Spaceships

Spaceship thread 3: Interiors Edition
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What's your favorite way of dealing with shipboard gravity? Full realism, Treknobabble, or just saying that ships have artificial gravity and ignoring the why?

Full realism. Even those"constant acceleration" ships is too soft for me. I want to see some spins or no gravity.

mass projectors. use "quantum physics" to have variable amounts of mass in needed directions. also useful for moving large objects and applying force

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I've always liked the idea that artificial gravity only works in FTL due to technobabble. That way you get gravity, but you can also have all sorts of fun without it, without any extra work.

Where's this from?

Eve online. Dunno the specific source of the pic though.

What are the most plausible explanations for gravitic manipulation technology a la mass effect? What would the consequences and applications be.

Wow I should have read the posts before mine, someone asked almost the same question

Just have artificial gravity. I don't need to work out the technicals to tell a story, unless they're important to the story.

Sometimes it'll be big centrifuges. Other times, there are just gravity generators in the deck.

How do you classify your ships Veeky Forums?

Do you retain the old designations of water-bound warships for traditions sake? Do class them by role and function? Do you create entirely new designations for spacefaring vessels?

Do you do something else entirely?

Genetic engineering to mitigate the long term health effects of microgravity.

I am thinking of using old water-bound designations. I.E. no destroyers or cruisers, but instead galeons, galleys, carracks. And frigates finally coming back as one of the top ships, instead of chaff they are now.

As appropriate for the campaign. I'm not going to be assblasted about realism in Star Wars.

Which of these got most realistic (more or less) spaceships and space combat?
1) Star Wars
2) Star Trek
3) Babylon-5
4) Battlestar Galactica
5) Stargate

I haven't watched single one of those, but I need some spaceship design tips.

The first consequence is perpetuum mobile.

The second consequence is fapfic about how Space Libertaria gets the gravity stuff from stupid aliens who don't understand the implications. Also the aliens are Greens so the NAP doesn't apply because fuck those guys.

Really, just pay attention to the consequences you think are neat. Deliberately ignore the rest.

B5. It's not hard sci fi by any means, but its ship designs like the Starfury fighter at least pay lip service to being space designs, not just WW2 fighter planes and ships in space.

none.

Here what you have to look for in realistic spaceships.

>Radiators, handwave antimatter engines all you want but you cannot handwave thermdynamics and those say that or you either radiate your heat out or you build it up inside and die.
>huge propellant tanks, you might use fission fuel, fusion fuel or wathever but you use to heat something and expel it out to gain momentum and that requires a shit load of propellant mass and hence volume. Also, this implies the use of nozzles.
>floor perpendicular to thrust axis, spaceships are not wetships, when you accelerate you are applying force against your crew, and it better be a force against their feet.
>No FTL or FTL communication, or you will see very extrange things like spaceships exactly like yours appearing and dissapearing out of existance, or the construction of your ship engines 3 years ago.
>No spacefighters, like none at all, they are not useful in space for being too small, underpowered and still requiring a lot of mass for the pilot, unmanned spacedrones is another thing.
>No stealthy ships, pretty much for the first reason, and no, going cold and quiet might only mean that they will detect you at the distance between Earth or the Moon and in a space faring civilization I would say that probably much further. And still cold and quiet means slow, extremely light, vulnerable... so is not really viable. Want stealth? Trick people but you will not trick sensors detecting your heat.


And I don't know if I left anything, but if I were to put a ranking between all of those... they minor or less fail at exactly the same points so I don't know if one is superior to the other in any meaningfull way.

>Want stealth? Trick people but you will not trick sensors detecting your heat.

I'm not even sure of this proposition. Those who chafe at the idea of there being "no stealth in space" when both sides have the capacity for a wide variety of sensors often propose that vessels use decoys of some kind to trick the enemy. I don't think this would work very well, and several hard sci fi settings elaborate on it as well.

Even if your decoy gives off the same heat signature as the main ship, it must have the same kind of propulsion system as the ship it is trying to imitate. If these propulsion systems are not the same, all the enemy would have to do is examine the plume of exhaust and see the difference. If you have the same means of propulsion for both ships, you must have the same masses as well. If the masses are different, the acceleration values for each ship would differ as well, and the enemy could pick out the decoy easily.

