Newtonian Aurora

[bean]

On the other hand, there isn't a huge amount of material available on this subject so if someone has knowledge in this area please speak up.

Steve

I personally am not an expert in this area, but on the 26th, I'm meeting Dr. Schonberg (http://civil.mst.edu/facultyandstaff/directoryschonberg.html), and I intend to ask him about this.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I personally am not an expert in this area, but on the 26th, I'm meeting Dr. Schonberg (http://civil.mst.edu/facultyandstaff/directoryschonberg.html), and I intend to ask him about this.

Great! Looking at his background he certainly would be an excellent source of information. If I can get hold of the appropriate data, my intention is to have a chance of impact based on distance travelled in a sub-pulse and the particle density in the system. The energy of the impact(s) would be based on particle mass and closing velocity. I haven't decided yet whether to simply average out a chance of impact across a system or have areas of greater particle density, such as within asteroid belts or in the tail of comets. The latter would be more complex but would add an extra terrain element.

The type of information that would be extremely useful would include particle densities and particle mass ranges within the Sol System, as well as the likely vectors of such particles. Are they generally orbiting the sun or are they passing through the system? How would those figures changes for other star systems or for systems within a nebula and what is the density range for different nebulae. I know this is reducing a very complex subject to a few numbers but any advice or guidance would be appreciated.

Steve

[Teiwaz]

Conventional warheads will be mainly for RP situations in a multi-Earth start.

Will conventional warheads have any use for planetary bombardment to minimize ecological damage?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Will conventional warheads have any use for planetary bombardment to minimize ecological damage?

Interesting question. Conventional warheads are more like an anti-ship warhead on a modern day tomahawk missile so they are tactically useful but you would need a lot to equal the destructive power of a nuke. Although perhaps some equivalent of the MOAB might be possible. The obvious advantage would be no radiation effects. I guess dust wouldn't be a major factor either. I'll have to look at this when I tackle planetary bombardment.

Steve

[Bremen]

I am coming to a similar conclusion based on testing. I keep changing max fleet speeds for a geosurvey fleet, depending on whether it is moving from Jupiter to Saturn, or operating within Saturn's moons, or moving within the inner planets. So far this has varied from 100 km/s to 2000 km/s for the same ship. To reduce micromanagement, what I need is a more intelligent way to set max deltaV used for a particular journey, especially when the ship is operating mainly on default orders, such as for geological survey.

Perhaps a combination of the portion of journey under acceleration and max speed, with the lowest speed taking precedence. Or maybe base it on distance rather than portion of journey so I can set a max speed at the start of the journey and won't need to track time passed.

Steve

I've been giving it some thought as well. The most useful setting would probably be something like "Only accelerate when one liter of fuel will reduce journey by x seconds", and possibly also a maximum speed setting. At least for civilian ships, what really matters is the amount of time involved, regardless of the length of the trip. At a guess the calculations might be pretty cpu expensive though, and it's also something tough for new players to understand.

More practical is probably your idea, and have a "only accelerate for x% of distance" setting alongside maximum speed. Not only is it easier to calculate, but without doing the calculations I suspect it probably scales fairly linearly with fuel efficiency. After all you're still accelerating at the same rate, what matters is how long you'll be moving faster before you have to slow back down. Expect plenty of newbie questions about why they can't set it over 50% though

[Teiwaz]

Interesting question. Conventional warheads are more like an anti-ship warhead on a modern day tomahawk missile so they are tactically useful but you would need a lot to equal the destructive power of a nuke. Although perhaps some equivalent of the MOAB might be possible. The obvious advantage would be no radiation effects. I guess dust wouldn't be a major factor either. I'll have to look at this when I tackle planetary bombardment.

Steve

Even a smallish size 4 anti-ship missile launcher is still spitting out 10-ton missiles, isn't it? A planetary bombardment missile design could be mostly warhead (planets being notoriously sluggish at the helm), which puts it right in the neighborhood of the MOAB. (Wikipedia says it's about 11 tons) And that's assuming you're wanting to fire one of them out of a light anti-ship launcher. I could see specialized planetary bombardment missiles being far, far larger than that, (for instance, one designed to be fired out a drone/probe/mine tube) and I'd think they could wreak havoc on any ground units which get caught outside of PDBs.

[sublight]

More practical is probably your idea, and have a "only accelerate for x% of distance" setting alongside maximum speed. Not only is it easier to calculate, but without doing the calculations I suspect it probably scales fairly linearly with fuel efficiency. After all you're still accelerating at the same rate, what matters is how long you'll be moving faster before you have to slow back down. Expect plenty of newbie questions about why they can't set it over 50% though

Might be more intuitive if labeled as "minimum %costing, maximum speed"

For continual acceleration/deceleration between points at relative rest Vmax = ?(distance * acceleration)*. So, if a survey ship with 4 m/s2 set at (60% minimum costing, 2,000 km/s maximum speed) might hit max speed on trips to the outer system, but for a short 380,000 km trip to the moon would hit ?(380k km * 0.4 * 4 m/s2) = 24.7 km/s relative on the acceleration leg.

Fuel efficiency (deltV) by %distance looks to be quadratic, not linear. To get a linear fuel efficiency correlation, it would need to be tied directly to either peak velocity or time accelerating. Either ought to be easily calculated, but I can't think of any concise, accurate wording for labeling that wouldn't lead to confusion.

Further thought: since earth has an orbital velocity of nearly 30 km/s, mistakenly using '24.7 km/s' maximum absolute velocity relative to the solar reference point could be Bad. I'd guess any maximum velocity checks should take into account relative motion of the destination.


