Willy Vereb

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

@KeyguypersonI have all of East and Central Europe. Most parts of Russia not included.
So that portion of the Earth map is at least safe.


Anyways, I think I claim the Von Neumann crater on the Moon, Europa moon and some colonies on Venus, Jupiter and the asteroid belts. The reason why we're so spread out because the country is united through only national ties and thus any portion of the solar system with consierable east european nationalities had become part of the Carpathia Union as a whole.
I am also considering to model this Union after the British Empire in a way, just for fun.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

I'm talking about spacecraft constantly firing their thrusters, regardless of whether they're populated.

My opinion is that it'd make battles more entertaining, given units can constantly course correct. If they're just slowly drifting, conflict resolution takes much longer. Not saying vehicles will always fire their thrusters, but that doing so isn't necessarily a big deal in areas with relatively nearby fuel depots.

@catchamber

Not firing their thrusters through the whole trip is not being slow, it's about not being wasteful with fuel. 200km/s is a pretty decent velocity.
Also having a few times the equivalent of their travel speed in terms of delta-V is more than enough to do fancy maneuvers during battles.

The problem is again that you cannot catch up to a ship that accelerated for a week with a missile which has only a few hours to do that. Without that the idea of hitting the enemy is very minimal. Nigh-unlimited fuel would be again very nasty in terms of exploits.

Spinning missiles that randomly change direction and release submunitions can overwhelm a target's limited defenses.

???
This is one weird idea which might work in a truly hard sci-fi setting where any impact is catastrophic but not here.
spinning and spraying submunitions is not a very good idea since you need spinal gun kind of velocities and mass to considerably hurt a ship here.
That and space is vast so randomly spraying submunitions would have a surprisingly poor chance to hit anything you'd think of as a target.

If you want a standoff range warhead using bomb-pumped lasers or nuclear shaped charges are both a better idea.You can try using a KE torpedo which splits into multiple penetrators to reduce the chance of evasion near the end of its terminal phase. It might work but only at very close ranges and it'd still be a bit up to luck.

Fair enough. I'm no material engineer, so I can't refute your claims about resistance to acceleration stresses.

Let me put it this way. The kind of methods you suggest are generally utilized for far slower events with perhaps not even thousandth of the G strain.
Also using lighter projectile just doesn't work unless the material has higher structural strength per unit weight than the previous one. Otherwise it's not relevant.

As far as I know, torpedoes are self-propelled missiles launched by vehicle-based systems, and guided projectiles are weapons that hone in on their targets. These aren't mutually exclusive, and space torpedoes would do well to have guidance systems.

That's just schemantics. Yes, torpedoes can be guided and preferably are. Not the point.
The important part is that torpedoes and spinal guns are different. They use different steps and own different strengths/drawbacks. Making a spinal gun's projectile self-propelled is a redundant effort which might compromise its ability to do well in its primary role.

The "cryoshell" wouldn't necessarily be for stealth, but to prevent the heated rounds from causing the launcher to fail, and to provide the round with simple propulsion and defense systems.

Care to elaborate on this part?

If leaders and diplomats are using it, I'd expect officers and businesses to do the same. I guess strapping them onto inactive stealthed units that are remote controlled does seem a bit excessive, from a roleplaying perspective.

I feel any usage other than the plot contrived one would be way too abusable for FTL comms.
It's better if all players agree on a few things where quantum entanglement communication can be used and maybe even mention the most definite taboo uses.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

<Snipped quote by Willy Vereb>
If you were driving down the Autobahn with a nigh endless supply of gasoline, you could punch the accelerator all day. Every celestial body I listed has vast amounts of easily accessible fuel. I already calculated how little mass a statite network would have, relative to a typical comet. Since they balance the solar wind and gravity, they can move to any spot in the system that isn't in another gravity well. This makes refueling trivial for anything but incredibly fast and faraway vehicles, which could still sacrifice total received fuel for shorter refueling times. This doesn't invalidated other forms of combat, because you can provide tons of fuel for mines and missiles. Even with 1g acceleration, defenders will still need space and time to avoid an incoming barrage. Given enough processing and projectiles, you can overwhelm your target's maneuverability and defenses.

