Death_Sheep
Cat Owned
- Location
- Wisconsin
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sir Isaac Newton really is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space.
Incompatible System
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
- Location
- Wisconsin
I've said something along these lines before, there is no such thing as "enough" antimatter. If you have any at all you automatically skip to having too much. Of course, if you leave it alone, you will go back to having none at all again, and a whole lot of energy suddenly released.
- Location
- Livin' in the Land of the LOST! *roar*
Right. But it's still safer than planium!
- Location
- The State of Denial
Antimatter does render itself safe... remarkably quickly. And energetically. With vengeance, even.
Planium is easier to handle. If your container breaks, but you've otherwise followed all the safety procedures, there's a good chance it doesn't explode.
If it does explode while you're physically present, you don't care whether it was planium or antimatter.
If it does explode while you're physically present, you don't care whether it was planium or antimatter.
- Location
- Neptune
Not a given. You have your gravity effect here and the laser allows you to touch the lives of people over there.
Having your gravity effect here does not imply having your gravity effect there too without actually going there.
- Location
- Do you really care?
Given the realities of the Blink drive, the single most effective weapon available to humanity at this point is to simply build a very small one and teleport an explosive payload right into the enemy vessels. Who wastes time going from A to B by way of shielding and armor and whatever else Mass Effect ships may have when you could skip all that and go right to the part where something goes boom?
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wasn't there the little problem of "we don't go near activated relays because - no, just no"?
- Location
- calgary
their was a previous mention about exclusion principles preventing the blink drive from appearing inside of a planet.
meaning that a sufficiently dense nebula should block blink drives.
meaning that a sufficiently dense nebula should block blink drives.
DarkSideBard
Flying, without moving on
A species in the Ringworld books even does this with Warp drives, though they're running from something more specific than "idiots". They just organize their system into a Klemperer Rosette, equip them with drives, and promptly fuck off towards the Galactic Void.
Epsilon Rose
The King of Unrest
"Dense" doesn't really have the same meaning for nebula. To put it in perspective:
Article: The air we breathe has a density of approximately 1019 molecules per cubic centimeter. (One cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter = 1/1000 liter).
[...]
The densest nebulae can have densities of 10,000 molecules per cubic centimeter (or sometimes even more).
- Location
- Best England - United Kingdom
Fragnostic
Cheshire
- Location
- Neko City
When you can literally and figuratively moon other species...
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Leviathan Khar'shan wgah'nagl fhtagn,
Something about not wanting to encounter another Rachni situation.
Basically they're scared of bugs.
- Location
- Neptune
The relays they took to cut off their sector of the galaxy were already activated. What they really don't want to touch is currently active relays.
Also known as the Taylor Hebert Syndrome.
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Fragnostic
Cheshire
- Location
- Neko City
Couldn't Taylor control cephalopods too? And Khepri basically anything?
Could she control "a" Reaper? Also, QA would probably [NOPE] any indoctrination.
EDIT: Taylor would love the Rachni.
- Location
- Software
Your comments make me think that a well protected WIMP prove could survive being very very near a black hole. And I mean very very very near. Did I mention how near?
Imagine the SCIENCE! And also the "Fuck y*u Collectors!" implied...
With the artificial gravity tech to create fusion reactors keeping antimatter "secure" is pretty trivial.
IIRC almost every ME civilization uses antimatter catalyzed fusion for their warships.
I'm pretty sure mankind can build if it really needs those reactors ... not sure why they would want.
As I said just before, keeping antimatter stable with their tech is ridiculously easy for them...
- Location
- Somewhere in the Ashes
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Such a weapon would open up anything in ME like a cheap tin can. Reapers included. Remember, their kinetic shielding does nothing against lasers. Crank the power output up a bit and it stops being a case of "I'mma cut you open from a million miles away" and starts being a case of "I'mma explode you from a million miles away", because past a certain point lasers stop being cutting, piercing, or melting weapons and start being impact weapons. That kind of raw energy transference WILL cause secondary explosions out the wazoo.Hmm. How to explain this...
