Over interplanetary distances, do RKVs have a significant advantage over an equally powerful laser or particle weapon?
Jeremiah Gomez
Question is wrong. An energy weapon usually seeks to cook something, yeah? Think of an RKV as an asteroid. A really fast one. You can't really use energy weapons that are that 'big' because the power requirements are absurd. That's talking about the deathstar or something.
Okay, let's define an RKV properly. It's a big hunk of fuck you - which can be anything, really - accelerated up to near lightspeed. Charles Stross has a good one - they sit out in the oort cloud until activated, where they accelerate up to as close as they can get to lightspeed and shut off their drives. At that point, unless you saw it start the acceleration burn, it's pretty much invisible. And it's riding so hard on the tail of its own light that you can't prepare even if you do see it. Say someone launched one with magic technology an AU from earth at us, so there was no burn. They launch it at, say, .95c, travelling from its start point. It'd travel the distance in 504 seconds. Light would take 480 seconds. Give or take a bit because I'm too lazy to be exact. The big 'thing' about an RKV is that it's sitting on its light. You can't see it, or stop it, or prepare - it's 24 seconds behind the current light.
Jacob Rogers
What about the limits of a RKV in EP? One of the points is that the mass has to be high enough to actually be an efficient energy delivery system but not very high since you are aiming at something like 10-15% speed of light and the energy cost is always exponential.
Thats just to say if there can be rings of anti-RKV around moons and planets that can just put themselves between the RKV and the target asuming a response window of minutes(so... they would have to be in low orbit and their only function would be mitigating damage)
Jace Stewart
>questions as to the PC's legitimacy ignored in favor of flashier topics You must have replied to the wrong post. The PC's right to govern mars, the most populous planet in their empire, is a central question as to their legitimacy.
>their legitimacy already goes without saying No it doesn't. Nobody has satisfactorily demonstrated that they have a legitimate claim to the land and people they claim to rule.
Camden Walker
At very high speeds, like I said last thread, a few hundred kilos of ice would be fine. The fastest known ships are antimatter couriers in EP. I don't have the astrophysics background to do a mock up of an EP RKV for you. For most of EP, it'd be easier ot use conventional weapons, antimatter hand grenades, etc. The big thing for the RKV is how invisible it is.
Sure, you could surround a planet with huge rings of matter. That'd be a feat in itself. And they would have to be *huge* - this thing isn't going to stop until it runs out of momentum, and it has a *lot* of momentum at that speed. You'd outmass the planet. If you're doing macro-scale construction at that level, nobody cares about a piddly RKV. You're already God.
Brody Martin
Er, easier to use conventional weapons rather than point a ship at something. Chances are they'd see that ship burning towards them and point a few weapons at it. Then take steps to eliminate the hypervelocity shrapnel that would result.
Anthony Wright
Yes.
They travel at speeds in which the information of their existence comes with lag.
They can't be tripulated so they don't carry much heat by themselves, and anything that has a cross section of around 20m^2 and is around 4k is very hard to see in space.
And mostly... the point of such weapons is that any RKV will put a big hole in a planet, deviate moons and vaporice small celestial bodies.
John Torres
The one thing I keep on seeing from "Children of a Dead Earth" are the drones that fly in a circle squadron and unleash enough flashlights to melt anything that flies. Maybe thats one of the common space defenses? Laser drone squadrons.
Julian Allen
The problem is even semi-RKV at 0.3c is insanely dangerous. Nothing stops attacker to use a ship that uses multi-warhead second stage.
Where close to the target second stage detaches and it is a couple dozen of missiles with chemical drives that choose separate targets and use drives to evade PD fire.
Even small missiles at 1 kg mass will deliver around a megaton of energy each.
Kayden Hall
No.
Small lasers can reach beyond a thousand km. If you want long range lasers you need large ships with large mirrors. This way you can reach up to around 1/2 light-second. Maybe even a full light second for some spinal designs.
For longer distances you'll need to use something like X-ray lasers but they are really hard to do without handwavium.
Jason Brooks
> I don't have the astrophysics background to do a mock up of an EP RKV for you
RKV are a matter of logistics, even we could just strap engines to something and let it accelerate for years to destroy that weird planet in proxima centauri that is looking bad at us.
