" This is similar to #2. Maybe the solution is to have the explodable parts jettisonable? We see this in Star Trek. When the engine takes enough damage or comes down with plot-osis, it may explode. Fortunately, they built in a handy eject button and can have it safely explode somewhere other than in the ship with all the people. 4) OSHA regulations. Maybe the explodium which powers the ship may not be stored near the people to begin with. Take a look at how the Enterprise is laid out. Maybe in your universe, the engines have to be separated like those warp nacelles are from the rest of the ship. In star trek, there are other reasons, but if those are the exploding parts and the people are a distance away, maybe they don't get blown up. Yes, it makes the ship less fortified, but also more survivable. It may be a sensible way to build. |
07-11-2019, 10:26 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
This isn't actually the problem. Despite how often it happens in science fiction, the problem isn't realistically that something on the ship blows up. It's that the damage done by the weapon is already enough to vaporize the ship, or a chunk of anything else of a similar size. The fuel can't blow up if it's already been turned into plasma by the collision....
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07-11-2019, 10:36 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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2) Just like it isn't vacuum that kills crews it's not exploding engines or whatever either. In Spaceships what kills ships is running all the way through their HP. PCs already get rolls to survive this too. You can't add "compartmentalization" either because Spaceships is already built around this as a central principle. That's what the 20 hit locations are. Each is a separate compartment in the ship. you transfer damage from the intial hit location because there's enough damage to destroy that compartment and blow through the bulkheads.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-11-2019, 11:14 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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07-11-2019, 02:22 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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It wouldn't help at all with the secondary explosions from nuke-scale kinetic impactors and not real nukes either. What it might do is expose the systems that are (Core) in Spacships so they could be attacked directly. It would also make radiation shielding much harder. You wouldn't try and defend against nuclear scale explosions by spreading out your components by a few tens of meters. You'd make smaller whole ships and spread them out by hundreds of kilometers. I've been trying to convey that the way to make Spaceships combat more survivable is to change the weapons used. Fiddling with ship designs won't do much at all.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-11-2019, 02:38 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
High velocity impactors aren't really nuke-like, even if they have as much energy. (Which is highly unlikely unless you've given your KK weapon superscience propulsion.)
A meteoric-speed impactor is only going to transform into an omnidirectional explosion if it gets stopped by what it hits. If it doesn't lose most of its multi-mps incoming speed in the collision, it mostly blows through the hull in a cone of plasma and shrapnel. Only a small fraction of the energy winds up in material flung off perpendicular to the original impactor's trajectory.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
07-11-2019, 03:12 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
I strongly recommend use of an exotic drive tech that simply makes kinetic missiles less effective. It can be particularly useful if drives generate a warp field of some sort, because then you can tune its properties for whatever else you want to go on, such as boarding actions (two examples of this are Drive Field in Spaceships 31, and Exophase Drives per SS7:22, but plenty of other options exist). A lot of SF is best handled as a Hyperdynamic Cosmos (SS7:26).
Another thing to consider is not having space combat. Even when survivable, it's generally pretty boring. |
07-11-2019, 03:34 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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Even at 7 miles per second a mass contains enogh energy to explode like 20 x its' own weight of TNT. The non^ missiles of Spaceships have 10 miles per second of Delta-V at 28 cm or less and 20 at 32 cm or larger. So that 32 cm missile turns into a plasma 57x as energetic as detonating TNT and that's the entire missile and not just a warhead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_...ion_velocities ....puts the detonation velocity of TNT at 6900 meters per second. A plasma 57 x as energetic as that must have a velocity of the square root of 57 x 6900. That's 52,000 meters per second which is actually faster than the 32,000 meters per second obtained from the missile's Delta-V. So there will be no solid pieces of the impactor or the part it impacts directly. Just an incredibly energetic plasma. Solid chunks from the edge of the blast zone where the explosion has started to dissipate are possible but they won't be going forward. Al the little individual atomic nuclei have collided with other atoms and transformed their momentum into radiating photons and random motion.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-11-2019, 03:51 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: How to make space combat more survivable?
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Now, assume there's air on the other side. Our plasma starts out pretty dense, but it's still going to interact air, spreading further. The end result is that it only takes a few meters before nearly all the energy is converted into a general explosion. |
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