@catchamber

Are we even talk about the same thing?
Our topic was infinitely accelerating warships, not satellites using the minimal amount of delta-V to get from point A to B.
The idea of a ship accelerating non-stop would destroy any semblance of fun in space battles because then speed is relative to just who started accelerating first and exchange of DEWs.
The problem is that when the battle starts the said ship would have accelerated for days if not weeks while your missile would have at best hours to catch up. That and with this creating RKKVs would be almost trivially easy. I really start to think we hit a language barrier and you're talking about something completely different than what your words imply.

If the torpedo doesn't activate its rocket, then it's a kinetic projectile, which still makes the launcher a coilgun. If a torpedo is too massive, just split it into an impactor and rocket, and have the rocket catch and redirect the impactor. If missile sensitivity to acceleration is a serious problem, you can make its parts lightweight and flexible.

Making the projectile lighter or have in-build shock absorbers (that's what you mean by flexible, right?) would not help much in this issue. We talk about up to a million G acceleration. Even with 60000G ading such system is challenging. You're far better off just forgetting complexities in general. And again, you confuse torpedoes and guided projectiles here. The whole point is that they both have different uses.

Would it help if you put a superconductive cryogenic envelope around the payload?

Supposedly you already do in order to not overheat the weapon. Also like I said it isn't really that the projectile would be easy to detect. Certainly less obvious than any kin of propulsion. Also it'd still need to use something to change course. I just say they aren't completely invisible.
I suppose it's possible to cool it in the process to make it less obvious but most of the time I think this would be pointless.

You could also combine the instant communication with time dilation, and end up violating causality by sending messages from the future back to the solar system. But, @Keyguyperson said that nobody has left the solar system yet, and I'm one to think that relativistic interstellar probes with stable ansibles have yet to be created by the setting's engineers.

Like I said my impression is that Keyguy really doesn't want us to abuse quantum comms and use it for everything. It's likely a plot device to have our leaders/diplomats talk in real time from astronomical distances away.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

So what astral bodies are are not taken yet?
I am considering to have holdings at various parts of the solar system but nowhere being an absolute figure.
Moon colonies in the Von Neuman Crater, floating cities on Venus, Jupiter colonies and industrial plants, etc.
I might take the moon Europa if nobody did that yet, though.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

<Snipped quote by Willy Vereb>
Just stating my observations.

@catchamber

Confused you with FrostedCaramel for the moment so pardon me on that.

<Snipped quote by Willy Vereb>
Considering fusion's unrealistically powerful in this roleplay, we could provide lots of hydrogen from Earth, Mars, Ceres, asteroids, outer system planetoids, and comets. We could also provide lots of helium from Mercury, Luna, gas giants, and Kuiper belt objects. If we add in all the statites, orbital tethers, other reactionless drives, aluminium oxide fuel from Earth and Luna, and methane fuel from wherever organic people live, we end up with most spacecraft almost always having enough fuel for constant acceleration, deceleration, course corrections, and spin gravity.

Not even close. Just because you can replenish your fuel that doesn't mean you can freely waste it on full throttle. That and depending on fusion mechanism you can't even naturally replenish your reactor fuel. Similarly your propellant is cheap but not something you can ignore.
But this is almost irrelevant. What isn't is that if such were plausible then it'd invalidate almost anything but laser weapons from combat because there's no way a projectile or even a missile could catch up to them.
200km/s is a nice average value which is fast enough to be "interesting" thus viable for cool space battles and feasible space travel yet it isn't too much to invalidate much of the nuances and fun of the hard sci-fi.