>Sure, you could surround a planet with huge rings of matter.
I was thinking of satelites, in the order of tungsten blocks surrounded by powerfull engines, and not for completly stopping the RKV but at least diminishing its effects.
I know that a RKV with 4,5x10^14 J of kinetic energy is destructive, what I don't know is what happens when it simply finds an obstacle in the middle; does it vaporice turning into plasma? How much energy is efectively transferred? How much does the mass of the obstacle counts?
I know that if I hit a billiard ball with another billiard ball the energy will be transfered, what I don't know is what happens with these superhigh energy systems.
Lincoln Kelly
I think you're missing the point of an RKV. It's that you don't see it coming, not in time to act on it.
Cameron Wilson
Okay, no, you're kind of fucked. Any 'satellite' or block of matter that is supposed to stop an RKV is either going to get annihilated and the RKV continue on, or the RKV is small enough that you could ignore it in the first place minus some small amount of damage. You can't really defend against them even if you can see them.
Michael Scott
Laser drones in Chode seem to have other functions that require high precision but not high power; like specialiced radiator destroyers.
In fact I found that powerfull lasers fill pretty well the function of PD, but on the gigawatt range, making the 100 enemy nukes go pop at very long range.
And since range in space combat is king, you can bet that you would rather have high power lasers in a few battlefortresses in orbit with huge radiators, instead of a distributed killsat network.
Maybe it would be like that idea in projectrho of hollowing an asteroid and filling it inside with radiators.
Matthew Price
It's one of the parts of the RKV. A really good part. The other is destroying everything on arrival.
In EP you probably can't make a full RKV without starting somewhere in Oort cloud and strapping a laser sail on the ship. Distances between planets are too small for ships to reach such high speeds.
Bentley Garcia
Mmn... I see there is no whipple shield equivalent for RKV.
But there must be some way to be safe from such weapons, is either that or abandoning anykind of planet colonization and instead filling the orbits with space stations that can just avoid the RKVs.
Ethan Peterson
>Maybe it would be like that idea in projectrho of hollowing an asteroid and filling it inside with radiators.
Radiators on the inside? Right...
Jayden Thomas
Yes, its not so retarded when you have a lot of volume and mass to transfer that heat, which is exactly what an asteroid would give you.
Dominic Miller
And, yet again, I'll say it: There are easier ways to cause wholesale devastation than going through the rigmarole of building the infrastructure required to assemble something that can get close to that level of lightspeed. With EP technology, you'd need to go to another system. So you'd have something turning up centuries later to hit something that isn't there. Antimatter is common-ish. 10kg of antimatter would vaporise earth, blind every sensor in the solar system pointing at it, sterilize the face of the moon and wreck the habitats facing earth, probably shred Venus too. A grenade is enough for most habitats.
A laser sail? Really? Are you mad? Is this insane troll logic?
Christian Edwards
then why are you hollowing it?
Carson Long
No, there isn't a way to 'be safe'. If you used the station example, orbital mechanics would make it nearly impossible - if you just boosted yourself out of the flight path if the rkv, you're safe. You're also out of orbit, so I hope you have al ot of reaction mass. Not to mention any damage done to your station by the sudden and unexpected acceleration - so unless you're throwing giant spheres into orbit with perennially ready rocket boosters studding every side..
Henry Young
To extract all that rock that can't transfer heat well, process it and create an efficient heat absortion system in the inside.
I guess I should have said heat sinks instead.
Jackson Phillips
Now that I think about it, producing 10kg of antimatter would probably involve almost as much energy as jamming something up to relativistic velocities. Panels, not sinks. Heat is the big killer in space - all current stations have had *huge* radiator panels. It's a bastard to get rid of.
Thomas Peterson
>You're also out of orbit
By definition I should have some boosters to compensate my orbital decay and I wouldn't require a very hard aceleration or displacement since the cross section of the RKV will probably be of a few meters.
The real problem is the window between knowing that an RKV is on my way and the acceleration capabilities of my station to actually alter the orbit(the RKV is not aiming at me, but rather where I will be so alter my orbit in advance is easy but a space station is clearly not designed for this)
Gabriel Johnson
Jesus fuck. Do you even read the posts of myself and the other person, or are you just hoping for the confirmation of your own theories on why everything works the way you want it to?