If we go the decoy route, you can try to reconvert your military spaceships into civilian vessels by exchanging their engines and using your smaller military vessels, so you can cover them in the "skin" of a much larger civilian vessel. But its not that simple you will have to:

>Make the mass exactly the same, otherwise the enemy will see that there is something weird with your acceleration
>Have the same activity and heat than a civilian spaceship, which might be problematic if the civilian spaceship is more automated(as it happens with tankers today) and require less crew.

But then, you are not being stealthy, you are trying to deceive in plain sight which is very different.

Another variation is convincing everyone that your cargo ship carrying containers filled with anything else but missiles, drones or space marines(pretty much like the soviets in Afganistan). But again is not stealth, its deception.

Now, I read a stealth design based around a giant lens heating a tungsten rod to use propellant and He or hydrogen going on the outer hull, absorbing heat and being used as propellant expelling that heat too. The problem is that making the calculations it only works if the enemy just happens to have very dense almost static sensors in one location and you can give them the cross section you want. In realty as soon as you have two sensors separated that ship could be detected at the distance between Earth and the Moon.

And even if it works on the crossection you want, it still would be detected(if I remember correctly I did this months ago) at something like 10 kilometers or so, which is plenty of time for a response, and as you guess, this ship design is for infiltration and concentrated attacks, it lacks any defenses or enough dry mass for carrying more weapons than specifically needed(or they might not be enough)

not THAT realistic, thank you

it looks cool. guess gotta watch the series now.

I'm actually messing about with a rather soft SF setting that will allow for stealth. Basically computers are shit meaning long range detection is shit.

Oh, and it's got fighters too. Fighters provide close control of ship missiles and at some point release it to the shitty automatics for the final attack run. And they probably carry a few smaller missiles and a nuke autocannon.

Most realistic would be B5 and BSG. Vipers are at least sometimes shown maneuvering in a vaguely realistic manner, ships are clunky as hell, weapons are kinda crap.

Stargate has some points. Tech development, alien handwavium tech being better than ours, Earth soldiers being monsters compared to the guys raised from birth to oppress any lowtech locals that get uppity.

Star Wars kicks realism to the curb but uses the language of realism, and you get people reacting realistically to things, at least sometimes. I don't know if the language thing makes it even less realistic than Star Wars.

Star wars just doesn't give a shit. Any attempt to quantify Star Wars stuff in real terms just won't work. Star Wars has some of its roots in the Lensman books, and those were written by an actual scientist who gave a lot of shits at work and had none left for when he wrote funny books.

I love both Star Wars and Lensman, and those ungiven shits are definitely part of it.

> Basically computers are shit meaning long range detection is shit.

There are solutions to this problem, when you limit the ability of the computers you can scale the computers into supercomputers and centralize complex processing. The real problem of this is that you are stuck with 1970 tech on many levels. You never had the ability to make physics simulations and so many things like miniaturization or optimization will suffer a lot.

Also, you do not really complex computation power to have at the very least autonomous missiles. Simple electronics and IR sensors are pretty much enough and we made them with "simple electronics" around the vietnam era, is just that your missiles will not make complex things like dodge CIWs and their accuracy will suffer but not in a meaningful way(nukes have like a 1km effective explosion radious in space)

Just think that the ZSU-23-4 could track and destroy air targets with precision up to 7 km away with a radar based around vacuum tubes. And the Mig-25 did something very similar.

Of course, I'm not saying that your setting is shit, only that there are more implications. After all, humanity could have been an interplanetary species with just 1970s tech but there wasn't a political will to establish the needed orbital logistics(and I'm looking down on both sides; the redneck military wasters and the leftards welfare queens)

Dammit user, now I have to elucidate.

The basis of the setting is something like "being human is enough" - it started with a discussion I had with a friend years and years ago where he put that forth as a bit of reaction to the whole transhumanist thing.

So you get a setting where there's a huge space effort from the 50s on, but computers never take off for reasons. Then on August 13 1999 an orbiting nuclear waste processing/power station gets a semiautonomous control system installed and goes boom. Cue Kessler cascade.

