Standard Sci-Fi Fleet

[Corvus 501]

This is my take on the standard sci Fi fleet. I'm looking for holes in the fleet design. These ase the ship types that I've thought of so far.
Battleships: They come with heavy armor, two spinal mass drivers capable of accelerating a 2,000 kilogram tungsten/depleted uranium projectile at around 12% of light speed, as primary weapons. Secondary weapons include missile tubes (capable of launching everything from anti single ship cluster missiles to capitol missiles. Also considered secondary weapons, are turret mounted deck guns. These are combination laser/mass driver weapons, set so the gigawatt range heavy laser cannon can fire through the barrel of the gauss cannon that is the mass driver for long range fighting. The armor is honeycombed titanium biased alloy, set on a high refractory steel alloy frame. The hull itself has hydraulic reinforcements, vacuumed proof individual compartments, and and a modular, easily reparable format.
They generally are used as ships of the line, as much as that concept applies in space. They will attack large formations, stop breakthroughs, assault planets, and generally take any job whose main requirement is to soak up massive damage, and not stop fighting till they are a debre cloud.
For shields, they, like most ships, carry heavy anti laser EM shields, and anti projectile plasma barriers. When combined, they can stop most any laser or projectile, if it hits the right shield.
They carry surprisingly small crews, basically command, engineering, and medical, with most of the rest of the crew as damage control, with a few marines. Their systems are heavily automated, mostly to keep crew numbers down, preventing as many casualties as possible.
Battle Cruisers: built as a a fast battleship, they carry the shields and primary weapons of a battleship, but only the armor of a cruiser. However, they do carry drives that make them faster than even cruisers, though still not as fast as a frigate.
Generally, they are used as fast response vessels, exploration, raiding, and police vessels, especially when dealing with heavy pirate raids. Sense pirates generally don't have the sort of logistical support to deploy anything heavier than a destroyer, and pirate "fleets" generally consist of frigates and freighters, easily taken down by interceptors, backed by planetary defense centers. When a battlecruiser hits them, there isn't much left, if they don't surrender.
In wartime, they act as heavy scouts, and raiders, disrupting enemy supply lines, taking out targets of opportunity. They carry heavier crews, as they are designed for longer deployments, where breakdowns can take truly strange forms, and original discoveries are sometimes made. The crews are generally multi skilled, and the captains independent, accustomed to having no direct contact with command, or, for that matter, anyone but a few frigates accompanying them. Engineering and medical both carry genuine scientist, and the crew tends to carry more than a few amature ones.
Cruisers: Cruisers are the mainstay capitol ships of most human fleets. Built to a more generalist design that that of battleships or battlecruisers, they can go anywhere and do most anything. They carry only a single battleship grade spinal mass driver, but have more missile tubes, and carry more deck guns. Their armor and shields may not be up to battleship levels, but they to can take and dish out some rather heavy damage in their own right, never mind when working together in fleets, as in their design. Battleships may be the core of any formation, and carriers may give them an unparalleled range advantage, but without cruisers and destroyers, anything that gets past the frigate screening units can do untold damage to the carriers, and would lower the ammunition reserves of the battleships, and might even prematurely damage their armor!
Destroyers: Think cruisers with lighter armor in exchange for heavier weapons. They cram in a bigger missile reserve, more launch tubes, and more deck guns, all in exchange for somewhat lighter armor. Not exactly a eggshell with a sledgehammer, but they do make good support ships.
Frigates: Armed with a few overcharged pulse lasers (about half again as powerful as a battleship's, they use power like a spinal mass driver, without the recoil), and no deck guns, they do have an impressive missile launch capability, for their size.
Corvettes: They have two uses: police work as orbital guard (think Coast Guard in space) and as point defense platforms. Only offensive weapons is a pulse lasers, a little more powerful than a battleship's.
Carriers: They sacrifice almost every offensive weapon in favor of their ability to launch parasite craft, everything from assault shuttles to fighter drones. About a third again the size of a battleship, they are the biggest human ship in space short of supper freighter, or tanker.
All ships types named are warp capable. The warp drive forms a warp bubble that takes the gravaty well of a Juputor sized planet to break the warp bubble, something that causes a large energy flash. It's considered a bad idea to put any space stations in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant for this reason. The warp bubble dosn't interact much with normal space much, so it isn't much of a planet buster.
The ships are like a cross between some of the capability and design of of nBSG, EA ships from B5, and UNSC ships from Halo. All ships mentioned are warp capable, and all gravaty systems are baised on the tech.

