Shielding Technology

[Doshii Jun]

because it would be useless unless you know attacks are coming, from where, and when they'll hit.

You mean like WARMS?

 

[Aendri]

That refers to focusing an existing, full cover shield, on a single, specific point. With a full shielding system like that, a system like WARMS would be okay. If you try and predict where something is going to hit with a reactive, point to point shield, if the system is wrong, you're dead on the spot, because you have nothing else to fall back on. With a full shielding system, even if you weaken some areas, there's still SOMETHING there to stop the hit if you're wrong.

Long story short, using a system like WARMS with a point to point system is boom or bust. Either you connect, and you're golden, or you miss, and you're dead. It's too risky for anyone with any other options to take.

 

[FrostJaeger]

Quite a valid point Aendri - wasn't thinking of just how damn fast energy weaponry moves when I posted yesterday. Also, with strong enough gravity generators, a GDA wouldn't be a challenge to create after all - as I'd forgotten completely about this.

 

[paladinrpg]

Hmm, I seem to have set off quite the controversial tech discussion here. Answer me this, though... do current NMX vessels use gravitic shielding already? Is this in some ways an upgrade to their style of deflecting attacks, rather than a new concept? If the distortions are localized,it could be a good secondary shield layer to stop high energy focused anti-ship weaponry. Like on a capital ship meant to take abuse and have the processing power/generator strength to handle it.

I liked that article, FJ. Very interesting the possibilities, and kind of makes me think the black hole torus idea could be workable.

 

[paladinrpg]

I was just thinking more on this topic and realized... could you theoretically take a Mindy Teleportation Module and modify it to displace capital-ship level energy attacks rather than physical mass?

If not, there is one other way: a defense sentry. It detects an incoming attack (ie, torpedo), latches onto it, and auto teleports the thing 3 AU away and blows up harmlessly. It might even be able to remove small starfighters and battlepods from the battlespace too if they fell within the size/weight limit (or at least enough to cause a partial teleportation of their critical systems/pilot module/etc).

 

[Wyld]

What do you mean by displacing? Like, teleporting the energy attack else where? seems like that could be made to make undodgeable, unblockable attack that just sort of pops into existance inside your own/your enemy's hull.

Actually hell, we can teleport things why don't they teleport starship level weapons to the inside of enemy hulls? I don't see a reason why teleportation based weapons wouldn't be a thing, even if it was clasified as a super weapon.

 

[Cmd_Jackson]

@Wyld beat me to it. I used to play a game, Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy, in which one of the factions had a teleporting missile. The missile would teleport itself to different to angles of approach on the target until finally impacting.

 

[paladinrpg]

Well, these are great ideas, but we are butting up against the limiter set by Wes on technologies like these. Just thought that perhaps I found a workaround... Still not giving up on the idea entirely though.

 

[FrostJaeger]

Ah, Disputed Galaxy...loved that game. Shame the MP got disabled....

 

[Cmd_Jackson]

Ah, Disputed Galaxy...loved that game. Shame the MP got disabled....

The entire game went down a few years ago.

I'm still waiting (possibly in vain) for the sequal, Starfighter: Infinity, to be finished. If you can still play Disputed Galaxy TELL ME HOW!

But I digress. Really, the Type 4 Teleporting Carnivore Torpedo would trigger it's teleport if it missed the target. It doesnt use it to bypass point-defenses.

 

[FrostJaeger]

The entire game went down a few years ago.

I'm still waiting (possibly in vain) for the sequal, Starfighter: Infinity, to be finished. If you can still play Disputed Galaxy TELL ME HOW!

But I digress. Really, the Type 4 Teleporting Carnivore Torpedo would trigger it's teleport if it missed the target. It doesnt use it to bypass point-defenses.

@Cmd_Jackson You can play it by going to whatever website you play it on, right-clicking the game itself (the flash animation), selecting "Quit to menu," then selecting "Login as Guest" iirc. This enables the single-player mode - though you can't save your progress...

 

[OsakanOne]

If you have a blackhole with a sufficiently large horizon, you yourself will be unable to escape it.

To give you a sense of how the mass dislocation of how a black hole actually works, if our star fell in on itself and became a black hole... Well, let's give you a sense of scale.

Our planet has a surface area of 510.1 million km square miles. It has an atmosphere that's 30 miles high. But we use less than 0.03% of our atmosphere's vertical space and our tallest skyscraper is only 0.007% of that distance And our entire atmosphere: the mountains, rivers, even the oceans, the sky are a slither so thin on the surface of our world that it is thinner than the lacquer on-top of the paint of the countries of the world on an atlas globe desk toy. That's everywhere you could have ever been in your entire life, is an infantesimally tiny part of the world. Less than 0.0000001% of the earth's total volume.

If we compress our sun into a black hole, it only has a diameter of six miles and a length of less than three.

You could walk about it in a complete circle inside a single day.

But if even your shoelace or the air around you got caught in its event horizon, there's nothing you can do to stop yourself from falling in. That's it: Game over.

It'll be slow. You probably won't even notice it happen at first because of the lensed light and the likely stretching of your environment around you. Like stretching an image in photoshop: slowly pulling the parts of the world around you -- and you, longer and longer faster than the parts further away. It'd happen so slowly that you'd survive the process. But its also inescapable: Even if you run away, you don't become any further away. I know that doesn't make sense, but that's what the physics say.

And you want to use this thing to catch bullets. Which are more than 1% of our total mass?

Yeah. Okay. Seems perfectly safe. You do that.

