Effective Combat Range in Space

[Dwelf]

I don't see why they would need to enter effective weapons range of the monitor. Sure you have allot of guns and missiles but your at the disadvantage. Feel free to ingore this if it doesnt fit the narrative you want.

Lets magic up a monitor and most probably a small one at that. 300m armour plate, 900m cube and an acceleration of 2G which is less but not too bad when compared to the frigates 5g. A magic frigate 20m wide 30m tall 200m long armour optional.

I'm going to use magical lasers with no divergance for this since what the weapon is doesnt really matter for this.
Taking into account the lack of FTL real space sensors we need to take round trip time into account.
~4 light seconds makes a decent range for this.
Targetting information is 4 seconds old weapons fire takes 4 seconds to reach the target.

Displacement = 1/2 a*t^2

20m/s acceleration
8 seconds
1/2(20*8^2) = 640m

To hit the centre of the monitor at this range you have a target circle with a radius of 640m.
The target profile of the monitor is 900^2 = 810 000 m^2
The area centre of the monitor could be in is Pi*640^2 = 1 286 796.35m^2
It wont take a large salvo 4-9 rounds to guarantee a central hit.

to hit a single frigate.
50m/s
8 seconds
(1/2)50*8^2 = 1600m

To guarantee a hit on the frigate you have a target circle 1600m in radius.
The frigate has a target profie of 20x30m = 600m^2
The area that it could possibly be in is Pi*1600^2 = 8 042 477.2m^2
You can fit the frigate into that area ~13404 times which gives you rougly the number of shots required with a perfect grid pattern in order to guarantee a hit on the frigate.

I doubt my little 900m monitor can mount 13000 guns on it. It certainly can't mount them and have them all covered by it's 300m of armour so baring a lucky shot the frigates are basically out of range while being able to easilly score hits on the monitor. The bigger you make the monitor the further away it can be shot from the worse it gets for the monitor.

Hope I got my numbers right.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Scenario:

Enemy builds ten thousand frigates while i build one monitor. Let's assume we each have one planet and I'm playing defence.

All his frigates attack me. Let's say five thousand decide to distract the monitor and the rest attack the planet directly, even bombing it, regardless of the fact that the industry down there is more valuable intact.

As has been said, why would anyone bother to build a frigate if a monitor can dispatch 10,000 in a moment of orgasmic nerd-wank?

The monitor opens up with its secondary weapons. 'Secondary', by its standards, is enough to smash a cruiser in half with the first shot. Did I mention it's fricking huge? And that guns have a high refire rate? And that it has fuckloads of missiles? Wild evasion or not, the five thousand frigates going after it last maybe ten seconds.

Have you thought this through at all? Or were you too busy self-fellating to notice that you've forgotten to account for things like . . . . well, let's see:
A) All those weapons will generate some quantity of waste heat. If they're stupendously powerful, they will generate stupendous quantities of waste heat, even if they were (magically, wanktastically) 99.99% efficient. A weapon capable of delivering the equivalent energy of a one megaton nuclear device will, at 99.99% efficiency will still generate a Hiroshima's worth of waste heat. How do you get rid of it? Unless you're using elf magic to shunt it off into the Great Magical Asshole of the Cosmos, you'll have to be using radiators. And the frigates can simply stop the marauding monitor by soft-killing its ability to reject waste heat from its own weapons.
B) As Simon says, all those armored doors can be jammed shut.
C) On the topic of armored doors, you can't just take a hull and pack it with weapons. You'll also need to make room for things like shuttle bays, bays to take on stores and supplies, hatches for maintenance, hatches for escape pods, hatches to load your ridiculously energy-dense fuel, sensors (like big telescopes and phased-array radars,) radiators, thermal exhaust ports, thrusters, engine bells, running lights, point-defense weapons mounts, and whatever external mounting is required for your shielding or FTL drive.
D) If the disparity between your micropenis compensation devices and other ship classes is so great that one penis compensator can effortlessly destroy 10,000 frigates, and its secondary guns can effortlessly destroy cruisers . . . why does anyone bother building frigates. Or, conversely, why does anyone call a ship that ludicrously outclassed a frigate? They'd simply put their efforts into building bigger ships and call those frigates instead.

