Newtonian Aurora

[UnLimiTeD]

One other thing that I wanted to bring up, interestingly completely unrelated to what is currently discussed:
I was thinking about current Size reduced Lasers, and how they apparently sacrifice a part of their "loading mechanism", thus firing more slowly.
Now what I wondered was if it is possible to also try it the other way around:
Have Lasers that have a higher cooldown phase, thus resulting in slower "reload"; possibly due to omitting part of the heat dispension.
They could also have a smaller capacitor that requires a higher incomming energy because they can only hold so much.
That'd allow for interesting ship designs where the generators funnel the energy into a pair of supercapacitors that can load the energy required for a laser shot, and then transmit it to the laser in one second.
They would result in a ship extremely dependent on it's energy system, and more expensive, but with a higher total firepower if one cycles through his "box lasers".
Additionally, will there be a tech to increase radiation efficiency of energy weapons, thus decreasing heat per emitted energy?

[PTTG]

If we are willing to be overt about it, we could say that even auto-tracking missiles need commands from the vessel to properly lock on to a target. Without it, they become dumb, or at least not as smart somehow, and are far more easy to shoot down.

[bean]

10 m/s2 (around 1G) is a very low acceleration value.

A ship travelling at 1000 km/s (not a crazy speed, at this average, she'd need about 2 months to travel from the Sun to Neptune), with a 10 m/s2 acceleration, would turn arctan(10/1e6), or 5.7e-4 degree, per second. A 45° course change would take almost a full day. Even at 100 km/s, a ship could turn about 20°/hour, and a right angle turn would take 4.5 hours.

At such rates, and unless they move at very low speeds (a few km/s, which means outer planets are hardly reachable, since intra system jumps are not possible), ships become little more than projectiles, and firing a missile in the general direction of something not right ahead becomes a very costly exercise.

So, if you want ships a bit more maneuverable (and space combat possible), you need much higher acceleration rates, which, again, make relativistic speeds feasible.

On the other hand, one could argue that such high speeds are not desirable (for ships and missiles) because of the lack of maneuverability they entail. But you'd still need a lot more acceleration than a few G (more in the hundreds than the tenth, in fact) as soon as you want to travel further than the inner planets and have more maneuverability than a modern day supertanker...

Francois

This is exactly the case.  The fact that you present it as a problem indicates that you don't understand a salient fact about space travel: ships are not maneuverable.  In any case with a reasonable delta-V to acceleration ratio (where you are accelerating over the course of days), you will not be capable of serious combat maneuvering.  They will spend days building delta-V, and that will prevent them from making quick turns.  To see any difference, you need hundreds of Gs, and that is simply not practical, even with drones, for engineering reasons.
Putting a 10G engine on a ship is going to impose enormous penalties for the vessel in question.  Not only do you need 10 times the engine of a 1G ship, you also need about 10 times the structure.  At that point, there's not much room left for weapons.

Matching vectors with the enemy ship might be the way to go for closer combats.  It leaves both sides with more options.

If we are willing to be overt about it, we could say that even auto-tracking missiles need commands from the vessel to properly lock on to a target. Without it, they become dumb, or at least not as smart somehow, and are far more easy to shoot down.

That would help mitigate the drive-by holocaust problem, and even more so if there is a range limit on the tracking commands.  You can't control a missile from way, way out-system.

[chrislocke2000]

Couple of thoughts on the drive by shooting piece:

- Upping the travel time variation for longer jumps could make it a lot harder to do this where you need to use several jump ships. If groups of ships are coming out of jump weeks apart that will cause some reasonable logistical issues for you.

- The mechanics of attacks on home planets create more of an issue for NPRs and their generation process as in most cases you will be spawning the NPR and hence will have already found their home system. This gives players a big advantage in knowing where to hit.

- I suspect that planetary defences are going to have to be substantially heftier than they are now.

- Given the big increases in travel time between stars and the loss of communication with ships I'm not sure how practical the whole jump in fire, jump out, jump back and fire again option will be.

On ship to ship combat:

- With the increases in fuel and the resulting reduction in usefull payload and the advent of area effect weapons I can see the number of missiles flying around coming down somewhat compared to current Aurora leaving us to duke it out on the close combat more often.

