Realistic Plasma Weapons

[Purple]

...Why, is your entire civilization collectively sterile and incapable of teaching anyone to do anything ever?

How can you even ask that question? How can crew not be importmant?
The crew is who control what the ship does. Without them it's an inert mass of iron.

What sane nation would regard that cost as tiny compared to the cost of re-training the crew? Especially if all the complicated jobs are done by machinery anyway, so that the crew's skill level and training requirements are reduced?

That's like saying that becouse of computers and guided missiles the skill level of pilots is irrelevant and you should strap anyone into a fighter jet. Yes, the skill levels are reduced and there are a lot less janitors and dish washers. But the true skilled crew is still a valuable commodity just like in any modern warship or tank or aircraft or what ever.

Why do you even put human beings on these ships, anyway? If the IFF is so good they always know who the enemy is, and the onboard AI is capable of maintaining, fixing, and fighting on its own with minimal guidance from humans (who are locked in a steel coffin several kilometers from the fighting anyway)... what's the point?

The more I read your post the more I think you are not getting it one bit. I mean AI? I newer mentioned anythign about any AI. You made that up. And without that, your argument in essence boils down to saying that becouse of things like smart missiles and fly by wire pilot skill no longer matters in fighter jets.


You don't need magic AI to do the things I described any more than you need nuclear reactors to power a flashlight.

For a start, how hard do you think it is to have a simple transmitter system for every person that acts as a communicator/tracker inside a limited and enclosed space like that of a starship. It can't be that hard since we do that today with cell phones. So why should each member of my crew not have a cell phone that tracks where he is? Add to that security cameras that some guy in the security room is watching and you have all you need. As a bonus, you can add some minimum software to recognize a humanoid form or even just a motion tracker and match the camera location with the known locations of crew members and flash a warning light if camera X shows something moving when trackers say all crew are accounted for and no one should be near camera X. It's 20th century technology. No one is talking about magical AI recognition, just plain old 20th century security.

And no, the on board AI does not maintain and fix things. I newer said that. Again, you are making things up. What I did say is that you have remote controlled maintenance machines. What this means is that if you want to change wiring near the surface in the head of battle you send a remote controlled drone there and not a crew member. The same ones you would send for surface maintenance rather than sending out people in space suits. There is still someone behind the controls but he is not exposing him self to danger. That is what remote controlled means.

Same with firing the weapons. I newer mentioned any AI control. All I said was that the guns aim them self based on humans telling them what to shoot. That is simply the reality of having a post WW2 firing computer. And since at the extreme the canons are kilometers apart it makes sense for each one to have its own targeting computer. Hell, ships back in WW1 had mechanical targeting computers to control the elevation and rotation. Why should my ships not have them?

Seriously, I don't mean to insult you or be aggressive but I have to ask you. How does me having things that can be built today with electronics from the corner store translate in your mind to having AI that can control the ship?

If the enemy is building two, or three, or four times as many ships that take the same amount of time and firepower to disable... they're gonna win. A lot. Because they will outnumber and outgun you, and all you gain is that your ships survive losing more battles while being pushed back and sent to the repair yards every time they fight on account of their surface features have been blown to bits.

But my elite crews are what makes starships so effective. A skilled crew makes a disproportionate difference. Furthermore, it takes many times less resources and time to rebuild a starship whose most costly and hard to make components (crew, FTL, internal systems, power plants etc.) are still intact and you just have to bolt on new turrets than it takes to build new ships from scratch after they are blown up.

And finally I don't know where you are geting your numbers from. 100X... yea sure. Do we make modern tanks unarmored with the logic that since a hand grenade can kill it's sensors and plug up machine guns there should be no armor for the crew?

The fact is you underestimate the sheer size of these things. A multi kilometer warship is not as easy to disable as a tank where all it takes is a good clean HE shell to blast it clear of sensors and weapons. You don't just go: "target their weapons" and after a few blasts the enemy is defenseless. In order to mission kill something this big you would have to constantly bombard it from all sides for a very long time until you blow off all of it's weapons and sensors. Battleships take hours upon hours of bombarding one another with shots and still walk away.

With small things like tanks if it takes X energy to punch through your ship to blow it up I can apply X energy and you are dead. Alternatively I can apply X/10 energy and you are going to be in trouble due to a mission kill. But with ships of this size if you apply X/10 energy and all you will get is a ship with 90% of it's systems still shooting at you. So it makes perfect sense to invest some money to have 2X or 3X extra protection for the crew just like it makes sense to have 1000Y protection for the crew of a tank when all it takes is Y to blow it's sensors off.

You will also note that Jutland was a colossal defeat for the German Navy and they never stuck their necks out of Wilhelmshaven again, being effectively neutered for the rest of the war...

