Starships

And have a couple ancient precursor race designs because why not.

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I drew this recently. I'm a big fan of the hard sci-fi radiator look.

Human space travel comes in many flavors in my space opera setting.
Nearly all ships are designed for one specific environment, one specific route and for one specific "race".
For example earth to orbit craft meant for use by baseline homo sapiens consist of conventional looking rockets that take off on a equatorial heading utilizing gravity turns to conserve delta v either that or people use space planes that dock with low altitude space stations before transferring to a larger transit station. Interplanetary travel is done with nuclear thermal rockets traveling equipped with variations of crew modules designed to accommodate the passengers for their specific physiological needs (Homo sapiens come in many genetically and cybernetically augmented forms to help them survive in alien environments) these ships are mostly enormous engines and propellant tanks with relatively small crew modules with large radiators and radiation shields, they come equipped with small embarkment craft for transporting passengers and crew between ships and stations.
Interstellar ships Come in many shapes and forms depending upon their point of origin and the time of their construction as humans went through various methods of traveling to different star systems over the centuries (Light sails, nuclear pulse drives, torchships, experimental alcubierre drives), Some of these interstellar craft are colony ships containing multiple generations of awake people living in a self contained environment and having adapted to centuries in space, others contain frozen human embryos under the care of AI, others have stored digitized versions of human minds which will be written to robot bodies upon reaching their destination. Because of the perils of prolonged space travel interstellar travel by flesh and blood humans is extremely limited.
High g AI controlled probes will make one way trips towards stars dropping communication bouys along the way to allow later transmission of AI to stars.

DESTROY THE CORE

What weapons do you prefer in your scifi ships?
>Particle Beams
>Railguns
>Missiles

[Screams in physics]

In my setting ships look like two long cones glued at the bases. Front one is 5km long and 1 km in diameter with the back one being only 4 km long for larger ships. As the ship is powered by the fusion engine, the back is tapered to reduce waste heat and the front is tapered to increase the chance enemy shots would "bounce" or have to travel through more thick armor thanks to a 11 degree angle. The older versions also have huge radiator fins attached to the back part while newer ones use dusty plasma radiators

I prefer ships to have a mix of lasers and mass drivers. In particular mass drivers that give a missile an initial kick and mass drivers that spam metal dust particles at 300 km/s

That's specific.

Nope. There are certain factors for a spaceship to work in a certain role. For example, if it is nuclear powered it needs to put a habitat section as far away as physically possible from the reactor, which makes the ship really thin and long. If you have a military ship it would have angled armor which either means a conical shape or a thin wedge

I've been playing a bit too much of Children of a Dead Earth. In any case, particle beam weapons have so tiny range they might as well not be used. Sand or dust cannons have huge accuracy at range and if you get it in low relativistic speeds they start doing radiation damage too so they become straight up better versions of particle beam cannons

Could you explain the difference? I thought Particle Beams were the same thing?

Fusion reactors will be huge, it's unlikely we will get compact ones for a long time. On the other hand, bigger ships are more efficient than smaller ones. Small ships have almost no advantages.

Running a game in the Culture universe. Players are ex-SC operatives that boarded the GSV Bora Horza Gobuchul to kill the Mind as part of the Idiran remnant's revenge.

Particle beams are weaponized atom smashers. They fire a stream of atoms at sub luminal speeds. They come in two forms: linear and synchrotrons. In the first case they are long and basically a large hadron collider scaled down and weaponized. In the second case they are way heavier but more compact.
The main issue of them is that they fire a particle beam which suffers from dissipation at range way harder than a laser. It also deals most of the damage as radiation killing people and electronics but requiring more energy to actually burn through armor.

There are two types of "ammo" for these: charged particles and neutrons. In the first case you can shield against them with just magnetic fields so they need to get "neutralised" while boosting neutrons is just plain harder.

Depends on the armament and technologies used.

Human ships mostly look similar to the picture. Though only heavy laser ships have such a big length to cross-section ratio. Most are much more squat.

Development of sub-light warp and proper laser AMS mostly killed conventional missiles. They are used only for long range bombardment of targets with thrust and no active defences. Development of composite anti-laser armour made most laser weapons useless - you need to build spinal variants to be able to reliably damage enemy ships. And development of missiles/torpedoes with sub-light warp drives killed gigantism. So the ships mostly go from fighter jet size to 10k tons for heaviest variants.

Main weapons are lasers (their precision is too good to pass up) and clusters of kinetic cannons for close combat.

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"Otters" sport similar technology but their ships rely a lot on broadside proton-beam cannons. So they have powerful prow armour to be able to get in range for a full broadside volley.

"Crabs" suck at engines for big ships and so use a lot of carriers. Their normal ships sport heavy armour and built as cheap as possible to make torpedoing them not economically viable.

"Flowers" are resident biotech specialists. Their ships are a bunch of symbiotic organisms working together. They have really good and sophisticated ECM systems.

Ah. So would a laser be preferred in space combat?

I'd have killed to see the EAS ships duking it out instead of only shooting with the secondary crap guns because budget

PrintScreen from a Roll20 session.

