Planetary Defence Drone

Elysia Shipyard
El-O-01 Planetary Defence Drone

1. About the Planetary Defence Drone

The Planetary Defence Drone is meant to work in tandem with the PDS, serving to cover a small area, and to be more manoeuvrable, yet extending the protection over a more flexible area, and to more tactically useful. It possesses less systems, but is still highly efficient. They are unmanned, and controlled by the ‘parent' PDS, with only limited autonomous ability beyond this.

2. History and Background

The second part of Elysia's planetary defence program, the PDD were made to grant more versatility in planetary protection, and to have greater utility, perhaps extending even beyond its set role, and to be used in a more tactical sense.


3. Dimensions and Crew Compliment

Organizations Using This Vessel:
Elysian Celestial Navy
Type: Planetary Defence Satellite
Class: En- -1
Designer:
Manufacturer: Elysia Nova Ship Yards.

Crew: None.
Appearance: The PDD is a smooth black oval with raised bumps which contains the Eye Beams.

Length: 30m
Width: 30m
Height: 25m

Decks: 1.

4. Performance Statistics

Speed (STL): 0.45c.
Speed (CDD): .20 to 2,000c using Combined Distortion Drive.
Note: The CDD can still function (although at reduced efficiency) even in the presence of anti-FTL fields.
Speed (Aerial): Mach 3 in atmosphere (When using shields to maximise aerodynamics). The PDS has the ability to use its anti-gravity systems to have a soft landing and VTOL.
Speed (Water): Up to 6 knots underwater. The PDS is able to ‘float' on the surface by increasing its buoyancy using its anti-gravity systems.

Range: The PDD is designed to surround a planet and to protect it, but unlike the PDS its position in this is highly flexible, and it is made to be able to move not only around the planets orbit, but possibly even to another planet or the battlefield.
Range (Support): Uncrewed, and with its own power source.
Lifespan: Ten years. The likely easy availability of repair crews from the planet will greatly increase this.
Refit Cycle: Gradual modifications and improvements will be made as the design is improved and perfected and Elysian technology progresses. A complete update will occur every six months.

5. Inside the PDD

The PDD does not have any rooms or anything for the sustaining of organic life, only various systems linked by superconducting wiring and semi-organic systems.

6. Ship Systems

Hull/Armour: The relatively new Elysian "scale" armour which nests thousands of super-durable plates in a self-regenerative base. This is highly damage resistant and disperses energy very quickly due to its high surface area.

Shield Systems: The PDD uses a elliptical dimensional distortion (EDD) shield, which folds space using electrogravitic fields, wrapping the said space around the drone, encasing it in its own bubble. Once in this bubble objects are sheltered from both solid matter weaponry, less solid matter weaponry (such as plasma or a particle weapon), as well as energy weapons (such as a beam weapon), because they simply pass through the curved space around the ship, in effect the drone is not there to hit. The EED extends in to subspace and hyperspace, and provides the same protection their as in normal space. The PDD's EED can protect against up to 0.5 YottaWatts worth of damage every square metre.

Interdiction Field: One of the most important features on the PDD is the Interdiction Field, meant to defend both itself and the surrounding area from a wide variety of superweapons or other offensive effects. The interdiction field, which extends in a disk one kilometre wide by 500m deep, and the interdiction field generator takes up a very large part of the drone, prevents hyperspace, subspace, normal space or any of the plethora of other dimensions from being warped or manipulated in any fashion. This prevents Transposition beams from working, given that they warp space, and also protects against any other weapon that uses dimensions to function, such as those that travel through hyper-space, draw energy from hyperspace directly to an area, rely on a sub-space effect such as sub-space tunnelling, casing or shielding. The Interdiction field is so integral to the design and purpose of the PDD that it remains on almost constantly.

Damper Field Generator: Through the use of a powerful anti-gravity effect around the ship, the PDD negates the force of gravity actually turning a Scalar EM wave back on itself, and completely protecting the ship and the surrounding area for a kilometre in every direction. The field is designed to cope with even the most powerful scalar weapons. The Field is on as a default, and has the added advantage of allowing the craft to float above water or the ground by repelling the ground with anti-gravity. The power is also sufficient to somewhat reduce the power of solid based weapons that are fired at the PDD.

Sensor and Computer Systems: The PDD contains a relatively simple computer and a somewhat sophisticated sensor suite, but mostly making use of other ships brains and senses.

Computer: The PDD makes use of a sub-sentient semi-organic computer capable of monitoring several hundred targets and to best place itself, it is nothing particularly brilliant and works more efficient when controlled by another Elysian computer.

