>a device on the ship that when activated emits the thermal and radio signature of a BIG asteroid
This won't really look like an asteroid, as you can't give yourself an Radar Cross Section bigger than you are via emission. It might be possible to use a reflective chaff cloud but that won't look like an asteroid. Beating radar isn't really important, as it's not going to be what you're spotted with. (thermal is most likely, but optical systems could as well)
Pretending to be an asteroid isn't useful though.
1. Ship leaves port (it's so easy to track that it will be) 2. Ship becomes asteroid (??? watch closely) 3. "Asteroid" approaches ship, which has likely been warned that something weird is happening already 4. Everyone knows the pirate ship wasn't a real asteroid, and can use signature analysis to identify it, especially once real sensors get pointed at potential piracy (full on optical telescopes which can image a ship directly might appear here)
Or, you have it on the whole time. 1. Hab launches asteroid under power in an unknown direction. 2. Oh shit moment because if they aren't stopped asteroids are potential WMDs, and this one hasn't sent warning. It's like secretly flying into a country by pretending to be an ICBM.
Pretending to be another ship is similar, as the other ships need to be of similar mass and composition to what they're impersonating. Decoys are essentially full fledged ships.
Here's how I think a pirate might operate: 1. Be a legitimate extropian, anarchist, or similar cargo hauler. 2. Intercept a ship in a "crowded" area like the main belt with a lot of traffic in various directions, so getting close isn't as suspicious. 3. Launch a boarding ship. Could be something like a Firewall stealth pod, or just a MH rocket which can outrun any big hauler. 4. Seize enough control of the ship to slow it down (undefended automated ships are best for this) 5. Bring in your mothership and take the cargo 6. Fuck off back to a friendly port
Dominic Myers
Ok, let's say your device works and doesn't cook your own ship with heat. You look like a fat ass ship with shitty drives and low mass.
>>Let's assume your target was blind or retarded and didn't make any pictures of your ship before your got them.
the pirates don't need to approach the cargo from the front, and again the first thing they should do is going for the coms, and if they take a picture of the pirate with their sensors, before switching on the asteroid device, other than with a normal camera, they will see a ship bigger than the pirate ship. And if they make a picture of the pirate ship after the pirates destroyed the coms who cares, they'll just have to delete those pictures.
If they somehow make a picture of my ship before destroying their coms, well fuck... they are pirates its not an easy and without danger life.
>>You need to hope that no one was making a space sweep in your direction before you activated your "cloaking" device.
If the pirate are going to make a robbery they will depart from a station with the "big ship" device turned on. (lets say an Extropia station or hub or whatever, just need to be a lot of ships there).
The big ship device would be something that give the pirates the thermal and radio signal of a ship bigger than the pirate ship but not so big that it would be super strange. If a thing that would be usefull with the possibility that someone comes at the pirates and says "we have this signal of a ship that made a robbery, let us check your thermal/radio emission of your ship to see if you are the one that did that" They will check the pirate ship and will see that the thermal and radio signal that they have is different from the one of the pirates.
cont.
Matthew Roberts
cont.
>>Even if you drop your device on the target ship and blow it up it won't stop someone from tracking your ship.
I actually don't care about that, they can track the pirates but they will track the big ship device signal that the pirates will switch off once in an Extropian station, so when they will go away from that station to sell the cargo in, let's say, another station they will go away without any device switched on. People tracking them would see that the big ship with thermal signature that made the robbery entered the Extropian station, with a lot of other ships, and a lot of other ships got out of the station, one of them will be the pirate ship with no device switched on, and the people tracking it will lose the signal once the ship is in the station.
Christopher Rivera
>>Pretending to be an asteroid isn't useful though. the asteroid thing is just to say something very big and very sudden, its more of a distraction and a problem for the most used sensors of the cargoship.
. Ship leaves port (it's so easy to track that it will be) Do they track every ship? why? and by the way it's not ship leaves port is ship with the thermal/radio signal of a bigger ship leaves port if they are going to commit piracy they start with the big ship signal
. Ship becomes asteroid (??? watch closely) Again, why are they tracking the pirates?