- For actual ship to ship combat I'm expecting engaging fleets to want to decide to engage each other and then adjust closing speed so it's actually pretty slow. Dog fighting then really just becomes a matter of relative movement - you might both be doing 5000 kms but only a few 100 in relation to one another. Similarly, course corrections will be tiny in the scheme of things but I'm expecting that they will still have a decent impact on relative position when considered against the direct fire weapons being used.

On lasers, I'm eagerly waiting for the rules post on that one. In the mean time it would be great to hear about some more of the initial test game results for combat (hint hint Steve).

Lastly I can see the old precursors as being potentially really nasty - especially if they have ships which mean they can make best of the fact that they have no fleshy bits to worry about for Gs!

[fcharton]

It is hard for me to think of a rail gun as an 'energy weapon', - but yes I agree - I expect direct fire weapons at very high velocity will dominate in close.

I was actually excluding railguns because their projectiles (in a newtonian setting) will be imparted the ship speed. Keeping with the blue navy metaphor, a railgun broadside always shoot a bit forward, whereas a laser broadside would fire sideways. The effect would be negligible if ship speed is much smaller than railgun velocity, of course (but keep in mind we're now in a world where physical limits are not on speed, but on acceleration).

He who can strike farthest - wins.  With the weapons discussed, nearly any hit will be fatal to a ship.  It will all boil down to who can see farthest - ie sensor tech.  

I wonder if this would be the case. In a world where course change is very costly, incoming missiles are very limited in terms of evasive action, and antimissile fire becomes a turkey shoot. So long you can detect incoming missiles (at short range), and have enough ordnance to fire back, you're pretty much safe.

In fact, since you fire your missile at a much shorter range than the enemy fires his, you should enjoy finer targetting. And by the time you see the missiles, it is probably too late to fire yours...

As for "seeing far", I believe we'll see something like forward recon drones, very light ships that can detect and pinpoint enemy ships or missiles. Those might replace most on-board sensors. This matches you idea about fighter, I think.

Tracking system delays on targeting data is one hurdle that I don't want to drop on him (or the processor).  In reality it is a problem.  In the game ?

I don't know how much it would add to coding problem (in fact, you could perhaps abstract it as some form of "damping" over control, say like a small random element, with variance a function of distance).

But the more I agree with your vision of very long range battles, and projectile-like missiles, the more I believe comm delays should become an important factor. I think they are worth pondering, perhaps just to decide they are unimportant, or can be abstracted. As I said before, all this is very unintuitive (even when you do understand the science behind it).

Francois

[fcharton]

The fact that you present it as a problem indicates that you don't understand a salient fact about space travel: ships are not maneuverable.

This is not specific to space, you have exactly the same situation down here, where acceleration due to course change increase with speed. You can maneuver, in space or on earth, so long velocity and acceleration remains in proportion.

The problem is one of scale. Even with hyperspace allowing moves from system to system, intra-system distances are very large, and call for large speeds (if we want to keep a "human" time scalein the game). And large velocities tend to imply higher accelerations (for speed buildup and course change).

Of course, from a modern technology standpoint, neither high speeds nor high acceleration can be achieved. But in the game, I think both should be technologies, and a player would be well advised to research them in parallel. (In fact, you'd probably have two lines of G resistance : for drones and for crewed vessels)

Francois

[UnLimiTeD]

I fully expect a system survey to take a half decade and several billion litres of fuel, and an attack run on an enemy homeworld might very well take a few years as well.
Take current Aurora; a campaign against an enemy might have your fleet in travel for years; now drastically increase the in system travel time and fuel use, but omit 75% of transit systems and their associated times;
It might actually come out pretty similar.

[bean]

This is not specific to space, you have exactly the same situation down here, where acceleration due to course change increase with speed. You can maneuver, in space or on earth, so long velocity and acceleration remains in proportion.

The problem is one of scale. Even with hyperspace allowing moves from system to system, intra-system distances are very large, and call for large speeds (if we want to keep a "human" time scalein the game). And large velocities tend to imply higher accelerations (for speed buildup and course change).

