NationStates Jolt Archive

I don't see why everyone is so into big warships. I mean, I see that they like them because they're huge, but what purpose do they serve? Smaller boats are a lot stealthier, more manueverable, more multirole (you can divide a large fleet up more easily than a small one), and it's better to load up a whole bunch of small ships with missiles or other powerful one-shot weapons than to build just one juggernaut that can't move anywhere. The stealth and manueverability is what I really like in small ships, because I plan on a lot of close-quarter ramming with medium boats and missile sniping with ultra-long-range torpedoes.

As with MT, big battleships are just too vulernable. Sure, you can make a huge BB, but then you just make a bigger cruise missile. It's a lot easier to destroy than to create, and you can't win this race between armor and firepower in the 20th-21st century. Not only that, but if you fire enough small missiles at the ship you're bound to send up soo much shrapnel that you damage radars, missile mounts, and start fires.

So, is there any particular reason that people in NS like big ships other than that they sound cool?

My nation is actually moving to more small craft for it's navy. We will how ever keep the ships we currnetly have for simplicity.

The thing is in the NS World, is that you don't have to choose between a large fleet of small ships or small fleet of large ships. People's militaries and defense budgets are large enough that they can have a large fleet of both large and small ships... which is usually the best idea, because it allows you to be prepared for anything.

As for why people like giant ships... having one massive ship is not the same as having ten tiny ships. The guns are bigger, stronger, and can reach farther distances on a massive dreadnaught ship.

On NS they're unrealistily hard to kill, and have awesome firepower. I personally dont use them, but i am considering desinging one. not that any of my existing dock facilities are big enough for them...

Most people dont have a fleet made entirely out of massively large ships. the fleet is normally augmented with a slew of smaller attack ships and escorts. Plue size added an element of psycological warfare.- mt Explain
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Ft explain-

Space adds a new dimension to combat. Larger ships mean more guns..... And since the battle ground is not level an enemy can attack form a million different points on the map. So having a large ships with comabt abiliy on all sides is an advantage.

The larger ships also tend to have larger fuel tanks and fuel reserves which allows them to go further.

ehh, a Modern battleship [as in one Built now] Could stand up to aircraft, and possibly cruse missles too. when dealing with stuff from the air, armour is less important than what counters you can throw at it, if i remember rightly. there's a major psychological element behind the battleships and so on.

on the other hand, I, at least, have a more... Interesting... plan that will see a significantly larger number of small ships, if it works, in my navy, and a total lack of SDs and Hyper Carriers [those things bug me no end]

but yeah, the large numbers of large ships is simply because battleships are something of a symble of how well a nation is doing, and how powerful it is[or they used to be] at least in the minds of it's own people. that and the whole "we can do it, why not? screw practicality and time to build" attiude.. wich simultaniously makes everyone happy coz they can HAVE these things, and reduces the psychological value because they become as common as frigates. [wich have a shocking cost/effectivness ratio IRL]

The larger ships also tend to have larger fuel tanks and fuel reserves which allows them to go further.

Well, most ships on NS that are larger than a destroyer are fission powered, meaning range is measured not in distance but in time [at least twenty years for a carrier].

The Doujin was marketed as something unrealistically hard to kill; superdreadnoughts can be killed, but that's not the point. The point is that it's a commandship, or flagship if you will, and they are, respectul to the size, harder to kill than something smaller. A small navy made up of 'stealth ships' would most certainly get it handed to them by a fleet worth of larger designs, be it mere battleships or dreadnoughts or super dreadnoughts.

Smaller boats are a lot stealthier, more manueverable, more multirole (you can divide a large fleet up more easily than a small one), and it's better to load up a whole bunch of small ships with missiles or other powerful one-shot weapons than to build just one juggernaut that can't move anywhere.
Yes... Using the same argument, we should probably repalce every Arleigh Bruke in the USN with little missile boat kjust because they might be more maneuverable, stealthier... You get the point.

If what you suggest is actually true, then the US Army would've replaced every Abrams tank with ten TOW-launching Humvees. But that is certainly not the case - and neither is your misinterpretating exaggeration of what a SD actually is.

because I plan on a lot of close-quarter ramming with medium boats
You actually ram other ships?

and missile sniping with ultra-long-range torpedoes.
What is this "ulta-long-range" torpedo that you speak of? As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as "ultra-long-range" torpedoes that can travel for hundreds of kilometers - and detection is still a concern, since with a smaller ship you're virtually blind before the larger ship manages to see you and blow you out of the water.

As with MT, big battleships are just too vulernable. Sure, you can make a huge BB, but then you just make a bigger cruise missile.
Err... Yes, and with this same logic we can prove that everything in the world is too vulnerable just because you can "design a bigger cruise missile and destroy it". So why bother making any weapons at all?

So, is there any particular reason that people in NS like big ships other than that they sound cool?
I thought this was already settled in a previous debate here (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=412713&page=24). If you want to start another debate, I don't see the point... Then again, you need to actually realize the fact that SDs are not intended to function by themselves, not are a replacement for smaller vessels: it is designed as a large command ship and multirole surface combatent that would form the center and flagship of a large naval taskforce. You can't say that they are bad just because you can replace them with smaller ships - it is as illogical as saying that an apartment is a waste of money when you could just have a thousand little one-room shacks.

if you still adamantly insist that SDs are useless just because tehy can be replaced with smaller ships while prone to the fantasy weapons you describe - then this discussion itself would be somewhat pointless. You need to realize what the SD actually is and what it is for before stating how flawed of a design it is. if you can raise enw points that actually conform to the actual definition of a SD, then fine, but the problem is that you aren't. A SD is certainly an unique type of ship in its own class that has no replacement, due to its immensity, role in NS naval warfare, and presence, much like a nuclear-powered supercarrier and its position in real life...

we should probably repalce every Arleigh Bruke in the USN with little missile boat kjust because they might be more maneuverable, stealthier... You get the point.
which would actually be more effective on the defensive (when you have fixed radar and land-based air) against another high-tech nation i.e. the forthcoming RL europe...

which would actually be more effective on the defensive (when you have fixed radar and land-based air) against another high-tech nation i.e. the forthcoming RL europe...
It was a rhetorical statement - and even then, I wouldn't agree. But I'm afraid that such a discussion is irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand - the point is that you can't use the "its useless because you can replace it with smaller ships" logic because using the same logic, you can essentially state that anything is useless, including rocks, because you have subatomic particles to supposably replace it. Using the same logic, then any warship would be useless ebcause you can easily replace it with fast, extremely maneuverable, and tiny Boghammers armed with machine guns and RPGs.

which would actually be more effective on the defensive (when you have fixed radar and land-based air) against another high-tech nation i.e. the forthcoming RL europe...

The British, IIRC, are replacing their designs with larger ships [at least their carrier]. But, since having a big ship would mean that your fleet was meant to propigate itself, it's all a bit irrelevent. Regardless, the Spanish fleet is certainly not developing smaller ships, per se. Their Principe de Asturias is so small becuase they don't really need a larger ship to begin with; but furthermore, they're investing in more diesel submarines for defensive operations - I believe the Germans are doing the same, explaining their developement of the U202 [if I recall the number correctly]; the best diesel/electric in service, if not that, one of the best.

But, it's not necessarilly because they understand that smaller ships are better for defensive operations. If sure if it suited their needs they would invest in larger ships; it's because they don't want to spend the money on a larger ship when smaller ships can do the job just fine against prospective foes. They also invest in larger ground aircraft platforms for more aircraft - the Eurofighter Typhoon, a joint German-British-Spanish-Belgian? design is an example of European tactical thinking [the larger Typhoon for defensive operations on the European coastline].

Well, for one thing, the fact that one of my Superdreadnoughts can take on any reasoable number of ISDs, and win may have something to do with my like of Bigger Hammers.

Well, the big ships can carry helos (or in space fighters), can have more guns, and can take several hits from enemy fire. Little ships pretty much die after a few shots and have little weaponry, only a few guns, maybe missiles.

It is my belief that the massive propogation of larger ships that are not present in real life is the fact that all the NS countries actually could, on a moment's notice, enter another war on the same scale as our RL WWII. We build bigger and bigger ships in an attempt to outrace our potential opponents, so if we enter a war and my ship has guns 100 mm bigger, and an extra 200 mm of armour, then I win.

Missiles can be effective, but the problem is nowadays the very-effective anti-missile defences such as the Phalanx CIWS system, to use a real-world example: Automated cannons and missile launchers that target incoming missiles and aircraft and can shoot them out of the sky from four km away. This means missiles and aircraft (Especially aircraft, when nowadays, and especially on NS, you can use anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down enemy aircraft from 100 km away, long before they can launch their payloads) are much less effective than they could be. When we design ships on NS, we take into account the fact that they coudl be attacked by massed missiles, and so we overprepare for this eventuality with massive quantities of CIWS systems and incredibly thick armour.

Most CIWS systems claim to have a 95% success rate, meaning (And I stole this from Sarzonia's excellent guide) to get 50 hits in on a battlefleet, 1000 missiles would have to be fired. And, because larger capital ships are usually on the inside fo defensive anti-aircraft picket lines, they're the ships that are least-likely to get hit, and if they do, the thick armour protects them.

Really, the only thing that can, realistically, hurt large fleets is a close-range engagement with another large fleet. Two evenly matched fleets with similar quantities of similar ships will, on NS, end up in close-in gun-to-gun combat between the battleships and superdreadnoughts, just because nothing else is effective.

In real life, there are no longer great powers that compete against each other. Most of the major powers are on basically the same side, with the possible exception of China. Any wars that are fought by the major powers are foght against smaller, vastly inferior forces, who are so out-of-date that they actually can be defeated by missile or aircraft strikes (Look at Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2 for examples). And it has been this way since the end of WWII, or at least into the 50s. WWII showed that the aircraft carrier was the dominant force on the planet, because radar wasn't developed enough yet and they didn't have reliable-enough anti-aircraft fire to be able to fight the aircraft. This is also why ground-based naval bombers were effective in the days of WWII, because unless the enemy fleet had a carrier of its own, to defend them with fighters (Which is why the Royal Navy kept one carrier with each of its fleets, fairly reliably, throughout the war), then their only anti-aircraft armament was pom-poms and machine guns, unreliable at best.

Nowadays we're seeing the end of this era. Advances in technology have led to the aircraft carrier no longer being as powerful as it was in WWII. It is still a powerful and necessary armament, but no longer as necessary as it has been in the past, because anti-aircraft ships can perform a role that has been played by carriers in the past. And we're seeing this in real life, too: There's an alarming trend in the major powers nowadays to upgrade the size of the ships in their navies, because they realize these facts as much as some people on a website do (us). Russia still has some heavy cruisers left over from the cold war that they're unwilling to decomission, and America reactivated and refitted multiple Iowa-class battleships to serve for ten years in the 80s and 90s (They bombarded forces in the Gulf in '91). Missile cruisers and aircraft carriers become more and more outdated with every advancement in CIWS technology. Someday we'll hear about an engagement in which an anti-aircraft ship beats off an entire missile or aircraft attack, and then we'll know the era of aircraft carriers is ending, and we're heading back into a new era of big, air-defensible ships with really big guns, the same way we have ended up on NS.

Most CIWS systems claim to have a 95% success rate, meaning (And I stole this from Sarzonia's excellent guide) to get 50 hits in on a battlefleet, 1000 missiles would have to be fired. And, because larger capital ships are usually on the inside fo defensive anti-aircraft picket lines, they're the ships that are least-likely to get hit, and if they do, the thick armour protects them.


95% success rate against an individual missile, perhaps, but not against a mass missile attack. Take in mind that the CIWS gun would have to turn, engage, process victory, then turn again - which can take, let's give it a round number of a minute. All the while, the next missile is all of a sudden almost at impact range; meaning, the 95% success rate doesn't translate that out of a 1000 missiles 950 will be knocked out of the sky. It means that it has a 95% chance of knocking out the first missile, and chance lowers respectfully after each successful engagement. If there's 1000 missiles coming at your ship, it's dead - but that's what we call missile spam. And then, the ship firing would have to get within range in the first place...so yea.

i have to disagree.
while missiles are less effective than they should be. well designed weapons (or even aircraft) should be able to confuse CIWS systems with equipment such as chaff and flares...
also, IRL, if someone tried to use an SD, particularly on america, it would almost certainly get blown to hell by a tac-nuke.
and in NS, attacking people who have prepared for it with SDs is not clever. trying to get one within it's range of my coast would doom it due to the old but massive shore defenses which can quite easily put out so much firepower that nothing could stop it all. (hello, semi-guided cannon shells, goodbye SD)

95% success rate against an individual missile, perhaps, but not against a mass missile attack. Take in mind that the CIWS gun would have to turn, engage, process victory, then turn again - which can take, let's give it a round number of a minute. All the while, the next missile is all of a sudden almost at impact range; meaning, the 95% success rate doesn't translate that out of a 1000 missiles 950 will be knocked out of the sky. It means that it has a 95% chance of knocking out the first missile, and chance lowers respectfully after each successful engagement. If there's 1000 missiles coming at your ship, it's dead - but that's what we call missile spam. And then, the ship firing would have to get within range in the first place...so yea.

Yes, I know all that. But also don't forget that we're not talking about 1000 missiles coming at one ship, we're talking about it coming at a massive anti-aircraft screening ship picket line. So while 95% may not be an accurate number, claiming all the missiles are coming at one ship is a roundabout method of deception. Also, the fact that the Phalanx is effective from up to 4 kilometres away means that NS systems, which are often better than their RL counterparts, can effectively target multiple missiles in a short time period because of the distance away.

also, IRL, if someone tried to use an SD, particularly on america, it would almost certainly get blown to hell by a tac-nuke.

Except that nowadays any use of nukes, tactical or otherwise, would lead to stuff nboody wants down the road, and possibly the end of the world. One side uses tactical nukes, then the other does, then strategic nukes, and then we all die in a big firestorm. Not saying it would happen, but it's likely enough that I doubt anybody would use a tac-nuke to destroy a ship.

I also disagree with super-dreadnoughts on principle. I just think they're a silly idea.

Also, while using chaff and flares to confuse CIWS systems may work in close, it simply wouldn't work against ships over a hundred and fifty km away, where missiles and airplanes are being launched from.

Well, the big ships can carry helos (or in space fighters), can have more guns, and can take several hits from enemy fire. Little ships pretty much die after a few shots and have little weaponry, only a few guns, maybe missiles.

There's no armor thick enough to fit on a ship that can resist even a Tomahawk cruise missile.

I agree with the original point of this thread. Seems 90% of NSers have no clue what the fuck they're doing, and they go on the basis of "omgz! My super battleship can beat anything and carries 10 feet thick armor!"

Nevermind the fact that battleships have been phased out of service all over the world precisely because they're too big, too slow, too unstealthy, too expensive to maintain, and you can build a -real- aircraft carrier instead. Not one of these 'hyper carriers'. Which is pure foolishness.

Carriers need to turn into wind and travel at a certain speed to launch its aircraft. If your ship is bigger than 10 Titanics then it'd take 10 minutes to turn it and 20 minutes to get enough speed to launch your aircraft.

Not to mention that with 200+ aircraft, it'd take so long to get them into the air, that before you were done launching the last 50 jets, the first ones you launched would need to come back and refuel. It takes several minutes to get a jet into the air. Lets say.. 3 minutes. If you had 200 jets to launch, that translates into 600 minutes.

It would take roughly four seconds for a Mach 2 anti-shipping missile to cover four kilometers [Mach 2 is equivalent to .6 kilometers per second]. You would effectively need at least hundreds of collective CIWS. But, a missile spam like that would fail in the end anyways because it's horrible tactics; so assuming horrible tactics, yes CIWS would in the end stop the attack. Fortunately, in a situation where people know what they're doing a missile spam attack like that is not too probably [as opposed to what I like to call surgical missile spam, since missiles do have strategy too].

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NSAL: How is an aircraft going to confuse a CIWS system with chaff or flare? Why would an aircraft even care? Chaff uses a chemical solven which puffs in the air like a cloud to mask the radar signature - there's no way you're going to mistake a huge CIWS mount with that - within the context of a missile.

And ok well, using tactical nukes sorta makes your entire argument here irrelevent because you cede the point that you would need such a heavy weapon to do it in the first place. But I wouldn't doubt that your foe would reciprocate with a tactical nuking of your entire defensive fleet. Tac nuking a SD is an act of desperation which certainly isn't necessary.

The point is to remember that no naval battle is going to take seconds to win; all naval battles are protracted [the Battle of Targul Frumos has been raging since September 2005, and in NS time has only been going on for less than three weeks].

Semi-guided cannon shell? One shell is not going to take out a SD. If wooden ships can take full broadsides and still fight then imagine what a SD can do, even with larger shells with explosive warheads. You're going to need dozens, if not hundreds, of shells - but the same vice versa.

In the end, there is not a end all, be all way of defeating a superdreadnought, as there is not an end all be all way of defeating a standard battleship; patience and the ability to write prose is in the end your friend.

The problem with the "battleships are obsolete" assertion is that they have all been retired IRL exactly because of the perception that cost is going to be a problem, and the fact that there is no longer the requirement for a battleship (in the point of view of the politicans and officers who were responsible for the re-decomissioning of the Iowas) - other times, the Iowas have performed in a quite splendorous way, especially in Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea. In fact, it was one of the major fears of Soviet admirals during the Cold War when the Iowas were put into service again - it is acknowledged that few Soviet missiles could effectively damage and sink an Iowa, unlike carriers which are only lightly protected. In NS, a vastly modernized battleship could perform quite admirably in both surface and land attack roles - it is an invaluable platform for fire support for landing troops, while other times with its thick armour and missile armament it also functions as an excellent surface combatent.

No ship armour could stop a Tomahawk cruise missile? Maybe so in RL, but in NS with big battleships, it is only an illusion. First, the Tomahawk is only subsonic, which means that its penetration power is doubtful at best, against armoured targets. It has a big warhead - but then again, if battleship armour can stop plus-14 inch shells, there's little doubt that it could also stop a Tomahawk's warhead as well.

As for CIWS - CIWS is your last resort... And definitely not the only point defence weapon on a ship. Most missiles will likely to be shot down either by long range or medium-range SAMs; if not, they will be most definitely shot down by small PD SAMs like the RAM before they reach the range of CIWS guns. Add countermeasures such as chaff and jamming to this, and you get the idea.

one thing... in RL, jamming is virtually useless except on anti-radar missiles or the very few that use radar guidance only. none of which include (at least UK) air-sea missiles. if the designers program in evasive manouvers, even the anti-computer lasers, which are PMT anyway as RL ones wont work, would be ineffective. stuff like SRBC and SAMs will stop fair-sized volumes of fire, but if you pile in more than about 15 missiles more than what the SAMs on a ship can handle, its going to visit davy jones and there's no way it will survive except by pure fluke.

I use piss small spaceships, I love them, they're nippy and manueverable and in some cases can group together in the destruction of larger ships, in MT I also use small naval vessels, not only that but it's PreMT stylee, Ironclads and Steamer ships, I guess I just like the odds against me, in the words of Bill Bailey, "As an Englishman I crave dissapointment"

I got tired of using huge numbers of Star Destroyers myself, so now I'm using Mobile Suit tech, which allows for large numbers of highly deadly machines that can take on star ships just as easy as an SD, or even better.

The problem with the "battleships are obsolete" assertion is that they have all been retired IRL exactly because of the perception that cost is going to be a problem, and the fact that there is no longer the requirement for a battleship (in the point of view of the politicans and officers who were responsible for the re-decomissioning of the Iowas) - other times, the Iowas have performed in a quite splendorous way, especially in Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea. In fact, it was one of the major fears of Soviet admirals during the Cold War when the Iowas were put into service again - it is acknowledged that few Soviet missiles could effectively damage and sink an Iowa, unlike carriers which are only lightly protected. In NS, a vastly modernized battleship could perform quite admirably in both surface and land attack roles - it is an invaluable platform for fire support for landing troops, while other times with its thick armour and missile armament it also functions as an excellent surface combatent.

No ship armour could stop a Tomahawk cruise missile? Maybe so in RL, but in NS with big battleships, it is only an illusion. First, the Tomahawk is only subsonic, which means that its penetration power is doubtful at best, against armoured targets. It has a big warhead - but then again, if battleship armour can stop plus-14 inch shells, there's little doubt that it could also stop a Tomahawk's warhead as well.

As for CIWS - CIWS is your last resort... And definitely not the only point defence weapon on a ship. Most missiles will likely to be shot down either by long range or medium-range SAMs; if not, they will be most definitely shot down by small PD SAMs like the RAM before they reach the range of CIWS guns. Add countermeasures such as chaff and jamming to this, and you get the idea.


That's what I'm saying. There's no RL ship right now that has armor able to stop a Tomahawk cruise missile, much less a Harpoon. The point is, there's no -need- for bigger missiles right now. I garuntee that if some country like China or India built a ship with enough armor to stop a Harpoon SSM, the USA already has engineers who have plans for building something bigger.

In the NS game, lots of people have missiles that are beyond-sonic and pack triple or more the explosives of Tomahawks and Harpoons. That would mean you'd need 5x or more the armor of modern day warships. That translates into VERY, VERY heavy ships that are going to be damned slow and hard to manuver. Yes, you could pack some very sophisticated gear on them, but that won't change the fact that you have billions of dollars worth of assets sitting out there vulnerable.

Okay, you pack CIWS sets onto your ships. You pack anti-missile missiles onto your ships. Well, what happens when someone designs their missile out of carbon so that won't show up on your radar, and paints it pale blue so it's basicly impossible to see? It won't NEED to go fast if it has enough explosive charge. Look what happened to the U.S.S Cole. A few hundred pounds of TNT sitting still blew a hole right through it.

It just doesn't make any sense to me to rely on armor. You -never- rely on armor on the modern battlefield.

The answer to your question is simple most players believe bigger is better, why have a cruiser when you can have a SD. The SD user never looks at the logistical side of using one of these ships. Here are some questions you should ask an SD player
How do you dry dock a 250,000 ton ship? If you can dry dock it how much extra did it cost you to build that dry dock and how many did you build?
How many deep water ports do you have?
How do you get something that size up to 30 knots and expect it to turn?
Even with the extended range with the 24 inch to 30 inch guns how would you get a SD with such a deep draft in close enough to some shore lines to use them? ( Real world example the Australian coast along the Great Barrier Reef.)
These ships are meant to be big and impressive and scare anyone who knows nothing on the subject of naval warfare. For the people who have even a little knowledge on the subject there are ways to take these ships down.

