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Posted by: Vandermeer
« on: July 26, 2014, 04:52:02 AM »

Quote from: Arwyn on July 25, 2014, 09:32:25 PM
Excellent stuff, so it sounds like we should add atomar lasers to the tech tree! ;)
I think it could already be in. The trans-newtonian tech might come up with new materials, but otherwise it is straight forwardly impossible to ever have a gamma laser, because what material would you build the focal of to reflect light of this kind that is famous for its piercing nature? ...And also because a lame infrared+other lasers could not possibly shoot this far, while it would also be kind of anachronistic to just research infrared laser when we are already flying into space... . It only all makes sense if they are trying to find an infrared application of an atomic laser.

...Not that I would acknowledge that this much thought has been put into the matter for real. Hell, despite several reports in the Bug thread (one coming from me), the description of the laser wavelength tech still falsely says the range becomes better if the wavelength increases .... while any technical progress works to reduce the wavelength instead.
I think one can come up with good explanations on its own though.

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I am with you on some of the actual issues around dispersion. I actually looked at that years ago when the whole debate about "nukes in space" arose. My conclusion is that if you are restricting the effect to both radiation (which you guys have just shown is iffy unless the armor is breached) you are left with thermal effects. Thermal is actually pretty good, the vaccum of space is actually a very poor conductor for heat, so immediate concentraton is actually pretty sustanabile, and then you have the secondary effect of "roasting" a target by heat loading his systems beyond the capbabilty of his tech to disperse the heat via some sort of heat sinks.
Overheating is indeed one of the greatest challenges of space travel. I think specialized overheating weapons might again fill the 'lameness' criterium of weapons , but it is certainly a frightening and plausible weapon possibility.

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The down side is that a battle with a lot of nukes getting thrown around is A) going to play hell with EM and thermal sensors, as the radiation and thermal effects will take a considerable period of time to disperse, and B) you are leaving pockets of extreme heat laying about that act as a thermal minefield for ships moving through the target area. Direct pursuit would be VERY dangerous in such a scenario.
I must confess I have no idea what nukes actually leave behind, but my educated guess is that given their reaction comes from relatively few concentrated 'ignition' mass, there would be no medium left to condensate such energy locally. All the released power just comes out as either neutrons or gamma burst, or other EM i think, so the field of thermal threat would disperse almost instantaneously.(?) Or would the local small cloud of radioactive particles indeed already be enough heat hazard ???
Things will be different for sure however when firing into dust clouds or asteroid fields.

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Dispersion of the effects from the warhead would be spherical, and inefficient as hell, so I guess you could agrue that the tech improvements to warheads would be both a matter of yield for volume and/or an improvement in focusing the energy into a more efficient pattern. For example, a sufficiently powerful magnetic field could act as a virtual liner, in effect producing a nuclear shape charge, which would be far more effective than the omni-directional blast of the basic warhead. This would in turn lead to smaller loads of fissile materials in the warhead to produce the same effect, netting out Aurora's smaller, more effective missiles.
I certainly like the idea. I see though that there would be an eternal competition of protection against focusing by this. If you had the means to 'contain' a massive energy release explosion so much that it can be directed (does not matter if through material or magnetic or whatever), you would far more easily become able to develop protection against it. It is basically how there is a (explosion guiding) pistol and a bulletproof vest, a tank gun and the tank armor. As soon as you have means to guide raw force of nature, you can also protect against it. If nukes could be "tamed" too, they would just degrade to becoming the next gunpowder. Not that this would really put a bar on the idea, because lower tech enemies will surely feel the effects of more concentrated force.


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The entertaining thing about Aurora is figuring out where the physics stops and/or starts and the handwavium begins. :)
I find it amazing that often a singular discovery could completely reshape the technological cosmos and all the possibilities the have yet. We have seen that in the past with steam engines, electronics, or lastly semiconductor tech - often a quite simple principle that we discovered that resulted in a wave of applications to totally change the face of all. If we would truly find means to overcome impulse physics in a certain way like Aurora suggests, it is fun to think in what a world that would result, which logical other applications suddenly have to arise (e.g. instantaneous wireless communication, or perfectly conserving and highly energy dense fly wheel capacitors). What would it change if we would figure out the nature of how some particles can be intertwined despite being possibly lightyears apart? Lots.

