Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: Federal Spacefarer on August 05, 2016, 09:42:47 am
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Good day everyone. I, as somewhat of a tinkerer of concepts, have thought of some ways just to consider. They may not be used, but that really does not matter. Since Blue Planet is however the creators want it to be.
Let's start with probably the (actually certainly) most abused ship of the class: the UED Toutatis. Admiral Calder, being faced with GTA warships designed to fight Shivans, often sends the ship his flag is on directly into a line of battle, directly contradicting the defensive minded design of the baseline Solaris. At some point (as many sources indicate after Delenda Est) he is going to have to change the design mission requirements in what would become his variation of the class. Sacrificing hanger space, facilities and operations as well as reorganizing the layout of the relevant interior, he has at his disposal two Toutatis-scale Mass Drivers (basically the range of a Narayana-scale gun with twice the damage). Here is what I think should take place in conjunction with or instead of what has taken place in the code.
The Toutatis still has the baseline Hitpoints and armor value in the code. Unless I am mistaken, I would think that given the weapons being thrown around in the current war (particularly from some shock-jump from a Titan-class destroyer), Calder would want to have extra insurance if something does hit as hard as what the Terran element of the GTVA throws. Perhaps enough armor to survive two volleys from a Titan's main beam guns having 60 seconds of time to get away instead of 30. This, again I could be mistaken, would be relatively easy to do given the base value.
Now based upon my calculations of the Mass Driver#Toutatis and other weapons, I could probably get away of fitting four Mass Driver#Narayana's and have increased volume of fire for the same space dedicated. Maybe even more if the best case scenario. One of my troubles with some weapons, if the're too similar, why should I have one over the other. I would, from a standpoint of uniqueness, make the bigger gun the Toutatis mounts a pair of either have increased base damage or increased range.
And that leads us to something potentially cool at the cost of reworking a very complicated model. The slabs of hull that you as the player can fly under could be much cooler in practice by making them as non-targetable subsystems that act as spaced-armor. This could make the Solaris-class as a whole more interesting and ad another visible reason why some in the Council of Elders were so passionately opposed to sending funds to the construction projects for these ships. They become more survivable (at general angles, it would not be able to provide complete coverage) and give the player an interesting spectacle to watch and think "Man, this must not be cheap to replace!"
Thank you for reading my post. I look forward to you're replies if any.
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Now based upon my calculations of the Mass Driver#Toutatis and other weapons, I could probably get away of fitting four Mass Driver#Narayana's and have increased volume of fire for the same space dedicated. Maybe even more if the best case scenario.
The same space, perhaps, but the same power requirements, thermal load, ammunition feeds? I doubt it.
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Some of the space dedicated to the pair of guns mounted on the Toutatis would be needed to handle the increased thermal stress and considering the size of the actual rounds (projectiles actually) and the desire to maintain rate of fire as the Narayana-scale guns, this would be taken into consideration along with what else to cut down, reorganize and compact and adding that to the requirements for mounting four smaller guns for the same damage output.
Also if you look up the preview of an act 4 mission for War in Heaven and look underneath the bow of the Toutatis, you would see the projectiles themselves are larger compared to Narayana Mass Drivers. Plus either more space from other systems reduced down in size or reorganized to be more compact dedicated to magazines or simply not maintaining the dimensions of the magazines would be an option.
Although I am not an engineer nor an architect by profession (I am not even in college.) I just simply think about a lot of explanations and explore a lot of background of stories.
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The smarter thing to do would be to just not charge into the middle of a tev battlegroup. Redesigning and refitting the Toutatis would take A LOT of time, even a refit would require weeks in drydock(spacedock?) and that's time the UEF simply doesn't have.
And no matter what you do to the Solaris it still can't measure up to the TEI destroyers, regardless of what the UEF analysts believe.
Hell, without active armor(aka armor.tbl trickery) it can't even survive a single salvo against the Serk team. If it used all its energy on weapons or charging its subpsace drive those 3 corvettes would kill it in 4 seconds.
It would probably be much better to take away a few power hungry systems and fit in better EW devices, as maintaining EW superiority and active beam jamming is something that might actually win battles, a few extra mass drivers don't really do that.
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Well of course not. That would be foolish and Admiral Calder is not a fool.
Well the two mass drivers that I mentioned, Calder managed to find the time and funds (from the desperately low pool mentioned in the story) to fit onto his flagship sometime after Delenda Est. (I did not make that up for a 'what if?')
