Molten Ferrometal as a Penetrator in Space Combat?

[mrtspence]

Hey all, was hoping I could get some input into the feasibility of this idea. I read in an Arthur C. Clarke book (I think) about a neat idea for a weapon. Some kind of coilgun would fire a thin jet of molten ferrometal at tens of km/s. In space, there would be nothing to dissipate the jet and I could see it making a neat hole in a target's armour (and the plasma explosions in the interior would do the real damage).

Would it work better at piercing deeply than a more traditional projectile? My assumption is yes. A more spherical projectile would likely explode on the surface, perhaps not getting to the juicy inside bits if it is behind a LOT of armour. I suppose it is functioning like an extremely long and thin penetrator round.

That's how I picture it working. I would love a reality check from someone who knows better than me though!

[Dass.Kapital]

Hello, a lay-man replying here.

I do seem to recal a pithy little comment, which I believe has floated around on these boards and else where, that

"Anyrhing traveling at more than 3KM a second completely converts itself into BLAM!".

So..it's not the molten metal so much as simply the mass travels REALLY fast and then dissipating all that momentum into said target.

Hope those vaguely remembered ramblings help at least kick off some ideas for yourself to search?

Very much cheers to you and yours.

[EdgarjPublius]

some modern armor-penetrating warheads (HEAT and some EFP warheads) are essentially molten jets of metal at the business end.

The difficulty is in stabilizing the penetrator and maintaining it's shape and mass. HEAT penetrators are effectively only within a very narrow stand-off distance from where they are detonated. EFPs are a little less sensitive, but still only effective for at most a few meters up to maybe a few tens of meters, sacrificing much in the way of penetration compared to HEAT and other shaped charges.

In space, you wouldn't have the same problems with aero-stability, but cohesion of the molten jet may still be an issue. Also, the effectiveness of hyper-velocity jet penetrators is greatly reduced at non-ideal angles of impact, which may be an issue in space combat with two ships maneuvering relative to each other (It's already a problem in terrestrial combat with armor sloped in ways to provide the worst possible angles for penetration)

[Simon_Jester]

Consider.

Railguns and coilguns dump some waste heat into the projectile.

If they dump enough heat in, the projectile melts.

So having the projectile end up molten could easily be a side effect of making the weapon very energetic.

Or, as I like to say, "a plasma cannon is just a mass driver built with homicidal indifference to the health of your bullets."

[Surlethe]

Why would you wast energy melting the projectile?

[mrtspence]

Why would you wast energy melting the projectile?

The reasoning is as follows:

It is my understanding that current hypervelocity penetrators tend to be optimized towards being long and narrow. There has been somewhat of a resurgence towards wider projectiles to counter reactive armour that shear said penetrators. At the speeds encountered, the mechanical action of reactive armour is likely to go way, way down, so that wouldn't necessarily be an an issue.

If long and narrow projectiles penetrate armour more effectively, then a very thin jet of metal would have all of the benefits of an optimally long penetrator (as long as the stream you emit) without suffering as badly from shearing/reactive armours. My current understanding is that long thin projectiles have less turned into plasma so the remainder of the projectile can push the super-dense, super-hot plasma through armour like the passe metaphor of the hot knife through butter--with the added benefit of an explosion as soon as the plasma has room to dissipate.

I think the main benefits over a solid penetrator of those dimensions would be incredibly easy geometry for storage and firing (could store ferrometals in whatever solid shape you want whereas it would be massively impractical to store and load 10-meter-long, extremely flimsy metal rods.

Also, melting some metal for projectiles would be virtually no energy or heat compared to the amount needed and generated by the gun itself and a few extra jules would be easy to find if the ship was powered by a robust engine or generator.

As to the issues of cohesion, I don't think there would be much in a vacuum to cause the jet to lose its cohesion. The parameters of the jet could also be tuned with great accuracy by the coilgun itself.

