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[Tack]

I know miniguns are currently electrically triggered.
I wonder why all smaller guns are triggered.
Is it a reliability thing?

It's just there to power the motor that rotates the barrels. There's no safe way to do that using recoil.

No. I meant Electonic Firing, as in it uses a spark directly on the percussion cap instead of a firing pin.

[Insanegame27]

Like the Metalstorm series of weapons?

[Parsely]

I know miniguns are currently electrically triggered.
I wonder why all smaller guns are triggered.
Is it a reliability thing?

It's just there to power the motor that rotates the barrels. There's no safe way to do that using recoil.

No. I meant Electonic Firing, as in it uses a spark directly on the percussion cap instead of a firing pin.

The M134 minigun uses firing six firing pins, one for each barrel. The cartridges are not electronically fired. Like I said, the electronic motor powers the action.

[Insanegame27]

Gunin, I think he meant THIS

[Parsely]

Metal Storm isn't a minigun. He could only have been talking about the M61 Vulcan, even though it's not a minigun.

[Tack]

Yeah, I was thinking about a range of rotary cannons.
I just naturally colloquialised.

However, my mistake has brought up a new question re: M134 vs Vulcan.
Why does one use electronic triggering and the other use a pin? Is a 20mm round too large somehow?

[Parsely]

Yeah, I was thinking about a range of rotary cannons.
I just naturally colloquialised.

However, my mistake has brought up a new question re: M134 vs Vulcan.
Why does one use electronic triggering and the other use a pin? Is a 20mm round too large somehow?

No. It's not because of the size of the round. Howitzers use very sharp firing pins to touch off shells. The gun inherently needs electricity so it was an easy choice to make, but it doesn't make the gun that much simpler since you still need mechanical extractors (these are the bolt assemblies being removed from the gun; here you can see them extracting the cartridges), so maybe it was purely a design choice and didn't affect things much on a practical level.

In general if your platform already has batteries, like a car, it's simpler to decide to use electric triggering. The Sherman for example didn't use a firing pin. The gunner had a foot pedal that set the shell off electrically.

[Tuxfanturnip]

I'm writing a "One big lie" piece where, for the most part, interstellar war doesn't happen due to the cost of FTL travel and the potential destruction caused by a FTL impact on a planet. The only reason anyone would have to do it are "to wipe out ____ because we don't like them," and so the only way for a really interesting conflict to happen is a vaguely plausible political snafu of epic proportions that results in both sides fighting each other with more or less the same goals. Some really strange things have to pile up to get mech suited soldiers on the ground.

More in line with the topic of the thread, the mech suits end up with two divergent design philosophies. One is essentially a lightweight, portable exoskeleton with integrated ballistic armor, probably just spaaace Kevlar, built to be low-maintenance, to use minimal energy just trudging around, and to be fast and agile when needed. The other is a small tank with legs and vaguely arm-like turrets and is controlled via a neural link of some sort to the operator. Their plasma "cannons" are more of a cross between a flamethrower and a nuclear thermal jet engine, for when the thing you want to burn down is made of concrete. Convoys full of engineers, neurosurgeons and fusion reactors follow them everywhere.

The way they're ultimately used, anti-laser defenses wouldn't be necessary, but they would probably have been built into them, considering they use lasers themselves... I doubt silvering would work on something that's meant to walk through walls on a regular basis, so it would probably use thermal conducting ceramics. How shatter-resistant would those likely be? Or is that just something that can't be predicted until it's discovered?

If any of that is too nonsensical, I could probably still change it.

[Parsely]

I'm writing a "One big lie" piece where, for the most part, interstellar war doesn't happen due to the cost of FTL travel and the potential destruction caused by a FTL impact on a planet. The only reason anyone would have to do it are "to wipe out ____ because we don't like them," and so the only way for a really interesting conflict to happen is a vaguely plausible political snafu of epic proportions that results in both sides fighting each other with more or less the same goals. Some really strange things have to pile up to get mech suited soldiers on the ground.

The way they're ultimately used, anti-laser defenses wouldn't be necessary, but they would probably have been built into them, considering they use lasers themselves... I doubt silvering would work on something that's meant to walk through walls on a regular basis, so it would probably use thermal conducting ceramics. How shatter-resistant would those likely be? Or is that just something that can't be predicted until it's discovered?

If any of that is too nonsensical, I could probably still change it.

You can avoid most of the problems of attacking a planet from space if the two warring sides are already on the same planet when they decide to start fighting. Alternatively it could be an insurgency. If the entire population isn't hostile then you can't threaten the enemy with orbital artillery since they're mixed in with civilians.

Ceramic armor is common today. There are lots of places where you can read up on how it behaves. In general know that today ceramic armor is, well, primarily ceramic, sometimes backed by steel or some other hard metal. The ceramic shatters when it's shot, so unlike steel armor it degrades every time it's hit. The advantages are that it has a much higher performance against AP ammunition, and it can be lighter than steel armor, but it depends which specific armor arrangements you're comparing to one another.

[Tuxfanturnip]

So... probably only the body would have ceramic armor, to protect the operator, and anything like breaking down walls through brute force would have to be done "hands"- or feet-first.

