[General Battuta]

Yeah, nukes suck in space, Helios bombs are ammunition-limited and can be intercepted.

If you read up on space warfare you'll find that highly directional, high-speed attacks are the way to go. Beam weapons do that. A beam weapon moves at lightspeed and can't be intercepted. It punches right through shields.

Stop making analogies to current economic systems and prices. You're dealing with a civilization that can mass-produce antimatter. US dollars are a terrible way to measure costs.

How do you plan to kill a Lucifer with Helios bombs, anyway?

[blowfish]

You forgot that they are cool

[Nuke]

well if i was gonna make a nuke lobber, first id make it small, like a corvette and very fast. it would attack front on in a charging assault. lobbing inexpensive warheads. i wouldn't use helios, id use harbinger equivalent bombs, nukes. if tipped with a shape charge they can burn their way into the hull allowing the nuke to enter and explode internally, same concept as a bunker buster.

it might even be possible to make a nuclear shape charge, which would focus the blast into the ship. supporting the nuke in a hollow lead shell with mercury filling the void. that mercury would vaporize almost instantaniously and the thickness of the lead casing would be beefy at the rear and light near the tip. so a jet of mercury vapor would burn into the hull microseconds before the shell itself vaporizes. you could imagine the result.

to increase their damage potential, you could fire them out of a coil gun, still using the booster to gain even more velocity. you would also want to fire them rapidly and in large volleys, to overwhelm interceptors and turrets. as for guidance i don't see why the missile can't be as accurate if not more so than a beam. it can make fine corrections en route. i don't see recoil being that much of a problem. a corvette is a massive hulk of metal and order of magnitude more massive than a nuke.

beams are still cool, but i don't see retro weapons as being totally obsolete. it will be some time before they make a laser more powerful than a single 30mm armor piercing shell.

[Mars]

The Fenris's Fusion Mortar is after all more effective than it's SGreen.

 Although if they were destroyable that might not be the case.

[jr2]

...Anyone think of the fact that if one Helios gets intercepted, its blast could conceivably take out all the other Helios warheads within its blast radius?    IDK if anyone pointed that out or not; I only skimmed this thread.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

...Anyone think of the fact that if one Helios gets intercepted, its blast could conceivably take out all the other Helios warheads within its blast radius?    IDK if anyone pointed that out or not; I only skimmed this thread.

That's a really good point...but for a warhead to be able to travel 2 clicks, probably under constant fire, the warhead must be durable enough to withstand shockwaves or light ammunition, but brittle enough to shatter when it's hit hard enough.

[foolfromhell]

A Helios being only $5 Million?
I don't think so. It uses antimatter. Currently, it costs $300 billion per milligram of antimatter. You're going to need a whole lot more to make a Helios. Even if it does get cheaper to make antimatter, its not going to be THAT much cheaper. Its going to cost a whole lot.
It also takes around 150 Helios to kill a Sathanas...

A Helios might cost more than a Fenris... The only time its actually used is when you have to disarm the first Sath.

Assuming that launching a Helios from a tube won't cause the Helios to explode and take out whatever is trying to launch it, blobs could still intercept it. Every bomb that is intercepted is wasted money.

IMHO, its still so much more efficient to just beam things to death. 

Well, then, the Harbinger is a Fission + Fusion bomb, so that wouldnt be quite cheap. I agree with the coolness factor, but still. This is 300 years in the future as you have said. Im sure they could use a coilgun or railgun to accelerate the bomb to high speeds. High enough not to be shot down. And if a fusion bomb today is only $7million, im sure it would be cheaper in 300 years. Especially if it is only required to travel a few kilometers.

[Herra Tohtori]

And if a fusion bomb today is only $7million, im sure it would be cheaper in 300 years. Especially if it is only required to travel a few kilometers.

Why do you assume that things like that get cheaper?

Yeah, technology advances as physics does; processes with common materials get cheaper and more effective, and so on. But get this - a car uses essentially same materials as a steam engine that preceded it - mainly, steel (also aluminium and other alloys, plastic, and otherstuffs, but mainly steel). Iron is a relatively abundant resource, and a lot of the availability of technology we take for granted is thanks to this fact... However, only because iron-related things have become a lot more accessible and cheaper in time it's not plausible to assume that all other branches of technology would advance similarly.