It was my understanding that HEAT rounds got less effective against sloped armour for the same reasons any other round doesn't like sloped armour--a higher chance of deflection and more matter to get through due to geometry. I am under the impression that a good HEAT round can only be stopped by reactive armour--which would get less effective as the velocities increase and the amount of projectile increases.

Really liking this discussion board so far! I like this community. I can't think of another place (except maybe the Rocketpunk Manifesto) where this kind of subject can be discussed by amateurs haha!

[bilateralrope]

Why would you wast energy melting the projectile?

The waste heat has to go somewhere. If it's a choice between melting the projectile, or damaging your railgun/coilgun, where would you send the waste heat ?

[Formless]

Yeah, but that's different from what is being proposed. Melting the bullet because you put that much energy into it vs shooting streams of molten metal just because you can.

Personally, I don't see the advantage of coilguns and railguns over warheads and lasers. All the ammunition you carry goes against your mass allotment, so you wouldn't want to be shooting big artillery shells I expect. Instead you would use little .17 caliber pellets * at hypervelocity or near relativistic speeds and fire them as rapidly as possible to make sure you get a hit or several dozen, because your enemy is a tiny little dot off on the horizon even at the closest engagements. And you need to put lots of them out to ensure a hit, because they can be detected and dodged at these ranges. Lasers on the other hand travel at the speed of light, so the only way you are dodging that is by randomly juking and hoping the enemy's targeting sensors can't keep up.

But my personal doubts aside, think about what advantages a hypervelocity projectile has in the first place. With enough velocity, not much else about the projectile matters. That idea about explosive plasma? First off you get that anyway, because at these speeds the bullet is going to fucking disintegrate along with whatever it impacts. If it hits a pressurized cabin, it will fling shrapnel all over the place and possibly create a blast wave in the atmosphere (depending on the exact energy of the bullet). Anyone inside will be dead, promise.

But that's if you hit a pressurized cabin. Most of a spacecraft will actually be exposed to hard vacuum, because there is little point wasting atmosphere, heat, and life support energy on machinery that doesn't need to breath. And that's assuming a manned spacecraft, as opposed to armed drones which will likely be a significant part of military operations in space. Possibly dominant, depending on the exact politics of space warfare. So most hits will be to these parts of the ship, and do their job by damaging or destroying critical components of the vessel such as the reactor (if any), heat radiators, coolant tanks, fuel/propellant tanks, sensors, munitions bays, critical electronics, and so forth. These are your primary targets, and many of them will be armored if possible. Even radiators will likely have a layer or more of glass to thicken them against incoming fire. Unfortunately, its very easy to make whipple shields to defeat hypervelocity projectiles, and precisely because of their tendency to explode on impact with anything. Another problem lasers do not have.



*or rods, I guess. I don't know if that will do anything to help penetration against a whipple shield.

[Guardsman Bass]

What's extra-nice about the lasers is that even if they can't damage the enemy spacecraft, they can still heat them up. Heating up your enemy's large radiators with your lasers in order to wreck his spacecraft's ability to get rid of waste heat sounds like a useful tactic, assuming your lasers can put out enough energy in their pulses to do that (and without running into over-heating issues of your own).

[Sea Skimmer]

Shaped charge jets aren't molten. They'd work worse if they were. Trying to fire molten metal at someone is going to turn into firing bird shot at them, your chances of maintaining a coherent projectile are about nil even in space, at any significant range. I don't know how you could even ever get it out of the barrel in one piece. On the other hand shaped charges that burn as they penetrate have real appeal and are now being made, but shooting normal material hard enough that it vaporized on impact would do the same thing as much noted here.

More length only helps a long rod within the mechanical limits of the material being used to make it, which is a rather low upper limit at high velocity tank sabots are already toying around at. Some really long, really thin projectile is just going to break itself up when the front tip starts vaporizing, or at lower velocity just violently decelerates, and sends a massive shockwave back up the rod breaking it to pieces. It won't just perfectly plow into the same tiny spot. Indeed at high enough velocity, against hard enough armor, you might well see the tail of long rod vaporize from these forces before it can actually come into contact with the armor, basically self destructing it. An optimal 30km/s kind of long rod is likely to be more slug like then arrow like.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Keeping it a coherent mass is the main thing. And if melting through armor is more likely to result in hull breech than kinetic impact, that also is a reason.

