Print

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

[GreatWyrmGold]

I didn't "let" her die, she was ripped to shreds by multiple cryssalids.

And she wouldn't have had a chance at Volunteerhood. I never even caught an Outsider, and even if I had I couldn't have finished the Base Assault mission because of graphics issues. (Apparently, I don't have enough video memory.)

[piecewise]

1.Gauss cannons (the man portable guns that are basically upgraded, larger gauss rifles) have 16th kiloton shells.

And how big are those shells? Could they be sized down to normal-bullet-sized ones, albeit with smaller yields? Would any such bullets be able to be fired at people without the shooter being in danger?

2. They don't hybridize. You can have a synth-flesh limb attached to a normal body, but they're not hybrid, it's just attached like a normal robot limb or prosthetic.

That's boring.
What's the fleshy part of synthflesh, anyways? Plastic? Rubber? Undefined intermediate polymer?

Hey, how big is an automanip? Such information is important for my planned Battlesuit-killer!
You don't need to be piecewise to answer, you know...

Depends on what they're being used for and how powerful they are. The ones in cannons like the ones on the sword are the size of small trucks.

...Might not be practical for my plans.

So, several inches?
Mortar shell or something it is, I guess.

Spoiler: The Grate Shell (click to show/hide)

1. Program an auto-matter-manipulator to turn everything from, let's say, 20 centimeters to a meter away from it into hydrogen when it receives a signal.
2. Attach a tactile sensor (ie, big button) to it. Do not touch the button. Ever.
3. Load them both into a shell, with a width a bit more than the width of the rest of the stuff and a length significantly larger, making sure to mark which end is the end that dropping it on will make your day very very bad. Also make sure to add some padding in the ends.
4. Mark "Do Not Use At Close Range" on the side.
You now have a Grate Shell! It's a bit big, but worth it!

When fired from a mortar or whatever, the automanip will hit the padding in back. When it hits the target (a battlesuit, in this case), it will slide forward and the tactile sensor will activate, telling the automanip to turn stuff into hydrogen. Including large amounts of battlesuit. The generation of a large amoung of hydrogen might result in an explosion should a spark emanate from the remnants of the battlesuit, but since it's far away I don't care.
Ideal world, you could recover the Shell later, but I wouldn't count on it.

It has bugs to work out, no doubt, but this is a good start.

Grate attempts to make the aforedescribed weapon for his Simus project, without destroying his virtual self.

This is basically the same as the Microwave glue bomb someone made elsewhere in this reply. Except it's gonna be more expensive. and bigger.

How big would an automanip for something like that be? And how flexible of a shape?

Spoiler: Another Grate Weapon (click to show/hide)

Okay, scratch the shell for a sec. Instead, have an automanip that hydrogenizes everything in a, let's say, 20-cm-wide cylinder with one end half a meter from the automanip and the other end 20 meters away. Not the best range, but I can work on the details once I figure out things like aiming and size and design.
(If this doesn't work, I'm probably going to try for a completely different tactic.)

1. For shells that size you're better off with conventional explosives.

2.Synthflesh is 100% organic. And angry

3. Not very big. Size of a zippo lighter maybe?

PROJECT OVERWATCH:
Yeah, TPU is on the wiki.  I put it there. 

Problem is that there's no weight for anything, so I don't know if strapping two gauss cannon generators on the thing would be light enough, or if it is how much weight I have left over.  Although... really, a cutting laser should draw massively more power than 200 HP, so it's probably not very important...

How much would an 8 TPU generator (four gauss rifle/two gauss cannon equivalent) cost by itself, without the extra costs presumably caused by needing gauss generators to be miniaturized?  Twenty pounds, unless it can be smaller for the same price.

Next question, how effective is the cutting laser at range?  Test against a battlesuit at 100m, 500m, 1000m, 2000, and 3000m.

-----------
PROJECT ABS-8

As to the sticky rocket, twenty degrees is a lot.  At least, if it affects the right area- the brain.  If your brain is just a few degrees off temp, it's doing pretty bad.  Serious seizures start happening when your brain is just five degrees over.  Twenty degrees should start doing damage pretty much immediately, making coordinated dexterity hard at the least.  And then, even if the manip cuts out after five seconds, their brain is still hot, and it's not going to cool before the pilot goes into a coma.  Especially considering the air jumped twenty degrees too.  Oh, and full robobodies should be just as susceptible- they have brains to cook too.

