Designing Armor for Star Wars like warships

[Raxmei]

I'm not seeing the point of a 200 meter vacuum layer.

Incidentally, is anyone reminded of manji by this thread?

[Purple]

The reason why I don't use robots is because I can't make AI work. Actually, that is not entirely correct. I have managed to construct a real AI but the thing costs as much as a warship to make just so I can get the equivalent of a normal human.

The out of character reason is that the GM has a thing against using cheap AI since it gives people chances to produce infinite ground force and fleets and encourages swarming rather than tactics.


Also, right now I am making a redo of the armor. How does this sound:

1. Keep the concrete in the middle
2. The outer armor layer is now a composite comprised of a sandwich as fallows: 1 meter thick ceramic coating, 10 meters of neutronium rebared with wolfram, another layer of 1 meter thick ceramic coating and than 5 meters of rebared concrete. And this paten repeats it self for the entirety of the outer ring.

How does that sound?

[Simon_Jester]

Right, though you'll want some 'crumple zone' layers that aren't just solid slabs: something that absorbs shocks better than reinforced concrete. If nothing else, the delicate bits of the ship should be mounted in this way- perhaps the compartments with people and machinery in them are actually surrounded by rubber bumpers or powerful springs or something.

[Korto]

Might just butt in here with some unnecessary information.
Kilns and furnaces often use "Firebrick", which are refractory bricks, which are of course ceramic. They can also use "refractory cement", which is mixed with water and poured just like redi-mix cement.

Another refractory which might interest you is ceramic blanket, which is a thick fluffy blanket and a very effective insulator (100mm can reduce temperature from around 1200-1300C to under 100C). This stuff is soft, squishy, non-brittle, and only has an annoying risk of asbestosis (fibres become friable at moderate temperatures). If you use this, it would also serve in a shock absorbing capacity.

[Simon_Jester]

Good choice. And since everyone wears spacesuits (or has them) anyway, since we're IN SPAACE... well, asbestosis isn't a major concern for the main armor belt.

In space, no one can hear the EPA scream...

[Purple]

Right, though you'll want some 'crumple zone' layers that aren't just solid slabs: something that absorbs shocks better than reinforced concrete. If nothing else, the delicate bits of the ship should be mounted in this way- perhaps the compartments with people and machinery in them are actually surrounded by rubber bumpers or powerful springs or something.

Hm... so I need to insert a soft layer right over there. But where do I put it? Do I put it where the concrete is? And than use concrete between that and another layer of softness and than finally have a second slab.

So ceramic slab, neutronium plate, ceramic slab, concrete and finally rubber. And this paten repeats it self for the entirety of the outer ring. How does that sound?

Also, I would love to hear more of this ceramic blanket thing. What are its properties, is there a link or something etc.
And finally, just how resistant to heat is neutronium? I mean what is its index of refraction and stuff.


As for mounting central areas in a shock absorbing coating I like the idea. Like maybe a layer of some sort of gel several meters thick and than concrete around that. This said how good would some sort of gel work as a shock absorber?

Good choice. And since everyone wears spacesuits (or has them) anyway, since we're IN SPAACE... well, asbestosis isn't a major concern for the main armor belt.

In space, no one can hear the EPA scream...

I honestly don't understand one bit of this.

[Korto]

OK, here's the technical data sheet I was sent when I was asking some advice about building a furnace.
This exact stuff probably isn't what you'd use, since it's only rated to 1260C, but there would be higher grades.

In appearance, it's like a thick heavy blanket made of white clothes dryer lint. It feels scratchy like roof batts.

Ceramic Fibre Blanket 1260

DESCRIPTION:
A Spun ceramic fibre blanket well needled with long fibres. It can be supplied in various thicknesses and densities to suit application.

Maximum Service Temperature (C) 1260

Bulk density per cubic metre (kg) 96, 128, 160

PERMANENT LINEAR CHANGE (%)
After heating to 1000oC for 24 hours ≤-3

THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY (W/m/ oK)
At a mean temperature (C)......400........600........800
160 kg/m3.........................0.12.......0.15.......0.24
128 kg/m3.........................0.13.......0.19.......0.25
96 kg/m3...........................0.14.......0.20.......0.29

TYPICAL CHEMICAL ANALYSIS (%)

Al2O3 ........Al2O3+SiO2
45...................98.0

The EPA mention is because the stuff, when heated, apparently releases fine fibres that may cause a condition similar to asbestosis. Of course, in a space suit, you're probably not going to worry about inhaling loose fibres.

[Sea Skimmer]

If he's trying to limit handwaves then he shouldn't be aiming for SW level firepower because.. frankly,, SW level is pretty absurd. And in terms of practicality there's no point in it from a storytelling perspective. You could get away with Megaton, kiloton, terawatt, or petawatt level firepowers (which are probably excessive) without getting into Star Wars levels of absurdity (which is in part driven by stuff like the Death Star and BDZ, but other things.) MT/kt/TW/PW doesn't even prohibit stuff like "mass extinctions" either, since you can just mass nukage at that point (or antimatter, or whatever.)

Enough 155mm DPICM artillery shells could cause a mass extinction event. I estimate that a mere 37,500,000,000 rounds weighing 2 billion tons would be required to completely kill every exposed living thing on the earths land surface (plus most 2011 era armored vehicles and anything that burns easily). Figure some millions of tons of bunker busters to kill everyone hiding underground, but still. It would be easy to see someone who had dozens of planets being able to produce that kind of arsenal. So in terms of wiping out life the firepower of your weapons or the power of the ships reactors is actually irrelevant if you have a large civilization. You only need high specific firepower to boil the oceans, and that’s just retarded as hell as an objective.

I was figuring in terms of armor, figure out what the armor could be, and then scale firepower vaguely to whatever that is. I’m just assuming excessively high yields

My thoughts on redudancy:

1. All my ships have 3 power generators that produce a total of 150% of the power needed for the ship. In essence, the ship can run at 100% required energy if it loses one and on 75% if it loses two of them.

