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Thor (heavy frigate)

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Hiram (Railgun drone)

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Occido MI (exploding mimic dron)

0 (0%)

Lux (Laser corvette)

0 (0%)

Stone (Solar sail transport)

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BIFROST (Laser drone)

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Pythagoras (Recovery ship)

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Julius (transforming drone)

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Total Members Voted: 0

Voting closed: December 13, 2012, 01:24:40 pm

[GreatWyrmGold]

I just ask you to not assume that pirates are morons and will not take countermeasures to any kind of weapon TR-12 will field

Only if I can assume that they're not psychic and that we could find ways to circumvent those countermeasures.

It'll be more. A railgun slug is a kinetic projectile. You want to transfer kinetic energy, so if the slug is lighter, you have to make it move even faster, requiring an even stronger magnetic field. Meanwhile, we certainly don't have 100% efficiency magnets, so the farther you scale up the field the more energy we waste. Also, interference with other drones or the drone itself is annoying.

Fine, scrap the cheaper ammo if you must.

We're in deep space. Everything flying around ends up in an orbit, or into the sun. In both cases they'll likely be a danger for a few weeks. Which is problematic, since the convoy is in the middle of the shell.Also, you can't just dodge or intercept a railgun shell. They're made of plastics, which has the one benefit that they're much harder to see.

Another reason to scrap the plastic.
Why can't you dodge them? It's not like you can't see them. Maybe you'd only have an hour or so before impact, but that's plenty of time to accelerate slightly and avoid the shell.

It's not hard to modify a point defense system to account for both drones and missiles. Fast reaction Laser point defense  (needed to destroy nearby missiles) will be fast and strong enough to intercept the drones. Provided they aren't flying more than a lightsecond out. But if they're that far their railguns are harmless anyway.

A point defense system made to efficiently intercept missiles, which nicely have a predictable target, are closer, and move towards the ship, won't work as well against drones, which have none of these helpful qualities and can also take evasive action.
A point defense system which takes these into account will be either more expensive or possibly less effective against missiles than one which doesn't, and therefore makes no sense if you're not expecting drones.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying the pirates likely don't have them unless they're somehow expecting drone attacks.

Nah. Not at all. Note that a missile is a long range weapon. The farther your PD can shoot, the better it's interception chances are. True, not all systems are as effective. Flak defenses will have significant problem with delay, but a decent laser point defense should be able to bridge the distance quite well. After all, not all missiles can be intercepted by standard missile defenses. (Kinetic missiles, breakup missiles, matroska drone missiles, close detonation missiles)

Um...missing context, sorry. Quotes are your friend.

Here I provide my vision of the Oculus Sentry:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The things that look like X-wing lasers canons are in fact the communication lasers. Red triangles and blue dishes are sensors. Black/red cuboids are electrical generators.

Size and mass on the right. a little more than 3 tons.

You really need to share what software you're using for that.

I suppose that an ideal ammunition for the Hiram-I could be determined within the month. I'm open to anything effective and not too expensive. Because, you know, giving a cheap drone expensive ammo defeats the purpose.

[adwarf]

Point defense is made for anti-fighter, anti-missile, anti-drone purposes, it doesn't matter if you can avoid cause in 99% of the cases the ships going to have enough PD turrets that it'll out shoot its target if not out maneuver.

[GreatWyrmGold]

If they can shoot a hundred Hiram-I's out of the sky, we send in a thousand.
They're dead ten times faster, so they destroy one-tenth the drones.

The numbers are made up, the concept's good.

And my point is that, unless they're expecting drones, they're unlikely to have prepared for them.

[adwarf]

If they can shoot a hundred Hiram-I's out of the sky, we send in a thousand.
They're dead ten times faster, so they destroy one-tenth the drones.

The numbers are made up, the concept's good.

And my point is that, unless they're expecting drones, they're unlikely to have prepared for them.

And your point is a failure cause it doesn't matter if they don't know about drones cause A) PD is made to kill drones, no matter what way you cut it point defense turrets have the purpose of killing things like drones. B) They control most of the system any ships we produce they'll know about before we use. Then there is most importantly C) we don't choose how many of what is built, they could choose to make 10 or 10000 of the drones we just make the designs so in the end our plans for them don't matter

[GreatWyrmGold]

If they can shoot a hundred Hiram-I's out of the sky, we send in a thousand.
They're dead ten times faster, so they destroy one-tenth the drones.

The numbers are made up, the concept's good.

And my point is that, unless they're expecting drones, they're unlikely to have prepared for them.

