Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Radio Controlled]

I think using automanipulators for that would be quite inefficient. Automanipulators don't have unlimited charges after all.

Of course it would be inneficient. I'm not denying that, just stating the possibility.

Really, looking at the amount of (auto)manips needed, this is turning into a costly affair already.

[Sean Mirrsen]

True, it would probably be something like a knife in a gun fight.  An invisible monomolecular vibro knife that flies under it's own power, but a knife nonetheless.

See: Black Death. Not invisible, but fast and punches way above its weight class.

The way I see it, it's actually more feasible in space.  There, there's no atmosphere to interfere with stealth, or to cause drag.  A magic space fighter would be able to travel under it's own power, and it would only need to push itself once whereas an atmospheric fighter requires a constant push.  If they really need to save brain power, then they could be fired from a cap. ship.

Stealth in space is a weird concept, insofar as you can't really mask your emissions against anything - active radar is nigh meaningless in space due to distances, but your passive emissions will give you away much more reliably, the enemy just needs to look. It's possible to mask the thermal signature with entropic cooling via automanips, and the reflected light and optical occlusion can be at least partially controlled, but in general it's much harder to be stealthy in space. Same goes for maneuvering. An atmospheric fighter requires a constant push to keep going, but can maneuver and decelerate at little cost, keeping the design simple. A space fighter will need engines facing in every direction (see: stealth issues) in order to be able to slow down and turn, otherwise it will be doing a lot of spinning around, and very little staying on target. Using space magic to augment it is possible, but I get the distinct feeling that the end result is going to remain impractically expensive, as all similar designs tend to. You'd be able to build a battleship for the cost of that magic space fighter.

They wouldn't be able to attack in the same round that they're launched most likely, but I doubt they would be flying along for the whole battle.  If we had such things at the beginning of this battle, how differently would it have gone by now?  What if we had launched the stealth fighters before we even launched boarders?  If stealth tech is good enough, they might even be able recharge mind points while sitting within spitting range.

I'll wait for the blow-by-blow to see how much damage a small ship can deal in the best possible circumstances (i.e. being a giant flying cannon), but given the outcome I'd say that it wouldn't be much different from a flight of cheaper non-stealth craft equipped with similar big guns and some point defense countermeasures like anti-laser coating. A proper stealth fighter is very dangerous, but it can't stay hidden indefinitely, and it still exists as a physical object - meaning that barring it being literally transparent, it will be taken out by massed PD laser fire in its general direction, as soon as the enemy realizes it's there - likely immediately after its second shot. Compared to the cost of less advanced cannon-fighters, which will still be able to squeeze off at least one shot before getting torn up, I think it'd be more of a rare special forces kinda thing, but not a frontline unit.

Of course, then you realize you can just use even cheaper bomb-pumped xrazer warhead missiles for the same purpose...

All of this is conjecture of course.  I just think the idea is neat.  Someone else will probably have to research it in VR, because I have a lot of stuff I want to do first.  Again, I doubt anything will ever come up with it. _{If we ever design one, I vote to call it a Shade fighter; It's a small version of a ghost ship, and stealth based.  A shade is a type of ghost, and shade is used for stealth.}

Well, it's certainly not unfeasible. Anton might take a look at the concept if the stay on Hephaestus becomes too boring. That is, if he survives the current situation, of course.

[Parisbre56]

It would probably work if you could resort to using a pair of amp specialists slaved to the avatar/pilot combo. The first Amp specialist "runs" the ship while the other is on standby to replace him when he gets tired. The pilot/avatar take care of the weapon side of things and ordering the Amp specialists. If necessary, they can all focus on one task (being stealthy or attacking) with the downside that they'll all get tired and have to rely on conventional systems for a while.

Although again, it would probably be cheaper to just launch amp specialists at enemies or save them for a ghost ship.

[GreatWyrmGold]

There is no stealth in space. It's simply not possible.

Neither is quantum immortality, phasing through solid objects, setting things on fire with your brain...
It's something to look into. If nothing else, we could look into heat sinks.

[syvarris]

There is no stealth in space. It's simply not possible. I will concede that with enough automanips, you can work around the fact that fighter-sized craft make no sense whatsoever due to manoeuvring (and size) constraints, but there is no stealth in space. At the very least, it will need life support for a brain, and that alone will make it shine like a beacon compared to the 2-3K background. Radar absorbent design and materials? Fine. Plain old invisibility? Sure, though there's not much point. But you're going to stand out from any source of heat, and that includes the support systems.