Liam Stewart
>10kg of antimatter would vaporise earth Wat. 10kg of antimatter is just what? 430 Gigatons. Earth gonna shrug it like nothing. Chicxulub was much more powerful and Earth is still here.
>A laser sail? Really? Are you mad? Is this insane troll logic? No. You make an antimatter ship. Strap a laser sail to it. And use both.
Joshua Scott
>Panels, not sinks. Heat is the big killer in space - all current stations have had *huge* radiator panels. It's a bastard to get rid of.
I know, its also the main reason stealth is either impractical or imposible in space.
But the point persists, you are making one giant battlefortress capable of absorving the heat of a powerfull laser for hours, it doesn't seem like a bad idea if you can pay for it.
Caleb Thompson
You can't alter your orbit in advance. Against RKV you have around a minute at best.
Asher Collins
You are asuming that the station would have to lose orbit, that is not true, increasing the radious of your orbit in 500m or 500m more eliptical is trivial and so I'm saying that since the RKV has a low cross section relatively to you its perfectly fine.
I'm also pointing out that the real limit is acceleration for an object that is not designed to accelerate fast, just to say that is hard but not imposible.
Ryan Long
A particle beam is a gas-phase RKKV which will spread out significantly during flight. Lasers will inevitably lose collimation. RKKVs either hit or miss.
Potentially pretty scary with perfect conversion of energy (literally never going to happen, or even get close) the antimatter fuel tank of a Destroyer can accelerate about 740 tons to 90% of light. Ignoring relativistic mass gain, which means 740 tons weighs ~1700 tons at 90% c. That means the actual mass you can accelerate will be a lot lower, but I'm not doing the math to find out exactly what it is. Probably still tons, but not very many. Bear in mind that this is still the perfectly efficient version, so an actual one with say 5% efficiency may be able to accelerate 50 kg to that speed. That's still nasty, but it's within the realm of a nuclear weapon.
I don't really like those antimatter numbers, they seem way to high for the rest of the setting.
EP ships apparently have a practical max speed of .5% c, so the acceleration burn for a .3 c RKKV-ship is easily months. That's a lot of time to divise countermeasures, or even launch your own strategic weapons. A big sign saying "In three months or more you die!" kind of defeats the purpose of an RKKV.
The weapon which is published and fills the roll of an RKKV is the pebble-swarm system from X-Risks (not called that, so don't control-F that term). It basically synchronizes the launch of lots of small pebbles so a whole high speed asteroid appears out of nowhere right on top of the hab. It's a lot less responsive, but much sneakier than an RKKV.
I thought ultra-big death lasers running off of molten-containment reactors was the current big thing there. Has it changed again?
Holy shit check your math there, 10 kg of antimatter won't even get close to destroying earth.
Benjamin Evans
> A big sign saying "In three months or more you die!" kind of defeats the purpose of an RKKV. Well it works similar to nuclear weapons in our days. Even if you hit your enemy first it won't save you from their counter-attack. Everyone will die.
Michael Ramirez
Against a cannon or magic RKKV you only have maybe a minute after it's fired. For a cannon you can see the huge structure changing facing to aim at something, and probably a bunch of energy signature changes as it prepares to fire. Dodging that should be possible, especially with FTL comms and how closely any RKKV installations would be monitored. (if any exist, as engineering a relativistic cannon weapon could easily be beyond transhumanity, or be impossibly massive).
A magic RKKV basically means the ETI is trying to fuck you, and that means that resistance probably means they remotely turn off all the molecular bonds in your space station or something equally crazy.
Rocket based RKKVs don't really have enough space to do a boost phase anywhere near their targets, and can be seen boosting very easily.
I don't think it's quite like that. In this case the missiles have already been launched, they just take a really long time to get anywhere. That's 3 months to devise countermeasures, or even just plan an evacuation. Intercepting an RKKV in it's boost phase should be possible, as should getting one as it coasts a great distance away.
Dominic Sullivan
Sorry. To be clear, your counter argument is what was ignored by the thread in favor of other things. I keep replying only to demonstrate that even if there are serious doubts to the consortium's claim to mars it gets swept under the radar and becomes a moot point.
Nathan Howard
...
Aaron Sanders
Why do you even want an RKV in your EP game?