Unidirectional sensors the PDD uses variable wide-band imaging clusters:

Long-range gravimetric sensors: These powerful sensors sense the presence of ships and other objects through the warping effect their mass has on space-time. While this sensor is not particularly good at getting exact information about the ship, it is extremely good at working out where something is, and the speed it's moving at. It also beyond many types of cloaking device to foil this indirect form of scanning.

Magnetic Resonance Scanners: This sensor is used to identify what the targets hull is composed of, and also the other elements that compose the ship. Upon collecting this data it is compared with the ships data-base, and through this identify whether this variety of ship has been seen before, and possibly distinguishing the creator (a common trend in creations for example), or a weakness in design.

Long-Range Infrared Spectrometer: This sensor basically detects the radiation given off by hot bodies. In space almost everything is cold, space itself is only around 3 Kelvin, and the only things which are significantly above this are stars, planets and other celestial bodies. As such, if something is giving of Infrared radiation and it's not a celestial body then it must be something artificial. This sensor won't work on the more advanced ships out there, but can be surprisingly useful at detecting less advanced, or damaged, ships.

Distortion sensors: This highly sensitive sensor is capable of sensing the distortions of space which are created through CDD and CFS', as well as other technology that utilises upon similar technology. In order to combat the danger that vessels cloaked using the CFS system could present, and so ships using a CDD could be tracked this device was developed, and it not only can locate the source of such distortions, but also discern certain information about it – such as power and possibly design.

Electromagnetic trans-space flux sensors: These advanced sensors detect tiny variances in the Electro-magnetic bands across all of the spatial planes. It functions as an incredibly advanced visual sensor, but only more so.

These sensors face the front of the ship and have a range up to 0.5 light-years.

Omnidirectional sensors of the PDD include :

Aetheric/quintessential/field/differential/particle/waves sensors:

Subspace mass sensors: This sensor simply detects mass in subspace, and its passage through this domain. This sensor also functions on the related hyper-space. It is vital for detecting vessels which are travelling through these domains. It is notably hard to hide your mass from these variety of sensors when travelling through Hyperspace or Subspace.

These sensors have a range of 0.25 light-years.

Weapons:

Beam Eyes (20): The drone's hull has 20 eyes placed roughly evenly over its surface. These powerful beam projectors are used from anything to destroying missiles to cutting holes in starships.

Primary Purpose: Anti-starship
Secondary Purpose: Anti-mecha/Anti-fighter
Damage: Moderate
Range: 2,000,000 miles
Rate of Fire: 5 times a second
Payload: Effectively unlimited, so long as the shuttle provides power.

Is there some problem with this technology Wes? It's sister technology - the PDS - is significantly more complicated and has been approved.

Since you do not seem to have noticed it, your 'Interdiction Field' would be disrupting your shield (EDD or whatever) and the 'Dampener Field Generator' since both of these rely on manipulating space-time (both very blatantly). I would also like a explanation of how this device does what it does. I realize other similar interdiction units have been approved without that description, but we need to start somewhere. Simply saying what it does but leaving the 'how' out of the explanation is not acceptable. I would like a similar explanation on the 'Dampener Field Generator'. How do you "[turn] a Scalar EM wave back on itself "?

On the sensors, what I have to say has been a long time in coming and actually goes for any ship that uses space-time warping shields or FTL drives (ones that generate a field surrounding the vessel). All sensors using waves and particles with a propagation speed of c or less would be totally unusable when you have space-time warping bubbles (STWB from her on). If your shield can block military-grade energy weapons, solar radiation at planetary distances and most radiation from starships don't stand a chance in hell of getting past the shield. If the STWB has a sufficiently low level of warpage than it might be possible that theoretical tachyonic particles might be detectable, but given the descriptions of these devices and there energy resistance, these particles would be stopped as well. This effectivly would make all ships using such systems blind to the world.

Oh, on that note, nothing would be safely able to travel through the STWB while it was powered up, unless it was also generating such a field of a equal or stronger field strength. Even then, while the bubbles would negate each other temporarily, the 'safe' regions inside of the fields (where the relative field strength is 0) would be disrupted and it would become quite likely that one or both ships would encounter the others STWB and would be torn apart.

Lastly the fire rate on the 'Beam Eyes' seem a bit fast(also, what is the beam made of? photons, subatomic particles? you railed on the new guy about such things, explain yours please) for the ships size (with the number of guns it has).

Simply saying what it does but leaving the 'how' out of the explanation is not acceptable

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Actually it is quite acceptable as you have stated yourself previous ones have been approved without needing it. Scalar weapons and zuesiaum also get by with little/no discription on how they work but rather only the results discribed.

Beam Eyes is a tech which would fall under the 'continuality' bit of the stararmy universe and would be allowed solely on that without any added discription as added discription could cause problems for previously written material.

They were used on all known Elysian vessels. And have been approved in the larger PDS.

I shall get around to your other points a little later.

Oh contraire monsieur.

The fact is that the weapon is up for inspection, and the science behind that. It doesn't matter if SA wouldn't know about it, or if it's an NPC ship - the tech still needs to be explained.

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There you have it, straight from the horses (Zack's) mouth. It would seem I am not the only one here who wants the 'hows' explained and not just the end result. Unless, of course, you would like to (gasp!) apply a double standard in applying such things to others but not to yourself, but we all know you guys would never do that, right? (feel the sarcasm Uso, feel it in your bones).

I fail to see how it would disrupt them. Simple make it how it was supposed to be with the others (and consistent with what they have done so far ICly) and you are fine. Just because it has been approved is not carte blanche to fail to further expand on things. If anything, you should expand on things more after you have started using it, since its abilities, positive and negatives, and such things become more clear. I am not saying it is outright invalid, I am saying it needs to be explained a bit more, and the fire rate reduced some. There is every bit of real-life evidence that different versions of the same weapons system (even called by the same name) can have different attributes (range, RoF, etc.).

On the sensors, that was more of a point, I don't actually expect anyone here to listen to it. You see, because that would make far, far too much sense and as you know, people try to keep that to a minimum with much of the tech (especially, particularly the older stuff, but this one shows it is being perpetuated) [seriously Wes, teleporting as standard equipment? Please stop saying you are "trying to tone down the new tech" when you bypass normal channels to weasel something like that into the tech.]

Again, that is all.

Vesper

I don't think it was a double standard Vesper. You quoted Zack out of context. Zack was commenting on completely new tech, whereas this equipment uses previously existing technology. Zack was commenting in the other thread because the poster thought he didn't need to explain anything because SA didn't know about it, or it was from a different universe or whatever. It's components hadn't been approved before, while the components of this tech have already been used in the RP.

That doesn't really answer your argument about reducing tech levels, but unless Elysia wants to get stomped (or a certain GM wants it to happen) I think this should slide because as it stands now there's really nothing to stop an enemy from just pushing a button and blowing up the planet. I don't know how workable the tech is but if it's been used before then there should be no problem here, at least in that regard.

I know we need to tone down the tech but doing it here will just create another problem. Some people might not consider it metagaming, but when the easy solution IC is to just blow a planet up and, for the sake of the RP, a player doesn't do so, it's not right.

There are no double standards Vesper. This technology has already been approved, in fact it was approved on ships up to two years ago – beam eyes are approved. The interdiction shield is approved. I personally don't like using technology that has no description of how it works on the ships which are purely for me – I like to explain everything on my NovaCorp ships for example, but on an Elysian vessel or a ship I design for KFY I have to accept that there is technology prior to my arrival which should be brought in to the design in order to make it realistic. All Elysian ships have been equipped with Eye Beams (with the exception of the Crataeius), and so it is fitting that they are used on these as well.

Why don't I explain the technology and science behind them? Because as far as I know there is no science. Wes designed them, and only Wes knows how they work – I don't. If you wish to know the science behind them then I suggest you ask him, because all I know is that they work in this setting – as shown by their use in other ships.

The same can be said of the Interdiction device – Wes is the one that knows how it works, and it is only he who can tell you why it doesn't disrupt the shields of the user. I could develop a theory, but if you want the answer from the person who actually understands them – ask Wes not me.

In short – the two bits of technology you want explained aren't mine, they're his.

They're just a stationary version of the old weapons pods Star Army ships used.

This weapon still needs help with the nomenclature, right? *prods Wes* It would seem to be P, since Wes considers it immobile.

I believe what he was reffering to was the 'Beam Eyes' were "just a stationary version of the old weapons pods Star Army ships used."

All of Vespers other points are against either technology which is used in a number of vessels or against Star Army technology in general.

Oh, well, it's still either P or H. *shrugs* Probably H.

See I really didn't like the idea of it being called a 'Space Station', given that it has no people in it.

Drones, like SOSDs, were given "O" nomenclatures.

I've edited it to reflect this. Anything else?

Anything to stop approval?

(Deleted original and posted again to effect a bump.)

I'll approve it once I make some edits. ^^;

So how are those edits coming along?

Hey Wes... How are those edits coming along >.>