Only becouse of the overwhelming numbers on the British side that made the whole battle redundant anyway. In a 1 on 1 numbers battle the German fleet would have been up and running in a few months while the British would have had to build more ships and train fresh crews. And I have a large enough industry that I can outnumber my enemies whilst building ships like these.

All else being equal, I can afford twice as many ships as you. Say you have 10 ships; I have 20.

And your 20 ships will suck compared to my 1 becouse my crews are more skilled.

My fleet shows up and fires 2X shots in the time it takes you to fire X shots, because I have twice as many ships. I disable two of your flying bricks, you disable one of my battleships. Your bricks run away, my battleship runs away. Now I have 19 ships to your 8.

Except that my battleships that you disabled will be repaired and back in action in a week and your smaller craft have to be rebuilt from scratch taking months.

We repeat the process several times; when the smoke clears, five of my ships (out of 20) are in drydock for repairs, while ten of your ships (out of ten) are in drydock. I am free to do as I please in the area we are fighting over, and to move forward and repeat the process.

Except that all things being equal your ships will have sustained much more damage to soft expensive components like power generators and FTL drives that are hard to replace whilst my ships will only need to slot in new turrets like a Lego puzzle.

Your ships spend proportionately more of the time in drydock, your military gets demoralized from being outnumbered and beaten up all the time even if none of them are dying

And ultimately you end up like the IJN air force in WW2 where you run out of skilled crew and lose to an enemy whose crew has survived the entire war and run circles around you.

The situation gets even more exaggerated if building a ship 10% as durable as one of your bricks costs me, say, 20% of what one of your bricks costs. At that point, my fleets outnumber you so badly that it stops mattering if you manage to kill a few of them, because I can stampede over you anyway.

Than I will swat you away like flies time and time again forcing you to replace more and more craft spending more and more time and resources on expensive engines and other systems whilst all I have to do is replace cheap stuff that can be done within a day in dry dock. Plus, your crews will be demoralized from loosing so many men and question you for letting them fly in such suicide coffins.

[Simon_Jester]

Purple, I have to say, you're so dogmatic about this stuff that it becomes comical.

...Why, is your entire civilization collectively sterile and incapable of teaching anyone to do anything ever?

How can you even ask that question? How can crew not be importmant? The crew is who control what the ship does. Without them it's an inert mass of iron.

Most of it is already an inert mass of iron anyway.

What sane nation would regard that cost as tiny compared to the cost of re-training the crew? Especially if all the complicated jobs are done by machinery anyway, so that the crew's skill level and training requirements are reduced?

That's like saying that becouse of computers and guided missiles the skill level of pilots is irrelevant and you should strap anyone into a fighter jet. Yes, the skill levels are reduced and there are a lot less janitors and dish washers. But the true skilled crew is still a valuable commodity just like in any modern warship or tank or aircraft or what ever.

That value is finite. It takes a finite amount of money and labor to train a man to do a job. It takes a finite opportunity cost to pull a man off some other job and make him do this military job. From the point of view of a wartime military, and this is very important, the value of human lives on your own side is finite.

There can be material expenses great enough that it is worth losing men rather than plunking down the money or steel or concrete to do the job, because you can quite literally lose the war if you squander your material resources, even if you still have all your men alive at the end somehow (unlikely).

Your ships are designed as if the crew's life has infinite value, such that losing any crew member means terrible, overwhelming defeat while expending unlimited material resources is acceptable. If the crew's life is so precious, why the hell are you fighting a war in the first place? It would probably be cheaper to give the other guy whatever they want, or to run away, and either option would involve much less risk of precious life being lost.

But instead, you insist on fighting the war, and on putting squishy people on this ship, concentrating them all in an overprotected steel box that costs far more than the amount of resources it would take to train those people's replacements. There is no thought of simply dispersing the crew through the ship (as normal in real life) so that the crew can continue to operate the ship even if it is damaged. No, you must put all your eggs in one basket, then make the ship ridiculous in order to ensure that the basket can never be damaged by enemy action.

Why do you even put human beings on these ships, anyway? If the IFF is so good they always know who the enemy is, and the onboard AI is capable of maintaining, fixing, and fighting on its own with minimal guidance from humans (who are locked in a steel coffin several kilometers from the fighting anyway)... what's the point?

The more I read your post the more I think you are not getting it one bit. I mean AI? I newer mentioned anythign about any AI. You made that up. And without that, your argument in essence boils down to saying that becouse of things like smart missiles and fly by wire pilot skill no longer matters in fighter jets.

