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[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Quick question, would it be possible to make a 'General survivability Suit'?
Not like the MK2, but kinda like a combination of all the specialised suits (EHP, Fatman, Industrial, Anomaly and the Radiation suits) Fit into one suit, perhaps with some downgrades in certain areas, for cost and weight purposes, so not specifically for just Gunfire, more for something like mission 2, so you won't get your head shoved directly up your ass when you detonate an explosive right next to you or someone accidentally increases the surrounding gravity by like 5 Fold.

[Xantalos]

Or just make it the most expensive thing ever but you're basically indestructible while wearing it.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Or just make it the most expensive thing ever but you're basically indestructible while wearing it.

Or just make a specialised suit that can fight against a giant flesh monstrosity that came about from Overshooting a will roll.
*WINK*
*WINK*

[Xantalos]

It couldn't handle my stunning personality.

[Empiricist]

How about just wearing a giant flesh monstrosity AS the specialized suit? Then it's got a 50% chance of not only protecting against overshot, but also devouring the overshot and becoming more powerful because of it.

[Xantalos]

[Toaster]

Lars has Worn the Xan.

(I almost typed Worn the Alan here)

[Devastator]

I'm also looking up some real FELs now.. and they seem to be pretty big.  Some proposed X-ray FELs need multi-kilometer long wigglers.  I know we got the magic electron guns, but you still need a pretty big wiggler, right?

The length of the wiggler doesn't matter as much if you're cycling the output back into the input to seed the electron stream. A long wiggler gives more time/distance for the electron stream to fully synchronize with the desired wavelength over the single pass. Once you have the electron stream, the rest you can fit inside a shoebox.

The problem right now is that XRays are very hard to reflect - there are no "mirrors" that can just punt a beam in a different direction, you have to use dense materials and grazing mirrors that deflect the beam over a series of shallow angles in a curve. It's a highly difficult prospect, technologically, not economical when large amounts of open space and huge magnetic vacuum tunnels are more available and easier to maintain - but we have that covered with new materials sciences and engineering techniques in ER, so we can do that instead.

Err.. are you channeling the x-rays, or the electron beam, back into the input?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Err.. are you channeling the x-rays, or the electron beam, back into the input?

That part confused me as well, but apparently yes, it's the X-Rays. The lack of conventional mirrors to feed the beam back into the undulator is cited as the reason why the existing high-energy X-Ray FEL projects, such as the european XFEL, use enormous linear facilities instead of something more compact.

The reason why the beam is fed back into the oscillation chamber is because the initial beam is not yet coherent - the magnets in the chamber impart the desired oscillation to the magnetic fields, but the electrons don't immediately fall into place. There's a lot of particle physics going on there (that I don't rightly understand), but the presence of photons already keyed to the desired frequency - X-Ray in this case - helps the electrons in the stream to synchronize their oscillations and start emitting fully coherent light. Having a simpler source of X-Rays helps jumpstart the process, but electrons with enough energy to form a damaging laser aren't so easily... swayed. Ahem. So, unless you already have a laser of the same power level as you're trying to generate, seeding the FEL with a pre-existing laser can only help so much.

Hope that doesn't make things only more confusing.

[Devastator]

Okay, so you feed the x-rays back into the machine so that they keep in synch.  That makes sense.. except if you have a magic x-ray mirror, why don't you just build a nuke-fueled x-ray laser?  Seems like it'd be easier.

Also.. well, magic particle accelerator, check.  Adding a magic x-ray mirror too it.. might be getting a little too theoretical.  Especially when it's bouncing spaceship-grade weaponized x-ray lasers off it.  I know it can be done, but if I remember right, the stuff is very far out there, is quite dependant on molecular structures, and well, breaks after very short periods of time from absorbing energy or having individual atoms shot out of place.  I'm finding it pretty extreme to whip up something that can deal with, at point-blank range and for dozens (or hundreds) of times longer, stuff that's supposed to penetrate tens of meters of spaceship armor tens of thousands of kilometers away.

