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How powerful are energy batteries?

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Re: How powerful are energy batteries?
Post by Somtaaw   » Thu Jan 07, 2016 4:42 pm

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Theemile wrote:
Besides the size difference of the weapons between a tank and a Starship (tons vs ktons) you also have a vast difference in the range the weapons are used at - Tanks have a range measured in kilometers or 10s of Kilometers on the ground (100s if they have anti-orbital capabilities) - Knife fighting range for starships is 100,000 KM.



Didn't Ransom's ship demand a 100km "security bubble" when she visited Barnett? And Theisman mused that a 100km security bubble, a laserhead missile is already inside it's detonation radius. So average knife-fighting range for starships has to be closer to 250,000-300,000 km.
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Re: How powerful are energy batteries?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Jan 07, 2016 5:21 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:
Theemile wrote:
Besides the size difference of the weapons between a tank and a Starship (tons vs ktons) you also have a vast difference in the range the weapons are used at - Tanks have a range measured in kilometers or 10s of Kilometers on the ground (100s if they have anti-orbital capabilities) - Knife fighting range for starships is 100,000 KM.



Didn't Ransom's ship demand a 100km "security bubble" when she visited Barnett? And Theisman mused that a 100km security bubble, a laserhead missile is already inside it's detonation radius. So average knife-fighting range for starships has to be closer to 250,000-300,000 km.
Just checked the ebook. She actually asked for a 5,000 km bubble.

Laserhead standoff is somewhere in the 25,000 -50,000 km (the later seen by new Andie CA laserheads in War of Honor)
Laser/Graser range is 400,000 - 500,000 km (against sidewalls) or 1,000,000 to 1,250,000 km (against unshielded targets)[1]

So yeah, knife fighting range is probably somewhere in the zone you said. And even if Ransom has asked for a 100,000 km clear zone that's barely any help, even if she kept Tepes's wedge towards every other ship/station and they were forced to use missiles.


[1] ranges from Rocket88's earlier post.
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Re: How powerful are energy batteries?
Post by cralkhi   » Sat Jan 09, 2016 4:53 am

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MadAmos wrote:I remember reading in one of the general StarWars vs StarTrek threads on reddit once. They did some estimates of the beam weapon power in Star Wars based on their ability to destroy/vaporize asteroids. Ah, found the source. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tec ... Beam2.html

These are people with too much time on their hands, but... it does give us a good estimate. The output of the weapons would have to be measured as between hundreds of thousands of TW to millions of TW.


Probably vastly more.

Supposedly Itokawa, about half a kilometer, could be destroyed by an existing megaton nuke, since it is held together only by its own gravity (which is very weak).

A megaton is about 4 x 10^15 J, so if the pulse is 5 milliseconds long as someone posted above, that comes out to a bit under 10^18 W.

That's a million terawatts - but that tiny object doesn't really qualify as a "small moon" IMO.

Saturn's tiny (about 3 km), low-density moon Methone has a mass of about 10^13 kg, and is made of ice. To heat it, melt it, then boil it would be something on the order of 10^19 joules. With the same 5 millisecond pulse, that's more like 2 x 10^21 watts (two billion terawatts).

And Methone is an extremely tiny moon, something like Phobos is probably more appropriate, and those would take orders of magnitude more energy most likely...
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Re: How powerful are energy batteries?
Post by Somtaaw   » Fri Jan 15, 2016 10:42 am

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Found a little nugget regarding PDLC fire rate in AAC.


BC-762, the lead Nike of the Nike-class, had 30 PDLC's per broadside. And in Chantilly, when up against Admiral Bellefuille's little Smoke and Mirrors trick, had over a thousand missiles inbound.

Oversteegen watched them come, absolutely motionless in his command chair, narrow eyes very still. Thirty point defense laser clusters studded each of Nike 's flanks. They were individually more powerful than any past Manticoran battlecruiser had ever mounted, with fourteen emitters per cluster, each capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That came to one shot every 1.2 seconds per cluster, but that was only twenty-five per broadside per second, and these were MDMs .


Now these PDLC's are listed as being more powerful than any battlecruiser ever mounted previously, and this particular BC class being almost as large as small battleships, could be a good indicator of the performance of capital ship PDLC's.

So, at the very least, some of the latest PDLC's can only fire once per sixteen seconds. Grasers can't possibly beat that, since they also need to do whatever they need to do, to have enough power to savage a hostile ship rather than just a short burst to take out incoming missiles. A few orders of magnitude difference in power requirements, so we have an absolute best-case fire-rate on most grasers at sixteen to twenty seconds.


And AFAIK, even before Grayson started going graser-happy on their ships, nobody mounted grasers on destroyers, and even many light cruisers had at best two grasers in their broadsides (Courageous-class CL's and similar era checked). So graser weapons were generally CA/BC and capital ships. I also don't think Grayson messed too much with their light cruiser armaments either, they're more fanatical about their heavy cruisers and BC's, just like Manticore.
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