Another reason would be more precise control of the projectile.


And could you use radiators as a DEW themselves? Like possibly use a Infrared weapon as a radiator?

[Dominarch's Hope]

It wont let me edit that post anymore....



And what if instead of Air Atmosphere, its a jello/amniotic fluid that the lungs can breath with some adaptations? I imagine the other benefits of such would be additional resistance to high G Forces. Im thinking that it possibly freezes a milimeter or so when exposed to hard vacuum and maybe it reactively condenses to the point of seperating itself from nearby fluid to attempt to contain shockwaves. Sure, anyone still caught within a certain zone is still fucked to some degree but it would contain some of the damage.

[Formless]

It wont let me edit that post anymore....

There is a ten minute edit window in every forum except OT, User Fiction, Testing, and GNC (or at least the STGOD subforum last I checked). Its to prevent people from abusing the edit function to dishonest ends. That's also why there is no official rule against double posting, within reasonable limits.

And could you use radiators as a DEW themselves? Like possibly use a Infrared weapon as a radiator?

No, the purpose of a heat radiator is to get rid of waste heat. We call it waste heat because according to thermodynamics, it has reached an energy state low enough that no meaningful work can be done with it. In this context, even though we call it "heat" its actually low enough energy that it would make a very poor weapon. If a heat radiator is glowing red hot, its about to melt, and your ship or machine is fucked.

And what if instead of Air Atmosphere, its a jello/amniotic fluid that the lungs can breath with some adaptations? I imagine the other benefits of such would be additional resistance to high G Forces. Im thinking that it possibly freezes a milimeter or so when exposed to hard vacuum and maybe it reactively condenses to the point of seperating itself from nearby fluid to attempt to contain shockwaves. Sure, anyone still caught within a certain zone is still fucked to some degree but it would contain some of the damage.

Like the LCL in Evangelion? Okay... symbolism of that show aside, you realize that in reality a fetus doesn't actually breath, right? It gets all its oxygen from its mother's blood.

There are perfluorocarbons, but IIRC those are mildly carcinogenic. They also weigh more than an oxygen atmosphere and take a bit more effort to synthesize. I guess it would have some of the advantages you mention, but I don't think protection from projectiles is one of them-- liquids transmit shock waves far better than gasses do.

[Sky Captain]

I think particle beams would be better and more effective than large slugs. Accelerator that could accelerate slugs to relativistic velocity would be too long to put on combat spacecraft while a linear particle accelerator only few km long could produce relativistic particle streams. Whipple shields would be of no use against that. Only way to protect crew and electronics from rad kill would be to wrap them in heavy radiation shielding that would eat into mass budget that otherwise could be used for bigger engine, more fuel or more weapons. Projectiles that move at only few dozen km/s are too easy to avoid unless fired at point blank range. They would be useful only against targets that move in predictable orbits.

[Sea Skimmer]

And what if instead of Air Atmosphere, its a jello/amniotic fluid that the lungs can breath with some adaptations? I imagine the other benefits of such would be additional resistance to high G Forces. Im thinking that it possibly freezes a milimeter or so when exposed to hard vacuum and maybe it reactively condenses to the point of seperating itself from nearby fluid to attempt to contain shockwaves. Sure, anyone still caught within a certain zone is still fucked to some degree but it would contain some of the damage.

Having the crew just use spacesuits in action while depressurizing or more likely, lowering pressure in the ship makes more sense then this idea. That also provides a large degree of protection against fires which are a godawful risk on a complex space craft, let alone one being shot at. The anti shock effect you suggest would have to be pretty ridiculous effective to avoid making things much worse. Freezing on instant contact with vacuum? That doesn't sound likely, certainly not with causing a lot of other painful problems in design, such as the basic issue of thermal balance across the entire ship.

