ASTA

American, not African American?

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From Stardust, To Stardust

That's assuming the missile attacks aren't dulled by anti-missile defense systems. But with different species with various paths of technological advancement and military doctrine, it's diffcult to assess who can destroy who.

Nationbuilding Roleplay?

Dinh AaronMk said
I'mma have to nope out of that.

From Stardust, To Stardust

So Boerd said
Number of planets inhabited

11 for my civilization. Planets are not close to one another, but are many light years apart. Terraforming technology was never discovered, so hunting for suitable worlds for colonization has been a challenge.

EDIT: Some kind of map would be useful.

From Stardust, To Stardust

I admit, that 50% lightspeed figure should be toned down, and will be toned down. Drastically. Also, that 10c cruising speed? Yeah... we have that technology already. Nobody's broken the lightspeed barrier, but the mechanism for doing so has existed since the late 90's. Thing is, we have absolutely no idea how to create the negative energy (yes, real thing) fuel that it would need. Plus, by the original design, it would need multiple universes of that. Using modern designs created by Edward White and his team at NASA, that figure can be reduced to the mass of the Voyager space probe. We still don't know how to create a single particle of this stuff though, but it probably exists according to quantum physics. Besides, that's a really, really slow ship to the rest of the galaxy. A few weeks to Alpha Centauri for humans, and the Eternal union just pops in at Mars from somewhere outside Sol in seconds.

My idea for the humans in the long run, however, is that they use "primitive" science to great effect. A high-power railgun could one-shot an alien ship, despite being "primitive" in comparison to "generic DEW".

I like harder (Not that hard, but harder) sci-fi (hence why I chose the Alcubierre Drive instead of a "Hyperdrive" or "Warp Drive"), but I've always been bad with research. In fact, I was going to make those cannons less "whoops I forgot a projectile at that speed would destroy a planet" and more "Cutting beams, but, like, molten metal". Think Sovereign's main gun from Mass Effect. Instead, I was lazy and picked a number less than 90, said "eh, it'll work", and threw it in.

Also, I'm kind of surprised that nobody complained about the fact that a sublight vessel (a fighter, no less) made it to Mars in 20 minutes. That's another thing to fix.

The Eternal Union probably used FTL to traverse that distance in such a short span of time. I figured the ship's "cruising speed" was the general velocity it operated at during ship-to-ship combat or when it was merely coasting through space using sub-light engines. Or something along those lines. I don't know why I thought that.

And, the idea that railguns or other types of projectile weapons are primitive is never justified in science fiction for some reason. I mean for one, you lose the indirect fire capabilities of projectile weapons---unless your DEWs defy all physics and somehow can arc over hills, mountains and around corners.

In the vul'kruun's case, they just modernized the firearm and standard solid-propellant cannon technology as well. And the railgun, the coilgun or its helical sub-types were never actually invented, but they were successful in creating shaped charges (both high-explosive and nuclear) that could propel a projectile through a barrel at extreme velocities. Sort of like a voitenko implosion gun, except minus the device's habit of self-destructing during the firing procedure. There are also light-gas guns, combustion light-gas guns, electrothermal light-gas guns, standard electrothermal guns, electrothermal-chemical guns, and scram cannons.

From Stardust, To Stardust

Kyelin said
Not to my knowledge. Though it wouldn't be a bad idea me thinks

^

From Stardust, To Stardust

WilsonTurner said
Fighters can have shields or armor, and allow them to resist the weaker weapons that would shred a missile. You fire a missile, there is a much better chance of the missile being shot down than a larger fighter with a variety of weapons, with possibly anti-CD and the ability to independently make decisions. It'd be more efficient to send in a couple squadrons to take out the CD and shield clusters after you've broken down the shields, and then focus fire on gaps in the armor, where communications, exhaust, or other devices or parts are sticking through. Primarily using capital ship weapons would be less efficient, though it may have better survival rates for pilots.

Or you could skip the entire fighter thing altogether and just give your missiles shielding, armor and their own autonomous intelligence construct. Also, missiles accelerate faster than fighters. And deaccelerate faster as well. They aren't constrained by the limitations g forces force upon living pilots, and therefore outpeform fighters in maneuverability.