[doom3607]

Huh... how heavy is a frigate... um, how heavy is a modern destroyer... one moment... call it 10,000 tonnes. Which is basically the same as 10,000 tons for those who don't know of the metric system, or who don't know it has tonnes (1,000 kilograms). Now how heavy would something with equivalent tonnage/size be if it's 15 km long with my proportions...

Ok, a frigate has 95.238095238095238095238095238095 kg/m^3. Roughly.

And a monitor has 105,000,000,000 m^3...

For a grand total of... 10,000,000,000 tonnes. Holy shit. So you're right, unfair contest. A million frigates would be fair. That's assuming equal firepower/weight though, which isn't the case- FTL drives are invariably about twice the size of a school bus. That's a vastly higher percentage of the space on a frigate than on a monitor. But always remember- frigates are not intended for real combat platforms. They are scouts, commerce raiders, and convoy protectors. Nothing more. Destroyers are the same way. Cruisers are the smallest ships that are seriously able to fight in the line of battle, and they're 750 meters long to the frigate's 150. The battleships are a kilometer and a half, dreadnoughts are 3 km, superdreadnoughts are 5 km. Dreads and superdreads are there for the most part to hammer holes in enemy formations and assault planets. Monitors are the answer. Supermonitors are the answer to monitors, and I still refuse to say how huge they are. The only comment I'm willing to make is that they are mostly definitely winter born. I'll let the trivia people work out what that means about their size.

And the hull isn't covered in armored doors. Like i've mentioned previously, almost none of the weapons are internal. Waste heat... is an issue I failed to consider. How to get rid of it... I hate to say it, but it's probably easiest to just dump it into the water supply. If you want to be really efficient, might even hook that up to a turbine so you can harness some of your own waste heat.

And, Dwelf- two things wrong with your post. One: Monitors are fuckloads larger than you put it. Two: if it's a multi-light-second range, this is not inside a gravity well. Monitors jumps to within limits of jump accuracy of frigate fleet. Boom.

[Simon_Jester]

...How did you get a figure of roughly 100 kg per cubic meter for your warships? That is significantly less dense than water; it's hard to imagine a ship made of metallic heavy machinery and such being that puffy unless someone went far out of their way to inflate its volume at the expense of its mass.

At some point, though, I have to ask: why would a monitor have vast combat superiority relative to its own weight in smaller craft? What, exactly, gives it that advantage?
________________

Side note:

One concern with big, blocky ships is surface-to-volume ratios. Each piece of useful hardware on the ship has its own footprint on the surface of the hull- so many square meters for a gun turret, so many square meters for a radar dish, so many square meters for an access hatch.

For a Really Big Cubical/Spherical Ship, most of the ship's volume is tucked deep inside the hull (under a heavy armor belt, in your case, which makes it hard to run cables and access corridors through the armor to get at the interior of the ship where the fire control computers and fuel tanks are).

This makes disposing of waste heat very difficult, as noted by Terwynn- the heat is generated deep inside the ship; how do you move it to the radiators without frying anything along the way? It also means that your ship will be comparatively vulnerable to mission-kills- there are limits to the amount of redundancy you can mount on a hull like this. There are other engineering problems (how do we abandon ship in an emergency, like if something weird happens to the reactor and starts irradiating the interior?). And so it goes.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Huh... how heavy is a frigate... um, how heavy is a modern destroyer... one moment... call it 10,000 tonnes. Which is basically the same as 10,000 tons for those who don't know of the metric system, or who don't know it has tonnes (1,000 kilograms). Now how heavy would something with equivalent tonnage/size be if it's 15 km long with my proportions...

Ok, a frigate has 95.238095238095238095238095238095 kg/m^3. Roughly. :mrgreen:

And a monitor has 105,000,000,000 m^3...

For a grand total of... 10,000,000,000 tonnes. Holy shit. So you're right, unfair contest. A million frigates would be fair.

There is the slight problem that surface area doesn't scale as fast as volume.

