Stronger shields weaker hulls!

I think your reasoning needs to be more in depth and clear.

And, if your changing game mechanics, you need to focus on game mechanics more than "it looks pretty that way..." -- there are other ways to make things pretty than that, even if its just "make shields flash whenever a ship is hit".

They make shields weaker because its fast at recharging and is just a nifty wall between you and a piercing laser/huge missle/ pulsing plasma shot. You don't rely on shields. You rely on thick armor plating. It sounds cooler anyways to shout "shields are down- but were still in the fight" than to say "shields our down! Were gonna get F**ked sideways!!!"

Hehe, "Shields are down, all hands kiss your *** goodbye!".

Plus as any Battlestar Galactica fan will tell you, who needs shields anyway.

Oh, any old timer Battlestar Galactica fan will tell you that the original series capital ships had shields.

The Vasari and Advent do not share the same shield/armor strengths/weaknesses as the TEC. Each race is unique in this regard.

Cool!

nice but i like stargate and bsg and i think if ur going to put that much armour on somethin then it would be huge and super slow cos ud need a hell o alot of armour to stop a nuke. And alien wepons like a rail gun would be sooooooo powwerful that it would simply bypas the armour

What do you mean, alien weapons like a rail gun? We've got functional rail guns... (shoot through 30 phonebooks with a unit small enough to carry, if you ignore the power supply ./drool) just need to find the right materials to make them out of so that they don't melt down every single time their fired...

As far as "simply bypass the armour"... What the heck are you smoking? Do you mean it would penetrate the armor easily?

Armor is pretty damn effective stuff. A tungsten/DU dart has a crazy hard time penetrating modern 'anti-penetrator' armor. Basically, this type of armor has a thin front layer of Tungsten/DU backed by a lot of less hard metal behind it. The high velocity penetrator shatters on the hard surface (ideally) and is absorbed by the backing armor.

These days, you see a lot of the above 'anti-penetration' armor combined with composite materials that defeat shaped charge plasma jets.

Throw in multiple layers of armor/hull (space ships don't have to worry about sinking) and you have a ship that is hard to put holes into with high speed projectiles/meteorites/HE.

We won't even go into slopped armor here...although it looks like Sins doesn't really get into that with their ship designs.

Also, nukes in space don't have devestating shock waves like they do in an atmosphere. All you have to deal with is the hard radiation and EMP. Only if the nuke explodes on contact/extremely close will you have to worry about heat.

Oh, yeah your right.

I'm no scientist, and I wouldn't have any idea so don't yell at me, but wouldn't EMP be useless in space? the photoelectrons that go off from the bomb are usually altered in effectivness and distance by gamma rays in the atmosphere here on Earth but, since we are in space EMP distance would either be dramaticly reduced or increased in a big way due to the tons gamma radiation hovering in space.

And Ron, don't you also mean kinetic energy, not just heat for nukes exploding near a ship?

they would have extreme heat tho and energy rail guns i meen that are at such a high temprature that the will mealt the armour and go right through im not sayin that the shields are down 1 more hit and where dead i just think that shield should be increased and hull lowered by a bit im not on about armour the armour value can stay the same. armour reducs the effectivness of thier weapons it dosent increase the structual strength well not in this game.

I believe that you can only use nukes to create an EMP on planets with a magnetic field (has to do how the field and gamma radiation interacts). So in space beyond our magnetic field, you can't do EMP attacks with nukes (I suspect that it still is possible, but that the gamma/magnetic spike would would be very short ranged and more easily shielded against).

Anybody feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this.

Yeah I was thinking like that. EMP wouldn't be possible.... but then again it is space. You could find an ultra magnetic asteroid getting doused in gamma radiation floating around and launch an EMP strike when it gets near an enemy planet... POP GOES THE WEASEL!!!!

Well in a real physics universe, armor would be good for nothing against attacks by mass driver type weapons, but could be useful against non-penetrating nuclear weapons, light based weapons.

A projectile accelerated (in reference to it's target) fast enough (let's say a 1000 km/s) would have so much energy that it would probably vaporize every kind of armor in it's way.

E,kin=½*m*v²
Let's say, 10kg of mass, with a speed of 1000km/s
½*10*1'000'000²=5*10^12 joule, which equals about 1Kt of TNT (1Mt = 4.18*10^15 J) which is about one fifteenth of the yield of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

A projectile of 10kg mass would have (if it's spherical) a diameter of about (let's say it's made of Osmium or Rhenium (very high boiling point and density of about 22g/cm³) 10cm. (We could also use DU which isn't bad at a density of ca. 19g/cm³.)