Of course, from a modern technology standpoint, neither high speeds nor high acceleration can be achieved. But in the game, I think both should be technologies, and a player would be well advised to research them in parallel. (In fact, you'd probably have two lines of G resistance : for drones and for crewed vessels)

Francois

Not exactly.  Yes, your speed does make maneuver harder in a planetary environment.  However, my point is that in space, when non-operatic ships fight under the same propulsion the cruise with, they are not capable of serious tactical maneuver.  Why?  Because a ship will spend days building velocity during cruise, then have minutes to hours to alter it during combat.  This is a fact.  Increasing acceleration will not change anything.  You have a higher base velocity, so the applied acceleration remains roughly proportional.  The only solution that provides lots of maneuver is to have a ship fight with a different drive then it cruises with.  AV:T did this.  Their ships have drives on the order of a G for combat, which run at miligee levels for cruise.  We simply can't get around this without adopting that solution, or going for operatic tech like the Honorverse has.

[chrislocke2000]

The only solution that provides lots of maneuver is to have a ship fight with a different drive then it cruises with.  AV:T did this.  Their ships have drives on the order of a G for combat, which run at miligee levels for cruise.  We simply can't get around this without adopting that solution, or going for operatic tech like the Honorverse has.

I guess the other option is to design engines with a fuel efficiency range and then allow the actual efficiency to be set whilst a ship is operational. This allows you to burn your fuel as efficiently as possibly during cruise but then burn fuel heavily to improve performance during combat - basically afterburners. However this is all more coding so I guess until we see how playable current mechanics are we can but ponder!

[PTTG]

That actually makes a lot of sense, though. I know that given the option, I would put combat engines on a ship that were, say, 0.01 times or less the efficiency of the cruise engine in exchange for a 5x thrust, even if it makes the engine or ship itself twice the weight.

Anyway, I remember a discussion somewhere on deep space tactics that expressed that it would basically come down to jousting. I disagree- I think tactics will revolve around simply being at the points of interest first, and holding the planetary high ground.

[bean]

I guess the other option is to design engines with a fuel efficiency range and then allow the actual efficiency to be set whilst a ship is operational. This allows you to burn your fuel as efficiently as possibly during cruise but then burn fuel heavily to improve performance during combat - basically afterburners. However this is all more coding so I guess until we see how playable current mechanics are we can but ponder!

That's actually what AV:T did.  Either way, the result is the same.

That actually makes a lot of sense, though. I know that given the option, I would put combat engines on a ship that were, say, 0.01 times or less the efficiency of the cruise engine in exchange for a 5x thrust, even if it makes the engine or ship itself twice the weight.

I'm not sure how effective that would be.  You're sacrificing cost and mass, and I'm honestly not sure how much even 5x thrust would be helpful. 
And as another note, we're dealing with cruising accelerations on the order of 1G.  To be useful, a maneuver acceleration has to be sustainable for longish periods of time, which limits it to something on the order of 3Gs for humans.

[Bremen]

That's actually what AV:T did.   Either way, the result is the same.
I'm not sure how effective that would be.   You're sacrificing cost and mass, and I'm honestly not sure how much even 5x thrust would be helpful.  
And as another note, we're dealing with cruising accelerations on the order of 1G.   To be useful, a maneuver acceleration has to be sustainable for longish periods of time, which limits it to something on the order of 3Gs for humans.

Which is why I think Newtonian combat will be dominated by fighters, or at least parasite vessels.  You could have a mothership with a high efficiency cruise drive, plus all the non-combat components; extra fuel tanks, maintenance storage, etc.  Then when combat threatens it launches a bunch of fighters and cruisers, which with their low efficiency drives and less weight spent on secondary systems could massively outmaneuver comparable non-parasite vessels.

[PTTG]

I think that we might still see some kind of bastard ship with neither the speed of fighters nor the staying power of carriers but that might find a good position operating from a planet or base and being strong enough to threaten fighters and fast enough to outmaneuver carriers. For these vessels, having a mixed mode drive could make sense, particularly if you need to get to the edge of the system efficiently, to get to the fight, and then maneuver quickly when you get there. Of course, single-mode drives would be more efficient and faster depending on design.

[procyon]

If we are willing to be overt about it, we could say that even auto-tracking missiles need commands from the vessel to properly lock on to a target. Without it, they become dumb, or at least not as smart somehow, and are far more easy to shoot down.

