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A Crisis of Physics

F

FM

Inactive Member
The mathematician in me wants to crawl in a hole and die right now.

So here's the deal. I was trying to calculate g-forces for my Hunter armor (WIP!), because I enjoy realism. Seeing that the Demon's max speed was .1c I chose that as a target, due to my design goal of making a cheap-ass armor that was better than the Demon.

So with a little research I started with a reasonable number - 21g of forward acceleration. That's about 206 m/s^2. After one minute, you're travelling at 44482.96 km/h. That's pretty fast, I thought. Unfortunately, it's only about 0.00004c, which is pretty slow relative to the Demon.

So I decided to figure how long it would take me to accelerate to .1c at 21g, and the figure came out as 40 hours. Which is not very fast at all.

So I decided to figure the math the other way: target velocity after a certain amount of time. I figured, 30 minutes to .1c is pretty reasonable, right?

Well, it wasn't.

The number I got for acceleration was 1698g. That's an increase in velocity of 16655 m/s^2. After one second, if you cut off the engines, you'd be travelling at Mach 47. AFTER ONE SECOND.

There's no way this is possible in any sane world. You'd have to have so much fuel it would be ridiculous. And that's another thing - there's no maximum speed in space, unless you count how fast you're going after your engines run out of shit to burn. There's no atmospheric drag in space like there is in an atmosphere.

It's patently insane. The human body can't take it, and due to my self-imposed mission goal the Hunter can't have inertial dampening or grav control or any of that, because unlike the Mindy we haven't invented super-tiny versions of everything over here in Lor. We don't have CDDs.

The math just doesn't add up. At all. On any of these things. And it's goddamned insane.

I think I'm gonna lay down for a while.
 
It's also science fiction. You design your way, everyone else designs their way.

If this is a backdoor gripe about Yamatai, it's not new or particularly compelling. It doesn't take math to know that what the Mindy does, along with some of the other armors, ships and technology in the SARP, is impossible.

But it's fun. Over the top? Sure, and that gets handled when enough momentum builds up. Starship Speed Standards, for instance. But it's still fun.

However, to thrust myself into hypocrisy before anyone else does it for me, I don't design things like that anymore. I stick with what I think I know.
 
It was a general gripe, to be honest, since everyone does it no matter the machine or faction. It's related to the earliest designs out of the NDI framework and such, and I didn't really post this to call out everyone on it...it's more a personal frustration.

I'm just sort of...dumbfounded by my conflicting desires - to be well-schematized and realistic, but to also be competitive. I want to make a machine people will want, but will they want it if it can't even catch up with the most basic armors available?

It's not like I'm a physics whore, trying to use tachyons to justify my overpoweredness. I'm just sort of looking at things and trying to work through my internal mathematical rejection of speeds based on fractions of the lightspeed constant.

I felt it deserved a post, at least.
 
Fair enough, fair enough. I shouldn't talk; small arms are child's play compared to the numbers you work with in armor design. I shall count my blessings. Competition sucks that way, but if you design an armor that isn't meant to take on the spacy armors out there, and you give it some cool stuff, you'll beat the "competitive" problem pretty easily. Neh?
 
Random note on a bit of your rant: Not necessarily. I've read a prediction that with gravity and such on ships that there might be a max speed due to the inertia caused by the gravity.

Although I'm not science person so I couldn't say.
 
There IS drag in space. Just very, very, VERY little. It's not a perfect vacuum, but rather a very, very, thin rarefied plasma.

Also, this bugs me too, but I'm under the assumption that there are things that manufactured gravity means inertialess drives which (Typicaly) require constant energy, so you can run out of fuel and drop to a 'standstill'. In a sci-fi setting. Which is really an excuse for starships to act like cars. But whatever.

Anyway, I figure since I'm complaining about the bio-tech rules being slightly too stringent in realism requirement, I shouldn't complain about the physics rules being too lax.
 
Solution: In environments where you want realistic physics, cast a modifier object that limits these things to realistic speeds.

This way, different styles of roleplay can be done and there will be effective room for these machines.

For example, a G-Diffuser or something that breaks all gravity dampening and means that if pilots aren't careful, they do black out (even Mindy pilots).

This would create a more level playing-field in scenarios like Nepleslian armor verses Yamataian armor (each specifically adapted to different things - each has the home advantage).
 
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