NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm about to start building big starships, but I don't know what space combat is like in Nationstates.

My Invincible class is going to be able to travel at 99% the speed of light. Most systems are 5-10 lightyears apart, so in Nationstates it wont be a problem if 1 day RL=1 year GT. They carry 12,000 people and are basically floating cities so that the crew dosen't get bored on these long voyages. They carry 55 antimatter torpedoes that explode 4,000 km. from their target and unleash an anitmatter cloud that keeps going for another 50,000 km. The Talon fighters travel at 1% the speed of light but can only manuever efficiently at .01% the speed of light. Their pilots are genetically modified to take high g-loads and have 10 times the reaction speed of normal humans.

Does this match up to the capabilites of your spacecraft? Or do most people not really pay attention to the technical stuff?

On the Space Travel idea, I use Sub-Space, which basically is like folding space, expect you enter a dangerous realm to get to the other side. I would dare say its instantanous, however seeing as how there are limitations, I would go so far as to say that....ist fast.

I will admit that I haven't really designed technical around all my specifics on Space Ships and the like, but I will soon.

If you want to know more, or want me to elaborate or just tell what weapons I use and the like, just tell me. :)

Here's my space forces. (http://hawk.proboards1.com/index.cgi?board=Military&action=display&thread=1103679193)

I wonder if we should just ditch subspace and just travel at 99% the speed of light (it's impossible for anything larger than a photon to travel at 100%, but it dosen't really matter). It'd make for an interesting game, and it wouldn't take all that long for ships to move if we assume all star systems are 5 lightyears away.

What I really want to know is, what is the range of your weapons? Our solar system is about 500 km., and my antimatter torpedoes can cover that distance in about 20 days. My fighter cannons can reach out 2,000 km., but usually fight only a few hundred meters away for accuracy.

I focus more on the RP aspect; that and I'm too lazy to write up stats, and all my stats are in Battlefleet Gothic anyways :P

What do the RPs look like? That could tell me what the characteristics of the ships are.

http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9701622&postcount=22

Theres a sample of one of my ships appearing.

But what does the combat look like? I'm assuming you all use lasers. Lasers suck. If you get your starships made of the right material, they can deflect certain frequencies of lasers. I use plasma cannons.

Also, my starships have thousands of bombardment missiles that are supposed to go after enemy tanks, after which I send in my foot soldiers and APCs. I don't have any tanks, because my bombardment missiles take care of them. Will this piss people off if they have a huge tank fleet?

What I really want to know is, what is the range of your weapons? Our solar system is about 500 km., and my antimatter torpedoes can cover that distance in about 20 days. My fighter cannons can reach out 2,000 km., but usually fight only a few hundred meters away for accuracy.

Well, I'm not 100% Sure, but to refrain from being a God-Mod I would say that the Ion Cannon we use could reach far, but as with any beam it would most likely loose its strength over distance. Now, I haven't refreshed my memory on physics yet in a while, so I'm not sure.

However, what I retain on a specific weapon is my Electro-Magnetic Microwave Projection Cannon. Its basically a weapon that shoots intense, concentrated bursts of Microwave particles. I believe this is a healthy choice for a weapon for the desire and knowledge that Microwaves do travel long-distances. I believe.

Mainly I suppose, if I were to give a point, I'd say a safe distance for the EM Microwave Projection Cannon could shoot from here to the Moon. Now, it would be weak when it got to the moon, or it could not. It depends on what the other player says due to the fact of my lack of data.

Lets see....Missles, Torpedoes, turbo lazers, ion cannons, Lances, Warp Cannons, Mines, boarding pods, fighters, bombers....Teleporter arrays, fusion weapons, and the odd graviton weapon.

Im also researching directed black holes. They're carried by big ships. What they do is suck in the other ship and then use the matter that's been collected to make the ship stronger.

My stats are fluid, they change depending on who I'm RPing against. And I'd suggest you do the same thing. Also, screw the 99% of c crap- anybody's starships can do that if they accelerate for long enough- and just get youself a FTL drive. Nobody cares what it is, you don't even need to have an original name for it.

Your missiles seem good, but you'll want something else as well. I don't care if you call them lasers or blasters or hyper-shootum rays, but you will want guns on your ships. Also, only 55 missiles for a ship with a crew of 12,000 is rediculous, a ship that size could carry hundreds strapped to the outside, and that'sassuming that all interior space is taken up and couldn't be used to store missiles. EDIT: I see you've got plasma-that's good, but is generally assumed to be short range.

Most people's starfighters can operate at much longer distances than a mere 2000km. my weapons range for a simple Air-to-Air missile is far above that. And I've got particle accelerators firing at near c velocities mounted on some of my fighters. Just click the link to my storefront in my sig and cruise around there for awhile. You'll figure out how to RP FT quickly enough.

EDIT: And I can't think of anybody who uses strait-up lasers. I see more railguns than lasers. Masers, phasers, blasers, trasers, kasers, etc- yeah I've seen those, but everybody knows that lasers aren't good enough against anybody with a brain.