Not sure how realistic that would be.  I believe even current Aurora has missiles search and home on new targets if the original was lost.  Just release and let coast till it finds a target.  Fire and forget is a reality today.

Matching vectors with the enemy ship might be the way to go for closer combats.  It leaves both sides with more options.

I see that as suicide.  Creating nearly uninterceptable trajectories while managing to place ordinance on target will decide battles to me, but only time will tell.

I was actually excluding railguns because their projectiles (in a newtonian setting) will be imparted the ship speed. Keeping with the blue navy metaphor, a railgun broadside always shoot a bit forward, whereas a laser broadside would fire sideways. The effect would be negligible if ship speed is much smaller than railgun velocity, of course (but keep in mind we're now in a world where physical limits are not on speed, but on acceleration).

No arguement.  Rail guns will have a momentum issue.  You will have to time your fire.

I wonder if this would be the case. In a world where course change is very costly, incoming missiles are very limited in terms of evasive action, and antimissile fire becomes a turkey shoot. So long you can detect incoming missiles (at short range), and have enough ordnance to fire back, you're pretty much safe.

In fact, since you fire your missile at a much shorter range than the enemy fires his, you should enjoy finer targetting. And by the time you see the missiles, it is probably too late to fire yours...

The big question will be on how accurate the AM defenses are.  A missile closing at .5c may be a difficult intercept, especially if set to detonate at long range with lase rods.  Only game play will prove the effectiveness of various weapon systems.

As for "seeing far", I believe we'll see something like forward recon drones, very light ships that can detect and pinpoint enemy ships or missiles. Those might replace most on-board sensors. This matches you idea about fighter, I think.

Agreed in spades.


And for a comment of the lasers, I am not sure the damage modeling may be correct.

If you can pinpoint a place on the hull of a ship 10s of thousands of km away, moving at thousands of km per second - hitting with any weapon should be a breeze.  Even with a pulse measured in ten thousandths of a second your target will have moved one hundred meters if going simply 1000km/s.  Most likely your laser painted the side of the ship.  The depth it may have scoured the armor could depend on the energy it has, but it is more of a sandpaper effect than a 'boring' one.

[fcharton]

Why?  Because a ship will spend days building velocity during cruise, then have minutes to hours to alter it during combat.

I'm not sure I see your point. You seem to imply that velocity building must take days. I would say this would be the case for freighters and early game ships, but warships would have high G engines (with some form of grav/inertial compensator, which would probably be the main feature of TN technology). Such ships would quickly accelerate to cruise speed (fuel cost being the same) and operate, most of the time, in ballistic mode, ie with engines stopped.

Even if high G maneuvers were too risky to be attempted out of battle, you could imagine a high G drive giving a low acceleration. Derivating Tsiolkovski's eq, you get the formula for accelerations (G), as
dV/dt = -v_exhaust/m dm/dt
To reduce acceleration, you could either reduce v_exhaust (which might not be practical in chemical rockets, but is perfectly doable if exhaust are accelerated by a field, as in a ion engine), or reduce mass output. In practice, it just means warships would have much more powerful engines than commercial ships, and probably some kind of anti-grav contraption to allow their crew and frame to sustain the high G delivered by the engine.

For all drives, there would be some speed over which maneuverability drops (because the engine cannot support such accelerations). This max-maneuver velocity would be low for old generation ships, or later day freighters, higher for military vessels, and much higher for fighters (because of the low m in the above eq).

A missile closing at .5c may be a difficult intercept, especially if set to detonate at long range with lase rods.

But those missiles would move in a straight line, bearing on your ship, no? So, if you can align with them (easy task if you are at rest, almost impossible if you are moving fast, but then, the missiles will have a hard time intercepting you...) and if your antimissiles have an area effect (just like enemy missiles), the only thing you need is that your AM "crosses" the enemy missile before it is in range of your ship.

Supposing your AM has the same speed as the missile (but you could adapt the formula), this means you can detect the enemy projectiles at twice their explosion range. But all this only seems to work if you can align your fire with enemy missile path, ie if you are very close to te ship targetted. "sideways" shoots at missiles, on the other hand, would be little more than potshots...

Francois