This clusterfuck of drums and girders are kewler than your sleek chrome-plated space fighter because it's...

If it doesn't have sleek, one piece hull and fins, I'm not interested.

a blend within reason is often the best way to introduce a scifi setting, too much of either is generally not fun unless you're catering to a very niche audience

Most of them don't know how to make interesting designs but they figure no one can criticize them for it if they copy whatever the internet says is realistic.

I generally reject synthesis, but it has its moments.

You would assume older ships, build in modules, to have a more "realistic" look to them, while more dedicated, built in orbit ships, had a more solid hull. Maybe with a possibility for modules to be added. Would think modularity has structural weaknesses, where as a single solid hull could enable faster turns and acceleration/deceleration without ripping all the connections apart. So something like military crafts would probably benefit from a single hull.

Fans of realism, whether it be hard sci-fi or practical armor and weapons are like vegans. It's not enough that they have their own tastes, they have to force those tastes on everyone else and try to make them feel bad for not accepting them too.

Mass Penalties are Murder, user.

>Any discussion pertaining to "hard science fiction" is not allowed in this board.
This fixes Veeky Forums.

Some of us genuinely enjoy the aesthetics of girders and drums. I personally quite like the look of factories.

>realistic
>no radiators
Really though that is a nice blend.

What realismfags don't get is that the sleek chrome lined spaceships are often realistic in design given their infinite fuel drives or whatever, except that they don't have radiators. That's it. Because all those girders and shit, that's what spaceships look like when UNARMORED.
Hardfags btfo,

What design is most realistic?

Trajectory designer, by virtue of it being too hard to see details, so it can be imagined to be sane.

I'll have you know I'm no hard sci-fi fag, but I love realistic weapons/armor/vehicles/etc because it seems like it's something that could conceivably be created and be useful. I have a difficult time suspending my disbelief with anything that isn't blatantly magic because I want to understand how it works and functions.

>blue, orange, grey
If you're gonna make an unshapely mess of a spacecraft, the least you can do is give it a consistent color scheme.

Vaguely related: Isn't there a term for a group of spaceships ships that work and act together as a single group rather than as individuals? I vaguely recall reading about such a concept ages ago.

>all the hard-scifi fags
>not knowing sphere is the most efficient structural shape in space
Give me one good reason why you're not having a Spaceball right now?

A perfect analogy

Yes those are called Fleets.
Or Commies, I guess.

They're a bigger target that's easier to hit.

I guess that's irrelevant when sci-fi missiles or sci-fi torpedo or whatever exist, but still.

Ah, I meant as a single group in the sense that there is a single control system directing each individual component like they are parts of the whole. I'm likely not explaining this well.

>a term for a group of spaceships ships that work and act together as a single group rather than as individuals

Flotilla? Fleet? Caravan?

Definitely Commies, then.

>They're a bigger target that's easier to hit.
Sure - OTOH, they can fit more armor for the same weight/volume ...

Congratulations on proving him right, and proving the people who wank off over "Realism" are ungodly automatons with no sense of imagination.

Sorry for being curious about how things work and asking questions.

>I must pick apart every system and design to find function.

Architecture must drive you mad.

Sometimes, but not often.

I'm honestly not that vocal about liking "realistic looking" stuff in sci-fi because I understand that most other people don't give a shit. I also don't read hard sci-fi because I find it boring as fuck.

Soft-scifi fags are self-limited by previous iterations of sci-fi like Star Wars and severely underestimate the size of the universe and our own solar system. In reality, a hard-scifi Interstellar warship would be enormous and something to be really scared off. It would have manufacturing capacity and self-replication and manufacturing. It would move at realistic speed feed by gargantuan fusion reactors capable to single-handedly power of whole national economies, and it would capable of firing powerful laser or relativistic roads. Anything that can reach the stars is going to be amazingly powerful.

>Not turning your gas giant and its moons into an interstellar spaceship.

Old hard-scifi and soft-scifi is exhausted and limited. You must think bigger.

Your imagination is sterile. It's the same Star Wars rip-off over and over again.

Eh, I figure that warships would have a shell to protect all the fuel tanks and dedicated components. Only civilian ships would have exposed parts.

