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I would imagine it would skirt too close to ai for council races. Though humans being humans we should have had true ai before first contact. After all we're already working on it.
Distance Learning for fun and profit...
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
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There was a crowdfunded multiplayer newtonian space battle game in development a few years ago, haven't followed up on that for a long time now...
EDIT: looks like they actually made it:
Infinity: Battlescape
Infinity: Battlescape is a space combat shooter involving hundreds of players across an entire to-scale solar system filled with planets, moons, asteroid belts, and other celestial phenomena. Seamless planetary transitions will bring combat from deep space to the surface of alien worlds without...
www.inovaestudios.com
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1) If you made a missile the cost of an F-22, in it's "low-rate-production" status, it would probably be the equivalent of an ICBM in effectiveness. You only NEED to fire one.
2) The below is accurate. Between life support, mass, and multi-function electronics, that also add mass/complexity, a gross-estimate of the pilot support is a full third - or more - of said F-22. This does not take into account the reduction in cost of fuel or engines a reduced sized for missiles would require, nor the reduction in cost of minimizing parts, assembly, or QC costs.
3) "Economies of scale" start taking effect when you can maximize automation, or ensuring long-term contracts, to offset the costs of "unique" equipment costs, assembly line costs, variable rate supply costs, human employment costs, and human training costs. For example, from my active duty days, a certain field radio was estimated to cost $60k a copy for low-rate production, $43k a copy for medium-rate production, and about $25k a copy for high-rate production. For another perspective, a B-2 bomber, which is very limited in number and does not have "mature" tech that is easily manufactured at a random manufactory, has a fleet of about 30 and costs as much individually as an Arleigh Burke class destroyer while having specialized, but functionally less capability or economy to operate.
Edit: To address the issue about control surfaces: No, they can't be made to cheaply take advantage of aerodynamic control surfaces. This is offset, however, by not having to deal with aerodynamic drag, possible vector control of the primary thrust, and relatively cheap, by highly effective, attitude control thrusters that would also allow mostly similar programming for maneuverability of the missiles due to effective similarities.
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I seem to remember that you could do interesting things in wing commander though it did fly more like a fight sim that didn't have gravity pulling downrather than a true zero g game.
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Yep.
In essence the council species are using WWI/II tactics and strategies in spaaaaace, but the tech should have replaced that with something much more fitting for the setting. It's like using cavalry charges when faced with tanks. The end result should be lots of little pieces of ground meat that are quite well cooked...
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
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As I recall, at least Human ships in ME still only had EM sensors; visible light and heat. I don't know that any race had gravitic sensors.
As Hermione Granger once said, "Nothing says 'you annoyed me' better than tactical nuclear weapons."
I'm very tempted to write a fairly short ME story based on what would happen if the canon ME scenario ran into humans who'd kept the Cold War mentality going until that point... Not sure how they'd have actually survived doing this, but we can put it down to plot armor
Because that would in a way be grimly hilarious; Turians decide to 'punish' the new species for breaking a law that doesn't apply to them, take out a civilian science vessel, and try to invade Shanxi... Only to run into massive amounts of anti-shipping missile fire that takes out most of their drop ships with pinpoint neutron warheads, ground based lasers that punch holes in the capital ships, thousands of satellite weapons that were at one point aimed at each other but now are all aimed at them, and if any of them manage to get to the ground, they find the crazy apes are firing nuclear mortars at them! With neutron bomb warheads small enough to fit several in a backpack. And chemical weapons, and Spirits know what else.
And once all the invaders are dead, the humans go looking for where they came from, with an eye towards making sure they never come back...
Hmm... A fleet of about ten thousand smart bombs with gigaton yields sent through the mass relay network aimed at Palaven? And as they pass through each Relay, a couple of dozen stay behind and nuke it.
It's the only way to be sure, after all
There's so much basic science fiction you can mine for working weapons if you assume Eezo basically lets you play with mass. Bomb-pumped lasers, sure. Alan Dean Foster style SCAAM projectors. Mass Drivers? Let's take HALO ODP's that fire a 200kg slug at 10% the speed of light that masses 2kg at launch and 2000kg after.....(so much free energy!).