Take an idealized frigate (being a 100 meter wide cube) and an idealized penis compensator, being a 15,000 meter wide cube. If we assume they both have a density of about 1000 kg/m^3 (which works out to be a block of iron that's 87% empty space), the frigate will have a mass of a million metric tons. The penis compensator will have over three trillion metric tons of mass. Pretty nice, you think, but there's a problem. The frigate has 60,000 square meters of surface area. The penis compensator, 1.35 billion square meters. Each square meter of frigate surface area has 17 tons of mass behind it. The penis compensator . . . well, each square meter of surface area now has 2500 tons of mass behind it. If our idealized frigate has five guns on it (with the sixth side being devoted to engines, this implies that each gun requires 10,000 square meters of hull area to support it) our idealized penis compensator will not have 112,500 guns. It can only have . . . 765 guns.

Why?

Well, the frigate's cooling systems can be 147 times more effective than the penis compensator's, since the frigate has much less mass per square meter to cool. End result: The power output of each ship's reactor cannot possibly scale linearly. When you use that power, you generate waste heat, and eventually the books are going to have to balance somewhere.

Ergo, with all that in mind, each idealized monitor isn't going to be worth the 22,500 frigates that a naive analysis would suggest. It's actually only worth 153.

And the hull isn't covered in armored doors. Like i've mentioned previously, almost none of the weapons are internal. Waste heat... is an issue I failed to consider. How to get rid of it... I hate to say it, but it's probably easiest to just dump it into the water supply. If you want to be really efficient, might even hook that up to a turbine so you can harness some of your own waste heat.

Aaaaand what happens when your water tank gets hot enough to boil? Run it through a turbine? Well, the turbine is constrained by the same laws of thermodynamics that the rest of your ship is. They won't be 100% efficient, and they can only do useful work so long as your whole system isn't filled with high-pressure steam. If you keep dumping waste heat into the interior of your ship, eventually your life support systems will break down and your crew will be baked to death.

At some point, you're going to have to get that waste heat off the ship. There are two ways to do it. First is by ejecting materials heated by your waste heat. This works until you run out of material to heat up. The second is to radiate it off into space; either through dedicated radiating structures, or by heating up the entire ship. One is much more uncomfortable than the other.

[doom3607]

I was thinking of ship as octagonal prisms for whatever reason, not cubes. Basically a long, comparitively thin stick. The octagonal fron end would be 20% of the length of the ship, wide. So it's actually got rather more surface area to mass than you guys did the work for...

I got the mass figure, simon, because I took the mass of a modern Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and applied it to a 150-meter long ship in the format I just described. Clearly, the mass was not high enough. Should I increase it by an order of magnitude or something, then?

EDIT: And all these nice math analyses keep forgetting that ships also have lots of missiles, not just guns. All you need to launch those is some way to get them through the armor, like a curving tunnel of some sort, and then they do scale just fine with internal volume.

[Dwelf]

And, Dwelf- two things wrong with your post. One: Monitors are fuckloads larger than you put it. Two: if it's a multi-light-second range, this is not inside a gravity well. Monitors jumps to within limits of jump accuracy of frigate fleet. Boom.

First. Bigger just makes it easier to hit from a longer range or from the same range since you can guarantee that all your shots will land on a relatively small area of the targets surface.

Second. Extremely short FTL jumps are rare in scifi so I had not taken a micro jump into account. The interesting point you raise here is that your FTL system allows jumps out of a gravity well but not into them. I'm not sure why the frigates can't just use the same trick to evade but it doesn't matter you have a counter to that tactic.

EDIT: And all these nice math analyses keep forgetting that ships also have lots of missiles, not just guns. All you need to launch those is some way to get them through the armor, like a curving tunnel of some sort, and then they do scale just fine with internal volume.

I at least was not forgetting the missiles I was ignoring them since it did not matter what the weapon was just how many you could fire at once and how long they took to get there. Missiles which are by definition guided come with a whole slew of other issues like ECM and counter missile fire. I wanted to start with a simple case which direct weapons fire is.

Curving tunnels have issues with surface damage may I suggest shutters over pods with a multiple segmented corridor with layered blast doored behind it for bringing ordinance up. The shutters protect the launchers from surface damage while reloading and the blast doors protect the interior should the launcher take a hit while firing. While allowing for nice big impressive missile volleys and we all know quantity has a certain quality to it.

Missiles are also too dependent on your technology which I didn't want to get into since you’re looking to write a story and I don't want to ruin any surprises you may have.