As far as range... How big is a battlesuit?  Is the head of the pilot more than three meters up?  If so, how much would it cost to increase the automanip's heating radius so it's one meter taller than a battlesuit?  I'll assume it costs one token for the test.

So: Take the design I have.  Create a large urban battlefield, then spawn two opposing forces a distance away.  Each is composed of fifty sods with MKI suits and gauss or laser rifles alongside five battlesuits piloted by a UWM trooper in MKI.  One side gets five trained UWM operatives equipped with my launcher, and four tokens worth of stealth technology for sneaking up on a battlesuit.  The other side gets the same operatives, but only equipped with Piezoelectric shard launchers- no stealth stuff.

Both sides have remote commanders who have good knowledge of their force's positions, and good communications with the troops.

Run the battle an arbitrary amount of times.  Who wins more often?  Try to figure out why- what's the biggest failing in my weapon?


((I'm mildly surprised that this might be a feasible weapon.  Only costs eight or nine tokens, and extra shots cost two if you can recover the manip.  Also, it can function as a trap, leaves the battlesuit at least mostly recoverable, and should be pretty light.  It's not even as short ranged as I thought it would be.

It's actually really similar to a futuristic AT4 with some added functionality, come to think of it.))

Oh god thats a lot of text.

An 8 tpu generator made using gauss gens would be like 5 token. And I believe the gens for those are like...I dunno, size of a deck of playing cards or so? So stack 8 of them and theres your size. Couple of pounds.

Cutting laser isn't really effective against battlesuits. Remember, their armor is made resistant to it using the reflective fibers that are spread through it.




Yeah, but that assumes you're hitting the exact right place for that to happen. It's gonna be a case of get a 5 and it's an insta kill, get a 4 and it doesn't do jack.

Battle suit is, say, 3 meters tall. Pilot's head is probably at about 7 feet off the ground, maybe a little higher.  Not sure what you mean though. You want to heat like, an oblong, pill shaped area from where the thing hits up like 3 meters, so you can just aim low and not have to worry about being direct?

That simulation...probably still the piezo guys because of the area off effect of it. But not by much. Gotta remember too, that 150 miles an hour isn't outside the range of being smacked or shot down by keen eyed pilots while the shards are much faster.

Same game different rules...
enter session with simus and others move slightly away from the group spawn two battle suits facing each other one normally assembled and one shown mechanically exploded

Spoiler: design (click to show/hide)

Have a small backpack mounted generator and capacitor bank (similar to the Gauss rifle's) then connect it to a set of laser rifle optics ruggedised to deal with higher power output and more powerful pump along with multiple gain media in series each pumped by the laser previous. Second the whole system is fitted in a chassis made of reinforced plastics and is shoulder mounted and has a scope contained in it that functions the same way as cam-eyes. Finally allow the pump & gain setup to be removed easily.

test system

I have no idea what you're trying to make there. Pump with a laser? Help.

Gain medium = the object that produces a laser (coherent light) when energised with another energy source including other lasers
Pump  = energy source for Gain medium

As above

So...just a big laser? I'm not seeing what makes this different from a normal laser, but bigger. Are you just trying to take a cutting laser and turn it into more of a pulsed thing?

[Corsair]

((A more efficient, cheaper, more powerful laser that can be broken down into the primary parts of 3 laser rifles  (one with a sniper scope) also It would be 3 laser rifles trained on one spot (if the power gain is linear)))

[GreatWyrmGold]

Which automanip is lighter-sized? The beam-hydrogenizing one? What makes the automanips need to be bigger (ie, is it just complexity or does increasing AoE/magnitude make it bigger too?), and how much? Can you think of a better word for this than "hydrogenizing"?

Put the automanip in a pistol grip. Make sure not to put it in backwards or anything stupid like that. Add a laser sight (you don't want to be missing with this) and a trigger. Change the cylindrical beam from 20 cm wide to 2 cm wide, and make it start right in front of the "barrel" (the other end is still 20 meters away). Fire this at a battlesuit. Observe results.

Can automanips be targeted by remote beacon thing? E.g, toss a beacon at someone, press a button, the automanip blows up the beacon?
What kind of armor is this, anyways? Materials? Structure?

And why is synthflesh so special if it's just organic? Or is that information above my security clearance? Would it be possible to infuse normal flesh with synthiness?

[PyroDesu]

Succinctly, yes. And it should work, in theory. I don't have very many concrete numbers, especially since I adapted the idea from a propulsion system. But I'm fairly sure the theory is good.