Even without Automanips, this makes some sense.  Fighters are inefficient compared to capital ships, yes, but we don't have the resources to build a ghost ship (which would be a capital ship variant of this).  I'm not saying build a less efficient version of what we have, I'm saying build the closest thing we have to the most powerful thing in the universe.  That said, yes, this would be a terrible idea if not for stealth.

Heat's easy to fix.  Coat the whole thing, stem to stern, with light armor.  Automate a micro manip to keep that at the proper temp.  Done.  The difficulty would come from wanting invisibility too -which would be needed, remember, our GM isn't the laws of physics, it's Piecewise- and that might need an external coating which requires an amount of temperature in certain parts.

I think using automanipulators for that would be quite inefficient. Automanipulators don't have unlimited charges after all.

...Uh, yes they do.  They just need electricity.

God damn it.  Now we'll be trapped in a "Yes-No-Yes-No-YES-NO" until I go search for a quote, won't we?

Of course it would be inneficient. I'm not denying that, just stating the possibility.

Really, looking at the amount of (auto)manips needed, this is turning into a costly affair already.

A single cap ship coilgun requires an automanip the size of a bus.  There's several coilguns per ship.

This fighter can chop a capital ship in half, and at worst is the size of four buses.

\:I


@Sean
Hmm.  Some decent points.  We don't really know how expensive this would be in terms of RU though, and that's the measure we were using for the black death and whatnot.

I will point out that a missile is easily defended against by PD lasers.  And if this thing works well, it would be a one-time cost, rather than the constant cost of continually manufacturing expendable glass cannons.


General question:
Why would manuevering be a problem?  This thing shouldn't dogfight.  It should get within ten miles of the enemy craft, then spawn a heatblade inside of it.  From the enemy's perspective, there wouldn't be any sign of an enemy ship, just a massive heatblade that was suddenly bisecting stuff.

As far as going places, you have an avatar with space magic.  In space, you only need one push to start yourself off, then the rest of the trip's free.  You don't need to stop near to your enemy- on the contrary, flying by is probably best for you.

As far as stealth, that would have to be done by automanips.  It shouldn't be terribly expensive either, because heat change is cheap.  And you have to freeze less volume than you have in automanips, because you only need to freeze the surface.  Since this is a space magic ship, it can be a sphere, which is the cheapest shape for this purpose.  As far as invisibility, well, we had a guy with an invisibility cloak that he got as a complete newbie.  Which means an invisibility cloak is also cheap.


...Wait, GWG is the only person who even remotely agrees with me.  You guys are right, this must be infeasible.  ._.

[Parisbre56]

@Syvarris: You must be mistaking me for someone else. And I just remember that the shield automanipulators had limited charges. Writing from phone so I can't search.

You could solve the stealth problem by coating it with black sand. Will make it invisible to most passive and active sensors.

[PyroDesu]

The issue I see with using an automanip to mask its thermal signature is that it would be a feedback loop - the automanip cools the surface, but requires power to do so, powering the automanip makes more heat, which means the automanip must get rid of more heat, which means it needs more power, which means more heat, so on and so forth.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The issue I see with using an automanip to mask its thermal signature is that it would be a feedback loop - the automanip cools the surface, but requires power to do so, powering the automanip makes more heat, which means the automanip must get rid of more heat, which means it needs more power, which means more heat, so on and so forth.

The manipulators break conservation of energy, or at least they tap into somewhere else to draw energy from or sink it to. The energy didn't go anywhere when Stacy freezebombed that city, it was lost to entropy. You're thinking of good old conductive cooling, which indeed has that problem, but the manipulators don't.

[Parisbre56]

Automanipulators use manipulator batteries I think, so feedback wouldn't be a problem. If I remember correctly, at least. Running out of battery charges would be a problem though.

[PyroDesu]

The issue I see with using an automanip to mask its thermal signature is that it would be a feedback loop - the automanip cools the surface, but requires power to do so, powering the automanip makes more heat, which means the automanip must get rid of more heat, which means it needs more power, which means more heat, so on and so forth.

The manipulators break conservation of energy, or at least they tap into somewhere else to draw energy from or sink it to. The energy didn't go anywhere when Stacy freezebombed that city, it was lost to entropy. You're thinking of good old conductive cooling, which indeed has that problem, but the manipulators don't.

Except that doesn't matter. We know that the bigger the temperature differential between what is and what you're trying to make it, it requires more power (or complexity, in the case of normal manipulators?).

