What would a modern space battlecruiser look like? That is, if antigravity or something was discovered next day and it being several years later.
Stargate tries to do it. But to me it seems like being made like a vessel floating in water with structural weakness like protruding hangars and briges etc, but in space.
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It would be a long tube with a lot of scaffolding-like reinforcements. It wouldn't rely much on armor because the weapon scales involved make armor pointless and extra mass a huge liability. It would probably physically separate the engine and reactor sections from crew compartments with empty structural filler to avoid radiation issues.
Visually it would kinda look like the Eiffel tower was wrapped around a rail gun and was covered in little thrusters that let it move randomly with some big ones in back.
Go play Children of a Dead Earth and have fun.
Antigravity tech would have no need for thrusters.
Tubelike body is something seen with stuff that blows something out of the back.
To me it seems like a Borg Cube type of craft would be the optimal design here. But it looks fucking boring.
The Goa'uld Ha'taks etc. from stargate are something that way too, but it seems like some Goa'uld designers a long long time ago might've thought a triangular shape less boring and more of a show than a boring ass cube but still relatively efficient to manufacture by using slave labor.
That game seems like it's about reaction engines.
If we go hard scifi, the fuel storage plays a huge part in the design, which often ends quite tubular.
The basic principles of weaponry, armor and encounters is still applicable. The antigravity system just replaces the engine with whatever systems are required to run it replacing the fuel storage, like a huge fusion plant with equally big tanks of fuel.
Tubelike bodies are how you handle having shearing forces, Its true of almost any thrust technology. If your tech moves your entire ship via gravity manipulation then it's still going to be a tube because that gives you the smallest possible hit profile against both a combat opponent and just debris in general as you move through space. Hitting a pebble at light speed is like setting off a nuclear bomb. You probably don't need the scaffolding if you just manipulate gravity buts it's still gonna be a tube.
But the tubular design takes away from the fire vectoring - or whatever the proper term would be for the maximum amount of directions a single weapon could aim at.
Well, assuming the thing would ever get into close combat scenario, like point defense against guided projectiles.
I don't thing hit profile does anything against smart weapons, or predictive aim - that is assuming the ships have any significant delay in their change of velocity in any direction.
Hit profile does a lot. You want your engage distance to be something where you are assured a first round hit and chances are you'll be detected since stealth in space doesn't exist. You need to be able to fire a relativistic speed round and avoid retu fire. That's easiest if you move randomly but your visible volume drmatica effects the chance of getting hit.
If you want to do that, stick all guns on one side, roll to face enemy. Space is really really big, everyone always has a ridiculous amount of prep time unless there is accurate point-to-point FTL.
But really, you don't necessarily want all your guns firing at once. If you are being shot at with lasers you want to roll to expose new surface constantly, so you want multiple fire arcs. If you are shooting missiles then arcs don't matter at all.
Even then, if you REALLY want to you make your ship conoid so that all the weapons can fire forward or to their respective sides.
That's weapons technology. If your ship is large enough to have a rail gun capable of firing at a percentage of light speed but that gun isn't the majority of your ship then it's built wrong. Build more smaller ships built around the guns and engines. One big ship is just a bigger, slower, less threatening target.
Lasers only really work as point defense. The energy required for a laser capable of seriously damagi a larger than aircraft carrier sized vessel is much better spent on firing a series of rounds of matter that all arrive at the same time (thus overwhelming the enemies point defense). A single 10 pound 10% of light speed shot would kill a ship the size of a large city.
You shoot lasers at the radiators to cripple the ship, you shoot mass drivers at the hull to destroy the ship.
How would a swarm ship work like?
As in a ship that is for the most parts comprised of large weapon platforms that attach to each other, or a core part that can a form an unified volley of relativistic fire if such need arises? Like if enemy has some very advanced defenses to intercept anything projectile (not laser etc. energy weapons)?
We've seen that in fiction but only in point defense mode?
If it's a tube pointing at you and moving randomly at relativistic distances you can't see it's radiators and it's rail gun barrels are probably very very small and hard to hit. But it probably can't hit you either since you are also very far away.
Realistic space battles are fucking boring. It's surprise attacks and ships firing at each other uselessly.
Oh, and the point of the swarm here is to divide the ship in order to make it as non-uniform target as possible.
Why would they ever have to attach to each other.
Power for crossing long distances in a shortest time possible, that's about it.
That's why i included a 'core' here.
So give them all bigger engines and have a ton of ships with no weaknesses instead of one big one that wants to spend all it's time broken up.
Without knowing what kind of technological hand waves you're using for energy production and if these ships are even manned it's impossible to review the idea.
Realistic and effective ships are mundane because space is a giant empty place where you can't hide and everything takes forever.
>big one that wants to spend all it's time broken up.
No no, not all time, only when combat is imminent.
>Without knowing what kind of technological hand waves you're using for energy production and if these ships are even manned it's impossible to review the idea.
I'm just disturbed by the aesthetics of most space vessels portrayed in fiction that use some sort anti-gravity or inertialless drives. The aesthetics and often the size of the vessels are useless/needless when it comes to their functionality.
