Earth Alliance Comments Thread

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

As there is no mention of research and survey rate, I gather this is 100% speed?

Great opening! What you classify as Destroyers would be a super-dreadnought for me, but hey ... Different universe 

Yes, 100% on everything.

In Babylon 5, destroyers are larger than cruisers, so I am staying with the original nomenclature . I guess that is true in Star Wars too.

[vorpal+5]

That's what you get when you let George Lucas makes the ship classification! 

[Froggiest1982]

I guess that is true in Star Wars too.

That's what you get when you let George Lucas makes the ship classification! 

in SW displacement is by the length of the ship, I always wondered if we could add "dimensions" to Aurora

[RougeNPS]

Yeah. In Star Wars, the current metric is based on the length, not tonnage or armament of the ship. The current system is called the Anaxes War College System.

I could enumerate its specifications but its easier if people just look it up. Star Wars ships are...absurdly large...the Eclipse II alone was over...something like 25 kilometers in length.

Edit: Just double checked, its 17k in length.

[Zincat]

Yeah. In Star Wars, the current metric is based on the length, not tonnage or armament of the ship. The current system is called the Anaxes War College System.

I could enumerate its specifications but its easier if people just look it up. Star Wars ships are...absurdly large...the Eclipse II alone was over...something like 25 kilometers in length.

Edit: Just double checked, its 17k in length.

You have literally picked the biggest capital warship in the setting, except from the Death Star. And maybe some other weird outliers, because the star wars extended universe is huge, so who knows if something else was shown there.
Most SW warships are in the 300m - 2 km range

Incidentally, to me 300m for a starship is a corvette at best. I don't get why most settings use such tiny, insignificant, pathetic spaceships. Come on, you're literally traveling between the stars! Surely you can do better than a wet navy ship. That's simply pathetic.

WH40k battleships are all 8km+. Now that's an acceptable length for a warship.

EDIT: of course the shape matters too. I mean, something like a borg cube is still passable because it's 27 cubic km, being a cube. If barely so. But well, keep in mind we're technologically tens of thousands of years in the future. Having tiny ships makes very little sense as there are surely a lot less constraints than what we'd have in a near future space scenario.

[RougeNPS]

The problem mainly stems from power constraints. The ISD II has an literal micro neutron star as its reactor for all its weapons, shield generator, and its Class 1 hyperdrive. There is a reason Star Wars ships are small compared to say...40K, 40K is pretty ludicrous in general. Take a look at the stats for ships in say BSG or Star Gate.

[Zincat]

I feel I am derailing a bit too much XD Just one last post.
Imho in a far future sci-fi setting, and (very important) considering you are in vacuum so with no movement problems from size, you have TWO possible rough scenarios

1) weapons are superior to defenses. Making a ship twice as big does not make it twice more durable. In this case, you want to build a billion tiny, hard to hit ships as you cannot defend anyway. You want as many tiny ships as possible, your ships are all throwaways. The smallest, fully functional warship possible is all you want, build it indefinitely.
2) defenses DO scale favourably with size, larger ships are more durable and not throwaways. In which case making larger ships is something you generally want.

A lot of Sci-fi settings go for 2). In this situation, large ships are desirable. Which bring me to my second point. If we're thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future, with technology much, much  beyond what we have, you have to suppose that assembly is not a problem.

In this case, I cannot justify large nations building "smallish" warships, except for patrol needs (so you can cover all your systems). Why would you? Bigger ships are just better and it's not a problem to assemble them.  You are only limited by availability of materials and crew (and here we could also suppose these ships are mostly automated anyway... but Aurora does not model that).
So large nations, with the means to do so, WILL build large ships. There is zero logical reasons to artificially limit yourself to mid-size ships, if larger ships are just more powerful. For your main battle line, you build 5 large ships, not 15 medium ones.

Sorry for the rant, it's just a pet peeve of mine. I can forgive it for near-future sci-fi, but for far future sci-fi settings, maybe with thousands of inhabited worlds, I just cannot justify 100m long warships. Unless you assume that defenses are just weaker than weapons, in which case you go with tiny drones instead.

And just for the record. Right now in the real world we're moving towards option 1. In the near future, the main armed forces will move towards drone-like armed small units, large weapon platforms will disappear. A veritable swarm of drone-like weapon platforms, all automated.
What the far, far, far future will bring, we just don't know. I prefer to imagine my far future in a more interesting situation, rather than: my army is 2 billions small drones all exactly identical to each other.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

There are physical reasons to limit ship sizes even if resources are available to build bigger.

The first one that comes to mind is, basically, the square-cube problem. Mass (and thus, force needed to achieve a given acceleration) increases as the cube of the length scale. But the ability of the structure to bear those forces only increases as the square. In effect, you have the problem of your engines ripping themselves out of the mountings. You can mitigate that with engineering (change the layout, spread out the engines, etc), but handling orientation is even worse. Huge ships need monstrous torques to rotate, and those loads can become unmanageable.

Basically, at a certain point going bigger forces you to slow down or the ship tears itself apart.

A related issue is heat dissipation (something most Sci-Fi ignores). Again, surface area (which is roughly your ability to dissipate heat) is proportional to the square of the length scale, while power requirements (and thus, heat generation) are proportional to the cube.