Mind you, you do have the new impossible armor substances.  Seems like a complicated composite of them (and more mundane materials) would be useful for building such a thing.  Still, I kinda doubt you'd get it right during your lunch-hour, without even a test bed for it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Okay, so you feed the x-rays back into the machine so that they keep in synch.  That makes sense.. except if you have a magic x-ray mirror, why don't you just build a nuke-fueled x-ray laser?  Seems like it'd be easier.

Nuke-fueled as in bomb-pumped? Kinda useless as a ship-mounted weapon.

Also.. well, magic particle accelerator, check.  Adding a magic x-ray mirror too it.. might be getting a little too theoretical.  Especially when it's bouncing spaceship-grade weaponized x-ray lasers off it.  I know it can be done, but if I remember right, the stuff is very far out there, is quite dependant on molecular structures, and well, breaks after very short periods of time from absorbing energy or having individual atoms shot out of place.  I'm finding it pretty extreme to whip up something that can deal with, at point-blank range and for dozens (or hundreds) of times longer, stuff that's supposed to penetrate tens of meters of spaceship armor tens of thousands of kilometers away.

Mind you, you do have the new impossible armor substances.  Seems like a complicated composite of them (and more mundane materials) would be useful for building such a thing.  Still, I kinda doubt you'd get it right during your lunch-hour, without even a test bed for it.

Do have the Spektr and Raduga as testbeds for the principle. This is just scaling it up to spaceship size. True, might need the exotic materials to make the reflectors durable enough for the higher power levels, but the principle remains the same. If the mirrors can't be made unaffected by the XRays regardless of composition and configuration (spaceship armor would be facing the beam head-on instead of a shallow angle like the grazing mirrors do, plus we have the exotic materials), some form of automated repair system is still possible.

All else fails, we still have the vector automanipulators for at least the looparound segments, but that's just overkill. And likely to run into the same power issues, and we can't even make new automanips yet.

Also, I believe I should have mentioned, I am perfectly fine with treating it as a personal science project. At the very least, an entire battlecruiser with all the intricate details and systems is not something you can whip up in an afternoon, regardless of how powerful your design software is, or how close a descendant you are to Tony Stark.

Huge gamma ray laser plus the artillery ship that's built around it, and a pair of upscaled FELs for a multi-beam battlecruiser that goes with them. Gimme an ETA and I can wait. Could probably add that to the action.

[Devastator]

Okay, so you feed the x-rays back into the machine so that they keep in synch.  That makes sense.. except if you have a magic x-ray mirror, why don't you just build a nuke-fueled x-ray laser?  Seems like it'd be easier.

Nuke-fueled as in bomb-pumped? Kinda useless as a ship-mounted weapon.

You just mount it on the outside, silly. ;-p

I'm not sure how the backpack versions got past the censors, personally.  They seem even more absurd.  Probably just didn't make any in-game difference, really.

I'm also not sure how, or if, a vector manip would affect photons.

[Toaster]

Quick, someone try to speed one up that way!

[syvarris]

@Execute/Dumbo

Battlesuit.  There.  It easily occupies all the roles you desire.  If that's not good enough, there's an extreme environment type.
 

I'm not sure how the backpack versions got past the censors, personally.

Technobabble that nobody understands, mostly.  Followed by a good helping of "we don't really care anyway, because it's balanced, interesting, and still has a more believable scientific explanation than 70% of existing things."

Honestly, we have a gun that shoots two foot long crystal shards that cut through tank armor like butter.  How does it work?  D-TAITH.

[renegadelobster]

Ooh, semi-random, possibly stupid idea. Use bomb-pumped FEL XASERS as missiles. Of sorts. Launch them out, give them some halfway decent targeting, guidance, and thrusters, have them attack from odd angles. The UWM won't know what hit them.