Not getting hit is a good thing. That would probably be integrated as much as possible from what the UEF have managed to develop with what little resources they could spare.
With the current armor rating... the Toutatis would be demolished within 4 seconds. I just thought (again I'm somewhat of a tinkerer) upgrading from this baseline to somewhere above (or at) 200,000 Hit Points worth of ingame strength.
However, I do understand your logic and line of reasoning. As I personally believe, there is more than one way to do, -insert need here.
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https://youtu.be/zNWnUPvDvfk?t=38s pause the video about here. This is one of the guns I was talking about on the UED Toutatis. The Mass Driver#Toutatis. Pretty big I'd say. There's another mirroring this on the other side.
For the best viewing, got to full screen and set the resolution to max. Play the video back and forth a little if you're having trouble (as I do.)
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A few things I should mention. In your analysis, you're relying heavily on table values; while these are of course important, they're nowhere near the whole story. They should very definitely not be taken as the sole measure of a ships' toughness in the BP verse; We do a lot of tinkering behind the scenes to make sure that every ship is as tough as the story (and the dictates of fun gameplay) needs it to be. Therefore I would strongly recommend to concentrate on purely "fluff" things in your speculations, as the table entries are sometimes misleading (There is one mission, I forget which, where the Carthage ends up having several million HP due to the fudging we're doing in the name of getting the gameplay we want).
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Yes indeed. Although they can be changed (in fact I'm counting on that) they are nonetheless explicit. (I have some difficulty comprehending implicit information. but I'm working on it.) One of the motivations for my thoughts on the Mass Driver#Toutatis is that it is too similar to the smaller gun mounted on the Narayana. When creating something we have an idea of the rough strength of that thing in a story but in the pure statistical application of that thought (you mentioned the Carthage having such massive strength just to get the overall gameplay right) that can take one iteration of strength statistically in game to another.
Also in my tinkering of the copy of the retail's code in my mod folder (I just do it simply to experiment. Nothing more at the moment) I set many of the ships and weapons to have decidedly non-retail values. For example, I set in my mod the GTF Uysses to have a max speed of 6750 meter's per second, a max overclock speed of 12000 m/s and the max afterburn speed twice the previous value and non-rechargeable but have ten in-game minutes of fuel. This can apparently work (I was actually worried) and now have problems getting certain weapons to fire at ranges beyond retail.
...Did I go too long? Because sometimes I go on a tangent (sometimes!?) and get long and winded in my explanation (one of the problems I am still working on).
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This is a good thread and a good topic, I am glad you are thinking about this!
The destructible subsystem idea is very cool, and could be done in engine (although I don't know if we will actually try to pull it off — messing with big .pof files is a lot of work).
We try not to make ships super tough "just because" — in the case of the Carthage, for instance, there's loads of fluff behind how tough she is, and the same goes for the Solaris-class, which by this point in the war has been tooled up pretty hard to survive beam engagements.
One of the big frustrations Calder has is the UEF's relative inability to concentrate force. Short of deploying bombers, it's very hard for the UEF to create big damage spikes in the battlespace. They can very easily create zones of control — a couple Karunas will lock down a large area against strike craft, and put out consistent damage against warships — but they don't have many assets (again, except their bombers) which they can drop in to absolutely secure a kill.
Calder's modifications to the Toutatis are generally meant to shift her from a command-and-control role towards a line combatant and center of tactical gravity.
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Thank you. I just thought "Even if this is not used, what ideas could be devised?" and see what other people think.
...I did acknowledge it was very, very complicated, did I?
Well not just because. The UEF have indeed been unprepared for the GTVA's beam-centric combat doctrine who prepared for a beam-centric environment and there ships (especially early on) would reflect that, having different requirements. And the spaced-armor I was thinking to actual be original to the design and it itself would then be adjusted as such to the current, absolutely hostile, environment of the war.
Calder's modifications to the Toutatis are generally meant to shift her from a command-and-control role towards a line combatant and center of tactical gravity.
Alright, then I have been wondering what the UED Eris was generally being progressively geared towards?
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Giant AWACS
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I just had a really cool idea! There was a German gun developed called the Gast gun, named after the man who invented it. It basically had two barrels that when one fired, the recoil operation would load and charge the other barrel and repeat the cycle. Eventually the former Soviet Union improved upon the Gast Principle gun and increased the rate of fire from 1600 rounds per minute to 3400 rpm. (These were machine guns.)