Just fucking email the players some nice exsurgent strains if you want the campaign to go out with a bang.
Asher Young
It would be interesting to have a Stargate-like game where the players are gatecrashers and find out about a plan of some rogue TITAN version of creating several RKVs that will destroy Mercury, Mars, Earth, Luna, Europa, Titan... in 30 years since launch.
Christian Torres
>as engineering a relativistic cannon weapon could easily be beyond transhumanity MARAUDER supposedly cracked that problem back in the 90s, albeit for an extremely small projectile. 200 years later it's conceivable that someone might scale it up.
Liam Sanchez
A plasma toroid is not the same thing as an RKKV. We've also "cracked" it with the LHC, but that's not an RKKV either.
Chase Sanchez
...
Landon Barnes
...
Jayden Nelson
...
Xavier Wright
>An energy weapon usually seeks to cook something, yeah? No. They generally seek to flash-vaporize small pieces of it fast enough that the expanding vapor carries away even more material with it.
Matthew Young
>anything that has a cross section of around 20m^2 and is around 4k is very hard to see in space. Luckily, nothing anywhere near the sun is that cold.
Asher Russell
No, MARAUDER did not result in a working weapon system, though the results were useful for plasma beam confinement fusion.
Brandon Baker
>It basically synchronizes the launch of lots of small pebbles so a whole high speed asteroid appears out of nowhere right on top of the hab. It's a lot less responsive, but much sneakier than an RKKV.
This was stolen directly from 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, only that book made it way more plausible.
Jaxon Gutierrez
...
Tyler Robinson
RKVs buildable by transhumans in this setting won't do much harm to planets
Ryder Reyes
Is that a good read? I haven't read it.
Especially not against a planet with an atmosphere, where the vehicle will probably airburst very quickly.
Noah Ross
If if it has the mass and the velocity, the guy at the far end won't know the difference.
Tyler Collins
>Especially not against a planet with an atmosphere, where the vehicle will probably airburst very quickly. At such speeds burst won't save you. It will just transform into a plasma cone and burn everything.
Ian Foster
>airburst
A 9x10^17J projectile impacting an atmosphere of the Earth would probably convert the atmosphere into a fireball with all that oxygen and flamable matter.
Austin Martin
>find asteroid filled with exsurgent nastiness >RKV it >launch it at someone >oh that's bad - luckily it will just create a fuckhuge plasma cone and torch our surface facilities >people get out of their bunker >OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD
:D
Anthony Brown
Ehh, considering that there will be multiple gigatons of energy in that blast I doubt only surface facilities will be damaged.
Parker Gonzalez
Technicalities mate. The point is that this provides a nice "oh shit" black swan event for the players.
You expect a disaster, but are given a brand new quarantine zone on Mars instead.
Lucas Rogers
Ahh yes, that retarded part where exsurgent and TITAN shit somehow can survive energies capable of splitting atomic bonds.
Zachary Green
>hurr durr what's lovecraftian horror and clarke's third law i dunno how to do scifi horror imma dum
The fact that it's so impossible for todays engineers (or EP engineers for that matter) makes it even more horrific.
Grayson Young
Nah, it makes it retarded. Together with psi it completely kills the 'sci' part.
Dominic Price
Sure, if by everything you mean a very localized area
William James
You cannot realistically portray technology beyond-human-understanding by just coming up with technologies we can imagine today.
You need to use some imagination, some fantasy to come up with semi-realistic beyond-human technologies.
Matthew Mitchell
Well localized is a relative term. There are still gigatons of energy and after they impact the surface they will try to spread.
Leo Myers
10^18 J of heat magically injected into Earth's atmosphere would raise the temperature by less than one thousandth of a degree.
Anthony Smith
Problem is the technologies imply certain things about physics of the setting. In this case implications are pretty shitty.
Carter Perez
There wouldn't be multiple gigatons of energy. Not even close. Antimatter drives have very low efficiency.
Benjamin Reyes
>RKV asteroid with rocket >before impact disengage rocket from asteroid >fly rocket into the wake of the RKV's destruction
Oh so difficult.
