Xeelee Nightfighter vs. Culture GOU

[ChosenOne54]

Culture ships, from what I've seen, seem to be the definition of the word 'overpowered,' but having just read Exultant, and being a third of the way through Vacuum Diagrams, I was wondering how a single Culture GOU (excession era) would fare against a single Xeelee Nightfighter. Both are incredibly durable, andboth seem to use FTL in combat (I'm not entirely sure if this is true of the Nightfighter, but I've seem people claim this), but which one would prevail? If one of either ships is not enough, then how many ships would be required to defeat the opponent?

[Sriad]

(I'm overdue to reread some Xeelee books so the details may be sketchy, but I'm confident this is generally right.)

The problem with matching anyone against Culture ships are their reaction times and effective range. We don't see ship-to-ship engagements in the light-year range and what we do see, regardless of time-traveling computers, takes a humanly perceptible length of time to resolve. A Nightfighter's frame is a hair's-bredth from being indestructible but there are breakable components that would definitely break with the application of a couple grams of CAM. Additionally we see FTL used only to get from place to place on the battlefield (battle-volume) and send data back in time. As best I can recall we've never seen combat in hyperspace.

The Xeelee absolutely have the ability to field warships that could beat the Culture's best, but we haven't seen them, only the evidence of the technology. In spite of all efforts humanity was never more than a tertiary concern for the Xeelee universally; small enough that they--based on whatever logic drives them--didn't feel the need to field forces other than what they already used against the birds. It may run counter to normal debate rules on this board to put it this way, but the reason we don't see ships that can beat ROUs is simply that 1: the tactics that would work against Ships would be ineffective against Photino birds and 2: they didn't get serious about humanity until we started threatening The Ring in earnest, which we haven't directly seen afaik.

If you have enough Nightfighters to weather the ROU's initial barrage--say a swarm of a couple thousand spread across a light-hour--they could travel back in time over and over and warn themselves about what was coming and formulate the best possible response, but you're still dealing a Flash vs. Jedi scenario (Quicksilver vs Jedi at best) even assuming they can shoot into hyperspace. The only on-page advantages the Nightfliers have are their structural durability, VASTLY superior FTL, and total acceptance of individual casualties.

[ChosenOne54]

Do we have any accurate calcs or yields for the Starbreaker Beams that the Xeelee use? Apart from obviously causing stars to supernova, how destructive are they? In one particular passage from Exultant, a group of Nightfighters swarm around one asteroid and manage to destroy it with continuous fire, and the passage was not overly impressive to be honest. The other example is of humans being split open by Starbreakers.

I've actually seen claims that Starbreakers have the power of 'several Death Star beams combined,' but nothing I've seen in any of the novels really supports this claim.

Of course, this could all be attributed to the fact that the Xeelee were fighting the Photino Birds, and such weapons were tailored to that purpose, as you mentioned.

[ThomasP]

The first mention of the starbreaker comes from the story Blue Shift, where the Qax find a pistol-sized gun that emits radiation at various power settings, so it's got a range of output.

Throughout the rest of the books and stories, starbreaker beams are doing everything from cooking food to casually ripping stars apart. Baxter describes them as something like a "laser" of gravity-waves (which is apparently effective on the Photino birds), and there's no mention or implication of any magic behind it -- beam fires, things go boom. There are a handful of instances where the beams cause anything from large craters to planet-killing and shredding stars.

[ChosenOne54]

Interesting. Do you happen to have quotes?

[Sriad]

Nailing down numbers for starbreakers is like trying to figure out "how powerful is a laser in Star Wars". The most impressive instance I can think of that doesn't involve shooting stars is around the end of Vacuum Diagrams, when they're used on planetary defense systems (housed on Jupiter IIRC) but it's been a long time since I read the book; my memory of the sequence is hazy.

Getting a handle for the power of Xeelee ships is hard partly because our understanding of their psychology is extremely limited. A charitable interpretation of what we see is that they feel a measure of pity for the other baryonic races and give them free reign, even at their own expense, to whatever extent doesn't endanger The Ring and their war against the Photino Birds. Why else LET mankind drive them out of the Milky Way and run rampant across the universe for literally hundreds of thousands of years? Their actions are hard to explain any other way.

One retraction on my first post: we sort-of see that the Xeelee can work with hyperspace perfectly well from the inhabitable hypercube in "The 8th Room". I think it's acceptable to infer that hyperspatial combat wouldn't be a problem.

[Xon]

The Xeelee hyperdrive is fairly exotic too.

The best description we have of it is the hyperdrive permits the rotation of everything in the field through the hidden 6 or so dimensions which are normally curled up on themselves. Later, and during the Exaltant book and the like they actually use the Hyperdrive to partially rotate the field so stuff like stellar radiation simply doesn't interact with the contents of the hyperspace field but you can still land a ship into it.

Most obvious example is when a bunch of extremist steal Stonehenge with a bunch of micro-singularities to provide gravity and a hyperdrive, humans can sit out in the open inside flux tube between Jupiter & Io and be completely protected from the enviroment.

[andrewgpaul]

Never mind - I deleted this post because I made a mistake.

[ChosenOne54]

So, the Culture GOU has an advantage due to it's ridiculous reflexes and range, and the Nightfighter with its comparatively ridiculous FTL speed, and insane durability.

[ChosenOne54]

Well, I've finished reading Vacuum Diagrams, and there were a couple passages that stood out to me. The first, near the end, when the Nightfighter is Spoiler

building a new Earth

, it talks of the Nightfighter carving out Fjords with a couple bursts of its starbreaker beam. In another passage, a starbreaker beam, used on some ancient planetary defense system, creates a blast about a quarter of the size of Saturn.