The answer to your question is simple most players believe bigger is better, why have a cruiser when you can have a SD. The SD user never looks at the logistical side of using one of these ships. Here are some questions you should ask an SD player
How do you dry dock a 250,000 ton ship? If you can dry dock it how much extra did it cost you to build that dry dock and how many did you build?
How many deep water ports do you have?
How do you get something that size up to 30 knots and expect it to turn?
Even with the extended range with the 24 inch to 30 inch guns how would you get a SD with such a deep draft in close enough to some shore lines to use them? ( Real world example the Australian coast along the Great Barrier Reef.)
These ships are meant to be big and impressive and scare anyone who knows nothing on the subject of naval warfare. For the people who have even a little knowledge on the subject there are ways to take these ships down.


-EXACTLY-.

Tarlag has a definite point. I find Super-Dreadnoughts are pretty much stupid. They're an unrealistic logistical nightmare that, by rights, should require about a million engines just to move, and should never reach the high speeds that some SDs do reach. Plus, once they get into battle they're basically just an expensive floating island with battleship guns. Sure, your turrets can turn, but what if your aft turrets get knocked out of comission? Then all the ships you're fighting just have to circle in behind you and blow out your aft.

I will admit that I don't know as much about naval warfare as many other people, but I do know some, because I'm interested in it and I think it's a shame the era of big ships is over. Some of those beauties were really majestic, and I think it's a shame we're down to destroyers, frigates, and corvettes as the only ships propogating navies in large quantities.

However, my IC government is not as bright. I made an In Character decision for, because my nation does use MT and does use battleships, to build a very large battleship, the HNS Fortress, to compliment the two Yamato-size battleships (One still under construction) that I built. This is an In Character idea that's not too smart. Without whatever kind of tech makes PMT Super-Dreadnoughts work, the HNS Fortress will be ineffective. Very slow, although deadly in combat, and vulnerable to long-range missile fire. It will probably get sunk in one of its first engagements, and that's okay with me.

Personally, the idea of building any ships larger than a battleship class is a bit unrealistic and stupid to me. The same kind of guns on an SD can be mounted atop a battleship, or placed onshore if you're not planning any offensive operations. The additional aircraft complement is also a moot point for Czardas because all ships in my navy can carry aircraft anyway, although mostly Daggers and Kestrels (which are VTOL).

My own personal equivalent of the SD is the Hailstorm, just an uber-heavy bomber that can fire 80 missiles and 28 large bombs but can also barely go past Mach 1.5 at the best of times and requires a shitload of escorts to go anywhere without getting knocked out of the sky by even an unguided missile. (I did purchase two superdreadnaughts from TSS a while back though—ICly Czardas must just want to keep up with the neighbors—but we have only used them in combat once.)

Interesting ideas, Tarlag. I've never thought of the logistics side of it all because I assumed that they'd find some way to handle it, but you have a good point. As for the manueverability issue, trimaran hulls would help but only to a point.

What I'm really talking about, though, is starships. Someone asked me about the big torpedoes I was talking about- look at my storefront and then at one of my carriers, it describes how they work. They're 100 meters long and have a range of 500 kilometers, but are fairly slow (the idea is that the fighters keep in contact with the enemy fleet and vector in the missiles over a period of a day or so). All this while, my small, fast, stealthy boats are evading and outrunning the big guns. My ships are medium-sized, but not too small. Their main armament is their torpedoes, and they have no long-range guns but VERY heavy point defence/close in weapons (100,000 guns on the Independent class). I get around the fuel cell problem by building "attack starbases"- moving starbases that divide apart after arriving on the battlefield into smaller units. After battle, they rejoin for extra fuel.

You can still mount a big gun on a fairly small ship, it's just that you can only mount one. And, if you outnumber your enemy and have faster ships, it's a good idea to ram.

Someone asked me about ramming. Yes, I ram often. My ships have no energy shields, but stronger hulls. They're fast, and they are equipped with ramming spikes. I consider it a very valid close-in tactic. I'm FT, if you haven't noticed.

For me, they serve as a clasic symbol of fear. Plus they serve as a type of space station.... Or at least my Tyrant Towerless Super Star Destroyer does with it's repair station.

And as someone already pointed out, our military budgets are large enough to allow this, plus I'm FT and there is an unlimited amount of space in space. It also depends on the level of tech you're playing as.

However, the larger are giant "HIT ME! OVER HERE! HIT ME!" targets.... For a good reason too. Most people will divert all firepower to the large ship, leaving the smaller ships in the fleet to move in and attack.

Also, my nation is, slowly regressing to smaller 8km or less command ships from the giant 15-30km size.

FT is where I think the larger ships are better (depending on the Tech. level).
Logistics would be not so much of a problem because of the higher level of technology. I personally would not build anything bigger then a Battlestar or Star Destroyer due to the cost issue. I will switch back to modern naval terms to explain my point ( this goes for MT, PMT, AND FT).
You can build one SD for 100 billion USD. It will have 15, 25 inch guns plus 200 anti ship missiles and 100 aircraft The cost of the planes will not be figured in). I think this is about average for most of the SD's sailing around now.
OK now what can I buy for my 100 billion USD
Ten Nimitz Class carriers carrying 75 aircraft at 6 billion each = 60 billion USD
Eight Tiger Class BCNs (from Cotland) for 4.5 Billion USD = 36 Billion USD
Twenty standard FFs for 100 million each = 2 Billion USD
Ten nuclear attack subs for 200 million each = 2 Billion USD
If you do the math that fleet is worth one hundred billion.

This gives the SD user 100 aircraft, you have 750 planes
His guns have a total throw weight of 60 tons (assuming 4 tons per shell)
You have a throw weight of 67.2 (assuming a 1400 pound shell fired from a 14 inch gun) This may not seem like a big difference but he has eight targets you have one.
He can launch 200 anti ship missiles you can launch 600 anti ship missiles
(10 per FF and 50 from each BCN)
Lets not forget our friends the ten subs each will fire six torpedoes for a total of sixty.
His 25 inch guns will out range your 14 inch ones but after the 600 missiles and the 60 torpedoes and the missiles and bombs from your aircraft it most likely will not matter.
But wait the SD user says I have anti missile and anti torpedo systems that are 90% effective. Sorry my friend that figure assumes only one or two incoming weapons at a time. Any AMS system (even the PTM ones would be overloaded with even a volley of 60 missiles let alone 600). On this point I will give the SD user the benefit of the doubt lets say its 50% effective. he is now only hit by 300 missiles and 30 torpedoes.
Even with the impossibly heavy armor these ships are carrying he most likely will have no radar to fire his guns and no steering or propulsion to move his SD, in other words he is now a BIG sitting target.
At the end of the day I will lose some ships lets say 20 Billion worth but he just lost a 100 Billion dollar investment.

WHO THE HELL USES A SD WITHOUT AN ESCORT OF SMALLER SHIPS!?

I think thats a pretty good question, anybody with a realistic grip on warfare would realize that alone, battleships and aircraft carriers could easily be sunk by, say, a submarine. But with an escort of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and corvettes(does anybody here USE corvettes(I dont)?), they are (metaphorically speaking) invincible. The same is true with SDs.

Also, there IS a ship in real life that can take a Tomahawk cruise missile hit and keep going. The IOWA class, as it has been shown, can take a direct hit by a Tomahawk... and all it would do is scorch the paint! The same is probably true with the YAMAMOTO Class(which was tougher then the IOWA Class), which, I remind you, was sunk only after taking ONE HUNRED-FIFTY OR SO TOREPEDO HITS!

The main problem with SDs, and Battleships, is crew requirement and cost. But for the ten million+ man militaries with trillions of dollars here on NS... that isnt a problem.

SDs in MT are pretty stupid, yeah, else countries today would use them in real life. However, I do think they have uses in FT.

For logistics, you don't HAVE to dry-dock it in space, just park it in a Lagrange point (so it won't float away) and fly little repair ships and stuff around it. Same for restocking it, keep flying small supply ships in and out. The size of it means it can carry supplies for months or even years in some cases, so you can keep them in action longer. Only problem is costs, but again, FT nations are usually rolling in cash so this isn't usually a problem.

In combat they have more benefits - yeah, people have said they got shot more, but they have defences like the CIWS and stuff, and since they are bigger they can fit lots and lots of them on the hull and still have plenty of room for lots of anti-small-ship guns and plenty of REALLY big guns. You might have a dozen smaller capital ships racing towards the SD, but if it has a dozen or more long-range cannon that can hit you before you get close enough to fire, you're all dead. I think someone mentioned damaging radar and sensors too, but with a ship that size you need lots of sensors, backup sensors, etc, so that shouldn't be a problem either.

And there's the point people made of support ships, sending an SD out on it's own is just suicidal. As was mentioned near the beginning, a fleet of smaller ships working with an SD or 2 would be best. It would certainly beat a fleet of just small ships, provided everything else was fairly balanced, so don't just discard them as idiot's toys - when my nation gets round to building a fleet we will have some really big ships as well as the small ones.

i have to disagree.
while missiles are less effective than they should be. well designed weapons (or even aircraft) should be able to confuse CIWS systems with equipment such as chaff and flares...Ever heard of something called electronic counter-countermeasures? Most everyone is familiar with the use of chaff and flares to draw off a missile attack. Militaries are using or developing so-called electronic counter-countermeasures to prevent spoofing. Thus, if someone fires off chaff or flares, the missile is being made more "intelligent" about following its target.

The point I am trying to show is this ships of the SD size in MT or PMT make no economic sense. Even if you added escorts if you kept the economic factors the same the SD side would still come out on the short end because of the massive economic investment.
No, no one in his right mind would send out an SD with out escorts. The non SD user can afford a lot more large to medium ships for the cost of an SD. Even with the all most unlimited budgets the SD is an unacceptable drain in resources.
In FT the larger ships do make more sense as long as you can absorb the massive cost of building and running these ships. But remember it only took one snub fighter to destroy one death star (abate a lucky strike but he did it).

*snip*

Yeah, I must have missed that bit. Any missile can have a computer chip stuck inside saying "follow that target, and ignore any others that pop up" or something to that extent. Then we get more intelligent countermeasures, and more intelligent missiles, but basically no ship can ever be immune to missiles, especially just by using chaff and flares. Even simple methods like optical guidance instead of radar or IR guided missiles would beat that kind of tech.

Well, I think we've pretty much settled the issue of MT big ships, but what about FT? What do people think of my idea of medium-sized, stealthy ships that fire off torpedoes out of range of the big enemy guns? Another big part of my strategy is having a very potent, very expensive fighter fleet to create a buffer zone. My lastest-generation fighter costs $2 billion +. Sure, it means that you buy less fighters, but less ships means you need fewer pilots, and you can be more selective about your pilot corps and train them better. Once these spot the big enemy targets, which won't be hard to do given their mind-numbing size, the long-range torpedoes are fired off.

Well, I think we've pretty much settled the issue of MT big ships, but what about FT? What do people think of my idea of medium-sized, stealthy ships that fire off torpedoes out of range of the big enemy guns? Another big part of my strategy is having a very potent, very expensive fighter fleet to create a buffer zone. My lastest-generation fighter costs $2 billion +. Sure, it means that you buy less fighters, but less ships means you need fewer pilots, and you can be more selective about your pilot corps and train them better. Once these spot the big enemy targets, which won't be hard to do given their mind-numbing size, the long-range torpedoes are fired off.

Ok. Take the Metal Militia II that's the standard Flagship of my fleets. 6 miles long(10 and change km), heavily armed and armored. It has the ability to tag just about anything they can see, due to my excessive use of energy weapons. I also have the ultimate missile defense system, based on the Protoss Warp Recall, and my proclivity for taking peoples missiles that are coming towards me, and instead of letting them hit me, I'll make a wonderful Gate and drop them right back in front of the enemy ships. Yes, this is a legitimate tactic, first used in NS War 1, Part 2, The Coredian Campaign.

Also, my ships are all generally large, meaning they can mount enough armor toi shrug off any but the most masive hits. The most recent example of this was my performance in the Galactic Civil War 2. Specifically my 18-75 kill ratio, in my favor.

Next you have to consider that bigger ships=more weapons. My 6 mile SDn mounts somewhere around 200 energy weapons of varying power levels. Smaller ships in my fleet mount significantly less, but size certainly does have its advantages.

er, this is FT. your long-range torps get spotted and blown to hell by counter-missiles. any that get through walk into a flak screen, and the survivors get taken out by my FT equivalent of CIWS. no use. (when all of my equipment is functoning right, which rarely happens in the NSAA FT military right now...) but the point still stands. bigger ships mean more counter-missile batteries and stronger shields. also more flak cannon. AND they have better sensor suites to back-track your missiles if you're using stealthed craft to launch.
In FT, big ships are worthwile, even if missile spams can, eventually, take them down, the cost in your smaller craft from return fire will be worse than the cost of the loss of one big craft, particularly if it had escorts it could sacrifice first. Pity i dont have many. (All of 4. 3 of which are poorly maintained and have poor crews. look ever-so-slightly scared people...)

Ok. Take the Metal Militia II that's the standard Flagship of my fleets. 6 miles long(10 and change km), heavily armed and armored. It has the ability to tag just about anything they can see, due to my excessive use of energy weapons. I also have the ultimate missile defense system, based on the Protoss Warp Recall, and my proclivity for taking peoples missiles that are coming towards me, and instead of letting them hit me, I'll make a wonderful Gate and drop them right back in front of the enemy ships. Yes, this is a legitimate tactic, first used in NS War 1, Part 2, The Coredian Campaign.

Also, my ships are all generally large, meaning they can mount enough armor toi shrug off any but the most masive hits. The most recent example of this was my performance in the Galactic Civil War 2. Specifically my 18-75 kill ratio, in my favor.

If you used that jumpgate tactic on me, I'd call it a godmod. Why can't I just send the missiles right back to you with my own jumpgate?

My antimatter torpedoes are 100 meters long and full of antimatter. I'll fire a few of them and see how long your ships can stand up.

As for the CIWS issue, my torpedoes detonate 3,000 klicks from their target, and the antimatter field barely dissapates at all at that distance- there's nothing between it and the target but space. They can be detonated at up to 50,000 klicks away, but with much less damage and accuracy.

About the anti-missile-missiles, the whole idea of me escorting my torpedoes with fighters is to kill whatever threats they run into, with their own anti-anti-missile-missiles if need be.

If you used that jumpgate tactic on me, I'd call it a godmod. Why can't I just send the missiles right back to you with my own jumpgate?

(OOC: Please, please, please don't. The last thing we need is another missile ping-pong game...


As for the big ship issue: In the last galactic civil war, I do remember cloaking around five small cruisers, each around 800 meters long, flying them behind one of Unified Sith's SSDs, then blasting the engines and flying away with only one ship lost. This allowed me to pummel the ship at my leisure with some of my larger vessels. This has lead me to believe that bigger ships are necessary, except they should be properly mixed with smaller ships.)

If you used that jumpgate tactic on me, I'd call it a godmod. Why can't I just send the missiles right back to you with my own jumpgate?

My antimatter torpedoes are 100 meters long and full of antimatter. I'll fire a few of them and see how long your ships can stand up.

As for the CIWS issue, my torpedoes detonate 3,000 klicks from their target, and the antimatter field barely dissapates at all at that distance- there's nothing between it and the target but space. They can be detonated at up to 50,000 klicks away, but with much less damage and accuracy.

About the anti-missile-missiles, the whole idea of me escorting my torpedoes with fighters is to kill whatever threats they run into, with their own anti-anti-missile-missiles if need be.

1: It's not a Godmod, it's an accepted tactic. Ask any ofthe big name FT nations, CW, Chron, Godular. Especially Godular. He was the first recipient of it. It has never been caled a GM exceptby people like TFU. Next, what's to stop them from coming back? The fact that I could drop them inches away from your ships as they dvance towards me is one reason. Another is that if you do it often enough I'll just drop them into the nearest sun(ala Khurgn, Galactic Civil War 2, torps and ships).

2: They'll never make it. They're 100 meters long? I can take that out with a burst laser from several tens of thousands of kilometers away. Contact and near contact weapons are a thing of the past. Standoff range laser warheads are the way to go. I use weapons that send 25 terrawatt range bomb pumped lasers in your directionat a range of 30,000 kilometers at detonation.

3: See 2, specifically about the energy weapons part.

4: If you can hit me with those Torps, yeah, I'll be toast, but again, missiles aroundme are a death sentence, or a suicide pact, take your pick.

Please, please, please don't. The last thing we need is another missile ping-pong game...


As for the big ship issue: In the last galactic civil war, I do remember cloaking around five small cruisers, each around 800 meters long, flying them behind one of Unified Sith's SSDs, then blasting the engines and flying away with only one ship lost. This allowed me to pummel the ship at my leisure with some of my lager vessels. This has lead me to believe that bigger ships are necessary, except they should be properly mixed with smaller ships.


But Kyanges, Godular and I had so much funwith the last episode of Ping-Pong Missiles, and no one has ever tried to defeat the Warp Recall since then. It's a refreshing change.

But Kyanges, Godular and I had so much funwith the last episode of Ping-Pong Missiles, and no one has ever tried to defeat the Warp Recall since then. It's a refreshing change.

(OOC: Lol, well, it that's how you feel about it, then I respect your position. ^_^. I will admit, I haven't seen it around so, heh, why not.)

1. Well, why don't I just fire the torps to within and inch of your starcraft in the first place?

2 and 3. Recall what I said about the range of 50,000 klicks. If I fire enough at that range, and most of them hit, they'll outrange your guns. Also, your laser guns aren't 100% accurate, and some of my torps will get through.

(OOC: Please, please, please don't. The last thing we need is another missile ping-pong game...


As for the big ship issue: In the last galactic civil war, I do remember cloaking around five small cruisers, each around 800 meters long, flying them behind one of Unified Sith's SSDs, then blasting the engines and flying away with only one ship lost. This allowed me to pummel the ship at my leisure with some of my larger vessels. This has lead me to believe that bigger ships are necessary, except they should be properly mixed with smaller ships.)

Wouldn't a ship as big as an SD have good enough sensors to detect cloaked stuff? I myself use cloaks on my more pricey fighters, but according to me at least it takes too much energy to power a cloak shield on a big ship. I don't know about 800-meter ships, though.

1. Well, why don't I just fire the torps to within and inch of your starcraft in the first place?

2 and 3. Recall what I said about the range of 50,000 klicks. If I fire enough at that range, and most of them hit, they'll outrange your guns. Also, your laser guns aren't 100% accurate, and some of my torps will get through.

Why don't you? Well, it may have something to do with the OTHER trick I pulled on Godular in NS War 1(it really is a good read, and part 2 gives some serious insight into my nations tactics and capabilities at the individual ship and massed conglomerate fleet level). The second trick was my FTLi. Wonderful thing FTLi is, especially when youdevelop a strategy to drop "pockets" in the FTLi, giving me the ability to send things out, and keeping anything from coming back in via FTL(aka warp gate, aka jump gate, aka whathaveye). I devekloped that in response to missile spam tactics, such as Godulars Red Rain, and my own APOLLO.

I am not someone to screw with ICly. So far as tech goes, I have some of the most versatile, and dangerous in FT.

Wouldn't a ship as big as an SD have good enough sensors to detect cloaked stuff? I myself use cloaks on my more pricey fighters, but according to me at least it takes too much energy to power a cloak shield on a big ship. I don't know about 800-meter ships, though.

(OOC: Well, I guess US was being nice that day... Size doesn't really have the most direct link to sensor ability though, unless you have a massive sensor array, or something to that effect.)

er, this is FT. your long-range torps get spotted and blown to hell by counter-missiles. any that get through walk into a flak screen, and the survivors get taken out by my FT equivalent of CIWS. no use. (when all of my equipment is functoning right, which rarely happens in the NSAA FT military right now...) but the point still stands. bigger ships mean more counter-missile batteries and stronger shields. also more flak cannon. AND they have better sensor suites to back-track your missiles if you're using stealthed craft to launch.

Makes me want to try out SCCAMs against you. The singularity on the tip pretty much makes them immune to frontal fire, so they're only really vulnerable to interception when they finally hit. Point defense lasers would make it even more fun. Simply because you have more point defense doesn't mean you're going to take out all the missiles coming at you. Hell, since it's also a bigger target, I can fire off more missiles at it per cubic meter.

Well, I think we've pretty much settled the issue of MT big ships.

Um, no, you haven't settled it all. There are still plenty of nations running round with superdreadnoughts. You know why? because all the reasons you lot have stated they are pointless in this thread are completely wrong.

1.) Nations are hella richer and bigger. Economic prowess doesn't *really* matter.
2.) The notion of defeating 1km~ long battleship with 20+ guns and approximately 15,000 missiles (5,000, let's say, for ASM) with a bunch of frigates and battlecruisers is pathetic. The SD would just launch it's ASMs at the frigates and use it's guns to slaughter the capital ships. In pretty much all 1v1 situations the Superdreadnought comes out top because it's superior range means it can decimate capital ships with gunfire and missiles and use other missiles to kill aircraft/FF/DDs because of the sheer amount of missiles it can carry.
3.) It also makes a great C+C ship.
4.) It is also great for Shore Bombardment.
5.) It is also great for Fleet Air Defence
6.) It is also great for fear factor.

As with MT, big battleships are just too vulernable. Sure, you can make a huge BB, but then you just make a bigger cruise missile.

Didn't you learn the first time this argument got torn to shreds? (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=412713&page=9) Huge missiles are easier to intercept and require heavy bombers or suicidally short range [saving weight by reducing fuel payload] to be deployed. A 'bigger cruise missile' is likewise going to be slower, easier to detect and easier to intercept; it's also going to be harder to carry on a non-dedicated platform.

Seriously, this is like arguing that better tank armour should be countered with bigger man-portable ATGMs without bothering to check if a man could actually carry the weapon anymore. 'Yes, a 235kg soft-launch ATGM could easily defeat the Abrams, tanks are useless.'

1.) Nations are hella richer and bigger. Economic prowess doesn't *really* matter.


Well, I'll address this right away. Many people seem to think that not only can they have lots of SDs (given how expensive they are) but also the whole complete package of escort ships. I guess most of them don't have much of an army or airforce. Economic prowess does matter if one wants to start counting costs. I don't have SDs for the simple fact that if a person lost one, well, it's quite a bit of money down the drain.