Lets see....Missles, Torpedoes, turbo lazers, ion cannons, Lances, Warp Cannons, Mines, boarding pods, fighters, bombers....Teleporter arrays, fusion weapons, and the odd graviton weapon.

You forgot Nuclear Torpedoes....I use Nuclear Torpedoes.

Muahahahaha....

Seriously, I use Nuclear Torpedoes for my Capital(sp?) ships.

My antimatter missiles are huge and expensive. That 55 missile group costs $7 billion.

Also, my ships can travel for 6.5 hours at 1% the speed of light, it's just that their weapons only reach 2,000 km. They have tons of decoy systems so that it's impossible for a missile to hit them unless it's huge and has a really big computer to sort through the stuff.

But what does the combat look like? I'm assuming you all use lasers. Lasers suck. If you get your starships made of the right material, they can deflect certain frequencies of lasers. I use plasma cannons.
Oh heavens no. No one uses LASERs for anything but PD (point defense) on their ships, and even then it's the "cheap" PD. Plasma is the bread and butter energy weapon, though it has many different names.

Also, my starships have thousands of bombardment missiles that are supposed to go after enemy tanks, after which I send in my foot soldiers and APCs. I don't have any tanks, because my bombardment missiles take care of them. Will this piss people off if they have a huge tank fleet?
Er... do you mean your starships also double-time in planetary assault? FT is usually split along lines of "naval" - i.e., ship to ship - and ground combat. Naval is what most people do, though many nations specialize in having tough ground forces, and maintaining good ground forces is imperative for homeland defense.

Whats most important is balance. I have ships ranging from multi-km behemoths to small, bus-sized corvettes and scout ships, and on the ground I have mechs, hovertanks, wheeled vehicles, and infantry. It's also good to have special forces units and the like.

I have a small "encyclopedia" of military terms and definitions on the "fleet" page of my homepage for Arizona Nova.

Im trying to keep a large ground force and a good space force at the same time, but its hard. I have 500,000 conscripts, I try to pay them well, but when I add it up I find out that even with 20% of my budget spent on defence I can't afford anything other than just maintenance. They get paid $40,000 per year each and I spend $20,000 year per soldier on training, but I think as my economy grows I'll be able to buy more stuff.

Also, how many big ships do you have? By "big", I mean $15 billion or more.

Well, I use this formula for fleet numbers and tweak as needed. I take my population in millions - i.e., about 4,200 right now. This is the total of my fleet. I then divide by three, which gives me three groups of 1,400. I have three main fleets - First and Second being devoted to defense, and third being "offensive" in nature, which gives me 1,400 which I normally can devote to extranational action. However, keep in mind such large fleets usually cannot be active all at once - invasions using the whole thing can take years to prepare.
My ships I don't classify by cost - I classify by size. The real big ships go under "heinous" and as such I don't make them the bulk of my fleet. Of the 1,400 ships in third, no more than one hundred will be the Neodammerung battleships, and of the ships they will take the longest to prepare for action, build, etc.
Also, keep in mind certain players can be picky regarding definitions of wank. To one a ship over a kilometer is wank, while to another a one-km ship is very small. Some players don't even publish sizes, preferring to "scale" them to the confrontation. So it depends who you RP with and which sci-fi genre or style largely influences your forces.

Over 15 billion? God you have no idea. I don't have a single capitalship that costs three times that. My standard cruiser is 200-some billion. But, as Arizona Nova said, it's really the size that matters. And as for numbers, let's see here... I'd say I've probably got about 200 to 300 capships (destroyers to battlecruisers, they all fall under there). And lord knows how many small craft and escorts. At least 5000, then quadruple that for fighter/bombers.

EDIT: Also, terminoligy changes a lot from person to person. For me a frigate is a small escort, right above corvette. For others its only marginally smaller than a cruiser. And I would like to point out that for me and all my puppets, Battleships are super-uber. Al-Imvadjah has five "Battleships", but a lot of people might classify my battlecruisers as battleships.

Check my factbook.

You think multi-billion USD ships are expensive? The mainstay of my fleet, the Cataclysm-class Battlecruiser, sells for a good ten trillion, which I think is a reasonable price for a vessel larger and more deadly than many nations Dreadnoughts. My destroyers are most likely in the trillion range, although they haven't really been statted yet. Just a note: I'm a puppet, using my primary nations stats for now (Otagia), and I only have twenty of these things. Don't go overboard with big ships.

As for weapons, I use lance batteries, gargantuan torpedoes (read: 70m with multiple melta warheads), fighters, and slightly modified teleporter arrays. Lasers are decent, depending on what style you're using: on a 40K ship, the lances are incredibly powerful, yet are still light-based weapons. In a Dune setting, lasers are decently powerful, but tend towards pseudo-nuclear reactions with shields. In a hard sci-fi setting favored by many Sol nations, lasers tend to be meh.

What's good? What you can write convincingly is good. What you can play and have fun is good. What you can play and be fun to play with is good.

