Newtonian Aurora

[HaliRyan]

There should be some special message when you do so much damage with a nuke that the ship no longer exists in any form.

Pretty much impossible, at least with a nuclear device. Maybe if you had a significant quantity of antimatter you could release enough energy to completely vaporize a whole ship, but with a nuke you're going to have to settle for taking chunks out of it.

[jseah]

A contact megaton nuke on a 50 meter vessel? 

I don't think you'll get all the bits, but they'll be very very tiny bits. 

[Rastaman]

Proper nukes! I really wonder how this will turn out in the end. How much damage can these nuclear missiles absorb before being mission-killed?

A normal 10 gram 7,62mm bullet that hits at 1000 km/s has an energy of 5000 MJ. A ton of TNT. I foresee guided kinetic missiles having much better performance than explosive warheads except maybe in a close orbit environment. Or shrapnel warheads! Imagine a thousand 10 gram bullets released at a relative velocity of 2000 km/s, say at 50000 meters distance. Each hits with 20000 MJ. Each needs 25 milliseconds to reach the target. Altogether they do 20 000 000 MJ of damage. Not good.

You can only stop all these threats with more nuclear proliferation. Each ship squadron will pack multi-gigatons in ASMs and AMMs.

[Mel Vixen]

Pretty much impossible, at least with a nuclear device. Maybe if you had a significant quantity of antimatter you could release enough energy to completely vaporize a whole ship, but with a nuke you're going to have to settle for taking chunks out of it.

Now imagine these tiny tiny bits of highly irradiated junk go down on a low-athmosphere world with an active colony. Atleast i dont want to be where this spacejunk goes down.

These calculations also show how dangerous nukes are and hack i am afraid that humanity could come to a sudden violent end. Also the effects on electronics sound good the *spoiler* might have !!fun!! with them.

[Beersatron]

What about adding in a random chance that Ship A could be in the shadow of Ship B when Ship B gets smacked by a nuke?

Therefore, no damage is applied to Ship A even though it is theoretically inside the damage range of the nuke.

Make sense?

[Mel Vixen]

What about adding in a random chance that Ship A could be in the shadow of Ship B when Ship B gets smacked by a nuke?

Therefore, no damage is applied to Ship A even though it is theoretically inside the damage range of the nuke.

Make sense?

Why theoritcly? Actually you could calculate blast-shadows iirc. its not even that hard.

[GeaXle]

Steve,

Will there be something about acceleration compensators, like in honorverse. It could be a new component that would have a max acceleration tech line and a max ship size tech line (or such). If it get destroy in a fight, or out of power for some reason and the ship is accelerating, then every one aboard would get kill but the ship would be almost undamaged and could be thug back and reused. There could even be an emergency "stop accelerating" probability. The ship would then have to use human possibility of acceleration until reparation are made.

Obviously missile and such wouldn't need that component.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I think acceleration compensation would be intrinsic to the Antigravity Minerals bit.  Tho damage to the antigrav systems might be interesting.

Many of the new/changed mechanics are interesting and seem like they would be portable to Aurora or Aurora II. Hrmmm...

[bean]

I can't wait for it!  Steve, this keeps getting better.
Antimatter warheads are more trouble then they're worth.  It really doesn't matter if the ship is in tiny pieces or big ones, and they're tricky to handle.
I don't want acceleration compensators.  This isn't honorverse, much as I like that setting, and we won't see the same sort of velocities they use.  If exhaust velocity is limited to c, I for one am not building ships that will routinely go above about .1 c.  Why not?  It's simply too expensive in terms of delta-V.

[Rastaman]

Seems ships must be very well defended anyway, and are slow. Six centimeters of armor looks very thin. Half a meter of armor, that's what I want to use.

[Mel Vixen]

Well given that most modern space-constructions are just tinfoil wrapped around a frame made from Hollow aluminium pieces its actually pretty solid.


Steve how will you handle secondary explosions? Say if a railgun-slug rips through a drive which causes catastrophal results? Especially with such things as gascooled Reactors or even magazines filled with nukes it could be devasting.

[Din182]

Seems ships must be very well defended anyway, and are slow. Six centimeters of armor looks very thin. Half a meter of armor, that's what I want to use.

According to the rules post about armour, that would be equivalent to 25 layers of armour in Aurora.

[Bremen]

Can I caution against completely removing missile agility? If I'm reading things right, a maneuvering missile will have 100% accuracy on any target with a slower acceleration than the missile; which is to say, any target.  It would seem more realistic (or at least, more reasonable) if there was a chance for a sufficiently nimble ship to dodge missiles.  One assumes the missile has to be aligned in the direction of thrust, IE it shoots a rocket out the back, so it would make sense if there's a delay to adjust course.  Not to mention this makes proximity detonations more useful; I don't imagine a missile going for a contact hit is much harder for PD to shoot down than one 250m out, at the speeds we can expect to see.

[jseah]

The thing is, unless a ship has missile efficiency engines, which it won't, a ship will never out-accelerate a missile. 
Similarly, ships cannot turn faster than missiles for the same reason. 

And as a missile approaches a ship, the ship becomes easier and easier to target.  (and so does the missile) You can't hide the engine of a MN-range drive from nearly pointblank range, ECM or no. 


The only thing ships have more than missiles is fuel efficiency.  So for missiles of a specific design fired a certain time-of-flight away from a ship, it cannot compensate for the ship's delta-v with its onboard fuel and still acheive its desired final velocity. 

And missiles in cruising mode for part of the journey have a lower final velocity and more time for the target ship to jink and force your missile to burn fuel to course correct. 

I think there will be a maximum effective distance of missile use against a target that knows you are launching and can jink.  (depends on time-of-flight * target max acceleration / missile delta-v for course correction)

[Yonder]

Every fleet in the system within the 10 MJ range limit, regardless of race, is checked in order of increasing range from the detonation, to see if the beam intersects the hull of any ships in that fleet. If it does, the actual ship is determined randomly from among those that could be hit.

Why are you choosing a random enemy ship instead of the closest one? If you did the closest ship for beam weapons then maybe you could have a formation editor so that we could keep our heavier armored ships in the front lines to run interference.