Makes me want to try out SCCAMs against you. The singularity on the tip pretty much makes them immune to frontal fire, so they're only really vulnerable to interception when they finally hit. Point defense lasers would make it even more fun. Simply because you have more point defense doesn't mean you're going to take out all the missiles coming at you. Hell, since it's also a bigger target, I can fire off more missiles at it per cubic meter.
okay, so those would ignore the flak and the point defence, but they'd get knocked out by counter-missiles going round behind them. oh and i can totally see them coming, and while that means right now i have to micro-jump past them right now, after i have some time and you get my planned storyline, i can deflect the missile part, causing the singularity to turn away, or break...

[EDIT] GMC, abrams are not invulnerable. hit it in the right place with a LAW and its toast. same goes for all tanks, even the challenger 2, although nobody has ever got one with a LAW in combat yet. spamming lesser tanks on abrams or challenger 2 units works too...

[EDIT] GMC, abrams are not invulnerable. hit it in the right place with a LAW and its toast. same goes for all tanks, even the challenger 2, although nobody has ever got one with a LAW in combat yet. spamming lesser tanks on abrams or challenger 2 units works too...

Um, that's an exercise in missing the point. If you built a tank ten times bigger than the Abrams, would a 250-kilo 'man-portable' ATGM be the answer? Would said ATGM render all tanks worthless?

While there aren't many RL exmaples of masses of smaller ships fighting a single BB there are lots of examples in a little game call Navyfield.

here you occasionally see battles involving 20 or so detroyers(dds) and light criusers(cls) agaisnt a single BB, the outcome: about 60-80% of the time the BB wins why? well for a number of factors: first there is the awesome range of BB guns and the fact that it only takes a single salvo from 1 BB turret to sink most DDs and many CLs, secondly the fact that any gun under 8"s is pretty much totally ineffective unless using AP ammo at point blank range and 8"s is pretty much the maximum size you can fit on a lighter vessel.

While not totally accurate the navyfeild model does point to soem issues, for the hypotheical "bigger missile" i refer to GMC Military Arms' point what exactly are you going to mount it on? a Frigate that has trouble mounting 8 harpoons? and wouldn't these big missiles be better mounted on a large ship so that you can fire more of them? histroically the large ship was driven by the large gun and i suppose in NS the alrge ship cna equally be driven by the large missile and the large defensive system (a BB can mount much more effective defensive systems, and reffering to Navyfeild a BB has secondary weapons about equal to a largish CL on each side at the very least).

When I see these multiple mile long ships, I just laugh. What happens when it gets hit and casulties are taken? It'd take 20 minutes for a medical team to run to the scene. And if there's a hole in the ship? 20 minutes for a damage control team to get there, which means the structure of your ship would be screwed by the extra long exposure.

And trust me. You -will- get hit. Modern day missiles have an accuracy of around 2-5 meters. FT missiles will have an accuracy of 1-3 feet. You're not going to miss a target 4 miles long.

When I see these multiple mile long ships, I just laugh. What happens when it gets hit and casulties are taken? It'd take 20 minutes for a medical team to run to the scene. And if there's a hole in the ship? 20 minutes for a damage control team to get there, which means the structure of your ship would be screwed by the extra long exposure.

You appear to be assuming it doesn't have a proportionally larger crew. By this standard, if a Nimitz is holed it hasn't a prayer because the flooding control systems and crew of a tiny PT boat couldn't possibly handle the flooding on such a large ship.

1.) Nations are hella richer and bigger. Economic prowess doesn't *really* matter.
2.) The notion of defeating 1km~ long battleship with 20+ guns and approximately 15,000 missiles (5,000, let's say, for ASM) with a bunch of frigates and battlecruisers is pathetic. The SD would just launch it's ASMs at the frigates and use it's guns to slaughter the capital ships. In pretty much all 1v1 situations the Superdreadnought comes out top because it's superior range means it can decimate capital ships with gunfire and missiles and use other missiles to kill aircraft/FF/DDs because of the sheer amount of missiles it can carry.
3.) It also makes a great C+C ship.
4.) It is also great for Shore Bombardment.
5.) It is also great for Fleet Air Defence
6.) It is also great for fear factor.\


1)You have missed my point even with all most unlimited resources SDs are still a logistical problem see my earlier post and you will see my point.
2) Yes they can, missile range is the same if aether fired from an SD or a BC.
The notion that SDs are invinicabe is a joke their size is their worst enemy
again how do you manuever a 1KM long ship. How do you armor its propulsion and steering. The propulsion can be taken out with conventional torpedoes. After that they are immobile. How do you tow them home, they are just too big.
Take a lesson from history the Bismark was put out of action by a single torpedo launched by biplane.
3) they do make great command ships also great targets
4) They are great for shore bombardment as long as there is no counter battery fire.
5) They can be good air defense, they are also vulnerable to good old fashioned iron bombs. Yes the low tech solution to this hi tech problem. A one KM long ship is a HUGE target you can't denigh that. An ultra high altitude bomber flying at over 100,000 feet dropping an 20,000 pound bomb would do some serous damage to an SD. No amount of armor the ship has would save it from that. Similar bombs were used in WW2 against certain targets in Germany, these bombs could penetrate 16 feet of reinforced concrete. If anyone says an SD could shrug off a hit like that then they have no grip on how physics work.
But wait you say you have air defense. My answer is this, I know I can build a Bomber that can fly higher then your AA missiles can reach. The bomb it self can be "stealth ed" so that by the time you see it it will be too late. one of these bombs may not sink an SD but 3 or 4 will. At even 10 million per bomb I think that is a good trade.

Take a lesson from history the Bismark was put out of action by a single torpedo launched by biplane.

Right, the lesson to pray that the SD has a armour scheme recognised as obsolete at the start of WW2 that leaves the steering gear unprotected. Which is a fault specific to the Bismarck.

The lesson is that the SD will then circle around because it won't be part of a battlegroup, so it'll have to make a dash for port rather than staying right where it is in the middle of it's battlegroup awaiting supertugs or repairs.

The SD will, if faced, retain its full combat power in terms of weapons and tracking systems. Immobilisation doesn't really make it or its battlegroup any less difficult to take out.

All told, good luck trying that.

But wait you say you have air defense. My answer is this, I know I can build a Bomber that can fly higher then your AA missiles can reach.

My answer is a fighter can fly just as high as your bomber and won't be hauling a heavy-ass 20,000 pound bomb in its gut slowing it down.

About the bomber issue- the player who dosen't waste money on $30 billion SDs will buy a lot more carriers and will certainly be able to shoot down your fighters with his escorts.

People talk about a larger missile being easier to hit, but considering that the American SM-2, for example, already has a PK of 70-80% it won't really make a hell of a difference. Big missiles, like the Soviet As-4, are also faster, with a speed of Mach 4 on the As-4.

My idea is to build a lot of 10,000-ton cruisers, cover the deck with big missiles, and fire them off. It dosen't matter if they're sunk after that point because almost all their weapons have been fired off. Because you are spending money on SDs as opposed to purpose-built air defense ships, you would have less SAMs, and no aircraft to help shoot the SAMs down (while the other guy probably would if he had a carrier or land-based air). The aircraft can hit the escorts, while the bigger planes help in shooting up the SDs.

About the bomber issue- the player who dosen't waste money on $30 billion SDs will buy a lot more carriers and will certainly be able to shoot down your fighters with his escorts.

Right, because more available carriers means all those carriers will always be in the right place at the right time. We all remember how American carrier planes intercepted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, don't we? Since, y'know, the Americans had carriers, so they should have been able to shoot down the Japanese fighters?

Also, what kind of non special-purpose carrier 'escort' has a service ceiling higher than any SAM?

People talk about a larger missile being easier to hit, but considering that the American SM-2, for example, already has a PK of 70-80% it won't really make a hell of a difference. Big missiles, like the Soviet As-4, are also faster, with a speed of Mach 4 on the As-4.

Got any other numbers and letters? The As-4 is a 'big' missile but you don't give warhead size. 'PK' is apparently important but you don't bother to explain what it is.

A large missile will take more effort to move, that's simple physics. It will turn slower and therefore be less able to take evasive action, so it will be easier to hit. It will present a bigger target, so it will be easier to hit. It will have a bigger exhaust flare to aim at, so it will be easier to hit.

It will burn more fuel over a given distance, so it will have shorter range. It will take more effort to get up to speed, so it will be slower or have even shorter range, or a higher proportion of the missile as booster meaning the warhead will be correspondingly smaller. It is heavier, meaning it must be carried by a big, slow heavy bomber or have a tiny fuel supply and be released suicidally close to the target. Two-letter acronyms do not nullify the laws of physics.

These are the same arguments debunked in the last thread, Athiesism. Repeating them doesn't make them any better.

Your carriers will, in general, outnumber the enemy's, and it's not a big deal if you have to fire off your SSMs without them.

According to globalsecurity.org, the SLAM-ER has a range of 174 miles, greater than any naval SAM. There are land-based SAMs with range to intercept the plane carrying it, but they are unmanueverable turkeys.

You talked about missiles and evasive action. I've never heard of a missile that takes evasive action. The As-4 has a 2,000 pound warhead (it weighs more than 2,000 pounds altogether, but the warhead alone weighs 2,000 pounds). In NS, if you build a bigger ship, you just build a bigger missile to counter it. It's easier to destroy than to create, and it's a race that the SD owner can't win.

The As-4 has even longer range than the aforementioned SLAM-ER. Bigger missiles have longer range.

okay, so those would ignore the flak and the point defence, but they'd get knocked out by counter-missiles going round behind them. oh and i can totally see them coming, and while that means right now i have to micro-jump past them right now, after i have some time and you get my planned storyline, i can deflect the missile part, causing the singularity to turn away, or break...

Considering that the singularity is generated by a KK drive and thus for all intents and purposes attached to the missile, somehow I don't think that would work. Even if it did, you'd now have a singularity headed directly for your ship, which is generally considered a bad thing. Now yes, you could jump behind them, but what exactly is preventing them from pulling a 180?

[EDIT] GMC, abrams are not invulnerable. hit it in the right place with a LAW and its toast. same goes for all tanks, even the challenger 2, although nobody has ever got one with a LAW in combat yet. spamming lesser tanks on abrams or challenger 2 units works too...

In Iraq a Challenger tank was stranded and surrounded by enemy units, including T-72 tanks. The Challenger took several hits from RPG-7's, which can crack 30 to 60cm of steel, as well as direct hits from enemy T-72's. The Challenger defeated all the threats and was rescued, repaired, and put back into action days later. Saw that on the History Channel.

BUT, back to the topic at hand.

The critics of the MT SD are failing to realize 1 thing....how the heck do you plan on getting close enough to even engage the SD? When I'm in a naval battle, I keep my SD's in the center of my battlegroup with support ships around it. Carriers would be the closest to the SD's since they are more vulnerable, as well as any transports or lightly armored ships. On the outer perimeters I have submarines, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, smaller battleships, and so on.

The argument about taking out an SD from the air.

Let's say you manage to launch several hundred fighters towards my battlegroup. Before you even get a visual on my fleet I will already have long range missiles in the air, as well as my own fighters. By the time you come within range of my medium missiles, my fighters would have entered the fray.

Assuming you make it past the fighters and the long range missiles, you then find yourself under medium range missile fire, as well as steady waves of fighters that are still being launched from the SD's and carriers. Assuming you make it past that, now you are within range of short range missiles and ship based cannon fire, such as radar guided flak (or my beefed AI driven system called SmartFlak that fires guided flak rounds). Of course I'm rushing this post and may be forgetting a few things, but that is a hell of a lot of firepower to get past. And mind you, these attacks are going on nonstop, and this is just at the outer perimeter of the battlefleet. You still have to get to the center to attack the SD.

I don't think this attack will be very successful.

The argument about taking it out from under the sea.

This is probably your best option, to torpedo the thing and use the air pressure underneath the ship to break its keel. Could work, but you'd have to get through submarine nets at the outer and inner levels of the armada first. No fleet travels without a generous helping of submarines, and just waltzing up to the SD and shooting it won't be easy.

But, assuming you get past the subs on the outer perimeter, you have to also get past the surface ships. Chances are your presence will NOT have gone unnoticed, and you will find yourself under torpedo fire, and possibly modified depth charges if anyone still uses them. Subs can also be hunted from the air as well.

Now, assuming your subs make it past all this, you have to deal with the SD's underwater defenses. My Sentinel class has underwater defenses such as decoys and torpedo batteries that can engage subs, and when added to the list of attacks mentioned in the last paragraph, it is unlikely that you'll be able to even get within firing range of the SD.

The argument about taking it out from the surface.

If you have noticed a trend in my last 2 points, you'll know that a surface attack is just as risky. My Sentinel class SD's fire 30" rocket assisted rounds, giving them 33% greater range than conventional shells. Add that onto long range missiles, attacks from above and below the sea, and you've got yourself a nice battle. I would think the last thing on you mind would be attacking the SD, seeing as you have dozens of other surface ships firing missiles and shells at you, as well as planes and subs harassing you from the air and from the deep.

Assuming your ships advance close enough, you've got to realize the sheer power of a 30" AP or HE shell. I doubt anthing would fare too well after taking a blow from something like that. Anti-shipping missiles from the surface and air, as well as torpedos from subs below, will slow your movements (but let's say you're a suicidal bastard).

Once you get that close you will find yourself under fire from smaller battleships as well as the smaller cannons on the SD. The attacks in the air will gradually build as more fighters take to the skies, and ship/air launched torpoedos/ASM's will also hinder your progress.

Assuming you can manage to fight off an entire armada to get to the SD, you still have to deal with all that firepower. I doubt you would make it that far at all.

I hope I have shed some light on how SD's can be employed and defended. NOBODY with a brain has an SD sail alone, there is almost ALWAYS some sort of escort. For me SD's are a trump card. If you attack it, then my other ships attack you. If you attack my other ships, my SD will attack you. I have yet to lose an SD because of this, and their support in beach landings is invaluable. Imagine for a second what a 30" cluster shell detonated at several hundred feet will do to an enemy's lines.....

The SD can be the staple of your fleet if you know how to fight a naval battle. But I'm not trying to say that SD=win, in the right hands an SD can be extremely deadly. But that's the catch, you have to know what you're doing.

Um, that's an exercise in missing the point. If you built a tank ten times bigger than the Abrams, would a 250-kilo 'man-portable' ATGM be the answer? Would said ATGM render all tanks worthless?
oh. oops. okay, you're right. but still, the big-arsed tank would still be vulnerable to enough smaller ATGMs, and would not be worth the expenditure of building it... ah well.


Oh, and i know about that challenger. that was lucky, and the troops attacking it were'nt using up-to-date tech, otherwise even a C-2 would be dead...

yeah, i know the singularity would be chasing me if i blew the missile up, but i could dodge that. or send it back. and yeah, but 180s take time. lots of it if your missile is carrying the generators required to keep the singularity under control...

Oh, and i know about that challenger. that was lucky, and the troops attacking it were'nt using up-to-date tech, otherwise even a C-2 would be dead...

The RPG-7 is more or less "up to date" tech. It gets 400 to 600mm of penetration; the Javelin, which is our latest anti-tank guided missile, gets 600mm+. The Milan, Europe's newest anti-tank guided missile, only gets 400mm [with some bogus claims up to 1000m]... the only RPG that outdoes the RPG-7 is the newer RPG-29, which was just released by the Russians [700mm RHAe penetration].

yeah, i know the singularity would be chasing me if i blew the missile up, but i could dodge that. or send it back. and yeah, but 180s take time. lots of it if your missile is carrying the generators required to keep the singularity under control...

Take time? All it has to do is spin around the singularity (rather easy to do) and it's now facing the proper direction. All it needs to do is wait for the singularity to start pulling it in the proper direction, which shouldn't take too long especially as the singularity itself is inertialess (it's turned off and on at high speeds to keep it from eating the missile).

Javelin doesn't have much penetration power, mainly because it doesn't need it. It comes down from above, striking the top of the turret, which is the thinnest armor.

Javelin doesn't have much penetration power, mainly because it doesn't need it. It comes down from above, striking the top of the turret, which is the thinnest armor.

Ok? There was never an argument that doubted the abilities of the Javeline [other than the fact that it uses a 6kg warhead, while the RPG-7 uses a 4.9kg warhead, and the latter still gets more penetration, because its thermobaric]; the argument was that the RPG-7 is not an 'outdated' design, any way you look at it. Even that is sorta irrelevent to this argument as a whole.

Ok? There was never an argument that doubted the abilities of the Javeline [other than the fact that it uses a 6kg warhead, while the RPG-7 uses a 4.9kg warhead, and the latter still gets more penetration, because its thermobaric]; the argument was that the RPG-7 is not an 'outdated' design, any way you look at it. Even that is sorta irrelevent to this argument as a whole.

I quit keeping up on the conversation after a while. ^.^

And although the RPG is an old design, it's very effective and no more out-dated than say.. a thrown grenade. Explosives have their uses.

The argument about taking out an SD from the air.

Let's say you manage to launch several hundred fighters towards my battlegroup. Before you even get a visual on my fleet I will already have long range missiles in the air, as well as my own fighters. By the time you come within range of my medium missiles, my fighters would have entered the fray.

Assuming you make it past the fighters and the long range missiles, you then find yourself under medium range missile fire, as well as steady waves of fighters that are still being launched from the SD's and carriers. Assuming you make it past that, now you are within range of short range missiles and ship based cannon fire, such as radar guided flak (or my beefed AI driven system called SmartFlak that fires guided flak rounds). Of course I'm rushing this post and may be forgetting a few things, but that is a hell of a lot of firepower to get past. And mind you, these attacks are going on nonstop, and this is just at the outer perimeter of the battlefleet. You still have to get to the center to attack the SD.

I don't think this attack will be very successful.


You wouldn't be able to buy too many fighters because you spent all your money on $30 billion SDs. The other guy will spend either a lot of money on carriers or a lot of money on long-range (500 miles +) SSMs. Because of this, you will loose air superiority, and so will not be able to scout out for the other fleet by air or even intercept most of the bombers and SSMs coming at you.

The SLAM ER has a range of 174 miles. The As-4 has a range of well over 200 miles. There are no naval SAMs with that range. There are land-based SAMs, but they are huge, unmanueverable turkeys.

You wouldn't be able to buy too many fighters because you spent all your money on $30 billion SDs. The other guy will spend either a lot of money on carriers or a lot of money on long-range (500 miles +) SSMs. Because of this, you will loose air superiority, and so will not be able to scout out for the other fleet by air or even intercept most of the bombers and SSMs coming at you.

The SLAM ER has a range of 174 miles. The As-4 has a range of well over 200 miles. There are no naval SAMs with that range. There are land-based SAMs, but they are huge, unmanueverable turkeys.

Says who? This isn't real life, this is NS. Besides, even a trillion dollars can buy a decent amount of assets.

I personally only field 3 Sentinel class SD's, and I have a few discount Doujin's that I bought during Opration: Hellfire.

If I wanted to go by Thirdgeek stats (which I personally don't), I have roughly 64.5 trillion dollars to spend on defense. Even if only a third of that went to my navy, that's still more money than I know what to do with. The argument that SD's will bankrupt your entire budget is false, because you fail to take several things into account:

1. The fact that NS budgets are exponentially larger than real world budgets.
2. Nations have TONS of trade agreements and storefronts all over the place that generate revenue.
3. In the unlimited realm of NS, there is basically no limit as to how much money you can make through selling arms, natural resources, services, etc.

Now, if you had a 60 ship fleet of nothing but SD's, I would say that the rest of your country is living in cardboard boxes. But fielding less than a dozen SD's? I doubt it. Yes the upkeep is high and crew/ammo costs are up there too, but the battlefield advantages that I stated earlier are worth it.

And as far as missiles go, again, this is NS. I've invented several surface to air missiles that can be used both at sea and on land that have excellent range, and put modern day missiles to shame. My 'Skewer' missile can travel several hundred miles easily, and enter a final boost stage for maximum speed as it nears its target. There are many others out there who have done the same, so please take this into account.

Two evenly matched fleets with similar quantities of similar ships will, on NS, end up in close-in gun-to-gun combat between the battleships and superdreadnoughts, just because nothing else is effective.


This is an amusing theory, but in point of fact ships consist of rather more than just guns and armor.

Without a radar system (which, by the way, can't be kept under the armor if you want it to be a radar instead of an expensive christmas tree), an SD is blind and useless except as a missile magnet.

And as far as missiles go, again, this is NS. I've invented several surface to air missiles that can be used both at sea and on land that have excellent range, and put modern day missiles to shame. My 'Skewer' missile can travel several hundred miles easily, and enter a final boost stage for maximum speed as it nears its target. There are many others out there who have done the same, so please take this into account.

Hell, why don't I just make a longer-range SSM then? There's a limit to how far your radars can see- at about 80 miles, the horizon gets in the way and you can't see anything at low altitude. So, at 200 or so miles away, you can't see an airplane at fairly low altitude. Once you start getting into long-range missile fights, over-the-horizon detection begins to become an issue. And the side with the most aircraft carriers will win, because they have the most air recon and have enough fighters to shoot down the enemy's. It's one or the other- a big SD fleet or a big carrier fleet. Some SDs carry aircraft, but not as much as a carrier of equal size.

Hell, why don't I just make a longer-range SSM then? There's a limit to how far your radars can see- at about 80 miles, the horizon gets in the way and you can't see anything at low altitude. So, at 200 or so miles away, you can't see an airplane at fairly low altitude. Once you start getting into long-range missile fights, over-the-horizon detection begins to become an issue. And the side with the most aircraft carriers will win, because they have the most air recon and have enough fighters to shoot down the enemy's. It's one or the other- a big SD fleet or a big carrier fleet. Some SDs carry aircraft, but not as much as a carrier of equal size.

Sorry, wrong again.

The AN/SPY-1 can acquire and track targets as far out as 250 miles and as far up as low Earth orbit. In addition, the phased array system can track 100 targets simultaneously and engage them automatically, prioritizing targets by threat characteristics.

This is the shit that US has right now as we speak. As a matter of fact, they've had this for years as the heart of the Aegis Combat System.

And you must not be too familiar with NS naval combat. Aircraft carriers are fine, but what happens when a missile or shell hits your flight deck? A 30", GPS guided, rocket assisted SD round will render your carrier combat ineffective with 1 shot if placed right on the deck.

Aircraft carrier aircraft can fly farther than SD shells, and their missiles can hit farther away than that. So in order to get close enough to use your SDs, you have to survive the air attacks.

As for the radar, you didn't refute my point about over-the-horizon detection.

Aircraft carrier aircraft can fly farther than SD shells, and their missiles can hit farther away than that. So in order to get close enough to use your SDs, you have to survive the air attacks.

As for the radar, you didn't refute my point about over-the-horizon detection.

