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[Parsely]

You cannot run a ship without generating heat, and you cannot be invisible unless you generate no heat.

You can vent it in a particular direction though.

You're just putting the heat somewhere else. They will see the hot mass you are dumping and find out where you are.

If you want to do stealth right, you also have to cool your space ship down to close the temperature of the solar wind at your position, else people will spot you by your thermal signature. Theoretically this is not impossible to do, you can dump the heat generated by on-board processes into internal some sort of internal storage, but such an internal storage has a limited capacity so your time instealth is likely to be limited to a few hours at most.

That's not getting rid of the heat, it's just concentrating it into one really bright hot spot instead of a wider silhouette. It takes power to refrigerate your ship, which means you need to fire up your nuclear reactor, which can be seen from outside the solar system.

[mainiac]

Not if you're surrounded.

The entire point of stealth is that you can position yourself advantageously.  I imagine that a submarine wouldn't be too stealthy if it went to snorkel depth in the middle of an enemy surface action group.  That doesn't mean submarines can't go undetected.

Also, some of the heat will be absorbed by the ISM and solar wind, so any ship with sensitive enough sensors could pick up the venting.

Deep space is cold.  Space close to a star where you need to worry about the solar wind is comparatively boiling hot (200 kelvin around the asteroid belt compared to 3 kelvin in deep space).  A ship that could detect something like that would give about a million false positives a second.

Useful chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Solar_System

[Catmeat]

You expect most star cruisers to have a computer (i.e mother, father) and a few may have on board gravity without it being a spinny space majig, you could mayhaps hack the comp and bust the gravity to 2 points higher, all the crew get fatter and your boarders... board the ship wearing some gravity influencing gears, then simply walk to the crew and drop a stone on their heads set grav to normal and cable tie the ship to your ships bumper and drive it to the nearest pay and spray, voila no longer wanted by space cops.
You could fire a short lived black hole into people imploding them. You could even effect gravity to the point where the affected ship and crew end up dying because of time dilation (running out of supplies) then board the 'ancient' ship laughing to the space bank.
Engineer an organisim to look like a control panel/button and it releases a stress gas that zombifys the crew and you have a work force, space fuck you could even have the gas do anything. Its scifi. The craziness is only limited by the tech level your races use.
And yes the military uses charged particle beams, samsung probably invented them

[TheBiggerFish]

Buh... Tha... Er.... No science...

[Catmeat]

Oh sorry did you want to hear me say laser or peace and repeat what I learn in chemistry. Haha you funny human I smile now.
Dont let your view of science distort an idea for a story.
Real space battles are usually explosive , laser plasma, firearm free cause chances of depressurising the space boat.
We dont even know the limit of elements or what gravity is so dont even try to tell me what is or isnt possible cause I consider scifi a version of fantasy.
And to the oxyeating bombs or any chem/bio gas, you have to consider the crew will have easy access to helmets and life support suits.
I in no way care to attempt to know anything nor care if im wrong so dont bother explaning or memeing it away. I am simply throwing ideas at the writer for inspiration

laser

[TheBiggerFish]

I think the idea is that they want realistic stuff.

[GiglameshDespair]

I in no way care to attempt to know anything nor care if im wrong

Such is evident.
However, the OP asked about how possible certain weapons systems are based on science. Saying anything is possible because of sci-fi space magic defeats the point.

[Amperzand]

I would say that "Science Fiction" is what this thread is intended for. "Tech fantasy" is what our friend Catmeat would like to dabble in. The two are quite thoroughly different. Compare 2001: ASO with Star Wars.


And to be fair, the military is actually developing various directed energy weapons, including charged particle beams. Most of them are either directly inferior to ballistic weapons, or intended for a different, more specialized purpose. Crowd control, say.

[iceball3]

What about space missiles?

Too slow, too easy to shoot down.

What about REALLY FAST space missiles, fired in salvos of 50 or more?

[Arx]

What about space missiles?

Too slow, too easy to shoot down.

What about REALLY FAST space missiles, fired in salvos of 50 or more?

They'd have to be going at pretty much c to stop the target from just hitting each one with any kind of weapon and deflecting it way off course. Over astronomical distances, a perturbation of a fraction of a degree is important.

[Fniff]

Scenario: portals exist. You have a gun that, when active, creates a portal to the surface of the sun. The portal is 1 meter in diameter.

What happens to people near the portal and how many safety features would you need to make it not deadly to the shooter/entire population of the planet?

[GiglameshDespair]

How long is the portal open?