I'll be way over there somewhere. Like, an entire country away. Underground.

Or space. Like an astronomical unit away.

Why? An event horizon becomes exponentially more massive as time goes on. And once a blackhole is running, that's it.

Our best math says hawking radiation (a type of black-body electromagnetic radiation which occurs in the visible spectrum as a greenish yellow that is also ultra-violet but occurs in such huge amounts that it would not only blind you if you saw it but destroy your retinas, face, skull, clothes, metal objects you wore, the room you stood in, your town, your county and a significant part of your country) means they will eventually get smaller. As to how you'd make enough to get rid of the black hole when you were done with it without utterly killing everyone in every direction if you did it near instantly (less than an hour) in a distance of half our solar system, I have no idea. Mass dislocation and mass/energy transference is not only difficult but its also really hard (like two people here will get that joke).

tl;dr: Can it be done? Yes, theoretically. Should it be done? Absolutely not. Why? Far too much can go wrong.

 

[paladinrpg]

Hmm, point taken about controlling a runaway gravity disruption/black hole effect.

However, what about going the other direction of extreme gravity to cancelling it? There is this technology from the Occestians, for example: Gravimetric Null Field Generator

 

[Aendri]

Also, it needs to be said, we have on fucking clue how the teleporters work. That's another AvaNet technology if I recall correctly, and has ALL sorts of anti-tampering technology in place. We have effectively zero capacity to modify or alter it in any way. So while it's an idea, about the only way to use the T/P technology to shield would be to literally attach some dumb sap to the attack, and teleport them and as much of the attack as you could away. You'd be dooming them, but it would, in theory, at least cut the efficiency of the incoming shot, if not negate it, depending on the mass/size of what you're trying to stop.

Keep in mind, the teleport unit that we've spent YEARS working on to improve or modify at all still has basically only been modified enough that it can move 300kg worth of mass, within a remarkably restricted space around itself. And that's with SARA and Black Spiral BOTH working hard as hell to improve and refine the technology within what we understand about it. After years of testing and research, we only managed to increase the range about a meter, and increase the weight limit by 100kg, and there's been no real progress in what, 7 years since then? Realistically, assume teleportation is as advanced as we can get it right now, barring some crazy, unexpected breakthrough on the scale of penicillin or electricity.

 

[Foxtrot 813]

If you have a blackhole with a sufficiently large horizon, you yourself will be unable to escape it.

To give you a sense of how the mass dislocation of how a black hole actually works, if our star fell in on itself and became a black hole... Well, let's give you a sense of scale.

Our planet has a surface area of 510.1 million km square miles. It has an atmosphere that's 30 miles high. But we use less than 0.03% of our atmosphere's vertical space and our tallest skyscraper is only 0.007% of that distance And our entire atmosphere: the mountains, rivers, even the oceans, the sky are a slither so thin on the surface of our world that it is thinner than the lacquer on-top of the paint of the countries of the world on an atlas globe desk toy. That's everywhere you could have ever been in your entire life, is an infantesimally tiny part of the world. Less than 0.0000001% of the earth's total volume.

If we compress our sun into a black hole, it only has a diameter of six miles and a length of less than three.

You could walk about it in a complete circle inside a single day.

But if even your shoelace or the air around you got caught in its event horizon, there's nothing you can do to stop yourself from falling in. That's it: Game over.

It'll be slow. You probably won't even notice it happen at first because of the lensed light and the likely stretching of your environment around you. Like stretching an image in photoshop: slowly pulling the parts of the world around you -- and you, longer and longer faster than the parts further away. It'd happen so slowly that you'd survive the process. But its also inescapable: Even if you run away, you don't become any further away. I know that doesn't make sense, but that's what the physics say.

And you want to use this thing to catch bullets. Which are more than 1% of our total mass?

Yeah. Okay. Seems perfectly safe. You do that.

I'll be way over there somewhere. Like, an entire country away. Underground.

Or space. Like an astronomical unit away.

Why? An event horizon becomes exponentially more massive as time goes on. And once a blackhole is running, that's it.

Our best math says hawking radiation (a type of black-body electromagnetic radiation which occurs in the visible spectrum as a greenish yellow that is also ultra-violet but occurs in such huge amounts that it would not only blind you if you saw it but destroy your retinas, face, skull, clothes, metal objects you wore, the room you stood in, your town, your county and a significant part of your country) means they will eventually get smaller. As to how you'd make enough to get rid of the black hole when you were done with it without utterly killing everyone in every direction if you did it near instantly (less than an hour) in a distance of half our solar system, I have no idea. Mass dislocation and mass/energy transference is not only difficult but its also really hard (like two people here will get that joke).

tl;dr: Can it be done? Yes, theoretically. Should it be done? Absolutely not. Why? Far too much can go wrong.

All this needs are funny, stick figure images and it might as well be an xkcd article.

 

[OsakanOne]

>It might not make sense but that's literally how it works.
>No, seriously. Before we realised causality incidence aka time criss-crossing over itself, we used to call it "the noodle effect"
>Gravity is probably the most terrifying force in the universe if you understand it properly.
>Why am I trying to get gravity over and give it mad heat as best heel?

>I write lots of it and I want to be feared.



>SCIENCE DOESN'T KNOW

 

[paladinrpg]

Oh my goodness, I just fell off my chair laughing

 

[OsakanOne]

 

[OsakanOne]

 

[Fred]

This was a shielding discussion thread. How did it become like this? orz