Realism vs "muh imagination" is like playing RPG with rules instead of playing rules-free pretend. Real creativity is enhanced by constraints like "this machine would actually work if constructed as depicted" or "this kind of armor was never actually worn in history". Those who enjoy realism are filled with an insatiable curiosity for understanding how the world works.
If someone gives you a blank sheet of paper and orders you to draw "anything you like", you'll likely be staring at it for hours without lifting the pencil, despairing at the task. If he asks for you to draw a kobold with a toupee triumphantly raising his spear, you'll get to work right away.

I'm on the realism side of the debate here, but that is a bad analogy.
Most people would just start drawing shit.

I agree with you, but only up to a certain point. Realism should provide a framework for design, but shouldn't stymie creativity. Good ideas or interesting concepts should never be abandoned just because they're 'unrealistic' - that defeats the point of fiction.

Incidentally, the best sci-fi is the kind with a single impossible technology who's implications are thoroughly explored.

You know you can appreciate both science "realistic" fiction as well as science fantasy.

Its like 2 different flavors stop comparing the two.

The issue I have there is that in real-world naval combat, the victor is the one who can both move faster and has a longer effective range, because kiting is a thing IRL. This means that in all likelihood, there will always be one side of a space battle that is trying to maintain an extremely long engagement range. Further, speeds in space are ridiculously high, meaning that firing at a craft which is moving perpendicular to your firing solution, with even a slight irregularity in its flight path, is almost never gonna be successful. Plus in space, there's no reason to ever be static relative to your opponent. So basically, you can fairly realistically expect not to be hit in the side. So why, rather a thin layer of armour over your vessel, would you not prefer to have a single, much thicker shield at the front, with a much smaller surface area, that every shot likely to hit your vessel would have to go through?

Besides, real-world navies have basically stopped using armour (seriously, modern warships have basically none) because the range and penetrative power of missiles is so great that the hindrance to speed and maneuverability that armour causes is not worth it. This would be doubly true in space, because it's a lot easier to fuck up a spaceship than a naval vessel. It's better not to get hit than weigh yourself down with armour that probably won't save you anyway.

I think that's true for typical engagements at least. But I guess if you want to pull of some shit like spending a month building up velocity, screaming into a system at retarded speed, faster than their point defense systems can properly track, blasting their fleet at point-blank with fuckhuge guns and both entering and exiting their effective range in a matter of seconds, then it might be worth having all-round armour so that a stray laser dancing on your hull doesn't manage to blow you to kingdom come.

Jovian Chronicles is an interesting blend. Fairly hard sci-fi until you get to the not-Gundams.

Sorry, sweetie, but I only settle for meta sci-fi.

How would you make a hard-scifi shield? I assume one would like closer to an active-protection system, only protecting a small bit at a time.

Is that fucking Garfield?

Off topic, but I agree with the second part of this. I like that kind of thing in any media. Have one thing that doesn’t exist, or can’t exist, and have the setting changed by that. I think that’s one thing Hannibal did really well. Will Graham astral projecting into the minds of serial killers sounds dumb as shit, but once they explored the effects it was having on his mind, the moral ramifications of forcing him to use it, the potential misuse of it, and the ambiguity of reality, the show got really cool, and interesting.

That has nothing intrinsically to do with fans of realism. It's like, "Fans of realism are like Jews, they have big noses and can't keep their horns away from your shekels." Huh?

In Star Wars they call those Hive Fleets or Slave Fleets. They fell out of favor after the crew of a dreadnought caught some virus, went crazy, and jumped an entire fleet of hundreds of powerful, expensive dreadnoughts to hyperspace and were never seen again.

Though I suppose that the droid fleets worked under the same principle.

I don't think speed matters much in space other than for making trips shorter and giving kinetic weapons a bigger punch. What's going to determinate combat is going to be acceleration. The fastest you can change your vector, the better. This would also limit spaceship designs (unless you go into transhumans), due human limited tolerance to crazy G.

Yes

Wouldn't space combat be operating at distances and speeds that basically made maneuverability irrelevant?

Batteries of lasers designed to shoot down missiles and, if really advanced, burn off chunks of incoming projectiles, forcing them to eject material so that their course alters and they miss. I don't think there's any known principle upon which one could base an actual energy shield. The closest is sheathing the thing in plasma (IIRC the Russians actually made a """"stealth"""" plane that does this to shield it from radar, but it obviously shows up like a second fucking sun on visuals), but even if said plasma can vaporise projectiles, a superheated stream of metal gas hitting your ship at relativistic velocities is still going to hurt.

