See, the problem with creating "armor" ships is that, in principle, there is no defending against a battleship gauss slug with any amount of conventional armor. "Kinetic Kill Vehicle" fully applies, because it moves at a decent fraction of c, is the size of a large vehicle, and is almost guaranteed to kill you. The only hope in that regard is for ablative kinetic-absorption armor, the effectiveness of which against attacks of that scale we've yet to test.
Are you sure? I remember during the space battle, a lot of ships took multiple hits. That means that ships aren't killed with one shot, which means stronger armor could potentially reduce damage from each shot, and make a ship capable of being shot more times before it's out of commission.
I could also point out the fact that the UWM uses armored ships, which means that the armor must be doing something. If it's not doing anything, then armor is just a whole lot of expensive dead weight you're lugging around. The UWM is a sluggish bureaucracy, but I don't think they're
that stupid.
The self-repair armor is going to be very good for smaller strikecraft though - being too fast and too small to target for the big guns, they'll only have to deal with PD, and the higher initial cost of the armor is going to be easily offset by the lessened maintenance costs of repairing laser gashes.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I was suggesting. Although, why would the self-repair armor have a higher inital cost? It's supposed to be the "cheap" armor, and happens to have the secondary benefit of self-repair. I think it's just inefficient for actually stopping heavy projectiles, compared to the hexsand.
If you want to go for killing power, then you have to go full kinetic, especially if you want to do it with current tech. There is no armor that protects against kinetics well enough. Yet. The reason I want to have a mix of kinetics and energy weapons (hopefully advanced energy weapons, not mere lasers), is exactly long-term. Gauss ammunition is not exactly hard to come by, but any fleet fighting away from supply bases is going to run out eventually, plus energy weapons are easier to aim (marginally, at the distances and target speeds/sizes involved) and are generally more flexible.
I completely agree with the first part, although the bit where you're talking about ammo is debatable. UWM armor is
very resistant to lasers, so trying to take out a ship without any kinetics is going to be difficult, especially if some portion of your weapons are empty gauss cannons.
Also, I did suggest we only do this for the initial run of ships, to offset the UWM's number advantage. They shouldn't be fighting long enough nor far enough away from supply bases for ammo to be an issue.
I'm not using barrier ships as justification for waiting. I know that we won't have them at least until we can dissect and make new manipulators, and waiting that long probably won't do. I'm using our low production capacity as justification for waiting, bizarrely. We can build things besides warships for the moment, and I'd like even the first batch of our ships to have some tech advantage. Which means focusing on and making new warship designs in VR, and Anton's been locked away in a secret lab working on a prototype that may or may not work for the past week, so he's going to get to making those ships first thing after testing. Deal?
Ummm. Well, it's been stated before, but building low-tech ships now isn't going to interrupt your warship designing. Plus, since we're retroactively designing them, your cool ship designs can be being built
yesterday, even if you finalize them at the end of this month. I think, anyway.
If I ask the questions now, I might forget to ask them later, and since PW doesn't have any of this set in stone, by the time we actually get to act on the answers, the answers may have retroactively changed due to reasons
Despite my occasional complaints and his insisting to the contrary, PW is actually really nice about retcons. If you ask now, and he changes it later for any reason aside from forgetting, it's the type of thing he would have changed anyway. If he does forget, remind him using a quote.
See, I've no idea which it will be. I have plans in mind, but I only know that some things are theoretically possible, to some extent. There are simple plans (in concept), involving making phasing ships using tech from Simus's phasesuit. There are more complex plans involving ships that can short-range-teleport themselves for boarding action or attack evasion. Then there's the idea of "Solar Stealth", rendering the enemy blind to the presence of the ship using targeted hallucinations by combining a long-ranged mindfuck gun with a specially made biochemistry overrider to induce a VR-like suggestibility state. Yes, basically shouting "I AM NOT HERE" so loudly that their brains agree despite all evidence to the contrary. A lot of things are possible, but we can't even really research most of those things until we can make new manipulators.
Yes, but listing these ideas is helpful. Aside from the phaseship idea, none of these had even occurred to me. Also, if you have to wait until manipulators are available for testing, then you could easily forget some of these ideas, or simply not have the time to play with them all. If you list them, other people can remind you, and play with them themselves. On top of that, ideas work in strange ways, and
Also, are you
sure we can't play with automanipulators in VR? I know we can't toy with overloads, or the internal workings, but we can get size estimates for certain effects, and see how helpful those effects are. Unless PW changed something and I forgot.
A guess is not good enough. Can they be made long-ranged enough? It needs research.
...Yeah. Hence why I'm researching them. I just don't think the research will pan out.
Whichever aspect of the ships we can improve, we should. We want better armor, better weapons, better everything. We can be choosy about what we add once we have things to choose from. Right now I'm looking into improving the weapons, because I have ideas that are actually short-term viable in that direction.
I don't think this is really accurate. We have lots and lots of potential things to experiment with, in lots of different ways, any of which could result in major improvements in some area. The problem we usually have is willingness/time/focus to work on a single project and finish it. Considering the rate that Hephaestus projects can go, a new gun can take a month to design, and we spend lots of time doing nothing in particular.
Choosing a focus would help with that. Heck, choosing a focus can help in the sense that Science teams can always improve stuff.
Hexsand armor is good if we can mass-produce it, though we still don't know how it stands up to spaceship combat. If you want to build something now, before any testing is done or any new weapons are made, start on a standard gauss-cannon battleship with hexsand armor. Building it should take long enough for some new tech to pop up and get tested.
I'm pretty sure we can mass-produce it, given that low cost was a primary design goal. Also, it was designed explicitly to replace BS plate, and IIRC BS plate is really just warship plate on a small scale.
And yes, that was pretty much what I was suggesting, although I still prefer large PSLs, since they perform better against armor. My question about what to build was more about what types, although I'll admit we don't have much information on what that even allows.
What I mean is, if we have to fight a fight. Like if we need to defend something or break the defenses of something. Running from a fight is a great way to keep yourself from harm, true, and might be a way of winning wars in the long run, but not a great way of winning battles.
True, and this is why I was suggesting heavily armored ships. I just was offering more options when I mentioned guerilla ships. If the other defenses we build are sufficient alone, then guerilla ships would probably be more efficient for the actions afterward.
But that's just providing another side to the argument. I agree with you that normal battleships would probably be our best plan.
((can we add "The return of Simus's higher brain functions" to the "List of things we're waiting on" to the Wiki?))
YES! YES!It is done.
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