There are some materials that will always require a lot of manpower and time and effort to gather in significant quantities. Which means that you need a lot of people or machinery to do the gathering (locating, mining, refining, transportation to production facilities) and that will always cost a lot of money. Even more in FreeSpace context because Earth is out of touch (so to speak) and thus they have lost a significant source of deuterium (Earth's oceans, though undoubtedly other planets have heavy water too), affordable ores (assuming Earth still could support significant amount of mining activity when contact was lost) with relatively friendly conditions for retrieving them - even the worst Chinese coal mines from hell are infinitely easier to manage than mining an asteroid. Other planets may have higher or lower amounts of metals, depending on the star's generation, ie. how many main sequence stars' lifes and supernovas the matter has gone through...

I would point out the distances and necessary energies involved in space travel adding to the cost, if it weren't for the fact that in FreeSpace context people never seem to be very worried about power sources, they have a few odd gas miners in the nebula in one (?) mission, so it doesn't seem to be an issue to them, especially with nodes taking care of any long range intra-system jumps as well as all intersystem jumps.

So... why would making nukes be essentially cheaper in future? They're still going to need same stuffs to make them, unless they change the laws of nature (though in FreeSpace context this is a pretty lulzy argument I must admit) they'll need fissible material, and fusion material (lithium deuteride works, if you can't find tritium...), and all the stuff needed to make an implosion shell (essentially a pretty complex shaped charge composition) for the primary phase of a hydrogen bomb (a fission bomb), and in a correct way that it generates a sufficient x-ray implosion of the secondary (hydrogen) stage of the bomb. If you have wrong kind of stuff between the fission primer and the fusion main stage of the bomb, it can absorb too much of the x-rays and fail to trigger a fusion reaction.

These materials will be all that much more difficult to gather in significant amounts after Earth's resources aren't available. Even after establishing comparative infrastructures at other planets, it's still at best just as costly as now on Earth, or possibly a bit less due to advanced mining processes, but the basic idea is that rare materials will always stay rare, it's just a statistical facts of physics talking.

[foolfromhell]

And if a fusion bomb today is only $7million, im sure it would be cheaper in 300 years. Especially if it is only required to travel a few kilometers.

Why do you assume that things like that get cheaper?

Yeah, technology advances as physics does; processes with common materials get cheaper and more effective, and so on. But get this - a car uses essentially same materials as a steam engine that preceded it - mainly, steel (also aluminium and other alloys, plastic, and otherstuffs, but mainly steel). Iron is a relatively abundant resource, and a lot of the availability of technology we take for granted is thanks to this fact... However, only because iron-related things have become a lot more accessible and cheaper in time it's not plausible to assume that all other branches of technology would advance similarly.

There are some materials that will always require a lot of manpower and time and effort to gather in significant quantities. Which means that you need a lot of people or machinery to do the gathering (locating, mining, refining, transportation to production facilities) and that will always cost a lot of money. Even more in FreeSpace context because Earth is out of touch (so to speak) and thus they have lost a significant source of deuterium (Earth's oceans, though undoubtedly other planets have heavy water too), affordable ores (assuming Earth still could support significant amount of mining activity when contact was lost) with relatively friendly conditions for retrieving them - even the worst Chinese coal mines from hell are infinitely easier to manage than mining an asteroid. Other planets may have higher or lower amounts of metals, depending on the star's generation, ie. how many main sequence stars' lifes and supernovas the matter has gone through...

I would point out the distances and necessary energies involved in space travel adding to the cost, if it weren't for the fact that in FreeSpace context people never seem to be very worried about power sources, they have a few odd gas miners in the nebula in one (?) mission, so it doesn't seem to be an issue to them, especially with nodes taking care of any long range intra-system jumps as well as all intersystem jumps.

So... why would making nukes be essentially cheaper in future? They're still going to need same stuffs to make them, unless they change the laws of nature (though in FreeSpace context this is a pretty lulzy argument I must admit) they'll need fissible material, and fusion material (lithium deuteride works, if you can't find tritium...), and all the stuff needed to make an implosion shell (essentially a pretty complex shaped charge composition) for the primary phase of a hydrogen bomb (a fission bomb), and in a correct way that it generates a sufficient x-ray implosion of the secondary (hydrogen) stage of the bomb. If you have wrong kind of stuff between the fission primer and the fusion main stage of the bomb, it can absorb too much of the x-rays and fail to trigger a fusion reaction.