Turns out there's a terrible secret in space that makes digital computers go bugfuck. The more exposed they are and the more complex they are, the greater the risk.

The moon colonies realize they're fucked and band together to survive. Things are iffy but then they find an alien flying saucer the size of a carrier. It's got a reactionless drive and hardware to install direct neural interface gear, and it's obviously built for humans.

Also there's traces of transuranics in the drive, reactors and such.

It's also very good for the Mars outpost who were truly fucked.

Anyway, centuries pass and it's time to go Star Trekking.

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>Another variation is convincing everyone that your cargo ship carrying containers filled with anything else but missiles, drones or space marines(pretty much like the soviets in Afganistan). But again is not stealth, its deception.

This is an interesting idea, but I doubt it would work. I imagine space vessels made for a purely civilian purpose would have relatively low thrust and put more of an emphasis on efficiency of their engines over the higher accelerations that a military engine might have. Thrust would be more useful to a military ship so that it could have a high acceleration and dodge projectiles, I suppose. The low acceleration of a civilian trading vessel might make it a sitting duck unless its opening salvo destroyed the enemies.

Also, if you essentially convert a civilian shipping vessel into a "Q-Ship" then it can basically only be used once. After your first attack ends, the enemy would probably treat all shipping vessels from your group as potential warships, and shoot them on sight.

So the Big Thing about the campaign is that people do stuff, and to pull that off we need some severe limits on what can be done with computers.

The sensor thing isn't absolute by the way. Lower tech factions (Earth is digging itself out of that category) will use nuclear pulse and torch ships, and those are a lot easier to see when thrusting than the saucers. Active sensors will give you away as well.

Ships are tens of thousands of tons or more, fighters 500-1000 with torch drives, missiles maybe 100 with torch drives and carry some sort of Casaba-Howitzer like warhead.

Penetration is a gamble - one close range nuke hitting would at least mission kill most ships but you're looking at a lot of defense. Defensive missiles, rapidfire cannon, (kinetic clusters? nukes?) maybe a laser. I'll have to tweak thigs so you don't have to spam excessively.

And the role of the fighter is to shepherd the missiles (maybe a brace of 4) and give the limited automatics the best possible shot.

So yeah, I agree with you but I want a setting that works in a particular way and I'm not afraid to tweak it. Thanks for bringing the Soviet hardware up, got me thinking!

> then it can basically only be used once.

In reality, these kind of operations are under the justification of "high risk high reward" like imagine the enemy has a laser web of 1TJ on Earth and you can't do anything until you destroy at least 3 nodes of such a web, then any operation which tries to destroy the web will be justified no matter the cost.

Full realism, UNLESS you actually deal with the implications of having casual technological mastery over gravity within the story.
40k really triggers my autism (unfortunately), because antigrav technology is described as rare and arcane (the Landspeeder is the only skimmer vehicle in any Imperial army, afaik), yet every ship has reactionless drives and artificial gravity. Or Battlestar Galactica, where you can't make defensive shields and you're desperately low on all resources, but you have magitech antigravity running 24/7 on every one of your ships. FUCK.

>40k really triggers my autism...
i always think it's like with tech in Asimov's Foundation

ship-sized shields and reactors and whatnots are common enough, but person-sized shield is seen as magic. same with anti-grav in 40k. Ships take centuries to make and can carry grav technology and void shields like standard issue, but for tiny things like Land Speeders it is really rare

Having none at all. Spaceflight is uncomfortable to the unaccustomed, and so is gravity to spacers. Stations can rotate for artificial gravity, but it doesn't mesh well with moving/steerable objects.

It's too difficult to shed the language of water-bound navies, so I go the other direction and embrace it - shuttlecraft are called pinnaces and launches, there are galleons and menowar and ironclads, enlisted men are called ratings, etc. Like The main distinction between ship classes is whether they're 'ships of the line', generally only deployed in fleets against other fleets, or not. 'Patrol' class ships are the frigates, cruisers, etc with enough delta-v and specialised systems to go on patrols, wave the flag, perform rescue or interdiction operations, explore newly claimed territory, carry ground troops, etc. Ships of the line, Line ships, sacrifice delta-v and versatility for fighting power, and they need to be supported by tankers & tenders if they're deployed for very long.

