Author Topic: Death Rays now a reality 2  (Read 30348 times)

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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
ECM is actually kind of dubious in space.

I disagree. Weapon systems which need to close to short range to attack/hit need to have a way of not being blasted to hell by point defense lasers or projectile weapons. Some means of giving a false reading to hostile sensors must therefore be achieved... that, and high speed/agility. If your missiles keep getting shot down because of radar/[insert sensor type here] guided weapons, you'll need to invest in a similar weapon that can pump that sensor array full of noise so it can get close enough do damage.

It has little to do with that and a lot with the arguments that ECM doesn't actually work in space.

Thermal, visual, there are a lot of ways to perform detection. All arguably counterable, but there's a debate ongoing.

 

Offline Thaeris

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Hmmm...

Looks like I might need to do more research, eh? Righto, then.
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Offline Flaser

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Just I just read this paragraph and couldn't help but laugh out loud.

"But the energy-sucking imploder lance's range was insanely short, in terms of space speeds and
distances, barely a dozen kilometers. Now, ships had to cooperate to grapple, to slow and close up to
maneuver. Given also the small scale of wormhole volumes, fighting looked like it might suddenly become
tight and intimate once again, except that too-tight formations invited "sun wall" attacks of massed
nuclears. Round and round. It was hinted that ramming and boarding could actually become practical
popular tactics once again. Till the next surprise arrived from the devil's workshops, anyway. Miles
longed briefly for the good old days of his grandfather's generation, when people could kill each other
from a clean fifty thousand kilometers. Just bright sparks.
" - Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vor Game.
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Hmmm...

Looks like I might need to do more research, eh? Righto, then.

Well, you might be right - ECM could be fantastic and practical as a way to help missiles get to their targets.

I'm just not...sure. How do you jam lidar, radar, thermal, visual pattern recognition, star occlusion, simple vectoring of any thrusting target...I've heard it argued again and again that it's basically impossible. I really could be wrong, though.

 

Offline Kosh

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Quote
ECM could be fantastic and practical as a way to help missiles get to their targets.


Um, isn't ECM supposed to prevent missiles from getting to you?
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Offline TrashMan

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Precisely. And did you read the post? A good laser will blow through a meter of it (a meter!) in a second at knife fight range.

1 meter. And you have to keep the laser pointing at the same spot for a full second. A enemy ship can move by a considerable ammount within a second.
And 5000 klicks is nothing. If you have lasers, getting that close is suicidal - you just make enemy mass driver more accurate.


Quote
Why? That's farcically ineffective. It can reach a tiny fraction of the range a missile can and it'll almost certainly never hit. Why not just fire a missile from the railgun?

Unlike lasers, KEWs are slow. Unlike missiles, they can't adjust course or coast-until-burn to engage a maneuvering target.

KEWs make a lot of sense using the ideal contact ellipse concept NGTM-1R outlined, though.

Innefective? Quite the contrary.

Missiles are more expensive and their powerfull engines burning make them stand out and very easily detectable. They are also bigger by their very nature, so you can carry less of them.
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Offline Ghostavo

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
I always wonder why you don't make the same arguments against other weapons.

If an enemy ship can move fast enough so that lasers have difficulty handling aiming, what does that say about other weapons whose ammunitions travel at sub-light speeds?  :P
« Last Edit: September 26, 2009, 08:12:17 am by Ghostavo »
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Quote
ECM could be fantastic and practical as a way to help missiles get to their targets.


Um, isn't ECM supposed to prevent missiles from getting to you?

It works both ways. Your missiles or their drone buses can have ECM.

Precisely. And did you read the post? A good laser will blow through a meter of it (a meter!) in a second at knife fight range.

1 meter. And you have to keep the laser pointing at the same spot for a full second. A enemy ship can move by a considerable ammount within a second.
And 5000 klicks is nothing. If you have lasers, getting that close is suicidal - you just make enemy mass driver more accurate.

