[bottomfan]

Freespace 2 physics cuts corners everywhere.

Ive always been 'annoyingly aware' that although the thrusthers are always ON there is a 'Top-speed' ( with a constant force accel. it, it  should go faster and faster). Not to mention the missiles and bombs.

[diamondgeezer]

I was just talking to Goober about weapon weights the other day. Now of course the mass of your weapons won't affect your top speed in space BUT they should affect your accel, decel and agility. This would be most useful for FS:AAB, especially if a weight limit could be set for fighters as well It would really affect your loadout choices since a fighter packed with huge bombs would be at a disadvantage in a furball...

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by TopAce
but to esape, you must turn away from your attackers, and use your afterburners. It pushes you backwards by default, If I understand LightSpeed well.

Yes, it pushes you back (unless your missile banks are mounted backwards). Also, afterburners don't quite provide enough thrust to get out of some situations

[diamondgeezer]

Actually, while I'm at it, I'd also like the option to no have bombs arm until they reach their target. Not using shields, I'm having trouble with interceptors killing themselves constantly by getting too close to the bombs they're trying to shoot down. If I could have a bomb which would only explode a bit when shot down but would go off with its full-scale bang when it impats the target, I'd be sorted

[Flipside]

Actually, I.m pretty certain that lower mass WOULD increase top speed. Weight is nothing to do with it, but if you have a Bomber with a Mass of 20000 Kg, and 8 Bombs with a mass of 1500 Kg each, the total mass would be 32000Kg This is the Mass of the bomber. There IS a function (I don't remember at present) which can tell you Velocity from a certain amount of Energy applied from a certain direction. This actually ASSUMES a friction/gravityless environment, and further variables need to be added to account for these in 'real' physics.
Therefore, after releasing 12000Kg worth of bombs, a Bomber has a Mass of 20000Kg total. Applying the same amount of Energy (from the engines) to a smaller mass WOULD result in a higher velocity I know Freespace doesn't obey the laws of physics even slightly, I suppose strictly speaking only acceleration would be affected, but I'm not sure

Flipside

EDIT : Ok, just checked my maths, acceleration would be affected, but in a truly frictionless environment, top speed would not, however, in a frictionless environment, there would be NO top speed from a constant thrust (obviously). So theres no reason why we can't pick and choose as we like

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Venom
missiles don't go boom along with their ships or, in real life, planes. that's what all that deal with "armed" is. for exemple, a sidewinder is armed only 2 seconds after the engine has been ignited, iirc. If by some (bad) luck it were to hit something before, it would just, well, not explode
submarine torpedoes are even worse, they can be armed seconds before it HITS its target, so intercepting it at half its course wouldn't make it explode either. all that is about safety.
a b2 that would crash wouldn't ignit 24 nuke explosions
during WW2, bombs were armed by hand, so they could explode if the bomber was destroyed just before it drops its load ( nothing sexual here ), but the weapon dude was supposed to wait for the last minutes before arming the bombs.

Actually, a bit of clarification is due here on this topic - and trust me, I deal with explosives in the army. I'll make clear what parts I'm unsure about though.

Nukes cannot explode as a nuclear blast unless they are detonated using the detonator. This is due to the precise coordination required of the primer charges going of to ram the whatever-they-are into the core of the bomb. These whatever-they-ares compress the core, causing fission. Fusion, AFAIK, is more or less the same thing, but using mini-nukes as primer charges to implode the core.

Disclaimer to this is that I may have gotten the specifics wrong, but the general idea is right - nukes and H-bombs will not go off without a precise series of events, one which most definitely would not occur in a catastrophic ship explosion. At the very most you would get the conventional explosives' primer charges exploding, but their effect would be extremely marginal.

Moving down the line: conventional explosives. Take a military-grade block of C4 and drop it, throw it, toss it into a bonfire - it won't explode. What will set it off is sparks (specifically the kind that come off a struck match as it lights) and other explosions. In our case, this means that, armed or not, if a bomb/missile's shell is breached all the way to the explosives inside (due to ship explosion), it's gonna go boom. Armed / unarmed is referring to the detonator, not the primary charge.