It's specified that it's a point-mass. It's a single point in space with a specific mass, there are no details to be seen.

How hard are we talking? Hard as in "Could build it tomorrow with a billion dollars" or hard as in "Throw it in a Tom Clancy movie and people might not notice"?

For the first, point defense lasers. Hundreds of them. The film is the opposite of hard sci-fi, but the mining ship at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy fits what I'm picturing to a T, hundreds of tiny laser turrets all over the hull of a ship that can bring so much energy to bear on a target that it vaporizes under the heat, the ejecta throwing it off course (I forget what this kind of thrust is called, where a portion of the mass explodes and pushes the rest of it away).

More fantastically... if you could make a powerful enough electromagnetic field, you could probably do all kinds of interesting things to incoming direct energy fire. I bet you could fire lasers at the sun all day and it wouldn't lose a step. Maybe something like that? A fusion-shield?

ablative laser and plasma shield-mind

All fandom is a cancerous fire that eats all the oxygen out of the air, lungs and brain.

muh aesthetic

Because they've gone to plaid

I long for the day we have these

I don't think there would be a huge variation in the types of warships seen. You'd have the big battleship which would dominate everything it fights, and then maybe smaller ships that could cover more area at once and engage in light combat, but wouldn't stand up to the battleships. Red called these 'frigates' in his Humanist Inheritance fiction, probably because their role is similar to the ship of the same name from the age of sail, and it is a term I like, so I will use it here. However, note 'cruiser' may also be an applicable moniker for these ships, probably depending on its specific mission rather than its design goal.

I feel these would exist due to economic efficiency rather than speed or range difference like those seen in the real sailing frigates. Let me explain.

Many of the arguments against space fighters can actually be used when talking about other capital ship classes as well. Let's look at what the roles of various naval ship classes basically were, and see if they could have an analog in space.

You had corvettes, which were small, maneuverable ships used close to shore. This role doesn't really apply in space. You might argue low orbit around a planet could be seen as a shore, but the problem is combat ranges would be rather large. If you have a stationary asset in LEO that you want to attack, you could put your battleship arbitrarily far away and attack it at will. If you have a mobile asset in LEO you want to attack, you can still attack it from some distance away, probably around one light second, to avoid too much light speed lag targeting issues and diffraction of your laser beams over the distance.

Both would be important, but I guess acceleration is more of a property of your ship while speed is more like a resource: acceleration is how quickly you can gain speed in a particular direction (hardcapped by human tolerance), but you can spend as long as you want building up speed prior to the engagement. Speed is definitely still important though: If your opponent can in fact both accelerate faster than you can and he outranges you, the only way to beat him would be to come screaming into the engagement, having spent a lot of time prior building up speed so that you can actually both close the distance to your weapon range and survive the time it takes to do so.

For comparison, the moon is about one and a half light seconds away from Earth. So, the battleship could be sitting out two thirds the distance to the moon and easily engaging the LEO target with precision and power. Corvettes being there wouldn't be of any help on defense, and the battleship can do their job on offense just as well, and at longer range.

A corvette type ship might be useful to the Coast Guard for police and search and rescue work, but that is an entirely different realm than a warship.

How about cruisers / frigates? The historical usage of the term referred to a small but fast warship, capable of operating on their own, and often assigned to light targets or escort duty. I do see an analog to this role in space.

A frigate would be no match for a battleship, however they would be useful in force projection, due to presumably being cheaper to produce and operate, thus more numerous. I'll be back to this in a moment.

And of course, battleships would be the backbone of the war fleet, able to swat down anything that comes at them except other battleships. If it were economically feasible to build a huge fleet of battleships, I see no reason not to. Let's investigate some of their traditional disadvantages and see if they apply in space.

The big one is speed: the huge battleship can take just about anything dished out to it and dish out enough to destroy nearly any other class of ship, but its huge size makes it slow. This isn't so much of a concern in space. Allow me to elaborate.

There are two things in space that are relevant when talking about "speed": delta-v and acceleration.