Quote from: Theodidactus on July 25, 2014, 11:20:03 PM
Actually, now that we're on that topic I would like to say that it would be sorta neat if you could temporarily blind scanners with a powerful nuclear burst. In my fiction, this is a tactic that was employed by one side of a battle, and I really think that having a bunch of big explosions go off right in front of you should have some terrible effect on your ship's ability to see other ships.
I subscribe to this idea. :) But I would like to have sensors with EM resistance to apply their check here too. Maybe widen the definition of the nature of the "resistance" here for this sake.
Posted by: Theodidactus
« on: July 25, 2014, 11:20:03 PM »

Actually, now that we're on that topic I would like to say that it would be sorta neat if you could temporarily blind scanners with a powerful nuclear burst. In my fiction, this is a tactic that was employed by one side of a battle, and I really think that having a bunch of big explosions go off right in front of you should have some terrible effect on your ship's ability to see other ships.
Posted by: Arwyn
« on: July 25, 2014, 09:32:25 PM »

Excellent stuff, so it sounds like we should add atomar lasers to the tech tree! ;)

I am with you on some of the actual issues around dispersion. I actually looked at that years ago when the whole debate about "nukes in space" arose. My conclusion is that if you are restricting the effect to both radiation (which you guys have just shown is iffy unless the armor is breached) you are left with thermal effects. Thermal is actually pretty good, the vaccum of space is actually a very poor conductor for heat, so immediate concentraton is actually pretty sustanabile, and then you have the secondary effect of "roasting" a target by heat loading his systems beyond the capbabilty of his tech to disperse the heat via some sort of heat sinks.

The down side is that a battle with a lot of nukes getting thrown around is A) going to play hell with EM and thermal sensors, as the radiation and thermal effects will take a considerable period of time to disperse, and B) you are leaving pockets of extreme heat laying about that act as a thermal minefield for ships moving through the target area. Direct pursuit would be VERY dangerous in such a scenario.

Dispersion of the effects from the warhead would be spherical, and inefficient as hell, so I guess you could agrue that the tech improvements to warheads would be both a matter of yield for volume and/or an improvement in focusing the energy into a more efficient pattern. For example, a sufficiently powerful magnetic field could act as a virtual liner, in effect producing a nuclear shape charge, which would be far more effective than the omni-directional blast of the basic warhead. This would in turn lead to smaller loads of fissile materials in the warhead to produce the same effect, netting out Aurora's smaller, more effective missiles.

The entertaining thing about Aurora is figuring out where the physics stops and/or starts and the handwavium begins. :)
Posted by: Vandermeer
« on: July 22, 2014, 03:26:14 AM »

Quote from: Theodidactus on July 21, 2014, 03:14:13 PM
This is why I always imagine my "laser beams" to be encased in some kind of quantum-magical bose-einstein condensate energy-storing cloud, as it rockets towards its target.
Ok, so to get the required 30k km range of a 10cm focal using a bose einstein atomar laser, we would need it to reach a wavelength of extreme minimum ~0.55 nanometer (additional factor 10 would make it pretty good already though). This kind of laser indeed abides the de-broglie wavelength as I just looked up, so its wavelength is h/(m*v). v cannot be exactly c, but let's assume the Aurora maximum of 297k km/s, so about 99%c. With that it would be totally ok to use a tiny particle of 4*10^-33 for the attack, so the worst we can do, hydrogen with 1.674*10^-27, is already much better. Hydrogen would actually get the laser to 1.32 femtometre (10^-15), which gives it a maximum range of amazing ~12.5 billion kilometers, or 1.25b for effective use. ..And it only gets better from there

Well, seems atomar laser are a good alternative in space then. A matter based weapon would avoid the problems completely, but at these ranges your prime problem might be more that the enemy cannot be easily hit anyway if flying evasive maneuver, as the attacks would travel for far too long to be useful outside of ambush strikes.