Meanwhile human lungs are not meant to pump liquid, they pump gas and only cycle a fraction of the air in the lungs at a time, so you'd have serious problems making this work at all, and it'd weigh a fair bit depending on the size of the ship as well as presenting a very difficult environmental control problem. You'd need a rather elaborate network of pumps to keep it circulating and filtered acceptably, stuff like going to the bathroom is now very difficult. Maintaining equipment is a complete pain ect.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Would it be theoretically possible to come about particle beam weapons the round a bout way, as in, using the particles to extend the range of the lasers by making the beam 'ride' charged particles to its destination?


About the heat-Okay.

[Dominarch's Hope]

And what if instead of Air Atmosphere, its a jello/amniotic fluid that the lungs can breath with some adaptations? I imagine the other benefits of such would be additional resistance to high G Forces. Im thinking that it possibly freezes a milimeter or so when exposed to hard vacuum and maybe it reactively condenses to the point of seperating itself from nearby fluid to attempt to contain shockwaves. Sure, anyone still caught within a certain zone is still fucked to some degree but it would contain some of the damage.

Having the crew just use spacesuits in action while depressurizing or more likely, lowering pressure in the ship makes more sense then this idea. That also provides a large degree of protection against fires which are a godawful risk on a complex space craft, let alone one being shot at. The anti shock effect you suggest would have to be pretty ridiculous effective to avoid making things much worse. Freezing on instant contact with vacuum? That doesn't sound likely, certainly not with causing a lot of other painful problems in design, such as the basic issue of thermal balance across the entire ship.

Meanwhile human lungs are not meant to pump liquid, they pump gas and only cycle a fraction of the air in the lungs at a time, so you'd have serious problems making this work at all, and it'd weigh a fair bit depending on the size of the ship as well as presenting a very difficult environmental control problem. You'd need a rather elaborate network of pumps to keep it circulating and filtered acceptably, stuff like going to the bathroom is now very difficult. Maintaining equipment is a complete pain ect.

I was remembering it from theories about G Force protection. I forgot about the part with the air hoomups flowing through.


Although that reminds me about something.

In Mass Effect, Light Armor is thin enough, or appears to be, to be worn under clothing. Why isnt it the basicuniform with the helmet being optional? Mostly bugs me about ME 2. Never played 3.

[Sea Skimmer]

Would it be theoretically possible to come about particle beam weapons the round a bout way, as in, using the particles to extend the range of the lasers by making the beam 'ride' charged particles to its destination?

How on earth could light ride anything that is by nature, already going slower then light? Let alone to gain range in the process? A laser in a true vacuum already has unlimited range, and even in actual space it will loose only very slight amounts of energy from hitting interseller hydrogen. We see light billions of years old from the earth. The effective range of a laser will be limited by diffusion of the beam and tracking accuracy, but these features are pretty certain to be worse with any kind of weapon firing a particle with actual mass.

The opposite of this idea, using a laser to push particles onto the target, might work. I just can't think of much reason why it would be useful to do so.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Yes diffusion. That determines the effective range of a laser. The idea is that the laser head hits, regardless ofbhow diffuse, then the particles hit a much more concentrated area and the photons follow along that path. Remember, you would still be emitting photons after the particle beam hit the target.

Im just theorizing that if the photons could be attracted to the particles or contained by them if you are shooting a circular tube pattern of particles, then the diffusion could be delayed and the range extended at the cost of timr to target for the coherent beam.


You get hit with a diffused laser beam.

Then the particles make contact and the laser is now refocused. Thats the idea.


EDIT:Didnt read to the part about a particle beam experiencing worse diffusion. Oops.

[Sea Skimmer]

Ignoring the technical problems, I'm not really seeing why you'd want to followup with more photons, instead of more particles anyway. While particle beam weapon is an incredibly vague category, most ideas for ones would be a lot more damaging then lasers. This seems kind of like trying to mount a bayonet on a heavy machine gun bullet.

[Dominarch's Hope]

...The entire exchange would be both firing at the same time, just the particles arriving a little later to give the beam coherence at excessive range. But it would only work for particles at 99% c anyways.