From what you (athiesism in the OT) describe, I get a feeling somewhat like the ships of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War; big brutes with a small number of huge missiles, maybe a few fighters, some defensive stuff. It sounds like you haven't really thought the implications through, though, what with the ships being able to get up to .99c and down again, but fighters and such being extremely limited. But there's a definite seed of cool stuff.

The science, as with that of Haldeman's (excellent) book, is complete garbage - who cares, as long as it's convincing and internally consistent? If you're, say, China Miéville, you can get away with pulling stuff out of your ass on a regular basis in a book because you're absolutely brilliant. We lesser mortals don't really have that option, so don't. If you do, cover it up. Well.

One problem I see is that while you are STL - and this is a valid style choice, just don't get up on some realist high horse because your stuff rapes a bunch of other laws of nature and as I said that's perfectly OK - you can't inflict that on others. So unless you hitch a ride with someone else or make a workaround like jumpgates or the use of black holes through ass-space like Haldeman, while your play can flow nicely assuming 1 day/year and small distances only, FTL users will always get there first.

That's what I'd call a "perfectly valid weakness". Good fun.

Another thing, while blatant statmongering gets old your nation's military budget will be pretty small right now. It gets bigger. No need for battleships right off the bat.

I won't get into the issue of mongering "my other nation's stats", particularly when you still play said other nation. That's a whole other can of fluids.

I won't get into the issue of mongering "my other nation's stats", particularly when you still play said other nation. That's a whole other can of fluids.
Thing is, I don't really use FT Otagia much anymore. Its basically used for MT now, and I wanted a different name for use in FT.

Thing is, I don't really use FT Otagia much anymore. Its basically used for MT now, and I wanted a different name for use in FT.

I think it's sorta iffy, and I have since Diablo_NL "changed" into Taurenor. Taurenor is perfectly huge these days anyway... It's confusing, and I think it contaminates the RP choices of the new nation. Khurgan's Khurgan, not Otaga.

Besides, you get a chance to be a dinky little microstate again! ^_^ Or wait a bit; I've got one bunch of notes that's been lying around while the nation's grown to 1.7G or so and changed from being ultratech evil hobbits to being high-magic Chinese myth. I'd feel perfectly justified in having Sun Wukong hop on a cloud and smack battleships out of orbit with a 10,000-kilometer iron staff with that one...

Anyway, maybe I should do less hijacking and more description of my spacedyships.

A few points from a realism perspective that you should keep in mind.

1) Plasma sucks ass. It's extremely diffuse hot gas that is worthless in space, it's like claiming you can sink an Iowa-class battleship with the steam from a boiling kettle. The only way plasma weapons make any sense is if it's accelerate to high percentages of c, and then it becomes a particle beam.

2) Lasers don't suck ass. Lasers are perfectly viable weapons, they just can't be used reliably beyond a 1 light second range due to lightspeed lag and beam dispersion.

3) Mass Drivers (railguns etc) suck unless you get the round up to high percentages of c.

4) Missiles are good.

Other points

5) Generic energy weapons are good but have dick all to do with plasma.

6) Plasma still sucks ass.

7) Gravity weapons aren't good either. Gravity is the weakest fundamental force.

Oh heavens no. No one uses LASERs for anything but PD (point defense) on their ships, and even then it's the "cheap" PD. Plasma is the bread and butter energy weapon, though it has many different names.

I can tell this kid is drifting more towards the hard aspect of sci-fi, so in this case plasma weaponry is useless (remember, plasma is an ionized gas, meaning it's going to disperse to a harmless density before it even really gets all too far from your ship AND it will impart a charge to your ship, making it a veritable magnet).

Missiles are THE preemo space weapon, equal with over-powered laser weaponry.

The general idea behind what future space combat will actually look like is going to be 10 second to one minute battles with both sides lobbing swarms of nukes at each other and continuously trying to shoot each other's missiles down while also trying to hit the enemy with their main laser cannon.

I keep my ships small so that they won't be easily detected. Here's my idea of a space battle:

Merkar Fleet, consisting of 2 Invincible class carriers (2 km., $20 billion plus $7 billion for missiles) and over 700 Talon class fighters ($400 million each), jumps into an area with Red Fleet, consisting of thirty multi-km. battleships plus fighters. Merkar hides behind a planet, star, asteriod field, nebula, or something else to hide it. Meanwhile, it sends out Hawkeye recon vehicles with heavy fighter escort. The enemy fleet nears the nebula the Merkaris are hiding behind, but are unable to spot it as it has powered down. However, the Merkari carriers spot the huge radioactive signature and launch 30 missiles. Enemy fighters scramble, but are knocked out in droves (hopefully). Once the fighters are down, the enemy attempts to launch interceptor missiles. The smaller ones are easily decoyed, but the larger ones, which have bigger processors, have to be shot down. One big antimatter missile is all it takes to tear a hole in the ship's hull and destroy most of its main armament. With their work complete, the fleet jumps out, doing a hit-and-run kind of thing.

If I RP along this general idea, will it make sense to people?