TL;DR: ships have the same problems living organisms do, and this limits their size.

[Vasious]

As there is no mention of research and survey rate, I gather this is 100% speed?

Great opening! What you classify as Destroyers would be a super-dreadnought for me, but hey ... Different universe 

Yes, 100% on everything.

In Babylon 5, destroyers are larger than cruisers, so I am staying with the original nomenclature . I guess that is true in Star Wars too.

I always assumed it was that the Omegas were a new generation replacing the Hyperions and Nova which relative sizes matched the respective Cruiser and Dreadnought designations and Mimbari was aside there was a larger capital on the plans but never produced.

Speaking of which will a Nova analogue be the Combat Drop troop ship to suppliament your Erebus and Phoebe class Troop Transports

Not sure it would be feasible to carry the division it did along with the 18 twin plasma cannons

[Zincat]

There are physical reasons to limit ship sizes even if resources are available to build bigger.

The first one that comes to mind is, basically, the square-cube problem. Mass (and thus, force needed to achieve a given acceleration) increases as the cube of the length scale. But the ability of the structure to bear those forces only increases as the square. In effect, you have the problem of your engines ripping themselves out of the mountings. You can mitigate that with engineering (change the layout, spread out the engines, etc), but handling orientation is even worse. Huge ships need monstrous torques to rotate, and those loads can become unmanageable.

Basically, at a certain point going bigger forces you to slow down or the ship tears itself apart.

A related issue is heat dissipation (something most Sci-Fi ignores). Again, surface area (which is roughly your ability to dissipate heat) is proportional to the square of the length scale, while power requirements (and thus, heat generation) are proportional to the cube.

TL;DR: ships have the same problems living organisms do, and this limits their size.

I'm sorry but this is not what I consider far future sci-fi. What you just wrote are realistic, plausible expectations based on real-life physics for the near future.
Under these conditions, the only possible result is: Humanity never leaves the solar system and dies here.

If you want to have far future sci-fi you HAVE to suppose that there's progress in all fields, enough to justify actually moving through the stars. Such as, different materials with characteristics far beyond what we have now, or ways to go around that (maybe the entire hulls are kept together by forcefields?). If you suppose that we're limited by modern, real world polymers and metals, we're not going ANYWHERE else. No matter that we have no way to move at relativistic or faster than light speed anyway, so travel is impossible.

Incidentally, Aurora does exactly this, introducing TN materials which can do things normal metals and polymers can't do, and a way of travel that's beyond anything we have as of now. Without these basic assumptions, far future sci fi is impossible and you can at most colonize the solar system. Or perhaps use generational or cryo colony ships...

EDIT: and I'm not advocating for infinite size ships anwyay. I'm just saying that in a far future sci fi setting, if limits do exist they are surely much, much beyond a 500m ship anyway.

[db48x]

If you want to have far future sci-fi you HAVE to suppose that there's progress in all fields, enough to justify actually moving through the stars. Such as, different materials with characteristics far beyond what we have now, or ways to go around that (maybe the entire hulls are kept together by forcefields?). If you suppose that we're limited by modern, real world polymers and metals, we're not going ANYWHERE else. No matter that we have no way to move at relativistic or faster than light speed anyway, so travel is impossible.

A common assumption, but not quite correct. There are a surprising number of engine designs that we could build with near-future tech that would be useful for interstellar trips. Mars in three days, another star system in but a century.

Also, we wouldn't even need near-future technologies to build a dyson swarm. Kurzgesagt did a great overview video on them:

However, none of that that is really relevant for B5, which leans heavily on beam spam, jump gates and anti-gravity. And warships with rotating sections, for the less-advanced races like the humans.

This is an unlucky start if you ask me, but the first engagement did go EarthForce's way; perhaps with no forces in the system the Centauri will back down. On the other hand, maybe they have a colony in the system as well.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

I think you missed my point.

It doesn't MATTER how far material science progresses. It's not a problem to be overcome so much as it's a nonlinear factor in the optimization to decide how large the ship should be. Improved materials will shift the location of the optimum, but won't eliminate the fact that there is an optimal size that is smaller than would be implied by "larger ships are more efficient."

The effect is not necessarily to make ships small. It's just that, even IF you assume that larger ships are better for defensive reasons, and so would want to make bigger ships rather than numerous smaller ones, you still wouldn't be incentivized to make bigger and bigger ships (even if you can afford them). There is a tradeoff, and improved tech doesn't make it disappear.

"I just cannot justify 100m long warships."

My point was that physics provides a justification, even if you remove fiscal constraints and set up weapons tech to encourage arbitrarily large ships.

[Froggiest1982]

all in this, so far my mind is still trying to understand the logistic of working on a 17km ship...

[TheTalkingMeowth]

all in this, so far my mind is still trying to understand the logistic of working on a 17km ship...

Yeah, none of this is getting into the systems engineering challenge that designing, building, and maintaining such a vessel would be. Probably impossible without superhuman artificial intelligence support (since systems engineering difficulty scales combinatorically, not even something nice and easy like exponential).

[RougeNPS]

Tram lines and people movers my friend. If you ever watched the Clone Wars, when they are on the Malevolence, you can see the trains going down the length of the ship.

Back on topic of this thread.

Eagerly awaiting the next Earth Alliance update Steve.