Seriously Borg cubes seem to make a fucking lot of sense here.
And the energy production here would be whatever that is required to make the ship do FTL and battlefield work as efficiently as possible.
>bigger engines
What if the engines have to be fucking huge in order to do their job?
Kinda like Tokamak type nuclear-fusion reactors would have to be in order to produce significant net power?
I feel like space battle will end up just becoming practically anime tier teleportation shenanigans once we perfect engines that go fast as all fuck
like
>ship A sees ship B
>hauls ass at some speed faster than you can see,
>at this point B's crew would have either already seen the other ship approaching and prepare to scoot out of the way of whatever opening attack A would have prepared
>then the two ships boost around space, trying to jockey for position so they can shoot some huge railgun at the other guy and snap his ship in half
>or they would just get fucking ganked and shot in the ass with a metal slug the size of a VW beetle going mach 14 and turned into a fine carbon powder
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.
Ftl requires an infinite amount of energy. It's not a real thing that is achievable even with gravity manipulation hijinks. If you had that amount of energy you could just collapse local space into a black hole and end the solar system if not accidentally destroy reality by causing either a new big bang or literally collapsing existence into a singularity.
You might as well say your power source is the size of a penny, in which case just have the ships fire themse at light speed into the opponent. You could have swarms of millions of them.
Is it infinite if you have to put power into it in the first place?
I donnot understand the question.
Can there be infinite energy if energy has to be inserted in order to have infinite energy
Because FTL drives in fiction still need energy to be added in order to do their FTL drivey stuff.
Wouldn't infinite energy just be nothing for us?
As in a universe of energy in all forms happening all at once now and forever?
I'm not familiar with this stuff, i'm just ripping it out of my ass. So please be gentle.
Infinite energy means that it would require more energy than can be gathered in the universe. Or if the universe is also infinite then you'd need all of it.
It's impossible logically. Like, it's a fun fictional thing to think about and generally it makes sci fi space stories possible but as you approach light speed the energy you need to keep accelerating goes up exponentially with the actual act of surpassing light speed requiring an amount of energy with no possible measurement because it's just infinite.
You also gain energy as you gain speed (hence why a bullet hits hard, it has a lot of inertial energy). As you approach light speed you would probably just collapse into a singularity as your gravity from mass energy breached what nuclear forces keep matter apart. If you actually achieved light speed and didn't become a black hole you would literally contain infinite inertial/kinetic energy. If you hit anything you would go right through. Though at infinite energy you would also collapse the universe because matter and energy are the same thing and you just became an object with infinite gravity.
But user, we already have real life as anime.
>Antigravity tech would have no need for thrusters.
sigh
At least pass high school physics before commenting on propulsion schema.
Antigravity would become woefully inefficient further out than the asteroid field of the Sol system, let alone more sparsely population systems.
Thrusters are cheap and hyper efficient at making you go, which in a friction-less environment is really all you need. Plus what happens when you need to turn? AG just resists mass; if mass isn't in the right place you can't turn.
Stop being fucking stupid.
depends on the setting
I wouldn't be surprised if first-generation spaceships in that scenario did look like water ships. Not because it's a good design, but because it's cheaper to build them in existing facilities which are designed for that kind of ship.
In the event of the US getting a void military, who would it be drawn from? The Air Force, or the Navy?
In a hypothetical future where void combat and interplanetary travel were regular, how would the military be broken up?
Separated into "void" and "planetary" main branches, each with their own sub-branches?
As it is now, just with "space fleet" tacked on alongside the rest?
So you're talking about a "carrier" to transport the "fighter" ships to a point close enough to the target for them to be "launched" into combat, while the carrier stays clear of the battlezone...
Squadron for smaller formations, fleet for bigger groups?
The truth is, it would depend massively on how the antigravity tech in the setting worked. What's more, that kind of technology is so far removed from our understanding of the laws of physics, that there would almost certainly be some weird min-maxing setup that a determined engineer could build, that would let them break the laws of thermodynamics over their knee.
And once you can break the laws of thermodynamics, the sky's the limit.
are you thinking of the networked drone swarms they're developing?
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That makes no sense. Antigravity either makes something immune or less effected by gravity or it provides gravity itself, just in the opposite direction. Antigravity as some sort of direct opposite of gravity can't be used to move anything and also would need to be scalar. But if it can scale you could just turn it up and woah you just control gravity and can now fly anywhere. Antigravity is like saying antilight or counterelectricity. It both doesn exist and the word implies nothing specific.
So don't be a douche about it.
Anti-gravity, space time manipulation, reactionless thrusters etc. Doesn't matter what makes the ship move and counter the gravity of massive bodies so well, as long as it doesn't have to push against mass in order to move. Therefore, no thrusters.
A fleet? Military tactics since time immemorial are about teamwork.
>So you're talking about a "carrier" to transport the "fighter" ships to a point close enough to the target for them to be "launched" into combat, while the carrier stays clear of the battlezone...
Not exactly. Fighter doctrine is something along the lines of increased force projection range.