So, we have the energy of a small tactical nuke (1 Kt) inside a small ball (10cm diameter) with a velocity of 1000km/s impacting on an armor (some sort of Wolfram/ceramic maybe?) Wolfram has a Lv of 43.5*10^5 J/kg.
m=Q/Lv (with m being mass which will boil, Q the amount of energy) we get:
M=5*10^12J/(43.5*10^5J/kg)=1.15*10^6kg ~ 1'150t.
So one shot of this weapon would be able to vaporize about 1'000 tons of armor on a ship.

I dunno about that, but it doesn't really sound like a ship could withstand such sort of damage for very long.

And I don't think that reflective armor would work very well against it, since it's of such a small size and with such a high velocity, that I don't think it could be deflected.

Against lasers and non-penetrating nuclear weapons, armor could work quite well imho. It would probably be made of something with a high thermal conductivity (some sort of crystal perhaps?), which could be rotating as well, to dissipate the heat/energy as good as possible.

At least that's how I think armor would work. Sorry for the crude calculations above, but I'm too lazy to get better formulas out.

What are you talking about? Closest I can think of anything I said about heat (in this thread anyway...) was that our current (modern, real life, we really do have them) rail guns melt down as soon as their fired...



Eh, probably true

Actually, thats the same reason lasers and the like would cut through armor pretty fast -- at the energy levels we're talking about, offensive weapons wouldn't melt or tear through armor, they'd explode it. To quote (paraphrase? )a favorite author of mine, "the transfer of energy is too sudden, to voracious, for [the armor to melt]".

As such, I see armor as being more of a really tough material designed to ablate and reduce attacks, (and used inside the ship to contain the radiating shrapnel and what not) rather than actually bounce them away.

These highly technical threads are making my brain hurt.

Well, so long as you learn something from them its a good hurt.

And if you gave us the patch, we'd spend more time playing less time hurting your poor, poor head...

i agree lol

let me again point out that ol' catch, equal and opposite. ships sending bolts out at 1000 km/s (how did you accelerate that again...?) esp. at 10 kg's would not only vaporize armor on the enemy ship, but it would turn the firing ship into a debris field to.

actually we dont have a problem with the projectile melting, the hot metal does some nice things to tanks innerd's

lets keep in mind that several thousand years into the future our material sciences will be far more advanced.

exactly soo our wepons tech will be alot more advanced

No, we don't.

But we do have a problem with the rails themselves melting



I'm going with a rail-gun or gauss gun approach



Depends on how sudden the acceleration is... and just how well re-enforced the firing mount is

small problem...

(psst, the same thing)
either way thats extreme acceleration.

1)no, no it really doesnt. even with a ship 2-3 km long (and assuming the gun barrel lines the whole thing) the force would be too great. also even if you did find some way to delay it your ship would still take stress damage.
2)the more reinforced the firing mount, the more damage the ship will take

If we have a space faring interstellar civilization that wages war across solar systems, accelerating something to this speed should be trivial.

You have a point if we're talking about a civilization that isn't able to leave it's own star system and it's a in-system war.

From this page i got the following formula:

(7) v(muz)=I(2DLu/m)^.5
v(muz)=Muzzle velocity (Meters/Second)
D=Length of rails (Meters)
m=Mass of projectile (Kilograms)
I=Current through projectile (Amperes)
L=Width between rails (Meters)
u=1.26x10^-6 (The magnetic permeability of free space, Henries/Meter)

Let's say the gun would be 2.5km long (D=2'500m) the projectile 10kg (m=10kg) the rails 10cm apart (L=0.1m) we get the necessary current by I=v(muz)/(2DLu/m)^.5
I=125'988'158A ~125 million Amps.

That sounds a lot, although currents in the million ampere realms are quite possible.


Also a quote from the above mentioned website:


So a velocity of 1'000km/s doesn't sound that unrealistic after all. And no, if the thing with the melting of the rails because of the back current can be solved, it wouldn't even destroy the firing ship.

your still talking 2.5 km long rails, these guys want to reach 1000 km/s on rails that (realistically) do not extend greater than 15 meters. and again, you're discarding the force that is going to be projected onto the ship, the damage to the ship hit by the projectile would be only exceeded by the damage to the firing ship.

this is one of those great things people continue to miss, the reason that problem doesnt exist on earth is because we always have something to brace ourselves against and to dissipate energy into (shoulder for guns, ocean for ships, ground for turrets etc.) spaceships have no such failsafe so they take the brunt of every blow they fire, thats why they would be far better off with a series of series-firing guns than one big gun, or a battalion firing in parrallel.

we're assuming energy isn't an issue for the sake of arguement, so the whole amps thing, not a problem.

we all take technological process for granted... you DO realize we're bound by the laws of physics right?

I'm sorry that 1000 sounds so trivial compared to 4...