ISD vs cloaked mines

[Mr Bean]

Here's what we know about Mass-Shadow's
While in Hyperspace, ships do not interact with real-space at all. The exception is via the Mass-Shadow, and the Mass-Shadow is any sufficently large gravitational objection can disrupt Hyper-space enough that it is impossible to stay in hyper-space. Any gravity will do, if you can produce a gravity field you can yank a ship out of hyper-space. If a ship tries to keep flying despite a mass-shadow, it's hyper-drive will burn out and the hyperspace "bubble" as describes in EU will break and the ship will be tossed back into real-space.

We don't know what the lower limit is, so even if a Hyper-space lane has mines ten inchs apart over five thousand KM's square, that might be total ineffective against a SW Hyperdrive equipped ship, because if the mines Mass is not enough it will go right through the mine-field.

Never mind as Wong noted the low-low chances of hitting said mine in a lane that might be a light-second across. or the low-low chances of a mine exploding quick enough to damage a Light-speed plus ship.

[Ender]

Here's what we know about Mass-Shadow's
While in Hyperspace, ships do not interact with real-space at all. The exception is via the Mass-Shadow, and the Mass-Shadow is any sufficently large gravitational objection can disrupt Hyper-space enough that it is impossible to stay in hyper-space. Any gravity will do, if you can produce a gravity field you can yank a ship out of hyper-space. If a ship tries to keep flying despite a mass-shadow, it's hyper-drive will burn out and the hyperspace "bubble" as describes in EU will break and the ship will be tossed back into real-space.

Every last bit of this is incorrect.

Try reading this for a quick summery.

[Darth Wong]

Also, I notice no one acknowledged my previous post. What's the matter, you people don't understand math?

The level of math required to figure out tachyonic interactions? No, I don't.

I wasn't talking about modeling the physical interaction between the tachyonic ship and a sublight object: I was talking about the fact that the thing isn't even going to detonate quickly enough to hit the ship before it's long gone, so whatever interaction occurs is likely to be no more serious than hitting some random piece of space garbage: something you'd think they're set up to handle.

As I understand it with tachyonic-baryonic interactions the issue is field interactions not particle interactions. The mine would cause a portion of the ISD's own mass to shed energy in the collision as it accelerates towards infinity. And I have no idea how one would calculate that.

Obviously, the physics of tachyonic interactions are not exactly a thoroughly understood subject. But since these ships aren't being destroyed by space dust and don't drop out of hyperspace until they're extremely close to the destination, either these interactions are very weak or they've found a way to deal with them.

[Mr Bean]

Every last bit of this is incorrect.

Try reading this for a quick summery.

Including my name? awwww..


However that page fails to address EU observed phenomenon and ignores a key point, specifically that a hyerdrive engine burns out while attempting to cross a Mass-Shadow(Artificial or otherwise), thus the safety cut-offs prevent ships from enter hyperspace while in a Mass-Shadow of a planet (Burns out the drive).

We don't know if you can cross a Mass-Shadow in hyper-space because your drive safteies will kick you out earlier or if disabled will burn your engine out before you can "cross" the shadow. It's interference

Why can't you go to light-speed from the orbit of a planet? If the Mass-Shadow was simply the physical manifestation of a macroscopic object in hyper-space the Shadow should instantly smash like a bug any ship trying to jump from a gravity well. But we see in the EU what happens when you try, that being your hyper drive burns out because it over-stresses as it tries to form a hyper-space bubble.

[Ender]

I wasn't talking about modeling the physical interaction between the tachyonic ship and a sublight object: I was talking about the fact that the thing isn't even going to detonate quickly enough to hit the ship before it's long gone, so whatever interaction occurs is likely to be no more serious than hitting some random piece of space garbage: something you'd think they're set up to handle.

I see that in one of my edits I dropped the part where I agree with that and also made a point about strength of the mines, shields, and the inverse square law.

Obviously, the physics of tachyonic interactions are not exactly a thoroughly understood subject. But since these ships aren't being destroyed by space dust and don't drop out of hyperspace until they're extremely close to the destination, either these interactions are very weak or they've found a way to deal with them.

Yes, the method being shields. Since the strength of the shields is sufficient that the mines are a nonentity, I figured the OP assumed that the shields were nt a factor for some reason.

Dark Nest has the Falcon flying into a denser part of a protoplanetary disk/nebula and the grains of dust being enough that if they hadn't dropped out they would have been destroyed. That could provide some limits if someone were to calc it.