We are actually very close to that point. Autonomous UAVs capable of taking off and landing, and of firing missiles, already exist. The biggest thing that keeps us from building robot fighter jets is target identification- and you claim to have already solved the IFF problem.

Also, perhaps you did not know this, but in the English language "AI" is often used to describe computer systems less intelligent than a human being but still capable of making decisions. Like the "AI" in a computer game- have you heard of that?

So screw 'magic' AI. You don't need it to build a robot battleship.

For a start, how hard do you think it is to have a simple transmitter system for every person that acts as a communicator/tracker inside a limited and enclosed space like that of a starship. It can't be that hard since we do that today with cell phones. So why should each member of my crew not have a cell phone that tracks where he is? Add to that security cameras that some guy in the security room is watching and you have all you need. As a bonus, you can add some minimum software to recognize a humanoid form or even just a motion tracker and match the camera location with the known locations of crew members and flash a warning light if camera X shows something moving when trackers say all crew are accounted for and no one should be near camera X. It's 20th century technology. No one is talking about magical AI recognition, just plain old 20th century security.

...What on earth are you talking about? My point is that the technology is good enough. Unless your people smacked themselves over the head repeatedly until everything about computer technology discovered after 1990 or so has been forgotten permanently, they should be quite capable of building ships like this, but with much less armor, and a robotic system to manage the ship.

If your people are such cowards that they refuse to send men into battle without fifty cubic kilometers of armor wrapped around them, why not just send robots? What are human beings doing here that cannot be automated, given that you're already having the whole ship be so thoroughly remote-controlled that the ship's damage control systems can't function without a significant degree of automation as it is?

Seriously, I don't mean to insult you or be aggressive but I have to ask you. How does me having things that can be built today with electronics from the corner store translate in your mind to having AI that can control the ship?

Because we probably could build AI that can control the ship, using electronics only a very little more advanced than what's on the corner store.

I wouldn't even be asking this question if it weren't for the fact that whoever builds your ships obviously values one human life at more than a billion tons of steel production. For the cost of a billion tons of steel, you could very easily come up with an automated system to replace almost any job imaginable.

If the enemy is building two, or three, or four times as many ships that take the same amount of time and firepower to disable... they're gonna win. A lot. Because they will outnumber and outgun you, and all you gain is that your ships survive losing more battles while being pushed back and sent to the repair yards every time they fight on account of their surface features have been blown to bits.

But my elite crews are what makes starships so effective. A skilled crew makes a disproportionate difference. Furthermore, it takes many times less resources and time to rebuild a starship whose most costly and hard to make components (crew, FTL, internal systems, power plants etc.) are still intact and you just have to bolt on new turrets than it takes to build new ships from scratch after they are blown up.

If your weapons are so dirt-cheap compared to the cost of the ship, you are doing something badly wrong, since the purpose of a warship is to deliver weapons to where they can be fired at the enemy.

And finally I don't know where you are geting your numbers from. 100X... yea sure. Do we make modern tanks unarmored with the logic that since a hand grenade can kill it's sensors and plug up machine guns there should be no armor for the crew?

Modern tanks get shot at by individual antitank weapons that can penetrate very heavy armor. This forces the tank to use extremely heavy armor to resist those weapons and keep fighting. Your ships are not- the weapons are popguns compared to the scale of the armor scheme.

Cutting the armor down by a factor of two would vastly reduce the cost and difficulty of building the ship... without meaningfully affecting its survivability in combat. Because either way, the ship just gets pounded until the surface features are wrecked, then runs away. It doesn't make any difference whether it takes four times, or ten times, or a million times more fire to destroy the ship than it would to wreck the surface; the battle is only going to last until the surface is wrecked- then the ship is either helpless and crippled, or going to run away.

With small things like tanks if it takes X energy to punch through your ship to blow it up I can apply X energy and you are dead. Alternatively I can apply X/10 energy and you are going to be in trouble due to a mission kill. But with ships of this size if you apply X/10 energy and all you will get is a ship with 90% of it's systems still shooting at you. So it makes perfect sense to invest some money to have 2X or 3X extra protection for the crew just like it makes sense to have 1000Y protection for the crew of a tank when all it takes is Y to blow it's sensors off.

You will also note that Jutland was a colossal defeat for the German Navy and they never stuck their necks out of Wilhelmshaven again, being effectively neutered for the rest of the war...

Only becouse of the overwhelming numbers on the British side that made the whole battle redundant anyway. In a 1 on 1 numbers battle the German fleet would have been up and running in a few months while the British would have had to build more ships and train fresh crews. And I have a large enough industry that I can outnumber my enemies whilst building ships like these.

One of the reasons the Germans were outnumbered is because their ships were too expensive and they couldn't build as fast as the British. I wonder why that might be... [looks at German ship design] Oh, right.

