Newtonian Aurora

[Elouda]

The alternative is simply to fudge the impact physics a little bit for the sake of gameplay and go with kinetics punching holes in things rather than making like a fusion bomb; this would make large ships in particular more survivable. This doesnt mean reducing their impact energy, rather just limiting the amount of energy theyre capable of depositing on a target.

[UnLimiTeD]

But that would mean that bigger is automatically better, which.... sucks.
Ultimately, an in-system Hyperdrive is the same as an extra-solar hyperdrive, just without disappearing from the 'physical' world.
Tech development and warmup and all that jazz already exist.

[Elouda]

But that would mean that bigger is automatically better, which.... sucks.
Ultimately, an in-system Hyperdrive is the same as an extra-solar hyperdrive, just without disappearing from the 'physical' world.
Tech development and warmup and all that jazz already exist.

Its just an option, and its not like it cannot be offset (or isnt already) through numerous other factors; most relevant to this case being larger cross section = easier to hit.

[chrislocke2000]

Must admit I like the idea of just punching holes in things, maybe with an inverse proportion of energy getting transferred to the ship so whilst overall energy goes up hugely then actual energy as a percentage of total drops dramatically as well.

Actually it could be very interesting if this created a bell shape curve on energy transfer so there was effectively a sweet spot on maximising the damage from a shell. Now you have an interesting conundrum - speed up or slow down to reduce damage!

Having ships survive and limp home or with crews madly rushing to get systems back up and running is going to make engagements a lot more enjoyable.

[bean]

The revised impact damage is OK with me.  It may not be totally realistic, but it's far better then introducing in-system hyperdrives back in.  Steve, please don't do that.

[Elouda]

The revised impact damage is OK with me.  It may not be totally realistic, but it's far better then introducing in-system hyperdrives back in.  Steve, please don't do that.

Agreed, I'd rather something else (handwavium shields, dodgy impact physics) to fix any issues rather than hyperdrives or some other movement tweak; the only place for those might be a way to fast travel between components in a multi-star system, and even then it would probably be just a variant of the intersystem hyperdrive.

[UnLimiTeD]

I really don't see the difference between "in-system" and "out of system".
If it's fine to take two months from one planet to another, I have no problem waiting 10 years for my ships either. And no, I'm kidding.
it should be consistent.
Just increasing the fuel cost by another factor, and be it just another x2, is a step in the right direction.
Having shells just "penetrate" is fine with me as well, though.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

If it's fine to take two months from one planet to another, I have no problem waiting 10 years for my ships either. And no, I'm kidding.

Imagine the course plotting for that, lol. I think the game will process far too slow to have low-energy travel.  It would take real hours to process enough time to get anything done at all. Also, the relationship between industrial productivity and travel times would get all wonky.  Unless you drastically slow down construction of all sorts (see above problem) then you'd end up with whole fleets being constructed by the time you got to an enemy world.

[UnLimiTeD]

Which brings us to the sad truth.
Space Combat probably ain't happening. 
So yeah, compromises will have to be had.
While assuming a good part of the energy will just pass through, probably a % dependent on the size of the ship, increasing the fuel consumption by another bit doesn't seem harmful to me.
Could be a tech line "fuel compression" that increases fuel/tank while slightly decreasing weight/fuel.

[jseah]

Must admit I like the idea of just punching holes in things, maybe with an inverse proportion of energy getting transferred to the ship so whilst overall energy goes up hugely then actual energy as a percentage of total drops dramatically as well.

If you pick this, can I recommend that energy (damage) deposited on target ship increases by the square root of the energy on the shell?

Then it becomes linear with respect to speed (and less than linear with respect to fuel). 

EDIT:
I can also support an in-system hyperdrive.  Except that I want it to be the same as the inter-system hyperdrive. 

Just remove hyper-limit and require a spooling-up time.  Jump from anywhere to anywhere, limited to Hill Sphere of bodies (which means no hyper to inside the orbit of the innermost planet) as long as the Hill Sphere itself is bigger than some minimum size. 

[procyon]

Current physics would say that the shell can't just punch a hole....

But current physics don't have any way for the slug to survive the quarter million plus Gs of acceleration it would take for the current railgun velocities we plan to implement....