. "Asteroid" approaches ship, which has likely been warned that something weird is happening already not if they aren't tracking me.
>>Pretending to be another ship is similar, as the other ships need to be of similar mass and composition to what they're impersonating. >>Decoys are essentially full fledged ships.
Ok lets say that the "big ship" device copies a ship with a similar mass of the pirate ship but different thermal/radio signature. Better?
. Be a legitimate extropian, anarchist, or similar cargo hauler.
Fine
. Intercept a ship in a "crowded" area like the main belt with a lot of traffic in various directions, so getting close isn't as suspicious.
Don't really get how it is suspicious, if you are going to jupiter from mars (for example), can't i do it too? Usually people in space use the shortest route to go from A to B.
. Launch a boarding ship. Could be something like a Firewall stealth pod
I wasn't thinking about that, i'm more a missile guy, good point.
. . . agree agree agree
Gabriel Ward
Are you redarded?
Camden Jackson
maybe are you?
Bentley Roberts
...
Cooper Howard
turn off your nick
Carson Lewis
or what?
Camden Price
>Again, why are they tracking the pirates? Why wouldn't you track pirates?
Anthony Reyes
because before they made the robbery they are still not pirates, so why track them? That's why the question before this was: Do port people track every ship everytime?
Alexander Smith
>Do they track every ship? why?
Same reason ports track which ships are near them. From a security standpoint its useful to prevent ships carrying something or someone unwanted from getting to you. Seeing as this can include Exsurgent viruses and saboteurs with nuclear weapons in Eclipse Phase a ship registry is extra important.
It's also very easy. You need a muse-tier AI or less to track what it sees and report anomalies it can't make sense of. You need a small IR telescope, and bigger ones for visual ID and generally seeing things far away. Nothing major for any hab. That combined with a bit of networking with allied habs gives you a quickly updating map of where every ship inside the orbit of neptune or pluto is.
>is ship with the thermal/radio signal of a bigger ship leaves port
Spectral analysis a muse could do will tell you that the heat is coming from heat sinks not a fusion torch. fusing hydrogen/helium look different than say, copper radiators. If you just turn up the engine power to match the signature you want, you'll accelerate too fast.
>Again, why are they tracking the pirates? In the present most near earth objects large enough to damage something (like the size of a dime and up) are tracked. It'd be a lot more, but we don't have much off earth. As tracking becomes easier in EP, you'd expect every ship to be tracked.
>not if they aren't tracking me. The pirates aren't a tiny speck of TITAN smart matter, they're very likely to be tracked.
>Ok lets say that the "big ship" device copies a ship with a similar mass of the pirate ship but different thermal/radio signature. Better? I'm not sure why the pirates would want to, but they could. I guess maybe if the hull is a known pirate ship? I'd expect them to get resold and chopped up a lot to make tracking harder more than adjustment.
Isaiah Diaz
Do airport people track every airplane every time?
Plus, if they only get to commit one act of piracy then they're pretty shitty pirates anyway.
Kayden Jenkins
not when the airplains are out of their radar.
I understand tracking something that is coming to you but why doing that to something that goes away from you? Do a Mars spaceport track all ships that take off all the way to their destination? Would all Extropian spacestations, or anarchist spaceports track you while you are leaving it?
>>Spectral analysis [...] accelerate too fast.
The device would transmit a signal. Thermic sensors and radio sensor, would translate that signal as "ehy there is a big ship here". It does not have to be something that heats up for real, its more like hacking the sensors, or an informatic virus.
>>I'm not sure why the pirates would want to because of this: >>The big ship device would be something that give the pirates the thermal and radio signal of a ship bigger than the pirate ship but not so big that it would be super strange. >>If a thing that would be usefull with the possibility that someone comes at the pirates and says >>"we have this signal of a ship that made a robbery, let us check your thermal/radio emission of your ship to see if you are the one that did that" >>They will check the pirate ship and will see that the thermal and radio signal that they have is different from the one of the pirates.
Thomas Ortiz
>ITT: people continue their extremely long winded conversation from the previous thread, ensuring that it dies a slow painful death like a babe left in the mountains
Luke Moore
You can have more than one discussion in a thread. How about starting one instead of being a dick?