At a certain technological sophistication lasers become ridiculous and if they are not limited by unrealistically crappy targeting systems they can work as point defense against everything but other lasers including dust flying at you at 0.1% of the speed of light. For example let's take the ship I described. If we coat the external layer of the ship with optical phased array in hard UV light spectrum(1km aperture) you get a beam dispersion of 2mm at 1 light second. You can pinpoint fry a spider from the Moon and shave from geostationary orbit with this thing!

PS: This is original content if you want to make naval looking spaceships just search for actual ships and mirror them in the middle. Add two such mirrored constructs in a row. Cut off any antenna that does not look particularly awesome. cover seams with random metal clippings from free texture images.
Add shadows by selecting parts and editing brightness.

Damn. With that sort of accuracy and range, would there even be a need for mass drivers? I sort of had the image in my mind of lasers for range, and titanium spikes hurled at relativistic speed for power/planet cracking. And maybe missiles for, like, some reason.

>Weapons

Super long-range mass drivers. Missiles. Warp-Torpedos.
Why not snipe a motherfucker from two solar units away? No need to see them.

I actually don't know if there was ever any art if jumpships in trinity, if have to go check

let me rephrase this. If you know where the enemy is why warp in there and fight them, when you can warp in the projectiles and hit them?

sensible

It bugs me too. I feel like it is boring to have ships only carry one type of weapon.However I can't find a way not to get any other stuff shot out of the sky from the Moon. So in my setting it is the top notch for factions who can afford to plate their ships with tiny laser turrets 5 nanometers in diameter. Older ships use less powerful lasers and there they can afford actual fusion drive missiles, drones(which are basically a missile with guns, it is unrealistic to recover them in mid battle) and weapons that spam dust at several hundred km/s. Also there is a thing called "combat mirror" which can refocus a laser at range to counteract light lag and beam dispersion.

That's one way to do it. I always approach the issue as a big game of rock-paper-lasers. Lasers have a hard counter (armor or shields, anyway you want to justify it), as do mass drivers and missile/drones.

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In settings like these I like it when people resort to indirect means to wage war. Economically, via espionage, electronic warfare, assassinations, destroying infrastructure etc. Makes it much more interesting.

Yeah, the issue is that there are no magical shields in the setting and no armor made of conventional matter can hold on to laser barrage of this magnitude. And I mean ships there carry meters thick nanomaterial/diamond armor and still last until they are hit first with a full power blast

I found a blogpost a while back that recommended a few ways mass drivers to compete with lasers. Its a pretty good read:
toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/03/electric-currents-and-kinetic-impactors.html

I'd recommend the whole blog really. Its a godsend for hard sci-fi.

Technically for any rpg outside of wargaming this is the only way to really do it. Anything outside of squad-level becomes too complicated to run.
Depends on the setting then. I remember the Trilogy of the Damned took the Star Trek explanation for Warp travel (shunt mass into alternate dimension) and used that as an active defensive measure. Can't shoot something that's technically in subspace, afterall.
Sweet! I'll have a look.

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I recommend you to check out Children of a Dead Earth. It (mostly) realistically models space warships that could be built with almost no technological advacement from now. In my opinion it is a way one could portray a first primitive civilization's space fleet.

In space, the best way to run away from the enemy is not to run away from it. It is go directly towards his direction for he will be forced to change their vector and lose huge speed and fuels to reverse course and catch you. Most space tactics and strategies will be very counterintuitive for people who have studies old warfare.

So we need Gato in charge of our space fleet.

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So we can have space jousting. Warships fly past each other doing a drive by shot and then flip and reverse to repeat

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I never got how the millennium falcon was supposed to be a cargo ship. The design makes absolutely no sense for the purpose of moving cargo. Honestly if it was a real spaceship it would probably be sold as some kind of family car type ship. The space equivalent of something between an SUV and a hatchback that you would see a family of five using for the school run in the morning.

Does seem odd.

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I don't know why, but I fucking love these.

I think Millenium Falcon's fork in the front is supposed to be a docking area and it would dock to a cargo unit almost bigger than it is and tug it around. It is probably that maneuverable because all the thrust was designed to carry the huge shipment.

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Here is my space vessel. Its a quite serious setting.

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Seconding Children of Dead Earth. Playing it gives you a very intuitive look at how space combat would be different from any other kind of warfare.

I still haven't beaten Vesta Overkill though. Levels a bitch.

They're cool in their own way as a sort of mass produced utilitarian design, but the Empire has much better looking ships overall.

I guess ant-sized ships would be heat efficient.

Vesta overkill is easy if you spam missile volleys of over 40 missiles each with a short delay or if you use ANY of the good player built modules. People have dust guns that have range in megameters and poke through any reasonable armor. Jovian Tour is a bitch though. You have a time constraint, a deltaV constraint AND the bastard AI can dodge missiles

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I launched around 500 laser armed drones and completely raped her fleet without any losses, was fun.

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I remember reading something on the OA website about some kind of extragalactic threat or entity of some kind, and nobody knew exactly what it was, but that it destroyed another civilisation maybe? Can anybody help me find it?

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orionsarm.com/eg-article/4802acd634205

Bottom part of this I believe.