So to be honest, I see no reason not to fudge the whole thing if it serves the greater good.  

I would say that some 'handwavium' be involved though in the ammo if it can survive mega Gs.  The ammo should probably be something that is 'out of this world' and ammo 'built' and tracked.  Otherwise the mass firing of slugs could still become a killer.  But I would defer on this to whatever Steve's feels like dealing with.

Don't like the in system hyper drive.  I would love to abuse it, but it would get abused badly and would likely make combat impossible.  Even an hour long warm up time, if we slow down accelerations, is way longer than what you will need to jump away from incoming ordinance.

[jseah]

Energy Density of Sorium Fuel: 1.83E14 J per kg (3sf)

Quite apart from the fact that Sorium Fuel has the density of water (which no one commented on =( ), this also means that the Vanguard survey vessel is carrying 43.7 gigatons of TNT equivalent in its fuel tanks. 

The handwavium of sorium engines might be needed to get the energy out, but this means kinetic kill missiles can replace nukes. 

Gigatons of TNT... I'm not familiar with impact physics, and no asteroid impact estimates include anything traveling faster than 100km/s or so.  And certainly not with pure iron projectiles less than a meter across. 

Drive-by nuclear holocaust is more like fragmentation missiles now.  Using a single interceptable drone for your random bombardment is not wise.  If the drone fragments into a thousand pieces, each with the power of a Hiroshima nuke... now THAT is a real nightmare to deal with. 


And this problem only gets worse as the tech increases.  Accelerations increase, max feasible delta-v increases, fuel efficiency increases.  Hence, the energy density of sorium fuel increases as well as the delta-v on a planetary iron bombing run.  Energy of proposed kinetic planet-killers will increase quadratically. 

If it's not feasible at starting tech, it'll be feasible by mid-game. 

[jseah]

I might like to note that whatever you do, whether it be leaving the one-shot-one-kill on the table or in-system hyper or making railgun shells punch through or something crazier, I will still be playing Newtonian Aurora. 

There is just about no way I *won't* be playing Newtonian Aurora unless it stops being newtonian (although moving to einsteinian might get me back =P)

EDIT:
I dislike moving away from realism.  I do, really. 

Leaving the one-shot-one-kill in would be what I would want to happen. 

[sublight]

But current physics don't have any way for the slug to survive the quarter million plus Gs of acceleration it would take for the current railgun velocities we plan to implement....

In a theoretical optimally designed rail gun a solid slug is effectively in free fall and could survive any amount of acceleration. The electromagnetic acceleration is distributed evenly throughout a conductive round as a body force, accelerating every atom in about the same direction at about the same rate. Any compressive/shear forces in the object would be small, sort of similar to how satellites in orbit are constantly accelerating but practically weightless. In Newtonian Aurora rail guns appear to be much closer to their theoretical potential than the modern prototypes of today.

The usual reason high Gs are fatal is that they are resulting from contact forces. The atoms in back are getting pushed into the atoms in front to propagate the force. As a result the inertial forces from the atoms in front trying to stay at rest (or the ones in back trying to stay in motion) generate internal forces compressing/pulling/shearing the object.

[Bremen]

The problem with one shot one kill is that it makes building larger ships foolhardy, and it messes up the balance between offense and defense.

I did have one idea, though it may be a bit late; make shields into deflection shields (IE, divert kinetic projectiles). This would mean that armor would be useful against lasers, and shields against kinetics.

The basic idea in my mind for deflection shields is they effectively reduce your target cross section while active, by diverting projectiles around the ship. Since shield strength scales by volume but target cross section just by area, this would have the interesting effect of giving a battleship a smaller TCS than a fighter. A hit would still be a kill, but would be even less likely on large ships.

Alternately, if people prefer shields that can be beaten down over just a reduced chance of catastrophic damage, the shield could drain energy to deflect each projectile until it ran out, then the ship dies. One is reduced chance of death and the other is x hits to kill, in the long run it works out to mostly the same results.

Before anyone claims this would make big ships too powerful, consider that the battleship would still be vulnerable if hit, and you could afford a lot of fighters for one battleship (and fighters would probably still be faster, making them hard to hit as well). I just think a game where smaller = always better would be pretty boring.