NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm fairly new here and have a few questions on Future Tech.


How fast could I have my ships go for interstellar travel?

How are lasers used? In point defense or a Star Wars-type cannon?

How many planets should I have with a population of 700 million?

Are artificial gravity and temporal stasis fields allowed?

Thanks for the help. I mate add to this if I get more questions.

I'm fairly new here and have a few questions on Future Tech.


How fast could I have my ships go for interstellar travel?

How are lasers used? In point defense or a Star Wars-type cannon?

How many planets should I have with a population of 700 million?

Are artificial gravity and temporal stasis fields allowed?

Thanks for the help. I mate add to this if I get more questions.

#1: well you can have your ships go as fast as you want its freeform but its preferred you have a speed limit what that is I don’t know.
#2 any way you want, lasers can be like SW lasers point defensive or your own capital ship lasers.
#3 if you spread out your population about 4 I estimate
#4 yes they are but it depends on who your rping with some will accept them some will not

Thanks. Would about 50x lightspeed be a reasonable limit, or should it be higher or lower?

I'm fairly new here and have a few questions on Future Tech.


How fast could I have my ships go for interstellar travel?

Your choice, although abusing instanteous (or near instantaneous) travel is frowned on.

How are lasers used? In point defense or a Star Wars-type cannon?

Once again, your choice. Just remember that big lasers need big power supplies.

How many planets should I have with a population of 700 million?

You could have just one (Earth has a lot more than 700 million). Don't go overboard on this: a single system won't attract any criticism, but the more you add the greater the risk of being called a godmodder.

Are artificial gravity and temporal stasis fields allowed?

Artificial gravity is (I think) fairly standard. Temporal stasis fields should be fine as long as you don't say something like "OMG1HAVTEHT3MP0R4LSLOLOL!!!!1111 I W1NZ0RZ!!1" Just don't make it too powerful, and you should be ok.

Thanks for the help. I mate add to this if I get more questions.

I hope this helped.

I'm fairly new here and have a few questions on Future Tech.


How fast could I have my ships go for interstellar travel?

How are lasers used? In point defense or a Star Wars-type cannon?

How many planets should I have with a population of 700 million?

Are artificial gravity and temporal stasis fields allowed?

Thanks for the help. I mate add to this if I get more questions.

1: no one really cares, when your writeing up stats it could be handy but as long as its not instant traval no one really bothered (even then it dont matter as long as you RP it right)

2: its been answered

3: well best thing is Colonies should have atlest 10 million to be useful, Homeworlds and Key worlds should always have the most population (like my nation where 1 billion people live on our homeworld with 2 billion spreed between the Inner systems and 1.552 Billion split between the 8-9 Populated colones). Tho to be fair you dont need a colony to own the system just say a military base or research base or even a prison camp.

4: Artificial Gav is like...well basic for FT, Temporal stasis Fields tho..em not shore i myself Ignore any from of Temporal Tech as i find it kind Godmodish but if you use it right im not bothered.

Well, for temporal stasis I mean like slowing time for people going beyond light speed so the galaxy doesn't age two hundred years around them, not that shit that freezes stuff in time or a time machine or anything like that.

Well, for temporal stasis I mean like slowing time for people going beyond light speed so the galaxy doesn't age two hundred years around them, not that shit that freezes stuff in time or a time machine or anything like that.

So, in effect, its a way of getting effective faster-than-light travel. Basically everyone in FT has some sort of FTL (unless you play with those boring "realistic future-tech" nations :p) so this should not only be fine but also make you look good because you took a bit of time to explain it.

Well, for temporal stasis I mean like slowing time for people going beyond light speed so the galaxy doesn't age two hundred years around them, not that shit that freezes stuff in time or a time machine or anything like that.


Ahh thats just normal FTL stuff, i use the same thing i just dont consider something like that Temporal tech. Temporal tech i consider is things like Temporal Shields, weapons, ships etc.