Gavin James
>not when the airplains are out of their radar. False
Tyler Brown
Jesus people, there are numerous space pirate groups in EP.
There has to be a way to do it.
Maybe tracking cannot be achieved on ships with dedicated stealth hardware, we do have metamaterial cloaks for humans.
Maybe pirates set up chaff and drones that fire off confusing signals at tracking stations along the optimal transport paths. As long as the value of cargo lost to such routes is less than taking another path, the transports will keep coming.
Tyler Mitchell
Say that to the Malaysian airplane, crew and passengers that they could not find some time ago. They had to use satellites to find it. There are places with no radar cover on Earth. The plane disappeared from a control tower radar and did not reappear on the radar of the next control tower on the route it was supposed to go.
Jackson Edwards
>The device would transmit a signal. >Thermic sensors and radio sensor, would translate that signal as "ehy there is a big ship here". >It does not have to be something that heats up for real, its more like hacking the sensors, or an informatic virus. Look pal, you clearly don't know what a thermal signature is and don't understand airgapping. Quit while you're ahead. Also, thermic? Really?
>The big ship device would be something that give the pirates the thermal and radio signal of a ship bigger than the pirate ship but not so big that it would be super strange.
A) Spacecraft don't normally have a radio signature that varies with size. B) You can't mimic drive plumes that are hotter than the melting point of tantalum hafnium carbide without actually making a drive plume, which means you're accelerating, which means that the drive signature can compared to your acceleration to determine your mass. C) Even if they only start tracking you after the piracy occurs you're still fucked.
Even in the modern day with pirates operating in places where they can disappear, they still rely on boats that orders of magnitude cheaper than the targets they're after because they absolutely will need to scuttle their boats and go to ground after doing a job.
Lucas Barnes
Also, depending on actual density of space travel, the fact that the Solar System isn't a unified whole probably puts some wrinkles.
Titan probably doesn't share their traffic control data with Jove, who don't share with the Consortium, etc. Spotting individual objects isn't hard, but we aren't currently in a system littered with spacecraft, space habs and smaller drones, platforms and probes. Now, I'm not an expert in telescope imaging, but I'd wager you can get some errors and misreads if your computer systems have to filter out a lot of bullshit and you have limited angles on something.
You can probably route around most such problems, but obviously we will never be looking at a detailed map of what space traffic is like in the system. If you're on a farhaul and an asteroid or a hab happens to get part of the way of the plane they need to maintain line of sight on you then the problem becomes logistics. You got a guy sitting out there you can call on the radio to look at it from a different angle? Do major shipping companies have telescope buoys littering the system? How hard is it to arrange one of those to have an accident? Can you cause a big, visible and noisy ruckus one place to cover for a smaller ruckus another?
Too many people in EP get fixated on technology magically solving issues when clearly it does not. So many human elements are left in the setting which can be exploited. It's like whining about how the Panopticon is invincible.
Christopher Rodriguez
>There are places with no radar cover on Earth. The thing about the Earth is that from any point on its surface most other points on its surface are invisible because there's a fucking planet in the way.
The point is that people like to track airplanes because they like to do investigations when bad things happen. This is entirely separate from the question of how easy it is to track spacecraft (really fucking easy).
>Maybe pirates set up chaff and drones that fire off confusing signals at tracking stations along the optimal transport paths. As long as the value of cargo lost to such routes is less than taking another path, the transports will keep coming.
The trouble with that is that a decoy that, for reasons already discussed, a decoy spacecraft must have the same mass as the spacecraft and the same engine as the spacecraft.
Zachary Jackson
>The thing about the Earth is that from any point on its surface most other points on its surface are invisible because there's a fucking planet in the way.
Depending on where your telescope is and where your ships are, there's a lot of shit that can get in the way in space too.
Carter Hill
>Titan probably doesn't share their traffic control data with Jove You can bet your ass they do when piracy occurs.
>in a system littered with spacecraft You're forgetting how big space is
>You got a guy sitting out there you can call on the radio to look at it from a different angle? If you don't then some other hab sure as hell does.