[Corvus 501]

Interstellar travle is a matter of stellar pinball, sending ships to planets and stars in range to reach the desired destanatation. If you haft to hit a star, it's considered a good idea to get out of there fast. Ship range is how far you can hit a star or gas giant, and the amount of time until energy buildup frys the ship.

[Ahriman238]

Aside from the FTL drive this sounds pretty forget-ably generic. I'm not really sure what you're trying to accomplish here, which is probably the best starting point. What is your fleet's purpose? What is the environment in which it functions, what threats is it meant to counter or offer?

[Simon_Jester]

To Corvus:

First of all, hit return twice between paragraphs to separate them. BBCode does not automatically create whitespace and doesn't do indentation, so if you don't separate your own paragraphs on purpose you end up looking bad.

Second, I would like you to stop and ask the following questions: "what is this navy intended to do, who is it intended to fight, what are the technological constraints, what kinds of threats are its ships designed to survive, and by their doctrine what is the normal means of fighting such an enemy?"

Answer those questions first, and you know what a navy is for. Then it makes sense to ask what it's equipped with and how big the ships are and so on.

Alternatively if you absolutely MUST design ships with giant spinal proton beams (as an example, it's something I did) then stop and consider very carefully, without preconceptions, how to make such a thing effective. What modifications to the hypothetical Hollywood 'generic SF' tactics are needed for such a ship design to be effective? What other features of the ship would be designed in specific ways to accommodate the key design element? For example, a ship with a long spinal weapon might well concentrate armor and other passive defenses forward, because it is most likely to engage the enemy from in front. This has the effect of saving a lot of weight, which in turn makes it easy for the ship to have a high acceleration to duck out of unwanted fights in which it is in danger of being caught in a crossfire. But THAT requires that the ship have efficient engines capable not only of pushing it forward (in the direction of the enemy) but also sideways (to sidestep enemy fire) and/or backward (to run away while still engaging the enemy).

This is just one example of many. The point is, you can't just plunk down "generic SF ships" in a vacuum, if you actually want to talk specifically and substantially about how they're designed and what they're for. Being deliberately vague about ship design works well if you're telling a story in which the ship designs aren't important (i.e. naval tactics aren't a major element). Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is an excellent example, with ships almost never being described in any detail at all, because they genuinely don't matter.

[Corvus 501]

Main weapons are oriented forward, broadside weapons are in turrets capable of swiveling foward to fire. Main weapons for most ships are spinal mass drivers, equivalent to MAC guns, or Mass Accelerators.

[Corvus 501]

The fleet has three main jobs: exploration, (mainly light units, with destroyers and battlecruisers) law enforcement, (anti piracy, ending rebellions) and national defence. Only on the third job would you regulary see capitol ships, though carriers would be present in anti insurgency operations.

[Ahriman238]

The fleet has three main jobs: exploration, (mainly light units, with destroyers and battlecruisers) law enforcement, (anti piracy, ending rebellions) and national defence. Only on the third job would you regulary see capitol ships, though carriers would be present in anti insurgency operations.

Most navies put the national defense part first on their list of priorities. But okay, clearly you're willing to have some dedicated units for one of these missions, do you want the lighter units to specialize or multi-role?

How far afield does exploration wander? Are they seeding vast area of space with telescopes or visiting systems? Presumably explorers are moving far away from friendly repair and refueling stations, so endurance will be a considerable design factor, as will redundancy of mission-critical systems.

How wide an area would this fleet police? What are the threats? Will neighboring powers welcome intrusion of this fleet's law enforcement?

What are the threats, or possible threats, to the nation? How will the fleet meet them? Will they strive for parity in capital hulls with other powers, focus on light combatants or rely on fixed defenses? Or some combination thereof?

[Simon_Jester]

Main weapons are oriented forward, broadside weapons are in turrets capable of swiveling foward to fire. Main weapons for most ships are spinal mass drivers, equivalent to MAC guns, or Mass Accelerators.

But WHY? What are the targets those large spinal weapons are designed to engage? Why is it necessary to use them in that way?

