Re: Kicking a few ideas around in my head (SF), would like to get feedback

On Aug 7, 1:43 am, MatthewJRotondo <rotond...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 7, 2:35 am, alien8er <Alien8...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:>   For say contemporary America, you could drive a Saturn V through our
detection systems.

That's amusing and a little disheartening at the same time.

Laughing at imagery like that keeps us from crying at the harsh
truths therein. ;>)

  How competent are the guys you have to fool?

I never liked the idea of making bungling strawmen evildoers, so
picture competent, well disciplined enemies. Picture Erwin Rommel and
George Patton and/or Bernard Montgomery dueling in the deserts of
Tunisia; two opponents equally matched in audacity and cunning. In
light of what others have told me though, I've decided to drop the
idea of "imitation stealth" as implausible.

Don't assume "plausible" and "possible" always have the same
meaning. I wanted to point out that space stealth isn't _completely_
impossible, just extremely _limited_. Even in WWII Tunisia there was
some stealth and spoofing going on, with camo paintjobs and inflatable
decoy tanks and such. Close-up neither would fool a professional
soldier, but at a distance they had the potential to fool them for
long enough to "help" them make the wrong decision.

In space warfare you cannot completely hide a warship; it's just too
damn hot and moving completely wrong to be a natural object. Well,
averaged over all viewing angles, and over a sufficiently long time,
that is. From some angles, over some limited time frames, it can look
like a natural object or be completely invisible, depending on how
sophisticated the detection systems you want to get it past are.

  ...I've always favored Powered Armor, like a Jim Suit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIM_suit

When I think of Power Armor, I think of...http://www.defitech.ch/divers/oct06/arnaud/index_files/image008.jpg

That's probably because I'm over 50, and you're not. ;>)

Also, I have an engineering background and need some solidity to my
examples- the JIM suit is a demonstrated technology but the
illustrated Warhammer suit is, well, just an illustration; there's no
indication of how it goes together or functions.

But the JIM suit is cool. Seems rather clunky, but I would guess that
in a few decades, they'll come up with something more efficient.

Yeah, well, I was thinking of the JIM suit as an ancestor of "real"
powered armor. I s'pose I could have said that...

FTM consider it as an ancestor of the Warhammer suit.

 with force-feedback motors powering all the joints. ;>)

Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (not that tragically bad Verhoeven
movie) had something similar, if I recall correctly.

Exactly! I read that when I was a kid, and it informed my idea of
what a "spacesuit" should be.

(Energy as currency vs. entropy)

That being said, surely as Proctor and Gamble makes a profit selling
Duracell batteries, there is some profit margin that is made in
selling stored energy, no? How do brand names like Duracell and
Energizer stay in business if every battery they sell is at a loss? Or
am I misunderstanding what you said?

Think about where they get the energy to charge the battery with
(actually, to refine the chemicals they assemble into a battery).
Largely from oil or coal, or other "stored sunlight" sources, or
nuclear power which is "stored supernova" power. All that stored power
didn't cost P&G anything to store, so it's effectively free (more
accurately, varying degrees of cheap to access and convert). If it
wasn't, P&G would indeed be operating at a loss.

When you or I buy one of those batteries, what we're actually paying
for is the work done to transfer the stored solar (or supernova)
energy from the oil or whatever it used to be inconveniently stored
in, to the convenient portable form we can use to power whatever we
choose.

Strictly speaking you pay more than the battery is worth in terms of
energy to do whatever the battery does, but do you want to spend your
whole life on a stationary bicycle powering your computer etc.? Of
course not, so you're willing to help feed, clothe, and house some
folks in Third-World battery factories so you can operate your MP3
player.

And although I had it in mind of putting joules in wallets; it seems
that the more logical solution would be legal tender backed by joules
which are stored in an energy bank, where the person can use wireless
energy technology (http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39008/113/)
to simply "download" the energy to where he needs it, potentially
converting it into watts for use. In light of your input, would there
be a necessary reduced efficiency? Intel's experiment claimed a 75%
efficiency. In light of the fact that this is a technology in its
infancy, what would be the maximum theoretical efficiency for getting
a joule of stored energy converted into something useful?

The basic technology behind such schemes, the transformer, is the
most efficient technology we have (typically 98% or better) _when
properly built_ which means close coupling between input and output,
nearly lossless core materials, and so on. Putting the primary and
secondary several feet or more apart in non-fixed locations, with a
"core" of air, and with other potentially absorbing objects in
proximity is not particularly conducive to maximizing efficiency.

That stated 75% efficiency figure is most certainly in carefully
contrived circumstances, and not particularly realistic ones.

Economics, they don't call it "the dismal science" for nothing.

Yep.

  As Boomer said, "What are we blowing up today?" Also, who is "we",
meaning what can "we" afford? Antimatter is indeed likely to be
horrendously expensive in any reasonable scenario, but then so are
nuclear warheads. Militaries expect to have to operate at a short-term
loss, as long as the long-term goals are met.

Earlier posts seem to indicate that, dollar for dollar, kinetic
drivers are the weapon of choice. I was referring to ship-to-ship
combat, by the way.

  Not that any of that really matters; short-range space warfare (in
this case, anything human reflexes are useful for) is extremely
unrealistic. Targets are more likely to be thousands of miles apart,
moving at planet-orbital velocities at least.

I have reflected on this fact. My idea is to use missile/kinetic
driver hybrids as a primary weapon. Accelerate a projectile using a
rail or coil gun to somewhere in the vicinity of the enemy's ship,
letting the momentum carry it in lieu of a big, fat, noticeable drive
system. When the projectile reaches the intended distance, an interior
charge detonates and throws a cloud of flak in the area, hopefully
peppering the enemy ship with high velocity kinetic slugs. Thoughts?
Criticisms?