With a standard rail gun, at least in PMT [low PMT, that is], a rail gun can have a range of over 300kms. Your aircraft may have a longer range than that, but so do his SAMs.

As for the radar, you didn't refute my point about over-the-horizon detection.

There's actually something called over-the-horizon RADAR, or OTH-R, which transmit radio waves with 3 to 30 MHz frequencies into the ionosphere - the waves then bounce back down, and bam, over the horizon detection. Unfortunately, ship based OTH-R stations have not been built - well they have, but they proved to be useless [because of ship sizes]... but I have an idea. Regardless, although over the horizon detection might not be possible, modern radars do certainly have high ranges - AEGIS is a prime example. Mounted on an AWACS a radar could have hundreds of kilometers more worth of detection range.

Take time? All it has to do is spin around the singularity (rather easy to do) and it's now facing the proper direction. All it needs to do is wait for the singularity to start pulling it in the proper direction, which shouldn't take too long especially as the singularity itself is inertialess (it's turned off and on at high speeds to keep it from eating the missile).

Not only do I think a no-limits singularity generator that somehow manages to absorb in-coming firepower but not immediately eat your missile is wankish and borderline god-mode, but I wonder: what is to stop someone from throwing a decent amount of anti-matter at the singularity, destroying it and the missile following it?

What exactly is to stop someone from catching it in a cross-fire (jump a ship to the opposite side and keep another at the original location -- the singularity can't be everywhere at once)?

Uber-tech wank-weapons aren't the be-all and end-all of FT warfare. Large ships, on the other hand, enjoy several advantages, depending upon the specifics of the technologies involved, that a number of smaller ships of equivilant overall mass cannot match. Also, independent of said specific technologies, a larger ship versus its mass in smaller ships will actually stand a better chance of winning than its opponent -- for each of the smaller ships it strips of shields and vaporizes, it reduces the in-coming firepower. The smaller ships, however, need to contend with the larger shielding capacity of their opponent before they can even hope to start reducing the out-going firepower.

Aircraft carrier aircraft can fly farther than SD shells, and their missiles can hit farther away than that. So in order to get close enough to use your SDs, you have to survive the air attacks.

As for the radar, you didn't refute my point about over-the-horizon detection.

*facepalm*

Of course I refuted it, I did it in my last post!

The AN/SPY-1 can see 250 miles, which is over the horizon. It uses 4 million watts to do so! Don't believe me? CLICK THIS (http://www.military.com/Resources/EQG/EQGmain?file=AN_SPY_1&cat=e&lev=2). You must not know that much about the AEGIS system, or the radar that makes it possible.

And while your places are in the air, they are effectively being tracked by the long range radar. Fighters can then be deployed to intercept, as well as long range anti-air missiles, all of which I said in my first post, which you must not have read carefully enough.

A rocket assisted 30" shell (if it existed in real life) would have a range of about 70 to 80+ miles. With the rocket assistance and GPS guidance it's basically a giant missile. So essentially at ranges of no less than 100 miles, combat is limited to missiles, which I said in my first post. Naturally one fleet is going to advance towards the other, and a gunfight will inevitably ensue. Unless of course one side begins to fall back/retreat after the missile exchange.

Surviving the air attacks will be no problem, as long as you have a combat system similar to AEGIS. The surface ships can track, engage, and destroy anything fired at themselves, and can assist fighters in intercepting your own craft. Flying aircraft into a large fleet with AEGIS and planes in the air is a bad thing, and will most likely result in you losing a lot of fighters.

hate to say this, but a single sentry orbiting over my fleet extends my radar for a massive distance. also, for NSAA at least, we have orbital platforms with VERY detailed resolution to spot enemy movements. okay, small groups of fighters can avoid it, but big-ass bombers or large fighter groups (i.e. escorts) show up bigtime. not that i use SDs, or have sentrys orbiting my fleet...

RADAR CANT SEE THROUGH WATER!

What is to stop someone from throwing a decent amount of anti-matter at the singularity, destroying it and the missile following it?
Nothing at all, excepting the fact that the singularity has no real mass, just a simulation of it. Antimatter would just be held in the singularity until it turned off long enough to release the antimatter (or blast, assuming there was already matter inside the singularity).

What exactly is to stop someone from catching it in a cross-fire (jump a ship to the opposite side and keep another at the original location -- the singularity can't be everywhere at once)?
Very true. Everything has its weaknesses, and you just found the main problem with KK shielding. Of course, it's easy enough to counter such a tactic by using FTLi. The things are less useful in a melee, but most of the vessels armed with SCCAMs are either long range stand-off vessels or short range fighters, intended to deploy their payload only a few kilometers away from their target, where they can't possibly miss.

RADAR CANT SEE THROUGH WATER!
But sonar can, and it's rather common on modern vessels.

1. The fact that NS budgets are exponentially larger than real world budgets.
2. Nations have TONS of trade agreements and storefronts all over the place that generate revenue.
3. In the unlimited realm of NS, there is basically no limit as to how much money you can make through selling arms, natural resources, services, etc.


1. So what if NS budgets are larger? SDs are much more expensive to maintain, to say nothing of your regular escort fleet. You are missing the point when you bring up the idea of saying "Yeah, I can afford an SD". The point is that another nation that also can afford an SD certainly can afford to sink the same amount of money into planes, smaller ships, missiles or whatever else it takes to counter an SD. How effective that may be is something else. Or, a nation can even sink it into buying or developing their own SDs

2. Having tons of trade agreements doesn't necessarily mean money is pouring in. You have to have a product or service to sell in order to generate income. Thus, your manufacturing base does have limits. And to be quite honest, it's a bit shaky when people open up storefronts to sell battleships and suddenly count that as revenue. There are limits on how many battleships you can make to sell to other people.

3. That's the problem right there when you say "unlimited". All nations have limits in how many resources they have (and then you have to extract it, process it, etc...), how many battleships you can make, or how many services you can sell. Sadly, the game as it is does not have any limits on this so all anyone has to do is suddenly claim that they sold a trillion tons of gold and that's why all their battleship bathrooms have gold plated urinals.
[/quote]


Now, if you had a 60 ship fleet of nothing but SD's, I would say that the rest of your country is living in cardboard boxes. But fielding less than a dozen SD's? I doubt it. Yes the upkeep is high and crew/ammo costs are up there too, but the battlefield advantages that I stated earlier are worth it.


Then this comes down to military doctrine. Still, if you lose one SD it shouldn't be easy to replace in terms of manufacturing and cost. Some obviously don't want to take that route.


And as far as missiles go, again, this is NS. I've invented several surface to air missiles that can be used both at sea and on land that have excellent range, and put modern day missiles to shame. My 'Skewer' missile can travel several hundred miles easily, and enter a final boost stage for maximum speed as it nears its target. There are many others out there who have done the same, so please take this into account.

Fair enough, so what's to stop your enemies from developing counters to your long range missiles? Certainly there are limits on how big these missiles can be and how far they can go.

But sonar can, and it's rather common on modern vessels.
yeah, i know that, but AMF was saying that the "AN/SPY-1" can see over the horizon with radar, which is impossible. he then linked to a website i cant access to prove it can...

yeah, i know that, but AMF was saying that the "AN/SPY-1" can see over the horizon with radar, which is impossible. he then linked to a website i cant access to prove it can...

Because it's military.com, you have to set up an account. Takes 5 minutes.

And no, it is not impossible. Sign up and read the damn description. Or read it here.

Description: Introduced in 1983 as the heart of the Aegis Combat System and the new Ticonderoga class Guided Missile cruiser, the AN/SPY-1 multi-function, phased array radar was a radical departure from prior conventional radar systems. The AN/SPY-1 held several advantages over earlier radars; First, where a conventional radar such as the AN/SPS-49 must sweep through a 360 degree arc looking for targets, and can only see those targets while they are within the radar's rotating "cone" the AN/SPY-1 radar is made up of four flat panels on the ship's superstructure which continuously radiate in all directions simultaneously, thereby allowing the system to acquire multiple targets coming in from multiple directions. Second, while a second radar is required to direct weapons to the target once it is acquired by the search radar, the phased array SPY-1 is capable performing both tasks simultaneously.

Radiating four million watts of power, the AN/SPY-1 can acquire and track targets as far out as 250 miles and as far up as low Earth orbit. In addition, the phased array system can track 100 targets simultaneously and engage them automatically, prioritizing targets by threat characteristics. There are currently four versions of the SPY-1 radar in service. Block I, the SPY-1A, was introduced with the USS Ticonderoga (CG47) and installed through the USS Philippine Sea(CG 58). Block II, the SPY-1B and it's later upgrade, the SPY-1B(V), was installed on the USS Princeton (CG59) and all subsequent Aegis cruisers, through USS Port Royal (CG 73). Introduced on July 4, 1991, the Arleigh Burke class Guided Missile destroyers are all equipped with the improved AN/SPY-1D. Finally, there is a reduced capacity version of the SPY-1D, designated the SPY-1F, available for installation on frigate sized vessels. While the United States does not currently intend to back-fit any of its Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates with the SPY-1F, the system is available for export.

So, AMF. I've heard from several SD builders on how to stop SDs, but I'd like to ask you your own opinion on how to stop an SD, since you've refuted seemingly every single attack option. So, how does one stop an SD in a battlegroup? Pray?

yeah, i know that, but AMF was saying that the "AN/SPY-1" can see over the horizon with radar, which is impossible. he then linked to a website i cant access to prove it can...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't radio waves reflect off of water and the ionosphere? So couldn't you bounce a sufficiently powerful radio wave across the water, hit the ship a couple hundred miles away, and bounce it back the same way? NOTE: I'm in no way an expert in the ins and outs of RADAR, so I'm operating on the little I know.

So, AMF. I've heard from several SD builders on how to stop SDs, but I'd like to ask you your own opinion on how to stop an SD, since you've refuted seemingly every single attack option. So, how does one stop an SD in a battlegroup? Pray?

I'd think trying one of the above routes in a higher volume would work nicely, most likely a combination of all of them. Just expect high losses.

I'd think trying one of the above routes in a higher volume would work nicely, most likely a combination of all of them. Just expect high losses.

That could work, though there are more than a few ways to defeat an SD alone. SD's in a battlegroup are much harder, because you're fighting a lot more than just the SD.

If it's just an SD by itself, the underwater option is your best. You're avoiding almost all of the ship's heavy defenses, and you just have to worry about torpedo batteries and possibly sub launching bays (like on the Sentinel). BUT, SD's have shitloads of watertight bulkheads, flood pumps, etc. A massive sub assault on all sides could do some nice damage. What you want to do is create enough air pressure under the ship to literally force it up and out of the water. When it splashes back down its keel will most likely break. But the problem is, how are you going to generate enough air pressure to do so without resorting to nukes?

SD in a battlegroup.....hmm.....I know a few methods, but I'd rather keep them to myself incase I need to employ them in the future. ;)

Nothing at all, excepting the fact that the singularity has no real mass, just a simulation of it. Antimatter would just be held in the singularity until it turned off long enough to release the antimatter (or blast, assuming there was already matter inside the singularity).

So wait, your "singularity" uses some kind of made-up artificial gravity technology to make itself (by the way, how the hell do you have a gravitational field with NOTHING at the center?)?

What is to stop someone from using similar technology on counter-missile missiles to negate the gravitational effects and smack your missiles out of the sky?


Very true. Everything has its weaknesses, and you just found the main problem with KK shielding. Of course, it's easy enough to counter such a tactic by using FTLi. The things are less useful in a melee, but most of the vessels armed with SCCAMs are either long range stand-off vessels or short range fighters, intended to deploy their payload only a few kilometers away from their target, where they can't possibly miss.

What makes sure YOUR FTLi works on someone else's form of faster than light travel?

Not to mention that a fighter a few kilometeres away from any big ship from a half-way competent designer will be dead before you can say "In-coming fire".

So wait, your "singularity" uses some kind of made-up artificial gravity technology to make itself (by the way, how the hell do you have a gravitational field with NOTHING at the center?)?

What is to stop someone from using similar technology on counter-missile missiles to negate the gravitational effects and smack your missiles out of the sky?




What makes sure YOUR FTLi works on someone else's form of faster than light travel?

Not to mention that a fighter a few kilometeres away from any big ship from a half-way competent designer will be dead before you can say "In-coming fire".

1: I use Gravity to move my ships. It's FT, we do things like that.


2: FTLi, well, mine simply puts up an extra-dimensional wall. You can't go FTL if you're trapped in real space.

okay, you can block hyperspace, and i do so near my capital ships and i, too use gravitic drives. its as conceivable as having control over tubules...

and yes, you could bounce RADAR off the ionosphere. (not sure on water, but it matters not, the same holds true) but you cant calculate the angle it'll hit the ionosphere (or water) and thus the direction of the continuation of the waves, thus you'd have no idea where the thing you were tracking was. it could be anywhere that your RADAR waves can come back from via the ionosphere and still hold strength. also, due to the non-continuous nature of the ionosphere (and the sea for that matter) the RADAR "picture" of the target would be broken up badly, and would probably be filtered out by the RADAR's computers.

BTW, that quote you provided from military.com says only that it can detect out to 250, not that it can detect at sea level that far. not that anyone wants you to know that RADAR is LOS only without checking up on it.

Not to mention that a fighter a few kilometeres away from any big ship from a half-way competent designer will be dead before you can say "In-coming fire".
A single fighter, yes. Waves of about a hundred thousand, plenty are going to get through. And yes, I can easily deploy a hundred thousand fighters in a single battle, even a small one.

er, okay, i withdraw the fact that you cant go over the horizon with RADAR, on reading stuff on wikipedia and remembering low frequency creep.
but that would be at poor resolution, and completely useless against any kind of stealth tech.

also, wikipedia seems to think you can get away with bouncing off the ionosphere, and says that the russians did it for a while, but it will still have had the problems from non-continuity. and is REALLY obvious when you're using it apparently, as it causes LOTS of radio interference all over the RF band. it doesnt matter what tech you're using, RADAR over-the-horizon will be expensive (specialist tech), inaccurate (on all but an SD or large battlegroup), useless on stealth, and possibly obvious.

About the OTH issue: I looked at the link and didn't see anything about OTH. There are anti-ICBM OTH radars, but they're much too big to put on a ship (has anyone seen the huge Cobra Dane?), and depend on a "convergence zone" type of concept- they can only see a narrow band of the sky OTH, making them good for a heads-up, but not for real-time missile guidance that you'll need.

AWACs might be a possible solution, as you can tuck it in real close to your fleet to defend it from enemy fighters. However, it can't detect a fighter at low altitude beyond 250 miles, and probably much less than that. The SSMs I'm talking about (AS-4) have a range of 300-500 miles.

As for satellites, they only overfly a portion of the world once every several hours, meaning that it would be highly unlikely for them to be in the exact right place at the right time. Also, they're extremely vulnerable, and if someone fires a bucket of nails along their orbital directory you won't know it until your satellite falls out of the sky.

A single fighter, yes. Waves of about a hundred thousand, plenty are going to get through. And yes, I can easily deploy a hundred thousand fighters in a single battle, even a small one.

IMO fighters are only good for making a "buffer zone" between his ships and yours. My biggest starships have like 100,000 point defence guns (at the expense of heavier armament), so it'd be difficult to get a hit on them with fighters or short-range missiles. Still, you need fighters to escort your long-range missiles to prevent them from being shot down. Also, you need them for recon and for destroying weaker enemies, like frigates, that wouldn't be worth sending a whole battleship fleet after.

As for satellites, they only overfly a portion of the world once every several hours, meaning that it would be highly unlikely for them to be in the exact right place at the right time. Also, they're extremely vulnerable, and if someone fires a bucket of nails along their orbital directory you won't know it until your satellite falls out of the sky.
er, yeah, i have enough sattelites that my own territory is always under surveilance by them. they have about 88% coverage of the rest of the world. fairly likely i'd be there...

1: I use Gravity to move my ships. It's FT, we do things like that.

I figured that. But projecting a gravitational field on a level equivilant to a miniature black hole without any kind of mass or equipment actually being involved stretches suspension of disbelief.


2: FTLi, well, mine simply puts up an extra-dimensional wall. You can't go FTL if you're trapped in real space.

Coincidentally, my race uses real-space FTL. Similarly, anyone who uses SW tech, Necron tech, the theoretical warp drive (not the ST one), or any of a large number of other FTL systems wouldn't be effected.

er, yeah, i have enough sattelites that my own territory is always under surveilance by them. they have about 88% coverage of the rest of the world. fairly likely i'd be there...

But it's so much cheaper to kill satellites than to launch them. Build a SCUD-type small rocket, load it with steel flechetes, do some rocket science, and find where you need to launch to get a hit on their satellite. Whats the most it could cost? $50-100 million? A lot cheaper than buying a $40-1,000 million + spysat and a $200-400 million big rocket to launch it.

AWACs might be a possible solution, as you can tuck it in real close to your fleet to defend it from enemy fighters. However, it can't detect a fighter at low altitude beyond 250 miles, and probably much less than that. The SSMs I'm talking about (AS-4) have a range of 300-500 miles.
To clarify: the Kh-22/AS-4 has a range of about 440km, is 13,000 pounds (in case if you haven't noticed, it's no Harpoon or even a BrahMos), and cruises at an altitude that makes it a very easy picking for modern SAMs as well as AAMs launched by fleet defence aircraft. A scaled down version, the KSR-5/AS-6, is still near 10,000 pounds, but only has a range of around 300km. Both were obsolete by the 80es.

Using newer missiles, assuming that you do have an idea about modern missile design & associated physics (i.e. the inversely porportional relations between speed, range, warhead, and weight), it is still inconceivable that the ships and/or aircraft would even get in range to launch the missiles at the SDs, before the escorts around the SDs, many kilometers from the SD itself, starts to annihilate your cruisers and bombers before they get into range.

But given that there was an argument about this, I don't see a need to continue adamantly insisting that SDs are useless... Whether they are useless or not, or even feasible or not, people will have varied opinions; but using faulty logic such as the "100 destroyer can replace a SD" fallacy, is not a way to prove how SDs are useless or not.

I figured that. But projecting a gravitational field on a level equivilant to a miniature black hole without any kind of mass or equipment actually being involved stretches suspension of disbelief.




Coincidentally, my race uses real-space FTL. Similarly, anyone who uses SW tech, Necron tech, the theoretical warp drive (not the ST one), or any of a large number of other FTL systems wouldn't be effected.

Your FTL will then likely be ignored as a wank. NO ONE uses Real Space FTL. Necrons are unused in FT for the most part(not sure if Ctan uses them or not) SW is stopped by the wonderful Gravity Well that my drive produces, making it a moot point. The theoretical Warp Drive is just that. Theoretical. I do not know of a single person that uses it. The point of FTLi is to make sure you have to fight someone. It's a plot device if you're unwilling to think of it any other way.

good point, but first figure out which ones are mine if you have that low a tech level, then get past their self-defence. yeah it costs, but they're damn useful.

and i use an interdictor style trick in concert with my anti-hyperspace. the only trick it cant stop is non-einsteinian model FTL, which still requires reaction mass. it also forces inertia on all matter (note, not it inertialess-es antimatter) in its radius. its only there to stop people teleporting missiles into my ships directly, cos thats harsh.

Coincidentally, my race uses real-space FTL. Similarly, anyone who uses SW tech, Necron tech, the theoretical warp drive (not the ST one), or any of a large number of other FTL systems wouldn't be effected.

Star Wars hyperdrives aren't Realspace drives. They go into another dimension, known as hyperspace. They're also countered nicely by powerful gravity wells ;). There's also a few (dozen) different types of FTLi, from the dimensional inhibitors to gravity wells to fields that prevent the stretching of the fabric of space time (also usually prevent tearing too, so is often part of the first one).

I figured that. But projecting a gravitational field on a level equivilant to a miniature black hole without any kind of mass or equipment actually being involved stretches suspension of disbelief.
Oh, there's equipment involved, just no mass. Thing is, the machinery is all inside the missile chassis, not inside the singularity. It pretty much replaces what would be a rocket engine in a standard missile.

IMO fighters are only good for making a "buffer zone" between his ships and yours. My biggest starships have like 100,000 point defence guns (at the expense of heavier armament), so it'd be difficult to get a hit on them with fighters or short-range missiles. Still, you need fighters to escort your long-range missiles to prevent them from being shot down. Also, you need them for recon and for destroying weaker enemies, like frigates, that wouldn't be worth sending a whole battleship fleet after.
A doctrinal difference, really. I enjoy sending gargantuan amounts of drone fighters into combat, as not only are they smarter and smaller, they're more maneuverable (no human that can be killed by excessive G-forces).

again, just wait till you meet the aliens that are going to take over NSAA in a while. (thats a clue on my storyline) they evolved on a 5G world, so are stronger, faster, and tougher than humans. admittedly not as good as drones at high-G manouvers, but they have intuition, and invention, neither of which can be taught to a computer that'll fit in a fighter...

again, just wait till you meet the aliens that are going to take over NSAA in a while. (thats a clue on my storyline) they evolved on a 5G world, so are stronger, faster, and tougher than humans. admittedly not as good as drones at high-G manouvers, but they have intuition, and invention, neither of which can be taught to a computer that'll fit in a fighter...
With creative applications of ansibles (entanglement based comms), it doesn't have to fit in a fighter. QUETZAL controls every single drone in my nation, so they have plenty of resources to run off of, and they're remarkably coordinated.

Also, wouldn't 5G adapted aliens explode under 1G or so of gravity? Sort of like deep sea fish.

To clarify: the Kh-22/AS-4 has a range of about 440km, is 13,000 pounds (in case if you haven't noticed, it's no Harpoon or even a BrahMos), and cruises at an altitude that makes it a very easy picking for modern SAMs as well as AAMs launched by fleet defence aircraft. A scaled down version, the KSR-5/AS-6, is still near 10,000 pounds, but only has a range of around 300km. Both were obsolete by the 80es.

Using newer missiles, assuming that you do have an idea about modern missile design & associated physics (i.e. the inversely porportional relations between speed, range, warhead, and weight), it is still inconceivable that the ships and/or aircraft would even get in range to launch the missiles at the SDs, before the escorts around the SDs, many kilometers from the SD itself, starts to annihilate your cruisers and bombers before they get into range.


About the escorts: If you mean that they're hundreds of miles from the SD then you can just go around them. If they're closer, then it dosen't really matter.