One meter is a ****-ton of armor. One second is barely anything in space warfare, where you'll know the enemy's precise vector minutes or hours in advance. And keeping the laser on the target is a trivial challenge compared to intercepting it with a KEW. Remember, the laser moves at lightspeed. The KEW moves at ****-all.

Furthermore, it's been said again and again that lasers are knife-fight weapons, so yes, 5000 klicks is indeed nothing. If you continue to show evidence that you do not read other people's posts then you'll get monkeyed again.

Quote
Quote
Why? That's farcically ineffective. It can reach a tiny fraction of the range a missile can and it'll almost certainly never hit. Why not just fire a missile from the railgun?

Unlike lasers, KEWs are slow. Unlike missiles, they can't adjust course or coast-until-burn to engage a maneuvering target.

KEWs make a lot of sense using the ideal contact ellipse concept NGTM-1R outlined, though.

Innefective? Quite the contrary.

Missiles are more expensive and their powerfull engines burning make them stand out and very easily detectable. They are also bigger by their very nature, so you can carry less of them.

This argument was originally put forth in the 40s by Willy Ley. It was annihilated. You're already proposing firing a missile (guided projectile or 'smart bullet') from your railgun. And you have to. Because at interplanetary speeds, the target will have moved, on average, three miles between the time the weapon was fired and the time the projectile reached the end of the barrel.

A KEW is effective at tiny, tiny ranges. A missile can fly across solar systems. It can cruise like a bullet and then adjust its course to intercept. You're going to need a lot of bullets, not to mention a huge railgun, to get near the effectiveness of a single missile.

Your problem isn't that you think KEWs are effective - they are. Your problem is that you're using them wrong. There is absolutely no reason for fancy, high-tech smart bullets. All you need to do is throw a beer can into the target's path to ruin his day. The muzzle velocity of the weapon will be trivial compared to the intercept velocity with an enemy ship.

KEWs are great. But they will never be as good at knife-fighting as lasers (too slow, they miss too much) and they will certainly never be as important as a ship's primary weapon: the drone, the kill vehicle, the missile. They have a place as area-denial, ideal contact ellipse weapons, dust that you spew into the target's path. They could also work well for point defense (though a laser/particle beam can knock out target electronics without having to waste time on actually blasting through.)

I always wonder why you don't make the same arguments against other weapons.

If an enemy ship can move fast enough so that lasers have difficulty handling aiming, what does that say about other weapons whose ammunitions travel at sub-light speeds?  :P

Yeah, exactly. Keeping a laser aimed at an enemy vessel for one second is trivial compared to keeping your weapon barrel pointed at a target ship's predicted position as it alters vector for long enough to fire, and then actually getting your slow-as-balls projectile to the target. Even adding thrusters to make a 'smart bullet' is fundamentally silly because in order to have thrusters and fuel that can match the acceleration of the target you'll be firing a mini-missile instead of a cheap beer can projectile.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2009, 10:43:56 am by General Battuta »

  

Offline TrashMan

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
I always wonder why you don't make the same arguments against other weapons.

If an enemy ship can move fast enough so that lasers have difficulty handling aiming, what does that say about other weapons whose ammunitions travel at sub-light speeds?  :P


Because other weapons don't have to keep hitting the same spot? That is a big problem, regardles of what Batutta is telling you. Depending on speed, the ship can move hunderds of meters in the space of a second.
A missile or mass driver has to hit it..anywhere..once. If the laser doesn't hit the same spot, the damage it ends up doing is superficial.

Lasers are the most accurate and fast weapon by far, but they do have their problems.
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Offline Ghostavo

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
I always wonder why you don't make the same arguments against other weapons.

If an enemy ship can move fast enough so that lasers have difficulty handling aiming, what does that say about other weapons whose ammunitions travel at sub-light speeds?  :P


Because other weapons don't have to keep hitting the same spot? That is a big problem, regardles of what Batutta is telling you. Depending on speed, the ship can move hunderds of meters in the space of a second.
A missile or mass driver has to hit it..anywhere..once. If the laser doesn't hit the same spot, the damage it ends up doing is superficial.