All right, thanks everyone. One more thing. What are usual metals and other materials that people make ships out of, becuase I have a strong suspicion titanium won't hold up to beyond light-speed travel?

I use Directed Gravity alot, and have a limited Temporal Stasis ability. My best advice is that when using Temporal Stasis, whatever you hit with it should be frozen, you can't hurt it, it can't hurt you.

All right, thanks everyone. One more thing. What are usual metals and other materials that people make ships out of, becuase I have a strong suspicion titanium won't hold up to beyond light-speed travel?

Generally, we make up metals, and use them, I use two, Neo-Steel, and Chromsten, they're both made from regular metals, but they've been compressed to increase their density, one is simply Titanium and steel compressed, and the other isTungsten-Chromium.

How many people could I fit onto a typical colony ship?

How many people could I fit onto a typical colony ship?

Generally, colonies start off at about 10 million strong, so I generally have colony ships that can hold a few hundred thousand or there abouts.

Thanks, this has all been really helpful.

What should I measure ship speed in when below lightspeed?

What should I measure ship speed in when below lightspeed?
Most people would measure in kilometers per second.

Could I go miles per second?

What should I measure ship speed in when below lightspeed?

I measure it in fractions of c, or in KPS squared. I don't know what others measure it in...

Could I go miles per second?

Sure, if you want.

Most people would measure in kilometers per second.
That's mainly for low orbit speeds. better way to do that is in fractions of c (where c = speed of light). .1c is really slow, like transport slow. .8-9c is really freakin' fast, like the fastest of fighters or ships. And another thing, the only real sublight speed limit is the speed of light, generally speaking .999~c because space doesn't really have much in the way of natural brakes unless you enter a nebula or atmosphere or something.

meh i use KPS, em...let me give you a link to a site i use:-

http://tactics.solsector.net/confed-list.htm

i use meny of the stats there, its easy thing to do when your knew (tho i edit the ships weapons and stuff just use the speed of the ships and sizes)

Could I go miles per second?
May I suggest Mega-miles per second or MmS. If you are having interspacial travel I am assuming that even your sublight speeds are going to be rather high.

Overlord-class Command Dreadnought
The Overlord is the flagship of the Kaldrenic Imperial Star Fleet. It is a massive warship with extensive command and communications technology and weaponry.
Dimensions: length 839 meters, width 189 meters, height 285 meters
Sublight Propulsion: 4 heavy radial ion drives
Maximum Atmospheric Speed: 2,250 km/h
Maximum Sublight Speed: 223,600 kilometers per second (kps)
Maximum Hyperdrive Speed: 50× light-speed
Maximum Range: 65,000 light-years
Crew: 1,200 plus 3,000 robots, 800 marines
Armament: 2 forward-firing heavy laser cannons, 6 turreted medium laser cannons, 60 rail guns, 2 EMP cannons, 36 turreted dual light laser cannons, 96 anti-matter missiles, 12 plasma torpedo launchers with 8 torpedoes per launcher, 60 point-defense repeating laser cannons
Armor/Defenses: 142 counter-measure drones, 3500mm Paratronium alloy (compressed, nano-engineered titanium, steel, tungsten, and aluminum composite), heavy fractal comb shield deflector matrices



Is this a decent design?

Thanks. Would about 50x lightspeed be a reasonable limit, or should it be higher or lower?