The big thing with SAMs is that everyone assumes that they can shoot down a plane at their max range. Sure, an SM-2 has a max range of 150 miles, but that's against a target at 0 feet that isn't manuevering away. At max range, the missile has long since burned out its fuel, bled off speed, and become almost unmanueverable, worthless against an evading aircraft. Max range of an SM-2 against a 20,000 feet target is no more than 100 miles, and probably more like 70 miles (variety of sources, including Wiki). So even a huge NS SAM couldn't hit a big cruise missile like the AS-4 before it was launched, and you can find a big enough bomber to carry it (the Tu-26 carries it).

With creative applications of ansibles (entanglement based comms), it doesn't have to fit in a fighter. QUETZAL controls every single drone in my nation, so they have plenty of resources to run off of, and they're remarkably coordinated.

Also, wouldn't 5G adapted aliens explode under 1G or so of gravity? Sort of like deep sea fish.

Drones suck. I use hyper-trained, genetically-modified human pilots. It's mostly quality over quantity for my fighters, because (at least according to modern air combat history) better trained pilots are worth a lot more than sheer numbers.

edit: I don't see why you guys talk about Gs in space. There has to be some kind of anti-inertia device in your fighters because it's going to get hundreds of Gs just accelerating (1-5Gs are kind of a moot point). So Gs don't really matter in space as long as you have something to cancel them out.

Your FTL will then likely be ignored as a wank. NO ONE uses Real Space FTL.

Oh, I do admit it's wank. It's meant to be. Everything ABOUT the race is meant to be wank. It's a character based RP nation, you're almost never going to see them in any kind of fight, and you will never see them in any fight that isn't pre-planned.

You see, I figured it would be particularly fun to play the plot-device, for once ;)

Necrons are unused in FT for the most part(not sure if Ctan uses them or not)

Nevertheless, they use some kind of real-space FTL drive.

SW is stopped by the wonderful Gravity Well that my drive produces, making it a moot point.

Very true.

The theoretical Warp Drive is just that. Theoretical. I do not know of a single person that uses it.

Doesn't mean no one can (or will) in the future. NS is a very chaotic RPing environment.

The point of FTLi is to make sure you have to fight someone. It's a plot device if you're unwilling to think of it any other way.

And I suppose that it doesn't become wank when combined with an indestructible, un-interceptible missile system that can ONLY be stopped by the use of jump-drive type technology?


Star Wars hyperdrives aren't Realspace drives. They go into another dimension, known as hyperspace. They're also countered nicely by powerful gravity wells . There's also a few (dozen) different types of FTLi, from the dimensional inhibitors to gravity wells to fields that prevent the stretching of the fabric of space time (also usually prevent tearing too, so is often part of the first one).

Actually, according to the latest canon, SW hyperdrives are indeed some kind of funky real space FTL. They somehow 'skip' the lightspeed barrier, like going .999c then .9999c then 1.0001c, etc. I liked the alternate dimension explanation better, but what can you do?


Oh, there's equipment involved, just no mass. Thing is, the machinery is all inside the missile chassis, not inside the singularity. It pretty much replaces what would be a rocket engine in a standard missile.

So wait, it's some kind of reaction-less bias drive that just happens to double as a shield?

Ah, I get it now. Still bothers me that the "Plot device" FTLi makes it wankish and un-interceptable, though.

According to star wars comic books its possible to put an asteriod or some other solid object in the way of a hyperjumping spacecraft and destroy it, so it has to be some kind of realspace mechanism.

And I suppose that it doesn't become wank when combined with an indestructible, un-interceptible missile system that can ONLY be stopped by the use of jump-drive type technology?
Not uninterceptable, nor indestructable. Just difficult to actually hit the thing.

Actually, according to the latest canon, SW hyperdrives are indeed some kind of funky real space FTL. They somehow 'skip' the lightspeed barrier, like going .999c then .9999c then 1.0001c, etc. I liked the alternate dimension explanation better, but what can you do?

http://www.starwars.com/databank/technology/hyperdrive/index.html

Star Wars databank, maintained by LucasFilms. Yes, it is an alternate dimension, as clearly stated in this nice little article.



So wait, it's some kind of reaction-less bias drive that just happens to double as a shield?

Ah, I get it now. Still bothers me that the "Plot device" FTLi makes it wankish and un-interceptable, though.
Pretty much. Although it's not uninterceptable (just close), and I already use FTLi in most conflicts (most, not all).

Not uninterceptable, nor indestructable. Just difficult to actually hit the thing.

For a fleet not specifically set up to hit it beforehand, yes, it's pretty much un-interceptable.



http://www.starwars.com/databank/technology/hyperdrive/index.html

Star Wars databank, maintained by LucasFilms. Yes, it is an alternate dimension, as clearly stated in this nice little article.

The latest Incredible Cross-Sections book describes the tachyonic hyperdrive whatchyamajig. Seeing as the Databank isn't an entirely reliable source of information on Star Wars (see: Length of Executor et al), I'm going to take the latest official canon book for its word.

Pretty much. Although it's not uninterceptable (just close), and I already use FTLi in most conflicts (most, not all).

Pretty damned close, putting it the way you do. The ONLY ways I can see to intercept it are an FTL jump to get on the other side of the singularity or having some sort of anti-gravity technology built into your intercept missiles.

The latest Incredible Cross-Sections book describes the tachyonic hyperdrive whatchyamajig. Seeing as the Databank isn't an entirely reliable source of information on Star Wars (see: Length of Executor et al), I'm going to take the latest official canon book for its word.
According to Lucas, the Incredible Cross Section books aren't as high canon as stuff that LucasFilms says. I'll try to find Lucas' canon policy, but from what I've seen, the website (the article on Hyperdrive is labelled "The Movies") is G-level canon, which outranks the ICS books, which are, at best, C-level. And yes, the length of the Executor is screwey, but that's what Lucas said it was, and Lucas is always right in these matters.


Pretty damned close, putting it the way you do. The ONLY ways I can see to intercept it are an FTL jump to get on the other side of the singularity or having some sort of anti-gravity technology built into your intercept missiles.
There's actually several ways to intercept them, the easiest being to use different formations. There are a few others, but I won't go into those, as they involve a few things about the SCCAMs I'd rather not be common knowledge.

or nerfing my gravity sheilding...

About the escorts: If you mean that they're hundreds of miles from the SD then you can just go around them.
How? They are organized in the fashion of a ring - it is even physically impossible to get around them, without you being fired upon. That's the whole theory of escorts placed around a capship. Further, while not being "hundreds of miles away from the SD", they are advantageous for the SD because they can shoot down aircraft and engage surface targets even before the SD is within range to engage them with its own weapons, aka providing an effective anti-air cover. It does matter.

The big thing with SAMs is that everyone assumes that they can shoot down a plane at their max range. Sure, an SM-2 has a max range of 150 miles, but that's against a target at 0 feet that isn't manuevering away. At max range, the missile has long since burned out its fuel, bled off speed, and become almost unmanueverable, worthless against an evading aircraft.
If you understand enough about SAMs and AAMs, you'll know that they aren't powered for a considerable length of their flight - that's right, they run out of fuel during the first portion of their flight. If max range is defined as the powered portion of the missile's flight, then you will probably be shocked to see the figures. It is the energy provided by the boost that allows them to fly and maneuver - and even then, a large warhead will most certainly destroy the target, since the missile doesn't have to physically hit the aircraft.

Are you going to tell me that your aircraft are capable of dodging several modern SAMs and AAMs? While still carrying the fuel and the payload?

Max range of an SM-2 against a 20,000 feet target is no more than 100 miles, and probably more like 70 miles (variety of sources, including Wiki).
"SM-2" doesn't mean anything. The SM-2ER Block 4, the newest and most capable one, has a range of around 240km (though some sources report that it in fact, approaches 400km, which isn't unbelievable). Several major NS powers have larger and newer SAMs that can reach an even higher range.

So even a huge NS SAM couldn't hit a big cruise missile like the AS-4 before it was launched, and you can find a big enough bomber to carry it (the Tu-26 carries it).
First, your assumption is faulty in that the bombers thaty carries the missiles aren't going to be very maneuverable in flight anyways, especially lugging around the long-range missiles (I'm assuming that they are of a newer model, since the AS-4 is obsolete). You'll have limited provisions for evasive maneuvers, unless you launch the missiles beforehand. This means that you'll a) rush up and potentially screw up the sequences of the whole attack, and b) you'll still get intercepted by fleet defence aircraft before you even reach range to launch even a 600km-ranged missile. Added this is the fact that long range SAMs alone will slaughter the bombers if they're going to launch their missiles in seaskimming mode, since even a 10,000lb missile still won't have much of a chance of seaskimming over 500 or 600km and still be able to deliver a decent warhead. Even if the missiles are launched at their maximum range, the fact that they doesn't seaskim means that they're ripe pickings for both SAMs and AAMs.


You can, in fact, apply this to anything - with your theory, battlegroups centered around a 200,000 ton BB or carrier will still be defeated the same way. The basic fact that you are still ignoring the fact that the SDs are heavily escorts leaves a very big gaping hole in your entire argument - your implication that the "Escorts wouldn't have mattered much anyways" can apply to any battlegroup, even your own "anti-SD" fleet. End of discussion.

There's actually several ways to intercept them, the easiest being to use different formations. There are a few others, but I won't go into those, as they involve a few things about the SCCAMs I'd rather not be common knowledge.

Sorry to keep this point going, but I'd still like to know how this singularity projection catches all incoming fire yet doesn't affect the missile. You said it turns on and off really fast right? Fire an energy weapon or a really well-timed railgun round at it to coincide with the gap, and the missile is gone. That shield can't be 100% effective, not without ripping the missile to shreds too.

Well, the railgun shell would have to pass through a gap less than a picosecond long, with a few nanoseconds or even microseconds before it reforms again, varying with how fast the missile (or ship) is moving. Still, it'd be theoretically possible to get a shot through, just annoyingly difficult, especially with the maneuverability of the SCCAM behind the singularity.

Well, the railgun shell would have to pass through a gap less than a picosecond long, with a few nanoseconds or even microseconds before it reforms again, varying with how fast the missile (or ship) is moving. Still, it'd be theoretically possible to get a shot through, just annoyingly difficult, especially with the maneuverability of the SCCAM behind the singularity.

Then laser based point defense should be quite effective, correct? Light should take much less than a picosecond to cover any reasonable distance for the effect of this singularity.

In NS, if you build a bigger ship, you just build a bigger missile to counter it.

So, your solution is to just repeating that nonsense ad nauseum? The bigger a surface-to-surface missile gets, the less useful it becomes and the easier to shoot down it becomes. 'Bigger missiles' are no a solution to anything, if they were we'd only use motor torpedo boats because our massive RL carriers would be busy cowering in fear of Harpoons. They aren't.

Then laser based point defense should be quite effective, correct? Light should take much less than a picosecond to cover any reasonable distance for the effect of this singularity.

Lasers would be most effective, but I'm annoying enough to have come up with a few countermeasures against those. Simply maneuvering the missile out of the way of the laser beam would work quite nicely, and the beam wouldn't be in contact with the SCCAM long enough to cause serious damage. There's a few other methods I use, but I'd prefer to save those for when they're needed. No sense showing your hand before there's even chips on the table.

Lasers would be most effective, but I'm annoying enough to have come up with a few countermeasures against those. Simply maneuvering the missile out of the way of the laser beam would work quite nicely, and the beam wouldn't be in contact with the SCCAM long enough to cause serious damage. There's a few other methods I use, but I'd prefer to save those for when they're needed. No sense showing your hand before there's even chips on the table.


...unless, of course, the beam is of sufficient power to simply vaporize the missile if it hits.

Or perhaps your missile also maneuvers faster than light as well.

If you understand enough about SAMs and AAMs, you'll know that they aren't powered for a considerable length of their flight - that's right, they run out of fuel during the first portion of their flight. If max range is defined as the powered portion of the missile's flight, then you will probably be shocked to see the figures. It is the energy provided by the boost that allows them to fly and maneuver - and even then, a large warhead will most certainly destroy the target, since the missile doesn't have to physically hit the aircraft.

Are you going to tell me that your aircraft are capable of dodging several modern SAMs and AAMs? While still carrying the fuel and the payload?


"SM-2" doesn't mean anything. The SM-2ER Block 4, the newest and most capable one, has a range of around 240km (though some sources report that it in fact, approaches 400km, which isn't unbelievable). Several major NS powers have larger and newer SAMs that can reach an even higher range.


First, your assumption is faulty in that the bombers thaty carries the missiles aren't going to be very maneuverable in flight anyways, especially lugging around the long-range missiles (I'm assuming that they are of a newer model, since the AS-4 is obsolete). You'll have limited provisions for evasive maneuvers, unless you launch the missiles beforehand. This means that you'll a) rush up and potentially screw up the sequences of the whole attack, and b) you'll still get intercepted by fleet defence aircraft before you even reach range to launch even a 600km-ranged missile. Added this is the fact that long range SAMs alone will slaughter the bombers if they're going to launch their missiles in seaskimming mode, since even a 10,000lb missile still won't have much of a chance of seaskimming over 500 or 600km and still be able to deliver a decent warhead. Even if the missiles are launched at their maximum range, the fact that they doesn't seaskim means that they're ripe pickings for both SAMs and AAMs.


You can, in fact, apply this to anything - with your theory, battlegroups centered around a 200,000 ton BB or carrier will still be defeated the same way. The basic fact that you are still ignoring the fact that the SDs are heavily escorts leaves a very big gaping hole in your entire argument - your implication that the "Escorts wouldn't have mattered much anyways" can apply to any battlegroup, even your own "anti-SD" fleet. End of discussion.

The SM-2 is what I was talking about. It has a max range of 240 km (aka 150 miles), but an acutal range of 70-100, maybe less, miles against high-altitude (20,000-40,000 ft.) targets. Because aircraft SSMs are launched from an altitude, they get a big range advantage.

I never said that escorts didn't matter.

AS-4s do seaskim the whole distance of their flight.

...unless, of course, the beam is of sufficient power to simply vaporize the missile if it hits.

Or perhaps your missile also maneuvers faster than light as well.

The wattage neccessary to vaporize an armored missile in less than a picosecond is, well, obscene. Not impossible, mind you, but usually not delegated to point defense.

ah, one thing, that singularity missile will be flying through flak clouds, cos the singularity itself will pull the flak rounds off course towards it, and then get raped by the flak it hits while the singularity is down... no more missile.

Excepting, of course, it would take more than a picosecond for the flak to pass through the singularity zone. Unless, of course, your flak moves at a trillion meters per second relative to the SCCAM.

ah, one thing, that singularity missile will be flying through flak clouds, cos the singularity itself will pull the flak rounds off course towards it, and then get raped by the flak it hits while the singularity is down... no more missile.

If you make a big enough missile, its warhead can explode out of range of PD. There's almost nothing to resist it's explosive force, and the explosive "cloud" will fly for thousands of miles.

If you make a big enough missile, its warhead can explode out of range of PD. There's almost nothing to resist it's explosive force, and the explosive "cloud" will fly for thousands of miles.

But if you rely on a cloud detoantion them you waste most of the weapons power, hence why most Ft missiles/torps use bomb pumped beam warheads, you take all the power of the warhead and focus it, giving you better pentration and a greater stand off range.

Well, I use antimatter clouds, those work well I guess.

Simply maneuvering the missile out of the way of the laser beam would work quite nicely

This isn't quite as easy as it sounds. Even with instant entanglement communiucations, you still have to detect the laser coming towards you and get out of the way before it hits. Your FTLi will stop your missile manouvering FTL, so you would have to detect the laser fire the instant it fires, and even then that's cutting it fine. I haven't had enough time to check everyone's technology, do we have faster than light sensors? If not, you just have to dodge at random or use some of these other countermeasures instead.

This isn't quite as easy as it sounds. Even with instant entanglement communiucations, you still have to detect the laser coming towards you and get out of the way before it hits. Your FTLi will stop your missile manouvering FTL, so you would have to detect the laser fire the instant it fires, and even then that's cutting it fine. I haven't had enough time to check everyone's technology, do we have faster than light sensors? If not, you just have to dodge at random or use some of these other countermeasures instead.

I have FTL sensors. I don't know about anyone else.

This isn't quite as easy as it sounds. Even with instant entanglement communiucations, you still have to detect the laser coming towards you and get out of the way before it hits. Your FTLi will stop your missile manouvering FTL, so you would have to detect the laser fire the instant it fires, and even then that's cutting it fine. I haven't had enough time to check everyone's technology, do we have faster than light sensors? If not, you just have to dodge at random or use some of these other countermeasures instead.

It's extremely hard to hit something as small as a missile 100,000-50,000 klicks away with a laser. Even if you have the best targeting software in the world, there's no way to compensate for gravity, solar winds, the sparse molecules floating around in space refracting the beam, etc. Lasers are particularly easy to deflect because all they are are light. If you make your armor just right, it can actually reflect certain laser frequencies like a mirror reflects light. All lasers are are light, after all. Everyone uses plasma for important jobs.

OOC: this is No_State_At_All, i just cant log in to the forum with my main account.

i have FTL sensors too...
I dont know how well my defences would hold up to cloud style missiles, but i know that my bigger ships monstorus regen rate on their sheilds make them capable of shrugging off energy type impacts from at least 3 other ships of a comparable size. the sheilds dont stop material stuff though, that gets slowed down by the gravity sheilds (but not until i get that plotline done...) and taken out by assorted point defence, i hope.

How can you have FTL sensors? Sensors need something to sense, and FTL things go soo fast that you don't detect them until they go right by you (a spaceship in FTL isn't emitting anything). But if someone says they have FTL missiles, ignore them- missiles are way too small to carry hyperdrives, and launching them into a jumpgate to make them hit their targets is unreliable and innaccurate.

Intimidation. Nothing says "back down" quite like a 1,300 foot long battleship. ;)

Still, we're mainly talking about combat ability here. Smaller ships are stealthier, and if you equip them with long-range weapons they can see the enemy first and shoot without being seen.

It's extremely hard to hit something as small as a missile 100,000-50,000 klicks away with a laser. Even if you have the best targeting software in the world, there's no way to compensate for gravity, solar winds, the sparse molecules floating around in space refracting the beam, etc. Lasers are particularly easy to deflect because all they are are light. If you make your armor just right, it can actually reflect certain laser frequencies like a mirror reflects light. All lasers are are light, after all. Everyone uses plasma for important jobs.
The point is kinda moot anyway. I did some math and figured out that light would only travel 0.3 millimeters in a picosecond, obviously not fast enough to cross the singularity. D'oh.

As for plasma, yes, it's great for point defense, but there's severe issues with it and long range combat. Mostly the fact that it disperses extremely quickly, as well as bleeding off heat into space.

Who cares? This is the future, I'm sure that they've found some way to fix that. The fact is, everyone uses plasma for their big, long-range guns. I use a kind of tachyon matter disruptor beam, though. I used to use plasma.

How can you have FTL sensors? Sensors need something to sense, and FTL things go soo fast that you don't detect them until they go right by you (a spaceship in FTL isn't emitting anything). But if someone says they have FTL missiles, ignore them- missiles are way too small to carry hyperdrives, and launching them into a jumpgate to make them hit their targets is unreliable and innaccurate.

Gravitic disruptions are FTL, 64 times the speed of light in fact. Your artificial gravity systems? Yeah I can detect those, and, by detecting THOSE, I detect your ships.

Who cares? This is the future, I'm sure that they've found some way to fix that. The fact is, everyone uses plasma for their big, long-range guns. I use a kind of tachyon matter disruptor beam, though. I used to use plasma.

I don't use plasma. My energy batteries on my warships consist purely of lasers and grasers, with an effective range of around 500,000 km for capital ships.


Gravitic disruptions are FTL, 64 times the speed of light in fact. Your artificial gravity systems? Yeah I can detect those, and, by detecting THOSE, I detect your ships.

Yeah, those are pretty useful considering how many nations use some variation of a gravitic drive. I also use recon drones fitted with nu-space communications suites. While everything but their gravitic sensors is still limited by the speed of light, they can transmit back to their mothership in real-time. Which when operating at several light minute ranges, is pretty useful.


According to star wars comic books its possible to put an asteriod or some other solid object in the way of a hyperjumping spacecraft and destroy it, so it has to be some kind of realspace mechanism.

Mass shadow. Running into the 'shadow' of an object in hyperspace is the same as running into it in realspace. Except going much, much faster.


Actually, according to the latest canon, SW hyperdrives are indeed some kind of funky real space FTL. They somehow 'skip' the lightspeed barrier, like going .999c then .9999c then 1.0001c, etc. I liked the alternate dimension explanation better, but what can you do?

That's one of the most retarded things I've read in this thread, and that's saying something. There's nothing in the ICS to support that its a real-space FTL drive, and even less to support this 1.0001c nonsense. Venators have an effective operating range of 60,000 LY. That alone discounts the ridiculously slow FTL speeds you're attempting to say that they have.


Your FTL will then likely be ignored as a wank. NO ONE uses Real Space FTL. Necrons are unused in FT for the most part(not sure if Ctan uses them or not) SW is stopped by the wonderful Gravity Well that my drive produces, making it a moot point. The theoretical Warp Drive is just that. Theoretical. I do not know of a single person that uses it. The point of FTLi is to make sure you have to fight someone. It's a plot device if you're unwilling to think of it any other way.

C'tan does use necrons. Also, attempting to say he can't use a theoretical warp drive because it's theoretical and no one uses it is just retarded, considering this we're RPing *SCIENCE FICTION* nations, grounding something in theory is still better then just plain making stuff up, like most do.

Finally, you accusing him of wank is rather rich, considering how you described your main PD system (which I'll get to next).


Ok. Take the Metal Militia II that's the standard Flagship of my fleets. 6 miles long(10 and change km), heavily armed and armored. It has the ability to tag just about anything they can see, due to my excessive use of energy weapons. I also have the ultimate missile defense system, based on the Protoss Warp Recall, and my proclivity for taking peoples missiles that are coming towards me, and instead of letting them hit me, I'll make a wonderful Gate and drop them right back in front of the enemy ships. Yes, this is a legitimate tactic, first used in NS War 1, Part 2, The Coredian Campaign.

Wank. Nothing but wank. You'd also have to drop the missiles back in realspace behind the enemy, not in front, because their velocity and inertia are going to carry them in the same direction they were heading before they got translated. In other words, back at you.

Let me make a text illustration.

[you].<-- (missile)......[them]

[you]................. <-- [them]

Understand?

Of course, that's also assuming they don't have a local FTLi field for their warships.


I got tired of using huge numbers of Star Destroyers myself, so now I'm using Mobile Suit tech, which allows for large numbers of highly deadly machines that can take on star ships just as easy as an SD, or even better.