These materials will be all that much more difficult to gather in significant amounts after Earth's resources aren't available. Even after establishing comparative infrastructures at other planets, it's still at best just as costly as now on Earth, or possibly a bit less due to advanced mining processes, but the basic idea is that rare materials will always stay rare, it's just a statistical facts of physics talking.

It would indeed be cheaper.

You only need to lob is 1-2 miles instead of a few thousand.

You dont need propulsion really. You can accelerate it to speeds faster than any blob turrets or fighters can move (The speeds the fighters in FS2 movie are a joke).

You can target them and make them extremely accurate.

Think about it.

Even if the nuke costed the equivalent of $70 million. That would be $10 billion to take out a Collosus. That's quite cheap considering the Collosus would cost ATLEAST a hundred times more to make. And atleast 15 years more. A good tradeoff. The sheer size of these ships is astounding. By your logic, stuff doesnt get cheaper, right? Well, if an Aircraft Carrier, the biggest human ships we have today, are a whopping $4.5 billion, and if the Collosus is over 6 miles long, wouldnt it cost atleast a trillion or more dollars? It can house tens of thousands of people.

I think the tradeoff of a few billion for a Collosus would be worth it. If at $70million per Harbinger, (10x the cost of the Minuteman I postulated), and about 20 would take out an Orion, wouldnt be $1.4 Billion Dollars. Again, the Nimitz is only 0.3KM Long. The Orion is 2.1KM long, that is 7x as long, and would require air supplies, food, jump drives, propulsion, etc.

The tradeoff of weapons worth $1.4Billion for something that costs a dozen times as much is certainly worth it.

Even if you dont have Earth, it is worth it. And, in FS1, they could have used these bombs instead of blob turrets, which are vastly underpowered.

[Herra Tohtori]

Cheaper, more expensive... Dollars are a really bad way to measure price. Money in general is...

Work hours or work years are slightly better. Or other resources. How many years would it take for a single worker to build a nuke, translates roughly to how many workers are needed to build a nuke in a year... or how many in a month. Or week.

How many people are there in GTVA, without Terra and Vasuda Prime? And after the Great War, GTI Rebellion, NTF insurgency and second Shivan Incursion? I'm guessing on scale of hundreds of millions. Possibly somewhere between a billion and two, but I'd say that's stretching it a bit. How many people you need to get the materials (mining, refining, transportation), do maintenance on mining and manufacturing facilities and assemble the warheads (using machinery of course, but still)? The worth of the weapons is at least the living expenses [salaries] of all these people.

Granted, the GTVA seems to be mass producing kiloton grade nuclear warheads (tempests lol) and bigger ones, so they probably do get off somewhat cheaper than on current day... but still, the effort and people involved would still cost a lot. The rarity of the raw materials is still an issue, whereas with space ships you have a lot of practically pure iron asteroids hanging around probably in most solar systems. Getting the reactors and all the systems working, same logic applies - basically the availability of materials is what defines the "price" of a mass produced ship, weapon or other gimmick.

So I'm not saying that things in general won't get cheaper. Remember I used the analogy of abundant resource, iron (steel) being the reason why cars have been able to become so much more available than they used to be?

Of course, you could argue that since GTVA seems to have abundant* amount of nukes and other munitions at their disposal, they must be cheap and they must have abundant resources on making them... but I'm just saying, if we assume that the bombs like Harbinger use similar technology as current day hydrogen warheads, their manufacturing process would be roughly as resource-intensive as in current day. Of course if they use the same magic that moves the ships around, I have no argument against that...


And talking about bombs and taking out Colossus or destroyers... the beams are still more cost-effective to use than bombs, as long as you have to use capital ships anyway. Colossus-style ships are just stupid but that's not the point in this discussion... spending 15 years on one warship is simply staggering idiocy in my eyes but as it's mainly a plot device anyway (we don't really see much of Colossus pwning the NTF) I don't really care either.

It goes like this - the enemy [shivans] have cap ships that are difficult to destroy. They can be destroyed with either bombs or beams (grossly simplified but essentially how the matter is). To destroy them with bombs, you need bombers and fighters to protect bombers. To use bombers effectively, you need carriers (destroyers) to haul their ass around. So you end up with cap ships of their own, and we've already established that cap ships using bombs is not as effective, sensible and cool as using beams (space and weight constrictions of hauling ship-to-ship munitions around instead of more bombers that could be used to deliver the munitions more effectively, and beam cannons offer more total firepower since their only ammo limitation seems to be energy from the reactors and heat dissipation speed...) - so the cap ships use beams rather than physical munitions.

