LordErrorprone wrote:
Yes, i forgot about that, you are right the slug could gain enough mass from those speeds to damage a ship, though let me ask you on impact when the slug goes through extreme deceleration what happens to all that mass?

Outstanding question. I have no direct answer to point at from personal research or from any tests that I am aware of, but I can give you educated speculation.



The idea of instantaneous is pointless for us in the real world, because, from our current understand of our wondrous black blob we call the universe, time is interwoven with everything (even an imaginary time if you go to the 11th dimension of M theory). So we have to look at it as it's contacting and then decelerating rather fast, but not instantly, as the slug piles into the metal - and uses its energy to deform its target area (and itself) and create heat from the friction and mechanical waves in the hull and so forth - the mass drops, just goes down, and thus the force of impact goes down (force isn't like the extreme of the Dirac Delta equation, after all). So if we looked at a chart of Force vs Time we'd see it have immense impact and then drop exponentially. When this occurs, yes, it will shatter, but it will do so after doing some pretty amazing initial damage.

Then aim where they are going to be.......And we are not fighting at relatvistic ranges!!!! you can see stuff buzzing around craver war ships from your fleet!

Ahh, you are very correct Draco, I did not consider that. If you are at ranges so far out that you cannot see them with visuals, then yes, that's right. I guess I was thrown off by the fact that, in the combat phase, they're in visual range and if one is fighting at those distance than you just have to double compensate: once for the fact that where we see the ship is not where it actually is, that's, say, it two seconds ago, so we have to fire where it would logically be four seconds from where we see it now.



If, say, you go to the higher levels and was able to tap into quantum mechanics for information retrieval (the same the dictates the change of spin of an electron and its coupled anit-electron) then we could easily call beams the king, but let that not take away from the fact that you have a very solid point for the overall view.

Gargomaxthalus wrote:
Actually the power of a laser degrades RAPIDLY in space since the laser's energy diffuses as it travels and is mostly heat energy in the near absolute zero of space. Bioware really did there homework on this stuff. Of course without Ezo, a mass driver would be less effective in real life but laser/blaster type weapons have a horrible power consumption:range ratio.

I think this would be a better explanation of e.g. plasma weapons degrading over distance than lasers. It's true that (especially hot) objects dissipate energy through radiation, but lasers are radiation, not hot objects. It is true that lasers of finite beam waist do diverge with distance, though it's negligible on "human" scales.



Though really, a "realistic" space battle probably wouldn't look very interesting. Give me endless-to-the-point-of-violating-mass-conservation rafts of missiles, glowing laser beams, visibly traveling kinetics, loud explosions, spaceships shooting each other at Age-of-Sail-esque ranges, and starfigthers engaged in World-War-esque dogfights any day.

i vote anything that makes kinetics NOT useless.

all the battles in this game are decided at long and medium range.

also lasers don't get worse at close range so. why bother with kinetics?



at the moment kinetics are as usefull as waterproof teabags.

WW2 space battles plz!

Evil4Zerggin wrote:
Though really, a "realistic" space battle probably wouldn't look very interesting. Give me endless-to-the-point-of-violating-mass-conservation rafts of missiles, glowing laser beams, visibly traveling kinetics, loud explosions, spaceships shooting each other at Age-of-Sail-esque ranges, and starfigthers engaged in World-War-esque dogfights any day.

Were a more beautiful picture painted in my mind before, I cannot remember it now. Bravo. I agree.

ShadowWolf wrote:
If, say, you go to the higher levels and was able to tap into quantum mechanics for information retrieval (the same the dictates the change of spin of an electron and its coupled anit-electron) then we could easily call beams the king, but let that not take away from the fact that you have a very solid point for the overall view.

Of course...Captain Taylor once used the gravity of a star to hit a target that was out of sight, much to everyone's surprise (with a beam weapon, no less).

Well how did that play out? Light bends around a star. The stars that we see near the sun are sometimes stars that are directly behind it, but gravity stretches time and bends light (which is rather fascinating, because light, in itself, is supposed to have no mass, but it still is affected by gravity! Of course, our understanding of gravity isn't anywhere near complete either). So if it was what we'd call "conventionally" behind the sun, he and the others may have still been able to see it.

I've noticed that allot of people are assuming that beam weapons are lasers when in fact if you look at the research tree the strongest beam weapons use things like dark energy or there's the Disruptor beam that bombards the enemy ship with various Baryonic and non Baryonic particles, Sci fi tends to do different things with the word "beam". Plus, since those types of beams aren't light and probably travel at speeds close to C so time would move much slower for them and they would be able to travel great distances without degrading much. ShadowWolf mentioned aiming with lasers but this is the future were mankind can travel to others stars and use weapons of mass destruction like their candy, I think they could come up with a better way of aiming.