Quote from: spoongoon on July 22, 2014, 01:38:39 AM
So that seems to be a no.
All is not lost...:
Quote from: Vandermeer
I am going for spheric design here, just because it is the absolute optimum for this case as this form conserves the highest amount of mass while presenting the least amount of surface area (so armor is saved ideally). Any other design will be worse in that relation, so the armor will always be thinner from that point on. A sphere of 2450 m³ would have a radius of 8.36 meters (V=4/3*pi*r³), and 27.55% of that is our conventional armor equivalent - 2.3 meters.
Ok, that is pretty thick by earthly standards. Let's look up the actual absorption power of steel. I found one halving per 2.5 centimeters. That results in a reduction of the factor 2*10^-28
I made an error here for the volume calculation. The armor is actually quite a bit thinner (not completely changing the result though). The thickness of the armor would be [radius of sphere of 2450m³] - [radius of sphere of 1775m³], and I rushed the step like a fool to make it a percentage when the object is 3 dimensional.. :-X  ..Well, one night of sleep and it jumped me on the re-read...
So the real thickness is just pretty precise 85 centimeters (= 27 centimeters as high-d-duranium), and that leads to a reduction of a factor of 5.8*10^-11. To get the required 178mJ of radiation to the inside of the ship, you would thus still need pretty exactly 3 million teraJoule of a hull hit. Not completely impossible I would say, but with those energies at your disposal you might consider to just blow the 12.5kt of ship apart for far less expense with a mundane traditional "kaboom"-device.

Crafts that only have of 1 layer of Aurora armor however would be pretty easy to fry. Around 50 gigaJoule of a hit would kill them here already. That is like pocket money for space ships at that tech-level.

Unlike with normal weaponry, armor produces an exponential effect when it comes to reduce radiation, so any radiation weapon's effectiveness would greatly fluctuate depending who it is you are hitting. And if someone goes over 4 layers, there is basically nothing such a weapon could ever do, so it would probably just be a terror object against civilian ships and scouts and fighters or so.
Posted by: Icecoon
« on: July 22, 2014, 02:21:42 AM »

Quote from: spoongoon on July 22, 2014, 01:38:39 AM
This is what I love about Aurora and the community, nothing can ever be simple.
You are right that the kind of armor these ships would likely have wouldn´t let radiation through.
I just tought it might be a cool mechanic reality be damned.
How realistic is it afterall that we have massive ships that can accelerate and decelerate instantly or that the sensor ranges are so short or that the space is basically an ocean.
It is up to you, if this idea has merit.
So that seems to be a no.

The enhanced warheads could be more useful if you could filter out the radiation somehow, maybe with terraformers.
Posted by: spoongoon
« on: July 22, 2014, 01:38:39 AM »

This is what I love about Aurora and the community, nothing can ever be simple.
You are right that the kind of armor these ships would likely have wouldn´t let radiation through.
I just tought it might be a cool mechanic reality be damned.
How realistic is it afterall that we have massive ships that can accelerate and decelerate instantly or that the sensor ranges are so short or that the space is basically an ocean.
It is up to you, if this idea has merit.
So that seems to be a no.
Posted by: Vandermeer
« on: July 21, 2014, 04:18:45 PM »

Quote from: Theodidactus on July 21, 2014, 03:09:56 PM
Think about it strictly in terms of the density of a METER of steel compared to the density of those Hazmat suits you see in the movies. That's like, equivalent to 700 hazmat suits. (did the math, more like 7,000)

Also keep in mind that when you read science fiction and discussions about the difficulty of "shielding" a spaceship from interstellar radiation, they're talking about minimizing long-run effects (5% spike in cancer rates over the lifetime of a crew of 1,000). Not the dramatic short term effects you want (everyone vomits and dies).
"I" don't want anything here for I regard radiation weaponry as too lame for battle as stated above. Intentionally built radiation weapons could easily be many factors stronger than what a ship normally was made for, especially in the energy mastery space age, so I don't think it was all that apparent that this would not work at all.

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Remember also that gamma rays are just a different wavelength of light. A directed beam of high intensity gamma rays IS a laser, and would behave in this game exactly as a laser would.
A laser is not just a beam of light. The definition is that the light has to be coherent, so of identical wavelength. Just being "gamma" does not constitute this condition. Gamma is everything lower than x-ray, so it could be an infinitely different mumbo-jumbo of many frequencies, and a gamma burst weapon would most likely be like this rather then unison.
Lasers are in this context of course much harder to produce than a simple gamma torchlight or gamma explosion. Except for concentrated armor piercing, the total effects on a target depend on energy alone, just as always, so I am not sure why the condition "laser" would even have changed anything in the equation anyway.