As long as the tactics works and the fighters and bombers help keep the cap ship alive, it doesn't take long before using beams becomes more cost effective than using just bombs to destroy things. Of course, the way Command wastes ships that rarely happens, but that's besides the point...

[foolfromhell]

What would take longer to build? A Hecate Destroyer or 150 Nukes? Because the Sathanas ccan take out a Hecate within 30 seconds, with no damage to itself.

The 150 Nukes may cost a lot, but it saves lives, saves ships, is effective, and although costly, prevents extinction. If the first Sathanas was taken out before it jumped to Cappella, The GTVA could have closed all jump points to Epsilon Pegasi and saved Cappella...

[Herra Tohtori]

Eh. Hecate would take longer to build, but hopefully it would also survive a lot longer than 150 bombs. Building 150 bombs per each enemy supercapship is a bit... extensive.

Besides. They need bombers to use the bombs effectively anyway... and to use 150 nukes against a single ship takes a lot of bombers.

Bombers need destroyers or carriers to support them and their escort fighters.

The inevitable existence of destroyers/carries makes them vulnerable to enemy cap ships. Thus they need something to defend themselves with... unless they wnat to trust solely on their fighter and bomber wings, which would be more stupid than Colossus. In this role, FS2 beams are better than bombs and other munitions - they are faster to return fire, do not have ammo limitations, can't be intercepted, and are also more powerful then bombs.

Fast projectile type munitions (either kinetic energy weapons or shaped charge missiles) would only be marginally better in firing speed and reduced sensitivity to interception, but they would still take a lot of space on board capital ships (space that would be better used  and they would eventually run out of them. And that would be terrible.

[castor]

The problem with launching a swarm of Helios bombs from a destroyer is the distance in between.  A bomber can close the gap and deploy the warheads while a destroyer simply cannot and thus large numbers of the launched warheads will be intercepted.

[Akalabeth Angel]

What would take longer to build? A Hecate Destroyer or 150 Nukes? Because the Sathanas ccan take out a Hecate within 30 seconds, with no damage to itself.

    It helps that the Hecate doesn't return fire.
    In order to talk about the Sathanas fleet though you're talking about 12000 Nukes on, who knows how many bombers, launched from X number of ships. As someone has said the Harbringer is special issue only, it's only apparently in one mission in the campaign. Therefore it's probably pretty rare. And thing's don't get cheaper. The Harbringer is cutting edge tech, just as is almost all military tech. DVD players get cheaper, but the latest military hardware? Don't think so.

The 150 Nukes may cost a lot, but it saves lives, saves ships, is effective, and although costly, prevents extinction. If the first Sathanas was taken out before it jumped to Cappella, The GTVA could have closed all jump points to Epsilon Pegasi and saved Cappella...

       Eh? Don't think so. Would've been exactly the same outcome as before, except with maybe one or two dead Sathanas. Earlier victory against the Sathanas would have only boosted the confidence/arrogance of the GTVA allowing them to more fully get their butt kicked.


        But basically, if the GTVA starts relying on only bombers and fighters, what's to stop the Shivans doing the same? Then instead of Freespace you get wing commander or something, where it's all about the fighters and the ships are just targets and you win by finding the other guy's carrier first. (no offense to any WC fans, never played it, so that may be inaccurate)

          And then instead of a Sathanas the Shivans send a mega-carrier which launches thousands of bombers carrying tens of thousands of bombs and they go to Capella and every other world and glass it with nuclear fire. The GTVA still looses, they just look a little less pretty while they're doing it.

[General Battuta]

Foolfromhell, can you please take a breather, read all the points that have been brought up against you, and respond to them, rather than going off on new tangents?

Thanks.

If you need a recap: 1) bombs don't go through Lucifer shields, 2) bombs can be intercepted, and when they do that, they blow up other bombs, 3) destroyers are too slow to get close enough to effectively fire the bombs, 4) bombs run out of ammunition, 5) beams look great.

I know you've suggested that bombs could be fired from a railgun or coilgun. That's certainly a viable alternative to beams. There's nothing to suggest it'd be any more or less powerful, however.