All else being equal, I can afford twice as many ships as you. Say you have 10 ships; I have 20.

And your 20 ships will suck compared to my 1 becouse my crews are more skilled.

Are they? Do you really think I can't draw a large enough pool of skilled and trained manpower out of a planetary population, with the vast economic resources required to build these ships, to come close to matching you in crew quality?

It is much harder than you think to produce one ultra-trained man or group of men capable of defeating a group twice their size, when the equipment on both sides is of equal quality. The idea that one ship can beat two, or three, or five, or ten identical ships because OMG SUPERIOR CREWS is a childish fantasy brought on by watching too much bad fiction.

This is just absurd wank- you're saying that your bad design logic doesn't matter because your people are so superior that they automatically win even when they're outnumbered by ships designed without your bad logic.

My fleet shows up and fires 2X shots in the time it takes you to fire X shots, because I have twice as many ships. I disable two of your flying bricks, you disable one of my battleships. Your bricks run away, my battleship runs away. Now I have 19 ships to your 8.

Except that my battleships that you disabled will be repaired and back in action in a week and your smaller craft have to be rebuilt from scratch taking months.

Nope. My ships weren't destroyed; they just ran away, like yours. The only difference is that they have a somewhat narrower margin of error between "surface features wrecked until ship's ability to fight is reduced" and "ship is totally annihilated." Which doesn't matter, since the margin of error was already insanely huge anyway.

All I have to do is build ships with one kilometer of armor instead of two; I still win, because I get all the real advantages of your ship design school on much smaller, cheaper hulls. Sure, I may occasionally lose a ship, but the odds are going to favor me being able to keep a permanent, overwhelming numerical superiority over you anyway.

Also, a week to repair damage on the scale you're talking about? Hah. Very funny, unless industrial techniques are good enough that I can replace the damn ships in a lot less than months.

Your ships spend proportionately more of the time in drydock, your military gets demoralized from being outnumbered and beaten up all the time even if none of them are dying

And ultimately you end up like the IJN air force in WW2 where you run out of skilled crew and lose to an enemy whose crew has survived the entire war and run circles around you.

Exactly how much does it cost to train reserve crews for new construction, anyway? How on earth did you end up in a situation where running a ship's crew through training school costs more than the fucking ship, when the ships are multi-kilometer dreadnoughts?

The situation gets even more exaggerated if building a ship 10% as durable as one of your bricks costs me, say, 20% of what one of your bricks costs. At that point, my fleets outnumber you so badly that it stops mattering if you manage to kill a few of them, because I can stampede over you anyway.

Than I will swat you away like flies time and time again forcing you to replace more and more craft spending more and more time and resources on expensive engines and other systems whilst all I have to do is replace cheap stuff that can be done within a day in dry dock. Plus, your crews will be demoralized from loosing so many men and question you for letting them fly in such suicide coffins.

Bullshit. The way you wank your ship, a ship with 10% of the durability will still survive extended pounding matches- it's just that the crew has (gasp!) only 500 meters of armor between them and death instead of 5000 meters of armor.

[Zixinus]

Ok, not sure if this is covered but:

Why not make plasma in a small chamber and accurate it out trough an ionising laser? Plasma is ionised gas so it should follow a counter-pole ionised path, right?

[Imperial528]

Modern tanks get shot at by individual antitank weapons that can penetrate very heavy armor. This forces the tank to use extremely heavy armor to resist those weapons and keep fighting. Your ships are not- the weapons are popguns compared to the scale of the armor scheme.

I'd like to use this to make a point, if you don't mind, Simon.

In the setting, there are several factions, each with different design philosophies. As you have pointed out, the weapons Purple uses are vastly underpowered relative to the total amount of punishment the ship can withstand.

One of the setting's factions is my creation, and my faction builds thickly armored, multi-kilometer star dreadnoughts as well. However, compared to Purple's ships, mine have very thin armor, even ones several hundred times the size of his (don't ask). This alone seems to make his design philosophy more logical, because it will take less firepower to mission-kill one of my ships than his. But, my ships also don't waste the many cubic kilometers of volume on inert metal, instead they are used for shield generators, backup power generators, larger weapons, and in most warships, massive spinal weapon mounts. To illustrate, I have produced a screenshot:



As you can see at the front there is a massive circular opening and a channel cut into the deck, this is a spinal energy weapon, its diameter is about 3% of the ship's length, which is about 40km, to put it into perspective. (IIRC most of Purple's ships are in the 15-20km range, although the cited ship is an exception rather than a rule, most of my ships fall into the 2-15km range, however they are designed with the same philosophy in mind.)

