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[Tack]

diminutive, but not fine, nor tiny, if you want dnd terms and my memory of the progression is correct.

T,D,F I think.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Fine is smallest (<6 inches), Diminutive is next (6-12 inches), then Tiny (1-2 feet), Small (2-4 feet), Medium (4-8 feet), Large (8-16 feet), Huge (16-32 feet), Gargantuan (32-64 feet), and Colossal (>64 feet). This is going by the height of a humanoid creature or the tailless length of a quadruped, the latter of which works much better with mammals and such than reptiles.

Of course, this suggestion is often ignored, as the Tiny rats will show.

[Parisbre56]

I think that a laser/heat shield-automanipulator costs 7 tokens and has 20 charges. Ask Bishop. Or search the on ship thread a bit for when he bought them.
You're probably better off using nukes or explosives or melter rounds or... anything really.

Oh, idea. Make an automanipulator that heats everything in a line in front of it to a ridiculous degree. Essentially a short-range man-portable avatar-strength pulse-laser. Good for a short range anti tank weapon. Or depending on how much power it can put out and what shapes it can project energy in, it can also act as a shield or door opener. Or you could use a telekinetic automanip to disintegrate stuff in front of you with some sort of anti-gravity field. Really, automanipulators have many applications as conventional weapons.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think that a laser/heat shield-automanipulator costs 7 tokens and has 20 charges. Ask Bishop. Or search the on ship thread a bit for when he bought them.

Something like that could work if this turns out to...not.

You're probably better off using nukes or explosives or melter rounds or... anything really.

Been done. We're supposed to think of new stuff, aren't we?

Oh, idea. Make an automanipulator that heats everything in a line in front of it to a ridiculous degree. Essentially a short-range man-portable avatar-strength pulse-laser. Good for a short range anti tank weapon. Or depending on how much power it can put out and what shapes it can project energy in, it can also act as a shield or door opener. Or you could use a telekinetic automanip to disintegrate stuff in front of you with some sort of anti-gravity field. Really, automanipulators have many applications as conventional weapons.

Another few ideas.

[syvarris]

No, there's no budget.  But I'd think you would want to create a plausibly useful weapon.  You could always just strap eighty laser rifles together and make a big turret array to complete Simus' assignment, but nobody would believe for a second that anyone actually intended it to be used.

And against spaceships... again, why can't you just use a manip-accelerated gauss round?  Launching a conversion manip at them has less effect, can be intercepted more effectively (laser gauss round? Plasma is flying at you, with same or slightly less kinetic energy.  Laser manip round?  All the destructive potential went bye-bye.), and is way more expensive because you can just reload the accelerator batteries.

Lastly, no, it isn't pointless.  This exercise isn't to find a good anti-battlesuit weapon (although that is a possible benefit), this exercise is to test our abilities as engineers and tinkers, especially under constraints.  I mean, if we really wanted a good anti-battlesuit measure then there would be constraints on price of the object, not type.  Telling people to design a specialized weapon, with the constraint that it has to be the type of weapon your target was designed to defend against?  That's looking for creativity, not a gun.

[Radio Controlled]

Neither are impossible, but that chemical charge might be hard to get balanced perfectly. And I doubt you can make that missile really reusable. Even if it is in theory I doubt many will survive to be reused.

For shaped chemical charge: how large would the smallest round be that can still reliably penetrate battlesuit frontal armor?

For automanip launcher: what is the smallest size the 'inner core' could be (this includes the automanip, guidance computers and other reusable but vulnerable bits)? And would it be possible to protect the inner core from damage when using a combination of padding, shock absorbers (hydraulic, springs and/or pneumatic) and a crumple zone?

((Also, hot damn it seems everybody and his grandmother is experimenting with automanips all of the sudden. Do I get a prize for starting a trend?  ))

OY!
How do automanips work? I need some help before I can start with Grate's design.

Do yer own frikkin' research! Though now that the search function is borked, I guess one could be forgiven for not wanting to use that unpractical solution using google search.

And thereby my tinker project is already completed.
Man I'm good at this.

Indeed, a good tinkerer will always start out with researching if there are existing things already that do what you need. A good tinkerer is quite lazy, like a good programmer really.

We REALLY need to do some science on Grate.
I mean think about it, if we could give his quantum immortality to OUR TITAN....

We need to determine what Grate retains from his current form when he dies. e.g. If his brain is removed to be put into a synthflesh body, does he even keep the quantum immortality?(problem: if not, the whole enterprise becomes kinda moot, since the only way of testing it is killing Grate and seeing what happens)
And if he dies while being full synthflesh, does he return full synthflesh? If yes, interesting options there.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Do yer own frikkin' research! Though now that the search function is borked, I guess one could be forgiven for not wanting to use that unpractical solution using google search.

What would I even search for? "Automanip" would turn up every post someone mentioned one in, and every post quoting one of those, and most quoting one of those. It's not just being able to search; knowing what to search for is also important.
If there isn't an "Automanip Guide" or something else with a distinctive, memorable title, search can be remarkably tough to glean data like that from; you need to find needles in haystacks, doncha know.