If you want to be competent at writing things, you must understand not only what you have but why you have it. Otherwise, don't even bother trying to detail it.

The fleet has three main jobs: exploration, (mainly light units, with destroyers and battlecruisers) law enforcement, (anti piracy, ending rebellions) and national defence. Only on the third job would you regulary see capitol ships, though carriers would be present in anti insurgency operations.

Dedicated exploration ships will be lightly armed- the Lewis and Clark expedition did not take artillery with it, with good reason.

There will be sharp differences, not necessarily in size of the ship but in equipment and doctrine, between the dedicated explorer ships, the dedicated patrol ships, and any light fleet escort units that exist. Even if they all have the same physical mass and the hulls are about the same size and shape, they're not going to be remotely the same ship.

Another point is that these "battlecruisers" of yours seem awfully big and expensive to be used for anything other than a specialist subdivision of the fleet. If they're built to the same general scale as the heaviest battleship-class combatants, then they are going to be expensive to maintain and operate, and will contain a lot of systems (like battleship guns) that are totally unnecessary for an explorer or law enforcement role.

And, to amplify Ahriman's question, what is the threat environment? What do these ships shoot? What do they get shot at with? Why were these weapons chosen? What possible alternatives exist? What situations would be an unusually serious threat to these ships, because of the unique strengths and weaknesses they possess?

Don't even bother specifying how many guns a ship has, or what they shoot, if you can't think of a reason why to give that answer, and no other answer.

It's a simple matter of conservation of detail.

[Corvus 501]

The navy's primary job is defence. I probably should have added something like "most importantly", but forgot.

[Corvus 501]

As to the threat envirement, it varies widely. They are rebels and pirates, (after a few years, basicly the same thing, you haft to do something to keep yourself funded, after all) with a few older warships, and maybe a few retrofitted merchant ships, with some missle pods taped on, or maby some extra point defence lasers. The most capable have been known to even turn freghters into makeshift carriers, baising a few fighter drones or interceptors from them.
A step up from that, is any newly emergent species that takes pot shots at Exploration Fleet ships, one of the reasons that they have battlecrusers available, that, and in case they stumble on anyone else's established terratory, and they decide to enforce a "no trespassing" sign with shipkiller nukes.
In most fleet battles, most races just slug it out with dreadnoughts, and unless somone is unusualy brilliant, or stupid, the outcome in a set piece battle is known beforehand. Humans, (and a few other species, most notably several human allies) use different tactics. In the few situations that call for it, humans use battleships in place of drednoughts, and on the defence, use suppermonotors, non warp capable supper drednoughts.
Carriers, not drednoughts, are the real heavy hitters, in human style navies.

[Corvus 501]

As to the individual threat envirement that led to the devolopment of the mix of spinal main gun(s) and turret mounted broadside guns was kind of simple. Ship armor and shields simply got so good that it took anti shipping nukes to get through, or more powerfull guns. As there are some practice considerations to the size of broadside cannon, the decision was made to mount spinal guns. As you need to turn the whole ship to align spinal guns, broadside guns where kept also, to increase tactical flexibility.

[Simon_Jester]

Corvus, I would like to ask you to pay a little closer attention to your spelling. Nine errors, especially ones like "drednoughts" for "dreadnoughts" and "supper monitors" for "supermonitors," is a bit much, and it detracts from the tone of your argument. Also I repeat my suggestion that you hit 'return' twice between each paragraph so they will actually BE separate paragraphs.

Now, just to be clear:

You are proposing that advances in material science and (vaguely defined) force field technology have made warship passive defenses* tough enough that only shells or beams from very large weapons, or a nuclear tipped missile, can penetrate. My main questions are:

1) If so, I would expect one of two scenarios:

1a) One is that nuclear-tipped missiles become the dominant arm unless active defenses are also strong enough to make it almost impossible to get missiles through enemy defenses.

The other comes into play if you have technology with high enough energy density that you can realistically achieve nuclear-equivalent energy yields in a kinetic impactor. For instance, a missile with an impact speed of three thousand kilometers per second (about 100 times better than we can do today, but you DO have relativistic spacecraft...), then the impact energy is one kiloton per kilogram of the missile. At which point a nuclear warhead really won't accomplish much that a pile of lead bricks in the nose of the missile wouldn't do just as well.**

In which case the dominant arm becomes the missile.