[Fniff]

Let's say the shooter can choose how long it remains open. What would the maximum it could be open before something awful like all the air being sucked out of the atmosphere happens?

[TheDarkStar]

Let's say the shooter can choose how long it remains open. What would the maximum it could be open before something awful like all the air being sucked out of the atmosphere happens?

Basically forever.

The first thing is figuring out where the portal would be. The Sun has no true "surface", but you can put it in the photosphere because that is the outermost layer. A google search tells me that the density there is roughly 10^-9 kg/m³ compared with Earth's atmospheric density of 10^-3 kg/m³, so the atmosphere would eventually get sucked out. However, the atmosphere is really big and it would take a long time for it to leave (someone else can find an exact number for this).

The radiation shouldn't be much of an issue either. The 1m portal will emit roughly 5 x 10⁶ W (using a 1m diameter hole and a solar radiation at the Sun's surface of 6.29 x 10⁷ W/m²). Compare this with an average car's 9 x 10⁵ watts or the average wind turbine (2.5 x 10⁷ watts) and you'll see that it really isn't much energy. Sure, enough to melt anyone within several meters, but not planet-ending.

The ionizing radiation shouldn't be an issue, either, since the the atmosphere is very very effective at absorbing that.

[My Name is Immaterial]

You expect most star cruisers to have a computer (i.e mother, father) and a few may have on board gravity without it being a spinny space majig, you could mayhaps hack the comp and bust the gravity to 2 points higher

These are all fair assumptions, but if we do have artificial gravity, it will probably be easier to use centrifugal force than any sort of gravity generator.

board the ship wearing some gravity influencing gears

This assumes that gravity works differently than it actually does. You really can't just turn gravity on and off, based on our understanding of physics.

cable tie the ship to your ships bumper and drive it to the nearest pay and spray, voila no longer wanted by space cops.

You might want to also scratch off the serial numbers.

You could fire a short lived black hole into people imploding them.

The energy necessary to produce [a microscopic] black hole is 39 orders of magnitude greater than the energies available at the LHC. The LHC takes 120 MW to run.
That's 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the power the Sun puts out in photons. It's 1.2*10^47 MW. That is NOT a antipersonnel weapon.

You could even effect gravity to the point where the affected ship and crew end up dying because of time dilation (running out of supplies) then board the 'ancient' ship laughing to the space bank.

That takes a such a ridiculous amount of energy, I'm not even going to distinguish it with a detailed response.

Engineer an organisim to look like a control panel/button and it releases a stress gas that zombifys the crew and you have a work force, space fuck you could even have the gas do anything. Its scifi. The craziness is only limited by the tech level your races use.

No, that's Science Fantasy, not Science Fiction. Here's a video talking about the difference between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy.

And yes the military uses charged particle beams, samsung probably invented them

Source?

Oh sorry did you want to hear me say laser or peace and repeat what I learn in chemistry.

No, I wanted you to keep your suggestions within the realm of the scientifically possible. I wanted to see ideas that, without leaps and bounds in our understanding of the basic principles of the universe, we could see in our world.

Dont let your view of science distort an idea for a story.

The Martian was a critically acclaimed novel and film. It is a GREAT story, and it is founded in really great science. Science did not get in its way, it pushed the narrative.

Real space battles are usually explosive , laser plasma, firearm free cause chances of depressurising the space boat.

Fair enough. I'll have to talk about how to reduce the risk of boarding actions later.

We dont even know the limit of elements or what gravity is so dont even try to tell me what is or isnt possible cause I consider scifi a version of fantasy.

Let me quote the OP to you, emphasis mine.

So I've had a few ideas of scifi weapons to use in my games and stories. I was wondering if any of them would be effective, not so much practical as scifi weapons usually aren't very practical but if they would be possible. If they are in the realm of possibility I would also like to hear how difficult it would be to produce.

And to the oxyeating bombs or any chem/bio gas, you have to consider the crew will have easy access to helmets and life support suits.

Yeah, that was something I tried to work my head around. I also tried to think about what would happen if the atmosphere control system- oh, wait, sorry, you don't care about what is and what isn't realistic.

I in no way care to attempt to know anything nor care if im wrong so dont bother explaning or memeing it away.

A. Clearly. B. I enjoy this, so don't tell me how to live my life.

I am simply throwing ideas at the writer for inspiration

As we all are, but we're doing it within the parameters he set in the OP.

Edit:

Haha you funny human I smile now.

Catmeat confirmed for... troglodyte? Alien? Non-native English speaker?


laser