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This is why I always imagine my "laser beams" to be encased in some kind of quantum-magical bose-einstein condensate energy-storing cloud, as it rockets towards its target.
That wouldn't help you, except if you manage to bring it to insanely high frequencies. The problem with casual light is that it behaves like a wave, so it has tendency to spread over distance. Bose-einstein condensates just converts normal matter in quantum state so that it applies wave nature too, hence same problem.
It might become easier to get high frequency material though, so the range would be better. I don't know right now, but it probably correlates with the De-Broglie wavelength, so a more massive medium can get ridiculously shaky. Maybe I will look that up tomorrow.
Real matter shots would however be ultimately immune against any dispersing effect, so why not that?

I myself try to stay classic in sci-fi and thus rename all the lasers to plasma weapons.(broadsides in Warhammer, staff canons for Goa'Uld, and even now Plasma lances again) That was initially because I thought lasers would range farther though, yet after finally doing the math today, it shall from now be the complete opposite reason. ;D
Posted by: Theodidactus
« on: July 21, 2014, 03:14:13 PM »

Quote from: Vandermeer on July 21, 2014, 02:15:05 PM

///What I actually came to say was that the laser thing bothered me a bit, so I thought and eventually calculated how big the dispersion in open space actually would be. Stunning result, I greatly misjudged, and Aurora is actually much extending the capacities of physics here. With the given tiny lens sizes of 10 or 15 cm and such, you would not be able to shoot further than lame 37 kilometers at extreme max. before frying your own mirror lense... . And even if you had material that could resist for more, your energy would just blur so much out that it would simply be very ineffective use of resource. To actually get to the range of the 10cm laser of Aurora (30k km) you would need a focal of around 4.3 meters, and then it would still be not optimal with the energy being spread out for about the same size on the enemy hull.
So I thought Aurora restricted too much, but instead it liberates from the shackles of physics quite a bit. Lasers may be superb PD in reality, but otherwise it appears better to stick to matter based weaponry.

This is why I always imagine my "laser beams" to be encased in some kind of quantum-magical bose-einstein condensate energy-storing cloud, as it rockets towards its target.
Posted by: Theodidactus
« on: July 21, 2014, 03:09:56 PM »

Quote from: Vandermeer on July 21, 2014, 02:15:05 PM

I guess that is pretty solid cover then, damn. Honestly wouldn't have thought that a meter steel could protect you this good. I guess I proved your point then... , ah well, was worth knowing.
Anything that makes it through this cover by radiation alone, will indeed most likely just blitz everything living inside away.


Think about it strictly in terms of the density of a METER of steel compared to the density of those Hazmat suits you see in the movies. That's like, equivalent to 700 hazmat suits. (did the math, more like 7,000)

Also keep in mind that when you read science fiction and discussions about the difficulty of "shielding" a spaceship from interstellar radiation, they're talking about minimizing long-run effects (5% spike in cancer rates over the lifetime of a crew of 1,000). Not the dramatic short term effects you want (everyone vomits and dies).


Remember also that gamma rays are just a different wavelength of light. A directed beam of high intensity gamma rays IS a laser, and would behave in this game exactly as a laser would.
Posted by: Vandermeer
« on: July 21, 2014, 02:15:05 PM »

Ohoh, the whole argument of this however stands and falls with the true size of "the dam". I understand the complication of fine tuning at already heavy energy amounts. It is basically how a fly can make movements of for us unthinkable millimeter precision, while I still struggle to not hit a centimeter besides the right key on the piano when moving fast. So of course when something is gushing over the ledge of an already massive energy dam(the thick armor), it is (statistically) going to be a proportionally equal massive overflow burst, totally blasting the crew. You say that this dam is of that enormous dimensions for space ships, but with the really light weighted Aurora ships, how thick can it really be?

For test I have a high-density duranium armor of 4 layers, constituting 1600 tons in total on a 12.5kt craft. We must translate that into conventional armor to be able to relate, as physical properties of high tech armor are measured in steel equivalents anyway (through the layer common comparison), so 1600 T2 armor is around 5400 tons worth of conventional armor. For this matter I assume that duranium is not only durable as 3.4 times conventional, but also absorbs just as much. Let's further assume the conventional armor is equivalent to steel, which is 8 tons per m³, so we got ourselves virtual 675 m³ to coat the design with.(again: it does not matter that high-d-duranium would only need 200 m³ for this, as it generates the same effect) If the craft has about 50% free inner space for corridors, quarters and anything filled with atmosphere, then we can project a real density of 4 tons per cubic meter of inner space. The leftover 7100 tons thus provide us with 1775 m³ to build the ship with.