1b) Alternatively, the dominant arm becomes the heavy spinal gun mount, in which case it is important to know what said guns are likely to be firing, how easy it is to dodge or otherwise avoid the hits, and what ships commonly do to minimize the consequences of a hit.

2) The performance of ships built under these design schemes is going to be very sensitive to their ability to evade enemy fire. What is a typical shot from a shipboard main weapon? What kind of destructive energy does it possess, and what kind of engine technology exists to avoid it? Answer this and, among other things, you define typical combat ranges.

3) If broadside weapon mounts are really that much smaller and weaker, then they will be almost useless for engaging anything except much smaller individual targets- basically, not good for anything but missile defense. Design should be done accordingly.

4) There is no logical reason to distinguish between "battleships" and "dreadnoughts;" a "dreadnought" is simply a word for a class of battleship that happened to, as it were, go viral... because it was the best way to design a battleship using early 20th century technology. David Weber notwithstanding, it is unlikely that in future we will talk about battleships and dreadnoughts as being distinct classes of ships. Except perhaps if some revolutionary type of "super battleship" is invented and briefly becomes the new craze until everyone else manages to duplicate it and it becomes boring again. At which point people go back to calling them 'battleships.'

5) If it really is as hard as you imply to carry a shipboard beam/shell-firing weapon that can damage other large spaceships, then fighters are basically reusable missile buses. Arguably, making the missile buses not reusable and just having the ships launch enormous barrages of missiles would be more effective.
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*A passive defense is something that's "always on," like a slab of armor plate. This is distinct from an active defense that has to do something to stop an enemy attack, such as point defenses or electronic warfare.

**[This is basically a scaled-up version of Robinson's First Law of space combat. Just as a one kilogram brick traveling at 3000 m/s carries kinetic energy equivalent to a one kilogram brick of TNT, a one kilogram brick travelling at 3000 km/s carries kinetic energy equivalent (or at least approaching that of) a one kilogram brick of weapons-grade plutonium.]

[Zeropoint]

There is no logical reason to distinguish between "battleships" and "dreadnoughts;" a "dreadnought" is simply a word for a class of battleship that happened to, as it were, go viral... because it was the best way to design a battleship using early 20th century technology. David Weber notwithstanding, it is unlikely that in future we will talk about battleships and dreadnoughts as being distinct classes of ships.

This reminded me of something I wrote to a friend a while back. Here's the relevant part of that email:

I read today that the USS Zumwalt, lead ship of the new Zumwalt class, was launched today (yesterday?). Reading about the class, what's on it, and how it's intended to be used, I was reminded of all the reading I've done about classes of military ships in the past and present. Turns out that if your sample space extends over the whole world and back to the age of sail . . . it's a mess, and you can't make any sweeping statements about what category of ship is bigger than which other categories, or what they're supposed to be used for, beyond a vague consensus that corvettes are small.

So, things finally crystallized in my head regarding what I'd call ship categories if I ever get around to making a fleet of ships for tabletop gaming. It's based loosely on current US categorization.

Carrier: ship whose primary combat capacity comes from the parasite craft they carry.

Destroyer: direct combat ship designed to kill enemy ships in the most expedient manner possible. They're called destroyers because they destroy things.

Frigate: ship meant to participate in fleet combat by providing support services rather than raw firepower. Still armed well enough to be dangerous but not the heavy hitter.

Cruiser: intended for long-endurance independent operation; sacrifices firepower for endurance and well-roundedness.

Corvette: general term for small combat support craft.

Now, this is pretty vague, and I've said nothing whatsoever about what kind of weaponry the ships will be armed with. "Frigates", at least some of them, would probably be found loaded down with lots of point- and area-defense weapons such as anti-missile missiles and fast-tracking laser turrets. I expect you'd also have EW frigates mounting the most sophisticated sensors and countermeasures available. If the technology of the fictional universe allows it, I'm inclined to equip the destroyers mainly with big energy cannons built for long range accuracy, so that when the enemy shows up, you can hit them first, hit them hard, and hit them again. Another obvious possibility is Russian-flavored ships that are composed mostly of field-swappable VLS cell clusters, analogous to a modern ship that could launch a thousand Harpoons or Exocets at you if they felt like it.