* d = 0.5*a*t^2 for continual linear acceleration, so d = a*t^2 for total acceleration/deceleration where t is time spent both accelerating and decelerating. So t = ?(d/a), Vmax = t*a=?(d*a). This calculates 'max relative speed'

[PTTG]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I was thinking about the multi-mode-motors from earlier and how future strategy may revolve around the use of low-acceleration high-duration carriers fielding high-acceleration low-duration fighters.

How about the addition of a proper docking system? What I'm thinking of is that we would be able to design, say, a cruising engine module consisting of, for instance, an engine, fuel tanks, crew quarters, and engineering sections, but no bridge, active defenses, or anything else. When alone, it would be unable to function. When docked to a ship with a bridge, it becomes a fully-functional part of the ship, increasing the mass of the vessel and everything. The only thing that remains is the ability to tell the command vessel to disable the inefficient engines.

Also, it'd be nice to be able to have a way to connect ships without using tractor beams.

[Thiosk]

Interesting question. Conventional warheads are more like an anti-ship warhead on a modern day tomahawk missile so they are tactically useful but you would need a lot to equal the destructive power of a nuke. Although perhaps some equivalent of the MOAB might be possible. The obvious advantage would be no radiation effects. I guess dust wouldn't be a major factor either. I'll have to look at this when I tackle planetary bombardment.

Steve

Im not sure what the request is.  I think its for weapons that don't hurt industry much, which is why we have the high-yield radiation weapons now to target population more directly. 

For low radiation yield, Normal research lines to decrease radiation yield would probably do the trick.  Nuclear weapons can be made to be quite dirty-- produce heavy, long lasting fallout, or astonishingly clean, in which there is an intense pulse of gamma radiation (blistering those in the vicinity)  but little residual fallout.  Additionally, targeting plays as important a role as the weapon technology-- the altitude at which the weapon is set off makes a big deal.

[Mel Vixen]

Well if we get a proper planetary invasion with a map, conventional weapons could be nice to take out enemy units and pdcs without harming the population or the environment. Also iirc the Russians demonstrated a fuel-air bomb that was as destructive as little boy.

Now something different, we have Nuclear-laser warheads but what about single use chemical-pumped lasers? Iirc there were some Flour-hydrogen lasers that worked that way.

edit:

Ok wikipedia has a lengthy article here. And there is even a patent for a explosive-chemical laser that does not need radioactive compounds. The patent is found here

[Yonder]

Now something different, we have Nuclear-laser warheads but what about single use chemical-pumped lasers? Iirc there were some Flour-hydrogen lasers that worked that way.

edit:

Ok wikipedia has a lengthy article here. And there is even a patent for a explosive-chemical laser that does not need radioactive compounds. The patent is found here

Chemical lasers actually aren't necessarily single use, you can keep using them until you run out of fuel. The YAL-1 was planned to carry enough fuel for 20+ shots before it landed to be refueled.

I mentioned the possibility that we could design a fighter with all batteries and no generators to mimic such a system, but unless batteries are naturally very tiny in NA that won't really work well unless there is some way to make the mechanics mimic the fact that we are using something with a much higher energy density. (Or at least Power Density). One way to handle this would be to apply the current "Reduced Size/ Increased Charge Time" technologies to the batteries (or PTGs, or whatever they are called). This could culminate with something like Box Launchers that can't be recharged outside of a hangar, or even--to fully replicate Chemical Lasers--actually had to be refilled from special magazines, or from the fuel tanks, or something else like that.

I'm sure it wouldn't be easy to implement something that went: slower fire rate, slower fire rate, slower fire rate, all the sudden needs 'ammo' though.

[PTTG]

Frankly I think that box launchers need to be a separate tree from regular ones. I don't see why I need to spend most of a decade removing the reloading system piece by piece before I can figure out how to make a hollow tube.

As for lasers, I would love to see a tech tree about energy density per ton and recharge rate per ton, ultimately enabling a fighter that specializes in laser weapons but needs to land to recharge.

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, I asked about the function of lasers a while ago, either a few pages past, or in another thread, and how "charges slower" would be only one way to do it, and not make much sense.
Ultimately, in NA, Lasers will be very high range weapons compared to everything but missiles, and very accurate at that.
Sure they have falloff, but they'll hit.
So having lasers that charge slowly is one way, having lasers that directly feed from the batteries, thus being small without direct drawback as long as the ship has enough supercapacitors to actually supply the energy is another, and I think having Lasers that require Ammunition isn't that far off.
One could also go the other direction, with lasers that contain a small backup powersource and extra cooling system.
Looking forward to what we'll find there.
Will we be able to set ship speed on a single move order, like "Move to jupiter at 1500 km/s"?

[Mel Vixen]

I was actually thinking that the explosive-chemical pumped variant could be part of a missile-warhead thus the low power variant of the nuclearpumped laser. That YAL was canceled is new to me it was promising. Having "laser-shots" as ammo is a interesting concept ... i wonder if you could get that down to the size of a riffle.

[bean]

Well if we get a proper planetary invasion with a map, conventional weapons could be nice to take out enemy units and pdcs without harming the population or the environment. Also iirc the Russians demonstrated a fuel-air bomb that was as destructive as little boy.

Two things:
First, the yield of the weapon in question was 44 tons according to Wikipedia.  Nowhere near little boy.  Secondly, I doubt that an FAE would work well at supersonic velocity.