We need to determine what Grate retains from his current form when he dies. e.g. If his brain is removed to be put into a synthflesh body, does he even keep the quantum immortality?(problem: if not, the whole enterprise becomes kinda moot, since the only way of testing it is killing Grate and seeing what happens)
And if he dies while being full synthflesh, does he return full synthflesh? If yes, interesting options there.

And three questions come up with this.
1. How would we research questions like this?
2. Would this go better in the Tinker thread or the OOC thread?
3. ...Or should we have a "Tinfoil/SuperTech/Mad Science Theorizing Thread"?

[Sean Mirrsen]

((Grate respawns to first-death status. No free synthflesh for you. However, this does pose a problem. If Grate were to stay on Hephaestus, he would eventually need a robotic body to not die of old age - which would be an option with uncertain repercussions, permadeath one of the likely ones. Can the transplant process even be carried out without killing the patient, in the conventional sense?))

[GreatWyrmGold]

Well...since he's in ARM, I figure that he's going to keep dying enough that reaching physical old age won't be a problem. And what is a death of old age? Merely a death by some disease made easier by the health problems associated with age. The idea of keeling over from old age, specifically that being different from otherwise or of it being an inherent issue of age, is a bit flawed.

[smurfingtonthethird]

Wait, does that mean Grate is the ultimate scout? Just fling him into an enemy position and wait for him to "respawn" with the information?

[PyroDesu]

((Sean, you can use whatever, just so long as you're not spawning complete weapons at cutting laser level and up. And I'm not working on the engineering challenge.))

I'm basing this thing on a design that uses it for propulsion (kind of like an Orion, but the detonation occurs at the throat of a magnetic nozzel and the fusion products and lithium are the reaction mass) - with a recycle rate of 14 seconds per pulse. And there's actually not that much fusion fuel to ionize - the lithium (actually, now I've read a study or two more... aluminium is better, swap that in instead) combined with the theta pinch (what I was reading for info was wrong, it's not a z-pinch, but a theta pinch that compresses the metal liner around the fuel) is what does most of the work - and scaling up the power of the device is done, it seems, by making the liner more massive (makes sense, I suppose - the fusion fuel ends up being crushed even more with the additional mass).

Though if it's really that much of an issue, we could swap fuels to a mix with a lower Lawson Criterion (deuterium-tritium, perhaps), since if less energy is required to set off the bomb but the energy from compression remains the same, then it should require less energy given to the fuel by radio excitation.

I think the core of the issue here is that you need quite a lot of energy to start the reaction regardless. Part through magnetic compression, part through radio excitation, but still a lot of energy. That you get a whole lot more back is obvious, but you need that starting spark, and that means a very high-density power cell, like the ones in the Black Death.

The entire device ends up being the aluminum fusion fuel canister surrounded by magnetic coils, plus radio antenna, plus power cell, arranged in a cylinder to be put into a missile, with the fusion canister up front. Only thing I can't say is how much energy needs to be delivered, so as to see how large the cell will need to be.

PW was saying that the radio excitation would be so inefficient that the power required would be unfeasible. The core of what I said is that there's not even that much fuel to convert to plasma, so the inefficiency of the radio antenna made little difference. The FRC magnetic field won't require much power either, for the same reason - it doesn't have that much plasma to contain (and the plasma will be at atmospheric pressure, anyways - not a high-pressure design, which would require very powerful field generators). The highest-power part would be the theta-pinch field, and that only needs to be powerful enough to crush the liner around the plasma - though in higher-yield bombs, with thicker liners, it will need to be somewhat more powerful.

[smurfingtonthethird]

How feasible is it to have a device that blasts the nyan cat song at 125dB? Would enemy infantry be disabled by pain?

[Doomblade187]

How feasible is it to have a device that blasts the nyan cat song at 125dB? Would enemy infantry be disabled by pain?

Sods don't feel pain.

Otherwise, it would be a plausible idea, just so long as we bumped it up a few decibels.

[PyroDesu]

Using pain as a disabling weapon would be better done in the same manner as PEP weapons.

PEP weapons fire a laser pulse that is very intense but only a fraction of a second in duration. The pulse vaporizes a tiny portion of the hapless victim's clothing or skin, creating a plasma burst intense enough to knock the victim to the ground. This was intended to be used for crowd control. I don't know about you but it seems to me that a pulse strong enough to knock one down is also strong enough to make one's eyeballs explode if it hit your face. But I digress.

However, during test performed on animals, the researchers noticed something unexpected. The pulses were creating pain and temporary paralysis in the test animals. As it turns out, certain pulses would create a plasma burst emitting an electromagnetic signal of proper frequency to artificially stimulate the nerve endings in the animal's skin.

[smurfingtonthethird]

I still like the idea of weaponised viral videos. Plus if it doesn't kill them, they'll go insane from it being looped eternally.