Spring RTS Engine

I've recently been doing some thought experiments about various aspects of futuristic space and since I'm not really an expert in any of it I thought I would share and see what others have to say about it.

(I'm considering making a setting for a sci-fi rpg and would like it to be at least somewhat realistically grounded)

Combat - ballistics, directed energy, missiles. Unless I'm missing something these are pretty much your options of damaging other space vessels. bullets travelling long distances could be dodged (or deflected with electro-magnets?) depending on the circumstances, lasers can be reflected, and missiles can be shot down.

Canisters of corrosive liquids (acids, etc..) could be used ballistically (or in missiles) and could have a wider spread than slugs but depending on the surface armor they could be completely nullified if a hit were to occur.

Considering the long distances in space, what do you think the most effective ship loadout/armor would consist of and why?

Travel - If you're traveling to another planet, the fastest way (granted a powerful enough engine and fuel) would be to accelerate at 1g (or higher if you want the crew uncomfortable) till you reach halfway then decelerate at 1g till you reach the destination. You would not need a ship that rotates to provide artificial gravity; the ship's acceleration would suffice.

And since there is effectively no friction in space you could have a ufo-ship to create a mini-world (with the center probably hollowed out for the engines) Of course I haven't really considered the energy implications of accelerating a massive mini-world at a constant 1g and am not sure how feasible it would be even given the ability to collect space-hydrogen into super effective fusion cores to power the behemoth.

There are a lot of things I haven't covered: fighter plane-ships, living on other planets, interstellar travel, etc.. but I'd like to hear your thoughts on these as well.

for the combat part, we had a thread about exactly that a few months ago.

bullets travelling long distances could be dodged

yea but they can bounce you into asteroids so astronauts must be carefull.

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They have not been many missions that went outside earth orbit. Actually I think the only ones were Apollo 8 to 17 so thats only 9 * 3 people who have left earths orbit and thats thirty years ago.

The most advanced space thing is probally the ISS and destroying that would be as easy to crashing an old TV satellite into it.

Fast forward some hundred (?) years and say there are colonies on the moon, mars and travel among them is common. Even then combat would only really be possible in orbit around planets. And even then hitting stuff would not be easy. In open space its probally impossible with launch windows, flight trajectories, high speeds and all that.

Saying something is technically impossible has always been stupid but I can not imagine living on other planets ever happening. Maybe half a dozen people in a tent thing on mars, like in a space station. But more than that...?

knorke wrote:

bullets travelling long distances could be dodged

yea but they can bounce you into asteroids so astronauts must be carefull.

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They have not been many missions that went outside earth orbit. Actually I think the only ones were Apollo 8 to 17 so thats only 9 * 3 people who have left earths orbit and thats thirty years ago.

The most advanced space thing is probally the ISS and destroying that would be as easy to crashing an old TV satellite into it.

Fast forward some hundred (?) years and say there are colonies on the moon, mars and travel among them is common. Even then combat would only really be possible in orbit around planets. And even then hitting stuff would not be easy. In open space its probally impossible with launch windows, flight trajectories, high speeds and all that.

Saying something is technically impossible has always been stupid but I can not imagine living on other planets ever happening. Maybe half a dozen people in a tent thing on mars, like in a space station. But more than that...?

IT WAS A SOUNDSTAGE ON MARS

Don't get trapped by that project rho site. It did that to me.

knorke wrote:...In open space its probally impossible with launch windows, flight trajectories, high speeds and all that.

Except for high speeds, other limitations are just because our current engines aren't powerful/fuel efficient enough. Launch windows exist for the simple reason that starting off outside them will require more fuel than a rocket can bring. Efficient trajectories are about the same - if a craft is not limited by fuel, it can go in all-time-powered flight mode, not limited to specific trajectory.

But anyway space battles, if any, are hardly going to happen in deep space (fleets will just have big troubles finding each other there, and little reason to fight for nothing but large amount of empty vacuum). Rather there would be planetary orbit battles, or battles near something important (asteroid field maybe). This lessens high speed factor a bit.

As for actual combat, unless something like force shields is invented, craft's best protection would be its maneuverability and ECM system. You just can't carry armor thick enough to resist incoming projectiles at orbital speeds, but you can dodge them, and guided missiles can be fooled. Magnetic fields are not a good protection - they can be circumvented by firing non-metal ammo. I'm not sure how effective reflective surface can be at deflecting laser beams, so whether such a weapon is any good is unclear to me.

Dodging also means the craft has to be capable of very high accelerations, so, unless some kind of inertial dampeners are invented, best fighter ships will have to be unmanned. The fighters are also not required to have any kind of streamlined form, since battles will hardly descent into thick atmosphere layers. Unmanned fighters don't have to be airtight either.

the side using robots will win.

Based on your comments it appears you want to remain fairly real-world grounded. If that's the case, a lot of things are just simply impossible - like shields.