You will get little disagreement; explosives work by pushing
whatever you want destroyed out of the way of the expanding cloud of
detonation products which, since it's driven by chemistry, is limited
to the low tens of kilometers per second. Also in conventional
missiles the warhead is a small part of the total mass of the
projectile.

With kinetic kill weapons the whole mass of the missile is the
"warhead", even split into slivers, and in theory can be accelerated
to whatever velocity you can afford to spend energy to achieve.

BTW speaking of imagery vs. "reality"; I'm a huge fan of the newer
Battlestar Galactica TV series if only for the space battle scenes.
They are still unrealistically close together but that's because it's
TV and you have to get both sides onscreen to maintain drama. Anyway,
the depiction of ship-to-ship missile and railgun combat is, well,
less phoney than most SF space warfare.

And yeah, fighters are pretty much pointless.

  "Naturally" in the sense that you have more room to put a bigger
power plant, and the option of using a lake, river, or ocean as a
heatsink which a spacecraft cannot do.

When I say "naturally" I mean "it makes sense to us laymen!" which is
your cue to pick it apart piece by piece ;)

What do laymen use for "common sense" though but imagery of past
events that are in some sense comparable? Consider WWII ship-to-shore
combat, with ships throwing shells at shore/inland targets many miles
away, and shore batteries trying to take the ships out. Overall it's
fairly similar, but shells aren't much affected by air where laser
beams are, and shorelines don't rotate out of line-of-fire the way
planet surfaces do as seen by spacecraft.

There are other fine points but I think you get the general idea.

  OTOH the other local inhabitants of the planet might object, which
situation likely wouldn't arise on a warship.

That's true. There's always the political implications of building a
planetary network of death ray lasers. My plan would be that they
wouldn't actually be mobile. Aiming towards an enemy spaceship of
course, but not capable of pointing at, say, a city. I also thought to
store them in ICBM-like silos, so they would really be nothing more
than a purely defensive weapon which, politics aside, I can see a
planetary population supporting under the right conditions.

We can't even get certain Senators to okay windfarms in their
backyards, but the planet isn't under attack either...

  Kinda like the WWII flamethrower; best not to be the most dangerous
thing on the battlefield, because it also makes you the biggest
target. Your Super Dooper Laser will require some hefty point defenses
of its own, because attackers will try very hard to knock it out.

That's true, but then I envision it like the Macarena: never a good
idea, but there's safety in numbers. The idea behind terrestrial based
weapons which I was envisioning is that, no matter how many laser
cannons you can load on a spaceship, you can load more on a planet,
with more powerful power plants, and more effective heat-sinks, all
you need are lasers strong enough to penetrate the atmosphere (which,
by logic, would also work the other way around). This isn't counting
kinetic weapons, of course.

Yep.

...I figured to just throw the idea of particle weapons out there
to see what happens; but it seems like they will be joining stealth
and space fighters in my "It doesn't work. Period." file.

although here's something to throw out there purely for the sake of
feeding the dogs: lightning bolts. They are a type of particle beam,
no? Is a "Lightning Bolt Cannon" theoretically possible/militarily
feasible? I would imagine that you would need to have some sort of
compensator for accuracy, and I have no idea of a lightning bolt can
even exist in space. Just mind candy to nibble on.

Um, no, they're an electrical discharge brought on by a potential
difference generated by friction between clouds and ground. To
extremely oversimplify; the moving air containing the clouds "rub off"
electrons from some of the atoms the ground is made of and the
electrons get stored on the clouds. The clouds are said to be
"charged" with electrons and therefore have electrical potential with
respect to the ground the electrons came from. Eventually the
potential difference is so great that the electrons "fall" back home
all at once and heat up the channel of air they travel through.

Naively, you can think of a lightning bolt as a very powerful, very
short-lived electron beam. But firing one at a target means you need
to generate millions of volts of potential difference WRT the target
to get the electrons to "fall" through, or else you expect your gun to
be charged to millions of volts _after_ you fire it. That takes us
back to Erik's explanation of how the gun defeats the beam by
attracting it back to the muzzle.

  Not all FTL spacecraft trajectories lead to causality violations,
but it's difficult to find a physical justification why they should be
realizable, but not those that do lead to causality violation, other
than to say "it's just that way" AKA Hawking's Chronology Protection
Conjecture.

  SImilarly one could postulate some form of FTL energy transfer that
could be modulated to transfer data FTL as well, as long as there's no
causality violation.

  Again though, finding a specific physical reason for the difference
so far barely deserves the term "fiction".

I've already filed this under "It's not possible, but I'm gonna use it
anyway because it's cool".

...Are you suggesting that there is some (extremely
improbable) way of preserving causality and relativity while having
FTL? My understanding is that you can only have two; and reality
seems to favor relativity and causality.

That's exactly what I'm saying, that I see no reason FTL is not
allowed _for those trajectories that don't lead to causality
violation_.

There was a long discussion here about that last year (I think) and
I believe I sufficiently defended my position, though there are severe
restrictions. For instance, the farther away you go in space, and the
faster you go to get there, the easier it is to violate causality by
turning around and getting back before you leave. So, FTL, if it's
possible at all, will be restricted to specific distance/velocity
regimes meaning interGalactic Empires are Right Out but in-arm
interstellar shipping and maybe warfare are barely possible. That
doesn't mean either will necessarily be politically or economically
feasible; that's another discussion.


Mark L. Fergerson
.

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