>Do major shipping companies have telescope buoys littering the system? They sure as fuck do if piracy is happening. Telescopes are really easy.
>obviously we will never be looking at a detailed map of what space traffic is like in the system Why not?
>How hard is it to arrange one of those to have an accident? A hell of a lot easier than arranging for lots of them to have accidents.
>Can you cause a big, visible and noisy ruckus one place to cover for a smaller ruckus another? No. That's not how sensors work.
Nicholas Davis
Maybe sensors can be decieved. Fire lasers in the right configuration at the tracking station and it maybe it can't give an exact picture of what is going on.
Also, once a ship is in transit, certain course corrections might be impossible to do while maintaining mission specs.
Again, we know for sure that pirates are a thing.
Just because you do not think it is possible to utterly defeat pirates does not mean the setting is like that.
William Cooper
All of that goes away if you have two telescopes.
Ryder Carter
Piracy that isn't highly violent doesn't invoke huge responses.
If it costs more to fight the pirates than the pirates steal, then the pirates are the rational price to pay.
Justin Evans
>Fire lasers in the right configuration at the tracking station and it maybe it can't give an exact picture of what is going on. It doesn't need an exact picture. It just needs to notice the guy running away with the stuff he stole.
>Also, once a ship is in transit, certain course corrections might be impossible to do while maintaining mission specs. So?
>Again, we know for sure that pirates are a thing. So they probably do it in little pieces of shit really close to fucking terrible places where they can throw away the spacecraft and disappear like real pirates.
Parker Hill
If the pirates are stealing less than operating cost of some telescopes then they aren't relevant to the plot.
Jayden Hughes
>You can bet your ass they do when piracy occurs.
Haha fuck no they don't. This is a solar system in cold war. If they're not stealing TITAN shit and they're not attacking your ships, nobody gives a fuck. The fuck would you help the jovians catch a pirate? You get fuck all from that because they're sure as hell not gonna share their intel data with you. You might log that on your own in case it comes up again, but share data with another polity?
>If you don't then some other hab sure as hell does.
Okay, that other hab is Anarchist and you're ComEx. They aren't taking your call, mate.
>Why not?
Well, the developers sure as hell are not going to make an accurate, comprehensive simulation of every body in the solar system and then realistically plot the exact numbers of space craft moving too and from each hab in real time. Rimward's technically out of date because we're still finding new shit in our solar system.
Are you gonna sit down and make it? Because I'm gonna ask where you're gonna get your data.
Aaron Price
If you can't beat technology, beat people.
Joshua Edwards
Go back to school kid. The USSR and USA maintained an extradition treaty during the Cold War.
Alexander Butler
Right, so when a shipper from Mars headed for Titan goes through the main belt and tries to use the bodies of that region to trim some dV use they go past an asteroid full of pirates who launch themselves at the ship, demand a portion of the cargo on penalty of blowing up the ship.
Then the pirates sell the goods on a bunch of other belt objects who have anarchist views, probably trading their ship too, and wait on another asteroid to repeat the process.
The Lagrange points of any other body probably provide similar opportunities for interdiction markets to skim off the top of trade.
And no one gets too bothered by it because dealing with the pirates or avoiding those regions would cost more than the pirates steal.
Jayden Jenkins
Or you're a faggot.
Camden Allen
The Commonwealth couldn't give away that data even if they wanted to. Orchestra would only release it when it became most immediately relevant and useful.
Evan Rivera
>goes through the main belt and tries to use the bodies of that region to trim some dV use Unless this is a many year journey using the ITN, guess again.
Regardless though, we're now far removed from the original pretend asteroid stealth system that was originally proposed and laughed at for being stupid.
Ethan Flores
He is a namefag already.
How could he not know himself for such?
Brody Brown
When is it okay to play a cute robot, whether or not it's a space pirate?
Chase Stewart
>Maintaining good relations with the Junta isn't useful, even when it serves a mutual interest
Hudson Baker
I honestly have no idea if it would be mutual with the Jovians. Remember, their plan for T-Day is to fort up and basically turn the entire Jovian orbit into a "fuck you" circle of every kind of comms jamming imaginable and hope the TITANs decide to skip it.