The 'huge numbers' thing right there annoys me, since ISDs should be more used as squadron level command ships or operating as the standard ship of the line, not something that gets tossed around as a main combat warship.

Finally, Mobile Suits in space are just laughable. I mean, mechs suck on ground, but in space? They'd be ripped to shreds by any semi-competent opponent simply because they're so incapable at fighting anything other than similar mecha or really underpowered starships. (I suppose they'd be good vs a civilian liner or something, but then again, just about anything is.)

er, yeah, my entire FT technology is based around gravitic tech. I consider gravitons to do many multiples of light (64 will do...) and seeing as how all matter gives them off (sez me) i can detect stuff moving at FTL. or piggyback other detection systems to detect weapons firing etc.
btw, missiles big enough to destroy planets could be given hyperdrives, and thus there would be no defence but to put up FTLi on every planet you own or let it be destroyed.

Still, we're mainly talking about combat ability here. Smaller ships are stealthier, and if you equip them with long-range weapons they can see the enemy first and shoot without being seen.

Yes... but bigger ships can equip more powerful detection devices, not only nullifying its 'stealthier abilities' but also probably detecting it before your smaller ship, with its less powerful detection devices, detects my ship. And my bigger ship can get more powerful weapons with even longer ranges to boot.

Still, we're mainly talking about combat ability here. Smaller ships are stealthier, and if you equip them with long-range weapons they can see the enemy first and shoot without being seen.

Do you have any idea how amazingly hard it is to hide in space?

Not to mention that, for every long-range weapon you stick on a small ship, a larger ship can have one with equal or longer range and a lot more firepower. Not to mention a whole hell of a lot MORE of them.

I don't use plasma. My energy batteries on my warships consist purely of lasers and grasers, with an effective range of around 500,000 km for capital ships.



Yeah, those are pretty useful considering how many nations use some variation of a gravitic drive. I also use recon drones fitted with nu-space communications suites. While everything but their gravitic sensors is still limited by the speed of light, they can transmit back to their mothership in real-time. Which when operating at several light minute ranges, is pretty useful.

C'tan does use necrons. Also, attempting to say he can't use a theoretical warp drive because it's theoretical and no one uses it is just retarded, considering this we're RPing *SCIENCE FICTION* nations, grounding something in theory is still better then just plain making stuff up, like most do.

Finally, you accusing him of wank is rather rich, considering how you described your main PD system (which I'll get to next).

Wank. Nothing but wank. You'd also have to drop the missiles back in realspace behind the enemy, not in front, because their velocity and inertia are going to carry them in the same direction they were heading before they got translated. In other words, back at you.

Let me make a text illustration.

[you].<-- (missile)......[them]

[you]................. <-- [them]

Understand?

Of course, that's also assuming they don't have a local FTLi field for their warships.


1: You use Honorverse, or something derived from Honorverse, or something associated with David Weber, at the very least. I use the Wedge, and the Grasers, as well as Apollo(w00t).

2: I didn't say they COULDN'T use it, I said that no one DOES use it, that I'm aware of.

3: It is not Wank, it is an accident derived from a clusterfuck fight. I'm telling you all, go read NS War 1, Part 2: The Coredian Campaign. It shows the first use of Warp Recall in that manner, and what resulted. Also, youre assumption about the way the missiles would come out is incorrect. Warp Recall is like a gate, if you go through a gate, you do not come back out looking backwards, towards the gate you just exited.

Gravitic disruptions are FTL, 64 times the speed of light in fact. Your artificial gravity systems? Yeah I can detect those, and, by detecting THOSE, I detect your ships.

I'm not familiar with gravitic disruptions, but I basically dematerialize my ships into tachyons and shoot them off at 365 times the speed of light (so they can travel 1 lightyear in 1 day). This requires a jump gate to do, but I like it because it dosen't use any other dimensions (I don't like using other dimensions because we're not sure they exist and I want to be realistic as possible).

About "warp recall" nonsense, it dosen't make sense at all to use defensively. Why don't you just warp a single super-missile to within a nanometer of the enemy homeworld and destroy it? Warps and hyperdrives let you pop up wherever you want, and that's just ridiculous.

I don't see why everyone is so into big warships. I mean, I see that they like them because they're huge, but what purpose do they serve? Smaller boats are a lot stealthier, more manueverable, more multirole (you can divide a large fleet up more easily than a small one), and it's better to load up a whole bunch of small ships with missiles or other powerful one-shot weapons than to build just one juggernaut that can't move anywhere. The stealth and manueverability is what I really like in small ships, because I plan on a lot of close-quarter ramming with medium boats and missile sniping with ultra-long-range torpedoes.

As with MT, big battleships are just too vulernable. Sure, you can make a huge BB, but then you just make a bigger cruise missile. It's a lot easier to destroy than to create, and you can't win this race between armor and firepower in the 20th-21st century. Not only that, but if you fire enough small missiles at the ship you're bound to send up soo much shrapnel that you damage radars, missile mounts, and start fires.

So, is there any particular reason that people in NS like big ships other than that they sound cool?

None, most NSers are still stuck in pre WWII in tactics. Thinking once a battleship gets underway it is unstoppable. (Except by a bigger ship) While this is untrue, you don't need to destroy the ship just the guns which most think it is un-realistic (even though it is sadly the most realistic version of attacking it) way of attack. NS is stuck like in the Civil War of America, bad tactics excelent weapons.

None, most NSers are still stuck in pre WWII in tactics. Thinking once a battleship gets underway it is unstoppable. (Except by a bigger ship) While this is untrue, you don't need to destroy the ship just the guns which most think it is un-realistic (even though it is sadly the most realistic version of attacking it) way of attack. NS is stuck like in the Civil War of America, bad tactics excelent weapons.

What's so Civil War-ish about using battleships for coastal bombardment?

Well, I use antimatter clouds, those work well I guess.

Anyone using Star Trek style shields (like myself) could easily weather that.

er, yeah, my entire FT technology is based around gravitic tech. I consider gravitons to do many multiples of light (64 will do...) and seeing as how all matter gives them off (sez me) i can detect stuff moving at FTL. or piggyback other detection systems to detect weapons firing etc.

Not going to argue on how fast Gravitons are. But, it is true that all matter emits Gravitons (sez science). How else would you explain how we can walk around and not float off into space?

btw, missiles big enough to destroy planets could be given hyperdrives, and thus there would be no defence but to put up FTLi on every planet you own or let it be destroyed.

Dude, ever hear of the Galaxy Gun from the Star Wars universe?

I'm not familiar with gravitic disruptions, but I basically dematerialize my ships into tachyons and shoot them off at 365 times the speed of light (so they can travel 1 lightyear in 1 day). This requires a jump gate to do, but I like it because it dosen't use any other dimensions (I don't like using other dimensions because we're not sure they exist and I want to be realistic as possible).

Sounds feasable. However, it will be quite easy to take out your FTL capability by destroying the Gate. And you do realize that Tachyons are extra-dimensional in origin?

About "warp recall" nonsense, it dosen't make sense at all to use defensively. Why don't you just warp a single super-missile to within a nanometer of the enemy homeworld and destroy it? Warps and hyperdrives let you pop up wherever you want, and that's just ridiculous.

I would say, only if it made for a good RP. I would do as he suggested and actually read the RP he suggests if I were you, dude.

Personally, I would love to see a Galaxy from ST go up against a Emperor class battleship from BFG.

Pwnage.

Personally, I would love to see a Galaxy from ST go up against a Emperor class battleship from BFG.

Pwnage.

1.) BFG?

2.) Only the names of individual ships get the italic tags, not class names.

3.) That was way off-topic.

1) Battlefleet Gothic, it's a table-top space battle game from the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I believe several NS players use this type of tech.
2) I'm sorry. Can you forgive me?
3) How so? This thread IS about large FT/MT warships, isn't it?

At any rate, NS is very much stuck in the dark ages when it comes to tactics. One of the main reasons that battleships and their bigger cousins, the dreadnoughts and supers, triumph over aircraft and missile systems in NS is because players (including myself, until recently) tend to devolp uber SAM and CICW defenses on their capital ships, making it a helluva lot harder to actually sink enemy ships with your airborne elements (i.e. carrier aircraft) then to simply pound the hell out of them with shells.

me says, wtf is the galaxy gun? apart from the fact that it sounds scaryily big, i have no idea what it is.
i'm considering adding a neutronium cannon to my biggest ships btw, cos on further thought, i dont see it being stoppable.

The Galaxy Gun is a GE weapon that fires large uber-explosive guided missiles through hyperspace at planets. Rather nasty, and FTLi doesn't help much against it.

i'm considering adding a neutronium cannon to my biggest ships btw, cos on further thought, i dont see it being stoppable.
Besides firing really heavy projectiles, what would be the point? It's a run-of-the-mill cannon, not even a railgun. So you'd be limited to very slow moving shots and would suffer from an annoying amount of barrel wear just to get the neutronium moving. Heck, any explosion large enough to get a good amount of neutronium moving would probably destroy the barrel all together.

Personally, I would love to see a Galaxy from ST go up against a Emperor class battleship from BFG.

Is it possible to be more mismatched? Wait. Yes, yes it is. Sick either the Planet Killer or the Nightbringer on the Galaxy.

I'm not familiar with gravitic disruptions, but I basically dematerialize my ships into tachyons and shoot them off at 365 times the speed of light (so they can travel 1 lightyear in 1 day). This requires a jump gate to do, but I like it because it dosen't use any other dimensions (I don't like using other dimensions because we're not sure they exist and I want to be realistic as possible).

About "warp recall" nonsense, it dosen't make sense at all to use defensively. Why don't you just warp a single super-missile to within a nanometer of the enemy homeworld and destroy it? Warps and hyperdrives let you pop up wherever you want, and that's just ridiculous.

Warp Recall can be used offensively. MY defensive use is more economic than expending my missiles to kill the enemy. If I can use my missiles offensively, AND your missiles offensively, I get double my moneys worth.

FTLi will. or at least, my anti-hyperspace jobby will at least. not that any of my planets have one... and you dont know where they are so...
oh, and i dont have the anti-hyperspace jobby till i get around to running that plotline...

and my FT stuff all uses gravitic accelerators in its cannons, not explosive propellant. not that i could get neutronium up to much of a speed with them, but hey, floating lumps of metal that cant be detected by half the possible detection systems around, and will rip big-ass holes in enemy ships if they fluke an impact. also good for flattening planets in one shot...

me says, wtf is the galaxy gun? apart from the fact that it sounds scaryily big, i have no idea what it is.
i'm considering adding a neutronium cannon to my biggest ships btw, cos on further thought, i dont see it being stoppable.

Besides firing really heavy projectiles, what would be the point? It's a run-of-the-mill cannon, not even a railgun. So you'd be limited to very slow moving shots and would suffer from an annoying amount of barrel wear just to get the neutronium moving. Heck, any explosion large enough to get a good amount of neutronium moving would probably destroy the barrel all together.

In addition to what Otagia said, those neutronium rounds would be quite easy to shoot down with nearly any decent point-defense system because of their really slow velocity.

Neutronium rounds are highly stoppable by any competent enemy who knows what "point defense" is.

At any rate, NS is very much stuck in the dark ages when it comes to tactics.

Yeah, when you have a race of who-can-make-the-most-stupidly-powerful-tech mid-battle, tactics do seem to go out the window. Most so called space battles I've seen on FT threads are very disappointing, in that one side just says how powerful his guns are and fires them, and the other side says how powerful their shields are and takes very few if any losses. Repeat ad nauseum.

From some of the technology in this thread, I realised that we aren't using science fiction, hard science fiction anyway, just fiction. I think I'll switch to PMT instead, it's actually possible to roleplay properly in that.

Sorry for being so off-topic but I decided I had to make the point eventually.

Yeah, when you have a race of who-can-make-the-most-stupidly-powerful-tech mid-battle, tactics do seem to go out the window. Most so called space battles I've seen on FT threads are very disappointing, in that one side just says how powerful his guns are and fires them, and the other side says how powerful their shields are and takes very few if any losses. Repeat ad nauseum.

From some of the technology in this thread, I realised that we aren't using science fiction, hard science fiction anyway, just fiction. I think I'll switch to PMT instead, it's actually possible to roleplay properly in that.

Sorry for being so off-topic but I decided I had to make the point eventually.

Its mostly due to people not having a concept of realism in their storylines. For example, in one thread a civilian spaceliner was attacked by pirates, and warships from at least five different nations showed up to investigate. A couple of them ended up shooting at each other.

What are the chances of that? Practically impossible. Space is huge, and even a large vessel when it's not a powerless hulk is still going to be hard to find.

That's my main gripe, people started treating space like its just a short trip down the block to get from system to system.

Second main gripe is the arrogance of a lot of younger FT nations. Nothing is more annoying then seeing some 500 million populace nation fielding a fleet of a hundred star destroyers or whatever. I was 250 million before I constructed my first dreadnought (I even made an RP out of its launch) and my fleet slowly grew from there.

Anyone using Star Trek style shields (like myself) could easily weather that.



What's more destructive than antimatter? It's the most destructive thing in the universe.


Sounds feasable. However, it will be quite easy to take out your FTL capability by destroying the Gate. And you do realize that Tachyons are extra-dimensional in origin?



Well, you just have to defend the gate then, or keep a spare handy. edit: Are you sure about the Tachyon thing? I thought that they were just a generic name for any material faster than light.


It's impossible to hide in space


Not if you don't emit anything. Just think of a "space submarine". The big things that would give your presence away would be electronic "noise", so just find a way to supress that (submarines use anechoic tiles to supress engine and other noise, for example). As for optical sensors, I'm sure that you'll have enough tech to make a "chameleon" kind of image disguiser. I usually use medium-size ships, and they're fitted with expensive long-range sensors. There's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to sensors, and a huge ship won't have a hell of a lot of a sensor advantage over a medium one. However, the big ship (by big I mean 40-mile-long SD big) ship will emit A LOT more "noise" than something 1 mile long.

Not if you don't emit anything. Just think of a "space submarine". The big things that would give your presence away would be electronic "noise", so just find a way to supress that (submarines use anechoic tiles to supress engine and other noise, for example). As for optical sensors, I'm sure that you'll have enough tech to make a "chameleon" kind of image disguiser. I usually use medium-size ships, and they're fitted with expensive long-range sensors. There's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to sensors, and a huge ship won't have a hell of a lot of a sensor advantage over a medium one. However, the big ship (by big I mean 40-mile-long SD big) ship will emit A LOT more "noise" than something 1 mile long.

Actually, heat is the biggest problem in space. Since the average temprature in open space is less than 2 Kelvin (-271 degrees C, I think), spaceships with a 293 Kelvin (20 degrees C) atmosphere inside will emit enormous amounts of heat. Even with hundreds of square kilometres of heatsinks, the heatsinks will still give off tempratures way above the background. If you use IR detection, it's pretty hard to sneak up on you in space.

1) Battlefleet Gothic, it's a table-top space battle game from the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I believe several NS players use this type of tech.
2) I'm sorry. Can you forgive me?
3) How so? This thread IS about large FT/MT warships, isn't it?

At any rate, NS is very much stuck in the dark ages when it comes to tactics. One of the main reasons that battleships and their bigger cousins, the dreadnoughts and supers, triumph over aircraft and missile systems in NS is because players (including myself, until recently) tend to devolp uber SAM and CICW defenses on their capital ships, making it a helluva lot harder to actually sink enemy ships with your airborne elements (i.e. carrier aircraft) then to simply pound the hell out of them with shells.

1.) Ahh, got ya.

2.) No apology needed. Its all good, dude.

3.) It is. But its not a versus thread like your last post.

What's more destructive than antimatter? It's the most destructive thing in the universe.

Known to MT science, true. But, with FT science, that opens up a load of new possibilities.

Also, it is quite easy to travel through an anti-matter cloud using Star Trek style shields. Your weapon would have to make physical contact with the hull to do damage.


Well, you just have to defend the gate then, or keep a spare handy. edit: Are you sure about the Tachyon thing? I thought that they were just a generic name for any material faster than light.

No, Tachyon is the name of a specific particle. They are extra-dimensional because of the FTL thing they can do. No real world particle can go that fast. Its against the laws of nature and physics.

As for the back-up Gate, hope you can afford it. And, as for defending a Gate, good luck. A determined opponent would problably find a way.


Not if you don't emit anything. Just think of a "space submarine". The big things that would give your presence away would be electronic "noise", so just find a way to supress that (submarines use anechoic tiles to supress engine and other noise, for example). As for optical sensors, I'm sure that you'll have enough tech to make a "chameleon" kind of image disguiser. I usually use medium-size ships, and they're fitted with expensive long-range sensors. There's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to sensors, and a huge ship won't have a hell of a lot of a sensor advantage over a medium one. However, the big ship (by big I mean 40-mile-long SD big) ship will emit A LOT more "noise" than something 1 mile long.

I'm not even going to touch this one.

Actually, heat is the biggest problem in space. Since the average temprature in open space is less than 2 Kelvin (-271 degrees C, I think), spaceships with a 293 Kelvin (20 degrees C) atmosphere inside will emit enormous amounts of heat. Even with hundreds of square kilometres of heatsinks, the heatsinks will still give off tempratures way above the background. If you use IR detection, it's pretty hard to sneak up on you in space.

Then you just find a way to control the heat of the exterior. Pretty simple.


Known to MT science, true. But, with FT science, that opens up a load of new possibilities.

Also, it is quite easy to travel through an anti-matter cloud using Star Trek style shields. Your weapon would have to make physical contact with the hull to do damage.

Do you mean that ST shields are good for deflecting small particles, but not concentrated mass? Does that mean I could just make a concentrated antimatter beam and it'd work?


As for the back-up Gate, hope you can afford it. And, as for defending a Gate, good luck. A determined opponent would problably find a way.

If it's deep enough in my territory, it'd be fairly easy to defend. I just don't like the idea of hyperspace because then you can just pop up anywhere and it's ridiculous. This is more "realistic", for lack of a better word, and it also creates interesting strategic chokepoints.

Also, presumably the gate would be very heavily shielded and armored, and the only way the enemy could destroy it is if he got a large part of his fleet to it without getting destroyed. If he does make it there, then odds are my fleet is dead anyway.

My type of FTL travel can only transport a ship to an object with a high gravity well, such as a planet or moon. In addition, there has to be a friendly "homing signal" near said gravity well so that the jump is accurate and the jumping ship doesn't end up in a sun or lost in slipspace.

I just dont use hyperspace in foolish ways. again, wait for the plotline, and then i'll use it to get the mothership of my alien race out of the way of monster assaults via a space AND time jump off into the distance... other than that, i'll use it sparingly to move ships around from system to system so i dont have to wait and use my non-einstenian model monstrously fast gravitic drive to get places at about 100 lights...

(btw, i personally discount the theory of relativity in my FT stuff because i see logical holes in it in RL...)

Then you just find a way to control the heat of the exterior. Pretty simple.

Difficult though. I'd say impossible, but then again it's FT so it probably could be done. Just very difficult to stop the enormous heat transfer from the inside to the outside.

(btw, i personally discount the theory of relativity in my FT stuff because i see logical holes in it in RL...)

Really? I've been studying it for most of the last 4 months and I haven't seen logical holes in it, I'd be interesting in hearing what they were. Not to mention the physical evidence they have found for it already.

on calculations, which i cant remember, light should doppler visibly when you turn your head from the direction of travel of the earth to the opposite direction, because the earth is making a significant percentage of lightspeed away from the center of the galaxy, and this is without figuring in the whole galaxies separating at monstrous speed factor.
i'm not sure on special relativity though, i didnt do enough on it in a-level physics, and couldnt find any resources i trusted on it at the time. too long since then for me to remember how it worked though...

thats the blatant one, the other ones are the whole fact that before it was done EVERYONE said that it was impossible to go faster than sound so i'm guessing that the same is true for lightspeed. also, light gets slowed down by other stuff, so it must have some mass. therefore complete inertialessness/masslessness should give infinite speed at all times. and by infinite speed i mean that the minute you put on speed you are at the same time in every place in the universe.

sorry if i dont make too much sense, my materials engineering exam this morning did my head in a bit, as did going to the pub after. :p

Well earth, and the solar system, and the galaxy in general are moving very fast, but less than 1% of the speed of light, and you don't start noticing relativistic affects until you start getting to high percentages. I'm sure there are some, we just don't notice them since they are so incredibly tiny at speeds we are going at.

As for light having mass, yeah, it has some mass when it's travelling, but no rest mass, which is different. I won't explain it now, since I doubt I understand it all and it's probably too long for this thread.

Travelling faster than sound was thought as impossible, yeah, I've heard that before, but the difference is they had no evidence. No solid evidence or theory to base it on. We have evidence for time slowing down as we approach the speed of light, using really really accurate atomic clocks on planes.

Of course, it might all be wrong, we might be able to travel faster than light, but as far as we can tell from theory and the little evidence we have, time does slow down as you get closer, as well as a few other things changing like length and mass. It's a very odd theory, anyway :p

I suppose you could mask heat signatures with enough effort, but then the interior (Everything inside the heat suppression shell) is going to be absolutely fried by waste heat.

Reactors still need to be active to run basic needs (even if it's an AI ship) such as life support and computer systems electrical supply. This will produce heat, and without a method of disposal, your ship is going to be toasted relatively quickly.

How do you deal with that? Radiators. Now the problem is that the heat is escaping and you can be detected. You cannot suppress heat and contain it without having a totally dead ship. No life, no activity, nothing.

It is imperative that the heat be allowed to drain off through radiators, as heat sinks are only useful during a combat situation and are useless but for allowing time with radiators retracted.

If you run with minimal systems to avoid detection, your trajectory can be found (by mass detectors, say) due to the impossibility of running 'cool' and simultaneously obscuring other signatures. You will then find yourself face to face with a cloud of antimatter that you cannot stop due to your shields being offline.

Also, if you bleed heat into hyperspace (or equivalent alternate dimension), what's to say that your enemy can't poke their sensors into that dimension and see that?

It's impossible to hide in space.

EDIT:
Just very difficult to stop the enormous heat transfer from the inside to the outside.

Even more difficult to stop the enormous heat transfer from your ship to your crew. Shouldn't the engineers be working on better ways to get rid of the heat? The faster you can vent heat the longer you can fight - assuming the radiators don't get shot off.

Known to MT science, true. But, with FT science, that opens up a load of new possibilities.

Actually, there can be nothing more destructive than antimatter. Not only does it actually remove matter from existance, but it also completely converts it into energy. It's literally impossible to get a higher yeild than with antimatter.

