Hows about another doozy.
Would like considered, the ability to generate a new solar system... BUT, I'd like to be able to create individually every planet, moon, asteroid, and comet in the system, with my own paramaters. (Setting orbital distance and speed, and perhaps a starting angle off of "north" so I don't have to run the simulation for a few centuries to jumble everything up).
Why do I want this. Well because I'm a moron pure and simple.
I'd like to take your silly space game, and play out glorious naval warfare simulations with it, how bout that. Make a bunch of planets, and conveniently place them around in the rough areas of naval bases during the second world war, perhaps the Pacific Theatre of Operations. Turn off orbital motion.
Figure that 1000km/s would be about equal to 60km/hr (a little less than 40 knots, fairly average speed for "fast" warships). Do a little math and scale the distance between the bases so they're roughly the same distance (travel time wise) apart as IRL.
Yes yes, use the game engine, to do completely what it was not made to do. It would be wonderful.
1Well that is true, however when you start accelerating a projectile in a smaller space (lets say to about 0.25c+ in 100m), the projectile would condense itself do to the immense pressures put on it.
2Also true, however the impact force of even the small projectiles will still be an immense issue for an enemy ship. Even though they would pass strait through, they will still leave behind so much kinetic energy that passing through doesn't really matter. I can't help but think about the super MACs from halo, they are so powerful that they blast through 2 Covenant ships (completely destroying them) and then cripple a third (although this gives you a bit more credit, oh well).
3A coil gun is a gauss weapon, so maybe instead you can set the ammo type when designing the gauss cannon.
1. (TBH, max range 50cm rail is actually firing at 1.2c)
But I don't understand what you mean by "condensing itself" unless you mean that the projectile will be "flattened" by Lorentz contraction.
Note that thats for shrinkage which might produce better penetration.
At the same time the mass of the projectile would scale up again by the same relativistic factor.
If the game wanted to be slightly more scientifically accurate. A if a 50cm rail with 1 vel (200km range, 40kkm/s speed, .13c) deals 20 damage on hit. A 50cm rail with 7 range tech, 1.4mkm r, 280mkm/s or .93c, woudl be almsot 2.7 times as heavy of a projectile at the speed, and should deal like 54 damage on hit. The best damage dealing weapon would be a 45cm rail at max range tech, with .96c projectile speed, and the 16 base damage would go up 3.6 times to over 57 damage on hit. Because relativistic effects OP.
2. at relativistic speeds, there'd honestly be chances of both really. Possibly a highly shrunken relativistic projectile could blast straight through a ship, leave a nice hole, and transfer almost no kinetic energy, primarily because at such high speeds, the atoms of the projectile can't really interact with the atoms of the target ship, coruscate this would only happen at speed in excess of .99c. With slower projectiles having an easier time hitting and transferring their energy to the target ship.
Meanwhile, if your armor was thicker, there would be more to interact with your projectile and try to absorb that energy. There would be more kinetic energy transferred to the target. (almost like, less armor would be better vs such extremely fast projectiles.)
Or it would obliterate the entire ship and turn the whole thing into a glowing, rapidly expanding, cloud of plasma. Dunno, we've never acutally done any kidn of proper testing firing relativistic speeded projectiles at stuff.
3. Point for me saying "coilgun" rather than gauss cannon, was so it could be a different research line than the existing gauss cannons (Which a large amount of the game and AI rely heavily on) and it might be quite problematic to start tinkering with the existing gauss cannon mechanics. Ofcourse a coilgun and a guass cannon are names for the same thing, and very much not the same as railguns.
Perhaps not even call them coilguns though. forget this scifi BS. I want a regular cannon.
gonna work out the exact sillines behind my plotted idea in the morning though. its getting late.