In the past I have tried to explain to Purple just how foolish his designs are if my ships can easily sterilize the surface of his ships, and then not be hindered at all in destroying the rest of it. But I haven't been very successful in convincing him, as you can tell.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

...Why, is your entire civilization collectively sterile and incapable of teaching anyone to do anything ever?

How can you even ask that question? How can crew not be importmant?
The crew is who control what the ship does. Without them it's an inert mass of iron.

Let's approach it from a cost/benefit analysis. How much does it cost to train a crewperson to run the ship. If we assume that an officer receives a training equivalent to a degree at MIT, it costs $156,000 to train him. An enlisted rating costs about $35,000 for initial training plus however much it costs to train them in a specialty. We'll assume $7500, which is the cost of a one semester college course. So if you had a ridiculously huge crew comprised of 9000 able-bodied spacemen and 900 officers, the total cost of training them is about . . . $523 million.

The cost of building a 100,000 ton Nimitz? $4.5 billion. As a simplistic measure, $45,000 per ton. Since you describe your ships as being mostly a box surrounded by a kilometers of armor, I will model your ship as a 5000 meter diameter iron asteroid made up of 50% empty space. It weighs 257.5 billion tons. So, taking the cost per ton stated above, your ship costs . . . oh, the best part of $12,000 trillion. In reality, the cost would probably be lower, but not so low as to be within shouting distance of building a dinky little Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. If we were to assume one of your ships costs just one trillion dollars (or Space Rubles, or whatever,) that's still about 2000X the cost of training the crew. According to the Rand Corporation, an aircraft carrier costs about $100 million per year to maintain. Again, going by the simple expedient of dividing cost by mass, we get an ongoing cost of $1000 per ton per year. The cost of maintaining one of your ships could be $2.57 trillion dollars per year. Even if I scaled down by 12,000, it still costs over $214 billion per year to maintain your ridiculously over-armored box.

If we assumed every person aboard the ship cost $100,000 per year to maintain (in terms of salary, benefits, and ongoing training,) we come up with an ongoing crew maintenance cost of less than a billion dollars per year.

tl;dr - The cost of training and maintaining your crew is an insignificant fraction of building and maintaining the ships they're living on.

[Simon_Jester]

Modern tanks get shot at by individual antitank weapons that can penetrate very heavy armor. This forces the tank to use extremely heavy armor to resist those weapons and keep fighting. Your ships are not- the weapons are popguns compared to the scale of the armor scheme.

One of the setting's factions is my creation, and my faction builds thickly armored, multi-kilometer star dreadnoughts as well. However, compared to Purple's ships, mine have very thin armor, even ones several hundred times the size of his (don't ask). This alone seems to make his design philosophy more logical, because it will take less firepower to mission-kill one of my ships than his.

No, it does not.

Two separate ideas belong here: "mission-kill" and "catastrophic kill."

"Mission kill" means that for the purposes of this battle, the unit is no longer capable of operating effectively and is no longer contributing much. "Catastrophic kill" means it is kaput, gone, blown to bits, never to be repaired.

It is very hard to catastrophic-kill one of Purple's ships, but much less hard to mission-kill it. Purple's notion is that by making catastrophic-kills difficult, you somehow make it impossible for the ships to ever really lose a fight. This is not true- historical experience on damage to large ships is that it can take months to patch them up properly. Better construction techniques help with that, but then the ships are made so much larger that it probably cancels out.

My main point is that without making mission-kills more difficult, one can make catastrophic kills theoretically more possible, but still quite unlikely... and produce vastly more, vastly easier to maintain and repair ships for the same cost.

But Purple is being a fool about this, doggedly clinging to a handful of half-understood military maxims at the expense of all other concerns, so this will probably not get through to him.

[Imperial528]

Ah, thank you for the clarification on mission-kills and catastrophic-kills.

However, I don't think you fully understood what I was saying in my post, which is my fault for not being clear enough. What I was trying to get at is something I've debated with Purple before, and it ties into how easy or hard it is to mission-kill a ship. The way his ships are designed, in order to actually destroy a weapon, you have to go through the outer layer of armor first. This is in stark contrast to mine, where the weapon turrets sit directly on the main hull, and although they are armored themselves, it would be, all things being equal, easier to mission kill my ships first, since vital parts of the weapons are exposed.

