Wes said:
Recently I've been seeing anti-matter more as a liability. It's like carrying huge tubs of the world's most powerful explosive in your car truck and then driving into a gun battle. The danger of carrying anti-matter onboard was underscored for me in recent Eucharis battles.
A huge liability real world physics need to tangle with everyday currently, with fighterplanes, naval warships and tanks having fuel tanks of their own.
Anti-matter, if treated correctly, is no more dangerous than any other fuel. And it just so happens it pretty much is the most powerful fuel source we have second to zero-point-energy.
Besides, Yamatai's aether technology has vastly improved with respects to aether cancelers...most newer ships use shielded aether generators that block the canceler's effects, and "alternate power sources" are mentioned...which I'm thinking would be matter-to-energy converters or fusion.
This annoys me. It annoys me a great deal. Especially seeing I wanted to install an aether canceller on Miharu's refit. Why? Because the Mishhu apparently use zero-point-energy in the same fashion. It also allowed me a credible chance to have that starship be decent at confronting aether-powered ships.
The ultimate Yamataian rebel destroyer, heh. No one expects a Yamataian ship to field that sort of hardware. This is a large reason why I intended to power Miharu's refit with matter/anti-matter reactors, not to mention the anatomy of those reactors is a lot more compelling than anything we have so far in regards of aether generators.
But what frustrates me more, Wes, is your
handwaving: "this was improved and can counter this". You did it for many things... subspace detonators, phasing and now aether canceling. Anti-this, anti-that? Do you see where you're going with this?
You're removing liabilities by simply tacking "my things are no longer vulnerable against these" on them, instead of actual intelligent design - no offense intended. To support our roleplaying environment, I feel you must do better than that.
The right way to have confronted our anti-shield - subspace detonating - ordonnance around was to equip secondary redundant generators on your ships. Perhaps spatial distorsion shields would be knocked out, but within the next moment you could have electro-magnetic and gravimetric shielding in place to compensate for an emergency. Not as powerful, but way better than being caught your pants down.
Versus phasing, you could have done better than ignore it by uprating your weapons and fight 'normally' afterwards. You could've designed new torpedoes that phased themselves (I did). You could've worked on shield expansions so that you could catch the said phasing ships in a net that you'd trigger an inter-phasing pulse (like done inside a ship) to make them visible and vulnerable again, at the cost of losing shield protection.
Regarding aether cancelling, that's a perfectly viable concept that I don't see how 'shielding' your aether power supplies would solve - it goes beyond than that, and even you could tell - looking at the material - that such limitation can be imposed viably. However, it's handily toned down in effectiveness if you plan ahead and outfit your vessel with various methods to sustain itself.
Methods, tools, to confront adversity while retaining those challenges and weaknesses. These are what makes this Roleplay roll and feel engaging, in a large way.
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End line is, Wes, that I would like to see Ketsurui Fleet Yard (you) build this setting's best ships through solid, intelligent designing with contingencies taken into account rather than the one line claim "shielded against this, very resistant to that".
Please promote interactivity, not immunity.
