[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34671980]Aerodynamics don't exist in space. The cube design is actually quite a good one.[/QUOTE]
Actually a cube is very bad, because it's very close to a sphere, which of all the shapes has the lowest surface area for its volume- a problem when you need to radiate heat somehow. A spherical or cuboid spaceship would look more like a pincushion, covered in radiator panels. If this is a combat vessel, a sphere or cube is also very easy to target since it has no thin axis to present to the enemy.
Also, it puts everything dangerously close together. A better design is the barbell shape, with one pod housing the drive system and powerplant, and the other pod housing the crew and equipment. That way your crew can live comfortably without being on the other side of a not-radiation-proof wall from a nuclear or fusion reactor.
[QUOTE=catbarf;34680158]Actually a cube is very bad, because it's very close to a sphere, which of all the shapes has the lowest surface area for its volume- a problem when you need to radiate heat somehow. A spherical or cuboid spaceship would look more like a pincushion, covered in radiator panels. If this is a combat vessel, a sphere or cube is also very easy to target since it has no thin axis to present to the enemy.
Also, it puts everything dangerously close together. A better design is the barbell shape, with one pod housing the drive system and powerplant, and the other pod housing the crew and equipment. That way your crew can live comfortably without being on the other side of a not-radiation-proof wall from a nuclear or fusion reactor.[/QUOTE]
[img]http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/7/71/DSI_hdapproach.jpg[/img]
[i]Lies.[/i]
All the gun discussion is missing a very important point
[IMG]http://pnmedia.gamespy.com/planetunreal.gamespy.com/images/oldsite/clusterimages/redeemer.jpg[/IMG]
[I] (unusable) iron sights on a handheld nuclear missile launcher.[/I]
The wonders of Unreal: it doesn't take itself seriously.
[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110511010408/halo/images/thumb/8/8d/Ih_manual_06.jpg/298px-Ih_manual_06.jpg[/img]
Literally 2-ton armor with energy shielding that is overall expensive as balls and very few people can ever even hope use it.
Yep, can totally happen, Halo is SO realistic.
[QUOTE=Saber15;34673757]Countermeasure broke all technology beyond that of Earth and made species smarter than humans more dumb. It didn't directly cause any deaths, but you can imagine how many deaths it would cause from anti-gravity cars and hovering buildings on a million different planets all suddenly collapsing to the ground because the physics that powers them no longer exists.[/QUOTE]
And the fun thing is, that according to children in the sky it probably didn't manage to kill the Blight which is still advancing to tine.
That actually makes the blight quite interesting. More or less an AI entity that was able to function in nontrancendental and AI zones and was able to survive and function even in the slow.
[QUOTE=catbarf;34680158]Actually a cube is very bad, because it's very close to a sphere, which of all the shapes has the lowest surface area for its volume- a problem when you need to radiate heat somehow. A spherical or cuboid spaceship would look more like a pincushion, covered in radiator panels. If this is a combat vessel, a sphere or cube is also very easy to target since it has no thin axis to present to the enemy.
Also, it puts everything dangerously close together. A better design is the barbell shape, with one pod housing the drive system and powerplant, and the other pod housing the crew and equipment. That way your crew can live comfortably without being on the other side of a not-radiation-proof wall from a nuclear or fusion reactor.[/QUOTE]
At the same time it is by far the most stable structure and by far the most balanced. There's no off axis which means it's by far the best for maneuvering.
As to space combat - well the benefit is that you also have no weak side to turn to the enemy. Since you have every angle armed just as well.
You can't catch a sphere under a skirt with a broadside to speak.
[QUOTE=Katatonic717;34712150][img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110511010408/halo/images/thumb/8/8d/Ih_manual_06.jpg/298px-Ih_manual_06.jpg[/img]
Literally 2-ton armor with energy shielding that is overall expensive as balls and very few people can ever even hope use it.
Yep, can totally happen, Halo is SO realistic.[/QUOTE]
500 kilograms, and the spartans have proven to be worth the investment many times over.
[editline]15th February 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=wraithcat;34712357]And the fun thing is, that according to children in the sky it probably didn't manage to kill the Blight which is still advancing to tine.
That actually makes the blight quite interesting. More or less an AI entity that was able to function in nontrancendental and AI zones and was able to survive and function even in the slow.[/QUOTE]
Well even in Fire they know that the blight isn't actually gone, it's just incapable of FTL travel and thus will never be a threat to the outer zones again. I think they also mentioned that the fleet would be at the tines world within some centuries. I haven't read the newest one in the series yet though.