Luke Powell
Piracy is bad for everyone who isn't a pirate
Nolan Sanders
We do not know how good the orbital mechanics for optimizing travel is.
Also, maybe it is totally normal to do some small transactions along course with residents of belts and Lagrange areas. Firing off smaller shipments with enough dV to make them interceptable by the arranged locals.
Again, we know there are real pirate groups, the GM is free to come up with an explanation as long as it feels plausible.
Logan King
>Autonomists >Not pirates
Pick one.
Connor Sanchez
>We do not know how good the orbital mechanics for optimizing travel is. Correction: You don't know. Gravity assists are neglible and frequently impossible for high speed trajectories.
Bentley Thompson
OK, just keep insisting on not having any speculative tech in your speculative fiction.
Isaiah Gray
>Speculative tech changes the fundamentals of Newtonian physics
Charles Miller
It could be worse, you could insist on harmony and cooperation in your game of transhuman conspiracy and horror.
Nathaniel Hughes
"Those fuckin pirates that steal my stuff too went that way ->" isn't exactly harmony, particularly considering that even nations in declared wars sometimes have that level of cooperation.
William Johnson
>mfw all of the pirate groups are highschool girls in miniskirts, cosplay, and skintight body suits
Christopher Walker
Ah, I see, so they operate out of a Scum Swarm.
Jace Bennett
I am sure someone tried that.
If that anime survived, it is now a cherished relic of human culture.
David Brooks
>You can bet your ass they do when piracy occurs. Titan is allied with factions which openly support piracy (Extropia and some anarchists), they aren't going to share data on their allies activities with the Jovians.
LLA and PC habs probably share a ton of data though.
ITN shipments are probably some of the easiest to steal from as well. Given the fractured state of the solar system I imagine nothing too valuable gets moved with them.
Nathan Watson
Ok. So I've been reading the section about the Jovians since they're the cause of so many fucking flame wars on this thread and all I have to say is this:
They are fleshed out plenty, why anyone says they need to be "fixed" is beyond me. Anyone who praises them as being the best faction is a retarded fanboy who forgot that they have the most vulnerable mesh in the solar system. Oh, and for anyone who thinks they stand a chance against the TITANs, your fucking retarded. You can nuke them as much as you want but 10 years for a recursive god intelligence is enough time to develop an army massive enough that they'll just bleed you dry of all resources.
Dominic Long
Nope. They're rich, bored Venusian schoolgirls. They operate out of a secret aerostat.
>openly support piracy >Extropia >it literally violates the NAP
>your
Grayson Baker
I didn't realize you also were in the sky piracy business, Claudia.
Liam Phillips
...
Grayson Brown
>speculative tech
>it's the future, so throw out the laws of physics
Get the fuck out, faggot.
Liam Johnson
...
Colton Morgan
...
Eli Turner
...
Jose Gutierrez
I'm about to go full Hekatonkheires on a bunch of pirates with their suped up drone army.
Should I feel guilty I'm going this far, or should I embrace my role in the defense of a bunch of sexy nuns on the run?
>It's like whining about how the Panopticon is invincible.
The trick is pretty much always to exploit vulnerabilities in the human element, the problem with the majority of the arguments for why space piracy should be so easy from our awful namefag ignores the technical elements that would make it difficult. Yes, space piracy will surely exist, but you'll need to take into account the available technology to work out where you've got room to operate.
If you denied the existence of the Jovian navy, then pirating stuff around there would be a great idea. The rest of us might go: "Hold on, there's the Jovian navy to worry about...".
Our namefag's plan involves being able to scan down ships using sensor systems while the plan simultaneously calls for nobody else being able to know the whereabouts of ships.
Juan Russell
PirateGM from the previous thread here.
I ran it. It went like this.