Anton, those are not up to me, it's Miyamoto you want for deciding on your fire extinguisher of a flying plasma cannon, as well as on your armed shuttles. And i'll see your side project when the others finish their task and I've decided whether they can stay. I already have some idea, but this is the finisher. And I'm sure you can ask Jim and Milno to come and see something if you want them to, just text them.

Oh, and that improved pure fusion bomb I talked with you about? I have it here. Fairly simple when it comes down to it, yes? This one is optimized to a 1 kiloton yield, but it can be scaled up and down - well, down to a point - by changing the thickness of the aluminium liner, see?

[syvarris]

Hrm.  Can the overwatch project for now.  Still useful as anti-infantry, but not as nice as it was.


So:
Why would it have to hit the exact right spot?  I said to make the manip heat everything withing a three meter radius, and upgraded that to a four meter radius.  That should create a sphere of heat centered on the manip.  If it hits the battlesuit's foot, every part of the entire machine should be hit, because the manip isn't leaving holes.  In fact, if the pilot's head is seven feet up, it should be able to hit the ground four feet away and still catch his brain.

Maybe you're confused because I said radius?  If it has a four meter radius, it creates an eight meter wide sphere centered on the manip.

Not that you should aim at the ground, it's just that rolling a three should be sufficient, because that's a "near-miss".


Modify the design slightly.  Change the activation signal so that an MK suit can transmit it, like the mininukes in the armory.  Also, modify the projectile so that it has a little handle or something, for easy manipulation.

Re-run the sim with the corrected design, and tell the users of this thing that it can be used as a trap- hide the projectile at the entrance to an alley, then activate it when a battlesuit walks over.  Also, place seven users of my device rather than five, but remove the stealth equipment.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Succinctly, yes. And it should work, in theory. I don't have very many concrete numbers, especially since I adapted the idea from a propulsion system. But I'm fairly sure the theory is good.

((To put it in simple and wildly inaccurate layman's terms, this is mostly just a different way of achieving the fusion conditions - temperature and pressure. It really boils down to compressing the fusion fuel and adding energy to it. The radio antenna adds the energy, in lieu of massive compression heating. The aluminum shell in a magnetic field does essentially this, except the shell is very thin and the field is more uniform, resulting in uniformly and rapidly compressed shell, with the fuel compressed inside, and the radio antenna pumps in enough energy to achieve fusion.

Like I said earlier, there are only two questions. How large the rig for this needs to be (heavy-duty electromagnets tend to be thick and heavy), and how large the extreme-density power cell feeding the power needs to be.))

Anton, those are not up to me, it's Miyamoto you want for deciding on your fire extinguisher of a flying plasma cannon, as well as on your armed shuttles. And i'll see your side project when the others finish their task and I've decided whether they can stay. I already have some idea, but this is the finisher. And I'm sure you can ask Jim and Milno to come and see something if you want them to, just text them.

Oh, and that improved pure fusion bomb I talked with you about? I have it here. Fairly simple when it comes down to it, yes? This one is optimized to a 1 kiloton yield, but it can be scaled up and down - well, down to a point - by changing the thickness of the aluminium liner, see?

"Oh, is that the device? I see. Curious. A rather... different setup. Cheaper, but different. Seems like it needs a whole lot of power to initiate. Might want to take a page from the Black Death and use one of the extreme-density power cells, if it'll scale down well enough, otherwise I really don't see it fitting in a missile warhead. Not on a shuttle-carried missile, at least. Power cells be heavy.

Well, I'll leave you to work it out then. I'll go ask what Miyamoto has to say on the ships."

Anton leaves Simus' area and finds a clear patch of Cyberspace to contact Miyamoto.
(continued in the on-ship thread because no longer Tinker)

[PyroDesu]

...Now I think about it, actually, I did come across a number, or rather, a pair of numbers, about the energy requirements of the propulsion systems based on this: For the 'low gear', based off of current achievable fusion yields, it was 27kW. 'High gear', not current but easily obtainable future yields, required 350kW.

And playing around with one of my more-used calculators, one that lets you set custom laser parameters and see performance, I think I can say that the batteries used in our laser rifles have at least 350kW worth of juice in them. These things have been known to cut or melt through decently thick metal, let's call it steel for ease, yeah? At 10kW with a 1cm beam diameter at the target you're making holes about... 7.13mm deep. That's a single second of firing (10kJ per second). The full battery would have 600kJ, normally discharging at 10kW. And that value is probably pretty underrepresented, since I mean, how much liquid metal do you think you'd get out of 10 seconds of firing that, if it's set to heat rather than drill, at the same power? Probably not enough to make a metal cast for your leg, like Milno did in Mission 1.