Please stop bringing up cost. Nobody has any idea what kind of industrial base or technology is available, and we certainly don't know how the GTVA economy functions.

[Herra Tohtori]

Please stop bringing up cost. Nobody has any idea what kind of industrial base or technology is available, and we certainly don't know how the GTVA economy functions.

I brought up cost only as a direct result of inevitable scarcity in the materials used in the nuclear warheads. It's a statistical fact that fissiles and other necessary materials are pretty rare all over the universe (like beryllium, which is not even formed on normal fusion chain on stars... it's used on the nukes' implosion mechanism because as an effective neutron reflector material it reduces the critical mass required for the fission phase to start), and scarce resources generally translate to expensiveness.

But, like said, if the bombs work by magic, then they do. Harbingers were nukes IIRC, but Cyclops and Helios missiles were "unconventional" warheads, which probably means they were something different, and obviously we can't know if the GTVA do have abundancy of the materials and other resources needed to produce them. If so, the price argument is completely irrelevant indeed (not that it mattered much compared to other arguments to begin with, it just got out of proportions a little bit...).

[Flipside]

Also, an awful lot can happen on a Battlefield in the time it takes a missile to get from A to B. That 'ride-time' is removed with beams, you get insta-hit, which can make all the difference at the right time.

[foolfromhell]

Foolfromhell, can you please take a breather, read all the points that have been brought up against you, and respond to them, rather than going off on new tangents?

Thanks.

If you need a recap: 1) bombs don't go through Lucifer shields, 2) bombs can be intercepted, and when they do that, they blow up other bombs, 3) destroyers are too slow to get close enough to effectively fire the bombs, 4) bombs run out of ammunition, 5) beams look great.

I know you've suggested that bombs could be fired from a railgun or coilgun. That's certainly a viable alternative to beams. There's nothing to suggest it'd be any more or less powerful, however.

Please stop bringing up cost. Nobody has any idea what kind of industrial base or technology is available, and we certainly don't know how the GTVA economy functions.

1. The Lucifer is also immune to Beams, as far as we know. Also, if the Shivans wanted, they would have used Lucifers and not Sathanii during the Second Incursion. If they did use another Lucifer, the GTVA wouldnt have been able to do anything...

2. When these bombs are going 5-6x the speed of fighters, im pretty sure they cant be hit easily. Fighters have enough trouble hitting me while going on a straight line at 80m/s... These bombs will have been accelerated to atleast 500m/s. Today's missiles go supersonic in an atmosphere. I am sure missiles 300 years in the future could go much faster since there isnt even an atmosphere...

3. At these speeds, even 20km of difference isnt much. If you go at 500m/s, you would reach a target some 6km away in 12 seconds. Barely any time at all.

4. At the sizes of these battleships, they could hold hundreds of bombs. If they do run out, they refuel. Right now, we have seen every Capital ship that gets into a fight come out damaged and requiring much repair. No difference in time really. With 300-400 bombs, you wont exactly run out quickly.

5. Yes, beams do look cool, but efficiency>aesthetics.

6. Yes, I mean railguns/coilguns. Bombers are ineffective. Ursas are damned slow. I suggest Maxims mounted on fast turrets for bomb-defense and railguns or coilguns to accelerate these bombs to uber-high speeds.

Thank you about the cost. I was answering what other people have said.

[Herra Tohtori]

1. The Lucifer is also immune to Beams, as far as we know. Also, if the Shivans wanted, they would have used Lucifers and not Sathanii during the Second Incursion. If they did use another Lucifer, the GTVA wouldnt have been able to do anything...

Except if beams could hurt it after all. Too little information to use that as an argument either way I'm afraid.

2. When these bombs are going 5-6x the speed of fighters, im pretty sure they cant be hit easily. Fighters have enough trouble hitting me while going on a straight line at 80m/s... These bombs will have been accelerated to atleast 500m/s. Today's missiles go supersonic in an atmosphere. I am sure missiles 300 years in the future could go much faster since there isnt even an atmosphere...

Yeah, well... Aegis guided present-day missile cruiser would be pretty much safe from such a threat, and I suspect the only reason the FS2 capital ships don't have systems of similar efficiency is because of gameplay reasons. Them Aegis cruisers can destroy ICBM's for frak's sake...