I suppose you could mask heat signatures with enough effort, but then the interior (Everything inside the heat suppression shell) is going to be absolutely fried by waste heat.

Reactors still need to be active to run basic needs (even if it's an AI ship) such as life support and computer systems electrical supply. This will produce heat, and without a method of disposal, your ship is going to be toasted relatively quickly.

How do you deal with that? Radiators. Now the problem is that the heat is escaping and you can be detected. You cannot suppress heat and contain it without having a totally dead ship. No life, no activity, nothing.

It is imperative that the heat be allowed to drain off through radiators, as heat sinks are only useful during a combat situation and are useless but for allowing time with radiators retracted.

If you run with minimal systems to avoid detection, your trajectory can be found (by mass detectors, say) due to the impossibility of running 'cool' and simultaneously obscuring other signatures. You will then find yourself face to face with a cloud of antimatter that you cannot stop due to your shields being offline.

Also, if you bleed heat into hyperspace (or equivalent alternate dimension), what's to say that your enemy can't poke their sensors into that dimension and see that?

It's impossible to hide in space.

EDIT:


Even more difficult to stop the enormous heat transfer from your ship to your crew. Shouldn't the engineers be working on better ways to get rid of the heat? The faster you can vent heat the longer you can fight - assuming the radiators don't get shot off.

Ok, watch this:

I now vent all of my heat into the Warp. You are unable to detect it, due to the impossibility of scanning the Warp. And yes, just ask any 40ker, the Warp is IMPOSSIBLE to scan with anything. Navigators can move through the Warp, but they cannot truly scan it as we think of the term.

One massive ship is impractical, as it cannot be everywhere at once.

Having all massive ships is also impractical, because they can't be used as screening units--they aren't fast enough.

And finally, having all tiny ships is also impractical, because your ships don't have the stopping power of a true ship of the wall.

It's all about balance.

As for this stuff about IR scanning?
How can you note the heat signature of something the size of a fly, compared to the solar system? I mean, damn. Even multi-kilometer-long ships are tiny.

If anyone wants, I have a partial diagram for just this sort of occasion. It's comparing a ship to Earth, not the Sol system, but it gives a good appreciation, anyway. http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/blast_archives/Emotes/icon_wink.gif

I'm like the only person that uses true Ships of the Wall on NS(assuming you mean the Honorverse model of a Ship of the Wall). Everybody else has things that are much less rigid in their use. I prefer my Wall because it has a wonderful ability to ram things, and kill them in a very brutal and Gravitic induced mess. Which has suddenly made me realise that ramming an ISD with my Leviathans is an extremely effective tactic for killing them...

I'm like the only person that uses true Ships of the Wall on NS(assuming you mean the Honorverse model of a Ship of the Wall). Everybody else has things that are much less rigid in their use. I prefer my Wall because it has a wonderful ability to ram things, and kill them in a very brutal and Gravitic induced mess. Which has suddenly made me realise that ramming an ISD with my Leviathans is an extremely effective tactic for killing them...

Indeed. A battle squadron of dreadnoughts has the benefit of automatic right-of-way in combat situations thanks to the wedge.

Indeed. A battle squadron of dreadnoughts has the benefit of automatic right-of-way in combat situations thanks to the wedge.

Yep. Just think about those 300km Wedges on the SUPER Dreadnoughts... One of those gets everything in the way to move. FAST. I only have 7 of MY personalized SDns, but still... Three of those do a speed run at their max accel(5-600gees with the newest compensators I believe) and see what happens to anything that doesn't move.

I'm like the only person that uses true Ships of the Wall on NS(assuming you mean the Honorverse model of a Ship of the Wall). Everybody else has things that are much less rigid in their use. I prefer my Wall because it has a wonderful ability to ram things, and kill them in a very brutal and Gravitic induced mess. Which has suddenly made me realise that ramming an ISD with my Leviathans is an extremely effective tactic for killing them...

I do.

And, Mini, I think you need to read this (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/Harrington/hh_wedge_geometry.htm) and this (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/Harrington/hh_mth_accel.htm). http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/blast_archives/Emotes/icon_wink.gif

I do.

And, Mini, I think you need to read this (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/Harrington/hh_wedge_geometry.htm) and this (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/Harrington/hh_mth_accel.htm). http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/blast_archives/Emotes/icon_wink.gif


The first has some value, but it tells me nothing I did not already know. The SECOND however, is less useful, due to the upgrades that have been effected by the time we reach "At All Costs." If your point was the destruction that occurs when two wedges make contact, then yes, it's a good point. The only issue is that there are no SDs with Wedges. In fact, unless you, or some other nation of which I am unaware, posess Wedges, I am the ONLY FT nation that uses Honorverse Impeller Wedges. The fact that nobody else ha sidewalls has allowed me to seriously beef the energy armament on my ships. In fact, for the most part my ships are armed ONLY with energy weapons.

It will however make a convenient reference for when I put the Wedge Ram to use. As will the passage from "On Basilisk Station" where Honor cripples the Courier through a similar tactic.

The first has some value, but it tells me nothing I did not already know. The SECOND however, is less useful, due to the upgrades that have been effected by the time we reach "At All Costs."

Hmm. I need to read that, then. Unfortunately, my library doesn't carry that particular one, and I haven't seen a bookstore that sells it. Bleh. >_>

If your point was the destruction that occurs when two wedges make contact, then yes, it's a good point. The only issue is that there are no SDs with Wedges. In fact, unless you, or some other nation of which I am unaware, posess Wedges, I am the ONLY FT nation that uses Honorverse Impeller Wedges.

I do, although my Space Navy is a system-defense force, and so has only CAs as their heaviest unit.

The fact that nobody else ha sidewalls has allowed me to seriously beef the energy armament on my ships. In fact, for the most part my ships are armed ONLY with energy weapons.

Why not just use missiles? If so few people have no sidewall generators, wouldn't it make sense to hit people from extreme range, and reduce the likelyhood or amount of personell loss? Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I like to keep the range open.

It will however make a convenient reference for when I put the Wedge Ram to use. As will the passage from "On Basilisk Station" where Honor cripples the Courier through a similar tactic.

Still reading that book (I've had to bop back and forth between them.), so I don't know what you're referring to, precisely. Therefore, please excuse me if I sound like an idiot when I ask if you refer to the grav lance, instead?

The first has some value, but it tells me nothing I did not already know. The SECOND however, is less useful, due to the upgrades that have been effected by the time we reach "At All Costs." If your point was the destruction that occurs when two wedges make contact, then yes, it's a good point. The only issue is that there are no SDs with Wedges. In fact, unless you, or some other nation of which I am unaware, posess Wedges, I am the ONLY FT nation that uses Honorverse Impeller Wedges. The fact that nobody else ha sidewalls has allowed me to seriously beef the energy armament on my ships. In fact, for the most part my ships are armed ONLY with energy weapons.

Um, I know of at least two or three other nations besides myself that use wedges and sidewalls. You haven't exactly stumbled across something that only you use.

You know, it would be GREAT if someone could tell me what the hell the conversation has drifted to now...

You know, it would be GREAT if someone could tell me what the hell the conversation has drifted to now...

Wedge=shield. Covers the top and bottom areas of a ship.
Sidewall=smaller shield. Covers the broadsides of a ship.

Missiles are longer-ranged than energy armaments (lasers, masers, grasers, etc.), but require penetration aids to get past sidewalls. Energy mounts are able to punch straight through a sufficiently-weak sidewall, but require closing to a smaller range.

Er, anything else?

Hmm. I need to read that, then. Unfortunately, my library doesn't carry that particular one, and I haven't seen a bookstore that sells it. Bleh. >_>



I do, although my Space Navy is a system-defense force, and so has only CAs as their heaviest unit.



Why not just use missiles? If so few people have no sidewall generators, wouldn't it make sense to hit people from extreme range, and reduce the likelyhood or amount of personell loss? Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I like to keep the range open.



Still reading that book (I've had to bop back and forth between them.), so I don't know what you're referring to, precisely. Therefore, please excuse me if I sound like an idiot when I ask if you refer to the grav lance, instead?

@Vernii: I would have been rather surprised if I WAS the only person to use them. I just haven't SEEN anyone else use them, until you told me I honestly wondered if I was the only person who had actually picked up on the possibilities of the Honorverse.

1: It's a good book, and demonstrtes my missile spam APOLLO Pods.

2: Same as for Vernii.

3: Because I can use the Grasers at any range now. They have no sidewalls to limit my range or the effectiveness at impact.

4: You'll see. Honor uses the Fearless to burn out the impeller ring of the Havenite Courier. The Grav-Lance comes later...

1: It's a good book, and demonstrtes my missile spam APOLLO Pods.

Are these any different from the Ghost Rider pods the RMN uses? Or are these different?

3: Because I can use the Grasers at any range now. They have no sidewalls to limit my range or the effectiveness at impact.

So the range of energy weapons are unlimited, so long as there is no sidewall?
Sweet. I never knew that.

@Vernii: I would have been rather surprised if I WAS the only person to use them. I just haven't SEEN anyone else use them, until you told me I honestly wondered if I was the only person who had actually picked up on the possibilities of the Honorverse.

1: It's a good book, and demonstrtes my missile spam APOLLO Pods.

2: Same as for Vernii.

3: Because I can use the Grasers at any range now. They have no sidewalls to limit my range or the effectiveness at impact.

4: You'll see. Honor uses the Fearless to burn out the impeller ring of the Havenite Courier. The Grav-Lance comes later...

The amusing thing with Apollo is I was using something similar to it before At All Costs even came out, but with nu-space control links instead of grav-pulse. The real genius idea of the book though was the Moriarty system.

For RP balance purposes though, I use the regular range vs sidewalls against any target with shields.

Actually, it'd dissipate rather quickly after a good distance. Grasers are electron beams, correct? Missile weapons would work much better, as they have a theoretically unlimited range.

Actually, it'd dissipate rather quickly after a good distance. Grasers are electron beams, correct? Missile weapons would work much better, as they have a theoretically unlimited range.

Grasers are beams of gamma radiation, lensed by artificial gravity. Also, missiles need to keep their drives up, or suffer burnout, where they go in ballistic, instead of being able to execute terminal maneuvers as they approach. MDMs, with three drives, extend the range, but they still don't make it unlimited.

Just reach combat speed and stop accelerating, preserving some fuel for terminal manuevers. You don't slow down in space, remember? And even if it's ballistic, it can still hit something. It's accuracy goes down quite a bit, but it can still hit something.

As for the grasers, yep, electron beams. The electrons would gradually repel each other, diffusing the beam.

Are these any different from the Ghost Rider pods the RMN uses? Or are these different?



So the range of energy weapons are unlimited, so long as there is no sidewall?
Sweet. I never knew that.

They are a MAJOR upgrade in the Ghost Rider System. It has FTL control, meaning that it cannot miss at any treasonable range.

They are technically unlimited range, Lasers and the like have practical limits due to ability on the enemies part to dodge, but their range is better than that of any missile.

@Vernii: I would prefer to link the Mules and Moriarty... What was the max number that the Havenites could pull with the Mules? Enough to throw several MILLION missiles in one voilley, plus Moriarty? That's BRUTAL, and enough to swamp ANY PD system. Also, am I the first person to even consider the Wedge Ram?

@Khurgan: That onluy works to a point my friend. Afer awhile you HAVE to start maneuvering again, because the enemy has moved.

Ballistic missiles are dead meat for point-defense laser clusters and countermissiles, because they don't have to constantly readjust projected vectors. That's why you always want to have some extra drive time for missiles.

As for using the ship itself to propel missiles, as the chart I listed says, destroyers hit 550 gees of accel, and missiles are considerably lower. But it takes time for a DD to get up to that speed, mainly because you don't want your crew to turn into so much raspberry jam. Missiles, however, don't have that limitation, and can start out at their 417 KPS squared accel rating instantly, and go from there. Therefore, when it actually counts, you have a much faster missile than a purely inertial projectile.

Well, I think so, anyway. Someone else can crunch the numbers, but it seems to make sense in my head, at least.

@Vernii: I would prefer to link the Mules and Moriarty... What was the max number that the Havenites could pull with the Mules? Enough to throw several MILLION missiles in one voilley, plus Moriarty? That's BRUTAL, and enough to swamp ANY PD system. Also, am I the first person to even consider the Wedge Ram?

Yeah, I think you are the first to think of wedge ramming. Not with combining mules and moriarty though. ^.^

Toss my equivalent of Apollo into the mix and it turns incredibly nasty.

Actually, there can be nothing more destructive than antimatter. Not only does it actually remove matter from existance, but it also completely converts it into energy. It's literally impossible to get a higher yeild than with antimatter.

Ever watch Star Trek: Insurrection? The So'na had one weapon that causes even more destruction.

Do you mean that ST shields are good for deflecting small particles, but not concentrated mass? Does that mean I could just make a concentrated antimatter beam and it'd work?

Actually, that's what the Navigation Deflectors in Star Trek are for. If you recall from Best Of Both Worlds, the Anti-Matter Spread was harmless against the Borg Cube with its Magnetic Defense Field (not even a combat shield).

If it's deep enough in my territory, it'd be fairly easy to defend. I just don't like the idea of hyperspace because then you can just pop up anywhere and it's ridiculous. This is more "realistic", for lack of a better word, and it also creates interesting strategic chokepoints.

You have to accept other peoples method of FTL. Otherwise, you will find that the list of people that will RP with you will decrease quite rapidly.

Also, presumably the gate would be very heavily shielded and armored, and the only way the enemy could destroy it is if he got a large part of his fleet to it without getting destroyed. If he does make it there, then odds are my fleet is dead anyway.

You do need to build in at least one con to this method of FTL. Otherwise that would be obvious God-Wanking.

Ok, watch this:

I now vent all of my heat into the Warp. You are unable to detect it, due to the impossibility of scanning the Warp. And yes, just ask any 40ker, the Warp is IMPOSSIBLE to scan with anything. Navigators can move through the Warp, but they cannot truly scan it as we think of the term.

Alright, we assume it's both possible to transfer heat into the warp and that it's impossible to scan inside the warp.

The question raised now is: How does one transfer the heat (you could scram the reactor into the warp, I suppose) into the warp indefinitely? Also, how does one divert the heat from all parts of the ship into the warp and 'radiate' it at a sufficient rate?

Right, looking up the Warp on Wikipedia, it's stated to be a 'domain of pure energy'. Now, naturally the amount of energy in any given area within this domain is going to be greater than any possible amount contained in a radiator extended into the Immaterium and thus your radiator will heat up instead of cooling, forcing you to blow off the radiator or face heat feedback.

What might work is a dimension with little or no energy, but then you'd stick out like a sore thumb if someone poked a sensor in there to have a look around.

Hakurabi, the Warp is accepted to be unscannable. The fact that it IS pure energy makes scanning it impossible. Now, if I were to go the easy route, I would just shift all of my heat into plasma, which is something solid that could be easily projected into the warp. The hard way would involve developing a one-way gate.

if you're gonna turn it into plasma, why the hell not shoot it at the bad guys?

if you're gonna turn it into plasma, why the hell not shoot it at the bad guys?

Because that requires a way to project it towards the enemy. My primary consideration is the Terran Ships, that don't use Plasma weapons at all. In all honesty, this is all hypothetical. Venting ANYTHING into the Warp would be extraordinarily dangerous, due to the presence of Daemons. I simply mentioned it to prove a point.

Ever watch Star Trek: Insurrection? The So'na had one weapon that causes even more destruction.
Right, and bad sci fi movies are of course paragons of what's possible :rolleyes: . Star Trek has more unfeasible technobabble than a room full of Evangelion fans. It's downright impossible to have a higher yeild by mass than a MAMA reaction, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Well, if you use enough fancy words, anything's possible!

Eh? Am I right?

Yeah. I did like Star Trek, but it got old fast. The space battles didn't hold my attention, and there wasn't enough....interaction between the crew to make it worth my while, anyway. The characters just weren't developed.

hmm. pure energy and/or neutronium would be equally effective as antimatter, methinks. also, antimatter comes in different types, and you have to get the right types for annhiliation, or nothing happens. i.e. to destroy a steel hulled ship you need anti-steel, but a bit more complex, and much more likely to succeed. it works on the quark level, for those who know as-level or above physics, so any structure as complex as steel would be compromised by any of the most common forms of anti-matter, but if you just pick out random anti-matter, some of it will be floating around with no opposite to annhiliate with for ages until someone flies over it and breaks their specialist equipment on it...
I can go into more detail, but it requires a lot of technobabble, and a bit of wiki search to refresh my memory on the finer points...

hmm. pure energy and/or neutronium would be equally effective as antimatter, methinks. also, antimatter comes in different types, and you have to get the right types for annhiliation, or nothing happens. i.e. to destroy a steel hulled ship you need anti-steel, but a bit more complex, and much more likely to succeed. it works on the quark level, for those who know as-level or above physics, so any structure as complex as steel would be compromised by any of the most common forms of anti-matter, but if you just pick out random anti-matter, some of it will be floating around with no opposite to annhiliate with for ages until someone flies over it and breaks their specialist equipment on it...
I can go into more detail, but it requires a lot of technobabble, and a bit of wiki search to refresh my memory on the finer points...

There is no such thing as "anti-steel", however, anti-hydrogen, anti-carbon, and anti-iron would all work VERY well in CONTACT with steel. However, I prefer to use a more effectivetechnique, not requiring acctual contact with the ship for the reaction. Blowing things up at a few KM distance is nearly as effective, without the specialisation issues.

Hakurabi, the Warp is accepted to be unscannable. The fact that it IS pure energy makes scanning it impossible. Now, if I were to go the easy route, I would just shift all of my heat into plasma, which is something solid that could be easily projected into the warp. The hard way would involve developing a one-way gate.

I think you missed his point - he accepted for now that the Warp was unscannable, he asked how you would get all the heat into Warp, and how would you get it to stay there. Thermodynamics says heat energy flows from hot to cold, and we don't even need to prove that, it happens so often. Plasma, being by definition very very hot, will radiate lots of heat to everything else around it that is colder. How you would transfer all this waste heat to the plasma, I don't know. Lots and lots of radiators in any dimension is the only way to reduce the heat signature of your ship, and even then sensitive enough thermal imaging could still pick you up.

FT might be able to invent fabulous new tech we don't understand yet, but it can't god-mode it's way out of proven physics like basic thermodynamics.

actually, anti-steel is completely possible. its an alloy of anti-iron and anti-carbon. what you really want though, is a stream of anti-up quarks from one side and a stream of postirons (anti-electrons) from the other. there are a few very very exotic materials (borderline godmodding to build a ship out of them as they are VERY VERY VERY rare) that wont be affected, but they arent part of any RT alloy. oh and they have such odd properties that if you built anything out of them, it probably wouldnt do what you wanted it too, although some of them are used in my hyperdrives...

I think you missed his point - he accepted for now that the Warp was unscannable, he asked how you would get all the heat into Warp, and how would you get it to stay there. Thermodynamics says heat energy flows from hot to cold, and we don't even need to prove that, it happens so often. Plasma, being by definition very very hot, will radiate lots of heat to everything else around it that is colder. How you would transfer all this waste heat to the plasma, I don't know. Lots and lots of radiators in any dimension is the only way to reduce the heat signature of your ship, and even then sensitive enough thermal imaging could still pick you up.

FT might be able to invent fabulous new tech we don't understand yet, but it can't god-mode it's way out of proven physics like basic thermodynamics.

FT most certainly can!!! We regularly ignore or modify gravity. Screwing with thermodynamics is no real stretch of the imagination.

gravity isnt proven to be untouchable, and imo it never will be, but thermodynamics is one of the few things you cant screw with. along with the speeds of sound and light, diffusion of gases to fill available spaces, and a couple of other things. (not including relativity :p)

Why the heck would you need anti-steel? Steel is made up of protons and electrons, which are made up of quarks. Just get antiquarks and you're covered for nearly everything. As for it having to come in contact with the target, why not just have it hit the material of the missile? Much simpler, and it would have to go through it anyway.

As for neutronium being more effective, no. It's just as effective as any other kinetic weapon, just a whole lot more mass in a smaller area. Even worse, you can't give it a charge, so railguns are right out. The only way to move it would either be gravitics, which is much harder to deal with than electromagnetics, or simple chemical propulsion, which would tend to blow up the cannon.

As for pure energy, sure, it would do nicely, but A) how are you getting the energy, and B) how are you keeping it from dissipating? It's the same principle as a point blank nuclear bomb versus a bomb-pumped laser. Sure, the laser is pure energy, but it's still getting its power from a nuclear reaction, and a lot of the energy is going to be wasted. You'd much rather have a simple direct hit with a nuke than having to go with the laser.

you wouldnt need anti-steel, but it would help, as it would get all of the steel, thus putting out more radiation to get othernearby ships...
and anti-what quarks? they come in 6 different varieties, not all of which are necesarially in steel (i have no idea...) and lack of positrons mean you have one big-ass electrical charge floating in space where the electrons are left behind by the antimatter/matter annhilation...

[EDIT]
D'oh, this totally shouldnt be an edit. sorry...
er, yeah, i use gravitic impulsion to move my ships, building guns to move stuff and/or devices to ignore the massive gravity of a lump of neutronium isnt a problem. and neutronium is so powerful because its gravity is so huge that it'll draw your ship in to it, making it much harder to miss with...

gravity isnt proven to be untouchable, and imo it never will be, but thermodynamics is one of the few things you cant screw with. along with the speeds of sound and light, diffusion of gases to fill available spaces, and a couple of other things. (not including relativity :p)

Well... I once read a book wherein the author postulized the alteration of the laws of physics in a limited area, for example, raising the speed of light arounda ship allowing it to go faster than would normally be possible. If you can screw with one part of physics, you can screw with all the rest of it. Personally this entire argument is a crock of shit. If you can see my ship in the heat shadow of all the planets and the sun... Well then there's no point in even trying to avoid detection in the first place.

Point on the antimatter, but just reacting it with the interior of the missile works just fine, and all protons and neutrons are made up of the exact same things, so there wouldn't be a problem there. Also, said electrical charge is called gamma radiation, which is generally quite fun if there's already a hole where the armor plating used to be.

er, yeah, i use gravitic impulsion to move my ships, building guns to move stuff and/or devices to ignore the massive gravity of a lump of neutronium isnt a problem. and neutronium is so powerful because its gravity is so huge that it'll draw your ship in to it, making it much harder to miss with...
If you've got a lump of neutronium large enough to draw in space-ship sized masses, why not just throw a planet at them? Easier than carrying around all that neutronium, especially as it's going to be making acceleration a pain in the arse for whatever's carrying it.