Otherwise, ships are just divided by how big and expensive they are. A small Patrol ship would be a frigate, while a small Line ship would be a destroyer, etc.

In our last campaign, ship gravity was produced as a side effect of the ships powerplant. Gravity varied depending on how far you were from it, with the engine room being nearly 2g's and the outter areas of the ship being 0.5. All the living areas were in the 1g area and all the cargo out on the outter circle where it was lighter.

'No stealth in space' is fatal to so many potential plots and dramatic devices, which sucks because it's pretty ironclad. Then again, so is the speed of light, and it's generally okay to break that rule for plot purposes so long as you think through the implications.

I've considered just pretending that telescopes are just a few thousand times shittier (or that the inverse square law is more like the inverse cubed law), and realistic NOSTEALTH4U only kicks in at closer ranges, based on the size of your sensors and the target's heat plume. I know it's a huge sci-fi hardness sin, but it prevents everyone in the story from constant strategic omniscience, so long as you don't think too hard about it.

The main problem with stealth (or rather with detectability) is the extremely small angular size an incoming ship has. To have constant active 360° detection at a decent range requires an ENORMOUSLY high powered system. It doesn't really matter that a ship has high heat output. Ships are tiny compared to planets and stars, so their footprint at such scales is small, and you can't be looking everywhere at once. Modern images of stars require long exposure times to get decent results, and that's not really an option when it's an inbound enemy spacecraft.

I wish I had the autism to actually play this game

Battlestar Galactica is pretty obvious about their gravity being generated by a complex wedon'thavethebudgetforthat generator

>a huge space effort from the 50s on,
A man can dream indeed.

>The more exposed they are and the more complex they are, the greater the risk.

Uuuh, ok this really sounds like hard unexplained handwavium. If you don't want powerfull computers there is really no need to explain, there is the whole rocketpunk genre and if you really want a hard explanation about why computers are not added into the equation you can do things like the soviets being the ones leading the space race by a landslide, they had computers but mostly stolen from the west and if the west sees that there is no need for powerful computers for space exploration and colonization and at the very least this confines computers into an engineers field for decades for lack of investment.

Just to say that there are options and everything can be explained in detail, I would not recommend the total suspension of disbelief route of Star Wars or even Star Trek.

>alien flying saucer

Not to say much here, but I would say that is quite dangerous. The implications of reverse engineering or simple imitation of alien tech ramify like a spiderweb, anything can happen and it needs to be plausible within the context of the story and taking into account the complete context of your setting, I would not dare to do such a thing since I don't like the idea of forcing things under the "suspension of disbelief"

>thousands of tons or more

I would ask for the mass ratio of the ships but I don't even know if you have calculated those. Either way, way take into account that moving such mass requires a big amount of energy, to the point where you might start to get relativistic kill vehicles and at least one level of the kardashev scale, I would say that If you can convert that energy into electricity there is no point in missiles at all since you can use it for fuckhuge lasers that will destroy anything from planet to planet(unless it maneuvers, relativity is a bitch)

I wish that were true, but it just isn't. Any vaguely interesting (non-ion) drive is going to be the brightest thing in the sky (apart from the local sun), it isn't hard to seed your territory with a few thousand cheap, tiny statites to form a sensor network. The space shuttle's launch rockets would be visible from Pluto.

>The more exposed they are and the more complex they are, the greater the risk.

Eh, it isn't hard to imagine some Eclipse Phase-tier transhuman threat that's really good at affecting the computers that humans build, but not good at affecting humans themselves. It would have to be a discussed (if not absolutely central) part of the setting, but it doesn't have to be handwavium.

>To have constant active 360° detection at a decent range

I doubt it, you are scanning for a spaceship that is moving at a "slow" speed(months or more of travel time) and is as bright as a lightbulb in the middle of the dark(if it has people it needs to be at least at 293K over a space that if I remember correctly was at around 2 kelvin so 146.5 times the background temperature.

And you can guess that if there is space traffic there is going to be a lot of interest in space sensors everywhere, so for example; if a Spaceship has a problem and ends up drifting in orbit you might be very interested in detecting its position at any given moment even if the only heat left is the one from the barely functioning reactor.