Automanipulators use manipulator batteries I think, so feedback wouldn't be a problem. If I remember correctly, at least. Running out of battery charges would be a problem though.

Fairly sure they use external power supplies if they're not personal-effect.

[GreatWyrmGold]

...Wait, GWG is the only person who even remotely agrees with me.  You guys are right, this must be infeasible.  ._.

Hey!

The issue I see with using an automanip to mask its thermal signature is that it would be a feedback loop - the automanip cools the surface, but requires power to do so, powering the automanip makes more heat, which means the automanip must get rid of more heat, which means it needs more power, which means more heat, so on and so forth.

Let's assume that automanips obey the laws of thermodynamics like that, rather than increasing the overall universal entropy in some other way or just ignoring the Second Law entirely. It'd still be useful for short-term stealth.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The issue I see with using an automanip to mask its thermal signature is that it would be a feedback loop - the automanip cools the surface, but requires power to do so, powering the automanip makes more heat, which means the automanip must get rid of more heat, which means it needs more power, which means more heat, so on and so forth.

The manipulators break conservation of energy, or at least they tap into somewhere else to draw energy from or sink it to. The energy didn't go anywhere when Stacy freezebombed that city, it was lost to entropy. You're thinking of good old conductive cooling, which indeed has that problem, but the manipulators don't.

Except that doesn't matter. We know that the bigger the temperature differential between what is and what you're trying to make it, it requires more power (or complexity, in the case of normal manipulators?).

Except when you can take away energy and exponentially reduce the returned energy, you will not need much to compensate for the feedback loop. In the worst case, a high-temperature buffer can be used to store energy excess from running the primary cooling system, which can in turn be periodically cooled by another manipulator, making use of the low energy requirement to run the whole thing pretty much indefinitely.

I mean think about it. Normal radiators work by letting heat radiate away. They don't take away ALL the heat, the coolant retains some of it, so effectively you still only sink a percentage of the heat, and still you need power to operate the coolant pumps.

Now do the same thing and replace radiators and coolant pumps with an automanip and its power source.

[PyroDesu]

The thing is, radiators get more efficient at dispersing heat as the working fluid temperature increases, and neither they nor the pumps have an increased power requirement as it does so. Not so for cooling by automanipulator - power requirement for the automanip increases as heat load increases.

[Harry Baldman]

The thing is, radiators get more efficient at dispersing heat as the working fluid temperature increases, and neither they nor the pumps have an increased power requirement as it does so. Not so for cooling by automanipulator - power requirement for the automanip increases as heat load increases.

See, I'm fairly certain that the actual power a manipulator requires is just for the interface, and I get the feeling (judging from what a manipulator battery pill did) that the power requirements for that are equivalent to those of a pocket calculator. The manipulator battery, rather, does something different entirely, and it's only called a battery because it looks like one. I'm reasonably sure piecewise stated something to that effect at one point. Remember that manipulator batteries are good for twenty uses, irrespective of what each of those uses is, it seems. So, the only "power" requirement that scales to the use seems to be mental fortitude.

Not that this whole manipulator stealth idea isn't far too stupidly expensive to be worth it, of course.

[PyroDesu]

The thing is, radiators get more efficient at dispersing heat as the working fluid temperature increases, and neither they nor the pumps have an increased power requirement as it does so. Not so for cooling by automanipulator - power requirement for the automanip increases as heat load increases.

See, I'm fairly certain that the actual power a manipulator requires is just for the interface, and I get the feeling (judging from what a manipulator battery pill did) that the power requirements for that are equivalent to those of a pocket calculator. The manipulator battery, rather, does something different entirely, and it's only called a battery because it looks like one. I'm reasonably sure piecewise stated something to that effect at one point. Remember that manipulator batteries are good for twenty uses, irrespective of what each of those uses is, it seems. So, the only "power" requirement that scales to the use seems to be mental fortitude.

Not that this whole manipulator stealth idea isn't far too stupidly expensive to be worth it, of course.

We're not talking about automanipulators the size of pocket calculators, here - we're talking about an automanipulator large enough to have the capacity to cool a decently large sphere to 2-3K, and in doing so shield that heat of life support, the automanips you would need to use for movement (the tyranny of the rocket equation is still in effect here, if you don't use them - you start to go a bit beyond 'fighter' scale if you plan to have any decent velocity, return capability, and manoeuvring capability), and the power source for all of the automanips.