(Spoilers) Future technological developments.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

"Just think of it as evolution in action."

It really pisses people off when I make this assesment of certain fatal incidents.

A Friend of mine said it best - "If it weren't for government enforced safety labels on consumer products, 1 in 3 of these people would be dead."

Remove the consumer safety labels and the human race will start the Darwinian process again.

Theemile wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

"Just think of it as evolution in action."

It really pisses people off when I make this assesment of certain fatal incidents.

A Friend of mine said it best - "If it weren't for government enforced safety labels on consumer products, 1 in 3 of these people would be dead."

Remove the consumer safety labels and the human race will start the Darwinian process again.

I liked Robert Heinlein's take on it:
Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

tlb wrote:It may be that a laser head can penetrate a sidewall, but it is not efficient because the beams are reduced, dispersed, and bent: look at the scene in UH where the SLN attacks the RMN ships at the wormhole and gets many shots down the throat to no damage because of the bow wall (similar to a side wall). Even fighting broadside to broadside, you can always try for the open aspect by shooting ahead or behind.

Laserheads can absolutely penetrate sidewalls. We see that frequently in the early books. I think the real advantage that the RMN had in that fight is that when you program a laserhead to go for the open throat you know that the standoff range can be more because there's no sidewall and you know that every km you close the range the better the PDLC intercept chances are. So the Cataphracts probably detonated from further out than they would have if they'd known they were attacking a sidewall.
The capital weight laserhead on a Cataphract-C can still penetrate the bow-wall - and in fact the RMN ships did take damage through theirs - but if the SLN had known to expect them the Cataphracts probably would have done substantially better (though still far worse than if there'd been no sidewall at all).

tlb wrote:True, the Beowulf stations were not valid military targets; but there should still be planning to prevent collateral damage. The discussion of blocking was for orbitals that did not possess a built-in defense capability. Weyland did not need blocking buoys when it could just turn on its sidewalls.

Eh, even a weak wedge is vastly more powerful than even the strongest sidewall. Weyland popping on its spherical sidewall would have reduced the damage that the graser torps inflicted, but they'd have punched through the sidewall (Admittedly losing a fair bit of power in the process) and inflicted deep and serious damage. (Remember that the grasers were significantly more powerful than even a capital missile's laserhead.)

And if the MAlign could figure out how to modify a spider drive to act as a penetration aid for a contact nuke they could possibly sneak close enough to slip a warhead through the sidewall before it detonated!!

The suddenly interposed wedge has a chance of taking out the missile or torp with no damage to the station behind hit. (You'd still want a sidewall up in case any of the attackers found a gap in your impeller defenses, but a sidewall really isn't a substitute for an imposed wedge)

Jonathan_S wrote:

Eh, even a weak wedge is vastly more powerful than even the strongest sidewall. Weyland popping on its spherical sidewall would have reduced the damage that the graser torps inflicted, but they'd have punched through the sidewall (Admittedly losing a fair bit of power in the process) and inflicted deep and serious damage. (Remember that the grasers were significantly more powerful than even a capital missile's laserhead.)
[/quote]
At close enough range the spider grasers can cut up an SD through it's sidewalls. And a spider can get to 30K range.

So yeah, wuldn't have saved the stations. I'd assume the targeting was based on the assumption that the stations were fully alerted and waiting, so the torps came in on different aspects and planned to get very close if needed.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:

Eh, even a weak wedge is vastly more powerful than even the strongest sidewall. Weyland popping on its spherical sidewall would have reduced the damage that the graser torps inflicted, but they'd have punched through the sidewall (Admittedly losing a fair bit of power in the process) and inflicted deep and serious damage. (Remember that the grasers were significantly more powerful than even a capital missile's laserhead.)

At close enough range the spider grasers can cut up an SD through it's sidewalls. And a spider can get to 30K range.

So yeah, wuldn't have saved the stations. I'd assume the targeting was based on the assumption that the stations were fully alerted and waiting, so the torps came in on different aspects and planned to get very close if needed.[/quote]


coulda, woulda, shoulda.


It all sounds good. And there was no warning, etc.

kzt wrote:No, the damage a nuke does at more then a km or two is pretty minimal. It’s an inverse square function, so the energy delivered to a target 10s of km away during that very short X-ray event is just not that much.

And the people designing this are not dumb. It’s an obvious target.

Sorry, no. Even in canon we have examples of fairly large robust targets being damaged by nukes at significant range. Missile pods, for instance.

The individual bits don't have to be vaporized to be rendered nonfunctional, and sensors designed to be as sensitive as possible are even more vulnerable to energy spikes than usual equipment.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

kzt wrote:No, the damage a nuke does at more then a km or two is pretty minimal. It’s an inverse square function, so the energy delivered to a target 10s of km away during that very short X-ray event is just not that much.

And the people designing this are not dumb. It’s an obvious target.

Sorry, no. Even in canon we have examples of fairly large robust targets being damaged by nukes at significant range. Missile pods, for instance.

The individual bits don't have to be vaporized to be rendered nonfunctional, and sensors designed to be as sensitive as possible are even more vulnerable to energy spikes than usual equipment.

It seems contradictory - because in ship-ship combat, they are called "contact" nukes for a reason - you need to be practically in contact to do any damage. Yet, we hear that Pods are susceptible to proximity nuke explosions - I would assume they are not armored in any way, and it's the EMP or radiation that fry them.

"Just think of it as evolution in action."

It really pisses people off when I make this assesment of certain fatal incidents.[/quote]

A Friend of mine said it best - "If it weren't for government enforced safety labels on consumer products, 1 in 3 of these people would be dead."

Remove the consumer safety labels and the human race will start the Darwinian process again.[/quote]

I liked Robert Heinlein's take on it:
Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.[/quote]

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Darwin Awards are and still will be awarded -- even if the award is not formal.

-- Stewart

Galactic Sapper wrote:A technology I hope to see a lot less of in the future: orbital habitats. They've been shown to be indefensible death traps in the event of hostilities and there's basically no justification for having them the size they are in story. Industrial nodes make perfect sense and having a resident population for that purpose is reasonable, but having platforms like Beowulf Alpha solely as residential platforms makes sense solely as a plot device.

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Some systems will mandate orbital habitats --
ex- Zelda in AoV -- needed as a logistics depot at the time, but only "marginally" habitable.

The game changes to star-nations willing to play by the "rules of war" and KNOWING they will be held accountable.

-- Stewart