And they're cheaper than a fighter as well.

From Stardust, To Stardust

WilsonTurner said
PD/Shield Clusters, maybe, but fighters will be more effective than missiles for taking those out.

This makes zero sense. Why would a fighter be more effective than a missile at taking out PD?

Kyelin said
The Ethereals dot exactly have a home world. It's where abouts and fate are list to them. They get around in small war bands of two to twenty cruisers, and can be found in various locations as they move about.Btw, on my phone :S

You might have a PM coming your way soon. :3

From Stardust, To Stardust

Well, let's assume you want to shoot a golf ball, which according to Google should weigh about 1.6 ounces. That's pretty light.

Adjusted for kilograms, a golf ball comes out at 0.0453592 kg. 50 percent the speed of light is 539,626,424 km/h (or about 540 million kilometers per hour), which when adjusted for m/s comes out to be 1.49896e8 meters per second. When all of the work is done, you'll get about 509,583,641,782,553.6 joules of energy for this golf ball's impact. This is enough to basically core any science fiction starship regardless of its armor or energy shielding. 1 joule is equal to 1 watt over 1 second. Assuming 100 percent efficiency, you'd need to dump about 510 trillion watts of electricity behind each shot in order to launch this golf ball at 0.50 percent of c. 1 trillion watts is equal to 1 terawatt. IIRC, humanity used about 16 TW of power back in 2006, which means you'd need to have a reactor that can produce 31 times the amount of power consumed by the entire human race during that particular year. And rapidly fill magical energy banks with this amount of juice (and discharge them without the entire ship exploding). And somehow cool this weapon (and its electrical components) down after each shot (and probably during the charging process too; unsure).

For one shot.

As I said, why haven't the Terrans conquered the galaxy yet?

WilsonTurner said
I can either warp for in-system FTL, which will pretty much make all combat capabilities useless and make scanning/radar unusable. And, ASTA, if you would have read and paid attention and not be so , you would realize that the Valkians primary defense will be armor, not shields or point defense. PD/Shield Clusters, maybe, but fighters will be more effective than missiles for taking those out.

You really can't detect sarcasm and/or jokes very well.

From Stardust, To Stardust

I think it's less about mod powers being abused and more about several individuals in this roleplay having a very poor sense of scale when it comes to weapon yields, weapon performance and the capabilities of military forces and production.

For example, I don't know why people are fretting over the cost of things. Once you get into space and start mining asteroids, planets and moons using sophisticated automation technology, generic Earth-like economies (capitalism specifically) cease to be relevant. Everything basically becomes free and fielding truly massive space fleets is possible. The only thing that isn't free is time, I suppose.

Additionally, a starship that can fire solid projectiles at .50 percent of c makes me seriously wonder why the Terrans haven't conquered the entire galaxy yet with their version of the SDF-1 or Space Battleship Yamato, because firepower of that magnitude makes several things come to mind:

1) The material sciences of the Terrans. A barrel (or a twin-rail system) exposed to the tremendous forces of a projectile flying through it at 0.50 percent of c would have to be forged out of near-godlike materials.

2) The power generation of the Terrans. Accelerating a projectile to 0.50 percent of c is indeed possible using standard starship engines, but this process would demand many years of accelerating to work. To get a shell up to that speed in an instant would require hyper-advanced power generating systems (no, antimatter won't cut it; you're going to need exotic matter for this, or a massive reactor that would spend an ungodly amount of time charging the power-banks for this weapon ), some sort of capacitor that can safely store that amount of energy and discharge it immediately without exploding and some way to deal with the absurd amount of waste heat generated by this thing.

3) Some tachyon weapon that can destroy Australia with one shot.

4) And a 'cruising' speed that's ten times the speed of light.

Basically you've made a ship that can solo every nation in the roleplay with impunity; the engineering and scientific capabilities of the human species makes that of every other nation's in this roleplay literally look like chimps banging two rocks together. I'd hate to see what the FTL speeds of this thing are.

Also, worms that can eat through body armor. Alright.

Now all we need is Wilson to come in with an impenetrable PD field that makes all missile technology obsolete.

EDIT: I'm not asking for people to adhere to Hard Science, but the shit I'm seeing is flat-out ridiculous.