If the ship has kilometers thick armor, I think you’d have a lot more then three power generators; depending on just what those are and if they scale up and down. It would be far more desirable to spread balanced units, or a mixed large and small generator system all along the length and width of the ship; within limits. You don’t want anything too close to the edge of the hull. Redundancy isn’t just a matter of having more power then you actually need, that gets somewhat wasteful as you might as well mount more weapons to use it (leaving some margin of power for future growth). Indeed in space a lot of enemy damage will simply reduce power demands by disabling equipment and weapons on the surface of the ship. You don’t have to worry about pumping out flood water, and fighting is greatly aided by the ability to vent compartments to vacuum. The ship being as big as it is, I would expect it to have many heavy robots and a VERY large machine shop to help with repairs, but the kind of power that stuff eats is probably not too ridiculous

What really counts for redundancy is having redundant pathways to connect numerous power and communications from the source to the receiver. These pathways need to be protected, and yet also be accessible enough that they can be repaired rapidly. They also need to be carefully controlled so you don’t get overloads or brownouts and whatever switching gear actually shunts the flow of power around is going to be crazy. Busbars for 80 trillion volts maybe?

How that all works will depend on how your power generation actually works and if it’s all explosive hazardous, meltdown hazardous or just blow a headgasket hazardous.

Since the main armor is kilometers thick you also have a non trivial question of how you ensure the protection the weapons emplacements themselves and the supporting ship structure and power and ammunition feeds that have to run back to the interior. You’re talking about a two kilometer tall barbette equivalent, its going to be hard to prevent the top of it from simply being severed unless we have some special magic armor to paper them with that for whatever reason is too expensive to use on the rest of the hull.

As you have no doubt noticed a real life battleship did not have a massively volumeous torpedo defense system strapped onto its gun turrets, nor did it have 18 inch thick armor plate on its hull bottom. This is possible because naval warfare predicates separate air, surface and subsurface threats, but in space none of that applies and any weapon can hit from any angle. Ultimately this is why the battleship itself died; it was in fact impossible to armor the turrets against massive explosions like a torpedo or heavy bomb hit provided if such weapons could hit accurately… a warning from history. Basically you need to justify why that 2km thick armor actually matters. The barbettes (to collectively refer to the power-ammo-communications runs which may or may not be in an armored tube) are far larger targets then the turrets and weapons emplacements are so protecting them is vital.

[*]All my vital areas (like the command bridge and the weapons bridge) are sealed from the rest of the ship and have their own life support designed to make them completely self contained. This also includes their own toilets, food and water supply to make them last indefinitely in case of a mutiny.

I’d suggest equipping all the ships major compartments to be equally or near equally self sustaining in life support. If you only do it for the officers on the bridge it would lower moral; don’t think it could be secret, enlisted men will know because it will be them fixing the damn thing when it breaks.

[*]All my crew are in jump suits that convert to space suits simply by putting on a helmet.

That would be nice, but it may have practical crew habitability problems because having a suit on sealed up to the neck would be uncomfortable. If you are using a counter pressure suit that might not be a problem anymore, or you could have different suits for different alert statuses. I would also suggest having spall vests and radiation suits available for the general crew for working around hazardous areas, and the crews of the surface weapons and other exposed areas might well have near power armor-jet pack kind of capabilities in a suit as they face a hazard of being swept into space as well as just being killed. Not that this is very realistic (one nuke going off nearby and you are toast) but its good for keeping up moral. Space is a very unforgiving battlefield.

[*]All the free space between the ship components (like between multiple decks) is filled up with armor and the vital sections are surrounded by something like 10-20 meters worth of it on all sides complete with huge blast doors.

Filling all volume with armor would create serious problems with maintenance access and being able to repair the ship in action. Just something to keep in mind. Void space has its value for protection as well. One possible compromise would be to flood certain spaces that do require maintenance access with some kind of fluid as a liquid loaded space. Water would work, but it would be conductive and corrosive to some material; some kind of low viscosity, high density non conductive clear oil would be ideal as far as I can think.

[*]All corridors are designed with 1 meter thick blast doors for every 3 meters long section that can be closed almost instantly to seal off breached areas.

A blast door every 3 meters seems pretty unrealistic to me; that’d mean how many total blast doors on a ship this huge? Every blast door can potentially fail and jam when you need it to be open and the shear amount of space so many blast doors need to swing at one time in unison wouldn’t leave much other room in the corridor for people! You could also use my liquid loading idea to flood areas in between pairs of blast doors, if the passageway is one that is not normally used in combat but would be desirable to protect. Things like hatches used for resupply or refueling that run through the armor but do nothing to help fight. Everything else sounds good.

[Darth Tedious]

How does neutronium fare against heat? I know it should stop all sorts of impacts but what about melting?

I recently read up on neutronium (the result of an interesting Trek vs. Wars discussion)

AFAIK there aren't any real knowns about neutronium. There are very few definite properties that can be defined. The real-universe stuff (as opposed to SW/ST handwave neutronium) is only theoretical, and its existance hasn't yet been proven.

Just as a comparison-
Real (theoretical) neutronium: Is found only in the heart of neutron stars. Has the atomic number 0, and is composed entirely of neutrons with no protons in the nucleus and no electron cloud. This allows it exist at an insane level of density (basically no empty space between the atoms). The drawback is that it can only exist under the intense gravity/pressure of a neutron star. Outside of such conditions, it would disseminate explosively.

Handwave neutronium: Is found in different places, depending on which universe you're in (neutron star cores in Trek, mined from moons and planets in Wars, insert other universes *here*). It is an exotic metal, often used in alloys. It is apparently very non-reactive (ST phasers have no effect on it, even in an alloy with carbon), but little can be told of its heat dissipation.

I would think you would probably need to use the handwave variety. Neutronium in normal form would be a problem, as the sections of your armour made from it would tend to self-destruct when they were exposed (assuming you had to rely on the adjacent layers to provide the needed pressure to keep the neutronium stable. That said, the crystal lattice of crysteal could be an effective handwave to solve the problem (though it might require the use of one or two more elements, and they may need to be forms of handwavium in themselves).
There was a theory put forward that a ship with a pure neutronium hull (like the Planet Killer from ST:TOS) could be made to work using force fields for structural integrity/containment. This is a really silly idea, because the level of energy a force field would require to keep neutronium under enough pressure to hold together is so great that it would be easier to make a whole ship out of force fields.

