ReaperofInterest
Herald of Disaster
WHAT the bloody hell is that and how small do your man parts need to be to justify even HAVING it, let alone using it?What do we need to make this?
Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution
- Thread starter Hoyr
- Start date
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Supermaterials for one.What do we need to make this?
To abolish the square-cube law for another.
That is a Mavor. Which is the biggest, longest range artillery cannon in Supreme Commander, which slings nukes across the entire map. And the biggest maps are 81 by 81 kilometers.
And quite frankly, it should have anti orbital capabilities.
Anti orbital cannons are already (and have long since) been a thing in Mass Effect, as evidenced during ME3 when you have to take back an old krogan facility on Tuchanka Cerberus had been using to make trouble with.
- Location
- America
Or a sort of space magic field that we can erect to decrease the mass of the barrel.
United Earth Federation T4 Experimental Artillery Emplacement.
Codename: Mavor
It fires kiloton scale nuclear shells out to a minimum distance of 29.3 kilometers and a maximum distance of 781 kilometers. (it has been stated that there is like, 10x gravity or something in the game)
Decim
On again, off again lurker.
- Location
- St. Louis, MO
That my friend is the UEF's Mavor. For some sense of scale, the blue dots near the Mavor's base are Mech Marines which fire 16 in. shells as their primary armament. So yeah, the Mavor is massive.
Edit: double
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Hm, that's a good point; other than the 50% carrier savings I hadn't really considered other cost-savers in our tech tree. I am curious, though, as to how a missile boat like my Trierarch concept would stack up against a more traditional MAC-equipped frigate, or even a group of them. To a first approximation, it seems to me that an anti-ship missile VLS would have a much higher initial rate of fire compared to the traditional frigate, with the downside of limited ammo and more expensive reloads. The disadvantages to me would seem to be worth the trade-off, especially for pickets around a colony world where supply lines are relatively short, but I guess that sort of depends on how anti-ship missiles compare to MAC-fire in a shootout.
Amberion
Mighty #9
The best part of the Bolo isn't the Hellbore, its the personality.... They are so noble and self sacrificing! The endings of their stories always make me cry >_>
Yeah...A.I.s that we can say "yes" to if they ask if they have a soul.
Hopefully we won't screw up and make Ogres instead.
- Location
- United States
The picture you have is very strange. It's as if somebody build a tank whose primary battlefield doctrine begins with "get surrounded". Can it unleash more than a half of it's firepower at a single target? Or it's reactor so underpowered that it can't fire more than half guns at once?
Depending on the mark, it is entirely possible that it can flip itself onto its sides with anti-grav and then fire everything at a single target. That being said, when would it ever, ever need to? The main guns double as orbital defense cannon. Also, it may be hard to tell, but they include an anti-kinetic battlescreen, VLRS and mortars. "Get surrounded" would be Bolo for "optimal target saturation" if they didn't also play at being snipers, and occasionally ninja. And if "Get surrounded" wasn't already Bolo for "Terrible Idea".
I don't think it is an official Bolo picture, however.
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Amberion
Mighty #9
It's not, but it's pretty damn close to what the official ones show. Let me see if I can find some good ones. Mostly from book covers.
Bolos are typically assigned one to a planet for picket duty. Having a bolo on your colony world was pretty damn good security, and many colonies advertised the bolo's presence as a deterrent to invaders. Nobody wants to tangle with one of these guys.
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- Location
- America
Nah, picket duty was for Golems. Having a single bolo on your planet meant that the entire planet was considered heavily defended.
Amberion
Mighty #9
Just for clarification for those not in the know, a Golem is basically a Bolo chassis with slightly fewer weapons and no AI.
MAC of however long that barrel is? That's pretty much it.
I'm going to change that most likely... turns out I used some bad assumptions for that.
Well the stuff you have up there is right but you're missing somethings.
Firstly the GARDIANs. The farther out a missile is launched the more time the GARDIANs have to shoot them down. Fighters (aka fancy missile buses) are used to counter this.
Secondly missiles launched from far out often cause ships to maneuver to evade. Ships have FTL systems (even if they aren't abused to their fullest effect in combat for safety reasons), missiles don't, thus the ship dodges. Fighters again are used to counter this as they can match a ship's speed and get close enough to launch.
Compacting that long-range fire means the computers have the opportunity to determine if the GARDIANs can take it or if evasion is required.
Ultimately this means that a lot of long-range anti-ship missile fire is wasted. Combine that with the price of the ammunition and its unattractive.