If the rounds are torpedoes, preferably multistage rockets that have their own railguns, they can reach higher speeds without needing excessively long cannons.

@catchamber

And that's the torpedo. We talk about the "coilguns" or spinal guns here. I think you missed my list from the previous page.
Torpedoes could have railgun or coilgun mechanism giving them an initial boost but that's not our topic. It's about a gun launching a guided projectile with only the bare minimum of maneuvering capability. Adding a propulsion unit to this would be counterintuitive. Not to mention the ship is unlikely to have enough energy to launch such a projectile. I think you could at least try to make a few basic calculations on this why. Even the pure KE required to accelerate a 20kg slug to 200km/s is 400GJ and with waste it would approach the terajoule range. If you try to get an at least 2-10 ton missile to reach the same velocity you'd need more energy than the first atomic bomb.
That and again, these spinal guns fire relatively simple projectiles. They're far less sensitive to acceleration than a missile would.

That being said there are still some inventive methods which might make this weapon a bit more interesting. I am just saying you have a bit of misconception here.

Are you sure they're only hot because of magnetic acceleration, and not also due to the friction from hypersonic motion through air? Even if they're still scalding when launched through vacuum tubes, I'm sure you could find a way to exploit that heat to generate extra thrust.

@catchamber

Absolutely.
Look, firearms push the projectile with the expansion of gases at extreme temperatures and hypersonic velocities. Do the copper and lead bullets melt in the process? No. During the operation of the railgun you focus the magnetic fields on the projectile for repulsive force. You directly use energy to move it and this has certain inefficiencies which shows in heat buildup.

As for using that heat for extra thrust...it's plausible but you would lose much more in the possess. You'd have to add complexity which reduces the max acceleration the projectile can bear. You'd also need to add some kind of propellant because few hundred degrees won't provide enough radiation pressure for this to matter. Propellant which is a dead weight in the overall scheme of things.

Normally, I'd agree, but

... quantum entanglement can transmit data instantaneously from one side of the solar system to the other.

@Keyguyperson

@catchamber

Wow, I think @Keyguyperson might need to nerf that since the potential for abusing this is huge and besides I think he only wants this for convenient "real time convos" between the governments of faraway factions.
As things are there's absolutely no reason why people wouldn't exploit this for interstellar conquest and to establish empires beyond the solar system.
... Or create super drones that can be controlled from any corner of the solar system. Equally problematic.
I know neither of these are Keyguy's intentions so this is why I tell you.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

@Willy Vereb Assuming a rocket with Lunar gravity acceleration, you can reach 200 km/s in 1 day and 10 hours over ~41 light seconds. Assuming Earth gravity acceleration, you can reach that in 5 hours and 40 minutes over ~7 light seconds. Given the inner system is ~46 light minutes across, repositioning units at these velocities isn't much of a tactical issue.

Combine this with modern railguns firing ~11 kg rounds at ~2 km/s for a mere 32 megajoules, packing dozens of tungsten rods in dispersal units, radiator vulnerability to lasers, rotating spacecraft minimizing direct laser strikes, having inactive stealthed missiles available to strike incoming targets, turning missiles into portable laser platforms, limiting military channels to quantum entanglement transceivers, and using enveloped fragments of comets as hulls and heat sinks, I'd say space warfare falls somewhere between a clusterfuck and a game of "who can make the most officers betray their superiors?".

@catchamber

I feel you haven't directly responded to my post here.
Yes, you don't need to accelerate for the whole trip to reach 200km/s. The problem is rather that no matter what you'd have limited fuel and propellant to use. That and even if the ship has enough fuel for multiple times of this delta-v it wouldn't use that for more speed in caution for maneuvers and eventually to decelerate when reaching its destination.