Thinking about things any deeper than that really requires specifics about the expected combat environment, which depends heavily on the assumptions built into the "game world".

[Corvus 501]

Drednoughts are heavier and somwat slower battleships. They are usually husbanded until they can be used in decisive battles, because off their cost and production speed. As a result, they are rairly used for anything but last stands or to drive home a victory. They are a great deterrent for sheer intidimadation, and are great for ensuring a negated surrender. As a result, wars where a bit on the formal side, until it was shown that a carrier full of fighters and torpedoboats could cripple any ship that didn't have a sudfficent fighter screen of its own.

[Corvus 501]

There are three types of shields. EM, gravaty (basicly David Webber's sidewalks from Honor Harrington) and plasma barriers, a bunch of plasma in a magnetic field in front of a ship, designed to stop debres from hitting the ship when it's in movement. Millatary grade barriers can stop a few shots from spinal gun shots from ships mounting comparable weapons. Battlecrusers have a battleship's shields and weapons, but only a cruser's armor. They can doge long range shots that the heavier and less maneuverable battleships cannot, but they arn't the damage sponge that a battleship is. They make up for this by being faster and more manuverable than a battleship or cruiser. They are essentially super destroyers.

[Patroklos]

Do you have any intention of using Newtonian physics outside your FTL?

1a) One is that nuclear-tipped missiles become the dominant arm unless active defenses are also strong enough to make it almost impossible to get missiles through enemy defenses.

The other comes into play if you have technology with high enough energy density that you can realistically achieve nuclear-equivalent energy yields in a kinetic impactor. For instance, a missile with an impact speed of three thousand kilometers per second (about 100 times better than we can do today, but you DO have relativistic spacecraft...), then the impact energy is one kiloton per kilogram of the missile. At which point a nuclear warhead really won't accomplish much that a pile of lead bricks in the nose of the missile wouldn't do just as well.**

If you are talking about kinetic forces alone then yes, but the primary damage from nukes in vacuum is radiation. So that gets us to:

Corvis, what is the nature of these shields? What do they block and is there a defined mechanism as to how the do it? Does it treat all damage the same? You make it sound above like its primarily a kinetic shield (why plasma?). That might work somewhat against slugs and lasers. That's not going to work very well against things like particle beams or the above nuke radiation. What exactly does EM shielding defend against, ALL electromagnetic radiation (there are some unintended consequences if that is the case...)?

[Corvus 501]

There are two shields used on human ships. Plasma barriers, a type of shield that's almost certainly practable, NASA is looking into using them as a micrometeor shield. Military grade shields would be designed to deflect significantly more energetic threats. The second type, EM or gravaty shields, act like sidewalks from the Honor Harrington series. They de focus laser or particle beams, and deflect, vaporize, or scramble incoming Missles or projectiles. They also do very well at stoping plasma.

Plasma barriers excell at stopping missle weapons, EM or gravaty shields do well at stopping energy weapons. Broadside weapons are only for hitting areas protected by EM shields, or lightly armored ships.

[Patroklos]

Are you referring to plasma windows regarding NASA? If so this is more a means to separate mediums like vacuum and air, think shuttle bays in Star Trek. But its cool you have a real world basis for your shield.

I don't see how this will help you unless the shield captures the mass of the incoming projectile. If it doesn't then that mass, even if turned into a ball of gas via interaction with your shield, is still moving at you at 12%C. If it does capture the mass then you still have to dispose of the energy somehow. Which makes me wonder how you are handling energy export on your ships. Radiation? some handwavium solution? How does this work if you have your shields up? Heat sinks?

I am not familiar with the honorverse. What would these EM shields do to a gamma ray burst? What would it do to light?

[Simon_Jester]

Corvus... I count fifteen errors in two paragraphs. If something is stopping you from fixing spelling, please tell me, I promise I'll understand. Also, you don't need a separate post for each paragraph; that's not what I was suggesting earlier.
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Now, you just defined 'dreadnoughts' and 'battlecruisers,' but you didn't really explain what they're for. 'Dreadnoughts' don't make a lot of sense if they aren't actually used whenever the fleet is engaged in intense operations. I can see them being 'husbanded for decisive battles,' but that's still enough to ensure that they're normally on one kind of campaign or another, if only so they're ready when a decisive battle takes place.