With guns a ship is more likely to tank the hits so it can get it's own in. Missiles on the other hand are things you don't want to tank, much less swarms of them.
On the other hand if the missile equipped vessel can get close then it's golden. Many frigates have missile launchers because the get close to larger ships. Other ships have them too, for various reasons.
Or at least that's why I think no one uses missile boats in canon. Of course due consideration should be taken for any technologies you have developed.
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Well yeah; our technology is why I'm envisioning missile boats suddenly becoming viable again. Specifically, it's the combination of our Repulsor engines, the Anti-ship missile tech's improvements on disrupter torps, the Improved Warhead's ability to dodge and protect against PD systems, and our targeting VI's improvements to evasion patterns that all combine to take the same revolution that made carriers a viable dreadnought killer and scale that down to make carrier-frigates good at killing regular frigates and cruisers.
From what I remember, our Improved Warhead is supposed to have anti-PD technologies built in, plus we're being smarter about the warhead itself and not having the torpedo activate its PME field as soon as it's fired like the canon disruptor torp. The kind of math that @UberJJK came up with for the Accipiter applies here: by the time the target GARDIAN system manages to track and begins to fire on the missile, it can't do enough damage to kill it before it has already closed the distance, especially with their outdated Fire Control VIs and laser systems.
Additionally, the Trierarch itself is designed with Warp Barriers and Arcane Blur armor specifically so it can close with an enemy starship, just like a normal carrier's fighter swarm would.
This is the problem that the Trierarch's own Hydras, and, ultimately, the Proreta's own payload of drones, were designed to handle. Hydras and the Proreta's drone swarms are tasked with preventing the enemy frigate from rabbiting to FTL by surrounding the target ship with cheap metal (either in the form of micro-missiles or Accipiter drones). Once the ship is surrounded the FTL drives will refuse to kick in, because colliding with solid material while going at FTL speeds will irradiate the ship and kill everyone on it.
As nonsensical as this statement is... yes the Improved Warhead Technology included anti-kinetic PD tech as well, and some evasion algorithms. Even though that's a delivery system upgrade not a warhead one. Word abuse
The canon disruptor is dropped ~10km from its target (IIRC). Dropped from a 0.1c fighter they can increase their mass by ~1000 and still hit in ~0.0105 seconds. And that's assuming the whole conserved KE thing.
Doesn't matter much. Canon GARDIAN tech still deals with something like that.
Relative velocity, it's a bitch and sadly ignored in a lot of scifi...
Err... not really? The missile has pretty inferior acceleration to the Accipiter (Lazy estimate 642.2m/s/s if I did the math right). An FLT fighter has even higher and the GARDIAN "slaughters*" them as they close, consider that they should be in the engagement range for fractions of a second. I tend to treat the fighter as going 0.1c, but there may be justifiable reasons that's too high.
*Okay okay it just mission kills a lot of them, but dramatic words.
The Accipiter shines because of numbers. Dodging the GARDIAN? I recall responding to that last time with a hah, no. It can barely play in the starship maneuvering league.
Well if it closes then it's much more viable. Repulsor drives make it close fast and its far more survivable than a fighter. I was mostly talking about long range missiles and long range missile boat. They work on static targets, ships not so much.
On the upside the PI missiles do have better evasion and targeting. Repulsors are better engines and give a very different targeting profile (though that can be countered). It's a better missile in a lot of respects, more will hit. It's not revolutionary enough, to do that you need to put a ME drive (low quality) on it to emulate a fighter (say compact drives tech?), but then the question is which is more cost effective both in setup cost and in spent material.
ME's space combat was background material for a Sci-Fi game about infantry... and well it shows.
Cassiemouse
Market Atheist
Can we have our lasers target their lasers then use missiles once we destroy their point defense capabilities? Also, isn't there a way to camouflage missiles? A missile with some form of electronic warfare package should be able to at least reduce the accuracy of point defense. A missile is a tiny target and if they flood the area around them with noise then lasers should have a hard time predicting where they will be.
There is no way a canon Scimitar is ever travelling at 0.1c without engaging its FTL drive and thus being unable to fire anything. A canon dreadnought's main gun only goes up to 0.02c, rounded up. If a fighter could get up to those speeds in combat then you wouldn't need a dreadnought in the first place, or for that matter disrupter torpedoes; you'd just get a bunch of fighters to tow a pack of tungsten rods up to 0.1c and release them at your target, giving you an instant pack of 90-petajoule kinetic slugs (assuming 100kg rods), about 90 times the power of the Tsar Bomba and ~1500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
Again, no chance at 0.1c. The reason our missiles have better or at least equal acceleration to an Accipiter is that the former has an eezo core already to pull its barrier disruption trick, and so there's no reason it shouldn't also have the ability to project an NME field to lower its mass and boost its maneuverability.