More like modular, in this case scattered force projection to make a more difficult target over a long distance with capability to defend against multiple threats such as a swarm of projectiles. Or in worst case, have individual parts work as a suicide drone or something.
Yeah, that's the sort of stuff I was thinking of. I swear I remember reading about people talking about theoretical spaceships doing a similar thing but I might be mistaken.
Um, if both of you are so far away that you can't damage each other, you're outside your effective range and move closer.
>Fighter doctrine is something along the lines of increased force projection range.
Also, because i don't think fighters as we know them would be any good in space. They would have to be quite disposable at the least, and come in swarms, that carry more swarms of more disposable ordnance, which could also carry swarms of some very disposable stuff whose only job is to impact the target ship.
But even still, i'd think powerful lasers would still make the viability of such devices questionable. Maybe, if lasers are used to fry sensors that control the point defenses, a swarm could then get through.
If these ships use some form of reactionless propulsion or something, they could carry far more mass with them, like one giant thick plate of armor that could deattach from the mothership/swarm to face the enemy ships/swarms?
well, there's always something like the Prometheus
That has nothing to do with the removal of inertial forces unless you're in some sort of magic bubble that just makes you fall towards places evenly across the entire ship. Even then, if you turn you're still going to experience significant shearing forces unless you've actually managed to create something that just gets rid of inertia entirely. At that point you're in a pocket dimension and can't interact with the strong or weak forces or experience gravity so good luck knowing where you are.
Also, if you have something that gets rid of the basic interactions between mass and inertia then why don't you just use it to teleport somewh at infinite speed. Why do you even need a ship?
This shits all fake but don't just use your pet definition of "anti gravity" and act like it makes sense and is a reason to be a jerk. It could very well be an engine that flings itself around but the rest of the ship is just attached to it. In which case it's very much a thruster since it produces thrust.
You can, my entire point was that it requires surprise. If you know each other's location you're just going to dodge around until one of you gets lucky. It's one shot one kill. That doesn't change as you get closer it just shortens the time before someone gets lucky.
If you have reaction less propulsion just use it in your gun and shoot a stream of laser like molecules at 99.999% of light speed in a big cloud that can't be dodged and annihilates anything you want.
Removing a fundamental force is a bad idea when you want an interesting setting.
I'm not fully versed in the terminology. But the ship here would not be pushing against mass. If definition of a thurster doesn't involve pushing against mass, then we can talk about thusters.
A thruster is just something that generates thrust. Thrust is just acceleration or propulsion. A thruster is generally a term used in a jet or rocket but its a pretty generalized term and a rocket doesn't push against anything. That's why rockets work in space. You are being accelerated by differential pressures, which is pretty identical to being moved by differentials in fields of gravity.
Also, reaction-less acceleration breaks all kinds of physical laws unless you just mean the appearance of no-reaction, because every atom within the area is being accelerated at the same time(as opposed to the engine moving and the ship being attached to the engine. That's pretty much magic, though.
>That's why rockets work in space. You are being accelerated by differential pressures, which is pretty identical to being moved by differentials in fields of gravity.
Typical rocket pushes against it's own mass/energy, which is the fuel, unless external push is given, like a giant laser or something. Or am i wrong?
Reactionless drives often involve fictional (not yet discovered) or some theoretical force to push against so the ship doesn't need to carry reaction mass to expel out of the back of the ship nor anything external.
Anything using energy to generate momentum sends an equal and opposite amount of said energy in the other direction. Lasers can be thrusters too. As can a light bulb with enough time. Or a radio antennae. Try not to think of things pushing against other things, that mental image doesn't work very well once you get into the math. If you have a way to induce thrust without Newtonian physics then maybe it's not a thruster though any thruster is just a thing that moves another thing by accelerating it in a direction so you're arguing semantics at that point.
A system that just uses a handwave to have something fall towards a direction through gravity is not visually similar to a thruster but it's functionally similar to one and depending on how it's configured may feel exactly the same to people on board.
I'm curious, if you've seen The Expanse, how would you analyse the weapons and armor systems, and the general trade off they have as seen in the movies (as the books don't give as clear a view)?
AND YET THE FUCKING NIPS REFUSE TO MAKE COOL JETS ANIME
I JUST WANT ACE COMBAT ANIME YOU SLANTY FUCKS JESUS
I for one like the setting where the crew are along for the ride and an ai handles everything to the point where when two combatants meet they both analyse each other and whichever assesses its chances as the worst surrenders to its opponent (including calculating whether er it could escape instead of engage) in whatever retarded small timeframe they think at, unless it's an acceptable margin of win/lose. Very gentlemanly engagements.
>I'm curious, if you've seen The Expanse, how would you analyse the weapons and armor systems, and the general trade off they have as seen in the movies (as the books don't give as clear a view)?
Have you only read one or two of the books? Pretty sure they go into a lot when things start heating up.
The reactionless engines in Ringworld were called thrusters. Niven never explains how they work though.
Also reactionless drives allow for trivial planet killer kinetic weapons.
I read them all (5? ) including the part where they use the railgun to generate thrust but don't remember it well desu.