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Space-Time

2 (14.3%)

Hammer Time

3 (21.4%)

Time...to die.

6 (42.9%)

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

3 (21.4%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[Taricus]

True, but that is more a case of design goals. So rather than trying to build one really super special experimental thing, we just push the limits with something that's meant to be distributed and used on a large scale.

But still, trying to treat the air like the sea just strikes me as something that's likely to fail spectacularly. For us or the enemy.

[Madman198237]

Research Credit Design:
GGG-12 (4): NUKE9.13, Parsely, Rockeater, Madman

Regular Design:
GHMG-12 (1): Taricus
Gravite (4): NUKE9.13, Parsely, Rockeater, Madman

It was mentioned that our grenade is a little...horrible for CQB. We should work on creating a Gravite grenade, capable of cranking up the gravity on anything you throw it at. I wonder if we could manage a scalable area as well, so that you could do narrow fields for crushing things like tanks, and wide fields for debilitating infantry without killing them or wrecking the buildings around them.

[Parsely]

That's true, a grenade that starts fires is no good for situations where you want to kill the enemy in a position so you can then occupy it.

[NUKE9.13]

Hmm, hmm. Should I change the wording of Gravite to make that easier to do? Cos that sounds tricky- you'd need to generate at least 6Gs for a few seconds to have a decent chance of incapacitating an average human, and if you wanted to crush a tank... well, I dunno, but probably Gs in the hundreds, right? The incapacitating humans part is probably doable, but the tank-crushing might not be (at least not with a grenade-sized weapon).

Speaking of CQB, we musn't forget to develop a pistol before the start of the war. And maybe a shotgun, or equivalent weapon. We've been promised trenches, after all (and city fighting to start off).

[Parsely]

So if you can somehow control the strength of gravity dynamically using gravite, such that you can throttle the strength for use in a vehicle, isn't acceleration implied? Why would you need to write that in?

As for damage, the actual speed doesn't matter, it's the acceleration (how fast the speed is changing) and the direction of the acceleration, and how that affects air pressure, and how that compresses and stretches a human body and its components, which determines lethality. So if a gravite grenade can generate explosive, local changes in gravity, it will work as an anti-personnel weapon. If it can do that better than an explosive then great. You spoke of anti-tank work, why go to the effort of crushing a tank? No armor can protect you from being twisted into a pretzel against the inside of your tank by gravity. Against infantry in the open it would have a worse lethal range since there's little to abruptly find yourself crushed against, still a terrifying weapon nonetheless and one that ignores cover. Trenches would be useless if it was strong enough and it could be delivered accurately.

[NUKE9.13]

Wut? I didn't mention speed at all? As for the tank crushing, Madman suggested that, I was responding to him.

[Taricus]

We might want a different material in lieu of gravite to allow us to actually play silly buggers with gravity offensively like that. But really, Gravite doesn't really strike me as being particularly useful. Not when compared to everything else we can do. Superconductors, near indestructable materials. You name it, we could try it. But again, it doesn't strike me as useful. Thus, putting this down again so there's some choice in the votes.

As for a CQC grenade, just swap the gavrilium charge with a conventional HE one. The lower blast radius would make it ideal for assaults. Now, if we're gonna do the GGG-12, may I request a name change to it for sanity's sake please?

Myomer:
A fibre that has no equal in regards to it's properties, Myomer fibres are effectively hyper-efficient muscles once an electrical current of sufficient power passes through them. A recent discovery that, with war seeming an inevitability, we could possibly use in ways to enhance our forces beyond what anyone has conceived so far.

Research Credit Design:
GGG-12 (4): NUKE9.13, Parsely, Rockeater, Madman

Regular Design:
Gravite (4): NUKE9.13, Parsely, Rockeater, Madman
Myomer (1): Taricus

[Parsely]

Wut? I didn't mention speed at all? As for the tank crushing, Madman suggested that, I was responding to him.

Oh, sorry, that's acceleration of gravity you mentioned, nevermind. Since you mention acceleration over time, what you're talking about is the rate of change of acceleration, which is called jerk. That's a useful term when we're talking about what accelerations people would survive, because x number of gees of acceleration could of course be fatal if it happens in a very short amount of time (the effects of an explosion), or not if it's over seconds or minutes as we know from experiments where humans have survived tens of gees in specific conditions.

(Not implying that I got them confused because that would make no sense in this context but, usually you use a small g in physics to denote the acceleration of gravity on Earth, big G is the gravitational constant.)

Myomer:
A fibre that has no equal in regards to it's properties, Myomer fibres are effectively hyper-efficient muscles once an electrical current of sufficient power passes through them. A recent discovery that, with war seeming an inevitability, we could possibly use in ways to enhance our forces beyond what anyone has conceived so far.

Does having this technology imply we also can make synthetic fibers? Is this a product of gavrilium or is there another historical precedent?

[Taricus]

It's a special material, so it's more of an out of nowhere thing (Or, at least, out of no-where regarding any other technologies), so I doubt it means any tangential improvements to making other synthetic fibres, nor is it reliant on gavrilium as written. But that being said, I can edit it to make it a synthetic fibre of gavrilium if desired.

[NUKE9.13]

Oh, sorry, that's acceleration of gravity you mentioned, nevermind. Since you mention acceleration over time, what you're talking about is the rate of change of acceleration, which is called jerk. That's a useful term when we're talking about what accelerations people would survive, because x number of gees of acceleration could of course be fatal if it happens in a very short amount of time (the effects of an explosion), or not if it's over seconds or minutes as we know from experiments where humans have survived tens of gees in specific conditions.

Ah, sorry, I messed up, I didn't mean Gs as in gravity/time, I meant multiple g. I was trying to say that, like, 6g (again, sorry for the confusion; my bad) downwards is enough to make people pass out, but not if it only happens for a brief moment. We'd need less upwards g-s, but then we'd have to nail their feet to the ground first (otherwise they'd just be falling into the sky).

E: What name would you prefer, Taricus?

[Parsely]

It's a special material, so it's more of an out of nowhere thing (Or, at least, out of no-where regarding any other technologies), so I doubt it means any tangential improvements to making other synthetic fibres, nor is it reliant on gavrilium as written. But that being said, I can edit it to make it a synthetic fibre of gavrilium if desired.

I don't think you can make up a new material without it being sourced from the special sci-fi resource we have or has a tenuous link to real science. Apparently they were making synthetic fibers in labs in the late 19th century, so mostly I'm just questioning the ability of the 1910s textile industry to produce synthetic fibers. I would appreciate it if the fiber either had roots in real science or our fake, anti-science, sci-fi material, since that's the source of our fictional logic.

[NUKE9.13]

Eh, I think Myomer as written could work. We can check with MoP.

[Parsely]

I mean I don't think there's a problem with the technobabble, but if we can just make up new materials then what's the point of having a special resource, you know?

[Taricus]

I think it was confirmed we could have several special resources, not just the one. Otherwise Gravite would be going no-where.

[NUKE9.13]

Well, it costs a design action to create a new special resource, and then we have to dedicate resource nodes to producing it, so it doesn't make sense to spam special resources. But I think doing at least two makes sense.