Feel free to play around with it, but I think I've made my point.

[Sean Mirrsen]

((Is that why the biggest lasers currently conceived of are bomb-pumped?

Also, yeah, that sounds pretty low as far as power requirements go. But the numbers to go with those yields would be neat. A propulsion system is inherently designed to be only powerful enough to push the ship, not destroy it - and any fusion blasts that don't damage a ship detonating them in its stern point blank are of questionable use as actual weapons. Well, besides what the Kzinti Lesson shows - good constant energy output from numerous small pulses is a good continuous weapon, but a subpar bomb.))

[PyroDesu]

((Partially correct, the other reason is that they're usually in spectra (X- and Gamma rays) that don't work otherwise.

Now, keeping in mind that a lot of that power is probably going to the magnetic nozzle to contain and direct those detonations as thrust.

Best numbers that might satisfy you that I can come up with are thrust for what I can only assume is each pulse, contained and directed: Low-gear gets 103 Newtons, high-gear gets 13,800 Newtons. Both have an exhaust velocity of 23,940m/s to 56,110m/s.

Also keep in mind that I'm basically working blind here. For obvious reasons, there weren't any studies as to whether this would make a good weapon, though as the Kzinti Lesson (Speaking of, has anyone else here actually read the Man-Kzin Wars novels?) taught us, any decent spacecraft propulsion is a pretty decent weapon in it's own right.))

[Sean Mirrsen]

((103 Newtons of thrust for 27kW sounds pretty darn good for a space thruster. But that's ten kilograms-force. Even assuming it's per pulse with some hundred pulses per second, you're looking at a ton-force total - i.e. about enough to shove a small car a little into the air - far from a nuclear bomb level of power. High-gear with 13.8kN is actually powerful, you could do a lot with 14 tons-force, multiplied by possible pulses per second and whatever the efficiency of the thruster's nozzle is, but... a kiloton is, per the wiki, 4.18x10¹² joules. That's 4.18 terajoules, if my memory on the prefixes is correct. Even if you make the high-gear engine of yours 42kN per pulse, and 100 pulses per second for 350kW... 4.2 meganewtons. Not sure how to make the conversion to newton-meters for a bomb (multiply by a meter of distance where), but even if the output squares with the power input (increase power by a factor of 1000, get output increase by a factor of 1000000) and there are some generous leeways in how power transfer works (as there should be), to me it sounds like you'll need at least a hundred times that laser rifle battery pack's worth of power in order to initiate a kiloton fusion bomb.

Of course, me being a verisimilitude-wielding quasi-engineer that mostly uses the various wikis for knowledge, you should probably recheck those numbers yourself, but my point still kinda stands. It takes a nuclear explosion to initiate fusion normally, and you can't take energy from nowhere to do that even with handy magnetic compression. You're really going to need a serious powersource.

(and seriously, try to ignore the way I use units... I just like the descriptions more when they're evocative, and a "kilogram-force" you can easily see as a force that supports a kilogram, or likewise a ton-force launching a lightweight compact vehicle into the air... stuff like that.)))

[GreatWyrmGold]

Secondary idea:

As we all know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of walking and jumping, we apply a force to the ground, and the ground applies a force to us.

Create a person with kinetic amps in his boots, right-side-up and up-side-down. See what happens with these two when they walk, run, and jump. Spawn new people as needed.

[NAV]

Secondary idea:

As we all know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of walking and jumping, we apply a force to the ground, and the ground applies a force to us.

Create a person with kinetic amps in his boots, right-side-up and up-side-down. See what happens with these two when they walk, run, and jump. Spawn new people as needed.

This already exists. Faith found them in the vr a long time ago. They work well on solid terrain, but dig a pit if you try using them on soft ground.

[Parisbre56]

I think that won't work. Kinetic amps don't have opposite reaction.
EDIT: And if you turn them upside down, you'll just turn your feet into minced meat.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think that won't work. Kinetic amps don't have opposite reaction.

I know this. However, the reaction the ground (or whatever) gives is an action, which can be enhanced.

Also, try punching with a backwards kinetic amp. Does this do anything? Reduce force or something?