[Ender]

However that page fails to address EU observed phenomenon and ignores a key point, specifically that a hyerdrive engine burns out while attempting to cross a Mass-Shadow(Artificial or otherwise), thus the safety cut-offs prevent ships from enter hyperspace while in a Mass-Shadow of a planet (Burns out the drive).

It doesn't address this claim because it deals with canon, not fanon. Hyperspace is realspace from a tachyonic perspective. You interact with all of it, with the only difference being that said interactions are dictated by superluminal physics rather then conventional physics. Your hyperdrive doesn't "burn out", your ship is destroyed. The Quaestor shattered a planet when it hit it in a hyperspace accident, the Falcon was nearly destroyed when it flew into a nebula/protoplanetary disk.

We don't know if you can cross a Mass-Shadow in hyper-space because your drive safteies will kick you out earlier or if disabled will burn your engine out before you can "cross" the shadow. It's interference

More fanon. Your safeties kick in and drop you out of hyperspace so you don't hit something and convert all your mass into energy.

Why can't you go to light-speed from the orbit of a planet? If the Mass-Shadow was simply the physical manifestation of a macroscopic object in hyper-space the Shadow should instantly smash like a bug any ship trying to jump from a gravity well. But we see in the EU what happens when you try, that being your hyper drive burns out because it over-stresses as it tries to form a hyper-space bubble.

Funny how what we see in the EU isn't that. The Falcon jumped from Byss in low orbit.

[Teleros]

That "large comet" is probably more than 500 miles in diameter (gravity then is even barely noticeable). Have you ever seen Star Trek drag/move any thing that is remotely that big?

As above with shifting that moon, although I admit at the time I wrote that I was thinking of a Star Wars power, with the massive transport & production facilities etc that you'd need.

Hyperspace routes aren't going to be like modern roads. It's a well-travelled and "known safe" route between two areas, but it doesn't have defined edges. You're not going to be able to mine something that's thousands or tens of thousands of kilometres wide with any realistic expectation of hitting anything, unless you use a truly gigantic number of mines.

Which is why I was considering it as a terrorist tactic or something similar. Heck, even the knowledge that you'd mined a route might work if it disrupted travel, rather like Thrawn's cloaked asteroids above Coruscant, now that I think of it.
You're right though that mining a route so as to reliably hit anything... frankly if I had those kinds of resources I wouldn't bother in the first place - a fleet of warships would do the job nicely, and be far more flexible .

Also, I notice no one acknowledged my previous post. What's the matter, you people don't understand math?

Assuming you're correct about the particle interactions - and I see no reason to assume otherwise - I think you pretty much killed the idea of explosive mines .

[Coalition]

Assuming they beam the mines in front in time, and the mines interact with the ISD, you might as well treat them as solid objects impacting the ship at c for a rough estimate of damage.

E=mc²

Assuming the mine masses 1 ton, that is 90*10^18 Joules. If I hve my math right, that is 21.5 Gigatons. Multiply this by the mass of the mine in tons to get more accurate. What was the shield rating of an ISD in Gigatons? Divide the ISD's shield rating by the 21.5 Gigatons, and that could be another estimate.

So it can range from zero (due to the mines passing through the ISD), to the number above. Aka author interpretation, where the squadron of ships jump to hyperspace. Some of them are going fast enough to pass through the mines, others just enough to take varying levels of damage, and others get destroyed.

[Darth Wong]

Yes, the method being shields. Since the strength of the shields is sufficient that the mines are a nonentity, I figured the OP assumed that the shields were nt a factor for some reason.

I actually think the interaction must be very weak, and I point to the Millennium Falcon dropping out of hyperspace at Alderaan in ANH as proof. Given the level of debris they flew into, they should have been destroyed before dropping out of hyperspace if the interaction is strong.

Dark Nest has the Falcon flying into a denser part of a protoplanetary disk/nebula and the grains of dust being enough that if they hadn't dropped out they would have been destroyed. That could provide some limits if someone were to calc it.

Be that as it may, ANH outranks that book.

[Darth Wong]

Assuming they beam the mines in front in time, and the mines interact with the ISD, you might as well treat them as solid objects impacting the ship at c for a rough estimate of damage.

Why?

[Illuminatus Primus]

ROTS ICS says that shielding on a hyperspace jump ring is sufficient to protect against interstellar gas and dust.