I mean you've got eezo, can you generate gravitons? Do they exist? Screw lasers, let's fire coherent gravity beams as a sort of "welcome to Shanxi, you jerks" message.
And all that crap about how nobody ever rams at FTL because of "safety interlocks from the Protheans everyone based everything on". Bull-crap. Someone would engineer out the controls from first principles, not just blindly copy a prothean design, so of course you have FTL kinetic kill vehicles.
That doesn't even get to the weird fact that they have specialized small unit ammo, but not specialized slugs for their warships?
"Well we have disrupter ammo, armor piercing ammo, incendiary rounds, polonium rounds, shredder rounds, etc, etc, etc for our hand guns. But for our ships we just basically picked up this rock and thought "Good enough"" ?
Where's your 20kg slug that, if the cheap computer onboard realizes it's going to miss it's evading target, explodes sending out bomb pumped lasers? The one that fragments into waves of flechettes to overwhelm shields? The one whose mass quadruples right before impact? The one who uses the impact energy to cause a brief fusion event, meaning if nothing else you fry it's hull sensors and vulnerable electronics?
The shells we fire from tanks today, with no space magic, do crazy things ---- did we forget all that in favor of "Throw rock very hard"?
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I'd read a proper version of that.I'm very tempted to write a fairly short ME story based on what would happen if the canon ME scenario ran into humans who'd kept the Cold War mentality going until that point... Not sure how they'd have actually survived doing this, but we can put it down to plot armor
Because that would in a way be grimly hilarious; Turians decide to 'punish' the new species for breaking a law that doesn't apply to them, take out a civilian science vessel, and try to invade Shanxi... Only to run into massive amounts of anti-shipping missile fire that takes out most of their drop ships with pinpoint neutron warheads, ground based lasers that punch holes in the capital ships, thousands of satellite weapons that were at one point aimed at each other but now are all aimed at them, and if any of them manage to get to the ground, they find the crazy apes are firing nuclear mortars at them! With neutron bomb warheads small enough to fit several in a backpack. And chemical weapons, and Spirits know what else.
And once all the invaders are dead, the humans go looking for where they came from, with an eye towards making sure they never come back...
Hmm... A fleet of about ten thousand smart bombs with gigaton yields sent through the mass relay network aimed at Palaven? And as they pass through each Relay, a couple of dozen stay behind and nuke it.
It's the only way to be sure, after all
Yep, I got kind of rambley, but the ME universe does really need a wake up call. The fact that humans are the first and only species(including Reapers and presumably past species) to use dedicated carriers says something ain't right.
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I've always wondered why the ME races don't deploy Sun Walls around their restricted-access relays. Far enough away not to damage the relays themselves, and close enough that any unfriendly force jumping in is liable to get an accute case of instant sunshine.
The basics of a sun wall is that you take a crapload of simple nukes, as many as you can get your hands on, and simply plonk them down in a many-layered sphere around the Relay a few kilometers deep. Leave, maybe 100m between the nukes, and just let them float there. Peaceful and serene, as long as no unfriendly IF/F transponder pops out of the relay. That makes them mad you see.
And once they're mad, they have a tendancy to go poof. but they also tend to take whatever made them mad go poof too.
They're insanely effective area-denial weapons, and this is just deploying them like minefields. Imagine the havoc that a few dozen (thousand) mininukes fired ahead of the main fleet would have caused the Reapers during the Battle for Earth. They wouldn't even need to be missiles, just launched munitions like a battleship-grade shell. Hell, might even fire them from the dreadnoughts, admittedly at less acceleration since they'd be more delicate, and you wouldn't want one going off inside the barrel.
Jacket them with X-ray lasers with tiny self-orientating systems so that when the nukes go off, dozens of disco-lasers go off in the middle of the Reaper fleet. Then hundreds. Then thousands, as the purpose-built Geth launch platforms that have been seeding themselves along the Kuiper Belt begin lobbing their produce at the Reapers on timed trajectories to intersect with their fleet just as they're maneuvering to intercept the Allied Races fleet.