So, kinetics or weber missile for extra long range then?

[Simon_Jester]

Why would you wast energy melting the projectile?

Why would you wast energy melting the projectile?

[long answer]

There's a much simpler answer:

"Because I'd rather dump 99% of a gigajoule into the projectile (and accidentally melt it with the last 10 MJ) than dump 99% of 100 MJ into the projectile (and merely get it glowing with a dull red heat with the last megajoule)."

Personally, I don't see the advantage of coilguns and railguns over warheads and lasers. All the ammunition you carry goes against your mass allotment, so you wouldn't want to be shooting big artillery shells I expect. Instead you would use little .17 caliber pellets * at hypervelocity or near relativistic speeds and fire them as rapidly as possible to make sure you get a hit or several dozen, because your enemy is a tiny little dot off on the horizon even at the closest engagements. And you need to put lots of them out to ensure a hit, because they can be detected and dodged at these ranges. Lasers on the other hand travel at the speed of light, so the only way you are dodging that is by randomly juking and hoping the enemy's targeting sensors can't keep up.

In any scenario where SPAAACE WAR is likely, ship masses range into the thousands of tons or higher, and kilogram or ton-sized projectiles are practical.

They have advantages at short range, advantages for bombardment (a 2 km/s slug will punch through atmosphere better than a hypervelocity BB), advantages in that they are harder to detect and engage with point defense (or jam or evade).

If you want missiles, I suspect you'll see a lot of weirdo descendants of HIBEX and Sprint...

What's extra-nice about the lasers is that even if they can't damage the enemy spacecraft, they can still heat them up. Heating up your enemy's large radiators with your lasers in order to wreck his spacecraft's ability to get rid of waste heat sounds like a useful tactic, assuming your lasers can put out enough energy in their pulses to do that (and without running into over-heating issues of your own).

Kinetic energy dumped into the enemy's hull will also, ultimately, turn into heat. Unless you're physically ripping bits off the hull, which has its own obvious advantages.

Shaped charge jets aren't molten. They'd work worse if they were. Trying to fire molten metal at someone is going to turn into firing bird shot at them, your chances of maintaining a coherent projectile are about nil even in space, at any significant range. I don't know how you could even ever get it out of the barrel in one piece.

I'd have to think about that. You CAN provide pretty uniform acceleration to a disjointed cloud of particles (think any particle accelerator ever), but it's not trivially simple.

Would it be theoretically possible to come about particle beam weapons the round a bout way, as in, using the particles to extend the range of the lasers by making the beam 'ride' charged particles to its destination?

Lasers do not work that way.

Also, lasers have less dispersion and therefore (arguably) longer range than particle beams- no space charge forces. Look up space charge if you don't know what that is. The whole idea is gibberish as far as I can tell.

[Formless]

In any scenario where SPAAACE WAR is likely, ship masses range into the thousands of tons or higher, and kilogram or ton-sized projectiles are practical.

Ships that size are not a given. The real world does not operate on Star Wars physics; so I am not keen on assuming spacecraft the size of terrestrial supertankers unless they are specifically for carrying cargo and thus not expected to fight or come near the front lines. The larger a spacecraft is, the less maneuverable it is due to momentum. Being big has lots of advantages, but being able to maneuver and dodge can still be a good thing. For instance, a spacecraft that is defending a position like an orbit or a Lagrange point can wait for the enemy to come to them, and can thus use more of its fuel being hard to hit rather than getting to a destination. And non-kinetic weapons like nuclear warheads, lasers, and particle beams are likely to be better than the armor intended to stop them, so being hard to hit in the first place is just good practice.

They have advantages at short range, advantages for bombardment (a 2 km/s slug will punch through atmosphere better than a hypervelocity BB), advantages in that they are harder to detect and engage with point defense (or jam or evade).

1) Kinetic bombardment is a very different can of worms, and entails very dissimilar weapons than the ones used to shoot spacecraft. It also implies a specific kind of warfare, one where planetary bodies are gigantic battlestations in their own right by default, and armed with (yes) big ass ground-side lasers.