[Darth Hoth]

This is only vaguely recalling, but for whatever it is worth I seem to remember the Vong using "hyperspace mines", in the sense that they had hyperlanes seeded with a variant of their biowank gravity generators, violently ripping New Republic ships out of Hyperspace. This would appear to be somewhat similar to Zsinj's designs, but usable on a larger scale. It was mentioned somewhere in the early to mid series; Star by Star springs to mind, but I cannot find the quote right away. If one has access to such things, rapidly transporting them might be somewhat useful. The Federation would not have such technology, however.

[Swindle1984]

Wasn't there a description of an Interdictor cruiser using its gravity well projectors to focus and crush some target in one of the Vong war books? If someone has the exact details, that could clear up the capabilities of Interdictor cruisers, at least when concentrating all the power of their projectors on one target.

Generally, they spread the fields out in a cone pattern to prevent ships from escaping into hyperspace or to drag them out.

So we know what they can do with dispersed fields in regards to hyperdrive (preventing hyperspace travel within their range, but not destroying the ships that fly into the fields), and if someone has the exact passage we know what they can do with concentrated fields.

Nothing in Star Trek has demonstrated gravity manipulation on that level, not including alien-of-the-week episodes.

[Wyrm]

One would think that a ST mine would be able to fuck up a ST ship. But using DW's math on a ship ~600 m long traveling at warp 9.9 (= ~6555c = 1.965e12 m/s — pushing the pedal to the metal, but not impossible) gives a contact time of ~0.305 ns, half a magnitude lower than 1 ns. A mine of this kind would not be able to reliably destroy the E-D if it were traveling max-warp.

Mike, would you please justify the 1 ns detonation latency?

[Darth Wong]

One would think that a ST mine would be able to fuck up a ST ship. But using DW's math on a ship ~600 m long traveling at warp 9.9 (= ~6555c = 1.965e12 m/s — pushing the pedal to the metal, but not impossible) gives a contact time of ~0.305 ns, half a magnitude lower than 1 ns. A mine of this kind would not be able to reliably destroy the E-D if it were traveling max-warp.

Mike, would you please justify the 1 ns detonation latency?

You're kidding, right? A better question is: how the fuck could you possibly make a weapon which can actually use up its reactants in less than 1 ns, considering the fact that even light can only travel 0.3 metres in that time? If you drop the containment on a bunch of antimatter, the particles still have to physically travel until they intermingle with matter particles; just how hot are these particles that they would be moving at a considerable fraction of c yet still be contained in the magnetic confinement field?

[Batman]

Mayhaps that's part of the reason why they put mines in positions where ships CAN'T go Maximum Warp and have a limited field of maneuver to boot?
Trek or Wars you CAN'T mine empty space. Well you CAN of course but it's moderately pointless. Even at Trek Impulse speeds you can go around any mine field of realistic size at your leisure. DS9 mining the wormhole worked because apparently, for whatever reason, you couldn't Warp-zoom through it, and Thrawn 'mining' Coruscant during TTT worked because the problem wasn't people running into the mines, it was the mines dropping on the planet.

[Ender]

I actually think the interaction must be very weak, and I point to the Millennium Falcon dropping out of hyperspace at Alderaan in ANH as proof. Given the level of debris they flew into, they should have been destroyed before dropping out of hyperspace if the interaction is strong.

I think the difference here is that in ANH they were decanting into the field, whereas in the book they were still FTL.

Be that as it may, ANH outranks that book.

ANH novel describes "shift shields" protecting craft while in hyperspace. Vader was going to claim that the Tantive IV was destroyed when it hit a meteor shower while FTL and its shift shields failed, destroying it.

[Wyrm]

One would think that a ST mine would be able to fuck up a ST ship. But using DW's math on a ship ~600 m long traveling at warp 9.9 (= ~6555c = 1.965e12 m/s — pushing the pedal to the metal, but not impossible) gives a contact time of ~0.305 ns, half a magnitude lower than 1 ns. A mine of this kind would not be able to reliably destroy the E-D if it were traveling max-warp.

Mike, would you please justify the 1 ns detonation latency?

You're kidding, right? A better question is: how the fuck could you possibly make a weapon which can actually use up its reactants in less than 1 ns, considering the fact that even light can only travel 0.3 metres in that time? If you drop the containment on a bunch of antimatter, the particles still have to physically travel until they intermingle with matter particles; just how hot are these particles that they would be moving at a considerable fraction of c yet still be contained in the magnetic confinement field?