Every time I have debated Purple on this and it has progressed to this point, he fails to understand that this does not hold due to the firepower disparity per weapon. Say you have weapons A and B, A has a firepower of X, and there are 100 of A, and B a firepower of 10X, and there are 10 of B. A is beneath a layer of armor that requires 20x firepower to remove, while B sits in a turret that can be destroyed with only 5x. When in a debate with Purple, I bring up the scenario, and he says "Ah ha, it takes less firepower to destroy your weapons than mine, which means I will win first!", and in response I bring up that he will require 250 shots to mission-kill me, while I only require 200 to mission kill him*. At this point he starts talking about how his ships are more durable, how they take hours to destroy, how he will still escape, and how his ship's greater number of weapons means he can shoot at more ships at once than mine. I point out that they take hours to destroy with ships built to his doctrine, not mine, and that being able to fire at more targets at once isn't much of an advantage when the targets you are firing at are killing you faster than you are them, and he loops back to the firepower argument.

Believe me, this can go on forever. Although out of the active debaters in the RPG, he is among the calmer ones. That doesn't make him more reasonable, though.

*The actual disparity is greater than this on a per-weapon basis, but I'm not going to do the math right now.

[AniThyng]

And ultimately you end up like the IJN air force in WW2 where you run out of skilled crew and lose to an enemy whose crew has survived the entire war and run circles around you.

I think the real lesson to take away from this (and also the Nazi experience) is that there's no point having a super elite core bolstered by barely trained replacements (because it takes forever to train elite troops) if your opponent is more evenly well trained overall, with veterans regularly rotated back home to train the upcoming batch rather then staying on the front where he ultimately only hones himself and the few people around him?

[avatarxprime]

Well what do you all think of actual plasma weapons like those suggested by Electron Power Systems. There early work was refuted by NASA in a review of the technology (available on their site under "technology"), but in a response they claim they dealt with NASA's concerns, although it forced them to lower their initial estimates. Still I found this floating around the interwebs and its supposed to have happened after the NASA stuff. Here's an excerpt from a draft of a report.

Potential Operational Payoff: used as KEWs, even a tiny (microscopic-scale)
EST would generate enough kinetic energy to destroy any military vehicle or
projectile operating in the atmosphere, including solid-rod anti-armor
penetrators. These charge-neutral plasmas would be produced in large numbers
in rapid succession to form a steerable beam. Impact velocities of 600
km/sec, possibly several times higher, may be possible, based on MIT's
extrapolation of AFRL's compact-toroid acceleration experiments for vacuum.

Metrics:
- Effects: target destruction by kinetic impacts far above hyper velocities
(defined by the speed of sound in metal and nonmetal targets)
- Speed: up to 600 km/sec (MIT estimate), possibly up to 2000 km/sec (EPS
estimate)
- Range: endoatmospheric line-of-sight up to space/atmosphere boundary
(officially defined as 62 miles)
- Power requirements: EPS proposes using EST mini-fusion reactors, whose
initial power could be provided by a car battery, to produce and accelerate
its ESTs.

Cost: no cost data available. The complexity of reliable mini-toroid
formation and acceleration with compact, relatively low-cost equipment
remains to be determined. Yet the fact that the EPS/MIT STTR work this
technology has attracted interest from Delphi is very significant, as the
automotive electronics industry is considered to be extremely demanding of
functionality per dollar and pound (e.g., mil-spec performance at
Wal-Mart-class 'commodity' prices).

I added some formatting to make it easier to glance through the excerpt I quoted. Also, incase anyone is wondering, the fusion reactors reference in the above quote are theoretical fusion reactors EPS came up with. Essentially you fire two electron spiral toroids (ESTs) at each other and they believe in the collision they should stick together and the plasma ions should fuse.

I tried searching, but couldn't find any site that hosted anything other than this draft that one of the people working for EPS posted himself, so take it with a grain of salt. I did eventually find the original posting of it though, you can read it here. It's an exchange posted between the EPS scientist and another individual. The full draft and some other comments are all there, I only posted an excerpt.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think that site looks like very obvious bullshit, which has not been updated in years and appears to cite a fictional peer review. Grain of salt? More like salt mine.

[Purple]

The main problem with you all is that you assume the two are exclusive. As in, you assume that becouse I am trying to prevent catastrophic kills no effort has gone into making mission kills more difficult. When in reality there is really not much more I could do to in that respect. I already use redundant power generators and localized fire control computers for the individual guns but the targeting has to come from somewhere. The same thing goes for most things. I can pile up armor over areas like shield generators and power plants but things that mater in a fight, weapons and sensors and stuff like that have to be exposed on the surface of starships. You can't hide those and you can't really pile up armor over them either. Sure, I can armor them enough to withstand several shots worth of my main battery each but there comes a point where this becomes just too impractical. If I add enough armor for my gun turrets to withstand a spinal mount 3km gun the thing is not going to be able to rotate let alone fire. And you imagine trying to use a radar antenna through several KM worth of metal. I mean, what am I to do, shift a million tons of metal open and closed every time I have to fire a shot or scan for something? No mater how you put it the things that need to interact with the outside world are going to be a weak point. It is absolutely the same logic that goes into tanks or real life warships. You amour each part according to how much you can practically add.