>AV: T

I really like that setting and the concept of the game itself, but I feel it would be better as a turn based computer game than an actual tabletop game. It is far too time intensive and obscure for any one to have any real interest. It would be very difficult to convince somebody to invest several hours into learning about space autism games when space autism combat is u-unfortunately very unpopular.

To be honest I liked the setting and the autistic descriptions of the ships more so than the actual fighting in the game itself. I'd rather have an encyclopedia about the Ten World setting and all the spacecraft, military and civilian and all the wars they fight in rather than rules to a boardgame that is too obtuse and obscure to play.

>tfw you will never defend Concord from the Caliphate of Medina with your 2nd rate Wasp Destroyer and your pack of York Class Gunboats

why even live

>terrible secret in space that makes computers go bugfuck
We're already hitting a wall on that IRL. It's called "cosmic rays." Unless you build a 100% rad shielded ship, you need each individual computer rad hardened, and as of yet there's no (unclassified) way to rad-harden anything smaller than a 65nm fab process. This means the ISS laptops are still rocking Core 2 Duo chips from a decade ago.

Now of course rad shielded ships are a necessity for exploring the gas giants, much less interstellar space, but that does put lower bounds on how small a ship's mass can be.

talking about space stealth and gravity, if a spacefaring civilization has access to artificial gravity, they might as well use it to warp space around their ship, kind of inverse gravity lens, shielding themselves from detection (but, likely, blinding themselves in that direction as well)

This could add a layer of finesse to space stealthing, as you'd have to
a) navigate in the blind: memorize the area you're sneaking in, use a satellite that observes stuff and sends you data from uncloaked direction, etc.
b) avoid detection by indirect means. Gravity lens cloak will warp some rays' trajectories, so you'd have to approach "downwind" from large radiation sources

Children of a Dead Earth is honestly pretty close - it has a similar dedication to realism, just at a lower tech level (feasible NTRs rather than high-efficiency fusion torches).

I'd love to see a game that was similar, but traded open-endedness for balanced, properly-paced multiplayer. But as you say, it's a pretty niche market.

Yeah, there are some handwaviums involved. The computer problem, the reactionless drive (which has a lot in common with jump drive and FTL comms; you can build an Orion jumpship or a comms station, some machinery like the DNI installer) I could just say NO to computers but it's Star Trek-ish; at one point the _Tycho Brahe_ will run into clues why this is as it is.

(It's Lovecraftian and can do as it wants, basically making computers puts you at risk of a von Neumann disaster that ends with a disassembled solar system made of stupid machines calculating _something_. Hoyle steady state or oscillating universe may be involved. And those systems generate the whatever.)

You'll mainly get humanoid aliens. You can sorta talk to the gas giant dwellers but not really exchange goods. Earth whales are subsentient but not all whales. There are no sauroid aliens above ape level. (there's a sauroid supercivilization that exterminates them) The Signal (the freaked computers) "communicates" only in white noise. There may be people living in Dyson spheres built by machines that craft defensive shields around gamma ray bursters, as parasites - those could be a source for the supermetals. They'd be insanely advanced to us but again, parasites.

You can do a lot with the alien tech, but you require insanely rare transuranics. (DNI and transuranics, yes I really like Delany's _Nova_) But most of it has already been done - reactors, reactionless drives, torch drives.

I have deliberately steered away from hard numbers on drives. The saucers are RKKVs by definition though jump points (zones?) a few light hours out would make it hard to get your speed up unless you first went outward. Or went the long way.

I think I'll arbitrarily set delta vee for a "normal" torch ship to a few hundred km/s and Orions at less than a hundred. One thing is that lowtech ships can generally pull more gees than saucers but saucers can run their drives for at least months.

Cool - it's sort of obvious in retrospect but cool.

I suspect "lead" is an unclassified way and "use hardware that doesn't need to be encased in 50 pounds of metal" is the problem with that.

I've put a great deal of time into Children of a Dead Earth, about 156 hours or so. Most of it was spent testing out various builds and modules. The game is good, but it is severely lacking in content that would make it great. I really wish there was some kind of 4x style mode to the game, or at least a dynamic campaign where the ships you and the enemy had were largely persistent between fights, rather than having complex orbital puzzles to solve basically. It does get a bit boring when the most optimum designs are basically min maxing to the extreme, and the game devolves into lasers burning each other, or lag inducing hordes of missiles and one gram kinetic dust.