2) By short range clearly you mean Science Fiction Spacecraft Knifefighting Distance. If there is one "HARD" sci-fi idea I cannot find issue with its that short range in space still means hundreds of kilometers between spacecraft.

3) the larger a kinetic impactor is, the easier it is to detect. With the multi-ton kill vehicles you've proposed I don't think detection would be an issue, since for starters you are now shooting them with rockets, not electromagnetically. This is where dodging comes into play, more so than point defense. In fact, PD for a KKV is in a sense an extension of dodging-- you want to give the bullet a push that sends it away from your ship like a fencer pushes his opponent's blade away. Its also a good argument for flying in formation/with a wingman or two. And guess what weapon happens to be excellent at both point defense and hitting your opponents back?

Yup. Lasers. They're like the Swiss army knife of space weapons. I suppose certain types of particle cannons could also work for this, but I think there are turret issues with particle weapons (if I remember Atomic Rockets correctly, once you've accelerated a particle beam up to relativistic speeds its inertia starts to resist attempts to make them turn in the direction the barrel is pointing) that don't apply to lasers.

[Simon_Jester]

In any scenario where SPAAACE WAR is likely, ship masses range into the thousands of tons or higher, and kilogram or ton-sized projectiles are practical.

Ships that size are not a given. The real world does not operate on Star Wars physics; so I am not keen on assuming spacecraft the size of terrestrial supertankers unless they are specifically for carrying cargo and thus not expected to fight or come near the front lines. The larger a spacecraft is, the less maneuverable it is due to momentum. Being big has lots of advantages, but being able to maneuver and dodge can still be a good thing. For instance, a spacecraft that is defending a position like an orbit or a Lagrange point can wait for the enemy to come to them, and can thus use more of its fuel being hard to hit rather than getting to a destination. And non-kinetic weapons like nuclear warheads, lasers, and particle beams are likely to be better than the armor intended to stop them, so being hard to hit in the first place is just good practice.

Bigger ships mount bigger engines; it's not a given that hard-SF space drives with good acceleration will be easier to make compact. Some have a minimum practical size (nuclear pulse propulsion, or anything that requires the ship to have a built in nuclear reactor). Others are low-acceleration, and therefore not agile, no matter how small you make them (ion drive).

"Agile fighter, clumsy battleship" is not a given in space any more than "very large ships" are. It all depends on which technologies you decide to design the ship around.

The one constant is that a bigger target will have less success in evading enemy fire- even at equal acceleration. On the other hand, it can mount better sensors (to see a nuclear missile coming from farther off), more defenses (to melt a nuclear missile that inconveniently came with an armored nosecone), and more "kill the other bastard first" capabilities.

They have advantages at short range, advantages for bombardment (a 2 km/s slug will punch through atmosphere better than a hypervelocity BB), advantages in that they are harder to detect and engage with point defense (or jam or evade).

1) Kinetic bombardment is a very different can of worms, and entails very dissimilar weapons than the ones used to shoot spacecraft. It also implies a specific kind of warfare, one where planetary bodies are gigantic battlestations in their own right by default, and armed with (yes) big ass ground-side lasers.[/quote]Who said the planet was a unified defensive position? Also, with the exception of ballistic missile subs and fighters armed with ASAT weapons, the planet's weapons can't dodge; they can be destroyed from outside their effective range by ballistic weapons if you're careful. It's a complicated thing.

2) By short range clearly you mean Science Fiction Spacecraft Knifefighting Distance. If there is one "HARD" sci-fi idea I cannot find issue with its that short range in space still means hundreds of kilometers between spacecraft.

You are jumping to conclusions about my idea of 'short range.' For a realistic gun and a target that can't dodge at soft-SF torch drive accelerations, a ballistic weapon could travel a hundred kilometers faster than the target can get out of the way. Depending, of course, on the size of the target.