[Simon_Jester]

And finally, just how resistant to heat is neutronium? I mean what is its index of refraction and stuff.

The material properties of neutronium would be fucking ridiculous, and probably not what you want for your ships; remember that a neutron star only a few kilometers across weighs as much as the Sun. The stuff's never existed in the lab because the conditions of pressure where it doesn't spontaneously evaporate/explode can't be duplicated in the lab. Also, there are strong reasons to assume it's a fluid, not a solid.

I'd go with "some kind of handwavy metal alloy," rather than "neutronium." Neutronium isn't really a very realistic material to make armor plate out of, especially not if you're putting it on in meter after meter of slabs.

As for mounting central areas in a shock absorbing coating I like the idea. Like maybe a layer of some sort of gel several meters thick and than concrete around that. This said how good would some sort of gel work as a shock absorber?

Depends on the properties of the gel. You won't get and shouldn't get detailed material performance figures for this stuff, Purple. The point is to come up with a combination of materials that provide the appropriate kind of defense, rather than to invent substances that (handwave handwave) just happen to have the super-material properties you need to make this work. So it's all "super-concrete" and "super-steel" and "super-goop," and not "this stuff has a bulk modulus of blah point blah blah."

I mean, what would you do with figures like that if you had them? Do you have the engineering or physics background to use them? Would there be any point to throwing them around inside your game/story/whatever?

Good choice. And since everyone wears spacesuits (or has them) anyway, since we're IN SPAACE... well, asbestosis isn't a major concern for the main armor belt.

In space, no one can hear the EPA scream...

I honestly don't understand one bit of this.

Asbestos is banned in many places because, while a great thermal insulator, it's made of mineral fibers that tend to break off and get into your lungs, causing a disease called "asbestosis." Korto's point is that the stuff he's talking about has the same problem at high temperatures. My point is that in space, who cares, because you can just put on a damn respirator mask whenever you get near the stuff.

Then I make a joke: in space, no one can hear the Environmental Protection Agency scream.

As you have no doubt noticed a real life battleship did not have a massively volumeous torpedo defense system strapped onto its gun turrets, nor did it have 18 inch thick armor plate on its hull bottom. This is possible because naval warfare predicates separate air, surface and subsurface threats, but in space none of that applies and any weapon can hit from any angle. Ultimately this is why the battleship itself died; it was in fact impossible to armor the turrets against massive explosions like a torpedo or heavy bomb hit provided if such weapons could hit accurately… a warning from history. Basically you need to justify why that 2km thick armor actually matters. The barbettes (to collectively refer to the power-ammo-communications runs which may or may not be in an armored tube) are far larger targets then the turrets and weapons emplacements are so protecting them is vital.

True. Purple's reasoning seems to be an "all or nothing armor scheme" type, in which the weapons (or at least the individual weapon mounts) are defined as noncritical, whereas the core hull is defined as critical and in need of armor protection.

[Connor MacLeod]

Enough 155mm DPICM artillery shells could cause a mass extinction event. I estimate that a mere 37,500,000,000 rounds weighing 2 billion tons would be required to completely kill every exposed living thing on the earths land surface (plus most 2011 era armored vehicles and anything that burns easily). Figure some millions of tons of bunker busters to kill everyone hiding underground, but still.

Heh, that's pretty interesting actually. I'd actually like to see a breakdown of that. It would be interesting to compare/contrast against other means of "mass extinction".

It would be easy to see someone who had dozens of planets being able to produce that kind of arsenal.

True. Although if anyone could, I think it would be just as likely they have nukes, and carry/use those as well. Unless for some reason (as above) the billions/millions of tons of conventional ordnance you specify is going to be inherently more efficient.

So in terms of wiping out life the firepower of your weapons or the power of the ships reactors is actually irrelevant if you have a large civilization. You only need high specific firepower to boil the oceans, and that’s just retarded as hell as an objective.

[/quote]

If you just intend to wipe out all surface life, then yeah you do have a point, at least if you are given sufficient time (although it depends on the technobabble too. Planetary shielding or even theatre shielding can possibly make such bombardments difficult to pull off, after all.) Sheer nukage could probably pull it off simply by thermal effects if you use sufficient airbursting (it doesn't take much of an increase in temperature to be fatal to humans either.)

Of course, ocean boiling/crust melting (getting at deep underground targets) is supposed to be the purpose in and of itself for Star Wars, and the ability for some ships to do that seems to be the main reason they even possess that level of firepower. But like you say that's retarded, but then again I didn't think I was saying SW firepower is reasonable or you NEED that level of firepower to wipe out a planet (hence the "SW firepower is absurd" bit.) Mind you it can also depend on your defenses again, like above. Planetary shielding seems to render all but the most extreme bombardments ineffective, after all.

[Connor MacLeod]

The reason why I don't use robots is because I can't make AI work. Actually, that is not entirely correct. I have managed to construct a real AI but the thing costs as much as a warship to make just so I can get the equivalent of a normal human.

What do you mean "can't make AI work". I don't think you'd neccesarily have to have AI functioning to have robots. Robots could be as simple as dumb drones. Hell you could possibly get away with remote controlled drones either, and it's still an issue.

The out of character reason is that the GM has a thing against using cheap AI since it gives people chances to produce infinite ground force and fleets and encourages swarming rather than tactics.

My suggestion is that if you're contriving warfare to happen a certain way, then you rely on the human/political factors to have it happen, the same way combat in the Dune universe is due to long term cultural/political factors. It's not perfect, but in real life "tradition" can prove to be quite a strong motivator, oftentimes more so than even law (especially if it's been at work for a long time.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Ironically I remembered this armour concept from my long ago days of hanging around the B5tech forums, made by a former, long ago acquaintance of mine. I'm not totally sure how "realistic" it is, but it sounds fairly plausible in the handwavy fashion, It might have some interesting/useful ideas to apply.

Another possible source to borrow from might be the revelation space universe.. I believe Reynold's ships tend to incorprate some fairly handwavey/fringe sciency materials or tech to handle attacks as well (although they aren't super heavy either.)