Isaac Nguyen
>Antimatter drives have very low efficiency. Wat
Robert Turner
And how you are going magically to drop rocket speed from 0.9+c to
Colton Murphy
First, over half of the annihilation energy is lost as pions and neutrinos. Next, over half of the remaining energy goes into your radiators rather than your propellant. Then, 99% of that energy is carried away in the propellant. Then, the tsiolkovsky equation rears its ugly head and reduces it by probably a factor of five.
Levi Powell
Compared to other drives it is still much better.
I also don't see how it stops a chunk of metal moving at near light speed from having gigatons of energy in it. Or how it stops from it impacting a target and transforming it into a molten glass and plasma clouds.
Jaxson Cook
What happens when you fire two RKV's at each other?
Cameron Martin
Grand Moff Tarkin high fives you.
Grayson Hall
No, it's actually considerably worse than most
Ethan Johnson
>a chunk of metal moving at near light speed from having gigatons of energy in it. If we assume 100% efficient conversion of matter to kinetic energy without considering the tsiolkovsky equation, you would still need more than 50% of the mass of the final projectile in antimatter to achieve that.
Asher Martinez
And who cares? 50%? 99%? As long as target is vaporised what's the difference?
Jeremiah Evans
A factor of several hundred difference in necessary antimatter
Landon Brown
In EP antimatter is measured in tons for major players. So they are perfectly fine.
Isaiah Ramirez
Can you use an RKV in a way similar to a nuke-powered x-ray laser?
If that is possible, you can put an RKV-powered x-ray laser inside the RKV, and make that laser shoot out some laserbeam coded with some exsurgent code.
Any system that detects the laser gets infected.
Christopher Garcia
That's no where near enough
Benjamin Fisher
Only if they execute the code
Anthony Lopez
What about putting a basilisk in the laser beam?
Cooper Cooper
They typically aren't interpretted by eye.
Joshua Perez
I mean, use the laser to burn a basilisk into fucking mountains, a moon, a planetary surface or something similar.
Carter Thomas
Why? 1 kg of "payload" even at 0.3c will have around 10^16 J. Due to requirements for drive size it probably will be around 10^4-10^5 kg or something similar.
The retarded destroyer design from the core book has 150 tons of antimatter. And Mars, Jovians and Titan all have at least a dozen of them. That's not counting battleships/dreadnoughts and smaller ships like couriers that too use antimatter.
John Edwards
Too unreliable. You'll need to drop a probe first to get readings on soil/stone composition. Than you'll need to predict weather and so on, and so on.Or your basilisk will have too many mistakes in it to work.
And even then it have a chance to work only on more advanced civilisations with satellites. Primitives will never receive your message because by the time they will be able to read it will be destroyed by weather and geological processes.
Asher Collins
Because bad efficiency plays poorly with the rocket equation. No matter how you slice it, an antimatter rocket RKV will do quite a few orders of magnitude less damage than a bomb using the same antimatter.
This is totally ignoring the low thrust of higher efficiency systems, which would necessitate light years of run-up distance.
Joshua Taylor
But if you can use a particle beam to accelerate a weapon towards the target, why not turn it around and use a weapon to accelerate a particle beam towards the target?
Michael Long
Dispersion
Julian Barnes
But there is no other way to get a craft up to such a high speed besides antimatter. If the damage was the sole point of RKV it would have been much cheaper to just throw a couple dozen fusion bombs at your target. Antimatter costs too much to produce in high quantities but as a substitute for plutonium in fusion bombs it would be okay.
Sebastian Rodriguez
...
Grayson Wright
...
Lincoln Thomas
...
Liam Smith
We have all these amazing ideas of what the spaceships of the future are going to be like. Gigantic titans of war and metal throwing death like Zeus from upon Olympus. But in reality, they're are going to be fucking tubes with rockets at one ends, laser/warhead at the other, and retros dotted around the exterior.
...
Although, we could go the WH40K route and just glam them up with some useless gilding/architecture.
Which brings up a question. How/Would Transhumans decorate the interior/exterior of their Hab/Spaceship/Colony dome?
Liam Sanchez
...
Bentley Lee
...
Juan Campbell
...
Brody Bell
...
Thomas Phillips
...
Julian Rogers
Yes, but in EP the antimatter production is not high enough to use RKVs as planet killers, or probably effectively at all.
Nathan Reyes
...
Connor Hernandez
>psi powers don't belong in the genre that birthed them This is why Trump is president, folks.