Yeah, I feel your pain. A lot of this is going to be meaningless back-and-forth until and unless we design our own space combat rules; you can tell ME itself sure doesn't have any consistent ones, other than some vague idea that humanity is smarter than the rest of the galaxy because they fought World War II.
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If your lasers have enough range. Burning off their sensors works too.
Not really. The targeting system uses IR and Visual light among other factors, stuff that you need an out and out cloaking system to defeat. Radar noise isn't useful since radar is a support targeting element not a primary.
Why can't it shoot at sub c speeds? It can still see (assuming it doesn't go to fast). 0.1c was an in combat top speed I assinged with minimal thought. I'm open to other options. Hell I've done the calculations for 0.00001C (Which by the way is about the speed a fully loaded F-22 in a 10c field would get to if it boosted for 20,000km). Using that disruptors have <0.3 second in the combat arc and the still need to be volleyed to get though.
A ten c field give a 10 degree field of view from a point FYI.
Given that I'm told a Beamed core AM designs can give thrust values in the Mega Newtons with masses about right for fighters... 0.001c sounds reasonable.
Oh Gods don't get me started on this non-sense. The canon dreadnought fire should be going most of c because shot speed affects shot effective range... It's not like they can't make the rounds light enough. On top of that the canon dreadnought shouldn't be able to hit shit at the ranges listed with those speeds. The only way I've ever managed to make sense of that is if it the impact effect after the dark energy dissipates.
On top of that that's speed relative to the launcher, if the dreadnought is going 0.02c relative to target then the total shot effect is 0.04c. Relative speed should be everyone's greatest weapon.
Welcome to why I like conserving kinetic energy. Also due to the above thing as well... planet crackers in a fighter ho! (No seriously if you don't conserve KE you can design a gun that will fit in a fighter and can use the FTL core to fire shots that could blast planets its kinda funny)
And fighters have a better core still, they still get their asses beat.
Ohhh can I? Grins... 99.99....% C MACs as standard ho!
And humanity isn't smarter, per say. The other race had fighters and disruptors to begin with (why do you think they have fancy GARDIAN tech). Dreadnoughts have fighter bays and cruisers carry them as well too. Humans are the only race to build fighter only ships. It's an alternative strategy worth considering but is ironically very poor for defense, because carriers are flimsy fighter buses.
edmantgoog
init high just high
anemone221
Oly Oly Oxen Free we are all out in the free!
- Location
- Texas
The main reason that I can see is that we had a second world war that included the pacific where we had just enough technology to fly planes off of a carrier and not enough technology to allow 300+ mile standoff missiles that would negate a water born carrier. Another thing was operating range of radar and intermediate bases in the pacific which considering both did not have enough range to be able to suffeciently hunt out a carrier battle group if they really tried to hide.
We are going about this the wrong way. We need to design a drone carrier on a cruiser platform running a 2x dreadnaught strength barrier. Drones are our future right now and it would be a lot more man power smart to run drone carriers out of a cruiser class. Or if you just want to get OP about it run it out of a dreadnaught class. The next gen Gerald F Ford carrier is 1/3 of a dreadnaught minimum distance and its fighter complement is 75+ planes if we were to use space efficient drones on a dreadnaught I would not be surprised at a 250+ fighter complement easy. And if we really want to get to bullshit attitudes we make the missiles like 50% more expensive and then we make them like Japanese anime missiles that pull off bullshit maneuvers with vector thrusters which we would input into the design. After that its all about the missile spam and we would take a hint from the 2007 game ace combat: skies of liberation and model the drones after the CFA-44 with its first special weapon witch if you look into jap animes is just pure fucking missile spam thats what we need to do if we really want to use missiles in space its about japanese missile spam from miniature CFA-44's launched like mass relay from a drone carrier sitting a half a system away. I mean cause if you look at it if you can make the missiles cheap enough but in great enough numbers where throwing 75 drones with 12 missiles each and make it cost effective the navy will lap it up faster then a cat with a cream addiction. The thing about the missiles is that if you throw 450 missiles at anything it will over tax any point defense system unless its prodigal not to discount throwing 900 missiles with decent warheads at a dreadnaught.
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