Kinetic bombardment - how destructive?

[takemeout_totheblack]

Hard scifi R-bombs are one of those tricky weapons, aren't they? Tremendously costly, require complex calculations and have a potentially high risk of missing their target altogether or hitting a grain of sand while moving at a .93c clip and vaporizing themselves! But the benefits are truly enormous, massive amounts of destructive power and nearly zero possibility of enemy interception!
Question relating to the topic of the original post; how does the Mass Effect influence their mass drivers, if at all? Does it somehow make it 'easier' to accelerate the projectile or do it without expending the necessary energy (>36kt due to friction and what not)? Or am I wrong in my assumptions and their main weapons do not use the Mass Effect at all?

[Ford Prefect]

Question relating to the topic of the original post; how does the Mass Effect influence their mass drivers, if at all?

They use it to lighten the rounds prior to firing, and it can presumably be used in some way to mitigate recoil. There was a thread recently about how this messes with conservation, but otherwise that is supposed to be how it works.

[takemeout_totheblack]

They use it to lighten the rounds prior to firing, and it can presumably be used in some way to mitigate recoil. There was a thread recently about how this messes with conservation, but otherwise that is supposed to be how it works.

Isn't that always the way? The whole point behind the Mass Effect is that it effects mass in a way that shouldn't be possible, right? I guess that's the definition of unobtainium "it just does, 'kay?"

[adam_grif]

It goes something like this:

1. Apply ME field to lighten rounds.
2. Fire lightened round.
3. Round leaves the field, regains its mass but keeps its velocity.


It doesn't take a genius to see how this effect can be used to mass produce planet killing missiles at minimal cost, but apparently they're too busy legislating the construction of 38 KT railguns to think about things like that

[takemeout_totheblack]

It goes something like this:

1. Apply ME field to lighten rounds.
2. Fire lightened round.
3. Round leaves the field, regains its mass but keeps its velocity.


It doesn't take a genius to see how this effect can be used to mass produce planet killing missiles at minimal cost, but apparently they're too busy legislating the construction of 38 KT railguns to think about things like that

God help the Reapers should someone competent get a hold of that technology! The war'd last like 10 minutes!

[adam_grif]

Indeed. I proposed rigging up the Kodiak drop shuttles with some automation and crashing them into reapers at high speeds as a solution to the "reaper problem" over @ bioware forums. The only responses were "that'd never work, someone would have thought of that by now if it was so easy!"

Sigh.

[Ford Prefect]

Your assumption seems to be based on the idea that mass effect has literally limitless capabilities, which basically makes it nonsense. Mass effect isn't free, after all. Why assume that it has massive untapped potential when there's no actual evidence of that massive untapped potential at all?

[adam_grif]

If you can achieve FTL velocities with it, you can achieve relativistic velocities with it. The equations for calculating how much energy you get out of it must be the same or very similar as the ones we use today, since that's how you arrive at the 38 KT figure for the railguns, as mentioned by the codex and the military instructor on the citadel.

They already use it to get better-than-optimal performance out of their antimatter reaction engines, and when they kick it into high gear, they can, just by normal acceleration, cruise over a dozen light-years in 24 hours. The only time their mass effect enhanced acceleration isn't subject to inertia is if they're exceeding the "real" speed of light, because apparently their ME fields increase the speed of light in a bubble so they can exceed it. This is to say that if you're going FTL and your drive core disengages, you drop back down to subluminal speeds, but in all other cases you appear to maintain velocity.

It does not require any performance above what is already shown.

[adam_grif]

Ghetto edit:

In case anybody cares, I just did some calcs, got 4383 c as the typical FTL velocity (12 ly / day). Not sure if I did it correctly or not.

[Ford Prefect]

If you accept it working like that, you have to accept that they also have ten billion gee antimatter drives.

[adam_grif]

Considering they can jump from zero to 4000 c in under a second using the mass lightening + antimatter drives, then yeah, they probably do. Now that I think about it, they should get turned into mincemeat just doing that because inertia suppression tech is not mentioned anywhere. And there should be all sorts of horrific physiological consequences to operating on a starship in FTL flight since the drive core has to lower the mass of the whole ship, passengers included.

[Ford Prefect]

Actually, Doctor Chakwas mentions that one of the thing she missed about starships was the feeling of acceleration dampners kicking in. In any case, I was simply pointing out how it's silly to just assume that there's no more to going FTLthan just tuning your mass all the way down and putting their thrusters to max.

[adam_grif]

This is a direct quote from the Codex:

FTL drives are devices which allow ships to travel at FTL speeds through space. FTL drive cores work by exposing element zero to electric currents, creating mass effect fields. It reduces the mass of an object - such as a starship - to a point where accelerations faster than the speed of light are possible. With a mass effect drive, roughly a dozen light-years can be traversed in the course of a day's cruise.

The precise maximum speed and the time this acceleration can be maintained varies depending on the exact type of FTL drive being used. In general, the larger the drive, the longer the ship can run at FTL.

If there's anything more to it than mass lightening plus acceleration, they aren't hinting at it.

[Ford Prefect]

Except for all you know they make the ship's mass negative. It obviously can't be as simply as the Codex makes it seem, because we're stuck with ten billion gee accelerations which don't fit with the established picture of the universe (it's even wildly out of line with the Jupiter to Pluto run in the beginning of the first game) and are impossible using the drive technology they have. Remember, most commercial ships use ion drives, but they can still manage FTL speeds.

[adam_grif]

If we're going by real world physics, no amount of mass reduction would help it go FTL, nor would negative mass. It would have to give the ship imaginary mass. It's stated that the subjective speed of light increases, and it's heavily implied that they just accelerate past the "real" speed of light.

