I have several questions here:
1) Overall, I am curious as to how the Freespacers have developed such a extremely advanced, overarching knowledge and skill with subspace technology, considering that their state-of-the-art technology not a few months previous was nuclear weapons, comparably slow STL, and their communication systems. Even with the help they no doubt received from the Nepleslians, it seems excessive that they went from studying blueprints of subspace devices to advanced theoretical development in the span of month or two.
2.a) What is “Phenolic-Fulleride layered mesh”? How does it go about “releasing a high capacity discharge to disrupt particle beams, plasma bursts, and even vaporize solid munitions”?
2.b) How does it release a electrical burst (I am assuming that is what you mean, it is not stated) powerful enough to “vaporize a solid [round]” but not cause itself catastrophic damage, considering most starship-grade rounds (and many PA ones) in this setting are composed of solid chunks of starship-grade armor?
2.b.I) Won’t vaporizing a round within/near the hull be a bad thing? Metal expands massively when vaporized and requires a huge amount of energy to vaporize, so you are creating a extremely fast, energetic, and very powerful bomb right next to or in the hull. This seems like a bad plan.
3) I can see the whole “death with honor” thing going on behind the escape pod destruct feature, but wouldn’t it be better to remove the “random chance” of blowing up but keep the remote-destruct feature? That way you can kill deserters but when you really need to get off the ship you don’t have a 1-in-10 chance of blowing yourself up (no doubt to the bewilderment of the enemy).
4) Is the fission system the only power source for the ship? Is see no way a nuclear fission system would provide the energy outputs that this ships other systems would provide. Fusion is maybe, and that’s if it is really large. As much as it is annoying how they are frequently poorly described, there is a reason most ships require exotic power sources to operate. Nuclear systems simply do not provide the power output you need.
5) Where on the ship are the graviton projectors? Forward main hull, docking ring, etc.
6.a) Where did this “Entropy Shroud ECM Generator” come from? Is it a new addition with this item?
6.b) How does this system block a sensor signal? Photons do not “destroy” each other when opposite phases intersect (and cancel), it just that the net waveform in that region is zero. As soon as the two waveforms move apart the net waveform will not be zero. Since you can’t predict the waveform exactly before detecting it and because it requires a non-zero time to detect the incoming waveform, analyze it, and transmit the phase-opposite waveform it is impossible to precisely match the incoming signal. This means that you can’t, at range, cancel out a senor signal. The rapid decay of the evanescent waves only exacerbates this issue.
6.c) What frequency ranges can this system cover? Also, how is the systems array built on the hull? The more surface area it covers the better it will operate in the short range (since it can better match the angles of incident photons).
6.d) This “spatial destabilization” business is what I am talking about in Q.1. How do they manage to generate a system on-par (or exceeding) with the systems used by top-of-the-line Nepleslian and Yamataian vessels when such technology as a theory was foreign to them not more than a few months ago.
6.d.1) What are the power requirements of this system? To output a powerful enough subspace distortion at ~40,000,000 kilometers is going to require a huge amount of energy. I will agree that you don’t need to match the total output of said ships drive systems, thanks to the metastability of subspace drives, but you are still going to require a fraction of its output to cause a system failure as you describe (and at .25 AU no less).
6.d.2) Likewise, it would require a massive amount of power to drown out gravimetric sensors. Unlike subspace systems, you can’t just “disrupt” a gravimetric sensor, which is detecting things using gravimetric waves (or at least as far as I understand the sensors operation). You need to create a field where the net gravimetric energy is higher than that of the sensors waves (much like how modern ECM functions), otherwise they will still be able to detect them.
6.d.3) I have just noticed, reading through it again, that the field it generates is sufficient to bend light. To do this at short range, this would require a titanicaly powerful gravimetric field. Even if it achieves this bending over hundreds of thousands of kilometers you are still making your ship a beacon to everyone out there fielding gravimetric sensors, since the field that would need could not be hidden. Since gravitimetric acceleration decays predictably with range, they would be able to pinpoint your ships location pretty easily. This could also be achieved even by races without gravimetric technology by simple observation of the starfield viewed through the field. Comparing the distorted image with the know starfield would allow them to locate the fields origin (and the ship).
6.e) I would like to know how this system is not a “’barbaric’ application of brute force”. By their very nature area-effect ECM systems (or interdiction fields) are brute force systems, overwhelming the sensor output of other starship through high-powered random emissions.
6.e.1) On that note, what kind of a EM band can this thing jam? The wider the band, the higher (much, much higher) the power requirements are.
7) What is the length on the tethers? If it is extending to .25 AU and assuming the tether is only 100 microns wide (slightly thicker than a human hair) the spool would have a volume more than 1,200 cubic meters. Assuming it where perfectly wound (with no inefficiency due to shape of the tether or mechanical needs of the spool) this would be a spool 10 meters long with a radius of 6 meters. That is a huge spool.