[doom3607]

Invert that. Jumps into grav wells are fine, not out. If it's a four ls range, someone's out a gravity well, and given their slow realspace speed, monitors are usually standing guard outside the gravity well anyway, so they can jump into battle faster. And yeah, short range jumps are fine- they still aren't accurate to within 1000 km, though.

[Dwelf]

I'd assumed to be guarding the planet that the monitor would be within the planet's gravity well.

1000km is an incredibly short FTL jump you most probably have the fastest cycling FTL system I've encountered.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I was thinking of ship as octagonal prisms for whatever reason, not cubes. Basically a long, comparitively thin stick. The octagonal fron end would be 20% of the length of the ship, wide. So it's actually got rather more surface area to mass than you guys did the work for...

Doesn't matter. There is no shape which magically beats the whole "volume scales faster than surface area." Even if we went balls-out with a sphere, volume scales by (4/3)*pi*r^3, whereas surface area only scales by 4*pi*r^2. And if your penis compensator is the shape you say it is, the balance is tipped even more in favor of the smaller ships.

EDIT: And all these nice math analyses keep forgetting that ships also have lots of missiles, not just guns. All you need to launch those is some way to get them through the armor, like a curving tunnel of some sort, and then they do scale just fine with internal volume.

These basic math analyses do take that into account. Unless you're launching your missiles by shoving them out the back of your ship with the BEEFCAKE MUSCLE POWAH of your sweaty crewpersons, you're going to have the same problem with what to do with the waste heat produced by launching them. If you use a mass driver to accelerate them out the ship, that accelerator is still not going to be 100% efficient. It'll present much the same problems as you'd have with any other railgun-type cannon aboard your ship. If you're using the missile's own rocket to launch it, well, the hot exhaust gasses will heat the ship on their way out.

Also, missile tubes, missile silos, missile boxes, and whatever else occupy valuable surface area. And since we've been over how surface area scales with respect to volume, you won't have as many tubes to shoot them with, even if you can carry lots and lots more of them. And that's before we get into the whole missiles vs. point-defense argument.

[someone_else]

I'll try to provide some kind of assistence to doom3607 since there are enough people focus-firing on him.

Now, others pointed out how being more mobile is generally a good idea.

You all know how a smaller thing is nimbler right?

It is not necessarily faster though.

You can look at the engines and say that the bigger is the engine the more efficient it is.
For example, you can say that an engine of size 2X is 4 times as powerful as an engine of size X.

Theoretically, this isn't totally wrong if you look at fusion engines, since the bigger the reaction chamber, the more distant the walls will be from the NUCLEAR FUSION FIRE you are riding. Being them basically IR and visible radiations from braking radiation in the fusion plasma (the particles are redirected by magnetic nozzle to go out your nozzle and provide thrust), that's the inverse square law. If you make an engine 2 times as big, its walls can withstand 4 times more punishment, resulting in an engine that is more than just twice as powerful. If the engine is 3 times as big, the walls can now withstand 9 times as much punishment, and so on and so forth.

Notice that I'm assuming your walls already contain the NUCLEAR FUSION FIRE somehow (handwaving). In realistic concepts it is usually a magnetic field and heavy-duty cooling for the superconducting rings doing the fusion chamber/nozzle.
I ignore how such magnetic fields would scale but I have the sneaking suspicion that there is a show-stopper somewhere.

Other spacecraft concepts simply have engines that don't scale down well. Say the Orion BOOOM BOOM drive.
It throws nukes and harnesses a fraction of their BOOM power with a pusher plate.
Since nukes have a minimum size, that is still significantly big for propulsion purposes, you are forced to design very massive spacecraft.
And of course, the bigger it becomes, the better and more efficient the engine gets.


So, this is a first detail you can use to cover your monitor's ass. They have far better engine performance than the frigates.
Although there is a catch. The frigates (being notably smaller) can rotate and pivot with much more ease than your bigger spacecraft. Unless you have inertial compensators anyway. Spin calc can help you understand why rotating a 1 km long cylinder at a very high speed is not good for the crew.

So Monitors may be attack spacecraft, meant to blast through enemy defences at RAMMING SPEED, while smaller stuff is still necessary as staying power.

A bit like tanks (your monitor) and infantry (smaller stuff).