On to antimatter... antimatter is/can only be contained by magnetic fields (at least that's the case in hard-core sci-fi; I haven't encountered anything to contradict this in real life). As it is an inherently unstable material (to say the least!), when the containment field ruptures, the full force of the bomb's antimatter reaction would take place.

As for all those other technologies (most of which are theoretical at best), go make up your own explanations. I'll theorize on some here though.

ZPE (Zero-Point Energy). This is essentially (AFAIK) a whole seperate dimension or level of energy "available" to be tapped. Therefore, I'd think that nothing would happen when a ZPE bomb in breached, since the energy is attained via coordinated and precise tapping into the ZPE realm of energies.

Uhm... I can't think of anything else.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]This idea has a lot of interesting applications.

BTW I quickly scanned through the thread and didn't notice if anyone pointed out that missiles would not drop in space unless boosted away from the launching vehicle. Of course we get to bend the rules a little to add to the fun/cool factor though.
[/color]

[Flipside]

Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
That'd actually be cool to implement on crappy old fighters... Imagine an Infyrno style explosion from the old, out dated reactors in Lokis, and Hercs. :devil:

Actually that could be a handy little bit of code for Bobboau to look at when looking at ways to make the explosions look even better

Flipside

[Deepblue]

Originally posted by Venom
missiles don't go boom along with their ships or, in real life, planes. that's what all that deal with "armed" is. for exemple, a sidewinder is armed only 2 seconds after the engine has been ignited, iirc. If by some (bad) luck it were to hit something before, it would just, well, not explode
submarine torpedoes are even worse, they can be armed seconds before it HITS its target, so intercepting it at half its course wouldn't make it explode either. all that is about safety.
a b2 that would crash wouldn't ignit 24 nuke explosions
during WW2, bombs were armed by hand, so they could explode if the bomber was destroyed just before it drops its load ( nothing sexual here ), but the weapon dude was supposed to wait for the last minutes before arming the bombs.

"Hunt for the Red October" anyone?

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Flipside
EDIT : Ok, just checked my maths, acceleration would be affected, but in a truly frictionless environment, top speed would not, however, in a frictionless environment, there would be NO top speed from a constant thrust (obviously). So theres no reason why we can't pick and choose as we like

There is. In space (frictionless) you can accelerate permanently if your engines keep going. But the faster you will be getting, the higher your mass will get (infinite mass at lightspeed). So your acceleration would slowly be decreasing (since you'd need to accelerate more mass) until it comes to a stop where your engines cannot create enough thrust to accelerate you anymore.

On to antimatter... antimatter is/can only be contained by magnetic fields (at least that's the case in hard-core sci-fi; I haven't encountered anything to contradict this in real life). As it is an inherently unstable material (to say the least!), when the containment field ruptures, the full force of the bomb's antimatter reaction would take place.

Antimatter is just as stable as our normal matter is. In antimatter the cores of the atoms are charged negatively, and you have positrons swirling around them. The only point where the thing tends to go boom boom is when it meets 'normal' matter, which will result in 1 g Antimatter + 1 g Matter => 0 g Matter + Tons of energy
Antimatter can only be stored in fields / space where it doesnt have any connection to normal matter.


Any antimatter would have an immediate blast once the ship is destroyed, which will probably cause all the hull to melt and be washed away to all directions
That again, would influence normal warheads to explode (as the compounds will be split most explosives provide their own oxygen ), including nukes (since youre getting immense temperatures).
However, if there's no antimatter involved on the ship, most missiles probably would not explode at all.

[Woolie Wool]

Nukes would explode more violently then normal if detonated with antimatter because the entire mass of the matter that comes in contact with the antimatter would turn to energy, causing a HUMONGOUS explosion. This applies for all antimatter/matter collisions.

[Flipside]

Originally posted by Lightspeed


There is. In space (frictionless) you can accelerate permanently if your engines keep going. But the faster you will be getting, the higher your mass will get (infinite mass at lightspeed). So your acceleration would slowly be decreasing (since you'd need to accelerate more mass) until it comes to a stop where your engines cannot create enough thrust to accelerate you anymore.

This is true, but even a Perseus at 120 Kph is going to have to accelerate for a looong time before it hits that barrier

Flipside

[Lightspeed]

Yeah that's true, but who said FS2 was using real physics?