The game also needs more variety in the modules one can create, especially things like nuclear pulse propulsion and particle beams. If only Qswitched was able to put more time into the game, or have a more mod friendly game.

Pic related is best faction beyond any doubt, RSF pig dogs please die

Oh, a quick dump on what the PCs have to deal with.

After some decades some people including most of the saucer's crew had decided that it was absolutely necessary to open up contact with whoever was out there. There was some drama and off they went on their five year mission.

They did pretty well, but a local major power found out what was going on and decided they needed a trading partner willing to accept shitty terms, maybe after some demonstration strikes.

So a fleet wades into Sol where we've got America, Russia, EU, China and Japan waving their fusion powered murderdicks at each other.
So these people wade in, tell us we're a colony, shoot off a few nukes at places like the sea off of major cities, and get stomped.

We get a better deal. Not so good that they'd have to bring a fleet that knew they couldn't afford to fuck around.

One big deal is that Earth is united, but only as far as everyone else is concerned. There is a UN with serious teeth, but there are limits. The Big Five have gotten pretty good at getting along and everyone else can just deal. Most countries are affiliated with someone.

So you get the ship _Tycho Brahe_ - it's crewed by Scandinavians but there's a bunch of EU personnel. Some of them are spies. There's some guys from the other powers. They're probably spies. (being a spy will be a character option) Spy doesn't mean saboteur. They're good and highly motivated but everyone knows they report to home.

Thanks to the square cube law it's far more efficient to just shield the entire ship or station at once if you're going for the lead approach, considering how many circuits there are on a spacecraft.

b-but square-cube law exists to screw people over, it can't be possibly employed for any benefit!

What I did in my sci-fi settings instead focus on making it smaller. I've got a single ship from the Union of Democratic Forces for Galactic Unity trying to help an overcrowded Water World where everyone lives in a really big !Oil Rig, while dealing with attacks from the People's Republic of Space Chad.

The Solar System is crowded with satellites, as well as a fair number of Asteroid mining facilities, so shooting every box coming and going isn't possible. Boxes big enough to store a few soldiers, maybe a lot of weapons for rebels that will go off-course at the end of its journey, even letting you sneak in fighter jets to cause trouble on the other side of the planet.

Stealth doesn't work against an armada, but a single ship occupied with all its other tasks in a busy area can be fooled.

The setting I'm working in has different humans nations than have Terra as a sort of spiritual leader. They all have they own nomenclature and stuff (like Space Control Ship, Drone Star, Harmonious Pacifier etc) but they are all also classified loosely be the Terra archive be weight and function. So a Space Control Ship is a war ship than is less than 1.000 t and doesn't have an autonomus FTL engine, it's a guncraft/gunship (cañonera) with the codename of patrol for his function, so patrol gunship. A Drone star, being a civilian ship with heavy militar capabilities and FTL engine, and being mid cruiser sized (100kt or more), it's a Carrack with the mothership moniker. The Harmonius Pacifier, it's a leviathan (+10mt), extremely rare and mostly alien owned, with the label of Star Destroyer because it can destroy anything in a star system (and I love Star wars).

>antigrav technology is described as rare and arcane (the Landspeeder is the only skimmer vehicle in any Imperial army, afaik), yet every ship has reactionless drives and artificial gravity
Every ship is described as rare and arcane, so it could be justified.

The main problem is that it's easy to say a ship is 'over there', but much harder to fix its position well enough to kill it. There's a critical distance beyond which you're just shooting at a pixel and hoping for the best.

>unmanned spacedrones is another thing.
Aren't they call missiles or something?

Not if you stick a cannon or laser in them.

Missiles are kamikaze/snackbar suicide drones. Reusable drones fire missiles/lazors/nukes/railguns of their own.

Deck plans count as interiors right?

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sure do
gief moar

do they have more for the Minmatar fleet?

>solid-core NTR

>horrifying

I agree, he should have used gas core instead, he could get more payload for any given amount of fuel with that closed cycle engine instead.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb