"Pauli's Hammer" Kamikaze Ship (In progress)

[Xerena]

The "Pauli's Hammer" kamikaze ship is essetially a big hunk of metal or other suitable material with a jump-type FTL drive (IE hyperspace, wormhole, TTD, but not CDD or hyperpulse), and cheap but sophisticated guidance sesors (alternatively, it can be guided remotely; otherwise it uses either an AI or an expendable kamikaze pilot, such as a Neko sprite or a Seraph). Upon acquiring a target, it activates its jump drive/teleporter (of whatever variety) and emerges right in the middle of the terget, preferably intersecting the bridge or a reactor or some other vital area. This of course destroys the kamikaze ship (which is what makes it a kamikaze ship), but also deals great damage to the target, often crippling or destroying it depnding on where it emerges, as a result of two objects suddenly attemmpting to occupy the same space at the same time. Most shields are useless against this weapon, however, interdiction fields and/or systems that prevent teleportation are effective, depending on the propulsion method used by the kamikaze ship.

A variation of this is to replace the "big hunk of metal" with an antimatter bottle, which will "fail deadly" upon emerging inside the enemy vessel due to the inability of two objects to be in the same place at the same time.

 

[Fian]

Most ships have interdiction systems that prevent this sort of thing from happening.

 

[Fred]

Fian has a point, not to mention the Mishhuvurthyar torpedoes seem to act on a concept resembling that.

I have to applaud your tentative suggestions though: you seem to have looked around the site somewhat, enough to be familiar with more than bits and pieces.

I'm starting to look forward to seeing your first character submission.

 

[Xerena]

To respond to Fian's post, these ships would generally be launched from a "mother ship", which could use it's interdiction device in anti-interdictor mode. Also, in the case of a TTD-based kamikaze ship, Interdiction fields would be ineffective, thouth other systems exist to stop this kind of technoogy (such as time/space anchors and certain types of shields). I consider the Mishuvurthyar torpedoes to prove that this cn work, and surely, sooner or later, it would occur to someone else to also build such a weapon.

Another point is that the very threat of these weapons could effectively force a hostile fleet to keep their interdiction fields up at all times, preventing them from using their FTL drives (including CDD and hyperpulse drives) for anything except a simultaneous fleetwide retreat.

The idea originally came from the Stargate: Atlantis tactic of beaming a nuclear warhead onto a Wraith hive ship, set to explode 1 second after arrival.

 

[Fian]

I love you already.

 

[Doshii Jun]

This tech doesn't get past a CFS, I thought. You can't just jump through a nested universe.

 

[Wes]

This tech doesn't get past a CFS, I thought. You can't just jump through a nested universe.

True.

 

[Xerena]

Yeah, but not everyone uses CFS, do they?

 

[Doshii Jun]

Any ship that counts does. *grins* But on top of that, this kind of "phased" tech has been used before, and we've generally dropped it to avoid "ONE SHOT, ONE KILL"-type weaponry. Doesn't this fall into that category?

 

[Xerena]

Where did I use the word "phased" or refer to this thing "passing through" something?

The "ship" I had intended to describe is one that "jumps" (for instance, using a TTD system or a wormhole or a hyperdrive) from its location to its destination, in much the same way the KIF's extension fold cannon shoots its particles right into the innards of the targeted ship without passing through its shields, its hullplates or the intervening space.

As for "ONE SHOT, ONE KILL"-type weaponry, in the midst of all of your "ONE SHOT, COUNTLESS KILLS"-type weaponry (*cough* Quantum Detonator *cough*, *cough* any sniper rifle *cough*). I'm sure it could be given a sytem to penetrate CFS. It would still be a rather expensive "one shot, one kill" weapon, and against really big ships, unless you get very lucky or use a really big (and expensive) kamikaze ship, it will take at least several hits to cripple or kill the target. Alternately, failing a jump directly into an enemy ship, it can simply use a CDD or hyperpulse drive to ram an enemy ship or station (or planet) at a few 50,000,000c, although in most cases 50,000c will do.

 

[Doshii Jun]

You're essentially talking about that though, aren't you? I'm not as scientifically inclined as you are, so bear with me if you will, but you're really just talking about a weapon that goes through shields somehow, right? It jumps from point A to point B -- point B just happens to be inside a ship.

It would be helpful to mention this thread. The tech you're talking about essentially can't be obtained by anyone but Yamatai, and any other FTL drives probably can't be tooled fast enough to make it really worthwhile. I'd also imagine the timing alone for this weapon to work, unless it's just launched and let go, is amazing complex.

The KIF weapons you're talking about ... I've never even seen them used. Wes, do we use stuff like that anymore?

Forgive the caps -- I wasn't yelling or trying to be demeaning with them. But the one-shot, countless kills types are being phased out and, for the most part, are phased out of current IC use. One-shot kills are limited to torpedoes now, where the energy weapons take multiple salvoes.

On top of this, we're talking about a weapon that would be so expensive to produce, it would be inefficient to even employ in battle. And who would use it to begin with, I wonder? Yamatai probably wouldn't, even though it has the tech.

This is the disadvantage to reading a shitload before you really start playing. You absorb too much without seeing how it's processed in the RP. That's not a knock to you doing your homework, which is incredibly well done by the way, but this is what happens.

 

[Fred]

What teleportation technology Yamatai has lies in the Mindy's teleportation module... and that one cannot transfer through active shielding such as what the CFS provides.

 

[Xerena]

Even if the FTL drive has trouble catching ships, it could still be a fairly effective anti-station torpedo, and costs basically whatever it costs to build the FTL drive, since it could consist of, say, an FTL drive nailed to an asteroid, starhip hulk, or other large debris. The FTL drive could even be taken from a damaged-beyond-repair ship or something like that, or created by nanobots by consuming the necessary materials from the asteroid on which the drive is to be mounted. Since they would be fairly cheap individually (and only moderately expensive in large numbers), you could launch a few thousand of these at a given area of space at such a density that at least one is almost guaranteed to emerge inside the target, and the ones that miss can be reused indefinitely until they score hits on something.

 

[Fred]

Yes, but battles at high FTL speeds are hard to interpret and beam weaponry can only go at 1c... which is why interdiction fields are around to slow ships and launched ordonance to considerably lower speeds (with sublight being preferable).

 

[Concerto]

How much does an FTL drive cost, anyway? Wouldn't it be cheaper to use conventional weapons, weapons which don't have to be replaced every time they're used?

 

[Xerena]

Couldn't this think still wreak absolute havoc against stationary targets, such as space stations and planetary/lunar targets?

 

[Concerto]

I stand corrected: torpedoes would have to be replaced but they don't cost all that much to produce.

I still say that a suicide attack should only be used as a last resort and in such scenarios where it becomes necessary you could use standard fighters for that instead of building a human-guided weapon.

As I recall the kamikaze squadrons weren't all that successful, either. Why would they work any better now?

 

[Fred]

Older Star Army vessels were capable of kamikaze attacks in the form of 'spiking', which was essentially using the ship's sharply angled prow along with a special forward-facing shield called 'the spike' to ram another vessel and possibly destroy it... which decent enough chances of surviving the said desperate attack if the ship wasn't very brittle by that point.

Another form of Kamikaze attack could be performed by the newer teleporting Mindy power armors, whom if they manage to get into the inside of a ship, could choose to have their power supplies reach critical mass, causing a roughly 40-meters diameter aetheric explosion.

 

[Strangelove]

Here's a similar but different concept some of you may be interested in looking at.

Relativistic Kill Vehicle

May be a better alternative to simply coming out inside a planet/station. Simply because it's immune to interdiction fields since it doesn't use FTL technology, and even if you somehow intercept and destroy it, the fragments and dust will have so much kinetic energy they'll still cause quite a blow.

 

[Fred]

Isn't that sort of like a mass driver?