Unless you're launching your missiles by shoving them out the back of your ship with the BEEFCAKE MUSCLE POWAH of your sweaty crewpersons, you're going to have the same problem with what to do with the waste heat produced by launching them.

Pssst. Pressurized gas or springs don't have heat management problems. After the thing is at a few dozen meters it ignites its engines and goes where it must go.

Missiles which are by definition guided come with a whole slew of other issues like ECM and counter missile fire.

Remote-controlled missiles controlled with a laser communication system are immune to ECM. Counter-missile fire is a problem for any physical impactor unless it is relativistic or you are fighting at Star Trek combat ranges, so that's fine.
They will unshutter and use their own sensors only in the final run, 5 seconds or so before impact. Jamming an IR telescope is difficult in deep space and at so close range.

[doom3607]

I'd assumed to be guarding the planet that the monitor would be within the planet's gravity well.

1000km is an incredibly short FTL jump you most probably have the fastest cycling FTL system I've encountered.

1. Well, this does make more sense.

2. I said the jump was only accurate to within 1000 km. In other words: if I aim for a given point, I will appear somewhere within 1000 km of it. More precision than that is impossible.

And thanks for the help, someone_else- the increased efficiency part didn't occur to me.

[Connor MacLeod]

The amin point to something like a "Monitor" type ship would be if you had some sort of "wormhole network" or WC-like "Jump point" type FTL setup. Those are choke points, and in choke points you probably want either disposable assets, or the biggest, toughest and most heavily armed ship you possibly could get. Mobility is a secondary issue (but engine power matters, because you want to get clear of the jump point and hold it. Alternately if you have some sort of "system-scale" shield network (EG like the Fronteir in The Last STarfighter - I just watched that movie again after some years) you might need a big ship to break through it.

As far as cooling goes, since his ship has far strayed from the realm of "realistic" he only needs to be concerned with plausibility (EG he has to have some internally consistent means of disposing of the heat - it can be just as magical as the rest of the other ships as long as it doesn't totally rape science.) SW did it with neutrino radiators (which actually don't NEED to be super-duper efficient,, although I still think there are broad limits to how much energy you can expect them to dump.) Some sort of extenrally mounted or deployed "weapons pods" like used in Revelation Space (man I am digging that series!) could work also. If you descend back into magic territory, and you don't mind incorporating further drawbacks into your ship, you could probably borrow again from SW and have some super magical heat sink system (or some super magical coolant that you can eject into space) that cna store ungodly huge amounts of energy. The drawback of course being that you can only use that for a limited time before you either run out of coolant or your heat sink is 'full'.

[Simon_Jester]

The salvo density of the UBERmonitor is still going to be kind of shitty compared to what its weight in smaller ships can throw- you can only physically throw so many missiles out of a launch tube per unit time, and the big ship will have proportionately fewer launchers than its weight in cruisers/destroyers/whatever. Nor will it have room to mount enough antimissile systems to stop a salvo much larger than it can throw, unless we assume missile defenses are so good that one Phalanx-mount-equivalent can stop dozens of incoming missiles... in which case those small ships are likewise extremely resistant to missiles.

So I suspect that in a fight against its weight in smaller ships, the monitor would lumber into range, only to see that entire huge enemy fleet toss out all their missiles in a short span of time. Meanwhile, the monitor, which has huge internal magazines of missiles but only limited launch capacity through the armored hull*. So it throws X missiles (with 100X more missiles in reserve, but not yet in position to fire out the tubes), while the enemy fleet throws 20X, or 30X, or 50X missiles (with no missiles in reserve).

Then the enemy employs the time-honored tactic of "scream like a bitch and run away," losing a modest number of ships to your secondary weapons in exchange for the really serious beating your monitor's going to take when 50X missiles hit it.

What has the potential to make monitors effective isn't so much ton for ton efficiency as it is command and control problems. Can we coordinate a fleet of 1000, or 10000, or 100000 ships? This is not a trivial question, unless we come up with some kind of super-formalized fleet organization that robs the individual ships of all initiative (the way Napoleonic infantry solved the command and control problem, more or less).
___________

*Note that there has to be a limit on how many weapons, power cables, and docking bays pass through that armor belt. You can't make the entire hull out of nothing but hatches, and each hatch represents a structural weakness.