One idea that does occur is that if you have these super-thick armor plates, you could handwave them to be superconducting (maybe with magic forcefield assistance there. Perhaps the fields only exist when supported in a proper physical medium rather than simply being able to exist independently?) Your armor might have some sort of absorptive/superconducting properties tied to some sort of heatsink/radiator mechanism (Technobabble or plausible your choice) That would be a bit like the B5 Wars Shadow cruiser "energy diffusor" tendril system (basically the absorbed energy is stored and radiated away at a fixed rate. I believe the Langston field in Mote in the God's eye works a similar manner.) For shocks and accelerations you could use some Tensor field/SIF analogue to help smooth out the forces and shocks and such. Kinda like the Energy Reflex System described in the link above. Thick armour gives you alot of volume to spread energy through, and as long as the absorption/retransmission mechanisms keep up, it might be effective, at least against primarily thermal attacks.

On the other hand you might also just stop phyiscal impactors and powerful explosions simply by deflection via some force field "repulsor" device. A simple EM field probably could do that. You could make it highly directional to allow for torpedo boat/bomber analgoues to slip around it to strike in a "below the waterline" type fashion (or maybe there are gaps or openings.. such devices could be "double blind" and prevent a defending ship from using their own missiles/projectiles as well while such devices are on.) It doesn't even have to "stop" a projectile instantly.. you could design it so its meant to gradually slow it or turn it aside over a distance, for example (unless projectiles move super fast. Then this probably wouldn't work. I was thinking of missiles that move at the speeds they tend to in Star Wars and 40K) .. eg tens or hundreds of km/s or less typically

[Sea Skimmer]

Heh, that's pretty interesting actually. I'd actually like to see a breakdown of that. It would be interesting to compare/contrast against other means of "mass extinction".

Area of earths land surface = about 150,000,000,000,000 square meters. Lethal area of 155mm DPICM shell = 4,000 square meters, that gives 37,500,000,000 shells required. Each projectile I have in mind weighs 103lb holding 88 DPICM submunitions which can defeat about 80mm of armor with a direct hit. So total weight is 1,931,250,000 tons, close enough to 2 billion tons for rounding! That means you are dropping no less then 3,300,000,000,000 individual bombs on the enemy.

DPICM is less effective then unitary against forests and steep slopes; but I don't see that as very important and you'd start mass forest fires all over. Plus you simply wouldn't really need to bombard open deserts or glacial ice so impacts could be more heavily concentrated on areas with major concentrations of lifeforms. A unitary 155mm HE shell has a lethal area of around 1,000 square meters so this would merely quadruple the tonnage required to eight billion tons, which would be easier to manufacture and might well cost less but wouldn't damage and destroy nearly as many armored vehicles. Video blow shows the round impacting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beiD1IpR ... re=related

True. Although if anyone could, I think it would be just as likely they have nukes, and carry/use those as well. Unless for some reason (as above) the billions/millions of tons of conventional ordnance you specify is going to be inherently more efficient.

Sure nukes work but they also really mess up the planet if you use a lot of them; a hypothetical ultra low dud rate future submunition wouldn't have the same problems. With real life dud rates you'd make the place uninhabitable for about two hundred years until they all finish rusting…. The main point was simply you can kill massive areas with weapons which are individually less then a pound each.

If you just intend to wipe out all surface life, then yeah you do have a point, at least if you are given sufficient time (although it depends on the technobabble too. Planetary shielding or even theatre shielding can possibly make such bombardments difficult to pull off, after all.) Sheer nukage could probably pull it off simply by thermal effects if you use sufficient airbursting (it doesn't take much of an increase in temperature to be fatal to humans either.)

Thermal pulse is even easier to protect against then submunitions would be though, and neither is exactly hard. The submunitions taking out armored vehicles and any exposed military equipment would make it much easier to invade and mop up if one insists on it.

I don't see time as being a huge factor if I can show up with 10 kilometer long ships that can dump billions of shells down for me. Back of the envelope calculations say that a mere 10x1x1km starship could haul upwards of 100 million 20 foot containers. Each container would then need to hold 375 shells to get the 37.5 billion rounds onboard. I’m not sure if that would fit or not, but it would at least come close (in real life weight would not allow this, but thank god for space!) Anyway, dump the containers from orbit and have each one burst to release shells as it comes down, or something. It could be done if someone wanted!

Of course, ocean boiling/crust melting (getting at deep underground targets) is supposed to be the purpose in and of itself for Star Wars, and the ability for some ships to do that seems to be the main reason they even possess that level of firepower. But like you say that's retarded, but then again I didn't think I was saying SW firepower is reasonable or you NEED that level of firepower to wipe out a planet (hence the "SW firepower is absurd" bit.) Mind you it can also depend on your defenses again, like above. Planetary shielding seems to render all but the most extreme bombardments ineffective, after all.

On paper you could go pretty crazy with deep underground facilities 8,000-12,000ft down, but the practical problems of sheltering any significant portion of the population in such facilities are downright insane. Planetary shields just boggle the mind. You need some real good magic to make that crap work without the foundations crushing if people are going to unload anything like hundreds of gigatons into it. Never mind the practical questions of shield-atmospheric interaction without the shield being vulnerable to slow moving objects or chemical weapons dumped from high orbit in colossal tonnages.

But really, you figure if you can make a Death Star or anything like it you really ought to be able to put an FTL drive on an asteroid, run it up to high speed, use FTL to jump close to the planet and then plow into it. Even taking the time to armor one side of the rock before you attack would be more reasonable then 160km battle stations. Pretty clearly I think the Emperor wanted planets blown the fuck apart for the sake of blowing them the fuck apart and had Space Krupp to help him make it happen.

[Beowulf]

Heh, that's pretty interesting actually. I'd actually like to see a breakdown of that. It would be interesting to compare/contrast against other means of "mass extinction".

Area of earths land surface = about 150,000,000,000,000 square meters. Lethal area of 155mm DPICM shell = 4,000 square meters, that gives 37,500,000,000 shells required. Each projectile I have in mind weighs 103lb holding 88 DPICM submunitions which can defeat about 80mm of armor with a direct hit. So total weight is 1,931,250,000 tons, close enough to 2 billion tons for rounding! That means you are dropping no less then 3,300,000,000,000 individual bombs on the enemy.