Lasers are the most accurate and fast weapon by far, but they do have their problems.


But again, hitting something with a laser continuously is far, far easier than hitting something with a projectile. It's on such a different scale of difficulty that it's almost funny.

Also, the laser has to hit overall the same spot to drill into the armor, no one said it has to be the exact same spot every time. Using an analogy, take a block of snow or foam and then try hitting it with a water gun. While to drill deep you have to hit the same spot a couple of times, even if your aim is not perfect, you will in time reach the bottom. And this is using comparatively piss-poor aim, instead of having a computer do a instant by instant correction. This assuming we are even talking about a continuous wave laser, which frankly seems odd when taking into account some of the advantages of pulsed lasers.

With the problems you are posing a laser, a projectile would never even come close to hit it. Missiles are another matter entirely.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2009, 12:28:14 pm by Ghostavo »
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
I always wonder why you don't make the same arguments against other weapons.

If an enemy ship can move fast enough so that lasers have difficulty handling aiming, what does that say about other weapons whose ammunitions travel at sub-light speeds?  :P


Because other weapons don't have to keep hitting the same spot? That is a big problem, regardles of what Batutta is telling you. Depending on speed, the ship can move hunderds of meters in the space of a second.
A missile or mass driver has to hit it..anywhere..once. If the laser doesn't hit the same spot, the damage it ends up doing is superficial.

Lasers are the most accurate and fast weapon by far, but they do have their problems.


They certainly do have problems. But as Ghostavo already said, tracking a distant target (5000 kilometers) means you barely have to move the laser at all. It's no more difficult than aiming a gun - far less so, in fact.

In any situation where the laser is going to have trouble hitting, the KEW will have an even harder time, unless it is an ideal contact ellipse weapon like a shrapnel warhead.

Pulsed lasers make the situation even easier.

 

Offline Thaeris

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
I've yet to do more research into ECM. Perhaps Herra could enlighten us?

If the sort of ECM as we're familiar with turns out to be implausible for most purposes... perhaps this might work:

A given physical weapon system must close to close range to inflict damage, whether by direct impact or by exploding (at a comparatively short distance) in such a way that a cone of shrapnel is directed towards the target. The problem is the physical weapon system, given that it can be detected by normal mechanisms, must overcome point defense weapons.

Lasers are inherently hard to avoid, and once fired, will probably never miss. Projectile weapons are slower, but will move at tremendous sub-light speeds and bear a massive amount of kinetic energy. However, these systems, like all systems, will have some limiting factor somewhere. A laser turret must move on a mount, which is directed by the fire control system. There will be a delay in the interfacing of these devices, however minimal. Feedback from fire control and the sensor systems will also be a part of this delay.

Thus speed is a tremendous factor for any weapon system or ship (if applicable) approaching an enemy target. Because speed... in referencing acceleration... is of such importance so as to gain any possible lead over the enemy fire control, the mass and armor of an attacking physical system will likely be compromised so as to maximize maneuverability and mobility. This however, is not enough.

As ECM of any form has not been validated so far, a means of spoofing sensors must be arrived at. Thus we arrive at an old approach: chaff. The weapon system will have affixed to it multiple chaff cartridges. When appropriate, the cartridges will fire. At some distance from the weapon, they will burst... simultaneously igniting a slow, hot-burning self-oxidized flare. Onboard the system, once terminal guidance has been determined, a generator will radiate a field in the relative area of the chaff, augmenting the sensor distorsion already imposed upon the target's fire control systems. The enemy's sensors must now deal with a cloud of ever-expanding, radiant emissions and heat. This approach may not fool all sensors, but it gives the weapons, especially if in groups, a better chance of successfully engaging the adversary.


Sounds almost credible.
"trolls are clearly social rejects and therefore should be isolated from society, or perhaps impaled."

-Nuke



"Look on the bright side, how many release dates have been given for Doomsday, and it still isn't out yet.

It's the Duke Nukem Forever of prophecies..."


"Jesus saves.