>The big shippy gangy thingie

You mean the armada?

Delta-v is determined by the specific impulse (fuel efficiency) of the ship's engines and the percentage of the ship's mass that is fuel. Tonnage of the ship doesn't really matter here: it is a ratio thing. If the specific impulse is the same and the fuel percentage to total mass the same, any size ship will eventually reach the same final speed. Thus, here, if fuel costs are ignored, small ships have no advantage over large ships. (And indeed, if you are going on a long trip, the large ship offers other advantages in how many supplies or for war, how many weapons it can carry at no cost to delta-v, again, if the ratio remains constant) So the question is how fast can they reach it, which brings me to acceleration.

Acceleration is determined by total engine thrust and the total mass of the ship. At first glance, it seems that the smaller ship would obviously have the advantage here, but there are other factors that need be observed.

One is the structural strength of the materials of which the ship is constructed. This becomes a big problem on insanely huge ships with larger accelerations, since the 'weight' the spaceframe must support goes up faster (it cubes) than the amount of weight it can handle (it squares). Mike talks about this on the main site when he debunks the silliness of giant insects. However, steel is strong enough that with realistic sizes and accelerations, this should not be an issue before one of the other ones are.

I like space ships that have a designs that makes sense within the rules of the setting whether its super soft or super hard. For example the ships from LoGH are far from hard, but they look like real war machines that have purpose instead of random sketches by some art guy who didn't put any though into how it actually works.

>

One that is a much bigger problem is how much the human crew can handle. In the space / atmospheric fighter thread we had the week before last, Broomstick discussed the limits of the human body to great accelerations. Well trained people in g-suits can handle 9 g's for a short time, but much more than this is a bad thing to just about everyone - their aorta can't handle it. In fact 5 positive g's are enough to cause most people to pass out, as she explains. If the crew is passing out, the ship is in trouble. This problem can be lessened by the use of acceleration couches: someone laying down flat can handle it much better for longer, but even 5 g's laying down is going to be very uncomfortable, and the crew will have a hard time moving their arms. Extended trips would probably be best done at 1 g so the rocket's acceleration simulates Earth normal gravity, with peak acceleration being no more than 3-5 g's for humans in the afore mentioned couches if possible.

That is probably the most significant limit on acceleration, since it is an upper limit of humans. No matter what technology exists, this cannot be avoided.

The third limitation will be based on the technical problem of generating this much thrust for the mass. This, too, can provide an upper limit, since adding more engines on to a ship will eventually give diminishing returns. The reason for that is the available surface area on the back of the ship where the engine must go increases more slowly than the mass of the ship as it grows. But, for a reasonably sized ship, this should not be a tremendous problem, especially when nuclear propulsion techniques are used, many of which have already been designed and proven feasible in the real world. Fission nuke pulse propulsion can provide 400 mega-newtons of thrust according to the table on Nyrath's Atomic Rockets website (see the row for Project Orion).

Three gees is about 30 metres per second squared acceleration. F = ma, so let's see what mass is possible. 4e8 / 3e1 = 1e7 kg, or about 10000 metric tonnes. Incidentally, this is the number Sikon used for his demonstrations in the October thread about brick vs needle. I think it a reasonable number for a battleship, so rather than repeat the benefits of this, I refer you back to that thread and the posts of GrandMasterTerwynn and Sikon on the first page, who discussed it in more depth than I am capable of. I agree with most of the views Sikon expressed in that thread.

So, for these sizes, the speed argument against battleships is very much sidelined.

You also pointed this out later in your post that these advanced propulsion techniques do not necessarily scale down very well, which may also serve as a lower limit on ship size, which is probably more relevant than the upper limit it causes.

You might ask if pushing for a greater peak acceleration would be worth it, and it is not, in my opinion. The reason again goes to the human limitations. Even if your warship is pulling 10 gees, it most likely won't help against a missile, which can still outperform you.

>So basically, you can fairly realistically expect not to be hit in the side.
No. Missiles and drones can engage via oblique angles. Shrapnel can always fly off and hit your in the side, either causing serious damage or sending your ship into a spin. And there's always the risk that grazing rounds will hit the sides of your ship instead of the front armor. At the speeds that those errant shots will be coming in at, one single round can rip your ship in half and kill everyone on-board.