I'm pretty sure you can do better than that. The M30 and M31 MLRS rockets indicate that you can fit 400 M85 DPICM bomblets into a 200lb warhead. Lethal area is a bit of a question but assuming the same bomblet density, would amount to 16000 m^2. Still amounts to some 10 billion cluster munitions, but only 1 billion tons. Given that the warhead is less than half the length, and approximately the same diameter as a MLRS rocket, gives rough dimensions of 6 feet long, and 9 inches in diameter. This would allow you to fit approximately 300 warheads into your standard TEU, at about 30 tons net each, which is actually what you can fit into a TEU, so we don't even have to stretch credulity there. Still need some 3.4 million TEUs to be transported. But this is SPACE! And it's much lower of a number than you calc'ed as necessary.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Skimmer

Going by size, the Death Star couldn't just have been a portable instrument of genocide; the incentive to build it that big wouldn't have been there. The main gun just didn't take up that big a fraction of the ship.

I think, for whatever reason, the Emperor wanted to make sure that the weapon he was using to blow up planets was big enough that some joker with their own spaceship couldn't easily destroy it. What wound up being so massy wasn't just the big honking beam weapon- it was the stuff he built around the beam weapon. The theory being that the battlestation would be invulnerable to enemy attack, possibly capable of basing fleets or even acting as a seat of government in its own right- say, if the Emperor takes it into his head that Coruscant isn't really a secure place for him and decides he wants a more formidable (and self-propelled) location for his throne room.

Remember, there are valid arguments for not making your terror weapon so cheap you can afford thousands of them- because if you're building thousands of them, some will wind up in the wrong hands, and suddenly your own authority is less stable.* Having a unique weapon that even enemy doomsday machines can't take down very effectively gives you an ace in the hole if you're worried about a decapitation strike aimed at you.

*I'm reminded of Eleventh Century Remnant's argument that what limits the size of the star destroyer fleet in Star Wars isn't tonnage or construction capacity- for one Death Star they could make far, far more ISD's than they actually do. It's manpower: finding reliable, loyal, and above all very stable officers to command the ships. They have enough trouble with that as it is. If they expanded the fleet by a factor of ten, the fraction of chancers, lunatics, and rogues would probably increase by a factor of more than ten. At which point the Empire is in much more danger of collapse, or at least progressive decay due to a surplus of lunatics.

It might be easier to find one absolutely reliable man and give him something that can blow up worlds than it is to find a hundred thousand absolutely reliable men and give all of them something that can "merely" devastate them. Or at least it's easier for Palpatine, seeing as how he's a telepath...

[Purple]

Hm... perhaps I should take a step back from numbers and return to the principals. I have a background in engineering so this should not be that hard to figure out if I bust open my old books. I will now write something up, and you people correct me where you think I am wrong.

For one, I am looking at using ceramics on the surface. This is because they are good at resisting high speed impacts and heat transfer. When hit with energy weapons, I am hoping the armor will disperse the damage over a wide area. If hit by projectiles I am counting that this will stop them from burrowing in causing things like bunker buster type warheads to detonate much closer to the surface wasting their energy.

Around the ceramics on both sides I plan to deploy a thick layer of Ceramic Fibre Blanket rated for much higher temperatures. This should help disperse the heat even more and effectively stop shaped charge type weapons as well as plasma and nuclear blasts.

Now, bellow that layer will be some sort of filler. This will be some form of steel but I won't go into it now until I determine the best structure.

This paten than repeats it self down to the inner level. At the inner level we have a slight swap. All the space between the compartments is filled with reinforced concrete to resist the shocks coming from the outside of the ship. The rooms them self will float in a form of gel that I have not figured out yet (working on it) that will absorb the shock and any vibrations. In essence, I am looking for a substance that mimics what is found in shock absorbers.

The armor is segmented into plates and reinforced throughout its structure by rebar. The ship it self is assembled from the in side out and the armor is put on last. After that is done, the ship is not designed to be taken apart easily for replacing parts. Instead, any replacement is taken in in small packages and assembled on the inside.

The weapons turrets, both standard and point defense are unmanned. The main weapons are controlled from a Fire Control Bridge in the core of the ship that looks much like a modern missile cruiser with people siting in front of computer screens picking weapons and targets and tracking shots. All point defenses are fully automated. As such, the loss of an individual weapon system does no other damage to the ship than loosing a gun.

During battle conditions all crew are called into what I refer to as "Vital Areas". Each of these areas has independent life support including power supply and serves a definitive purpose on board the ship in combat. The non essential areas like crew quarters or recreation facilities are subjected to a communal life support but will be empty during combat. The main reactors are just there to provide power to the non essential areas, weapons (since powering a massive railgun system of hundreds of weapons just won't do with anything less than a massive reactor) and FTL systems.

All electrical and other lines of communication (intranet cables, watter supply, ventilation etc.) are located within the lining of regular access tunnels that the people will use to get around the ship anyway. This gives the insides of a starship the appearance of a maze of tunnels but it's really just a multi level grid. All the components are hence redundant (due to the chess board like design) and easy to access.

All my crew are in a space suit equivalent that they wear under their uniforms. But this is not the sort of thing you imagine to see from NASA. Appearance vise it is the equivalent of a G-suit with a helmet capable of rapidly pressurizing and has internal heating. It's not designed to keep people alive in space indefinitely, just to keep them alive until they can either patch up what ever leak happened in their compartment or get the hell out of it.

As for the blast doors, their primary purpose is boarding defense. If an enemy has to cut through a 50cm door every 3 meters he will take a long, long time to get to the areas that are important. And each of the sealed off compartments can be depressurized or flooded with stuff like toxic gas or hot plasma. And yes, there would be millions of blast doors on the starship.

[Darth Tedious]

With that many blast doors, boarding would be absolutely pointless. You could probably get away with having a lot less, if onboard defense is their main function. Maybe one every five metres? Gotta think of the budget...

[Purple]

With that many blast doors, boarding would be absolutely pointless.

Well yes, that is the point. I want to completely demoralise any others who so much as think of boarding me that they just drop it.

You could probably get away with having a lot less, if onboard defense is their main function. Maybe one every five metres? Gotta think of the budget...

Alright, one in 5 meters it is. I need space to fit the auto turrets anyway.