As for you citing railguns, unfortunately the formula for velocity within such system is roughly v^2 = 2*a*s which means if you raise the acceleration or armature length the velocity won't raise in proportion but rather by its square root. So when I raise the length of the acceleration from 10m (navy railgun) to 1000m (spinal gun) its velocity would only raise by 10 times. So to around 20-35km/s. Granted, the navy railgun is far from the fastest you can achieve. Taking other experiments as an example solid projectiles can withstand maybe even hundred times of this. Albeit realistically it's questionable you can put any complexity into such systems. But again, fiction. We can afford to err to the side of fun. Also the projectiles won't be absolutely cold, either. Railgun rounds are heated to 1000+ Kelvins during launch. Even if we assume less waste heat due to efficiency the weapon has much more power here to begin with. So the projectile would be almost glowing hot. Still, that's just a twinkle in the dark compared to the blaze that is a space rocket on active burn. The projectile will cool and would only provide heat signatures when performing maneuvers. So yes, it'd be relatively stealthy. But not quite that much. Also yes, space battles would be long and complex. Albeit I am sure we'll find a way to roleplay them in a more accessible manner.

As for quantum entanglement comms, they'd still need radio/laser comms to even work. You see the reason why quantum entanglement doesn't allow superluminal communication is because you can't transmit information with them. Or more like you only can if you know the measurements both sides made. Which means in order to confirm the information you need that data be sent via conventional measures. Same for quantum comms if they'd ever work. Chances are high that we'd only use such system at specific times while radio or laser communication would dominate. Especially when you consider the devices needed for quantum comms would be sensitive so you wouldn't fire them out as part of a projectile.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

The conventional railgun does normally fire solid ultra-dense slugs. If there are correctable railguns slugs, then the possibility of a knife fight is essentially null. Who ever has the best railgun wins, hands down every time. Your plasma arc will do nothing to the slug other than turn it into a cloud of molten hot metal still traveling as fast as it was before, if the arc even has enough time to act upon it. CIWS will not be able to intercept something so fast and a missile would face the same interception problem. A ship could not out run a self correcting round, at least not larger ships. I find the idea to be a bit OP.

@FrostedCaramel

Alright, since Keyguy haven't returned yet I think I can address this worry in better detail.
A missile has propulsion and overall it's kind of like a small automated spacecraft in capability. Now compare this with a guided projectile. Unlike missile which has on-board propulsion the projectile would only have some maneuvering thrusters for small course corrections and terminal guidance. They would not be as maneuverable as ships and their velocity would be realistically around 20-60 km/s plus the velocity of the launching ship. Even if we assume some fictional boost and call it 200km/s it'd be about the same velocity as the enemy spaceship going at average. It'd take about 1.5 hours to reach the target from 3 lightseconds while if you are lucky you can detect the projectile within 3-6 seconds. You have over an hour to react. Of course the projectile has sensors and can correct its path but it'd be a long chase. Said projectile has limited fuel and subpar maneuvering units compared to a full sized ship. The advantage over missiles would rather be cheapness, lightness and the fact it reaches the target from distance about twice as fast without less obvious signs of its arrival. Yes, this might make them better than missiles in a certain aspect but the latter has warheads and can use proximity detonation with a nuke or use even more standoff methods like nuke-pumped lasers or nuclear shaped charges. They also have more room for gadgets thus electronic warfare or even owning a CIWS is not out of question for these. So yeah, there's a benefit in both.

As for interception, aside from electronic warfare which is obviously plausible you can also shoot it down. CIWS can be of anything and if it's close enough then it cannot maneuver much so even coilguns with inferior speed can work. Plasma arc method is a bit iffy when it'd likely intercept from meters or perhaps just centimeters. But depending on intensity it works. Basically as the projectile is vaporized it'd turn on itself as an improvised ERA so the damage would be indeed less albeit not zero. Lasers would be a rather obvious choice and probably combat would involve finding means to overwhelm such defenses. And again, there is more than a hour of time before the projectile closes in. It's possible to launch your own guided projectiles or smaller missiles to intercept the target from long range.
Overall battles could be much more complex and exciting than just one side shooting their uber projectiles first and the enemy having no response against it. Much more.
This is also the part where submarine warfare comes in. Because anything but DEWs would be taking so long they're better compared to torpedoes.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