You're right. I should've thought of that.

But it seems that ST mines are shit even against ST ships. The same calculation you did with SW ships brings the contact time of a moderately large ST ship going at max below a nanosecond, even if only by half an order. More realistically, the mine is going to have a latency of ten nanoseconds, as the mine has to get information to all its parts "explode now", which would increase the minimum 1 ns latency by an order of magnitude easily. Even the D going at a modest warp 7 (= ~656c) can roll over a mine in less than ten nanoseconds.

Unless, of course, the mine has a proximity fuse, rather than a contact fuse. That way, the mine can pre-blow and send a big wall of destruction for you to splat into.

Not that the federation can build a proximity fuse to catch a SW ship about to roll over it, mind.

[apocolypse]

DS9 mining the wormhole worked because apparently, for whatever reason, you couldn't Warp-zoom through it

It's been a while since I've seen DS9, but if memory serves you have to approach the entrance and exit at impulse speeds due to the time it takes for the aperture to form. I'm assuming warp speeds would have the ship overshoot it before it can properly form.

[Finagle]

It doesn't address this claim because it deals with canon, not fanon. Hyperspace is realspace from a tachyonic perspective. You interact with all of it, with the only difference being that said interactions are dictated by superluminal physics rather then conventional physics. Your hyperdrive doesn't "burn out", your ship is destroyed.

Ender, you seem to have missed the fact that the hyperspace page presents a theory for the mechanics of hyperspace. The tachyonic explanation is not neccessarily accurate, it's just a completely unproven (although pretty well thought-out) theory. Canon sources don't say anything at all about interactions between objects in hyperspace and realspace, except when discussing mass shadows.

Also, IIRC we do have a canon source which states that crossing a mass shadow in hyperspace causes the hyperdrive engine to burn out, rather than simply destroying the ship. I believe it was in Tyrant's Test that this was stated. It's the one where the NR had to borrow Bakuran ships to get through an artifical mass shadow - it's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure the explanation of how they did it was to have a series of hyperdrives in place so that a new one was activating as the old one was burning out, thus allowing limited hyperspace travel within the artificial mass shadow.

[Ender]

Ender, you seem to have missed the fact that the hyperspace page presents a theory for the mechanics of hyperspace. The tachyonic explanation is not neccessarily accurate, it's just a completely unproven (although pretty well thought-out) theory. Canon sources don't say anything at all about interactions between objects in hyperspace and realspace, except when discussing mass shadows.

Learn to read, I already provided 3 examples that contradict you, and IP provided a 4th. For a 5th one there is the explicit statement in the AOTCICS that hyperspace is simply realspace from a tachyonic point of view.

Also, IIRC we do have a canon source which states that crossing a mass shadow in hyperspace causes the hyperdrive engine to burn out, rather than simply destroying the ship. I believe it was in Tyrant's Test that this was stated. It's the one where the NR had to borrow Bakuran ships to get through an artifical mass shadow - it's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure the explanation of how they did it was to have a series of hyperdrives in place so that a new one was activating as the old one was burning out, thus allowing limited hyperspace travel within the artificial mass shadow.

1) That was the Corellian trilogy
2) Provide some quotes
3) Rationalize them with the newer evidence.

[Batman]

Unless, of course, the mine has a proximity fuse, rather than a contact fuse. That way, the mine can pre-blow and send a big wall of destruction for you to splat into.

Given that mines with contact fuses are already moderately useless even in naval warfare except in VERY specific scenarios I assumed that in spacial warfare, proximity fused mines were a given.
Not that it's going to make much of a difference of course.

[Darth Ruinus]

For a 5th one there is the explicit statement in the AOTCICS that hyperspace is simply realspace from a tachyonic point of view.

Can you provide a quote? I would very much like to read that.

[Aaron]

Can you provide a quote? I would very much like to read that.

Hyperspace

Hyperdrives allow voyages through an eerie realm called hyperspace-i.e. the ordinary universe viewed from a ship travelling faster than the speed of light. Hyperdrives adjust faster-than-light "hypermatter" particles to allow a jump to light-speed without changing the complex mass and energy of the ship. In addition to hyperdrive travel, an equally wonderous technology exists, called hyperwaves: supralight signals for real-time transgalactic communications through public HoloNet relys. Hyperwave transceivers require almost stellar-scale power, yet signals can be blocked by nearby massive obstructions or by deflector shielding.

[Darth Ruinus]

Gracias.