How would you have it?

[Nyrath]

EDIT: on second thought some of the claims about the fuel needed for Valkyrie are pretty silly. It's some ridiculously low amount of antimatter.

Adam Crowl asked Dr. Pellegrino about this:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... l#valkyrie
As it turns out, the mass ratio of 1.5 only applies to a Valkyrie capable of approaching ten percent lightspeed. The 92%c accel + 92%c deacel Valkyrie has a more realistic mass ratio of 22.

This means that the R-bomb launching starship is a bundle of projectiles and a flimsy low mass engine attached to a titanic fuel tank containing hundreds of thousands of tons of antimatter.

[Ford Prefect]

How would you have it?

I'd just accept that FTL in Mass Effect is total magic and stop trying to assume it has any application beyond moving a ship from A to B.

As it turns out, the mass ratio of 1.5 only applies to a Valkyrie capable of approaching ten percent lightspeed. The 92%c accel + 92%c deacel Valkyrie has a more realistic mass ratio of 22.

Well that is much more sensible.

[adam_grif]

I'd just accept that FTL in Mass Effect is total magic and stop trying to assume it has any application beyond moving a ship from A to B.

All ME field tech is pure magic, but since how it works is explained in a black box fashion it can be reasonably applied to other things. "It's magic don't think about it" is reasonable, but not how things are done on SD.net, the site where Starwars and Star Trek are analyzed, probably the last things on the earth intended to be analyzed by their authors.

[chung16]

This is a direct quote from the Codex:

FTL drives are devices which allow ships to travel at FTL speeds through space. FTL drive cores work by exposing element zero to electric currents, creating mass effect fields. It reduces the mass of an object - such as a starship - to a point where accelerations faster than the speed of light are possible. With a mass effect drive, roughly a dozen light-years can be traversed in the course of a day's cruise.

The precise maximum speed and the time this acceleration can be maintained varies depending on the exact type of FTL drive being used. In general, the larger the drive, the longer the ship can run at FTL.

If there's anything more to it than mass lightening plus acceleration, they aren't hinting at it.

There was a post over on the official forums from one of the writers about how FTL works with a ME drive:

The mass effect envelope affects not only the mass of the ship, but the mass of the bubble of space-time around it. You're not just reducing the mass of the ship, you're reducing the mass of the medium it's moving through. Within this "subjective" frame of reference, the speed of light becomes effectively higher.

One known flaw in the design is that while the ship is capable of ludicrous speed within the subjective frame of reference within the field, the field itself exists within the objective frame of reference, and is thus lightspeed bound. So a "real" ship working under these principles would outrun the edge of its own drive envelope!

For now we've ignored that - we had tons of other technologies to work out. I suspect in the second game the theory will be refined, such that ships are dropping mass field bubbles ahead of themselves, like a toy railroad engine with only two lengths of track. As the engine passes over the "front" track section, you pick up the "back" section and drop it at the end of the front section, so its there when the engine reaches the end of its current section.

http://meforums.bioware.com/forums/view ... =104&sp=15

[adam_grif]

That doesn't really help, since the point of contention was whether they still had to just accelerate conventionally after mass has been lowered/lightspeed increased.

[takemeout_totheblack]

Tangentially related to OP, say you have a mass driver of respectable power ranging from hand held weapon to artillery piece, and you fire your weapon at something. My question is, if the mass driver can spit something out at high hypersonic speed (mach 7+) what will the projectile have to be made out of to avoid being evaporated by air friction after, oh say, a second or two? I'm under the assumption that a mass driver artillery piece will be firing fairly dense material fast enough to ruin a battleship's day, but what is that material? Probably not iron, not very dense and prone to melting. Tugsten? Dense with good heat handling capabilities, but is 'good' good enough? Or would an coating of ablative ceramic over a less hardy material be the way to go?

I'm not too sure how big the projectiles should be, but I'm going to take the Mass Effect route and say 'grain-o-sand' for infantry weapon and I'll take the random metric route and say 'baseball' for artillery.

[Darth Wong]

What makes you think such a material exists?

[takemeout_totheblack]

So definitely a fictional substance then?

[adam_grif]

Oh not this thread again

[Sea Skimmer]

I don’t have figures for mach 7 handy, but an object at mach 8 in the lower atmosphere will reach over 5,600 degrees F skin temperature on the leading edges. For comparison the peak skin temperature on the space shuttle peaks out at around 3,000 degrees F. Tungsten melts at 6,192 degrees F, but it would become far too soft to serve as structure at lower temperatures. So you’re going to need some kind of ICBM reentry vehicle style heat shield.

The lower 99% of the earth’s atmosphere is about 35,000 feet thick, about 6.63 miles. An RV can stand up to that at speeds that range as high as mach 18 while protecting the nuke inside. At mach 8 down low you’d cover 6.63 miles in around 4 seconds. So ranges like that should be within reason for a heat shielded projectile, possibly several times that. The real trick though, would be getting the projectile and the heat shield material not to tear apart upon the massive accelerating of firing the weapon. ICBMs and other missiles accelerate much more slowly. That problem could be impossible to solve, but who knows.

This range is also only a very rough estimate, because I am not accounting for the changing density of the air the ICBM actually moves though, nor the lower but still critically high speed of the mach 8 hypersonic shell. I’m just figuring they balance each other out well enough for the example of a hypersonic shell flying entirely within the lower atmosphere. I wouldn’t expect accuracy to be real great in an artillery role either, because of the burn off of the heat shield, though most use would be near direct fire anyway.

Sustained speeds of mach 4-6 are much more viable for current materials under any set of atmospheric conditions.