Well... I once read a book wherein the author postulized the alteration of the laws of physics in a limited area, for example, raising the speed of light arounda ship allowing it to go faster than would normally be possible. If you can screw with one part of physics, you can screw with all the rest of it. Personally this entire argument is a crock of shit. If you can see my ship in the heat shadow of all the planets and the sun... Well then there's no point in even trying to avoid detection in the first place.

You can screw around with stuff we haven't proven, but ignoring the stuff we have proven is kinda like saying the world is flat, because I win more that way...

You could hide your heat signature if you were near a sun or pretty close to a planet, but more than a few hundred thousand km or so away and the heat isn't high enough to hide in. Space is too empty and too damn cold for that.

You can screw around with stuff we haven't proven, but ignoring the stuff we have proven is kinda like saying the world is flat, because I win more that way...

You could hide your heat signature if you were near a sun or pretty close to a planet, but more than a few hundred thousand km or so away and the heat isn't high enough to hide in. Space is too empty and too damn cold for that.

You're not hearing me are you? We have proven gravity exists. I control, increase, decrease, and ignore gravity on a regular basis. If I can do that with Gravity, which we have incontrovertable proof of, I can do it with ANYTHING. Either I can't affect gravity, or I can affect everything else.

Could always bother Kanuckistan and beg him to let you use contextual thermal entanglement. Use one of those devices and put the other end on some world you need to heat up somewhere. Of course, getting him to let you use the things would be rather difficult (or expensive, or both).

Right, and bad sci fi movies are of course paragons of what's possible :rolleyes: . Star Trek has more unfeasible technobabble than a room full of Evangelion fans. It's downright impossible to have a higher yeild by mass than a MAMA reaction, no ifs, ands, or buts.


Note, I SAID DESTRUCTIVE POWER, NOT YEILD. The Son'a had such a weapon.

Oh, and please don't bring the anti-Trek thing into this. Well Star Trek wasn't 100% Sci-Fact (what good Sci-Fantasy show is?), it did cover the bases in explaining how things work.

There is no such thing as "anti-steel", however, anti-hydrogen, anti-carbon, and anti-iron would all work VERY well in CONTACT with steel. However, I prefer to use a more effectivetechnique, not requiring acctual contact with the ship for the reaction. Blowing things up at a few KM distance is nearly as effective, without the specialisation issues.

Uh, why can't anti-steel exist? If a molecule can exist, then so can the anti-molecule.

Uh, why can't anti-steel exist? If a molecule can exist, then so can the anti-molecule.

Because it's a composite.

Next, who's to say that you're "screwing" with gravity at all? You're just using it to make your life easier. Like electricity. http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/blast_archives/Emotes/icon_wink.gif

But anywho, I stand by my point. Heat doesn't radiate far enough into the void to be detected before it dissipates.

Unless, of course, you're right on top of the enemy.

At which point you're fucked.

er, yeah, and if a composite can exist, so can its anti-composite.

and gravity is proven to exist, not to be immutable. but then, actually, on further thought, why cant we screw with thermodynamics. i'll withdraw my arguments on that one.

Note, I SAID DESTRUCTIVE POWER, NOT YEILD. The Son'a had such a weapon.
Yeild IS destructive power. The more yeild you have, the bigger a bang you get, the bigger the bang, the more people die.

it did cover the bases in explaining how things work.

No it didn't. There's more incomprehensible technobabble in that show than an Eva fan trying to explain how an AT field works.

You're not hearing me are you? We have proven gravity exists. I control, increase, decrease, and ignore gravity on a regular basis. If I can do that with Gravity, which we have incontrovertable proof of, I can do it with ANYTHING. Either I can't affect gravity, or I can affect everything else.

We don't know how gravity works. If its a graviton particle or wave or something, you can build a machine to produce them with a high enough tech level. Ignoring gravity is also within physics, according to an article I read a couple of weeks ago in a scientific journal. Ignoring heat loss isn't within physics, it can't be done.

On a slightly seperate note, if you and the other FTers believe you can do absolutely anything, how the hell do you get any roleplaying done at all? At least with the lower techs there are limits to stop god-modding, but FT seems to be god-modding by definition.

In a universe where he gives a damn, David Weber wants his Fasset Drives and Apollo missiles back. DW-prime says he'll make an exception for those of the offenders with all sticky and gross copies of Path of the Fury and At All Costs who buy replacements, and that you'll have his blessing. Or at least Jim Baen-prime's.

Er, yeah, FTers in my experience do get fairly into godmodding, but everyone sort of stops at the same level of godmod and it becomes fair. ish.

<...>

On a slightly seperate note, if you and the other FTers believe you can do absolutely anything, how the hell do you get any roleplaying done at all? At least with the lower techs there are limits to stop god-modding, but FT seems to be god-modding by definition.

I was about to simply go "I'm an FTer, and while I do do plot-devices at times they're not intended to stomp all over people, nor do I claim being able to do anything because that's boring."

But then I noticed that in a quite satisfying way I am godmoding. As a writer I get to make up whatever crazy shit I want - I'm a god, baby! But just ripping off whatever source material gives the bigger numbers (and ignoring inconvenient limitations like how wedges and Fassets exist in environments where they aren't godmodes as such, and don't need to make sense to other players) gets boring to me. Oh, and while the more egregious wank I've seen referred to in this thread is mainly Weber based, Weber's work is actually pretty far down from the top of the totem pole when it comes to military nastiness.

But never mind that. That's just me justifying why I'm disgusted.

Back to where I can make up whatever crazy shit I want. Well, what kind of shit do I want? Hm. What kind of shit do I want? Or even... What kind of shit I want? All relevant questions, and one of them even implies that your mileage may vary and that I'm not Grand High Poobah Gamemaster of the "NS RP Campaign", more's the pity, peons!

Pity, that.

I want shit that's crazy and doesn't wreck my suspension of disbelief, because if it does it stops being fun. I'm ICly militant, and FT, and I originally envisaged the Territory as being very, very fight-happy - so it would have to be fun to fight against, and for that matter with. "The Territorials deployed psi-amplified war-minks and the entire Reich army tore itself apart! What now, Supreme SATO Leader Empress Joanna von Sachshausen, Ma'am?" "Well, we did win. Tea and crumpet?" I mean, how fun is that for anyone, especially when I just "won" by ripping off tech from Cordwainer Smith. Oh, noone will play with me, yay.

So, the crazy shit has to make me fun to play with, and be fun for me. And so, I can do whatever the hell I want, but there are very sharp limits to what I want.

Well, wanky-as-hell joke alts aside. But that's another story.

Oh, and about the heat - nothing says you can't stop radiating for a while, or radiate in a direction where the enemy ain't.

Good point on the heat thing TT... hadnt thought of aiming the heat output...

I guess if you shot the heat out fast enough in a certain direction it wouldn't have time to expand into a cloud and head in all directions. But the fact is, how do you get an EXACT fix on an enemy just by their heat emissions? You'd know somethings near, but what if the enemy just launches heat decoys to make you think his fleet is somehwhere else? IR alone is a poor way to detect something; you need several sensors to validate it.

In RL, of course, space battles would be nothing like they are in Nationstates. Assuming that we eventually find some way to do FTL travel, and we probably won't, none of the fighting would be done by humans. It would be a bunch of robots fighting it out, and battles would last nanoseconds because weapons by then would be soo destructive. Noone does that, of course, because it sucks for RPing. So there's no point in nitpicking about the details.

But about my idea of a "space submarine". All of my medium ships carry a strong fighter and recon complement. I'm counting on the fighters to succeed so that my recon guys can spot the enemy and give targeting info to the torpedoes. IMO the main sensor of any FT fleet is not the ship sensor array, but the fighters. If you win the fighter war, you can fire off your ultra-long-range missiles without the enemy seeing you.

er, yeah, i dont actually have fighters, but my sensors will follow your missiles back down your throat, and your fighters will be much too busy dodging smaller missiles to send back much in the way of sensor details on my fleet...

I guess if you shot the heat out fast enough in a certain direction it wouldn't have time to expand into a cloud and head in all directions. But the fact is, how do you get an EXACT fix on an enemy just by their heat emissions? You'd know somethings near, but what if the enemy just launches heat decoys to make you think his fleet is somehwhere else? IR alone is a poor way to detect something; you need several sensors to validate it.

Well, heat doesn't travel in clouds, you can't really point it. It is the energy in everything, it can travel through particles and vacuum, so you can't just stop it and tell it to go somewhere else. What you CAN do is try to insulate everything, but the problem is space outside the ship is really cold, the heat will transfer there somehow. It might not transfer very quickly, but you can't stop it entirely, just try to reduce it to so low a transfer the enemy sensors can't resolve it.

And yes, heat decoys would be a brilliant idea to combat heat detection. Unlike most FT tech arguements I've seen on this forum, I am perfectly happy to accept a weakness in the tech. The main advantage of it, however, is to stop people sneaking up on you - setting off a heat decoy makes sure they can't pinpoint you, but it's a loud announcement that you're there in the first place.

EDIT: I didn't spot this until after I posted:

But anywho, I stand by my point. Heat doesn't radiate far enough into the void to be detected before it dissipates.

I'm not sure about that. Heat manages to get to us from the sun after all, even if it does radiate away really quickly again. I think you could detect it from quite a distance, enough to remove the element of suprise at least.

The sun is very hot mind, a massive number factor above what a single ship puts out. and anyway, there are perfect insulators. oddly enough, superconducting fibre is a perfect insulator for heat...

The sun is very hot mind, a massive number factor above what a single ship puts out. and anyway, there are perfect insulators. oddly enough, superconducting fibre is a perfect insulator for heat...

Yeah, but you don't need to detect them as far out as the sun is from the earth, so it doesn't need to be as hot.

It is? I didn't know that, very nice. Well if you want to spend lots of money insulating your stealth ships with it, then I guess you could hide your heat emissions. Just have to be careful your reactor heat doesn't fry the crew when it stacks up :p

er, me no use a reactor when in stealth mode. and at that point, i just soak up external radiation to provide power for my few operative systems. (lights, air circulation, some command systems) I cant be bothered to use stealth much anyway...

btw, i'll withdraw the superconducting fibre bit, it is a perfect insulator, but only when at 0 kelvin, which requires energy to maintain, even in space, and will add to the reactor load, and overheat the interior faster. not clever... could be used to hide one side of the ship from IR though, while the heat dissapates on t'other side...

Yeild IS destructive power. The more yeild you have, the bigger a bang you get, the bigger the bang, the more people die.

I would like to see a subspace weapon capable of tearing a rift in the fabric of space-time go up against a Anti-Matter warhead of the same yeild.



No it didn't. There's more incomprehensible technobabble in that show than an Eva fan trying to explain how an AT field works.

Lets see. I was speaking more along the lines of a Star Wars Hyperdrive and a Star Trek Warp Drive as easier examples. It is quite easy to find out how each part in a Warp Drive engine works. Care to explain exactly what a Hyperdrive Motivator does?

We don't know how gravity works. If its a graviton particle or wave or something, you can build a machine to produce them with a high enough tech level. Ignoring gravity is also within physics, according to an article I read a couple of weeks ago in a scientific journal. Ignoring heat loss isn't within physics, it can't be done.

According to physics, Gravitons, like Photons, exhibit both particle characteristics and wave characteristics.

According to physics, Gravitons, like Photons, exhibit both particle characteristics and wave characteristics.

Gravitons have also never been observed and remain entirely theoretical.

Gravitons have also never been observed and remain entirely theoretical.

Actually, I heard they had used some particle accelerator and found evidence they do exist. Don't recall where though at the moment.

Actually, I heard they had used some particle accelerator and found evidence they do exist. Don't recall where though at the moment.

They've found some things that behave in a way that could imply gravity has particulate properties, but nothing concrete enough to put the existence of the graviton in mainstream physics.

Note, I SAID DESTRUCTIVE POWER, NOT YEILD. The Son'a had such a weapon.

Same thing.

I would like to see a subspace weapon capable of tearing a rift in the fabric of space-time go up against a Anti-Matter warhead of the same yeild.The definition of 'yield' escapes you, huh?

In any case, the result would be pretty clear - a milligram of MAM reaction beats the wrist-training exercises of authors neglected by nature (It forgot to add length and girth...) by many orders of magnitude. See, whatever you do - An actual explosion >>> Silly SciFi techbabble hastily written on a few sheets of paper.

Lets see. I was speaking more along the lines of a Star Wars Hyperdrive and a Star Trek Warp Drive as easier examples. It is quite easy to find out how each part in a Warp Drive engine works. Care to explain exactly what a Hyperdrive Motivator does?Oh? So this is why we've built them, huh?

Oh, wait... They're just imaginations and plot devices. The're not actually real and thus don't require - Indeed, shouldn't actually have - a 'Technological' explanation.

And now, Monsieur - Stop arguing with what you've seen in (Made-up, in case you didn't know. And I fear you do, indeed, not know...) SciFi shows and/ or novels, and try to use the knowledge you may (Should) have acquired in highschool.

It is quite easy to find out how each part in a Warp Drive engine works.

Yes, they don't. You should probably try reading 'The Physics of Star Trek' before claiming any Treknology could actually work.

is it just me or have we slightly drifted off the point...

i've been reading the whole thread. it's not just you, and it's Definatly not just slightly.

though the bit about the honorverse was pretty interesting. i like those books.

er, me no use a reactor when in stealth mode. and at that point, i just soak up external radiation to provide power for my few operative systems. (lights, air circulation, some command systems) I cant be bothered to use stealth much anyway...


It's not really that big of a deal. Heat emissions are just a big uneven cloud. Even if they do get to the ship's sensors without taking years to travel through thousands of miles of space, and even if they don't dissipate by then, it's still very hard to get an EXACT fix on an enemy in a heat cloud.

I'll just trace your missiles back to the launcher. And your fighters will be too busy dodging missiles to spot me.
What if they have a stealth casing that falls off once they've moved a certain distance, then heads back to the ship to be recycled and used for another missile? About the missiles, my star fighters cost $2.1 billion and have soo many decoys that they're virtually immune to small missiles with limited computing capability.

Heat emissions are just a big uneven cloud. Even if they do get to the ship's sensors without taking years to travel through thousands of miles of spaceHeat... Infrared radiation... Photons... Speed of light in the vacuum... faster... Much... Much... Much faster...

Yeah, but you don't need to detect them as far out as the sun is from the earth, so it doesn't need to be as hot.

It is? I didn't know that, very nice. Well if you want to spend lots of money insulating your stealth ships with it, then I guess you could hide your heat emissions. Just have to be careful your reactor heat doesn't fry the crew when it stacks up :p

I'm shooting blind here, since I've never had the pleasure of measuring a CA's IR signature and how soon it disappears, but even with the IR signature of a village--or perhaps a heavily-industrialized suburb, as I imagine it would be like--it probably wouldn't get very far. Now, electrical emissions? That's far more practical for detecting ships, in addition to old-fashioned radar.

On a side note, I do agree with your assessment of the "perfect" insulator. It would either have to radiate inward, where it cooks the people inside like so much sardines in a can, or radiate outward.

er, yeah, and if a composite can exist, so can its anti-composite.

Right, nevermind. http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y273/blast_archives/Emotes/icon_ninja.gif

Yes, they don't. You should probably try reading 'The Physics of Star Trek' before claiming any Treknology could actually work.

Sorry, meant to say, "supposed to work". My bad.

Sorry, meant to say, "supposed to work". My bad.

Actually, it's far less obnoxious when you only have a vague idea how something works. Think about it: all that time in Voyager episodes where Janeway and someone else are running through that episode's list of Treknobabble about the latest exotic particle or new type of radiation, what's actually happening in the story? Nothing. It's padding to make the episode last 45 minutes, using scientific-sounding terms, and is not a good thing.

What does a Hyperdrive Motivator do? 'Something important involving hyperdrive.' Right, clear to carry on with the story. Same with the Heisenberg compensators and inertial dampers on Trek ships; nobody's ever even tried to explain how they work, they just do. That's how silly technology should be handled; the more you try to explain it, the more obvious it becomes that you're just making stuff up to fill the hole where the plot should be.

You're not hearing me are you? We have proven gravity exists. I control, increase, decrease, and ignore gravity on a regular basis. If I can do that with Gravity, which we have incontrovertable proof of, I can do it with ANYTHING. Either I can't affect gravity, or I can affect everything else.

At which point you lose all sense of credibility. It's like that Science Fiction Writer's fallacy - "I've already broken relativity, why not go all the way and break everything else!"

You can get away with breaking a law or two from time to time, but not all the time. As a rule of thumb you should hang on to as many physics as your technology allows for. Sure, you break the laws of gravity with one tech, but don't do all-or-nothing.

We're co-operative storytelling here, not godgaming to win.

Ok i have not read this entire forum cuz im either tired or just too lazy...
Big ships can be stealthy too if you have a cloaking device or a disguise for the ships. Like in this one book Star Wars Visions of the Future 2 Imperial Star Destroyers were cloaked making them look like an orbiting comet. It even fools scans into believing it is indeed a comet. And i agree small ships have their roles but how do you suppose it takes on a Super Command Ship a thousand times its size.

single-use high-power lasers...
punch a big hole right through almost any ship...

single-use high-power lasers...
punch a big hole right through almost any ship...

You can put that on a small ship while still leaving room for all the other essential systems needed to be a ship? Are your people 2 feet tall?

Then what is to stop a big ship from having a single-use high-power shield for just such an occasion?

This is all so pointless.

Ok i have not read this entire forum cuz im either tired or just too lazy...
Big ships can be stealthy too if you have a cloaking device or a disguise for the ships. Like in this one book Star Wars Visions of the Future 2 Imperial Star Destroyers were cloaked making them look like an orbiting comet. It even fools scans into believing it is indeed a comet. And i agree small ships have their roles but how do you suppose it takes on a Super Command Ship a thousand times its size.

You can't afford to cloak very many ships, but almost all ships are fairly stealthy. When most people think of "cloaked", they mean they make the craft very, very nearly invisible, for example if they wrapped it in a different dimension to make it nearly invisible. ALL FT ships, though, have some kind of stealth ability, in the same way that the F-22 fighter isn't pure stealth because it can be detected on radar once it gets about 7-10 miles away. However, a capital ship that's a thousand times larger is going to emit A LOT more emissions than a smaller ship, and will be A LOT easier to detect.

You can put that on a small ship while still leaving room for all the other essential systems needed to be a ship? Are your people 2 feet tall?

Then what is to stop a big ship from having a single-use high-power shield for just such an occasion?

This is all so pointless.

In SOME situations, but not ALL situations, it might be best to have a few lightly-armored, short-range destroyer-size craft equipped with a single-use weapon. If the enemy uses his single-use shield to blunt your attack, you just fire the next in line destroyer once his shield burns out. And on and on, until your overwhelming numbers of high-firepower ships disable his larger one. Even one big hit on an enemy SD will probably put it out of action for a short while and make it return to base for repairs, buying you time to fight a battle without enemy capital ships getting in the way. However, this strategy might not work, though, if you get bogged down attacking his smaller ships. However, if he puts his small ships forward and his big ships too far back, you'll be able to defeat them piecemeal. And if he places them too close, you'll be able to charge for his SDs with your one-shot ships and disable them. It all depends on his tactics, your tactics, your equipment, his equipment, and other things.

In SOME situations, but not ALL situations, it might be best to have a few lightly-armored, short-range destroyer-size craft equipped with a single-use weapon. If the enemy uses his single-use shield to blunt your attack, you just fire the next in line destroyer once his shield burns out. And on and on, until your overwhelming numbers of high-firepower ships disable his larger one. Even one big hit on an enemy SD will probably put it out of action for a short while and make it return to base for repairs, buying you time to fight a battle without enemy capital ships getting in the way. However, this strategy might not work, though, if you get bogged down attacking his smaller ships. However, if he puts his small ships forward and his big ships too far back, you'll be able to defeat them piecemeal. And if he places them too close, you'll be able to charge for his SDs with your one-shot ships and disable them. It all depends on his tactics, your tactics, your equipment, his equipment, and other things.

Sticking specialized weapons, like a grav lance, for example, in a tin can or a cruiser is not a good idea. It will work the first few times you try it, but after the enemy knows about it, and is looking for that one type of ship, nothing can stop a ship of sufficient size and speed from laying the smackdown on it. If you stuck it in a battlecruiser, then I'd be inclined to agree with you, because they tend to have a good balance of survivability and speed.

Sticking specialized weapons, like a grav lance, for example, in a tin can or a cruiser is not a good idea. It will work the first few times you try it, but after the enemy knows about it, and is looking for that one type of ship, nothing can stop a ship of sufficient size and speed from laying the smackdown on it. If you stuck it in a battlecruiser, then I'd be inclined to agree with you, because they tend to have a good balance of survivability and speed.

They only get that reference if they read Honorverse. A better example would be putting an Axial laser on a Dreadnought. Sure, you'll get the jump on them once or twice, but it doesn't have the survivability to take the fire that's gonna come its way...

Any competent commander with a tightly coordinated formation of capital ships protected by lighter screening warships shouldn't be at risk from that type of strategy in the first place.

I'm not going to escalate this into a full realistic physics argument (Relativistic ships/torchships with multi petawatt weapons slagging each other in single passes) but yes - a well grouped formation of smaller capital ships (inertia) with dedicated defensive craft will be more effective than one gigantic small-asteroid sized ship bristling with weapons and heavy shielding.

It's like if you only have enough for one SD, hypothetically. You would be better off using the money to build a fleet of specialised ships instead of just the one SD. Granted, in practicality you would have enough for maybe five SDs and could build a SD and a giant fleet for it, but in FT where true shielding is possible a battlefleet may be of more value due to inertia and subsequently maneuverability.

No sense having a massive, shielded, many-gunned ship if your mass is so high that your enemy can just lob asteroids into your path and destroy you.

In anticipation of the argument that shielding can deflect that, bear in mind the speeds at which space battle would occur. You would be moving at a minimum of 10% of C (You would be going nowhere if it were any slower) so enough asteroids/K interceptors/mines would be able to overwhelm shielding eventually. Assume FTLi for this scenario.

My single use lasers are adjunct weaponry which is fired first, before the engagement, and draws the power that the drive and weapons will be getting in battle and are only mounted on my frigates and line-of-battle-ships. (2nd and 1st rates...) and are dropped on firing, so the ship is just as effective.
I try to use them to knock a hole in the enemy escort formation, so my escorts can mop up the other guys, and then help out a bit against the enemy capital ships, rather than trying to hurt the enemy capital ships. i'm still in the process of using them for the first time mind, so i cant say how well they work.