Ship ideas

[ante185]

Mass in space is irelavent! I can throw a hammer in space and it will
Change my direction if flight! So more armor more mass is most irelelevant! Whats the point there is the faster smt is "floating" the more enegry you need to change its direction! Its all about vectorial math! Nothing is about mass!

Well mass has a tendency to not wanting to accelerate, that's why truck for example will take a longer time to stop and will have a longer break distance then a regular car, regardless if they were in a weightless environment or not. Also in the first part of your post do you mean that ships should be able to turn without slowing down? because that's what will happen, your ships will speed up towards a location and when they get to top speed they will "glide" towards it and if they turn at this stage they wont slow down, as far as I've heard at least, so you could have ships going backwards at their top speed as they have speed up to top speed then turned 180 degrees.

[PerfectDeath]

more mass will result in a lower thrust to 'weight' ratio. Even without gravity pulling the mass down, that mass will take longer to accelerate if the thrust does not increase in proportion.

[Pandora]

From basic physics, p=mv. That is to say, momentum equals mass times velocity. Add in acceleration, and this is all you really need to know about how stuff moves in space, although it does require some thinking to get it there. First off: Momentum is not a scalar! That is to say you can do all sorts of funky diagrams with arrows and lines showing change in momentum. To look at it simply: If you accelerate at 1mps² for 100 seconds, your velocity along your original vector will be 100mps. Say you rotate your ship 90 degrees, and apply the same acceleration for 10 seconds, what is your velocity along your original vector? I'll give you a hint, you don't have to do anything to get the answer. (yes physicists, I am well aware of how brutally i'm simplifying things!) In space, there is minimal deceleration. In short, to slow down or change your vector along an axis you have to apply acceleration.

What's more, short of C (the speed of light, 299,792.458 kps) and energy requirements there is no limit on velocity! If you accelerate at 1g (~9.8mps²) from the start of the universe to now, you will never reach C for two reasons. 1, as you approach it your inertial reference frame will shift, making your actual velocity increase lower. This is a result of your inertial mass increasing (to understand how this works, go to wikipedia!) Furthermore, the amount of energy required to accelerate as you get closer to C asymptotically approaches infinity. This is why in conventional physics, it is a safe statement to say that we cannot conceive of an FTL engine. As a brief aside, there actually is a limit on your speed:The quality of your particle shielding. The higher your velocity the greater the impact with radiation and particles, as well as the more of them you hit (simply because you're moving fast!) So the quality of your ship does, to an extent, limit your velocity.

Now, remember what I said in the first paragraph? Assume you hit your maximum velocity (as defined by the limits of the energy required for further acceleration and your ships particle shielding), it will take you an equal amount of acceleration to stop as it did to get you to that point. This is because the vacuum of space (again, physicists I know I'm glossing over stuff!) there's at best minimal drag to decelerate you. Thus the practical limit on velocity is not what your ships maximum is, but rather what velocity you can decelerate to a relative rest from in the time you have available.

I have a lot more I could say on this issue, but unless there's interest in that occurring I'll save it.

[ViroMelchior]

From basic physics, p=mv. That is to say, momentum equals mass times velocity. Add in acceleration, and this is all you really need to know about how stuff moves in space, although it does require some thinking to get it there. First off: Momentum is not a scalar! That is to say you can do all sorts of funky diagrams with arrows and lines showing change in momentum. To look at it simply: If you accelerate at 1mps² for 100 seconds, your velocity along your original vector will be 100mps. Say you rotate your ship 90 degrees, and apply the same acceleration for 10 seconds, what is your velocity along your original vector? I'll give you a hint, you don't have to do anything to get the answer. (yes physicists, I am well aware of how brutally i'm simplifying things!) In space, there is minimal deceleration. In short, to slow down or change your vector along an axis you have to apply acceleration.

What's more, short of C (the speed of light, 299,792.458 kps) and energy requirements there is no limit on velocity! If you accelerate at 1g (~9.8mps²) from the start of the universe to now, you will never reach C for two reasons. 1, as you approach it your inertial reference frame will shift, making your actual velocity increase lower. This is a result of your inertial mass increasing (to understand how this works, go to wikipedia!) Furthermore, the amount of energy required to accelerate as you get closer to C asymptotically approaches infinity. This is why in conventional physics, it is a safe statement to say that we cannot conceive of an FTL engine. As a brief aside, there actually is a limit on your speed:The quality of your particle shielding. The higher your velocity the greater the impact with radiation and particles, as well as the more of them you hit (simply because you're moving fast!) So the quality of your ship does, to an extent, limit your velocity.

Now, remember what I said in the first paragraph? Assume you hit your maximum velocity (as defined by the limits of the energy required for further acceleration and your ships particle shielding), it will take you an equal amount of acceleration to stop as it did to get you to that point. This is because the vacuum of space (again, physicists I know I'm glossing over stuff!) there's at best minimal drag to decelerate you. Thus the practical limit on velocity is not what your ships maximum is, but rather what velocity you can decelerate to a relative rest from in the time you have available.

I have a lot more I could say on this issue, but unless there's interest in that occurring I'll save it.

Well said and explained.

[Pandora]

Well said and explained.

Thanks. I'd love it if this game were more realistic in this way, but honestly that wouldn't be a very fair game. Want an example of how? IDGAF here one is anyway!

You have a fleet, armed with VERY long range missiles and lasers. You come out of FTL 15 30 light minutes out of your target, and go to max acceleration. once you hit .75C, or something along those lines, cut acceleration and coast in. A missile that can accelerate at 1500mps², a fairly low sum for a missile especially one carried on a space ship, fired at .75C from a range of 15 light seconds will cross the gap in under 20 seconds. If they came in under stealth, only breaking stealth to fire 4 salvos (one at 60, 45, 30 and 15 light seconds with travel times of 80, 60, 40 and 20 seconds respectively) and with a VELOCITY at launch of 224,844,343.5 mps. That's 3/4ths the speed of light. At that speed you wouldn't need anything besides a well designed kinetic projectile to do damage. Why? Well, we know KE = 1/2(mass * velocity²). So, assuming they don't increase their relative vector towards the target (aka, don't close with it any faster), the missile would have a kinetic energy of 25,277,489,401,972,996 * m. That's 25.277 TRILLION TIMES the mass. If we give this missile a mass of 907.185 kg, or 1 short ton (2000 lbs), we get a kinetic energy of 2.29 * 10¹⁹ newtons. 1 newton (N) equals 1 kilogram per meter per second squared. Written out long ways? that's 22,900,000,000,000,000,000 N. To give you some reference: the kinetic energy of a car crash of a 1000 kilogram car, traveling at 110 kmps (roughly 60 mph), had a kinetic energy of 6,050,000,000,000 N. It would take 3785124 car collisions using these numbers to equal the kinetic energy of one of these missiles. Given these numbers, if each ship fires 10 missiles in each salvo (40 missiles per ship), and there are 100 ships? that's 4000 missiles.

Can you imagine a scenario where that much destruction wouldn't wreck an entire fleet before it knew what was coming? if you can, I would love to hear how! Final though: I wasn't even factoring what they could do in the fraction of a second they were in energy weapon range.....

[Fengyea]

ahh I see that makes alil more since.