If you want a stunning portrayal of how Z-G combat might work, I cannot recommend the book "Footfall", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell. The Archangel was an Orion-Drive, a pulsed nuclear rocket that had atom bombs as the motive force. A 10m thick slab of iron was the "engine bell", and between that and "The Brick", which was the command center and main body of the ship, was the mother of all shock absorbers.
Atop the Brick, which had two nuclear power plants to generate steam for attitude control, was the Shield, an armored shell that overhung the sides of the Brick, and shaddowed its cargo: The guns off the Iowa sisters (all that remained), fitted with a reload mechanism, a magazine, and a maneuvering unit. Oh, and they were firing the Iowa's nuclear shells.
They also had all four Space Shuttles, each carrying 15 of the upper-stage chunks of the US's supply of Nuclear ICBMs. They wouldn't need the lower stages, since they'd be launched from high orbit, and their target was the alien starship that had smashed the Earth and tried to conquer it.
Sorry for waxing poetic, but it was a DAMN good read.
"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad."
The basics of a sun wall is that you take a crapload of simple nukes, as many as you can get your hands on, and simply plonk them down in a many-layered sphere around the Relay a few kilometers deep. Leave, maybe 100m between the nukes, and just let them float there. Peaceful and serene, as long as no unfriendly IF/F transponder pops out of the relay. That makes them mad you see.
And once they're mad, they have a tendancy to go poof. but they also tend to take whatever made them mad go poof too.
They're insanely effective area-denial weapons, and this is just deploying them like minefields. Imagine the havoc that a few dozen (thousand) mininukes fired ahead of the main fleet would have caused the Reapers during the Battle for Earth. They wouldn't even need to be missiles, just launched munitions like a battleship-grade shell. Hell, might even fire them from the dreadnoughts, admittedly at less acceleration since they'd be more delicate, and you wouldn't want one going off inside the barrel.
Jacket them with X-ray lasers with tiny self-orientating systems so that when the nukes go off, dozens of disco-lasers go off in the middle of the Reaper fleet. Then hundreds. Then thousands, as the purpose-built Geth launch platforms that have been seeding themselves along the Kuiper Belt begin lobbing their produce at the Reapers on timed trajectories to intersect with their fleet just as they're maneuvering to intercept the Allied Races fleet.
If you want a stunning portrayal of how Z-G combat might work, I cannot recommend the book "Footfall", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell. The Archangel was an Orion-Drive, a pulsed nuclear rocket that had atom bombs as the motive force. A 10m thick slab of iron was the "engine bell", and between that and "The Brick", which was the command center and main body of the ship, was the mother of all shock absorbers.
Atop the Brick, which had two nuclear power plants to generate steam for attitude control, was the Shield, an armored shell that overhung the sides of the Brick, and shaddowed its cargo: The guns off the Iowa sisters (all that remained), fitted with a reload mechanism, a magazine, and a maneuvering unit. Oh, and they were firing the Iowa's nuclear shells.
They also had all four Space Shuttles, each carrying 15 of the upper-stage chunks of the US's supply of Nuclear ICBMs. They wouldn't need the lower stages, since they'd be launched from high orbit, and their target was the alien starship that had smashed the Earth and tried to conquer it.
Sorry for waxing poetic, but it was a DAMN good read.
"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad."
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
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A few kilometers is too close. Mass Relay transit causes what is called 'drift': You end up slightly (or not so slightly) off from where you were going. A single small ship with a really damned good helmsman can cut that drift to just under fifteen hundred kilometers from the Relay. The more mass you send through, the higher the drift. Send a fleet through all at once, and you're going to spend quite a bit of time just getting them all back together.
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That is also fine. These things would only be used around the most heavily defended relays, and most civilian traffic wouldn't even know they're there. They're small, dense lumps of very cold matter that isn't doing anything, just waiting for a signal to go poof. They don't emit any signals they don't emit much heat, they don't even emit any noticable radiation, because that's -stupid-.