[Sea Skimmer]

Re: Skimmer

Going by size, the Death Star couldn't just have been a portable instrument of genocide; the incentive to build it that big wouldn't have been there. The main gun just didn't take up that big a fraction of the ship.

The main battery doesn't take up that big a fraction of a North Carolina class battleship either; but dispensing with the rest of the ship wouldn't be too practical. We really don't know enough about the Death Star design to know if all that extra space was required or not. Clearly the ship has excessive volume, but the decks enclosing that volume may be necessary. Bracing the gun onto the side of the reactor at an angle like that is a pretty epic engineering task given that turbolaser type weapons have recoil and yet the superlaser has no apparent recoil absorption mechanism other then the shear mass and rigidity of the ship. It would be possible that the individual superlaser generators are recoiling inside the mount but this only makes life even more complicated. Also the ICS shows major components of the main reactor running the entire height of the ship, and they had to attach engines to the thing. It may be that filling in a sphere was the only make to hold it all together structurally, at least if one demanded that all structure was armored to prevent the enemy from breakup up the ship with small caliber weapons.

I think, for whatever reason, the Emperor wanted to make sure that the weapon he was using to blow up planets was big enough that some joker with their own spaceship couldn't easily destroy it. What wound up being so massy wasn't just the big honking beam weapon- it was the stuff he built around the beam weapon. The theory being that the battlestation would be invulnerable to enemy attack, possibly capable of basing fleets or even acting as a seat of government in its own right- say, if the Emperor takes it into his head that Coruscant isn't really a secure place for him and decides he wants a more formidable (and self-propelled) location for his throne room.

I've always figured it had a major mobile base role. However that could have just been a side effect of having so much empty volume in a design that had to be that big and the natural demand to do something with the space; we really don’t and can’t know given that the expanded universe crap on the Death Star design suffers from terminal retardation. Even if the Emperor wanted mobile command base that can invade as well as blow up planets that would still would hardly require all those decks to be effective…. finding sufficient sufficiently loyal men to man the ship becomes a non trivial problem. Even if a deck on the Death Star is 10 meters tall that would leave 16,000 decks the largest of which, has an area of 20,000 square kilometers! That’s significantly larger then Kuwait. A big chunk is taken out by the reactor, but still! Packing in anyone the Emperor could want would be possible with a much smaller vessel.

The Death Star 2 is so much excessively larger in turn that the idea of the space being required for a mobile base is even less credible. Sure they have city planets you might need billions or trillions of troops to attack on paper, but who would ever realistically think you could assault such cities on the ground and not just end up demolishing them anyway? Knock over a single 10 kilometer tall skyscraper and bad shit happens.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm pretty sure you can do better than that. The M30 and M31 MLRS rockets indicate that you can fit 400 M85 DPICM bomblets into a 200lb warhead. Lethal area is a bit of a question but assuming the same bomblet density, would amount to 16000 m^2. Still amounts to some 10 billion cluster munitions, but only 1 billion tons. Given that the warhead is less than half the length, and approximately the same diameter as a MLRS rocket, gives rough dimensions of 6 feet long, and 9 inches in diameter. This would allow you to fit approximately 300 warheads into your standard TEU, at about 30 tons net each, which is actually what you can fit into a TEU, so we don't even have to stretch credulity there. Still need some 3.4 million TEUs to be transported. But this is SPACE! And it's much lower of a number than you calc'ed as necessary.

We'll, we'd do even better with a aircraft dropped CBU; the US had one anti personal cluster bomb from the Nam era with a thousand something bomblets in it. But I like 155mm because a single 155mm HE round set to delay action (or in the future void sensing, why not?) could kill everyone in most houses and defeat significant shelter bunkers. So it’s easy to see how one might mix in some unitary warheads to handle wiping out targets like that, the numbers come from the rounds we don’t need to drop on empty deserts and glaciers. The 200lb GMLRS warhead is a tad excessive for this, and anyway it all goes back to trying to emphasis that even small warheads a person can pickup can inflict genocidal damage without just shooting each specific person with a rifle. Either way, we are talking tonnages that someone like the Empire or Trade Federation would easily show up with which is all that matters. I do wonder now that I think about it, just how many 20ft containers one of those Trade Federation ships hold could. The curved hangers are totally retarded, but the radius of the curves isn't TOO bad so we won't waste as much space as we might.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Skimmer
Going by size, the Death Star couldn't just have been a portable instrument of genocide; the incentive to build it that big wouldn't have been there. The main gun just didn't take up that big a fraction of the ship.

The main battery doesn't take up that big a fraction of a North Carolina class battleship either; but dispensing with the rest of the ship wouldn't be too practical. We really don't know enough about the Death Star design to know if all that extra space was required or not. Clearly the ship has excessive volume, but the decks enclosing that volume may be necessary. Bracing the gun onto the side of the reactor at an angle like that is a pretty epic engineering task given that turbolaser type weapons have recoil and yet the superlaser has no apparent recoil absorption mechanism other then the shear mass and rigidity of the ship. It would be possible that the individual superlaser generators are recoiling inside the mount but this only makes life even more complicated. Also the ICS shows major components of the main reactor running the entire height of the ship, and they had to attach engines to the thing. It may be that filling in a sphere was the only make to hold it all together structurally, at least if one demanded that all structure was armored to prevent the enemy from breakup up the ship with small caliber weapons.

Wasn't there an EU case of someone building the Death Star main gun, slapping some engines on it, and using it as a low-budget superweapon?

That notwithstanding, I suppose my argument can be turned around, say that the sheer size was required for other purposes... nonetheless, it can also be put to good effect, if the thousands of cubic kilometers not filled with structural components but still enclosed in hull for other reasons are turned into a naval base.

Random thought: what if all those bottomless pits on the Death Star were actually 'access spaces,' for moving extremely large pieces of cargo or heavy machinery to where they were needed? The Death Star would have some truly epic requirements when it came to maintenance, feeding the crew, and so on; you wouldn't want to try running everything through the turbolifts we saw.