I mean, you can proclaim that the doors are hundreds of meters thick... but what about the hollow space in the armor that the door occupies when it's open? If you have a sliding hatch or a plug of armor that slides into position to keep enemy fire from coming up your own gun barrels back at you... those hatches have to fit somewhere else when the gun is being fired, and that "somewhere else" is going to be a big empty space in the armor scheme when the hatches are closed.
___________

EDIT: Arguably, you get more out of making your ubermonitor armed primarily with beam weapons than you do with missiles. Beam projectors may actually profit from the increased physical scale possible on a larger ship, and from scaled-up power generation.

Missile launchers don't; the optimum size for a missile-carrying ship is rather small unless missile defenses are extremely good or there are other factors (like FTL drives only working on huge ships).

[doom3607]

Hmm. The last two posts are seriously making me want to reconsider a few premises. When it comes down to either altering how the universe works or getting rid of an insanely huge piece of compensating for something, I think I'll rewrite the universe.

So... bigger ships mount beams, rewrite to include some sort of "warp point" or whatever network, and come up wth either a magic radiator or a magic heat sink. Hmm... I'll have to look into theorised but wildly impractical, for now, methods of doing either.

And, Connor? There are externaly mounted weapons pods. That's where most of the armament on any given ship is. There a bit of internal stuff like some PD, but not much else.

Thanks for the help, guys! This is seriously making this that much less ridiculous!

Of course, nobody's math can consider the psychological shock of seeing a ten billion ton ship coming at you, which is probably... considerable.

[someone_else]

As far as cooling goes, since his ship has far strayed from the realm of "realistic" he only needs to be concerned with plausibility

Bah, I'd say to dump the heat in the armor. That armor is going to be a fucking huge heat sink in and of itself. Of course this leaves the engine's own waste heat (that will be mindboggingly huge compared to anything, really) to dump somewhere.

If it had a more manageable acceleration (and mass anyway) it could have been done with normal radiators of a not-so-huge size.

The salvo density of the UBERmonitor is still going to be kind of shitty compared to what its weight in smaller ships can throw

I think you are using it wrong, so to speak.

I'll try to give it a reason to exist. It's not so hard, but won't look a lot like the original concept.

Monitors are big, heavy vessels designed to blast through any defence fleet and annihilate it ok?

Let's have an arbitrarily high number of space vessels defending a planet.

The Monitor manages to arrive at very high speeds, and will have to enter the enemy's sensor range with its engine "forward" (it is travelling reversed).
This gives it protection, since it annihilates anything coming close much better than an armor. But it doesn't thrust at full tilt, it doesn't need to decelerate. Although can vector a little the thrust to maneuver every now and then.

It still has sensors on booms and stuff (radar or ladar, the torch is slightly too much for IR and visual detectors) pointing at ships of the defence fleet.

When it is close enough it deploys KKVs, that are basically space-worthy guided projectiles. Since these KKV start at the same speed of the Monitor, they can have an arbitrarily high speed, and will then use their own engines only to home on the targets.
It can also shoot a barrage of solid slugs if the targets aren't very mobile.

Then it passes by at a ludicrous speed. KKVs hit at the same ludicrous speed.

When it is getting far from the enemy, will likely have a plate of moderate armor to stop eventual thrown crap, that due to its very high speed will be hard-pressed to contact at all. Add countermissiles if necessary.

So, its main advantages are:
-it can carry a boatload of KKVs
-it delivers the KKV at a very high speed, which makes intercepting or laser-killing them *much* harder.
-it is more or less invulnerable to the enemy's weapons.
-in times of peace it is a useful tug to move around exploitable asteroids and the odd space station every now and then.

Its main disadvantages are:
-this vessel is basically a Space Age trebuchet, you either follow the instructions correctly or it is worse than useless.
-it is an attack-only vessel, you can use them defensivley but it's a pain in the ass to time everything.
-due to the faster speed, it's harder for the KKVs to make contact on the enemy.
-It can launch a realtively limited number of KKVs due to limited surface area, although it can use Lego-like KKVs that are stacked toghether without any other stuff than power and data cables. So that after the first "skin" of KKVs is deployed there is a second "skin" of KKVs ready to go.
-while it is "passing by at ludicrous speed", it risks to be hit if it is not fast enough or it hasn't deployed enough KKVs so that the enemy is more busy fighting for its life than trying to kill the monitor.