They just hang around, waiting for a signal to interdict the relay. And anyone coming through after that is going to get a warm welcome.
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I have to say this now but my we are a vindictive and blood thirsty bunch tonight 
I'm finding the first surprising, but you're not the only one to say it. The latter is definitely only going to be true if you're willing to make the drone fighters less full-featured...though you probably are, since it's more expendable than a crewed plane and has the edge of not being subject to human g-limits. And taking away the cockpit overhead makes it more practical to go small, too.
No, if you were in the range of a cruise missile, it wouldn't do what you're saying it does. That's where I was coming from to begin with. Cruise missiles don't have the situational awareness, agility, or other countermeasures to defend themselves against intercepting aircraft. You obviously could give them those capabilities assuming you've got smart enough control systems (which you probably do), but you'd be adding expensive sensors and other features that most missiles don't have or need.If, on the other hand, you want to make a fire and forget sort of thing, you're in the range of a Tomahawk cruise missile, only much quicker. Those things are about 1.5 million dollars apiece, which the US military seems to think is quite affordable. Proportionally the ME humans could easily afford to make thousands of things of this general nature by that point. Even hundreds would turn the tide of many if not most battles...
As far as the extreme maneuvers goes, that's what the mass effect fields are for; Reduce the mass of the missile to make it easy to throw around with fairly modest thrusters. If it works for fighters, and it pretty much has to or they'd be sitting ducks, it works for missiles
I hate to say this, but it is in fact legal, on an international basis, as shown in this article from the UK. Wanted DEAD or alive: The FOUR men we need to STOP to put an end to ISIS
Note this line in the article: "The Iraqi-born 44-year-old has a $10million (£6.3m) bounty for information leading to his capture or death."
Capture or death... sounds like wanted dead or alive to me.
Can anyone better versed in UK newspapers tell me how reliable the Express is?
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Found it again and man has it grown:
Infinity: Battlescape
Infinity: Battlescape is a space combat shooter involving hundreds of players across an entire to-scale solar system filled with planets, moons, asteroid belts, and other celestial phenomena. Seamless planetary transitions will bring combat from deep space to the surface of alien worlds without...
www.inovaestudios.com
So you're saying instead of a few hours it'd take forever to piece the invading fleet together.
Since, you know they'd be spread over an even wider area, individually.
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Correct. The thing is, Cruise Missiles usually don't -need- countermeasures like that, not when they can hit supersonic speeds, or even hypersonic nowadays. Any human pilot that tried that would be strawberry jam on toast somewhere near the aft end of the missile. The acceleration needed to send that large a missile hurtling at hypersonic velocities would kill the pilot, unless some sort of inertial dampeners were involved.
Missiles depend on raw speed and maneuverability to get to the target before it can get away or send up too much shit for its tiny computer brain to deal with. This is why telemetry-operated drones can be so goddamn nasty: all the benefits of a missile, with a human piloting it.
So you're saying instead of a few hours it'd take forever to piece the invading fleet together.
I'm more thinking it'd be a "which gas molecules were part of the target and which were parts of which bombs?" situation.
Did you deliberately ignore the part where the source is the US State Department?
There's a world of difference between a private citizen calling for something like this and a government doing it.
Also, they are offering the bounty for information leading to capture or death.
Information. They want to grab him, not have you go out and do it.
Again a very different thing.
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- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Current cruise missiles don't have those things, yes, because as said they don't need them as the first thing, and because they're based for the most part on tech that was cutting edge in the 80s. Back then it cost millions of dollars per unit to have a computer that could do terrain following by image recognition from a camera at low altitudes and high speeds.
Now it's a single ten dollar chip.
Computer tech has moved on a lot in the intervening time. The expensive sensors and processing and so on are pretty much commodity products these days. You could literally build a functional cruise missile with a 500 mile range and a decent payload from parts from a good model shop, including a turbine engine, for a few thousand dollars. The only thing I'm surprised about is that no one has actually done it yet...