Yes.
They have gravity generators capable of producing fields in the range of millions of g, unidirectionally. They can make very large lasers. Obviously, as we can make very large lasers now, and I can't believe that in a century-plus of advancement that wouldn't be something that was researched heavily. And there is basically no theoretical upper limit to how big you can make something like a carbon dioxide laser, the only limit is really an engineering one.
So you combine these two simple inventions. What happens if you fire a laser into a very intense gravity field? That's right, it causes blue shift. What's blue shift? Raising the wavelength and therefore increasing the frequency of the photons, by adding kinetic energy to them.
So, you put a massively powerful IR laser into one end of your gravitational accelerator and you get a massively powerful x-ray laser out the other end. Turn it up a little more and you get a gamma laser. Beam divergence decreases as wavelength decreases, so jacking up your laser from IR to gamma hugely reduces the spot size at any given range, which in turn even more hugely increases the energy density. The shorter wavelength allows more of that energy to be absorbed into the target. And so on.
You end up being able to slice bits off asteroids from a million kilometers away without any effort at all assuming you can actually hit the thing and pump enough energy into the beam. I ran the numbers in the BOLO thread at one point, and the maximum range is pretty amazing.
Of course, if you can run it continuously at that power level, you just raster scan the area you think the ship will be in
And you can't really dodge a laser. Especially as you can't see it except where it interacts with something, and if that something is you, it's way too late. There's also the minor issue that it's a gamma laser so even a glancing hit is going to produce secondary radiation that will irradiate the hell out of anything in the way. That's the biggest issue with it, really. You might have to turn it down to extreme UV to be safe...
And you can steer it with a gravity field too, as well as focus it. Gravitational lensing is an interesting thing.
Yeah, they've got plenty of weapons options that don't need something as fiddly as planium
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And even if direct telefragging doesn't work, if humanx work together they could develop (big) drones that switch the blink drive to severe posigravity at arrival. Ie, a few million gs near a target with a nice steep gradient (ie, bringing the gravity sheer weapon to the target).
Epsilon Rose
The King of Unrest
I'm pretty sure those grav drives also produce a pretty strong wimp Flux.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Assuming targets are shielded. If not, that solution isn't one.
- Location
- Do you really care?
If there is no way to shield an area of space from being accessible by Blink drive, then all else being equal, blinkdrive warheads are the more difficult weapon technology to defend against, because by the nature of what a spaceship is, there is simply no way that there will not be hollow spaces inside of it that are at least person-sized. No matter how much or what kind of armor or shielding you slap on a vessel, you can't avoid the fact that somewhere inside of it, there must also be a place where the crew can actually live and work.
The simple fact that Blink drive technology can straight-up bypass any and all defenses that do not outright prevent it from functioning is as much a paradigm shift as the development of artillery and airplanes were to the idea of castles or city walls. Nobody bothers to build something like that anymore, because there is just no point in even trying.
The simple fact that Blink drive technology can straight-up bypass any and all defenses that do not outright prevent it from functioning is as much a paradigm shift as the development of artillery and airplanes were to the idea of castles or city walls. Nobody bothers to build something like that anymore, because there is just no point in even trying.
- Location
- Somewhere in the Ashes
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...you do know we still build bunkers, and walls for that matter, right?
- Location
- Do you really care?
Not as strategic defensive fortification of the sort that castles and city walls were, no. I think the last historical example of someone trying that is the Maginot line. Sieges in the medieval sense are not a thing that happens anymore, the weapon technology outstrips our defensive technology by too much.
Mind you, that doesn't mean it is guaranteed to stay that way. If you look at it from a historical perspective, there's a sort of cycle to that kind of thing. Sometimes, defensive technology outstrips weapon technology, sometimes weapons technology outstrips defense. Telebombing is the kind of thing that massively skews that balance towards weapons technology.