I don't know if this could ever possibly be applied but this could make the Mass Driver#Toutatis further unique by at least doubling or even tripling the rate of fire. Just a thought.
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I suggest looking for Solaris page in Hard Light Wiki, there is some interesting things about it.
And I always thought that UEF uses railguns - where recoil is a different case than in normal firearms. And the problem would still be centered around energy management, I suppose.
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Oh I have. Some have been a while.
Yes, I do mean railguns (I have thought about the mechanics of non-detonating propellant weapons and how to keep them as either semi-automatic or fully-automatic with their reloading systems in my sci fi.) Chucking a very large projectile at very high speeds would still create a lot of recoil and the system has to absorb it somehow. Since we are in space and not on blue water terrain, the designers would have to figure out how to, starting with small ships, prevent the gun from becoming a solid matter engine (when necessary if the Druuge from Star Control 2 are of any indication. You can actually use the main gun as an engine in the game) to the very large ships with sufficient mass to make the path of least resistance as pushing the gun into and breaking parts of the ship. Part of the energy of recoil could be harnessed (and absorbed in a sense) and utilized for loading additional rounds. I just thought of the Gast Principle as some random crazy idea off the top of my head to throw out just because.
Giant AWACS
That's funny... I was just thinking of that as how you would explain the enhanced EW capabilities for the Eris in-game...
Based upon a reread of the Eris article, she would also have additional carrier capabilities that could be applied even more so for the Solaris given Admiral Byrn's decision to use her in such a strategic capacity... If he sees just that due to his knowledge of... unconventional methods to projecting strategic power in adherence to the Elder's predominate opinion upon how to actual win while remaining true to Ubuntu. He would have had to eventually. This would not be an easy feet to actual make practical, let alone successfully employ (which I assume he may have the resources to do and is actually plot critical at some point that we have not yet seen.)
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This is a good thread and a good topic, I am glad you are thinking about this!
The destructible subsystem idea is very cool, and could be done in engine (although I don't know if we will actually try to pull it off — messing with big .pof files is a lot of work).
We try not to make ships super tough "just because" — in the case of the Carthage, for instance, there's loads of fluff behind how tough she is, and the same goes for the Solaris-class, which by this point in the war has been tooled up pretty hard to survive beam engagements.
One of the big frustrations Calder has is the UEF's relative inability to concentrate force. Short of deploying bombers, it's very hard for the UEF to create big damage spikes in the battlespace. They can very easily create zones of control — a couple Karunas will lock down a large area against strike craft, and put out consistent damage against warships — but they don't have many assets (again, except their bombers) which they can drop in to absolutely secure a kill.
Calder's modifications to the Toutatis are generally meant to shift her from a command-and-control role towards a line combatant and center of tactical gravity.
A question, then: in the "More BSG" video Dan Bell posted to his channel, the Toutatis never brings her two big cannons to bear against...any ship, really. It just seems to be a massive waste of firepower. Is that video not representative? Would the Toutatis be better off incorporating more Hwacha launchers instead of the two big guns? What about a boosted EWAR suite like the Eris?
One of the advantages the Solaris has is that nearly all of its weapons can be brought to bear in almost any direction; the two big guns are a huge exception to that.
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Personally I would have expected him to spend most of his time facing towards the enemy so his big damage dealers could function, sortof like the frigates do.
Obviously that wont always be a tactically viable option (getting into what the guy above is talking about), but nevertheless.
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I was curious about this myself. However it did say it was work in progress in the description. Also some combat scenarios don't provide the best opportunities for any combatant fighting in it.
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About the railguns.
They base on accelerating a metal bullet with generating a proper magnetic field (coils wrapped around the barrel, fired in a proper sequence). There is no internal stress resulting from the explosion of bullet's chemical components, no gases created in a chemical reaction that need to be vented somewhere. You just put a bullet in a barrel, and since you do it in a nearly kilometer-long ship, you can sacrifice a little bit of space in it to mount there a loading mechanism based on servomotors. And even if you can't, what makes you think that the UEF is not using that Gast mechanism, or something even better?
There are bigger problems related to railguns than their reloading mechanisms. They require a singnificant amount of electric energy and they generate heat. And UEF tech seems to have big problems with generating large amounts of energy - look at their capships' weaponry. Mostly torpedoes and projectile-based guns.
Take a look at The Blade Itself: if you use damage control systems, you have -75% ROF on your guns, and if you decide to hotload your main weapons, your ship has to handle a power grid crisis.