[ChronoReverse]

A nuke detonated by antimatter?  Eh?  If you put a nuke in contact with antimatter, you get an antimatter reaction and only that.  You'd also lose more than enough radioactive material to even achieve critical mass (if that's anything left).  The explosive charges in nukes are shaped precisely to crumple the plutonium, not atomize it.



As for antimatter-matter explosions.  We really don't know how that will work out.  Frankly I'm inclined to believe that it's unlikely to achieve a large blast even if we _could_ ever generate that much antimatter.  Think about it.  Matter is REALLY not dense at all.  Kinda like the space between stars and galaxies.  Normal matter interaction is just electrostatic forces.

So what?  Won't the antimatter just attract it's counterparts?  Well, Because matter isn't very dense (even stuff like lead) as soon as the leading particles come into contact with its counterpart and annihilate, the energy release will more than easily force the matter and antimatter apart again.  What results is something like a fizzle as the two sort of skids around each other.  It's similar to the effect of pouring liquid gas on a normal warm surface or pouring water on a really hot surface: it skittles around.

If you poured a cup of liquid nitrogen on a warm surface and can simultaneously have it all vaporize, you'd have a big explosion as well.  But reality generally makes that really hard to do (if possible at all).

I'm sure a way could be worked to simultaneously contact the matter and antimatter, but it's not as simple as just say "pouring" them into the same jar.





In any case, kickback of launching a bomb and changing acceleration (which includes manueverability, it's the same thing) sounds like a good addition to FS2.  It really doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that it would make the game more interesting.  Additionally, instead of a REVERSE nitro charge, I'd prefer a shaped ROTATIONAL charge that would flip me over approximately 90 degrees.

[kasperl]

well, if you take thematter, and keep the antimatter contained, and then throw the matter into the containment field, and have both matter and a/m as a gas, i think you should get some larger explosion.

[Flaser]

Antimatter does exist, it was scientifically proved, since they even created it. How? In a cyclotron. They made high energy particles crash and matter and antimatter particles were created.

Actually matter and antimatter won't either push or atract each other as their inherent charge is zero.

When antimatter and matter come into contact they annihilate each other and create a 100% energy equivalent of their mass.

So this time you indeed get E=mc2, whereas in a nuke or H-bomb, only a small friction of the matter gets converted into pure energy.
Imagine the massive force an antimatter warhead could yield...terryfying. Both in effect and in budget to build a damn thing.

No wonder, that in FS1 they had to revert to an H-bomb when building their biggest bomb.

[ChronoReverse]

Antimatter _atoms and molecules_ are generally neutral in charge just like such normal matter is normally neutral.  But anti-protons and protons (and the other complement component particles) are attracted to each other and spiral in together.  The only problem is, we haven't made anything past antihydrogen.


Hmm, a gas is even less dense.  Even if you mix them really nice and evenly, the "collision" rate higher in the beginning, gas being what gas is will still go POOM and explode in showers of energy.  But at much lower yield than what you'd expect =(
So unless you're driving a blimp towards that Shivan cruiser....


Also, even in the case of our "smallish" nukes, even tho the percentage of mass converted to energy is miniscule.  It's still more than "just a few" atoms, or even "several" atoms =\  From a googled page, about 0.1% of a fission bomb gets converted to energy while a fusion bomb has a whopping 1%.  In any case, unless we find a way to mass produce antimatter (which requires a large energy input, we'll need to harness the sun's energy for this) and find a way to "detonate" all the antimatter that's both reliable and doesn't take up too much space (just an engineering problem really) nukes are just so much easier.


But in the end, what does real life matter?  All we need to do is put a lot of technical jargon into the tech database decriptor and then we can do whatever we want =D


Oh yeah, a lot of our nukes have more than a kilogram of fissible and fusionable material in them.  So assuming we're comparing with a thermonuclear bomb, then we'd need at least 10 grams of antimatter for the _same_ potential blast.  I wonder if we've even made 10 grams of antimatter yet.  I used to believe so, until something showed me some numbers.

[Flaser]

Manufacturing in space would render a couple of things a lot easier. With a high power fuison reactor even the energy could be not that much of an issue, bit it would still be pretty expensive and would be hard to use.

[Descenterace]

Is the Helios an antimatter warhead?  I thought it was just a massive thermonuke.