I don't know about any rules on NS, but I do know that Einstein proved it was impossible to trvael faster than light speed

Overlord-class Command Dreadnought
The Overlord is the flagship of the Kaldrenic Imperial Star Fleet. It is a massive warship with extensive command and communications technology and weaponry.
Dimensions: length 2,753 feet, width 620 feet, height 934 feet
Sublight Propulsion: 4 heavy radial ion drives
Maximum Atmospheric Speed: 1,400 mph
Maximum Sublight Speed: 138,900 miles per second (mps)
Maximum Hyperdrive Speed: 50* light-speed
Maximum Range: 65,000 light-years
Crew: 1,200 plus 3,000 robots, 800 marines
Armament: 2 forward-firing heavy laser cannons, 6 turreted medium laser cannons, 4 harmonic resonance generators, 2 EMP cannons, 36 turreted dual light laser cannons, 96 anti-matter missiles, 12 plasma torpedo launchers with 8 torpedoes per launcher, 60 point-defense repeating laser cannons
Armor/Defenses: 142 counter-measure drones, 3500mm Paratronium alloy (compressed, nano-engineered titanium, steel, tungsten, and aluminum composite), heavy fractal comb shield deflector matrices



Is this a decent design?

Can you convert that to meters or km please?

Most people on NS use the metric system for measurements and the like.

I would say its a reasonable design for a realitivly newer nation. Although some people will try to say that basic Laser cannons lack power. These are noramlly the Science guys who do nothing but yell about whats possible and whats not in RL.

I don't know about any rules on NS, but I do know that Einstein proved it was impossible to trvael faster than light speed

Einstein proved that Realspace FTL was impossible, we generally don't use Realspaceas our FTL medium...

I changed the dimensions and speed statistics to metric. Any suggestions for improvement?

I have to ask about your 'Maximum Range'. Is this per FTL jump/useage or is this the farthest the vessel can go from home without haveing to turn back do to lack of supplies.

For RP purposses, vast distances are noramlly covered using FTL drives of various kinds. The distance between the points are normally not very well defined. But then no one cares normally as long as the story is good.

EDITED: For a small nation a 800-900 meter vessel may be considered large but for most FT nations thats the size of a large destroyer or standard Cruiser. Most people judge sizes off of the fact that the most widely used vessel the ISD or Imerial Star Destroyer is about 1.6 KM i believe. Classifications such as destroyer cruiser and dreadnought are realitive to firepower vs size i suppose.

i would say that the EMP weapon is a waste of space, most if not all FT rpers would have some form of EMP defence on all of there systems (mainly since you have people like me useing Nuclear and Fusion Missile and torpedos that make an EMP wave), but other then that i must say its an all round decent ship.

When figuring out what FTL speeds you want, never forget travel time. Your dreadnaught, for example, maxxes out at 50 Cee, with a range of 65'000 Ly(the range is good; it can cross most of the galaxy, but only one-way, so you'll need bases for galaxy-wide force-projection).

It would thus take your ship 1300 years to complete such a journey, the practical effect being that you can't project your forces very far; even at RL day=IC year timeflow, it would take three and a half RL years to make the trip(conversly, if you only want limited/local force projection, or to utalise a system of gates, slow FTL can be good for RP).

For units, I sugest using the metric system; it really is alot simplier, and most people use it.

Aylestone's sugestion of using 'mega-miles per second(MmS)' fails to realise that even 1 MmS would be well in excess of lightspeed.

I also have to recomend against temptation to weaponise the use of temporal stasis as has been hinted at; you're lible to be accused of godmodding.


Revisiting the issue of speed, this time sublight, I'd say you've pegged a good mark at roughly 74% Cee; you can reasonibly call this a limit by factoring in time dialation and the effect of blue-shifted rads and particles, tho please remember that your ship has inertia.

You might also want to add an accelleration and/or turning figure at your disgression, but be careful to keep accelleration figures reasonible if you post them.


What else... oh, what are those "harmonic resonance generators" suposed to be?

This is also more of an IC consideration, so feel free to ignore me, but you might also think about unifying your ship's armament a little rather than it's present hodge-podge, unless having all those different types of weaponry serves a purpose.

Harmonic resonance utilizes focused sound waves to shatter/disentegrate solid objects.

65,000 light-years would be wihtout stopping for supplies. I might increase the max speed to maybe 200x lightspeed. Would that be reasonable?

For now I only intend to have 1 of those, since they are considered 'dreadnoughts' in my fleet. Im 700 million population.