It is... NOT a good idea to spend great sums of money on weapons that in the event of a war, you don't actually intend to use very much. It almost guarantees you won't get your money's worth out of them.

At most you get something like the employment of battleships in the North Sea during World War One, which I could talk about at length if you want, but right now I'm skipping over it.
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'Battlecruisers,' well, frankly in space warfare the entire concept of a "damage sponge" doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you ever send a valuable element of your force out somewhere specifically so it can get hurt? Why would you ever deliberately expose something to enemy fire 'because you can?' That doesn't happen even in real life warfare.

The purpose of protective systems (point defense, armor, jammers, evasive capability, or other more fanciful technologies) is not so that the ship can act like a 'tank' in an MMORPG. The purpose of those systems is so that the ship can continue fighting the enemy, and doing harm to the enemy, in the most effective manner possible, for as long as possible.

The real question is, doctrinally, is a ship better protected by agility or by armor, and I suspect that most naval powers would make up their minds one way or the other.

So except for a few experimental vessels, I'd expect that any given fleet would consist almost entirely of either fast, lightly armored capital ships, or slower, more heavily armored ones. Not a random mixture of both types.

Historically, battlecruisers built to capital ship scale but with minimal armor were a weird dead-end concept; relatively few were actually built, by only a few fleets, and combat experience showed that they weren't really fast enough to stay out of trouble, and that their lack of armor protection meant they weren't sturdy enough to survive trouble. Contrary to what Jackie Fisher said about them at the time, speed was not armor.

In spacegoing warfare, where agility is more likely to actually save you from being hit so long as you keep the range open, that may change- but in that case, it just becomes "the new normal" in capital ship design.
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A third and final point is that you have to remember that in space warfare, there are very few reasons to fight a battle in open space. Armies marching on land can bump into each other at any old place because there's only so much room to move around. Space is huge. Almost any combat will take place around some physical thing, or because some physical object is threatened and your fleet is intercepting my fleet before it gets there.

This affects any tactical concept you have of whether 'fast' ships or 'slow' ships are better, in ways that merit some serious thought.

---

Now to address Patroklos' response to me, and what came after:

1a) One is that nuclear-tipped missiles become the dominant arm unless active defenses are also strong enough to make it almost impossible to get missiles through enemy defenses.

The other comes into play if you have technology with high enough energy density that you can realistically achieve nuclear-equivalent energy yields in a kinetic impactor. For instance, a missile with an impact speed of three thousand kilometers per second (about 100 times better than we can do today, but you DO have relativistic spacecraft...), then the impact energy is one kiloton per kilogram of the missile. At which point a nuclear warhead really won't accomplish much that a pile of lead bricks in the nose of the missile wouldn't do just as well.**

If you are talking about kinetic forces alone then yes, but the primary damage from nukes in vacuum is radiation. So that gets us to:

Corvis, what is the nature of these shields? What do they block and is there a defined mechanism as to how the do it? Does it treat all damage the same? You make it sound above like its primarily a kinetic shield (why plasma?). That might work somewhat against slugs and lasers. That's not going to work very well against things like particle beams or the above nuke radiation. What exactly does EM shielding defend against, ALL electromagnetic radiation (there are some unintended consequences if that is the case...)?

A dense enough cloud of plasma would actually be very hard for a charged particle beam to penetrate- or at least, it would tend to diffuse and distort the beam so much that it would stop being nearly as effective as a weapon. Plasma is very effective at blocking or distorting long-wave electromagnetic radiation (which is why you can't use radio to talk to a re-entering spacecraft), but not so effective on shorter wavelengths like visible light or (much more so) X-rays and gamma rays.

There are two shields used on human ships. Plasma barriers, a type of shield that's almost certainly practable, NASA is looking into using them as a micrometeor shield. Military grade shields would be designed to deflect significantly more energetic threats. The second type, EM or gravaty shields, act like sidewalks from the Honor Harrington series. They de focus laser or particle beams, and deflect, vaporize, or scramble incoming Missles or projectiles. They also do very well at stoping plasma.

Plasma barriers excell at stopping missle weapons, EM or gravaty shields do well at stopping energy weapons. Broadside weapons are only for hitting areas protected by EM shields, or lightly armored ships.