Or a line of dialogue in Delenda Est: "Disengage feed safeties and hotload the mass drivers", or something like that.
If the recoil of that weapon would be used, I bet it would be based on converting that kinetic force into electrical energy an pouring it back into ship's veins.
Regarding the AWACS, there are some moments in WiH, where it is actually playing a significant gameplay factor. Darkest Hour - vectoring in SSM strikes, The Plunder - Tevs using it to counter UEF torpedoes, Aristea - an Oculus jamming Tev main weapons, Delenda Est and the mission before it... The entire Tenebra. Okay, most of BP warfare is either based on EWAR, or augmented by it.
And Byrne...? He's rather busy with his own secret project.
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Bullet implies it contains it's own propellant. Is this the case?
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Oh, sorry. Used the wrong word here. Still learning the language!
I think a projectile* would be better. Thanks :P
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gryazev-Shipunov_GSh-23 Here is a link to the page for the former Soviet aircraft mounted gun. Click on one of the pictures that provide the best view of the article. In the second paragraph, there is a link to the page to the Gast Gun for a more wordy description of the mechanism.
Railguns actually uses two 'rails' of magnetically opposite metal (in relation to each other) while what you are describing would be called a coil gun (because there is an actual coil in the barrel.)
Firearms using differing methods to load rounds (the projectile, the casing with the propellant and primer in this case) do not convert (at least in the 20th century) the kinetic energy into electrical energy (this actually loses some of it as waste) but simply directly uses it in the mechanical action of the loading system (20th century machines in some cases don't even have any electrical components as far as I am aware of mostly the early half of it.) Thus far, I have not seen any gun that is two barrels and fires in tandem as one gun (if they do, they are two different guns linked to each other except maybe the mass drivers on the Karuna-class Frigate.)
What would be even better, and this would be such a monstrous piece, would be to have it as a rotary gun (at least three barrels or more) self-powered (not just externally) using the recoil to augment the loading with the whole system and pelt the enemy with a visible stream of major-caliber artillery shells. (This would not be cheap across the board.) :eek2:
Concluding, in any multi-barreled system, the main point is to give the barrel(s) that is/are not firing a chance to cool down more than in a single barrel system while increasing the rate of fire. (The power shunt system aboard would have been, back to blue planet, designed to or modified to meet the "do more with less" concept (actually necessity), given the demands presented.) Torpedoes would just simply be jettisoned and then power themselves out.
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FWIW any system to reclaim energy from the recoil of a railgun would necessarily have to reduce the kinetic energy of the slug compared to just mounting the gun hard against the hull, so you'd be better off powering the loader and whatever else directly from the main power grid.
(Incidentally UEF mass drivers are definitely coilguns, not railguns.)
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Yup, that's another mistake by me. At least you won't get bored here with me. :rolleyes:
I meant using a mass driver's recoil to generate energy :P. The barrel is pushing a projectile, that's action. The reaction would be the barrel attempting to make a move relative to the vessel carrying it. There could be an attempt to convert it into electricity - something like gathering energy from braking in electric cars.
I don't really see use for a complicated reload system in those weapons since there is no shell and gases to get rid of. you just put a block of metal in a barrel.
And I still insist that the UEF is using coilguns and their ROF limitations come from the heat generated by coils and their power requirements.
I think I should just back off from this discussion.
I think the Jacob's Ladder is the proper name. But I think it works thanks to ionised air - it has a lot smaller resistance compared to normal air. An electrical arc is created at the bottom of the Ladder, it ionises and warms up the air around it. Hot, ionised air is starting to fly upward, and the arc is following it. When that air goes high enough above the Ladder, the arc becomes too long and breaks up. Another arc is created at the bottom of the Ladder, repeat.
Railguns seem to be related to the direction of magnetic fields generated by the electrical current.
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FWIW any system to reclaim energy from the recoil of a railgun would necessarily have to reduce the kinetic energy of the slug compared to just mounting the gun hard against the hull, so you'd be better off powering the loader and whatever else directly from the main power grid.
Newton's Third Law of Motion "For every action, there is an equal yet opposite reaction." This is why jet propulsion works. This is also why, even with a fixed barrel, there is recoil. This is also why I said the system has to absorb it somehow.
Now I know what firing method the UEF uses in there guns. Thank you. This was obscure for me previously.
I think I should just back off from this discussion.
Sorry for making it seem like a hostile topic. I did not mean to do so.