It doesn't matter how low the density of matter is.  A kilogram is still a kilogram.  Half a kilo each of matter and antimatter (and once we can produce 10 grams of antimatter, we'll have no trouble producing 500 grams, or even several tonnes) would produce a larger blast than any weapon previously constructed.  We're talking the complete obliteration of a country the size of France.

If you were to make a TC bomb of total mass 500kg, it is estimated that the Earth would be thrown slightly out of orbit by the explosion and almost 20% of the planet's mass would be rendered down into plasma instantly.

TC (Total Conversion) weapons are extremely powerful, and it's unlikely that anyone would be crazy enough to build one.  Actually, given the overall stupidity of the human race, someone's almost certain to build one, assuming we all last that long.

[Robin Varley]

Yeah, Antimatter's just a bit expensive the going rate in 1999 was:
62.5 trillion dollars a gram

But hey, were talking about over 300 years in future, so it doesn't really matter.

Back to what this thread was really about, err, I'll try putting a Volatile flag for weapons in, and have a ships explosion add in any Volatile weapons on board including blast radius.  The only thing that I see as being a little tricky is taking into account the armour/shield/subsystem modifiers of the weapons in question, doing the improved manoeuvrability shouldn't be hard.  I'll bung it in with some other stuff I've done that I want to get tested, before I ask about  having any of it submiited to the main source code.

One question, for the manoeuvrability, should the current turn rate, acceleration etc of a bomber like the Ursa or any ship in fact be the base value, where any weapon with say a 'heavy' flag reduces this; based on the amount of cargo space all the weapons with 'heavy' take up.  'Cos you could end up with a very sluggish ship, and how much should 'heavy' weapons affect the ship?

Thats if you do it with flags at all.

If you want to find out about the use of antimatter as a power source for propulsion you can look here:

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop12apr99_1.htm

for some incredibly dry stuff on nuclear weapons, go here:

http://www.infomanage.com/nonproliferation/primer/

There's of stuff about things like nukes and antimatter on the internet, unfortunatly a lot of it is written by idiots - in fact worryingly it applies to any subject in any area ( we were once looking up some stuff on cocktails, and having made them, realised the person who wrote the recipies could never have tried them themselves, the gits.

EDIT: back to physics, the 500kg TC device mentioned above would release energy to yeild equiavlent to ~ 11 giga tons of TNT, however, and this is a big however, it wouldn't have the exactly the same effect because a proportion of the energy released is released as radiation ( see that nuke link I mentioned earlier for some thing similar that happens with them )  in comparison:
Hiroshima device was ~20 kilotons
St Helens was ~10 megatons
I think most modern big nukes are 200 to 700 kilotons
the big city busters of the early cold war were bigger than 1 megaton
The biggest bomb humanity detonated was about ~60 megatons( dont quote me on that, it was a USSR device and I think Tsar was in it's name somewhere)
Krakatoa was ~200 megatons
If an asteroid hit us and the explosion was of around the 11 gigatons mentioned before, it'd destroy, and I quote:
'Land impact destroys a large state (eg- California, France, Japan) and produces enough atmospheric dust loading to affect global climate, freezing crops. Ocean impact creates hemisphere-spanning tsunamis but no global climate change. Global ozone layer is heavily damaged.' -( actually thats the low end it would also get the effects of the next in the list, see the link below)
This is taken off this site though I know it's originally off a differnet site, as mentioned in the refrences for that page):
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/index.html
Go to the essay section and then look at planet killers
Althougth the site is about Star Wars, it is a very good and (accurate on the science) site, if your gonna start talking about things like this I suggest a look - the forums are also worth a good look to, hey thats enough pimping for the moment.

If I apear a bit preachy about this sort of thing, I suppose its because I am, I did 2 years of a physics degree before deciding to switch to just computers, and when you see wrong information being handed out, not that any has really happened here yet, it gets annoying, just like you get annoyed when some damn fool lists the wrong recipie for a Jack the Ripper cocktail.  And I imagine If you hear somebody talking crap about something you knew a fair amount about you get annoyed, or a least think there a fool.  Well I think I've humilated myself enough for the mo.


Anyway the big question: how much should manoeuvrability change?