3) the larger a kinetic impactor is, the easier it is to detect.[/quote]If speeds are limited to a few km/s, detection is very likely: coating a metal slug in radar-absorbent material won't hide it forever. At higher velocities though, you have a serious problem with objects crossing your practical detection envelope before you can engage them. Especially if your ships are small (few hundred tons) and you can't mount massive PAVE PAWS-esque radars to pick up incoming ballistic golf balls from three thousand miles away.

Also bear in mind that I was comparing (for detectability) a kinetic slug to a maneuvering missile. You bet the missile is easier to see coming.

In general, though, evasion is an issue and there's a hierarchy of 'range' definitions.


1) Ballistic weapons are short-ranged by nature. In HARD HARD SF they're probably limited to muzzle velocities in the single-digit km/s range; going higher as the SF gets softer won't change much because all the other weapons have their basic design limitations relaxed and (correspondingly) range increased.

The problem is that they can be dodged. Even if they're invisible it doesn't matter, because the enemy can just burn their engines at random to sidestep a shot they didn't see coming.

We can feasibly get muzzle velocities up to, say, 2-3 km/s without even trying very hard. 5-10 with a bit of effort. Effective range for a ballistic weapon is then measured in terms of time: how long does it take the enemy to sidestep incoming fire by several times their own width? And how far can a projectile travel in that time? Against a bigger target, the same gun is longer-ranged. Counterintuitive at best.


2) 'Energy' weapons (lasers of varying frequency and charged-particle beams) are medium to long ranged. Unless you fight at light-second or longer ranges and have accelerations in the 10g-100g range, they're essentially undodgeable. Defense revolves around electronic warfare (trick the enemy into shooting where you aren't), passive defense (armor and magic-shields), and of course getting the other bastard before he gets you. Being dodgy only helps a tiny bit in that it keeps the enemy from focusing a beam on the same spot on your hull for very long- which makes a burnthrough less likely.

The limit on energy weapons' effective range comes from dispersion. Both lasers and particle beams are vulnerable to this, especially with realistic-sized hardware that can fit on a ship of hundreds of tons.


3) Guided missiles have nigh-unlimited range. With the right engine, you can even do something sadistic like:
-Launch missiles at Mars, through a fixed mass driver orbiting Earth
-Wait six months for them to coast to Mars, ballistically.
-Have them fire up their engines and independently seek out and destroy whatever targets you want exploded.

Something like that may not always be a good idea, but it's well within the range of the possible. It arguably stretches the definition of "missile attack" to the breaking point: are they missiles, or is this a form of highly aggressive and crafty mine warfare? Anyway, speculation aside.

A guided weapon can totally defeat a target's attempt to maneuver. It's immune to the "multiply muzzle velocity by time it takes them to dodge" calculation, which limits the range of all other weapons. The catch is that it's going to mount smaller sensors than its mothership, so it's easier to fool. Also, it's probably using some kind of energetic drive, so it's easier to detect than a cannonball travelling at the same speed would be.

Yup. Lasers. They're like the Swiss army knife of space weapons. I suppose certain types of particle cannons could also work for this, but I think there are turret issues with particle weapons (if I remember Atomic Rockets correctly, once you've accelerated a particle beam up to relativistic speeds its inertia starts to resist attempts to make them turn in the direction the barrel is pointing) that don't apply to lasers.

If the particle accelerator is a linac, you don't have this problem- the particle beam doesn't change directions in the first place, any more than a normal bullet does on its way out the gun.

And the particle accelerator really does need to be a linac. If you can't fit it in a turret, make it an spinal mount; it's worth it.

Conversely, lasers are easily redirected IF you can put a mirror in the path of the beam without frying it. This is easier said than done with a powerful weaponized laser- should work, but it's not something that can be totally ignored.

[Dominarch's Hope]

What happens if two relativistic kinetic kill vehicles collide with each other?


Like a 30 kg projectile traveling at 80% the speed of light hits another of the same size and speed headon?

Isnt that technically an FTL impact? Is that the next study equivalent of the LHC once we can make RKKVs?