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Ayy thanks lad that was exactly what I was looking for.

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It's a tug-ship. The cargo would actually go on the front attached to the mandibules.

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>Star Wars
>Sci Fi.

Why for each of those examples?

Tell me more about your setting.

>I can't find a way not to get any other stuff shot out of the sky from the Moon
Because you lack education. That laser won't burn through 6 meters of nickel-steel plate that will be warship armor. Not anytime before Christmas at least.

Lasers will be anti drone/bomber and anti torpedo (Note, I differentiate a torpedo or armored nuclear cruise missile, from a missile, a much faster, no armor, conventional explosive for short range attacks). Why? Because to use them against other ships would take too long. Once someone opened fire with a laser to begin the hour long process of cutting complete through a warship's hull, the target warship would simply turn it's lasers on the attacker's laser ports. This woul melt the port to occluding the laser and rendering it inoperable; unless you want to burn through your own hull and lenses.

On the other hand, a quick burn, from a single laser, against a drone, missile or even a torpedo could be done and even used to bait the opponent's captain into firing his lasers to reveal their location for burnout.

This will make it a game of hide and go seek for each captain hiding his lasers in reserve until necessary. Using them only for anti nuke work would be wisest, as a nuke detonation against the hull of a ship, wins the fight.

The third weapon in the triad will be railguns/mass drivers. These will be mid to short range weapons, since they will be too easily deflected by defense drones launches, or dodge by a micro burst from the maneuver ports. These weapons will be the actual armor crackers for space combat. They have a higher damage curve then lasers, but need mass. Therefore their only use will be in close to mid range broadsides. Enough metal thrown out to overwhelm defensive measures and make it hurt.

The key to naval combat will be the tactics revolving around removal of opponents defenses (including lasers) while trying to get a nuke to hit. And when that fails, throwing iron rocks at high speeds.

where can i watch this show?

>His ship is not 86% fuel.

Awful design.

The basic conceit is humanity and other species becoming interstellar civilizations within the ruins and shadow of older ones, and coming to grips with each other and how they relate, and sometimes their own artificiality.

In terms of spaceships, the primary drive type pictured above is a sort of gravity-traction device. Is going to leave a big sheer plane of warped space behind the ship that it's 'pushing against' to move. Combat is mostly nuclear shaped-charge missiles and railguns. With some lasers and other widgets thrown in for good measure.

Not really sticking to hard sci-fi, so much as semi-permeable.

Have a loose, half-assed reference document?

docs.google.com/document/d/1rG0Fz_CLtXHqZ2tBPCKbI19H_W0gLLWi8fpSp6M00Ts/edit#

It's not licensed, so it's either streams or torrents.

I dunno, it's gotta have a design that is at least symmetrical, with its thrusters placed in line with the center of mass if you want it to go in the right direction.

I understood some of those words.

Not really. The center of thrust has to be in line with the CoM, but depending on the number and placement of engines, that could be a really strange configuration.

Lasers can be made to penetrate thick armor fast. In this particular case lasers work like a fast strobe instead of a constant beam. This way the armor vapor doesn't get in the way of the laser beam so it blasts the hole repeatedly instead of melting it. Also when you are pouring several terawatts of power into a technically kilometer wide laser phased array you are going to be lucky to hold for over a few seconds with any reasonable amount of armor. What you discussed applies only to lasers we currently have and outdated technologies, not to UV phased arrays and miles long free electron lasers. Also the best laser armor is the one with highest vaporization energy, which is a subtype of diamond.

Yeah, but maneuvering would be an absolute bitch if you've got engines all over the place, to say nothing of fuelling them. Plus, that way if an engine cluster has to be shut down or gets shot off in a fight then you've suddenly got more thrust on one side than the other.

It'd be easier to put them all in a group somewhere.

Oh yeah, there's definitely some downsides to doing it that way. I'm just saying you could. It probably wouldn't be the greatest idea.

>ex-SC
>boarded the GSV Bora Horza Gobuchul to kill the Mind
>part of the Idiran remnant
Humans, assassinating a GSV, in wartime, after defecting from SC to the Idiran remnant.

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Very well:
Exibit 1: nuclear fission produced radiation can be blocked by two things: range and shielding. Shielding is always heavy since it relies on dense heavy materials. Thus you put it only if you can't use anything else. Distance in space is easy to do. There is a particulat point, however, when ship's spinal truss weights as much as the shield it would replace. Also it is not always practical to make a long ship for every occasion. However civilian ships would always attempt to put a reactor on one end, habitat on another end and everything else they are carrying in- between to reduce the exposure.
Exibit 2: There is such thing as "angled armor" which is the cheapest way to increase survivability. Basically if you have an angled armor plate a bullet that hits it would have to travel through more material than if it impacts perpendicular armor plate. At a certain angle bullets would start bouncing off the plate and lasers could potentially be partially reflected. This makes angled armor a way to cheaply make normal armor more effective. Thus a ship would want a way to maximize the angle that faces the enemy to get the most out of this effect. So we have a ship with a pointy nose towards enemy, which corresponds with either an elongated cone, a thin wedge broadside or something similar.

I am fond of the flying grey brick.