>players scan their Belt space region and find a target >an automatic freighter carrying unprocessed fissionables >they decide to attack it >they even plot the interception course and don't fuck it up >players enter visual range >freighter hails them with a pre-recorded message that boils down to "dangerous contents, collision course, back down or we open fire in 10 minutes" >players refuse and continue their boarding attempt, without weapon fire though because if they destroy the ship the goods are irretrievable >freighter fires a mass driver volley, and hits >fucks up the players ship pretty bad, it's literally pierced straight through in multiple places, air, fuel and oxidizer are leaking, albeit slowly >players fire back, hit the freighter and fuck off to their base
Pretty underwhelming.
Landon Baker
You should give context, because that sounds great.
Sounds about right, space combat goes from 0 to dead really fast in remotely hard SF settings. Next time they should pack an accurate laser and poke out the targeting sensors.
James Price
Ex-Jovians hijacked a decommissioned destroyer and is on its way to the outer rim, our group is in a scum fleet, that it is currently visiting, while we double deal every single group we encounter.
The Ex-Jovians are full of civilians, and nuns that we invited to a coke-fueled orgy of degeneracy that only the scum could throw, just before they take the long trip to Uranus.
Unfortunately for them, one of our team members owed a big favor to a bunch of pirates, and twisted his arm for a HUEG weapons shipment in the millions worth of creds. Outfitting them with a dozen or so suped up Guardian Angel bots, and synths, armed plasma rifles, and seeker launchers etc...
He went along with it since he was also promised a cut of the share, because these pirates were going to hijack the ship these Jovians came in on, under the cover of a fleet wide communications blackout from a pre-announced hacker threat that notoriously was done before as a method to force everyone to harden their networks against intrusion.
As we learned who the pirates were going to attack, we decided, as the already horrible double dealing bastards that we are, to backstab the pirates, and maybe take their ship instead as payment. All the while acting like we're BIG FUCKING HEROES.
Jonathan Jones
>player is asked to help a sale of xenofungus found from a blackmarked gate site >sells the shit to some people >get a call from a mysterious John that would like to procure said xenofungus from group we already sold it to. >compete with a group of Ultimates that were also after it >steal back the xenofungus we sold after kicking the shit in of a group of Ultimates while looking like BIG GODDAMN HEROES >Firewall calls in wondering what we're up to >have to come clean with Firewall >Firewall oks the sale so long as we track the target >backstab mysterious John >also forknapped a psi-exsurgent cult leader for the mysterious John too, he wants a lot of "interesting" things >came in as heroic "EMT Volunteers" after a party member kicked in that cult leader's brain matter to goo >forknapped cult leader >gave both goodies to mysterious John with tracking nanos ready to latch on whoever is transporting the goods.
And now pirates, and sexy nuns.
All in under a single day in the Scum Fleet.
Christian Ramirez
Actually the original question was piracy in EP. What i proposed was building a device that tricks the sensors of the target ship and telescope that might track you as a way to do it.
Could be hahah
>>plan involves being able to scan down ships using sensor systems while the plan simultaneously calls for nobody else being able to know the whereabouts of ships. nope
meh
Carter Rogers
Hey guys, remember when we talked about creating an army of Nazi lolis using neotenics and AGI's?
Jeremiah Martin
This guy remembers.
Michael Morales
Yes.
Your waifus a shit.
Colton Morgan
...
Logan Cooper
It ain't bait, bro.
Logan Nelson
No one insults my waifu.
Owen Perez
...
Joseph Bailey
>if they destroy the ship the goods are irretrievable What are the contents in this case?
Carter Butler
It doesn't matter. Ship explodes (and it really fucking might), everything flies off into space. There are no magic tractor beams, you know.
Apparently it's updates, seeing some new terms on there.
Hudson Turner
>>Extropia >>it literally violates the NAP you've hit the nail right on the head there
Jayden Williams
Does the Recognition Guide have all the morphs because I swear I remember seeing a professional looking doc, with pics, that had morphs that aren't in the Guide?
Juan Martinez
Sadly, I think some of these new entries are even more cancerous.
Matthew Clark
>fapper
I love it. Totally will include it in my games. There's always at least one player who just won't quit rolling to fab EVERYTHING, it drives me up the fucking wall but I can't just forbid it.
Wyatt Cooper
Yeah, see, some of these are actually clever or funny.
And then some of them are just stupid and childish. "Skinbat"? "With missiles"?
