Hrm, so the 20 million is just for excavation and building underground? Then there are two more problems I think we might need to solve:
1) As someone mentioned a bit ago, we need a free (automated?) shuttle service to and from Elysium's capital.
Well I mentioned a hyperloop but I suppose a shuttle works as well. Having it be free would be pretty simple. Repulsor engines, Arc Reactor, and advanced VI mean the only operating cost would be maintenance.
2) Living underground is taxing because there are no windows. Maybe we should invest in large holographic curtain-walls that project an aboveground view? The fact that said curtain-walls can also be used as the world's biggest game displays is
entirely beside the point.
Wall curtains? No. Just make all the walls actual displays. I know it can be done since the Queensland University of Technology (where I went for my degrees) has this three story building with this massive central column that is entirely covered in a giant computer display. It was
really cool, though not very useful.
Yeah, 22 seconds to orbit is pretty crazy, although by the end of that atmospheric boost stage you're moving at ~10,000 m/s so we'll need to put these drones into some sort of protective shell for the ascent.
It's not the final velocity we need to worry about but the initial. It's in the first 10km, 6 seconds, that is the biggest concern since that's where most the atmosphere, and hence heat, is. Given that as I said the Sprint missile can fly through that at
ludicrous speed without melting (although it hits 2,000C) it's doable.
That reminds me, have we ever figured out a good reason for ME to be using fighters instead of drones? I'm kind of concerned that our anti-starship drones are cheating, since they're sort of relying on warfare principles that, somehow, ME races have all determined to be infeasible over the last 2,000 years. Maybe those GARDIAN lasers are super-efficient at taking down anything that's not wrapped in a refractive NME field, and our non-ME drones will be taken out by the thousands?
You have to remember the difference between these drones and anything ME can field; unlimited amounts of large thrust. An Accipiter has an insane acceleration at 3.5km/s/s and can maintain that for months on end.
Up until now there has been
nothing that can do that. They had a choice between either chemical rockets, which provided large accelerations but little endurance, and anti-matter, which provided medium acceleration and lots of endurance.
So basically
every fighter had to have an eezo core if it actually wanted to move fast enough in space to be relevant. At that point fighters are valuable enough that you want to keep them.
ME races seem to have an obsession with the idea that drones are disposable, which is probably why AIs keep rebelling, for some reason. Best as I can figure they never really got combat algorithms working well enough for drones to be anything but disposable. That or by the time they did get them good enough the culture of "Drone = Disposable" had already dug itself in
Paragon Industries meanwhile brings three revolutionary things to the table:
1)We have, AFAIK, the best VI software that exists. Period. The only way it could be better is if we upgraded to AI (and using AIs for disposable drones would be immoral as hell)
2)We have the engine technology (repulsors) that gives insane acceleration and endurance without requiring Eezo.
3)Our drones are at
worst 74 times smaller then a fighter and more realistically closer to one five hundredth the size.
The end result is that we have yet another revolutionary product that could change the way war is conducted. Just like the Legionary and the Tiger.
@UberJJK, since your vote seems likely to win at this point (lost my first-mover advantage, darn it!), I have to ask: do you have an investment plan for this 5.4 billion credits that you're planning on not spending on factories, or is it just sitting in a giant vault at zero interest like Scrooge McDuck?
Hmm. Well LSD costs 123,000USD per gallon. An Olympic swimming pool contains 660,000 gallons. So a swimming pool of LSD would cost 81 billion credits if it still costs as much in the future as it does now. That seems a little expensive. Amusingly enough at 4.4 billion credits we could afford to fill that pool with something that costs 6,666.66666666cr per gallon.
Hmm at 1,500USD per gallon we could swim in a literal pool of blood! I wonder how much Batarian blood costs?
Jokes aside I have been considering plans to put that money to use and will probably end up writing up some of them in the nearby future.
I actually have the same question about the 400 million credits I have left over at the end of my spending plan. If we're really bound and determined to keep billions of credits sitting around in a slush fund like we're an insurance company, we should do what insurance companies do and invest that capital in something, either that or issue dividends and spend it all on a gigantic shopping trip or something (maybe we can build our own private Factory III under our house?)