I've always figured it had a major mobile base role. However that could have just been a side effect of having so much empty volume in a design that had to be that big and the natural demand to do something with the space; we really don’t and can’t know given that the expanded universe crap on the Death Star design suffers from terminal retardation. Even if the Emperor wanted mobile command base that can invade as well as blow up planets that would still would hardly require all those decks to be effective…. finding sufficient sufficiently loyal men to man the ship becomes a non trivial problem. Even if a deck on the Death Star is 10 meters tall that would leave 16,000 decks the largest of which, has an area of 20,000 square kilometers! That’s significantly larger then Kuwait. A big chunk is taken out by the reactor, but still! Packing in anyone the Emperor could want would be possible with a much smaller vessel.

Trick is, if you design the ship in certain ways, the fact that a random percentage of the crew are personally unreliable is relatively unimportant. What matters is that only very stable people have control over the superlaser: essentially the same problem people face today with nuclear weapons. You don't ever want the decision to drop one in the hands of people who might possibly do it for stupid reasons.

You can have the usual number of chancers, goldbrickers, idiots, and borderline personalities on a Death Star. You just can't have any of them in the main gun slot, or in a position to take over the ship from the stormtrooper contingent. And for running the planet-killing apparatus on one Death Star, you may need a lot fewer men than you would to run the planet-razing apparatus on ten thousand ISD's.

[Connor MacLeod]

Area of earths land surface = about 150,000,000,000,000 square meters. Lethal area of 155mm DPICM shell = 4,000 square meters, that gives 37,500,000,000 shells required. Each projectile I have in mind weighs 103lb holding 88 DPICM submunitions which can defeat about 80mm of armor with a direct hit. So total weight is 1,931,250,000 tons, close enough to 2 billion tons for rounding! That means you are dropping no less then 3,300,000,000,000 individual bombs on the enemy.

DPICM is less effective then unitary against forests and steep slopes; but I don't see that as very important and you'd start mass forest fires all over. Plus you simply wouldn't really need to bombard open deserts or glacial ice so impacts could be more heavily concentrated on areas with major concentrations of lifeforms. A unitary 155mm HE shell has a lethal area of around 1,000 square meters so this would merely quadruple the tonnage required to eight billion tons, which would be easier to manufacture and might well cost less but wouldn't damage and destroy nearly as many armored vehicles. Video blow shows the round impacting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beiD1IpR ... re=related

heh. That's actually a kinda neat way of doing it. Yield wise that's got to be quite a bit lower.. single digit gigatons of explosives, tops? What are the kill mechanisms (eg shrapnel, thermal, blast, etc.) How deep are we talking as far as below ground and attacking underground locales? Would there be any danger of contamination or pollution from the explosives, un-detonated explosives, or things like that to consider? How owuld that fare relative to what Nukes do?

Mind you, there's still the issue of stuff like theatre shielding and the like.

Sure nukes work but they also really mess up the planet if you use a lot of them; a hypothetical ultra low dud rate future submunition wouldn't have the same problems. With real life dud rates you'd make the place uninhabitable for about two hundred years until they all finish rusting…. The main point was simply you can kill massive areas with weapons which are individually less then a pound each.

Are you talking "mess up" in the sense of fallout/radioactivity, or just from the fact you need lots of nukes to achieve the desired lethality (which also means injecting huge quantities of energy into the planet.) In the latter case you have a point, but insofar as BDZ or 40K Exterminatus goes, that is generally assumed to be part of the process (fucking up the planet that is, at least to some extent.)

Of course, I've heard of cases where 40K fucked up the planet with overuse of conventional weapons too (artillery, chemical weapons, etc.) in the process of a war, so your approach has some interest to me as well in how that might be achieved.

Thermal pulse is even easier to protect against then submunitions would be though, and neither is exactly hard. The submunitions taking out armored vehicles and any exposed military equipment would make it much easier to invade and mop up if one insists on it.

A good point.

I don't see time as being a huge factor if I can show up with 10 kilometer long ships that can dump billions of shells down for me. Back of the envelope calculations say that a mere 10x1x1km starship could haul upwards of 100 million 20 foot containers. Each container would then need to hold 375 shells to get the 37.5 billion rounds onboard. I’m not sure if that would fit or not, but it would at least come close (in real life weight would not allow this, but thank god for space!) Anyway, dump the containers from orbit and have each one burst to release shells as it comes down, or something. It could be done if someone wanted!

True. I don't think SW would bother doing it, but I could see 40K doing it as one option as a premeditated act - but they would need a special bombardment ship to carry those munitions and deploy them (which they arguably have, so again this does have my interest.)

On the other hand, I doubt you could just have any conventional warship carry that much payload and deploy it nromally, at least not without some tradeoffs. Nukes or starship cannon are going to be vastly more inefficient than what you describe at this activity, but the ISD (or 40K warship, tho 40K is more flexible in this regard) in question would likely have them available more readily.

On paper you could go pretty crazy with deep underground facilities 8,000-12,000ft down, but the practical problems of sheltering any significant portion of the population in such facilities are downright insane. Planetary shields just boggle the mind. You need some real good magic to make that crap work without the foundations crushing if people are going to unload anything like hundreds of gigatons into it. Never mind the practical questions of shield-atmospheric interaction without the shield being vulnerable to slow moving objects or chemical weapons dumped from high orbit in colossal tonnages.

True, although "insane" and "magic" are pretty much par for the course for most Star Wars or 40K tech though, so that clearly isn't a had and fast limit.

But really, you figure if you can make a Death Star or anything like it you really ought to be able to put an FTL drive on an asteroid, run it up to high speed, use FTL to jump close to the planet and then plow into it. Even taking the time to armor one side of the rock before you attack would be more reasonable then 160km battle stations. Pretty clearly I think the Emperor wanted planets blown the fuck apart for the sake of blowing them the fuck apart and had Space Krupp to help him make it happen.

Heh. That, or just use a massive amount of explosives to blast it apart. Or just run any starship into the planet or whatever. That certainly is osmething that has bugged me for awhile - tech wise the SW galaxy ought ot have lots of ways to mess up the planet than just the Death STar.... but at this point I think the SW galaxy cares less about efficiency in these sorts of matters. They almost seem to favor deliberately wasteful (I mean even with planetary shields I doubt you need to blow up the whole planet, much less blow it up so that it scatters at thousands of km/s.) And dont' forget the case where the Emperor had a planet's entire oceans carted off as a punishment. That's both insane and inefficient as a use of resources.