[QUOTE=catbarf;34680158]Actually a cube is very bad, because it's very close to a sphere, which of all the shapes has the lowest surface area for its volume- a problem when you need to radiate heat somehow. A spherical or cuboid spaceship would look more like a pincushion, covered in radiator panels. If this is a combat vessel, a sphere or cube is also very easy to target since it has no thin axis to present to the enemy.
Also, it puts everything dangerously close together. A better design is the barbell shape, with one pod housing the drive system and powerplant, and the other pod housing the crew and equipment. That way your crew can live comfortably without being on the other side of a not-radiation-proof wall from a nuclear or fusion reactor.[/QUOTE]
Radiating heat can be expelled using exhaust ports or is regulated in a continuous cycle, as to not waste anything, so that's not really the issue. Combat in space will most likely NOT include kinetic weaponry, since there is so many forces at play on them, and that's the only thing you should be worried about when it comes to combat and space. Gamma weaponry, plasma, and missiles are where it's at. Doesn't matter what shape you are, it's hard to defend against something like that.
The cube organizes things and if the ship is built correctly everything should work fine. The fact that it has an off axis means that it's an extremely well-balanced ship and can maneuver in practically any direction without being in danger of cracking in half. You know you can block radiation right? You just need some thick lead and you're good to go.
[QUOTE=Katatonic717;34712150][img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110511010408/halo/images/thumb/8/8d/Ih_manual_06.jpg/298px-Ih_manual_06.jpg[/img]
Literally 2-ton armor with energy shielding that is overall expensive as balls and very few people can ever even hope use it.
Yep, can totally happen, Halo is SO realistic.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/SPARTAN-II_augmentation_procedures#Augmentations[/url]
I'm busy resisting the urge to make a parody thread that completely denounces Halo and other great Sci-Fi series and turns into a Killzone circlejerk at the second half.
[QUOTE=wraithcat;34712357]At the same time it is by far the most stable structure and by far the most balanced. There's no off axis which means it's by far the best for maneuvering. [/QUOTE]
You're right that a cube is stable, but in space you don't need to move in any direction, just forwards as determined by the orientation of your drive system- and a more traditional, elongated shape will do that just as well.
More importantly, designing and constructing spherical parts is expensive and more difficult than simple rectangular plates and traditional truss structures. In some cases, it can result in overall structural weakening.
[QUOTE=wraithcat;34712357]As to space combat - well the benefit is that you also have no weak side to turn to the enemy. Since you have every angle armed just as well.
You can't catch a sphere under a skirt with a broadside to speak.[/QUOTE]
When combat ranges are measured in hundreds of thousands of miles, and detection ranges in millions to billions, being strong on every side doesn't matter- it might take a couple of minutes to bring a different side to face the enemy, but it takes hours or days for any meaningful change in relative position to occur. Being surprised is very unlikely.
And again, it means you're an easy target no matter how you orient your ship. With a traditional cylindrical shape, facing the target presents a very tiny target profile.
One problem some sci-fi authors have raised is that the approach you describe with weapons everywhere would weaken the ship by preventing it from concentrating fire in any one direction, but I disagree. Missiles can move after launch, and lasers can have a central array fed through multiple turrets on different sides.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]Radiating heat can be expelled using exhaust ports or is regulated in a continuous cycle, as to not waste anything, so that's not really the issue. [/QUOTE]
Neither of those two works. You can't expel heat through exhaust ports, the point of an exhaust port in real life is to expel air carrying heat. Expelling any gas to get rid of heat would put a finite limit on your cooling ability, and would result in a ship with a few minutes of usable reactor time. The only viable solution is radiator panels, like what the ISS uses.
As for continuous cycle- violation of the laws of thermodynamics. You can't get something for nothing. There's no way to make heat go away, or use it (ie a thermocouple) in a manner that doesn't produce even more heat. You have to radiate it somehow.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]Combat in space will most likely NOT include kinetic weaponry, since there is so many forces at play on them, and that's the only thing you should be worried about when it comes to combat and space. [/QUOTE]
On the contrary, kinetic weapons are extremely effective without any air resistance or other such terrestrial forces at work, and at the relative velocities involved any decent hit is an instant kill. The problem is travel time, which makes unguided munitions entirely worthless as the slightest acceleration during the several-hour time-to-impact results in a miss by thousands of miles. The only practical kinetic weapons are thus missiles (explosives are pointless at the relative velocities we're talking) and guided coilgun rounds (pretty much missiles launched from coilguns).
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]Gamma weaponry, plasma, and missiles are where it's at. Doesn't matter what shape you are, it's hard to defend against something like that.[/QUOTE]
The problem with gamma weaponry is that there are precious few known sources of gamma rays. Even with a practical means of building a gamma-ray laser, there's nothing it can do that a more modest UV-wavelength laser could do instead.
