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[Aseaheru]

 It may work better as a coilgun(And depending on exactly how the aliens guns work we may be able to use parts of their weaponry), but otherwise I have no issues with the idea of a railgun once we get the tech. It would certainly work better than lasers in atmosphere and have a longer range than plasma.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Sorry stuff is taking so long on my end.  Going to a drag race yesterday and having to work on some work for college due tommorrow today has been killing my time.  Do not know when turn will be coming out, but I can admit being slightly surprised at how many pages we've gone through already, compared to the number of turns.

[Aseaheru]

 Yah, one amusing thing about the last arms race game was the relative lengths of each sides thread. It also shows to a lesser degree in Sensei's current arms race game.


 Also, must... finish... turn... writing...

[Kot]

The side with better players had the longer thread obviously.

[RAM]

alloys would be great, but sadly we can't research them yet.
I agree that weapons and power sources are the best ones, still not sure which one would yield better results.

By the way, what do you think of my railgun idea?

I feel that both weapons and power result in energy manipulation theory, with the power being more theoretical and the weapon being more practical...

I kind of love the railgun, but how do we aim and defend it? Even with the burst rounds it is going to be difficult to hit a target travelling at 2400 kph. Ground targets would be plausible, but aiming at something 200 kilometres away is sort of tricky. I guess we could just pre-site the entire country and observers could just note the target's location relative to the death towers that mark the known coordinates. Still, I suspect that the enemy has greater range than our air-defence does, so we really can't protect a site. If they want to blow something up then they can... Maybe we could give it a deployable armoured dome? enough to keep the enemy knocking on the door for long enough for our air forces to surround the site and pour in by the hundreds?

[andrea]

the enemy at this stage has a range of 15 km. we can outrange that, with a ground installation.
That said, aiming is going to be incredibly hard. 200 km is an entirely theoretical range, related merely to the power of the design. we couldn't hit the broad side of an airship hangar at that distance with current tech ( although we could certainly destroy whatever it hits). maybe we can get 40-50 km? that is roughly similar to big warship range of this time period, so I suppose aiming at that distance can be done without sophisticated technology ( although with a basic computer, hitting ground targets would become MUCH easier... but so would basically everything else)

The iron dome thing is interesting.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

@How to target: Computers should work. We could make the coil gun and then follow it up with a design for a targeting computer for it. It probably won't be the most complicated thing, but it should be a solid step into better electronics

[andrea]

@coilguns

I picked railgun as a concept because multi stage coilguns ( the things you want to use if you need high speed) require quite accurate and fast switching of power between coils, which is a non trivial feat of electronics, which we might have trouble to overcome on rapid time scales. Railguns by comparison are quite simple, assuming that you solve a lot of materials problems.

@computer a targeting computer as the first effort in the field seems a good idea. small, mono purpose thing, but it is practical and gives experience.

[Sensei]

ptw

[RAM]

Oh, I don't doubt that the railgun could reach 15 kilometres, but I doubt that it would be reliable as an air defence. If it cannot defend itself than we need to defend it with something else, and I am not convinced that our existing air defences will be effective at the range that the enemy can engage from. So they can just keep lazily dodging the railgun and completely ignoring the ackack while they pummel the railgun into oblivion. I could certainly see it being an extremely effective upgrade to our field artillery, but attacking aerial opponents with it would seem risky, not so much because it is ineffective against them, but rather because it can't afford to attract attention. Now, if we have an effective anti-air cannon, or we mount the thing in the midst of dozens of airfields, than maybe we can go blazing away without losing it. And certainly we could play the odds, hope that we down the target before it gets inside the railgun's effective engagement range(I expect that it will be slow to turn, so within a specific range an alien craft will be far too swift to be tracked.) but I see it as a national effort that will have almost no resilience. Great so long as it is ignored, but if it starts trying to dance while the enemy is paying attention then it will likely be tripped...

[stabbymcstabstab]

-snippy-

well remember it only needs to work once. after we get our hands on one of their ships we could probably reverse engineer something to replace it.

[Aseaheru]

 Their plasma weaponry probably utilizes coils of magnets to accelerate the globs of plasma. I say probably because that is the best way humans have figured out to do it, but it may be done a different way here. From what I can tell, in UFO:EU there was something about antigravity fields and the like.

[Sheb]

We still have no way to aim a railgun. There is a reason AAA, even later one with mechanical aiming computers had to use bursting flak rounds rather than aiming bullets at the aircraft. Aiming in the general area of a slow-moving airplane is the best that can be achieved. Meanwhile, you wants direct hits on a tiny UFO going at 2400 km/h?

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Well it's less "want" and more "that's what we'll need to aim for if we want to maybe shoot one of these things down." We're not dealing with slow moving airplanes so we need to be excessively ambitious with our designs and goals if we want to begin to make progress that means something.

With the railgun we can at the least use it to try to hit their crafts while on the ground and then GTFO while soldiers move in. Or we could go with rail guns as in humongous train mounted artillery pieces and try to achieve the same effect. But we'd still have to make a targeting computer for it.

[andrea]

@sheb: not necessarily direct hits. We can have the projectile fragment mid flight, to cover a wider area. Against the early scouts, even a fragment should have an effect.

Plus, I suppose it might be able to do ground bombardment on a good part of our island by itself. Although perhaps we might have better ways to achieve that.