Harmonic resonance utilizes focused sound waves to shatter/disentegrate solid objects.

In that case it won't work. Sound is waves of changing air pressure. In space there is no air, and therefore no sound, so unless you plan to use your dreadnought as an atmospheric fighter, your harmonic resonance generators are useless.

:headbang: Shit, you're right. I'll remove them.

:headbang: Shit, you're right. I'll remove them.

I would suggest you use navigational deflectors and/or tractor beams in order to prevent smallish objects from hitting your ship. As I use an ST (Star Trek) base idea, all of my ships incorporate a navigational deflector.

Overlord-class Command Dreadnought
The Overlord is the flagship of the Kaldrenic Imperial Star Fleet. It is a massive warship with extensive command and communications technology and weaponry.
Dimensions: length 839 meters, width 189 meters, height 285 meters
Sublight Propulsion: 4 heavy radial ion drives
Maximum Atmospheric Speed: 2,250 km/h
Maximum Sublight Speed: 223,600 kilometers per second (kps)
Maximum Hyperdrive Speed: 50× light-speed
Maximum Range: 65,000 light-years
Crew: 1,200 plus 3,000 robots, 800 marines
Armament: 2 forward-firing heavy laser cannons, 6 turreted medium laser cannons, 60 rail guns, 2 EMP cannons, 36 turreted dual light laser cannons, 96 anti-matter missiles, 12 plasma torpedo launchers with 8 torpedoes per launcher, 60 point-defense repeating laser cannons
Armor/Defenses: 142 counter-measure drones, 3500mm Paratronium alloy (compressed, nano-engineered titanium, steel, tungsten, and aluminum composite), heavy fractal comb shield deflector matrices



Is this a decent design?

Pretty good. Keep in mind though that most FTers use some wierd term for their energy weapons, lasers being considered weak and generic @@

That sublight speed is probably better measured in acceleration, although there is an effective limit to how fast you can go. Also, your FTL speed might be a little low. Pluto is ~5 light hours from the sun I believe. It would take you six minutes to go from the Sun to Pluto with your current setup. That might not seem like much, but FT empires can be in entirely different galaxy clusters. It'll take a while to get anywhere with that rig.

As for your weapons, you're gonna want to simplify. Make it so you can fire your plasma and anti-matter torpedos through the same tubes, unless you intend one to be anti-starfighter and one to be anti-capitol ship.

You also have listed 36 dual light laser cannons and 60 point-defense laser cannons. Unless these do 2 seperate jobs, it seems to me like you could combine them. Light weapons are probably already on the scale of PDGs, and you should reserve space for your heavy hitters instead of a ton of light weapons. (do NOT look at SW ships for examples of balenced armarments, they're terrible about it, ESPECIALLY star destroyers.)

Harmonic resonance utilizes focused sound waves to shatter/disentegrate solid objects.
There is still a way to use this if you still want to. You could shoot something into the enemy ship that starts vibrating. When it finds the resonance frequency of the vessel, it can increase in power until it falls apart.

Hope this helps!:D

Pretty good. Keep in mind though that most FTers use some wierd term for their energy weapons, lasers being considered weak and generic @@

That sublight speed is probably better measured in acceleration, although there is an effective limit to how fast you can go. Also, your FTL speed might be a little low. Pluto is ~5 light hours from the sun I believe. It would take you six minutes to go from the Sun to Pluto with your current setup. That might not seem like much, but FT empires can be in entirely different galaxy clusters. It'll take a while to get anywhere with that rig.

As for your weapons, you're gonna want to simplify. Make it so you can fire your plasma and anti-matter torpedos through the same tubes, unless you intend one to be anti-starfighter and one to be anti-capitol ship.

You also have listed 36 dual light laser cannons and 60 point-defense laser cannons. Unless these do 2 seperate jobs, it seems to me like you could combine them. Light weapons are probably already on the scale of PDGs, and you should reserve space for your heavy hitters instead of a ton of light weapons. (do NOT look at SW ships for examples of balenced armarments, they're terrible about it, ESPECIALLY star destroyers.)