Of course this vessel assumes that engine power rises faster than engine size, so that its engine can do wonders while the engines of the smaller stuff cannot match it.

Let's see if you find obvious mistakes that invalidate the idea (so far I think it should work).

[Simon_Jester]

Problem one: Engine plumes really aren't very good armor, period. They may damage incoming projectiles, but by the time said projectile gets close enough that the damage starts piling up at a useful rate, the projectile no longer really needs to be guided- so burning off its targeting radar or telemetry receivers doesn't do you a lot of good. And vaporizing it, if the thing is well designed, is pretty much out of the question.

Problem two: the enemy will be concentrating so much fire against the monitor that if they have a roughly equivalent tonnage of weapon platforms firing at it, you will have a very hard time launching munitions from it. I mean, your ship masses roughly ten billion tons; what happens if I have a billion tons of coilgun platforms firing time-delay shrapnel shells at it?

This is a fairly obvious trick, really. Picture a solid kinetic impactor that bursts into fragments which spread through a cone centered on the impactor's line of flight (a narrow cone, at soft-SF muzzle velocities). If I've got lots of guns concentrated on your single supermonitor, I wind up with clouds of little mini-impactors going all over the place in the kilometers immediately surrounding the ship.

They're not big enough to do more than scar up your armor, but the sheer volume of fire I could achieve with that kind of tonnage dedicated to defense batteries means that almost anything in the vicinity of your ship is going to take hits. While your monitor can easily survive the fire directed against it if I'm using that kind of shell, kinetic kill vehicles launched from the monitor will have problems, because they're being shot at during the beginning of their boost phase- they have to linger in this area where the flak is coming in fast and thick for however long it takes their main drive to light up and push them clear of the monitor. You risk losing a significant fraction of your KKV launches this way.

The same problem arises if I have efficient laser or particle beam weapons, which can be detuned to deliver a 'wash' of light or charged particles surrounding your ship- continuously, with no gaps to make it easy to launch KKVs in.

Now, this only works because you're launching everything from a single huge target- I can direct a much more concentrated bombardment against that one target, potentially enough to saturate the space immediately around it with volume-effect. Space is big, yes, but the volume immediately around your ship isn't.

If your launchers are more dispersed, on the one hand your launch platforms are relatively less immune to my 'volume effect' weapons... but I have to disperse that volume effect over a much larger volume to cover all the launchers, and the odds of your KKVs getting through the saturated zone greatly improve as my ability to deliver the saturation drops off.

[doom3607]

Hmm... considering a rework of the FTL system here... since it's alien tech that nobody knows how it works, nobody call me on the physics- I just said all theory says it actually can't do that, anyway.

Let's say that ships can't jump from "anywhere outside a gravity well" to "anywhere within ~1000 kilometers of whatever point they aimed for". Let's make it more warp-point-ish. Let's say, on the direct line between any object massing more than (insert arbitrary amount here) and whatever point it happens to be orbiting, there's a sphere, let's say 100 km in diameter, where ships can jump to/from. other than that, drive remains the same- twice the size of a school bus, ~1000c, etc. So monitors now have the purpose of simply going through first and being able to take more hits than anything else so it can smash enough of the defenses to let the follow-up waves survive. Make sense? At all?

If you think it's stupid to have the points like that, I'll just say the aliens who keep telling everyone how to build FTL drives built the jump points that they use. They're already 'sufficiently advanced' anyway...

[Dwelf]

Let's see if you find obvious mistakes that invalidate the idea (so far I think it should work).

The problem I see with this is that any projectile hits you take work off your relative velocity. So your pumping out KKVs with a high relative velocity but you will be taking hits back with a similar amount of energy simply because most of the velocity is yours. There is little difference between getting hit by something moving at 20k km/s and hitting something while moving at 20k km/s.

The dificutly of hitting you now comes down to can they get any projectiles into your path after that. Its back down to a target area based on travel time and your acceleartion so the area they need to shoot at isn't any bigger than if you were immobile.

