That we can. Maybe I should alter my vote to two single-product Spave Factory Is: one for 5 GW Arc Reactors, 1 for "Revy's personal 100m ultra high-speed luxury space yacht/mobile space lab"--since one of the recent rulings was that we need one of those to research some of the advanced techs (like multi-core eezo drive? TIR? Which techs haven't been specified, but I presume most really advanced space techs are included).
Building a dedicated Space factory for that seems like a waste. Better to either double down on Arc Reactors (either another 5GW or a 150GW) or some other high volume (
@Hoyr What do our marketing people say sells the best/would sell the best after the Arc Reactors?) item.
Still curious as to why you want a minimum billion credit reserve, and why a "mere" 400 million is too little.
Honestly I don't know. It's really just a gut feeling. So the best justification I can give you is that it makes me feel better.
I was arguing for that before and
was vetoed.
Ah. Well that explains it.
Wait, don't particle beams still have mass, as, you know, particle beams? Or is the idea that particle beams do damage by being fast rather than being massive?
They do have mass but it's pretty tiny and they are moving rather fast. However given that we know MAC rounds can 1.3PSL I really doubt speed is that much of a factor in whether or not KBs can effect it.
Best I can come up with is that we're talking about
really low masses. Which would actually further explain why ME projectiles are so small. The smaller the mass the less they can be effected by KBs.
Question: Why aren't we setting up grants for promising students? It wouldn't cost that much, and we might get some useful people out of it.
Good idea! Another thing, along with providing venture capital funding, to add to the list of things to do.
Good to know.
A single product factory requires one less quarter then a general factory. I though about doing a -2 for the same reasons you mentioned, but it made some of the build times just too short, so I went with -1.
Yeah that makes sense. Would applying the -2 part only to Space Factories work? It could be justified as with smaller factories the difference between specialized and single product is small enough that there isn't a significant reduction in time while with larger factories it becomes significant.
Eh some of the manuvering SB we'e looked at gives a 15LY/day frigate ~36,000km/ acceleration and my spin calcs (done for that post I'm still working on), say that a 180 degree flip is a fractional second event. Which is leading me more and more to the conclusion that the is some sort of reason that ships only use those high levels of mass effect for FTL and nothing else.
Well duh.
It's pretty obvious that they
have to only use those high levels of ME in FTL only otherwise fighting would be
really different.
I can see a number of reasons for this. First off the more you decrease the ship's mass the more the light coming to it's sensors is distorted. Now going by the codex this can be accounted for but that would increase sensor lag due to the needed processing time and consume computer resources.
Furthermore it takes a lot of energy to power a ME core so the more you push it the more energy your pumping in. Not only does this reduce your drive time, important if you lose and need to escape since it reduces the number of possible directions to escape in, it would also increase heat build up therefore lowering combat endurance.
Finally the laser beams fired by the ship's GARDIANs will be distorted by the ME field which could reduce their effectiveness (going by the glow ME fields seem to scatter light).
At least that's what I can come up with off the top of my head.
Okay so this is one of those time when the game really contradicts the lore hard. Even the best of the phasic and proton round only ever do a 55% shield bypass meaning the shields are still stopping them. The Collector Particle beam, which is a continuous beam doesn't bypass shields at all. The majority of particles have mass. The no-rest mass particles* are the photon, gluon, and the it might exist but we're not sure Graviton. I'm fairly sure that the repulsor is none of those.
*Apparently some of the maybe up for debate?
Hurray for gameplay/story segregation? I mean it would be pretty sucky if phasic rounds ripped right through enemy shields (OP) and players would
hate it if an enemy (Collectors) could out and out ignore your shields and deal direct to health (or tech armor if you have it) damage.
*Begin raging at the lore* As you said a Kinetic Barrier blocks stuff, matter, things will mass. Every freaking particle beam we get a good description of in ME uses "massive" particles. Hell kinetic barriers work best against high speed low mass object. Which a particle beam's particles are! To top that off (and possibly why high speed is bad) the speed of light in the barrier is most likely lower, so you get that fun speed or light braking thing that the codex talks about and I hate. The explanations I can thing off involve braking radiation still passing though, or that barriers are reflexive.
Actually if anything I think that's what they are
least effective again. Why else would they make guns the shoot high speed low mass objects? You don't use lighting pokemon against rock pokemon, you use water pokemon (first example I thought of...).
So if anything the fact that all the guns in ME shoot low mass high speed projectiles suggests that KBs have issues dealing with that. As I speculate above my guess is that speed isn't important (that's just to keep the energy up) the mass is. The less mass something has the less effective kinetic barriers are against it.
Hate you so much ME lore so much. *Cries*
/hugs
Mind if you have a good explanation or I missed something I'm willing to hear it.
Always willing to try to explain away stupidity/inconsistency!
That's why I choose to Ignore it for the most part. All though I though it had been said before that repulsors had a charge time and then fired a beam for a bit, then charged again in weapon mode. You see the charge time (and hear the whine) in the movies. I just wasn't inclined to look it up so that may be wrong.
Edit: Ah I found the relevant bits. Repulsors can be fired continuously as long as they have power. But weapon mode takes a bit more power and using it for stuff in the "unibeam" level will drain a reactor. So yeah continuous low level fire.
Good to know! Luckily the Accipiter is kinda overpowered. It can run all 6 repuslors at 700MW each and have 800MW to spare. Given that at
most it would only ever have cause to activate 4 repulsors (Weapon, counterbalance, and dodge in the other two directions) at any given time there should always be at least 2.2GW of spare power for the weapon to draw upon.
Well yeah. I'd question the level of focusing suggested due to energy's natural inclination to spread and the fact we don't see the beams really doing the focusing thing in the movies. They always seem to look the about the same radius as the firing port (meh movies). The level of focusing is a key factor for armor damage. Really are to many unknown to try to guess repulsor beam spread.
Indeed. That's why I said it's the real question (for the GM!
). Running quickly through the notable numbers:
100mm = 3,184,713 = 3.1MPa
90mm = 3,930,818 = 3.9MPa
80mm = 4,970,179 = 5MPa
70mm = 6,493,506 = 6.5MPa
60mm = 8,833,922 = 8.8MPa
50mm = 12,755,102 = 12.8MPa
40mm = 19,841,270 = 19.8MPa
30mm = 35,360,679 = 35.4MPa
20mm = 79,617,834 = 79.6MPa
10mm = 318,471,338 = 318.4MPa
5mm = 1,275,510,204 = 1.3GPa
1mm = 31,847,133,758 = 31.8GPa
Huh. Turns out I screwed up my prior numbers. Whoops. I've triple checked these so hopefully they are right.
5MPa = max estimated rated pressure of the
Seawolf SSN submarine
9.2MPa = Atmosphere of Venus.
15MPa = yield strength of human skin
21MPa = pressure inside an aluminium scuba tank
70MPa = yield strength of copper
250MPa = yield strength of structural steel (A36)
941MPa = yield strength of tungsten
1.5GPa = tensile strength of
Inconel 625
2.6GPa = yield strength Steel, 2800 Maraging steel
So really it's up to you to determine just how much damage you want the Repulsor beam to do. Although
@TheEyes brings up an interesting idea. Perhaps there is some kind of lensing effect going on so that rather then forming a really narrow beam it instead focuses that beam on a really narrow point.
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