Modern blue-water navies are a poor analogy for what space combat will actually be like.

Long range acceleration would again be limited to around 1 g or less due to the humans, mentioned above. However, even at 1g constant acceleration (which would probably not be used due to fuel concerns anyway), an Earth to Mars trip could be measured in mere days. More offers little advantage there either.

Lastly, there may be a question of rotation. A more massive and longer ship would have a greater moment of angular inertia than a smaller ship, thus requiring more torque to change its rate of rotation. Again, I don't feel this will be a major concern. At the ranges involved, you again have some time to change direction. However, this does pose the problem in quick, random accelerations to throw off enemy targeting.

Going with the 10,000 metric ton ship, let's assume it has an average density equal to that of water: one tonne per cubic meter. For the shape, I am going to assume a cylinder, about 10 meters in diameter (about the same as the Saturn V), with all the mass gathered at points at the end. The reason of this is to demonstrate a possible upper number for difficulty of rotation (moment of inertia), not to actually propose this is what it would look like. Actually determining an optimal realistic shape for such a ship would take much more thought.

With this, we can determine the length of the cylinder to be 10000 / (π r2) = about 130 metres long. Now, we can estimate the moment of inertia, for which, we will assume there are two point masses of 5000 tons, each 65 meters away from the center. So moment of inertia for the turning axis (as opposed to rotating), is 2*5000 * 65^2 = about 4e10 kilogram meters squared.

Now, let's assume there are maneuvering jets on each end that would fire on opposite sides to rotate the ship. Let's further assume these have thrust about equal to that found on the space shuttle, simply because it is a realistic number that I can find: about 30 kilo-newtons. Let's determine torque, which is radius times force, so 3e4 * 65 * 2 (two thrusters) = about 4e6 newton meters. Outstanding, now we can determine angular acceleration possible.

Angular acceleration = It, where I is moment of inertia and t is torque. So, we have 4e6 / 4e10 = 1e-4 radians per second squared. This is about a meager 10th of a degree per square second. Remember this is acceleration - change in rotation rate. Once spinning, it would tend to continue spinning. This is also a lower limit: most likely, the thrusters would be more numerous than I assumed, and probably more powerful as well, and the mass probably would be more evenly distributed. But anyway, let's see if it might be good enough.

As I said when discussing linear acceleration, you would want some quick randomness to help prevent a concentrated laser beam from focusing on you, and you would want the ability to change your path within a scale of minutes to prevent long range coilgun shells from impacting. There isn't much you can do about missiles except point defense: a ship cannot hope to outmaneuver them due to limitations of the crew, if nothing else.

Some unpredictable linear acceleration should be enough to do these tasks, unless the enemy can get lined up with you, in which case, you will want to change direction to prevent him from using your own acceleration against you, and blasting you head on. So the concern is can you rotate fast enough to prevent the enemy from lining up with you. So, let's assume the enemy can change direction infinitely fast, and can thrust at 3 g's. The range will still be one light-second.

We can calculate how much of an angle he can cut into the circle per second if he attempted to circle around you. His thrust must provide the centripetal acceleration, so we can use that as our starting point. Centripetal acceleration is equal to radius times angular velocity squared, thus, sqrt(30 / 3e8) = 3e-4 radians per second.

So, its angular velocity is three times that of the acceleration of the battleship. Thus, it would take the battleship three seconds to match that rotation rate. It would also want to spin faster to make up for lost time, thus lining up on your terms again. I feel this is negligible because of two factors: if the enemy actually was orbiting like this, its position at any time would be predicable, thus vulnerable, and the battleship can probably see this coming: the enemy's tangential velocity must also be correct to do such a burn - he can not randomly change the orientation of his orbit due to his limitations on linear acceleration. This means you can see what he is doing and prepare for it with a small amount of time of him setting the terms. In this small time, he would not even move a degree on you: still easily within your armor and firing arc. (Also, weapons turrets on the battleship would surely be able to rotate at a much, much faster rate, so outrunning them is impossible anyway).

Thus, I feel neither linear acceleration nor angular acceleration are significant limiting factors as size increases within this order of magnitude.

Long story short: unlike marine navies, speed is not a significant factor in space warship design, unless you are getting into obscene sizes.