The best thing I can hope to do at this point is make sure that my ships take X to mission kill and Y to catastrophic kill and than ensure that Y>X and X> what ever the comparable enemy can dish out. The plan being that even if his spinal gun or prolonged bombardment blows off all the guns on one side of my ship the ship can just turn around and keep firing as opposed to blow up into space dust.

[Purple]

Also to add one more thing. Originally, these ships were not going to have any shielding. As such, armor would be their shields.

[Simon_Jester]

The main problem with you all is that you assume the two are exclusive. As in, you assume that becouse I am trying to prevent catastrophic kills no effort has gone into making mission kills more difficult. When in reality there is really not much more I could do to in that respect...

No, you've got it backwards.

The point is that when you make catastrophic kills so hard, by making your ships individually so expensive, while mission-kills are still relatively easy, you stupidly and pointlessly cripple your fleet. An enemy can, for the same cost, build a vastly greater number of ships and throw them against yours, simply by leaving off some of the preposterous redundancy and excessive armor-thickness you attribute to your designs.

Their ship loses nothing but the ability to survive for hours as a blind, disarmed hulk- and in exchange, the fleet of your enemy gains the ability to bring more weapons to the battlefield, mission-kill your ships more quickly, and put large numbers of them in drydock for repairs at will. They occasionally lose a ship, but not often, certainly not against the popguns you arm your ships with, the ones that take hours to do any damage to an enemy ship built to roughly the same scale.

You do not gain massively battle-experienced crews; the only really important experience they have is of running away after someone blows the guns and sensors off their ship for the fiftieth time. The enemy, meanwhile, defeats your fleets repeatedly, forces them into drydocks, can attack them in drydock, and captures whatever objectives they're trying to defend.

The best thing I can hope to do at this point is make sure that my ships take X to mission kill and Y to catastrophic kill and than ensure that Y>X and X> what ever the comparable enemy can dish out. The plan being that even if his spinal gun or prolonged bombardment blows off all the guns on one side of my ship the ship can just turn around and keep firing as opposed to blow up into space dust.

If the enemy's ships take X to mission kill and Y/2 to catastrophic-kill, and (Y/2) is still greater than X, you're going to lose. Because he outnumbers you, but for practical purposes his ships are no less dangerous to their enemies or resistant to being destroyed in action than yours.

Fleets lose ships sometimes. It happens. It is not the ultimate disaster that can happen to a navy.

[Purple]

If the enemy's ships take X to mission kill and Y/2 to catastrophic-kill, and (Y/2) is still greater than X, you're going to lose. Because he outnumbers you, but for practical purposes his ships are no less dangerous to their enemies or resistant to being destroyed in action than yours.

Fleets lose ships sometimes. It happens. It is not the ultimate disaster that can happen to a navy.

You are saying that the margin between X and Y should be smaller than some Z while you don't even know what that Z is as you don't know what my Y is as you can not know what the Y is becouse you don't realize that kilometers worth of armor is the equivalent of a very thin armor plate when facing things like spinal mounts. Having such levels of armor does not make my ships a million times more durable, the difference between X and Y is a single digit factor and not a triple digit one.

[Simon_Jester]

If the enemy's ships take X to mission kill and Y/2 to catastrophic-kill, and (Y/2) is still greater than X, you're going to lose. Because he outnumbers you, but for practical purposes his ships are no less dangerous to their enemies or resistant to being destroyed in action than yours.

Fleets lose ships sometimes. It happens. It is not the ultimate disaster that can happen to a navy.

You are saying that the margin between X and Y should be smaller than some Z while you don't even know what that Z is as you don't know what my Y is as you can not know what the Y is becouse you don't realize that kilometers worth of armor is the equivalent of a very thin armor plate when facing things like spinal mounts. Having such levels of armor does not make my ships a million times more durable, the difference between X and Y is a single digit factor and not a triple digit one.

It would really not be difficult to design weapons capable of neutralizing the surface features of a ship like yours, especially without magic energy shields to stop high energy particle flux from frying electronics. This would be so much less energy-intensive than boiling away gigatons of armor. You could do it from longer ranges, with smaller weapons, on more numerous ships.

Besides which, you yourself talk, over and over, about the extreme survivability of these ships. If suddenly enemy weapons are more powerful and the amount of armor you've added is so limited compared to their firepower... why don't you mount such powerful weapons yourself?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The main problem with you all is that you assume the two are exclusive.

