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.