Edit: Oh and the galaxy gun. They can stick hyperdrives on probe droid containers and fighters as small as an A-wing and can cross hundreds or thousands of LY in hours or days, yet they still limit themselves to LOS beam weapons generally within visual ranges.

[Connor MacLeod]

In general, the best argument fo rthe Death Star's existence that one can devise is basically "because we can". There are going to be lots of different ways to do it better or more efficiently (some of which wouldn't REQUIRE blowing up the whole planet, mind.) than using a giant impractical raygun. But for whatever reason, they wanted the raygun. You can throw in the "Clone Wars" into that category too (why use clones when you have droids, FFS.)

SW has never really had an over-arching need to drive it to go for efficiency or optimization, but culturally there's lots of reasons why you don't want to get too efficient at killing with the tech they have. It's quite liekly they'd wipe themselves out with fleets of AI controlled Death Star doomspheres firing hyperdrive equipped planetkillers at each other from across the galaxy, or something.

[Sea Skimmer]

heh. That's actually a kinda neat way of doing it. Yield wise that's got to be quite a bit lower.. single digit gigatons of explosives, tops?

109,128,820 tons of Composition B, plus whatever the detonator and expulsion charges weigh, which might be another few million tons.

What are the kill mechanisms (eg shrapnel, thermal, blast, etc.) How deep are we talking as far as below ground and attacking underground locales?

Four or five meter lethal fragmentation radius, the shaped charge will defeat a 70mm RHA plate at 0 degrees. It can start fires by M42/46 grenades don’t have a dedicated incendiary effect as far as I’m aware, some cluster bombs have zirconium ring for that. Blast effects are minimal; this is 30 grams of explosives.

A much newer submunition of the same size could potentially defeat 75-100% more armor and the case could be fragmenting reactive metal explosive. The fragmentation radius won’t go up because you just don’t have that much metal to spray out. Note that 88 grenades at 5 meter lethal radius covers closer to a 7,000 square meter area then the 4,000 square meters I credited each shell with, so we have significant overlap in lethal fragmentation frag radiuses built in.

Would there be any danger of contamination or pollution from the explosives, un-detonated explosives, or things like that to consider? How owuld that fare relative to what Nukes do?

In real life DPICM can hit as high as 50% dud rates under optimally shitty conditions and bad production lots. However I theorize that a future DPICM subprojectile could have a fundamentally different, all electronic arming and fusing system that would simply cease to be hazardous once the battery drained. An insensitive munition explosive could also be used as well. Right now that would just be too complicated to mass produce. Even in real life these things get produced in the 100 million+ range. Comp B explosive is toxic, almost all explosives are toxic in reasonably large quantities but a one time mass use isn’t likely to have more then transient effects if any. So after a heavy rainfall the area would be more or less usable given hypothetically safe bomblets.

Mind you, there's still the issue of stuff like theatre shielding and the like.

Sure but no one ever tries to explain how a theatre shield would work even in sci fi terms. We have big guns and big rocks for that anyway.

Are you talking "mess up" in the sense of fallout/radioactivity, or just from the fact you need lots of nukes to achieve the desired lethality (which also means injecting huge quantities of energy into the planet.)

Both. Nukes leave radioactivity, and using more nukes together makes the fallout worse then the sum of its parts as far as we can tell. Nuclear blasts do not scale up well in terms of inflicting mass damage, so your talking about tens of thousands of the things to carpet the earth if not far more. You are also simply dumping a tremendous amount of energy in the environment and destroying plant life far more extensively. DPICM would start a lot of wide fires, and tear up trees and bushes but it wouldn’t be flash scorching everything in sight and killing all the grass leading to planet wide dustbowl. This makes it much more realistic to move in loyalist colonial types to takeover the planet and mobilize its resources for the WAR EFFORT. Clone loyal colonists if you have too…

In the latter case you have a point, but insofar as BDZ or 40K Exterminatus goes, that is generally assumed to be part of the process (fucking up the planet that is, at least to some extent.)

Of course, I've heard of cases where 40K fucked up the planet with overuse of conventional weapons too (artillery, chemical weapons, etc.) in the process of a war, so your approach has some interest to me as well in how that might be achieved.

I think WW1 already showed you can fuck up the landscape big time with conventional and chemical weapons. Many chemical weapons kill plants and sustained high explosive bombardment will toxify the landscape on its own. Some new explosives aren’t so bad in that respect, but the TNT base stuff they used in WW1 outright killed many shell filling plant workers. Most artillery firing ranges are considered the same as toxic waste dumps.

On the other hand, I doubt you could just have any conventional warship carry that much payload and deploy it nromally, at least not without some tradeoffs. Nukes or starship cannon are going to be vastly more inefficient than what you describe at this activity, but the ISD (or 40K warship, tho 40K is more flexible in this regard) in question would likely have them available more readily.

The cost of a chartering or building a container ship to deliver the attack seems trivial in comparison to building the barracks you need just to house the workers to build the Death Star.

True, although "insane" and "magic" are pretty much par for the course for most Star Wars or 40K tech though, so that clearly isn't a had and fast limit.

Yeah okay, but they also all act like idiots as persistently as they can, so one has to seriously wonder about how well a lot of stuff they do actually works. Look at Africa, completely inept idiots can fight each other a very long time as long as they are bad at killing. The Death Star may just have been a solution to the chronic retardation of Star Wars forces in general… its not a great basis to work from.

Heh. That, or just use a massive amount of explosives to blast it apart. Or just run any starship into the planet or whatever. That certainly is osmething that has bugged me for awhile - tech wise the SW galaxy ought ot have lots of ways to mess up the planet than just the Death STar.... but at this point I think the SW galaxy cares less about efficiency in these sorts of matters. They almost seem to favor deliberately wasteful (I mean even with planetary shields I doubt you need to blow up the whole planet, much less blow it up so that it scatters at thousands of km/s.) And dont' forget the case where the Emperor had a planet's entire oceans carted off as a punishment. That's both insane and inefficient as a use of resources.

Punishing people brutally by removing an ocean makes vastly more sense as a deterrent then killing everyone, which quickly puts you into a spiral of needing to kill on bigger and bigger scales.