And, since I find it interesting, I want to finish talking about possible ship classes, so back to the comparison list.

Submarines depend on stealth, and since there is no stealth in space (barring pure magic like the Romulan cloaking device), there are no submarines in space.

Destroyers operated to protect larger ships against submarines and small, fast ships, like torpedo boats. Since speed is not a significant factor and stealth impossible, there are no fast ships nor subs, meaning the destroyer has nothing to do, thus would not exist. (Though, you might chose to call what I call frigates destroyers if you prefer the name, but IMO the role is different enough that is isn't really accurate. But the US Navy somewhat does this, so it is up to you as the author.)

A cruiser is simply a ship that can operate on its own. Frigates, destroyers, and battleships can all also be called cruisers depending on their mission.

A battlecruiser is a ship meant to be able to outrun anything it can't outgun - it had the speed of a lighter cruiser with the guns of a battleship. In real navies, this was usually achieved by taking armor off a battleship. However, since speed is not limited by mass in the given order of magnitude, a battleship and battlecruiser would have the same speed: the battleship would be a clearly superior vessel. Thus, no battlecruisers. (Now, if you have FTL, then that might create a battlecruiser class, but I am trying to avoid talking about magic in this discussion, since as the author, it is entirely up to you what the magic can and cannot do.)

A destroyer escort is a small, relatively slow ship used to escort merchant ships and protect them against submarines and aircraft. But, in the real world, aircraft can threaten a ship due to its superior speed and submarines due to stealth. So neither of them are there, making the destroyer escort worthless. Frigates or battleships would have to be doing the escorting, since they are the only things that can stand up to what they will be fighting: other frigates or battleships.

Now, a little more on what I mean by frigate. It is basically a smaller battleship, built simply because I am presuming they will be cheaper to produce and maintain, thus allowing more of them to exist. With more of them, they can be in more places doing more things. Cost is the only real benefit I can think of: if for some reason you could crank out and operate / maintain battleships for the same cost, I see no reason why you would not.

The 10,000 ton proposal might actually be the frigate, with the battleship being larger than that, or it might be the battleship with the frigate being smaller than that. The relationship would remain the same, however.

This.
I love how people fail to put the two and two together.
Have to maintain constant (superior) range? Move broadside to the enemy.
Best place to put massive amounts of ordnance? At the broadside.

Space warfare = fighters in space my ass.

You want armour so you don't get instantly melted by lasers from a million kms away, its literally the only defence against them.

... now that's a raspberry ... LONE STARR!!!

From a million kilometers, a laser beam will take over 3 seconds to hit you and will have diffused significantly, so provided you jink a little you'll be fine with minimal ceramic armour, as the enemy won't be able to focus the rather weak beam on a single point. Within a laser's killing range, why god would you not face the thick part of your armour towards the enemy?

If we're talking lasers, say both sides are in effective range with the ability to focus fire on a specific point on the enemy armour. If you have concentrated all your armour into a single shield covering your entire ship from the enemy's perspective, they have to burn through a significant portion of all of your armour before getting through. If the armour is spread out, then a smaller portion of your total armour will need to be burned through before internal damage is taken.

The only thing that might be a concern against lasers specifically is that if you have a super-insulated hull with the outer layer being able to conduct heat ridiculously well, the increased surface area might make it possible to radiate the heat of the laser more effectively than the shield with similar levels of conductance and insulation.

What about multiple smaller ships ships (drones, perhaps) coming at you from different angles or a single ship using bomb pumped laser missiles to hit you from different angles or maybe even mirror drones bouncing lasers from a mothership. I get the idea of focusing armour on a specific side, but putting almost /all/ of it onto a single shield seems risky.

Not past a certain point.
If you have light speed weapons, then you can't dodge because by the time you've seen it it's hit you - but, if you were flying unpredictably before they fired, it'll be harder for them to predict where you'll be and get a good hit in in 2 minutes and 14 seconds when their lightspeedweapon reaches your expected position.

If you're talking missiles that go as fast as they can and then burn out and rely on built up speed, more like briefly self aiming slugs - same as above.
If you're dealing with ones that have the fuel and capabilities to come at you bro and do so fast, and with fuel and ability to manoeuvre once they get to you, you still want speed and mobility yourself.
Your ship has a lot more fuel than their missile, even correcting for size and weight, so if you can stay out of it longer than it can chase you, you win.
Assuming you have shit point defence obviously.
But why settle for only one defence?