As for plasma, forget everything sci-fi's taught you. Plasma is utterly useless as a weapon for the same reason steam is: despite being very hot, it disperses too quickly to be useful. In a vacuum, plasma tries to fill the available space resulting in negligible effects. Magnetic containment, like many movies, books, and games postulate, is impossible for a number of reasons.
Missiles, on the other hand, are practical as I said before, but susceptible to being mission-killed by laser or CIWS-based point defense. Submunitions are practically a necessity.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]The cube organizes things and if the ship is built correctly everything should work fine. The fact that it has an off axis means that it's an extremely well-balanced ship and can maneuver in practically any direction without being in danger of cracking in half. [/QUOTE]
The main drive is facing one direction, so it can only apply thrust in one direction, no matter what shape it has. It could have multiple main drives, but that's a hideous waste of mass for some entirely unnecessary functionality, given that any ship would simply be able to turn to face a new direction before applying the new burn.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]You know you can block radiation right? You just need some thick lead and you're good to go.[/QUOTE]
Do you know just how thick it would need to be? Shielding doesn't linearly block a certain amount of radiation, it blocks a percentage along a square-root curve. In order to reduce radiation to 'safe' levels when a crew member may be within a few dozen meters of a nuclear reactor requires meters of lead, in addition to a neutron/particle shield as the lead is only suitable for blocking x-ray and gamma-ray radiation. Because this hypothetical ship has a cuboid shape, placing the reactor within the body of the ship, the amount of surface area that needs to be shielded is huge. It ends up lugging dozens of tons of lead around, just to protect the crew.
On the other hand, if the reactor is 100m away from the crew in a second structural pod, the amount of shielding necessary is reduced to one small shadow shield, and the thickness can be much less thanks to the inverse square nature of radiation.
Considering that in both of this guy's threads he makes painfully retarded OPs then never posts again, I'm guessing he's a troll.
To be honest I expected badage boys
To be honest, I recall that due to the sheer size and speed of space combat, it's very likely that ships are more likely to get to close ranges ranges which once more makes your standard railguns more or less viable.
The moment you're fighting even light minutes apart means that both sides have ample time to deploy enough counter measures to make guided munition almost useless and far enough that even minute course changes make LS weaponry miss.
On top of that you get the issue of energy based weaponry dissipating across distance so their effective range might actually be less than a railgun.
So in order to actually be able to fight each other, ships are likely to get close enough for cheap railguns to be usefull as well as laser based weaponry to be deadly.
Also as far as I remember, standard missiles would actually be nukes that aren't build to directly hit the enemy ship as that would be fairly unlikely, but instead detonate from a certain distance and use this detonation to power a strong one shot laser.
Even our current AA missiles aren't wired to actually hit a plane. But instead detonate a bit ahead of it.
[QUOTE=abcpea2;34441424]zombies arent realistic and max brooks doesnt know a fucking thing[/QUOTE]
What in the name of CHRIST are you talking about. Zombies do really exist dammit! (Not in the traditional sense, but close.)
[QUOTE=wraithcat;34729885]To be honest, I recall that due to the sheer size and speed of space combat, it's very likely that ships are more likely to get to close ranges ranges which once more makes your standard railguns more or less viable.
The moment you're fighting even light minutes apart means that both sides have ample time to deploy enough counter measures to make guided munition almost useless and far enough that even minute course changes make LS weaponry miss.
On top of that you get the issue of energy based weaponry dissipating across distance so their effective range might actually be less than a railgun.
So in order to actually be able to fight each other, ships are likely to get close enough for cheap railguns to be usefull as well as laser based weaponry to be deadly.
Also as far as I remember, standard missiles would actually be nukes that aren't build to directly hit the enemy ship as that would be fairly unlikely, but instead detonate from a certain distance and use this detonation to power a strong one shot laser.
Even our current AA missiles aren't wired to actually hit a plane. But instead detonate a bit ahead of it.[/QUOTE]
Convergence speeds can be a few miles per second, but when you can see a ship from the other hand of the solar system and hit him from a few million miles out, the likelihood of getting to close range is pretty much nil.
As for distance, you're right in that damage will be reduced, but lasers aren't subject to the inverse-square law- they still diffuse, but in a vacuum it's a linear progression. As the fantastic website Project Rho provides, the equation for beam radius on target is:
RT = 0.61 * D * L / RL
Where RT is the radius at the target, D is the distance, L is the wavelength, and RL is the radius of the lens or reflector.