ShadowWolf -

if we fire a slug at .5C and it has a speed of .6C then the speeds should add up vectorally and give us 1.1C, but that's impossible by our current understanding of science.

I don't know where you got that from, if you accelerate an object to .5C then its speed will be .5C, maybe not in relation to other objects but that won't effect force, even so force is only a small part of calculating damage, if the slug hits the ship, will it shatter or is it strong enough to even damage the hull, at those speeds its about whose got the better material. Since we are applying real physics then lets think about how the slug will leave the ship in the first place. I probably don't have to tell you that accelerating a slug to even .5C would require in incredible amount of energy then like I said to actually hurt the ships hull you would have to have a slug with allot of mass which would increase the energy required to accelerate that slug, the question then becomes will the slug survive being accelerated like that. Mass Drivers don't make much sense when you apply real world physics because of the energy and time required it would be better to use missiles or "beam weapons". Anyway, i'm going to get of my soapbox now.



Edit: Wow allot of people posted while was typing.

@Lord



No, no, you made a valid point. In my expediency I forgot to say that it it's all in reference to a rest frame. If someone, at their idea of rest, saw a ship at .5C and it fired a round at .6C (these, again, being hypothetical answers) then you'd think, by classic mechanics, the stationary observer would see the round traveling at 1.1C (after breaking the light barrier and then it would leave Cherenkov radiation at the barrel that fired it). But, that is not true. In fact, a round fired from a ship where the ship is moving at .9C and the round is fired at .5C or so forth would, to the rest frame observer, be viewed as moving at somewhere around .96C.



Now, here's the kicker. As you go up in speeds, the mass increases and since its shape may be the same (we haven't verified if Lorentz contraction actually makes the shape condense or if it just makes it appear condensed and there is "phantom matter" behind it) we have two scenarios, but let us go with the more applicable to our situation, that the Lorentz contraction only messes with light bouncing off the object and not the object itself. This would tell us that the object has gained more mass (as its speed has gone up, given by the boost factor gamma) and the shape (thus the volume) is constant. That means rho (the density) will have shot up and suddenly it has more umphf to it. So, yes, material science would play a huge role (specifically for surviving that kind of acceleration and the heat from its launch, because you're right, it'll require a lot of energy), but is not the sole factor in will it shatter or not.



The truth is everything really relies on the speed and direction of your target, because the damage, force, speed, and everything else is all relative to it if we consider it the frame of reference (which we would to calculate the impact energy and so forth).

LordErrorprone wrote:


ShadowWolf -



I don't know where you got that from, if you accelerate an object to .5C then its speed will be .5C, maybe not in relation to other objects but that won't effect force, even so force is only a small part of calculating damage, if the slug hits the ship, will it shatter or is it strong enough to even damage the hull, at those speeds its about whose got the better material.

I think he meant "fire a slug at 0.5c at an object moving towards you at 0.6c."



The best part?



You can work out how fast that slug is moving relative to the object. In this case, their relative velocities are ~0.91c

Yes, i forgot about that, you are right the slug could gain enough mass from those speeds to damage a ship, though let me ask you on impact when the slug goes through extreme deceleration what happens to all that mass?

LordErrorprone wrote:
Yes, i forgot about that, you are right the slug could gain enough mass from those speeds to damage a ship, though let me ask you on impact when the slug goes through extreme deceleration what happens to all that mass?

Pancakes, probably.

Draco18s wrote:
I think he meant "fire a slug at 0.5c at an object moving towards you at 0.6c."



The best part?



You can work out how fast that slug is moving relative to the object. In this case, their relative velocities are ~0.91c

That would make more sense.

ShadowWolf wrote:
The Short of It



If we want to be ultra realistic, then Einstein would tell us Long Range: Beams, Medium Range: Missiles, Short Range: Kinetics.

Actually, no. Beams would be mid-range. If you're fighting at relativistic ranges (the point at which the beam weapons take seconds before impact) then you can't rely on sensors to tell you where your target is: that data is 6 seconds old already and it'll take another 6 seconds for the beam to hit (or miss) during which time the enemy has moved.



Therefor, the only viable weapon at these ranges are missiles, which can self-correct their flight path as they near the target.

I didn't say instantly just extreme deceleration.

@Lord



I did not mean to insinuate that you were, just clarifying a point. I forgot to mention the rest frame concept in my first post and it lead to confusion, so I wanted to be extra thorough for the ones that would come after.

I'll revise an earlier statement.



What happens depends entirely on the materials in question. However, at relativist speeds, the force imparted by meaningful amounts of mass reduce most objects to behaving like glass: they shatter.

Draco18s wrote:
I'll revise an earlier statement.



What happens depends entirely on the materials in question. However, at relativist speeds, the force imparted by meaningful amounts of mass reduce most objects to behaving like glass: they shatter.

Does most objects mean the slug and the ships hull or just the ships hull?