And your point is a failure cause it doesn't matter if they don't know about drones cause A) PD is made to kill drones, no matter what way you cut it point defense turrets have the purpose of killing things like drones. B) They control most of the system any ships we produce they'll know about before we use. Then there is most importantly C) we don't choose how many of what is built, they could choose to make 10 or 10000 of the drones we just make the designs so in the end our plans for them don't matter

A. Point defense intended for use against drones is different (in this case, more complex/expensive) than point defense made only for missiles and other projectiles. If pirates don't expect drones, they won't waste time or resources on improved targeting range, improved AI, etc.
B. They control the system, but not the planet. Unless they have spies on-planet, in which case we're screwed pretty much whatever way we go.
C. They'll probably listen and act smart. If we say, "Here's the Hiram-I, it's useless in small numbers," they'll probably be smart enough not to make only small numbers. I have some faith in humanity...

[racnor]

I think that the drones have capability, but they aren't the be-all and end-all. Point defense will almost certainly be ably to hit them, especially since they are, as someone said, a recognized ship designation, and if a ship's armor is strong enough to endure one hit then it's strong enough to endure thousands (ie' it would have to be struck in the same spot twice), but they could still defeat small ships, and maybe act as point defense on their own. Actually, that would work really well, especially with lasers.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I imagine the drones as an economy military until we can secure some nearby mineral deposits.

[Furtuka]

Ptw

[evilcherry]

We're in deep space. Everything flying around ends up in an orbit, or into the sun. In both cases they'll likely be a danger for a few weeks. Which is problematic, since the convoy is in the middle of the shell.Also, you can't just dodge or intercept a railgun shell. They're made of plastics, which has the one benefit that they're much harder to see.

Another reason to scrap the plastic.
Why can't you dodge them? It's not like you can't see them. Maybe you'd only have an hour or so before impact, but that's plenty of time to accelerate slightly and avoid the shell.

Assume the craft moves at a speed near to the escape velocity of earth (11km/s), and railgun shells at 10x this velocity. (110km/s).
If we are to detect something at a range of exactly an hour, that means we must have the capability of detecting this at a range of 40k km.


This is not unlike looking for a fragment which would become a shooting star in space. Utterly impractical.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Oh wow, my bad. Math's off.

Well then, detecting at a mere 10,000 kilometers seems more reasonable, and leaves 12 minutes. Of course, even five minutes (plus a ship watchman supplemented by a computer watching stuff) would be enough, since the projectile is small enough to not have any danger except by a direct hit. Assuming a ship no more than 100 meters, five minutes would mean that to move the ship 2 ship-lengths away from its current path in time would require 40 m/sē of acceleration, or around 4 G's of acceleration. Remember, though, that this requires under 5,000 kilometers of detection radius (smaller than it sounds, with such things as radar and space on your side) as well as having to move twice the ship's length out of the way; a mere G of acceleration would take them out of the way in time.

Not ideal, but unless there's an attack every week or two, most of the time the ammo should be well on its way away from the planet. After a day, the projectile at your estimated speed would be 9.5 MILLION kilometers away. That's about 6% of an AU by my calculations, which is a rather notable number even in space. Since the shots that hit aren't much of an issue, and the misses would all be going in one direction, not too bad.
Which brings me to another point: Most of the time, the navy would be able to estimate where the cloud of missed shots would be, giving ships well beyond detection radius to evade.

[Maxinum McDreich]

*sigh* None of us know how point defense works in this particular set-up.

Logic dictates that it seems likely that PD would be standardised to handle drones aswell. But, the pirates are using older craft. For now, anyway. Doesn't mean they can't use the PD to target drones, but it'll mean the drones MAY be more effective early game.

Drones are good early gamers. Later game, I wouldn't expect to see drones except for repairs, surveillance, sabotage, kamikaze drones... I imagine that last one deployed from a larger ship and boom boom boom... targeting the weakest points ^^.

Bear in mind that there are many particles traveling at ridiculous speeds in space as it is, though most are microscopic. Hulls will be designed to easily shake off those kind of things. Therefore, an effective railgun would need to be large and long to be truly devastating. On a drone... I feel like they'll end up like pee-shooters.
Now, drones that carry warheads isn't the daftest idea. Since the PD will already be targeting drones, it's more likely that more close range warheads will get through. The problem with that is ammunition, but I don't imagine these drones to be on standby, but rather deployed by merchant ships in case of emergency.
Something to consider.

[GreatWyrmGold]

You left out distraction/minor damage as a use for drones. Fire a big missile or two and have it enveloped in a cloud of cheap drones with something like railguns or whatever, the missile will make it there better.

A round specially designed to penetrate spaceship hulls will penetrate hulls better than a round not designed to, or a random rock. Any ammo we use will be a potential problem, but in practice not much of an issue, especially if we bother to track when battles happened and what directions ammo was fired.

[adwarf]

GAH! Stop thinking of railguns guys, we are specialized in making lasers, so go with lasers until railguns have an actual profit for using them. As it is it just makes drones and ships that much more expensive then what we need to be designing right now >.>

[GreatWyrmGold]

We are? Oh, yeah.

Well, lasers are a bit problematic with the heating, but if we can get around that, I'd be willing to design specs for a Hiram-I in spirit which uses lasers.

[tryrar]

I'm pretty sure being specialized in lasers means we can get around heating problems, so Go for it GWG