I do like the idea of issuing a dividend. Expect for one small problem. What the hell would Revy, and her parents, do with it? Revy already receives a million credits a quarter.
To put that into perspective she gets 11,111cr per day and has done so for over a year and a half now. Given how much time she spends in the lab I imagine most of that just pools in her bank account.
Revy's parents meanwhile live in a 10 million credit house, have access to the most advanced technology in the world, and just got back from an all expenses paid week long trip to Earth. I really doubt there is much they'd want to spend (large) amounts of money on. Not to mention the awkwardness.
I don't think anyone has ever proposed a good reason for piloted fighter over drone fighters that follows from the setting other than A) not trusting autonomous systems and B) Accountability for high powered weapons.
*points above*
A cultural perception that drones are disposable and that fighters are expensive enough that they need a human pilot to take care of them. Best I can come up with.
Personally unless there is a major size difference between a fighter and a drone fighter they look about the same to me. Pilots even good ones are fairly cheap compared to the cost of a fighter. Using the visuals to guesstimate (I'm using that word a lot), You'd save like 1/6 the volume deleting the cockpit. Repulsors would save little on the already tinny fighter drives and and the arc-reactor might save some.
Other then that its still small and easily lasered.
That comes into one of the revolutionary things about our drones. They are several tens to hundreds of times smaller.
Well yeah, Even my more anemic guesstimates indicate that the guardian array of a light frigate (four turrets with LoS per hemisphere, 20 MW .01s pulses 50% duty cycle) murder like 200 of them per second. And that's a really really low estimate, higher. It's probably higher (IDK 4,000 per second?, eh might not be able to track fast enough...).
The big advantage is the 10km range. With it's acceleration an Accipiter can likely play keep ahead of the turrets (IE dodging from their movements) within 1km of the ship.
All they need to do is make it through the 9km kill zone.
With a 2km breaking range (1km from each side of the ship) they would be limited to no more then:
V = 3,500t
V/3,500 = t
2,000 = 0.5*3,500*t^2
2,000 = 1,750*t^2
t^2 = 1.14 seconds
V^2/12,250,000 = 1.14
V^2 = 1.14 * 12,250,000
V^2= 14,000,000
V = 3,741.66m/s
Of course that is only the speed they have to enter the 2km sweet spot. If they decelerate during the 9km kill zone they can try and make it through faster.
9,000 = -1,750t^2 + ut
3,741.66 = -1,750t + u
u= 3741.66 + 1,750t
9,000 = -1,750t^2 + t(3741.66 + 1,750t)
9,000 = -1,750t^2 + 3741.66t + 1,750t^2
9,000 = 3741.66t
t = 9,000/3741.66
t = 2.41 seconds
u= 3741.66 + 1,750*2.41
u= 3741.66 + 4209.36
u= 7,951m/s
So by flying into the kill zone and decelerating they can get through faster. 2.41 seconds is a long time in laser combat but it's far better then anything else.
Mind I am assuming that the turrets can spin really fast, existing CIWS can do ~115 degrees/s. But that's spinning a giant (6 freaking tonnes!) heavy device. This is an about a meter wide object at a guess and it has very little mass. RL electric motors can do thousands of RPM or thousands of degrees per second. I imagine that space future motors can do insane speeds and stop with laser precision (man that's bad
).
On the other hand these mirrors seem to be under a lot of strain so they might not be able to handle the high accelerations. Also don't underestimate the mass here. A mirror 1m in diameter and 5cm thick masses 100kg. It's certainly not light given that they need to be thick enough to not melt, apparently an issue for ME
.
Of course that's not taking into account the time the drones spend in the engagement envelope which is where things get confusing and I have to start guessing. The writers of ME really seem to have ignored the space combat element or failed to explain things like why we don't see high speed combat. And they really missed on the idea of relative veocity and other important space details.
Were is my duct tape?
Heh. Originally my idea was for the Accipiter to blast a hole into an enemy ship and blast it from the inside. Then I realized that if it could do that it could simply blast it from the outside.
I'm going to have to rate you drones at "annoying" barring large swarms.
How large? I wouldn't be surprised if a 100 or so could actually make it through and begin ripping the enemy ship apart.