Bentley King
Yeah. Nothing stops me from using the good ones and cutting out everything I don't like, though.
I even keep my games PG-13.
Gavin James
"With missiles" is kinda funny. I genuinely laughed at that.
I think it will get old soon if actually used, though.
Ayden Hall
Well, it is funny - as a joke. Good once or twice maybe as a punchline.
But the idea that people walk around saying "Hey, bro, fuck you with missiles" (or whatever that sounds like in your local language) in a serious manner doesn't click at all. Same with people using "Fail/Failure" on the same level as "cunt".
On the other hand, I could see somebody saying "I'm going to SELL YOU" with some serious venom and it have some serious implications in the EP world, just as bad as saying "kill" or "fuck".
Wyatt Johnson
To be fair, you don't often see "like the dickens" either.
Gavin Ortiz
Depends on how many anglo children you talk to.
Brody Smith
>Ship explodes (and it really fucking might) Why would that happen?
Dominic Sanchez
Telescopes and the military response to deal with the pirates.
Pirates don't stop being a thing just because you point out that they exist.
Julian Brooks
Why wouldn't that happen? If a drive gets damaged, it's almost certain. Metallic hydrogen is naturally unstable, plasma rockets actually heat hydrogen to plasma which requires ridiculous amounts of pressure and heat, same and even higher for fusion drives which are actually used in most long-range flights, and antimatter is fucking antimatter which is self-descriptive.
Connor Diaz
Y'know, last time this circulated, we actually came up with a decent number on our own. Anybody have any fun ideas lately?
I came up with something based on our recent spaceship discussion
>POP-TOP >A rocket motor or other propulsion system. Said because most systems are highly volatile and tend to "pop" if damaged. "POP THEIR TOP" is slang for taking out a hostile ship, sometimes broadened to killing or disabling someone in general.
Gabriel Diaz
Knowing where they went sure makes it a lot easier to forknap them though, plus you can also use that information to try to avoid them.
Metallic hydrogen would be a problem but isn't used in large amounts on long hauls because high acceleration isn't necessary and high delta v is.
Fusion reactors do not explode when they break.
If it's an antimatter courier then you're not going to catch it anyway.
Jason Ortiz
A fusion reactor would explode if the main chamber (y'know, the one with gas is in a state similar to the core of a fucking sun) is breached or magnetic containment is disabled. Both systems are pretty large in size and can be damaged.
Also, it's not a fusion reactor, it's a fusion rocket. And the game states that they are similar to plasma rockets.
Angel Evans
If a ship is using hydrogen for remass or fuel storing it as metallic hydrogen would make some sense. You'd save a lot of volume and not have to worry about hydrogen escape and embrittlement. That said, volume is probably not a huge concern for transport ships, and supermaterials can help solve the other two problems.
It's not really that much of an explosion. Plasma cools super fast, and isn't terribly energy dense. It's one of the primary reasons plasma weapons aren't very scary IRL.
Ethan Long
ATMO is atmosphere.
BIG DARK is space, naturally.
To DELTA somewhere is to proceed somewhere at high velocity. As in, "we don these drop suits, delta through atmo and hope that killsats miss us".
To SNORT VAC is to run out of air, for any reason. In some cases similar to modern "feed the fish".
DROP SUIT is a hardsuit for orbital drops.
To DISK someone is to fork-nap.
Christopher Richardson
It's not the temperature, it's the pressure. Try making a hole in an industrial-grade tank pumped with several atmospheres worth of room-temperature gas. You'll regret it. A fusion reactor would have several orders of magnitude more pressure.
Mason Flores
>A fusion reactor would explode if the main chamber (y'know, the one with gas is in a state similar to the core of a fucking sun) is breached or magnetic containment is disabled. No, it wouldn't. The magnetic confinement is the only thing making fusion happen. Breaching it makes the reaction stop.
>Also, it's not a fusion reactor, it's a fusion rocket. And the game states that they are similar to plasma rockets.
Yeah, so the reaction isn't even inside the spacecraft proper, making damage even less likely.
I would also expect metallic hydrogen storage to come with its own host of problems, with slow leakage being low on the priority list.