If the micro FTL jumps remain in then this becomes even more suicidal since your going to be driving into the rounds so how fast they can make the rounds go isnt an issue.

Hmm... considering a rework of the FTL system here... since it's alien tech that nobody knows how it works, nobody call me on the physics- I just said all theory says it actually can't do that, anyway.

Let's say that ships can't jump from "anywhere outside a gravity well" to "anywhere within ~1000 kilometers of whatever point they aimed for". Let's make it more warp-point-ish. Let's say, on the direct line between any object massing more than (insert arbitrary amount here) and whatever point it happens to be orbiting, there's a sphere, let's say 100 km in diameter, where ships can jump to/from. other than that, drive remains the same- twice the size of a school bus, ~1000c, etc. So monitors now have the purpose of simply going through first and being able to take more hits than anything else so it can smash enough of the defenses to let the follow-up waves survive. Make sense? At all?

If you think it's stupid to have the points like that, I'll just say the aliens who keep telling everyone how to build FTL drives built the jump points that they use. They're already 'sufficiently advanced' anyway...

An interesting scaling that may make monitors and large ships viable without changing from the anywhere to almost anywhere system. As far as I gather a single school bus sized FTL is powerful enough to move any object. What happens if you make it so that the FTL drive needs to recharge/cool down/spin up/<<Do Something>> before/after jumps? Since monitors are soo big they can mount huge numbers of these drives. This would allow them to perform tactical manouvers that smaller ships simply have no hope of matching. What better defence against a missile wave then to not be there when the missiles arrive. Time to reload? back in 5. Pods are empty? Be right back going to get some more.

[doom3607]

Regretfully, even at the 1000c the drives can do going to resupply would necessitate a supply base effectively in whatever system you're fighting in, otherwise it would take days to get there and back, not counting time to reload. But that might work, I'll wait for further feedback. At any rate it's something I didn't consider.

And for the last time, it's not "anywhere to almost anywhere" it's "almost anywhere to anywhere, but inaccurately"!

[Purple]

And for the last time, it's not "anywhere to almost anywhere" it's "almost anywhere to anywhere, but inaccurately"!

It's the same thing really. 1000km is nothing, assuming your ship can achieve escape velocity (11.2 km/s) your ship will cover that distance in about a minute and a half. With the kind of firepower and ranges you are talking about that is trivial.

[doom3607]

No, I mean in the sense that he seems to believe you can jump out of gravity wells, but not in. It's the other way around.

[Dwelf]

No, I mean in the sense that he seems to believe you can jump out of gravity wells, but not in. It's the other way around.

No you mentioned that you can't jump out so I left it at that. The almost anywhere was a reference to the inaccuracy of the drives. I could probably have phrased that better but there you have it.

bah fixed my spelling

[Terralthra]

Unless you're launching your missiles by shoving them out the back of your ship with the BEEFCAKE MUSCLE POWAH of your sweaty crewpersons, you're going to have the same problem with what to do with the waste heat produced by launching them.

Pssst. Pressurized gas or springs don't have heat management problems. After the thing is at a few dozen meters it ignites its engines and goes where it must go.

Good sir, the laws of thermodynamics are not tramps. You must at least buy them dinner before violating them.

1st Law violation: Springs and pressurized gas do not generate energy; they are essentially batteries, storing energy in a way that is easy to release as kinetic energy. Even if you use them, they still must get the energy from somewhere, and that energy generation method will produce waste heat, because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

2nd Law violation: Springs and pressurized gas do, in fact, generate waste heat. Compressing a spring and a gas produces heat as a byproduct of friction. Always. You don't detect this when you compress a spring in your hand because the amount of energy is miniscule and your hand isn't a good detector of heat on that scale. That doesn't mean it isn't there, and when you're talking about enough energy to move KKVs around en masse, that amount will get rather non-miniscule rather quickly.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh.

You can probably manage missile launch racks without causing unacceptable waste heat problems- the amount of energy required to get the missile going at ~10 m/s just to get it out of the ship isn't really that extreme, especially if it's done by mechanical means that are (relatively) energy-efficient such as hydraulics.

At that point you've got more work on your hands handling the waste heat from the engines than from the launch system.

Of course, this increases the danger that the missiles will be destroyed by random fire in the space immediately around your ship before it can light off its main drive.