8.a) As I reload the page I see two notes have been added to the end of the writeup. The energy requirements for this to act as a weapon at 15 million kilometers are quite simply insane. DR 5 is on the order of multi-megaton nuclear weapons and you are saying that the “powerful EM emissions and spatial warping” are doing this. Even with the inherent metastability of subspace shields (and I must add that not all shields are subspace based) the energy output of this system would be, quite literally, astronomical.
8.b) To give a idea of the kind of output this would require, I have done a calc of it (we all know I love calcs). Assuming DR 5 is equivalent to a 10 megaton nuclear weapon and that the 10 megatons is released perfectly efficiently (i.e all of it is damaging). I am also assuming that cross section of the power armor is 2.5 m^2 (estimated from a 5 m^2 total surface area, roughly 2.5 times larger a normal human, also making the following calc conservative) and that this area takes the form of a circle, making its radius ~0.9m. At a distance of .1 AU this circle will subtend an arc of approximately 12 billionths of a second of arc. Its overall area as a percentage of the total effect sphere (with a area of 2.81E27 m^2) at this range will be ~8.9E-26% (or 89 billion, billion, billionths of a percent).
Assuming the armor is being subjected to the above 10 megatons of energy over a period of one minute (though it should be noted that most shields perform substantially better against energy applied over a long period of time, meaning the actual energy that the armor is being subjected to is much higher than assumed 10 megatons) this amounts to a power of 6.97E14 watts or 697 terawatts or approximately 46 times the average power demand of the human race in the year 2004. The overall power of the entire field is 7.8448E41 watts. This is 160 thousand times more power than the luminosity (read= power output) of the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
Even if you assume that the destabilization effect requires a small fraction of the “effective energy” of that DR, you are still talking about insane energy needs. And all of this, I need to add, is coming from a nuclear power plant a few dozen meters in size.
9) Why do different weapons systems have different to-hit modifiers? I would think secondaries, since all of them are controlled by the same AI in most instances, would have a much better chance to hit since they have much better tracking than the bigger guns.
10) Overall this whole ECM system is hideously overpowered, even it where on a state-of-the-art Yamataian ship, never mind a Free Spacer’s one.
11.a) On this “difference engine”, is this related to the inertial dampener system?
11.b) If the above is correct, then this system is taking the leap to being able to actually direct the ships momentum, yes? Isn’t that really freaking advanced?
11.c) Also, how is this system affected by the ECM or other types of interdiction fields? I would think it would totally collapse, since it is saying explicitly that it requires very exact control of gravimetric fields.
12.a) What is the propulsion for the missiles? 0.6c is pretty damn fast. I also think the DR ratings are a bit high for a nuclear weapon, but they are in line with the scaling of the DR system.
12.b) Isn’t 4 missiles a minute really, really fast construction time?
13.a) What kind of wavelengths does the laser system operate on?
13.b) I have also just noticed a large number of notes about the utility of systems on the ship to pirates and other criminal entities. Will the Free Spacers be selling these refitted ships to such groups, either openly or in secret?
14.a) How does this ‘Kinetic Detonator Cannon’ interact with the ships own systems as well as any interdictor fields?
14.b) How big is the round?
14.c) This system apparently is generating a massively powerful gravimetric field to contain the core , wouldn’t this have serious adverse consequences to the rest of the ship? Remember that gravimetric fields do not just vanish after a certain distance, they are persistent.
14.d) What does this thing use for in-flight guidance? Not just the system itself (which has to be extremely resilient to survive the massive shears it would be subject to), but also what kind of sensors it uses. Realize that its own effects are going to be hugely distorting its view of space.
14.e) Wouldn’t a gravimetric field strong enough for relativistic accelerations rip the core apart?
14.f) How do you create the negative matter? This also ties in with Q.1 and Q.6.d, this seems like a very advanced use of gravimetrics and matter creation for a race that otherwise does not seem particularly advanced and has not had access to advanced technologies for very long.
15.a) What do the drones use for propulsion that allows them to go 120,000 km/s? How long can they travel at this speed under power?
15.b) Similar to 12.b, isn’t a production rate of 12 drones a minute excessive?
15.c) What is the payload for the Phantasm gunships when using the laser (which has a output in the high megaton range judging from its DR)? In my support of these guys, I explicitly stated several times that they would have a limited payload due to the strict limits of their power systems.
,
Vesper
Edit: Q15.C is of less import as I found the description of the weapon in question and since it is a explosive-pumped laser it is less of a issue. However, I do have to seriously question how a light-weight ship can withstand a DR 7 nuclear detonation occurring within the ship, since said detonation is going to have a yield in the gigaton range.