I am going for spheric design here, just because it is the absolute optimum for this case as this form conserves the highest amount of mass while presenting the least amount of surface area (so armor is saved ideally). Any other design will be worse in that relation, so the armor will always be thinner from that point on. A sphere of 2450 m³ would have a radius of 8.36 meters (V=4/3*pi*r³), and 27.55% of that is our conventional armor equivalent - 2.3 meters.
Ok, that is pretty thick by earthly standards. Let's look up the actual absorption power of steel. I found one halving per 2.5 centimeters. That results in a reduction of the factor 2*10^-28
...

All is not lost - Untreatable deadly dose is 10Sv, which is 10 J per kilogram of body weight. The human body is pretty exactly 1 ton per cubic meter, and we have 172 on board with 70 kilograms average each, so that equals 120k joule of precise radiation to kill them all (in some time). Since you will need to flood the whole inner ship (1775 m³) to be sure however, and only 12 m³ are humans, you will for real need about 178mJ of a hit, which is an initial attack of 88,187 weka Joule (10^30), or in other words 300 peta joule ..and then another 300 peta joule for every joule you had... .....ahh...äh...uh-huh .. uhm...well

I guess that is pretty solid cover then, damn. Honestly wouldn't have thought that a meter steel could protect you this good. I guess I proved your point then... , ah well, was worth knowing.
Anything that makes it through this cover by radiation alone, will indeed most likely just blitz everything living inside away.

Assuming the approximations I made here were good enough: Myth of "Radiation Weaponry" -
...Can we call those enchanted radiation warheads now already? ;)

///
Quote from: Vandermeer
I am pretty sure that other limitations exist for those reasons too, like the restricted laser range... . Refraction in space is actually not all that great, so you could probably easily shot even an infrared laser to 1,5m kilometers without it losing significant power.
What I actually came to say was that the laser thing bothered me a bit, so I thought and eventually calculated how big the dispersion in open space actually would be. Stunning result, I greatly misjudged, and Aurora is actually much extending the capacities of physics here. With the given tiny lens sizes of 10 or 15 cm and such, you would not be able to shoot further than lame 37 kilometers at extreme max. before frying your own mirror lense... . And even if you had material that could resist for more, your energy would just blur so much out that it would simply be very ineffective use of resource. To actually get to the range of the 10cm laser of Aurora (30k km) you would need a focal of around 4.3 meters, and then it would still be not optimal with the energy being spread out for about the same size on the enemy hull.
So I thought Aurora restricted too much, but instead it liberates from the shackles of physics quite a bit. Lasers may be superb PD in reality, but otherwise it appears better to stick to matter based weaponry.
Posted by: Theodidactus
« on: July 21, 2014, 10:18:07 AM »

Quote from: spoongoon on July 21, 2014, 08:51:15 AM
*Enhanced, yes that is correct.  If you like you can envision a directed burst of gamma or neutron radiation which according to my wikipedia research penetrates quite well.  Btw I like your username.


Quote
Really not sure if an instant death would be possible by Gamma though. At some level, sure, but already at nuke niveau?... Futuristic tech better helps out.


Keep in mind that these ships have many many "layers" of armor which are very thick. A gamma ray can fly through a sheet  of lead, with sufficient energies, it can get through anything, but anything that can punch through multiple tons of armor is going to behave like a "laser" in both form and function.

Gamma radiation of sufficient energies to punch into heavily armored ships is not going to have the dramatic "biowarfare" effects you want (vomiting, clumps of hair falling out, nonorganic stuff untouched). It's going to fry the crew and the ship with it.


Translation: you are describing a gamma ray laser pumped by a nuclear warhead, which is already in the game.


EDIT: I should explain myself better:

When we say that "alpha particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper", what we mean is that when this beam hits the paper, virtually all alpha particles are going to be absorbed by it at various points along their transit through the paper. Alpha particles have both a high mass and a high charge, so their odds of interacting with things (even air) is very good. These interactions release energy, in the form of broken chemical bonds (which is why they're bad for you, as they break up your delicate internal chemistry) and also in the form of heat.

When we say that "gamma rays can't penetrate X" what we mean is that most gamma rays will be absorbed by X as they move through it. imparting their energy into X. If X is water, the water will heat up. if X is metal, the metal will heat up.

When we say that "gamma rays can penetrate X" what we mean is that most, of a significant amount of, gamma rays will not be absorbed by X as they move through it, enough to do something significant on the other side.