Many forms of absorbing energy do generate heat. I suggest a compound system of absorbing the recoil (primarily because in my sci fi, there is a lot more kick in any of the weapons when firing.) Part of the system is concerned about using the energy to load the next round, while the remainder attempts to minimize generation of waste heat that could be used to absorb the recoil, in conjunction with the dedicated system doing this.
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You misunderstand basic physics if you think you can absorb energy from a railgun without losing kinetic energy. Since the projectile is being accelerated using magnetic induction there is no longitudinal pushback. The only force applied is to the point where the electrical circuit is closed off.
Think of railguns more like magnetic slingshots and you'll understand why you can't use the recoil.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion Here is a link to the physics of what we are talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun Here is the link to the wikipedia article and go down to the "Materials used" paragraph for comparison.
https://youtu.be/wa_vuX5_oAk The video evidence of the Third Law of Motion and the information above.
I will be honest, I had questions about the physics after what you said. Above are my researched examples.
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The fire rate of any of the UEF gauss rifles and mass drivers is governed more by the time it takes to build up a firing charge rather than the time it takes to load a projectile into the gun.
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Well, then I guess I was bringing too much of my sci fi (concerning railguns) into Blue Planet. :banghead:
Alright, then the priority of weapons design is not so much "how can I load the next round as quickly as required" but instead "how can I make the charging system as efficient, power wise, as possible while still having massive application of force." Since it takes longer to charge the weapon then to load it, that would rewrite my approach in the technical lore. I would still make the Toutatis mass driver as unique as possible then what it is derived from (the Narayana mass driver by appearance) so it would be more interesting to potentially watch in action.
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Well, of course it will push back, that was never the question. The problem is that unlike gunpowder the majority of the opposing force acts on the sides of the rails rather than directly pushing back. The pushback you see there is simply due to air pressure after an extremely fast projectile "pushes" it out of the way and it rushes back in. It's not nearly strong enough to practically use for anything compared to a standard cannon of the same size.
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I would still make the Toutatis mass driver as unique as possible then what it is derived from (the Narayana mass driver by appearance) so it would be more interesting to potentially watch in action.
But that is quite literally not the point! Calder was able to modiy the Big T with a bunch of huge guns because those gun assemblies were stockpiled parts that were originally intended to go on a Narayana somewhere. See, it would be nice if there was a special gun mod for the Solaris, custom built to exacting specifications and fitting perfectly, but there's just not enough time to make that happen within the timeframe of War in Heaven. Calder has to make do with what's available, and what is available is a pair of Varunastra-B gauss cannons.
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I seem to vaguely recall reading somewhere that the Solaris had expansion slots on the front meant to fit specially designed guns that they had in the stockpile but had not installed pre-war and hadn't gotten the chance to install once the conflict kicked off (due to a pressing need to keep the destroyers ready to go at all times presumably).
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My thoughts on the Solaris is that it is cool and good and maybe the bit behind the rotating section should be flipped to make its engines look less weird.
Thanks for reading.
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Newton's Third Law of Motion "For every action, there is an equal yet opposite reaction." This is why jet propulsion works. This is also why, even with a fixed barrel, there is recoil. This is also why I said the system has to absorb it somehow.
I do just want to show my work here: the amount of energy pushed through the gun when it fires is constant, or at least not dependent on how the weapon is mounted. Energy is force times distance, and we have equal and opposite forces acting on the slug and the gun. The share of the shot energy that goes into the gun rather than the slug is therefore directly proportional to how far the gun moves while it is being fired. If it's mounted on a giant warship then it will not move much; if it is mounted on some sort of carriage to capture the recoil it will move much further. So any energy absorbed from the recoil comes directly out of the kinetic energy of the projectile.
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I would still make the Toutatis mass driver as unique as possible then what it is derived from (the Narayana mass driver by appearance) so it would be more interesting to potentially watch in action.
But that is quite literally not the point! Calder was able to modiy the Big T with a bunch of huge guns because those gun assemblies were stockpiled parts that were originally intended to go on a Narayana somewhere. See, it would be nice if there was a special gun mod for the Solaris, custom built to exacting specifications and fitting perfectly, but there's just not enough time to make that happen within the timeframe of War in Heaven. Calder has to make do with what's available, and what is available is a pair of Varunastra-B gauss cannons.
I meant to potentially watch in action as the player. Sorry. I was not very clear.
If the story calls for very similar characteristics, then by all means. It is (as a team) your story after all.