You can try some values yourself- the point is that with any decent amount of energy applied, it doesn't matter if your radius is a square centimeter or four square centimeters, it's still going to put a ton of energy on target- enough to start drilling.
Countermeasures are pointless. In real life, countermeasures are designed to make the decoy look like the actual ship or plane. Against radar, they provide a fake radar signature. Against heat-seekers, they provide a fake heat source. In space, neither works- optical detection will still see the ship, and the only way to build a viable thermal decoy would be essentially a decoy burning at the same temperature as the nuclear reactor of the target.
Decoys are useless, but point defenses are not. Smaller, cheaper missiles can intercept enemy missiles, and missiles can be mission-killed with lasers. The problem, though, is that there's no reason not to use MIRV-style submunitions to provide a much harder intercept target. Instead of burning out three missiles, now the point defense has to deal with a hundred fifty bomblets.
Railguns are by no means a cheap alternative to lasers- on the contrary, lasers are practical right now, while railguns are not. Coilguns, the more practical little brother of railguns, are more realistic, but still not cheap by any means. And again, they would essentially function as glorified missile launchers, since any unguided munition is useless. It doesn't matter if it's going Mach 10- that's 3.4km/s, which at 100km (which from a laser standpoint is 'breathing down your neck' range) means a full half a minute to intercept, plenty of time to dodge. If the projectile is guided, on the other hand, it's a practically guaranteed hit.
Nukes are effective, although not as effective in space as in the atmosphere. They're also finicky and sensitive, making them vulnerable to point defense, and at the relative velocities involved they're not that much more lethal than kinetic missiles. There's no need to detonate near the target, since in space, unlike in an atmosphere, it is not possible to bank to rapidly change course, and detection and tracking can be optical rather than an imprecise and time-delayed system like radar. Since the missile is essentially a ship with higher acceleration, it's a guaranteed hit, since there is nothing the ship can do the missile can't match. The only question is whether or not it's intercepted before impact.
[QUOTE=catbarf;34720589]You're right that a cube is stable, but in space you don't need to move in any direction, just forwards as determined by the orientation of your drive system- and a more traditional, elongated shape will do that just as well.
More importantly, designing and constructing spherical parts is expensive and more difficult than simple rectangular plates and traditional truss structures. In some cases, it can result in overall structural weakening.
When combat ranges are measured in hundreds of thousands of miles, and detection ranges in millions to billions, being strong on every side doesn't matter- it might take a couple of minutes to bring a different side to face the enemy, but it takes hours or days for any meaningful change in relative position to occur. Being surprised is very unlikely.
And again, it means you're an easy target no matter how you orient your ship. With a traditional cylindrical shape, facing the target presents a very tiny target profile.
One problem some sci-fi authors have raised is that the approach you describe with weapons everywhere would weaken the ship by preventing it from concentrating fire in any one direction, but I disagree. Missiles can move after launch, and lasers can have a central array fed through multiple turrets on different sides.
Neither of those two works. You can't expel heat through exhaust ports, the point of an exhaust port in real life is to expel air carrying heat. Expelling any gas to get rid of heat would put a finite limit on your cooling ability, and would result in a ship with a few minutes of usable reactor time. The only viable solution is radiator panels, like what the ISS uses.
As for continuous cycle- violation of the laws of thermodynamics. You can't get something for nothing. There's no way to make heat go away, or use it (ie a thermocouple) in a manner that doesn't produce even more heat. You have to radiate it somehow.
On the contrary, kinetic weapons are extremely effective without any air resistance or other such terrestrial forces at work, and at the relative velocities involved any decent hit is an instant kill. The problem is travel time, which makes unguided munitions entirely worthless as the slightest acceleration during the several-hour time-to-impact results in a miss by thousands of miles. The only practical kinetic weapons are thus missiles (explosives are pointless at the relative velocities we're talking) and guided coilgun rounds (pretty much missiles launched from coilguns).
The problem with gamma weaponry is that there are precious few known sources of gamma rays. Even with a practical means of building a gamma-ray laser, there's nothing it can do that a more modest UV-wavelength laser could do instead.
As for plasma, forget everything sci-fi's taught you. Plasma is utterly useless as a weapon for the same reason steam is: despite being very hot, it disperses too quickly to be useful. In a vacuum, plasma tries to fill the available space resulting in negligible effects. Magnetic containment, like many movies, books, and games postulate, is impossible for a number of reasons.
Missiles, on the other hand, are practical as I said before, but susceptible to being mission-killed by laser or CIWS-based point defense. Submunitions are practically a necessity.