Complaining about hyuoomans "limiting" you to 1g is unrealistic. The crew can handle short sprints with higher acceleration, and you don't have enough delta-v to keep accelerating at 1g long enough to complain.

I agree that it is risky (and that you should still keep a bare minimum bit of armour along the sides to absorb weak, extreme range laser hits and the like , but the benefits I believe outweigh the drawbacks. It's only in the case of incompetence really that you would get flanked to the extent that your main battleship can't merely swat the flankers aside. A drone will never be able to have a laser battery capable of of harming a battleship of the same tech level before said battleship's own laser batteries make the drone and all its drone friends go poof, and as another user pointed out above, the battleship's size shouldn't really limit its speed or acceleration much. So there's no reason a battleship can't apply the same tactic of keeping distance and keeping the shield forwards when being chased by drones. And remember, the bigger the gun, the further it can shoot effectively, and this applies to lasers too, so a battleship's main laser batteries will almost certainly outrange any drone or small ship.

Naturally, if some sort of fuckery happens and you do end up swamped by enemy vessels on all sides you'll be screwed, but I'm pretty sure that in that case you're screwed anyway, all-round armour or no.

Humans don't limit a ship to 1g, they limit it to 5g, assuming a mixed crew. If it's a crew of one or two specifically chosen pilots, you could maybe crank it up to nearly double that for a few moments at a time without killing your crew, but at that point you've reinvented the fighter plane.

I once made a roller coaster in RCT3 that none of the little people wanted to get on. I checked the stats window and it was calculating that it pulled 17g at some points of the ride. Guess the guests could do the math in their heads.

Space battles are going to be filled with so much static and chaff that remote controlled drones will almost certainly be useless and autonomous drones easily tricked.

>So why, rather a thin layer of armour over your vessel, would you not prefer to have a single, much thicker shield at the front, with a much smaller surface area, that every shot likely to hit your vessel would have to go through?
Because it doesn't matter how good your warship is if it gets killed by space dust before the fight even starts.

Hard science fiction seems to be a call to ignore the vast majority of shit that made science fiction fun in the first place in favor of jacking off to trivia.

Most hard sci-fi is shit, most of everything is shit, congratulations brainlet.

Hard sci-fi is the only place you can get (occasionally) thought out neuroshanagens identity fuckery you get from stuff like Watt's Blindsight, Egan's Diaspora or Stross's Accelerando and I fucking love that shit for some reason. Don't really care for spaceships so I can't contribute meaningfully to the thread.

That IS more realistic... to a pre true space age civilisation (current humans), where sending stuff up is so expensive you need to be minimalistic and send things in modules because you can't afford or have the technology to build an actual spacecraft. Its going to be rickety.

I really like both hard and soft SF, and I typically argue against gratuitous realism on Veeky Forums, so it feels strange to read this.

OTOH, I’ve never cared much for space opera, hard or soft; I have very little interest in space battles, realistic or otherwise.

Realism mostly operates in the service of the story— if it doesn’t, nobody cares about it, and you’re being dull. The situation is admittedly a little bit different for roleplaying games, where internal consistency helps both the GM and the players anticipate the effect of various actions upon the world, but the general principle is much the same.

>Incidentally, the best sci-fi is the kind with a single impossible technology who's implications are thoroughly explored.
It’s certainly true that this is a property of many excellent works of science fiction. It’s also true that “vaguely futuristic mish-mash” describes some of the worst SF in existence. But I’m not sure that a focus on a single impossible technology is the defining trait of excellent science fiction. It’d make lousy writing advice, for example: you could write a hundred stories about impossible technologies without hitting on anything interesting, or producing a single good narrative.

I really adore these ships JC designs generally are great.

They’re the smallest target for a given volume, idiot.

Yes and no. Assuming that all shots land within a circular area, a long cylinder will present a smaller target because more of its cross section will fall outside of that circle.

Only if it's shot at head-on.
Once shots begin to come in from the broadside, it's fucked.

vertical launch tubes are smarter let you minimize profile from a side at least, the habitat ring is pointless unless it's a station.