When you're making a manned fighter, not only is there a very large cost penalty for making it survivable for the pilot, but because of that you need to make the entire thing to aerospace specs, which also adds a couple of decimal places to what otherwise would be a complex but not extortionately so machine. Take out the pilot, dump all the weight of the hardware needed for them to control the thing and live to tell the tale, that allows you do downsize it significantly for the same payload. This makes it much cheaper. Since you no longer need to keep a human alive for long enough to do their job and return (or not depending on how good they are vs how good the enemy is) you can make the drone fighter much cheaper still if you drop the human rating of the aircraft to something considerably less exacting. You also have far less in the way of support systems required to maintain a fleet of the things in the field, since if nothing else you don't need to have lots of pilots and support staff on standby. This reduces system cost even further.
The end result is a very inexpensive, by manned aircraft terms, vehicle which is still reliable enough for a weapons system, and sufficiently low cost that you can field lots of them per existing fighter. They'll be far more lethal in combat, especially if the opponent is still using actual people to fly their aircraft on a one to one basis, you don't really mind if half of them end up getting shot down in the end since you can make more at low(ish) cost and don't need to write a lot of letters to relatives, and there's a good chance that in fact most of them will come back since they're that much more effective anyway.
Now, of course all of this is predicated on a computer system good enough and smart enough to properly replace a pilot, but that's something that's right on the cusp of happening even now. Give it twenty years and only third world countries will fly manned aircraft in battle. And they'll lose 99 times out of 100 to the robot fighters because they simply can't keep up...
At the same rate of progress, by 2175 or whenever canon ME happens, there shouldn't have been any piloted fighters at all. That the Citadel species were using them shows that they are in that respect at least not really any more advanced than 21st century earth-type humans... And makes one wonder why.
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What is this "good skynet mini-series; and why have I not ever heard of it before?
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That's not how acceleration works at all. Going fast, in or out of atmosphere, doesn't cause or require you to experience high g-forces. Though it might be how it works in a Mass Effect analogy, since given no shortage of delta-V spacecraft do just keep accelerating. However, a fighter doesn't have to keep up with a missile to make an attack run on it.
(Also, older cruise missiles were actually quite slow, and hypersonic ones haven't made it into service yet, but that's a side track.)
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
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- in lockdown waiting and bored...
This is Sufficient Velocity.I have to say this now but my we are a vindictive and blood thirsty bunch tonight
Our forum is literally named after the easiest way to weaponize something.
A good chunk of us are also on Space battles.
I don't think I need to state the obvious there do I?
So yeah. We are bloodthirsty about this sort of thing.
FaerieKnight79
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At the time, "dead or alive" bounties were not a legal writ allowing you to kill the person listed. They were a reward for bringing in the person, with the payout not requiring the person to be alive. They were expected and suppose to be captured alive though. There were self defense laws in place that would allow you to kill the felon if they were actively attacking you or if they were actively fleeing (since this could be to draw you into a trap). Since the capture likely happened in the middle of nowhere, there was no proof one way or the other if the bounty hunter claimed the person had attacked them or was running away. Note also that such bounties were typically paid to law enforcement officers. It was typically law officers who would track down and capture someone with a bounty on their head. Also, even if all/most of the work was done by civilians... law officers were still likely to get the lions share of the bounty. The Fred brothers, for example, might have killed Jesse James by shooting him in the back. But even after they were pardoned by the governor... they still got only a tiny fraction of the reward. Most of it was paid to the local sheriff... who had not been involved at all in taking down Jesse James.
This is funny because their pseudo-physics directly explains why FTL ramming shouldn't work. The basic, relay-less Mass Effect FTL works in part by reducing the vehicle's apparent mass to zero. That means it doesn't have the kinetic energy its rest mass and speed would imply. If they do turn up its mass above zero, that means it's no longer FTL-capable.
Reasoning based on Mass Effect's pesudo-physics is not particularly reliable. But the writers easily could have explained it that way.