The main drive is facing one direction, so it can only apply thrust in one direction, no matter what shape it has. It could have multiple main drives, but that's a hideous waste of mass for some entirely unnecessary functionality, given that any ship would simply be able to turn to face a new direction before applying the new burn.
Do you know just how thick it would need to be? Shielding doesn't linearly block a certain amount of radiation, it blocks a percentage along a square-root curve. In order to reduce radiation to 'safe' levels when a crew member may be within a few dozen meters of a nuclear reactor requires meters of lead, in addition to a neutron/particle shield as the lead is only suitable for blocking x-ray and gamma-ray radiation. Because this hypothetical ship has a cuboid shape, placing the reactor within the body of the ship, the amount of surface area that needs to be shielded is huge. It ends up lugging dozens of tons of lead around, just to protect the crew.
On the other hand, if the reactor is 100m away from the crew in a second structural pod, the amount of shielding necessary is reduced to one small shadow shield, and the thickness can be much less thanks to the inverse square nature of radiation.[/QUOTE]
I love this post. Please, keep going.
[editline]16th February 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=RearAdmiral;34721069]Considering that in both of this guy's threads he makes painfully retarded OPs then never posts again, I'm guessing he's a troll.
To be honest I expected badage boys[/QUOTE]
Badage Boys are dead, we've been disbanded for a long time now. Xing's on to better things now.
[editline]16th February 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=SgtdawnPCFTW;34730303]What in the name of CHRIST are you talking about. Zombies do really exist dammit! (Not in the traditional sense, but close.)[/QUOTE]
If the blood is coagulated then it CAN'T FUCKING WORK. If the cell's die then the body can't even fucking function.
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34715852]Radiating heat can be expelled using exhaust ports or is regulated in a continuous cycle, as to not waste anything, so that's not really the issue. Combat in space will most likely NOT include kinetic weaponry, since there is so many forces at play on them, and that's the only thing you should be worried about when it comes to combat and space. Gamma weaponry, plasma, and missiles are where it's at. Doesn't matter what shape you are, it's hard to defend against something like that.
The cube organizes things and if the ship is built correctly everything should work fine. The fact that it has an off axis means that it's an extremely well-balanced ship and can maneuver in practically any direction without being in danger of cracking in half. You know you can block radiation right? You just need some thick lead and you're good to go.[/QUOTE]
You need big, delicate heat radiators to get rid of heat.
Plasma is worthless as a weapon. It's basically like making a gun that shoots steam.
The only effective ways to get gamma rays are through Excalibur style bomb-pumped lasers and through gamma lasers
[editline]16th February 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=SgtdawnPCFTW;34730303]What in the name of CHRIST are you talking about. Zombies do really exist dammit! (Not in the traditional sense, but close.)[/QUOTE]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/zI7FO.jpg[/t]
"Zombies Exist" is a true statement. "Zombies using the Hollywood definition exist" is not.
Zombies were originally a person who was poisoned using pufferfish toxin and Hatian Voodoo practices. The poison caused someone to fall over and appear dead as they would become paralyzed and in some cases catatonic, the voodoo priest or priestess who poisoned the person would then wait for them to be buried, dig them up, and keep them drugged to act as slave labor.
So yes, zombies exist.
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;34736732]"Zombies Exist" is a true statement. "Zombies using the Hollywood definition exist" is not.
Zombies were originally a person who was poisoned using pufferfish toxin and Hatian Voodoo practices. The poison caused someone to fall over and appear dead as they would become paralyzed and in some cases catatonic, the voodoo priest or priestess who poisoned the person would then wait for them to be buried, dig them up, and keep them drugged to act as slave labor.
So yes, zombies exist.[/QUOTE]
This occurred much in Haiti. It as discovered by the French anthropologist Dr George De Rouquct.
[QUOTE=RearAdmiral;34721069]Considering that in both of this guy's threads he makes painfully retarded OPs then never posts again, I'm guessing he's a troll.
To be honest I expected badage boys[/QUOTE]
i dont think u know what a troll is bro
[QUOTE=Cheesemonkey;34736904]i dont think u know what a troll is bro[/QUOTE]
you're very clever.
[QUOTE=Katatonic717;34712150][img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110511010408/halo/images/thumb/8/8d/Ih_manual_06.jpg/298px-Ih_manual_06.jpg[/img]
Literally 2-ton armor with energy shielding that is overall expensive as balls and very few people can ever even hope use it.
Yep, can totally happen, Halo is SO realistic.[/QUOTE]
Are you forgetting that my country doesn't exist or something?
All of the discussions of "Now I can see that happening in the future" reminds me of
[url]http://www.smilorama.com/how-people-from-1900-imagined-the-future/[/url]