However, "something significant" depends on the situation and in your situation I'm afraid you're not going to find a happy medium between "the crew notices nothing is amiss and has a statistically higher rate of cancer in 20 years" and "Everybody fries along with the ship in a manner exactly like a laser beam".


Realistically speaking, it would require an absurdly involved amount of fine-tuning to find just the right frequency fired at just the right place through the ship at just the right energy to kill the crew in minutes (rather than hours, days, or months) but leave everything else untouched.

Unrealistically speaking, a race that had the technology to do this would be better served...I dunno, teleporting nuclear waste into the ship, or just frying individual crew with point meson bursts or something.

Posted by: Vandermeer
« on: July 21, 2014, 09:44:31 AM »

Quote from: spoongoon on July 21, 2014, 08:51:15 AM
*Enhanced, yes that is correct.  If you like you can envision a directed burst of gamma or neutron radiation which according to my wikipedia research penetrates quite well.  Btw I like your username.
Yupp, nothing can really stop gamma radiation, while neutrons just demand a certain thickness.(otherwise the neutron radiating ITER fusion reactor would roast our good engineers that basically work next door)

It is true though that nothing speaks against some hull penetration through radiation (After all, microwaves work too...), but I think it comes down to a style of play question. Real space combat would probably be much more boring because you cannot really expect ships to engage in lengthy battles with conventional weapons anymore. Just like today the most efficient way to fight would probably be bio weaponry (with you having the antidote). In a space age where we are able to control such immense energies that it becomes feasible to fly around the planets, you probably just unleash one single immense powerful attack that we just cannot use planetary because of fallout drawbacks, and then it is over - winner is who shots first. Those realistic scenarios don't make for an interesting and watchable conflict however, and I think roasting enemy crew with hull ignoring radiation is too such a lame warfare method. You could have one massive microwave beam tuned to the wavelength of water, and all life would just evaporate in its path no matter what, but no Klingon would ever deem that a battle worthy of either glory or honour.

I am pretty sure that other limitations exist for those reasons too, like the restricted laser range... . Refraction in space is actually not all that great, so you could probably easily shot even an infrared laser to 1,5m kilometers without it losing significant power. There is a line between realism and interesting fiction, and I believe armor piercing crew frying invisible radiation is such a thing where it is crossed for most people.

Quote from: Icecoon on July 21, 2014, 09:16:19 AM
Hmm and how would you direct a burst of radiation? When a warhead explodes, it spreads the radiation in every direction.
On the other hand, this is an interesting idea for a cannon ... something like the microwave, but this would kill the crew.
If the warhead explodes nearby, it would just be like the laser warhead - it is enough to be close for full damage. Also there was this argument over AMMs that they destroy enemy missiles by detonating nearby, because why in the hell would a 2.5 ton object, ramming another at 30k km/s ever need explosions to bring something down otherwise?
For the AMMs I am not so sure if that argument really holds up, but maybe flying missiles are just easy to take out. However for radiation - humans are easy to condemn when it comes to the amounts of energy released by a nuke. Totally save to do it a hundred meters, or even kilometers afar with space age energy levels.
Really not sure if an instant death would be possible by Gamma though. At some level, sure, but already at nuke niveau?... Futuristic tech better helps out.
Posted by: Icecoon
« on: July 21, 2014, 09:16:19 AM »

Quote from: spoongoon on July 21, 2014, 08:51:15 AM
*Enhanced, yes that is correct.  If you like you can envision a directed burst of gamma or neutron radiation which according to my wikipedia research penetrates quite well.  Btw I like your username.

Hmm and how would you direct a burst of radiation? When a warhead explodes, it spreads the radiation in every direction.
On the other hand, this is an interesting idea for a cannon ... something like the microwave, but this would kill the crew.
Posted by: spoongoon
« on: July 21, 2014, 08:51:15 AM »

*Enhanced, yes that is correct.  If you like you can envision a directed burst of gamma or neutron radiation which according to my wikipedia research penetrates quite well.  Btw I like your username.
Posted by: Icecoon
« on: July 21, 2014, 08:19:13 AM »

Quote from: Vandermeer on July 21, 2014, 06:08:24 AM
Do you know another technology where you can magically grow another pair of arms? I don't think so!

Quote
Thor: Your ancestors called it magic...
...but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same.

 :)