Why would plasma barriers be good at stopping very dense, heavy objects moving at hundreds of kilometers per second? I'd expect the opposite- because gravitational forces might at least BEND such an object's trajectory. All the plasma will do is rough it up a little.

Another question: "these are the shields on human ships" doesn't tell me: are they the only kinds that are possible, are they the only kinds humans know how to build, or are they the only kind humans think it's economically practical to use?

[Patroklos]

Yeah I didn't think about that regarding particle beams. It doesn't have to be charged though.

That still leaves us with the EM shield regarding the nukes. I am having a hard time figuring out how this thing could stop gamma rays/x-rays/neutrons without it basically becoming a Langston Field and blinding the ship. The plasma shield will probably do that too. I am probably over thinking this and should just stop at EM shields = bad radiation barrier.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah I didn't think about that regarding particle beams. It doesn't have to be charged though.

Neutral particle beams are going to be far harder to build, and far harder to collimate. Given how shielding-with-cloud-of-plasma works, it would probably be more cost effective to just build a larger charged particle beam weapon that will simply blow away the enemy's plasma cloud by ablation/attrition. There's got to be a limit on how fast they can pump out plasma and how efficiently they can hold it in place, in the face of an extremely intense disruptive force.

That still leaves us with the EM shield regarding the nukes. I am having a hard time figuring out how this thing could stop gamma rays/x-rays/neutrons without it basically becoming a Langston Field and blinding the ship. The plasma shield will probably do that too. I am probably over thinking this and should just stop at EM shields = bad radiation barrier.

Neutrons can be handled by covering the ship with appropriately doped concrete and will cause minimal damage. Plasma shields will not stop high-frequency electromagnetic radiation (such as X-rays).

A shield that can stop high frequency electromagnetic radiation would have to be either technomagic, or some sort of ultra-intense gravitational distortion (generated by technomagic). Corvus has explicitly said his ships have the latter, so I assume that's what's doing it. As a side effect it would tend to distort light so severely that it would be hard to see out through the shield.

On the other hand, there are ways around that.

Shipboard sensors might be designed to compensate because they know the precise strength of the gravitational distortion- although that has limits, tactically speaking. Ideally, you don't want any light from the direction of the enemy to hit your hull, because if their radio emissions can hit you so can their lasers.

On the other hand, artificially diffusing that light with the gravity distortion might not stop you from seeing them (with sensitive telescopes and radio antennae), and yet still stop you from being hit full-force by an incoming laser weapon. Sure, the light from the laser hits your ship, but it's spread out over a wider area and causes much less damage.

Or the ship might actually 'see' by way of signals relayed to it from a drone flying nearby, which has a clear line of sight past the shield. There's nothing in the rules that says an intense gravitational distortion has to protect the ship from all directions, after all, and indeed it would probably be simpler if it didn't.

[Corvus 501]

Human ships don't have gravaty shields, they have EM shields. They arn't nearly as effective at stopping projectile fire as gravaty shields, but they can be made. The races that do use gravaty shields, on the other hand, do have" tecnomagic", otherwise known as "sufficiently advanced technology."

[Corvus 501]

As to the radation problem, well, the shields don't do much, that's what the armor's for. With the cooling issues that brings up, (and the general cooling issues that you run into with spaceships) the solution is surprisingly simple. Just borrow the little quirk of human anatomy known as sweating. Just vent coolent through "pores" in the armor to cool it. Under normal circumstances, use normal radiators to conserve coolant.

[Batman]

Most people generally expect there to be an 'i' in 'gravity' you know. Just saying.

[Batman]

As to the radation problem, well, the shields don't do much, that's what the armor's for. With the cooling issues that brings up, (and the general cooling issues that you run into with spaceships) the solution is surprisingly simple. Just borrow the little quirk of human anatomy known as sweating. Just vent coolant through "pores" in the armor to cool it. Under normal circumstances, use normal radiators to conserve coolant.

...You do know that in space, that coolant is effectively radiators, right? You dump heat into the coolant, you eject the coolant, it radiates away the heat. Granted, the heat is no longer your problem, but you're spending a lot of mass on what is effectively single-use heat sinks.
Human sweating works because it uses convection/evaporation cooling. Out in space...not so much.