@KeyguypersonWe can perhaps help differentiate by making these coilguns/railguns large spinal mounted monstrosities. Well, not quite taking up all space in the ship but rather it requiring length. There's only so much acceleration you can impart on a projectile before it's no longer a projectile. On the other hand there's a minimum velocity you'd want for the projectile otherwise it'd take too long to reach or would be too slow to be a viable threat. Based on these I devised quite a few weapon types that might use similar technology yet have completely different roles.

Weapon Types

Launcher/tube: Coilgun mechanism giving some initial velocity for the missiles. They are relatively compact and only help to give distance between the ship and missile before the latter's engines fire. If neccessary you can also distinguish between missiles that only get the minimum speed and torpedoes which get a decent starter velocity from a longer coil.

Mass Driver: Coilgun system accelerating heavy mostly inert munitions for orbital bombardment. Think of Rods of God and similar ideas.

Spinal Accelerator: Long coilgun system which accelerates a relatively small guided projectile towards the target. It might run through the entire length of smaller ships but the largest ships might not need that much. Or alternatively do it for even faster and deadlier projectiles.

Heavy Spinal Accelerator: More likely to be used for large warships, these shoot more complex projectiles which might have warheads, better maneuverability or other desirable features. The said projectiles are also tend to be larger for the same reason. As complexity makes them more sensitive to acceleration they need length to compensate which makes them only fit for the larger warships.

Plasma Accelerator: Normally acceleration limits mean you need considerable length of coil to achieve decent velocities. In case of the plasma accelerator though they abandon that caution and use almost tiny amounts of matter accelerated to often even higher velocities than normal. Plasma weapons are deadly but generally plagued with short range as they cannot be guided and worse the plasma tends to rapidly disperse. You could even say they're the shotguns of space warfare.

Dust Accelerator: Another method to overcome the length limits is using even less complex yet still solid projectiles. Dust accelerators fire nothing but dust or even singular crystal structures of a solid (usually tungsten) in a continuous stream. They are effectively like particle beams but often slower. They compensate this with much better throw weight and reduced dispersion. Best comparison is a water cutter but with far larger velocities and raw power. This is the "Death Ray" as imagined up by Nikola Tesla.

Particle Accelerator: An alternative to lasers. The two weapon types share a lot of features but lasers disperse less and overall longer ranged. On the other hand particle cannons can have more penetration and spread deadly radiation if impacting with certain materials.

Coilguns Compact gun systems rarely used in ship to ship combat due to their low velocity, nor are fit to intercept most projectiles and missiles for the same reason. On the other hand they can have a decent punch for their power unlike lasers so they are sometimes used to deter opponents and smallcraft at "knife fighting" ranges.

Also I think there are more alternatives than just orion drives and torchdrives. Last time I worked with somebody on a realistic "near future" space NRP setting. I distinguished the following methods.

Willy's list on propulsion

Laser Propulsion: As others said letting nuclear power in the hands of civilians is a bit iffy. Sure, powerplants are safe but just turning that torch the wrong direction could be a giant mess. So my idea was to establish a network of gigantic lasers that can propel most civilian craft in space. Their acceleration is kind of low and they require other alternatives like rockets, elevators or mass drivers to escape gravity. On the other hand it's constant so it's overall better than most alternatives for long tours.

Annie Drive: Annie is antimatter safely embedded in molecular bonds which can be stored like a powder. It only has the tiny fraction of antimatter's energy density but it's safer than even rocket fuel and easy to use. It saves up a ton on complexity compared to nuclear drives and very mass efficient as propellant. As such small military craft loves this. On the other hand it's kind of expensive to make thus annie powered vessels only move when necessary and even prefer carrier style warfare. That and hitting the fuel reserves has a good chance of the ship blowing up like an improvised nuke. Absolutely not recommended for civilian use. Another drawback is that annie drive vessels still need an independent power source to the rest of their systems. So the more energy-consuming is a ship, the more you want a reactor+torchdrive rather than annie drive.