3. At these speeds, even 20km of difference isnt much. If you go at 500m/s, you would reach a target some 6km away in 12 seconds. Barely any time at all.

Well... for the sake of comparision it's about 600,000 times the time it takes for a beam to hit the target (assuming beams propagate at or near light speed, which may or may not be the case, but it sure at least looks like it).

Also, 12 seconds in combat is actually incredibly long time...

4. At the sizes of these battleships, they could hold hundreds of bombs. If they do run out, they refuel. Right now, we have seen every Capital ship that gets into a fight come out damaged and requiring much repair. No difference in time really. With 300-400 bombs, you wont exactly run out quickly.

And what exactly would prevent them from taking same amount of damage - or more - if they were using ship-to-ship missiles/projectiles instead of beams?

About the effective firing times... I really can't be bothered to look at the tables to find out what the average damage output of some ships' beam cannons are, so it's kinda hard to calculate how much bombs would need to be launched per minute to match that damage capacity. Someone with more interest could easily calculate it, and I kinda suspect it's surprisingly many, even with Terran ships with relatively slow refire rates compared to shivan beams... so 300-400 beams would probably run out surprisingly fast I reckon.

5. Yes, beams do look cool, but efficiency>aesthetics.

...except in video games. And I'm still not convinced about cap ship bombs/missiles being more effective than beams.

6. Yes, I mean railguns/coilguns. Bombers are ineffective. Ursas are damned slow. I suggest Maxims mounted on fast turrets for bomb-defense and railguns or coilguns to accelerate these bombs to uber-high speeds.

For all we know, there might be a reason why the bombs are so slow.

The personal shields used in Dune come to mind as first and foremost example (some technology that stops large high-speed projectiles but lets slower ones penetrate)... Another could be that the sophisticated electric warfare technology prevents effective tracking, guidance and triggering of large scale warheads at higher speeds than we've observed. There could be millions of reasons why the bombs are so slow (gameplay reasons are the most likely, but rationalizations are nice to invent...). Bombers being slow is more related to FS2 game mechanics than anything else - in reality, there's no reason why bombers would have any speed limits, they'd just have limited acceleration compared to fighters. But of course in FS2 game mechanics this isn't the case.

You're kinda contradicting yourself here. You say bombers are ineffective because they are slow in FreeSpace, but you don't think bombs are ineffective because they could be fast (but of course they are slow in FreeSpace). You can't have both halves of the caek.

[Titan]

1. The Lucifer is also immune to Beams, as far as we know. Also, if the Shivans wanted, they would have used Lucifers and not Sathanii during the Second Incursion. If they did use another Lucifer, the GTVA wouldn't have been able to do anything...

2. When these bombs are going 5-6x the speed of fighters, I'm pretty sure they cant be hit easily. Fighters have enough trouble hitting me while going on a straight line at 80m/s... These bombs will have been accelerated to at least 500m/s. Today's missiles go supersonic in an atmosphere. I am sure missiles 300 years in the future could go much faster since there isnt even an atmosphere...

3. At these speeds, even 20km of difference isnt much. If you go at 500m/s, you would reach a target some 6km away in 12 seconds. Barely any time at all.

4. At the sizes of these battleships, they could hold hundreds of bombs. If they do run out, they refuel. Right now, we have seen every Capital ship that gets into a fight come out damaged and requiring much repair. No difference in time really. With 300-400 bombs, you wont exactly run out quickly.

5. Yes, beams do look cool, but efficiency>aesthetics.

6. Yes, I mean railguns/coilguns. Bombers are ineffective. Ursas are damned slow. I suggest Maxims mounted on fast turrets for bomb-defense and railguns or coilguns to accelerate these bombs to uber-high speeds.

Thank you about the cost. I was answering what other people have said.

1) Lucifer can't really be used as an example, due to aforementioned reasons, and that it only appears once... twice counting... OTHER CAMPAIGNS

2 and 3) You're not talking about freespace with that. bombs go just barely faster that the Ursa/boanerges that holds them.

4) not only are the aforementioned problems true, but what if the enemy happens to hit a turret's ammo storage? It would destroy that part of the ship, along with the fact that it would probably destroy any other nearby turret's ammo, which would spread to destroy the whole ship

5) As herra said

6) I don't know really how to respond to that, but i think we'll never be able to do something like that in-game, due to engine limitations. The railguns used in INFA go about the same speed as blobs.

7) how old are you?