There is still a way to use this if you still want to. You could shoot something into the enemy ship that starts vibrating. When it finds the resonance frequency of the vessel, it can increase in power until it falls apart.

Hope this helps!:D

Lasers are only weak if you pick a low wattage, for example, my Terrawatt Lasers are capable of eating holes in very large pieces of armor.

My advice is to generally list your acceleration in Gees, or kps, 100gees is about 1kps, since most of those on here aren't like us Americans, using sensible Miles and such... FYI, my biggest ship makes about 600 Gees of acceleration.

He's right about the weapons, my heaviest ship has 150 medium\light weapons, and only 60 truly heavy weapons.

That's all I have to input for now.

He's right about the weapons, my heaviest ship has 150 medium\light weapons, and only 60 truly heavy weapons.

Well, I'm wary of having as many as 60 main weapons. I take the approach that most modern naval designers took for BBs when building something like a dreadnought or battleship in FT. I understand that these ships are lumbering behemoths, but an executor with several thousand of the same generic main weapons is strange.

For example: most modern battleships/dreadnoughts had 3-4 main turrets. Then they had double-tripple that of secondary batteries. (I loop anti-cap torpedo batteries in secondary too unless it's a dedicated torpedo ship) Finally they had just about as many PDGs onboard that they could realisticly squeeze on.

For all intents and purposes, an ISDmk1 has 60 Heavy Turbolasers and 60 Ion Cannons. A 1.6km ship, and it has 60 weapons of the same class as it's main weapons? A more realistic turbolaser layout would be:
4 quintuple heavy turbolasers (5X power feed of normal heavy)
10 double heavy turbolasers (2X normal heavy)
20 normal heavy turbolasers turbolasers

This greatly reduces the number of main weapons, but gives you some really heavy hitters. It's the choice between multiple 5"ers or a very few 16"ers.

sry for the hijack!

Well, I'm wary of having as many as 60 main weapons. I take the approach that most modern naval designers took for BBs when building something like a dreadnought or battleship in FT. I understand that these ships are lumbering behemoths, but an executor with several thousand of the same generic main weapons is strange.

For example: most modern battleships/dreadnoughts had 3-4 main turrets. Then they had double-tripple that of secondary batteries. (I loop anti-cap torpedo batteries in secondary too unless it's a dedicated torpedo ship) Finally they had just about as many PDGs onboard that they could realisticly squeeze on.

For all intents and purposes, an ISDmk1 has 60 Heavy Turbolasers and 60 Ion Cannons. A 1.6km ship, and it has 60 weapons of the same class as it's main weapons? A more realistic turbolaser layout would be:
4 quintuple heavy turbolasers (5X power feed of normal heavy)
10 double heavy turbolasers (2X normal heavy)
20 normal heavy turbolasers turbolasers

This greatly reduces the number of main weapons, but gives you some really heavy hitters. It's the choice between multiple 5"ers or a very few 16"ers.

sry for the hijack!

Well, at 6 miles in length, effectively SSD size, my biggest ships can handle having 60 big ass guns...

65,000 light-years would be wihtout stopping for supplies. I might increase the max speed to maybe 200x lightspeed. Would that be reasonable?


It really depends on what kind of reach you want.

If you want to reach out and touch someone anywhere in the galaxy, 10'000 Cee would be about the practical minimum. The reason being that you'd be able to cross the galaxy in something less than 10 IC years, which translates to 10 RL days in accordance to the popular "RL day = IC year" paradigm; based from Sol system, you could probally reach anywhere within an RL week if you've bases or a supply ship to give you the range.

Any slower than that, however, and you'll really start having problems with your ships taking forever, iRL, to get anywhere; even 10 kilo-Cee will leave you RPing long travel times when going very far.