Torchdrive: Vessels that use nuclear power (either fission or more commonly fusion) to burn inert fuel and let that propel the ship. Unlike annie drives the torchdrives are generally safe and the worst you can get is radiation leak or accidents at the torch end of the ship. On the other hand compared to rockets this tend to be massively energy demanding and needs a beefy reactor to do so. The massive heat also make them a bit nasty at takeoffs so if possible torchships don't do that. Large ones might not even be designed to ever land. Compared to annie drives the torchships are relatively cheap to fuel (depending on reactor and inert fuel characteristics) but they have a large "sink cost" in building the power system for them.

Pulse Drive: Nuclear propulsion for less sophisticated needs. They can be mostly described as detonating nukes behind the ship for propulsion. The simplest designs do literally just that which is terribly inefficient compared to torch drives. More sophisticated desings use micro nukes within a reflective chamber to utilize large percentage of the energy while achieving a more continuous propulsion. Some of these designs might even have benefits over the torch and annie drives but generally only used if the previous two are just not feasible for a design. Pulse drives also have a nasty reputation and many sections of space outright prohibit them. Albeit some of these restrictions don't apply to the new and more sophisticated pulse drives.

Other Propulsion Types: While not the mainstream these days other forms of propulsion systems still have a niche. rockets, ion drives, plasma thrusters and so on. They are more compact and thus they are very popular for maneuvering and docking aid. Rockets in particular are still excellent in regards of heat output versus thrust and quite popular as "cheap" takeoff mechanisms from astral bodies. Another interesting propulsion system are the mass thrusters which use nothing but electromagnetic forces to launch material behind the ship as propulsion. They're the new champions in low heat propulsion and some of them use pulse mechanism more akin to a back mounted coilgun. They have many issues which prevents them from becoming mainstream but there's a growing niche for these both for stealthy military applications and alleged environment-friendly nature.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

I seriously doubt any currently known material can protect against anything but lasers. The sheer delta-V required for these weapons would make them absolutely devastating. On the other hand this is fiction and we can use the willing suspension of disbelief to not worry about this. So armor has some use and the energies involved won't be catastrophic enough to rarely need a second hit. I am completely okay with that. I mean we have other pop science or fantastic elements already so a bit of lenience for the sake of more enjoyable space battles is welcome.

Anyways, I described it as similar to the mix of fighters and submarines because maneuvering is a priority and so is the kind of cat and mouse sensor and predictory race within the thin confines of a sealed ship which is typical to these two armament types. Realistically it'd be the world's most complex math problem to fight in space and predict the actions of the enemy or throw off their calculations. Of course I am not against some Space Opera style fun, just saying.

I suppose describing it as modern naval combat with fighter like speed differentials would be more appropriate here. You can definitely outrun attacks like aircrafts do while multi layered defense and offense would be also relevant.

1/1/2300: "Black January" [Sci-fi, Cyberpunk NRP set in the Solar System]

Somehow I knew that if you joined in you'd go with Space Hungary.

@Keyguyperson

Not hard to guess when I consistently done the same. I just wish to use them properly in an NRP for a change.

Anyways, are those concepts on space combat are set in stone?
I mean missiles with terminal guidance are neat but coilguns? They are far from non-viable but calling them the mainline direct weapons instead of lasers and particle cannons seems a bit off.
Also the idea of line battles sits oddly with me. Something closer to submarines or oversized fighter jets seems a closer approximation for space combat.
Of course people should be free to try some mildly space opera fun.
Speaking of which, how durable are the warships? Realistic as in paper thin and easy to destroy or they take multiple hits and behave more like naval ships in this sense?