[Rolepgeek]

I'm writing a "One big lie" piece where, for the most part, interstellar war doesn't happen due to the cost of FTL travel and the potential destruction caused by a FTL impact on a planet. The only reason anyone would have to do it are "to wipe out ____ because we don't like them," and so the only way for a really interesting conflict to happen is a vaguely plausible political snafu of epic proportions that results in both sides fighting each other with more or less the same goals. Some really strange things have to pile up to get mech suited soldiers on the ground.

The way they're ultimately used, anti-laser defenses wouldn't be necessary, but they would probably have been built into them, considering they use lasers themselves... I doubt silvering would work on something that's meant to walk through walls on a regular basis, so it would probably use thermal conducting ceramics. How shatter-resistant would those likely be? Or is that just something that can't be predicted until it's discovered?

If any of that is too nonsensical, I could probably still change it.

You can avoid most of the problems of attacking a planet from space if the two warring sides are already on the same planet when they decide to start fighting. Alternatively it could be an insurgency. If the entire population isn't hostile then you can't threaten the enemy with orbital artillery since they're mixed in with civilians.

Ceramic armor is common today. There are lots of places where you can read up on how it behaves. In general know that today ceramic armor is, well, primarily ceramic, sometimes backed by steel or some other hard metal. The ceramic shatters when it's shot, so unlike steel armor it degrades every time it's hit. The advantages are that it has a much higher performance against AP ammunition, and it can be lighter than steel armor, but it depends which specific armor arrangements you're comparing to one another.

If there's more than two groups or powerful military interests,  you could also have there be rules of engagement,  and if you break them,  by,  day,  cracking a planet in half,  everyone teams up to crack all your shit. We have nukes today, after all, and while we don't have massive total way scenarios,  there's still military engagements. It's hard to make use of a non-existent planet, population, and/or industrial base.

As for armor, you can have composite armor; superconductor exterior plates or VRA (or both, in different areas) mounted over ceramic insulator/armor tiles, over tungsten or some other metal alloy. Maybe a couple layers of other stuff;cut would definitely depend on the area of the suit being armored.

[Tack]

Just use ceramic with rebar and an overlay.
Like a tungsten mesh weave ceramic? Not entirely plausible, but hey, it's the future.

Plus considering how high-maintenance they are, I like the idea of pit-crews switching out a set of half-powdered plates between actions.

[Tuxfanturnip]

I'm writing a "One big lie" piece where, for the most part, interstellar war doesn't happen due to the cost of FTL travel and the potential destruction caused by a FTL impact on a planet. The only reason anyone would have to do it are "to wipe out ____ because we don't like them," and so the only way for a really interesting conflict to happen is a vaguely plausible political snafu of epic proportions that results in both sides fighting each other with more or less the same goals. Some really strange things have to pile up to get mech suited soldiers on the ground.

The way they're ultimately used, anti-laser defenses wouldn't be necessary, but they would probably have been built into them, considering they use lasers themselves... I doubt silvering would work on something that's meant to walk through walls on a regular basis, so it would probably use thermal conducting ceramics. How shatter-resistant would those likely be? Or is that just something that can't be predicted until it's discovered?

If any of that is too nonsensical, I could probably still change it.

You can avoid most of the problems of attacking a planet from space if the two warring sides are already on the same planet when they decide to start fighting. Alternatively it could be an insurgency. If the entire population isn't hostile then you can't threaten the enemy with orbital artillery since they're mixed in with civilians.

Ceramic armor is common today. There are lots of places where you can read up on how it behaves. In general know that today ceramic armor is, well, primarily ceramic, sometimes backed by steel or some other hard metal. The ceramic shatters when it's shot, so unlike steel armor it degrades every time it's hit. The advantages are that it has a much higher performance against AP ammunition, and it can be lighter than steel armor, but it depends which specific armor arrangements you're comparing to one another.

If there's more than two groups or powerful military interests,  you could also have there be rules of engagement,  and if you break them,  by,  day,  cracking a planet in half,  everyone teams up to crack all your shit. We have nukes today, after all, and while we don't have massive total way scenarios,  there's still military engagements. It's hard to make use of a non-existent planet, population, and/or industrial base.

As for armor, you can have composite armor; superconductor exterior plates or VRA (or both, in different areas) mounted over ceramic insulator/armor tiles, over tungsten or some other metal alloy. Maybe a couple layers of other stuff;cut would definitely depend on the area of the suit being armored.

Civilization is extremely fragmented by the fact that there's FTL travel but no FTL communications, so any sort of interstellar entity either holds only a couple of systems or shuttles around selling the sovereignty of the settlements they abandon. Neighboring systems tend to homogeneous but very different, and any sort of hostile action would probably be taken as seriously as WMDs. The way FTL works also means that whatever is deployed could as well be the size of a small city; the fuel costs are the same in each case and dwarf manufacturing.
I guess what I said at first wasn't quite true as a generalization, but it's true for this setting, and at some point I started exaggerating it a bit, working backward from "What would make this even more of a moral outrage?"

[TheDarkStar]

How can you have FTL travel without FTL communication?

[Tuxfanturnip]

How can you have FTL travel without FTL communication?

Well, no communication faster than a spacecraft. And while you're sending those hard drives, why not wait for a few thousand passengers to cover the costs, and then shovel the cargo bays full of anything you could sell on the other end...