Everyone else takes normal damage.
"

-Flipside

"pirating software is a lesser evil than stealing but its still evil. but since i pride myself for being evil, almost anything is fair game."


"i never understood why women get the creeps so ****ing easily. i mean most serial killers act perfectly normal, until they kill you."


-Nuke

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Could work. I personally think that ECM in space is cool, as are countermeasures and flares and stuff, and if it's cool, roll with it.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
In any situation where the laser is going to have trouble hitting, the KEW will have an even harder time, unless it is an ideal contact ellipse weapon like a shrapnel warhead.

Not even that. You just have to basically fill the titular ellipse, which represents from your opponent's manuvering options from your perspective, with enough shots that he has to run into one or more of them.

Honestly this applies to any form of weapon when you start dealing with light lag. 1 lightsecond is not the max range at which combat is possible for this very reason.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Yeah, I mentioned that earlier. You just need to put enough crap in the ellipse of all their possible vectors that they hit something.

 

Offline Thaeris

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Space-flack with a shaped-charge via mass driver. Projectile is launched... at some distance as determined by friendly fire control, a shaped charge will break apart the frangible projectile into a predictable "cone of destruction." This point in the detonation will be within a desired tolerance range so at least some of the high-velocity mass will impact along any possible flight path the target might take.

...Secondary detonation mode for this weapon includes exploding after the target has been hit by a full, non-detonated round.  ;7

You just have to wonder about the long-term consequences of space battles... several hundred... thousand years afterwards, Blibjoe is standing in his/its back yard when he/it splattered into tiny bits when a missed sabot-round from a railgun traveling at sever million miles-peh-hour lands point-down on top of him... or it.
"trolls are clearly social rejects and therefore should be isolated from society, or perhaps impaled."

-Nuke



"Look on the bright side, how many release dates have been given for Doomsday, and it still isn't out yet.

It's the Duke Nukem Forever of prophecies..."


"Jesus saves.

Everyone else takes normal damage.
"

-Flipside

"pirating software is a lesser evil than stealing but its still evil. but since i pride myself for being evil, almost anything is fair game."


"i never understood why women get the creeps so ****ing easily. i mean most serial killers act perfectly normal, until they kill you."


-Nuke

 

Offline MR_T3D

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
Space-flack with a shaped-charge via mass driver. Projectile is launched... at some distance as determined by friendly fire control, a shaped charge will break apart the frangible projectile into a predictable "cone of destruction." This point in the detonation will be within a desired tolerance range so at least some of the high-velocity mass will impact along any possible flight path the target might take.

...Secondary detonation mode for this weapon includes exploding after the target has been hit by a full, non-detonated round.  ;7

You just have to wonder about the long-term consequences of space battles... several hundred... thousand years afterwards, Blibjoe is standing in his/its back yard when he/it splattered into tiny bits when a missed sabot-round from a railgun traveling at sever million miles-peh-hour lands point-down on top of him... or it.
which is why yuo have to hope that some sort of geneva convention dictated that spaceships must use photonics-based weaponry.
or particle-resistant 'sheilds' are developed on planetary scale.

 

Offline headdie

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
though your sabot would probably burn up in a planetary atmosphere now the question is what happens the the thin hulled colony ship that gets hit by those same sabot shells
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Offline Thaeris

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Re: Death Rays now a reality 2
According to the Warhammer 40K quotes in the rulebook:

"There is no arguing with the barrel of a gun."

According to me:

"There is no arguing with a tungsten-jacketed, depleted uranium-cored sabot round!"

 :headz:
"trolls are clearly social rejects and therefore should be isolated from society, or perhaps impaled."

-Nuke



"Look on the bright side, how many release dates have been given for Doomsday, and it still isn't out yet.

It's the Duke Nukem Forever of prophecies..."


"Jesus saves.

Everyone else takes normal damage.
"

-Flipside

"pirating software is a lesser evil than stealing but its still evil. but since i pride myself for being evil, almost anything is fair game."


"i never understood why women get the creeps so ****ing easily. i mean most serial killers act perfectly normal, until they kill you."


-Nuke