And the main problem with you is that your head is so far up your ass that you can read the size tags on your shirts from underneath.

As in, you assume that becouse I am trying to prevent catastrophic kills no effort has gone into making mission kills more difficult.

The problem is that if you want to have a warship that shoots missiles or PEW-PEW laser murderdeathkillrays at other warships, you're going to have to expose some expensive bit somewhere and risk having it shot off.

When in reality there is really not much more I could do to in that respect. I already use redundant power generators and localized fire control computers for the individual guns but the targeting has to come from somewhere. The same thing goes for most things. I can pile up armor over areas like shield generators and power plants but things that mater in a fight, weapons and sensors and stuff like that have to be exposed on the surface of starships. You can't hide those and you can't really pile up armor over them either. Sure, I can armor them enough to withstand several shots worth of my main battery each but there comes a point where this becomes just too impractical. If I add enough armor for my gun turrets to withstand a spinal mount 3km gun the thing is not going to be able to rotate let alone fire. And you imagine trying to use a radar antenna through several KM worth of metal. I mean, what am I to do, shift a million tons of metal open and closed every time I have to fire a shot or scan for something? No mater how you put it the things that need to interact with the outside world are going to be a weak point. It is absolutely the same logic that goes into tanks or real life warships. You amour each part according to how much you can practically add.

And here, you just blithely stated all the reasons why your great white space whales are ultimately a stupid idea . . . and then insist that your great white space whale is a great idea.

The best thing I can hope to do at this point is make sure that my ships take X to mission kill and Y to catastrophic kill and than ensure that Y>X and X> what ever the comparable enemy can dish out. The plan being that even if his spinal gun or prolonged bombardment blows off all the guns on one side of my ship the ship can just turn around and keep firing as opposed to blow up into space dust.

And if your great white space whale can kill (pulling a number out of my ass) five less-armored and cheaper superfuckerkillships before they can mission-kill you, then all your opponent has to do is build six. Or build ten, and send six after your great white whale, and five more to strike at its support bases; since you presumably don't have infinite money and can't build infinite great white space whales.

If I could build a ship that carries a single '3 km spinal mount' and I could mount it, in say, a 3000x500x500 meter box . . . the box with the single main weapon has about 1/88th the internal volume of the great white space whale (were you great white space whale a perfectly spherical ship five km in diameter.) Which means it'll cost 1/88th as much, so I could either build 88 of them for the cost of one great white space whale, or I can build enough to reliably kill a great white space whale plus however many support ships I need to reliably murder your supply lines.

[Purple]

It would really not be difficult to design weapons capable of neutralizing the surface features of a ship like yours, especially without magic energy shields to stop high energy particle flux from frying electronics. This would be so much less energy-intensive than boiling away gigatons of armor. You could do it from longer ranges, with smaller weapons, on more numerous ships.

I did say originally, not presently.

Besides which, you yourself talk, over and over, about the extreme survivability of these ships. If suddenly enemy weapons are more powerful and the amount of armor you've added is so limited compared to their firepower... why don't you mount such powerful weapons yourself?

Their strongest spinally mounted weapons are powerful enough to gut my weapon turrets but are rare. Ergo it makes sense to protect my ship from them but to make this less of a priority than protecting it from enemy average rate weapons. The things they use in normal warfare and not for masturbatory Death Star situations. Their average rate weapons are strong enough to after a sustained bombardment start chipping away at my turrets and eventually blow my ship apart. My average rate weapons are of the same strength as theirs since going larger + mass production incurs significant costs in power requirements and ammunition storage among other things. How much shells for his gun do you think he can put in that ship? And if his ship can die to my average grade shells just fine ten times over in the time it takes him to aim, load and fire his spinal mount than who is right?

What you suggest is the equivalent of saying that since a RPG7 can score a mission kill on modern tanks we should strip all of their armor save the minimum to protect them self from a RPG7. After all, a mission killed tank is as good as dead right?

And what GMT suggests is building an army of glorified one shot missile ships that will be about as useful as the Dora. Yes it can kill just about anything this side of Sevastopol but try hitting a moving target with it.

[avatarxprime]

I think that site looks like very obvious bullshit, which has not been updated in years and appears to cite a fictional peer review. Grain of salt? More like salt mine.

I'm doubtful of it too, hence why my post is entirely couched in the language of "maybe but probably not." Still, if the technology could function at even 50% of what they are describing it would still be an incredible thing to have. A plasma that is stable in an atmosphere without requiring any outside containment has so much potential. Heck, if it just has the potential of leading to a technology that would work as advertised it would be rather cool.

Also, what fictional peer review are you talking about? The journal they published in is a real journal as is the NASA response.