Physiologically speaking, traveling at speeds in excess of 1G is practical for humanity. Technologically, its not practical at all because of energy requirements. And don't forget, you can only accelerate for half of the trip. For the second half, you must negatively accelerate.

Is your intent to mimic real-life, some pseudo real-life scifi, or just flat out fiction?

PicassoCT wrote:the side using robots will win.

I raise you an EMP

i'd like to think that if humans were able to travel in space at a low cost, there would be no need for war... if you got angry enough about the situation you were in, you could just scoot over to the next solar system and start over.

re living on other planets : i think it would be the sort of thing where unmanned / self-replicating robot probes were sent first... land on the surface, collect materials to duplicate itself (reprap 3.0) and then dig into the surface of the world, creating a sealed system of habitable caves for inhabitation by the eventual arrival of humans.

fighting in space : depending on the maneuverability of craft, i would think that the most potent weapon would be a solid projectile designed to puncture the inhabited area of a spacecraft, killing the entire crew in a single blow. of course, since distances in space are on a truly massive scale with regards to maneuvering and hiding, these projectiles would probably need to be guided via computer.

lasers don't really make much sense in space to me; you'd need a lot of juice to power them up and keep them focused enough to do damage in an environment that acts like a massive heatsink

of course if you COULD easily power a laser of this size, then you wouldn't need to worry about guided torpedoes

armour : to counter this sort of weapon ships would need a self-sealing membrane (like the really expensive car tires) as well as extra bulkheads and shielding, as well as mirrored surfaces to reflect and disperse laser weapons.

I raise you an Picard

KaiserJ wrote:i'd like to think that if humans were able to travel in space at a low cost, there would be no need for war... if you got angry enough about the situation you were in, you could just scoot over to the next solar system and start over.

Not only that, but space is far from empty. Even places which are widely regarded as empty are frequently full of base elements, such as hydrogen. In fact, hydrogen availability is the central concept behind the Bussard Ramjet.

Things like comets (water) and asteroids (raw materials including gold, diamonds, iron, tin, etc...) are also thought to be abundant. They certainly are in our own solar system. Remember, its thought that most of the water on Earth actually arrived by means of comets.

If i should die in space, i want my coffin to be shot at the enemy with a rail gun.



I raise you my burrial site.

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:

PicassoCT wrote:the side using robots will win.

I raise you an EMP

I raise you organic computers

I raise you the golden age problem, were for every meassure/weapon named, a counterweapon is found in ancient threads on the interwebs, leading to our decendants having no imagination at all, so phailing the day, we fail to come up with a sollution.

yup, know about those bussard ramjets and "light sails"... lol my brain is chock full of stuff like this from reading what is probably way too much science fiction.

to me it comes down to power source... i would assume that a new type of power source would be required to make space travel feasible and economical; perhaps something that works like the ramjet to scoop up materials near the earth and then bring it back to an orbital "filling station" in order for ships near the earth to refuel... bring people up and down from the planet via spaceplanes (like richard bransons)

of course with something like "zero point energy" as a power source, you could provide a spaceship with an unlimited amount of power to accelerate and decelerate, changing the entire dynamic of how we currently view space travel

the other massive problem is how does a human survive such a long journey to another star? the options seem to be cryogenic freezing (which has miles to go before its even close to being feasable, ice crystals forming in the brain and whatnot) or having a massive spaceship capable of supporting many humans for multiple generations... im not sure if i'd feel good about having a kid on a spaceship though; talk about limiting their options from an early age!

it would probably be possible even with our current technology to build something like one of these generational ships, but would probably throw the entire planet into poverty by way of the required resources.

what we really need is teleportation. if we could teleport to other planets without requiring any space travel whatsoever... need fuel? suck it directly out of a gas giant... want to go to grandmas? just step into the teleportation booth and dial her number. convicted criminal? you'll be teleported to fend for yourself on the horror planet of alpha centauri five amid giant ants and flying bears.

teleporters would throw the entire idea of space combat wide open... maybe the only safe place to be would be on a spaceship, if they were able to teleport to your planets and they knew where they were...

i raise you "robocop 2"

maackey wrote:Travel - If you're traveling to another planet, the fastest way (granted a powerful enough engine and fuel) would be to accelerate at 1g (or higher if you want the crew uncomfortable) till you reach halfway then decelerate at 1g till you reach the destination. You would not need a ship that rotates to provide artificial gravity; the ship's acceleration would suffice.

Interesting idea... but if the ship is really long, and has really long pipe where you can fall down, wouldnt you fall down like 10 times faster than on earth? since while you fall down, the ship speed is increasing exponentially, thus the bottom of the ship will basically hit at you, instead of you hitting at it.

Hmm... i think the air in the ship would get much more pressure too, if the ship is really long, the other side of the ship has really low pressure, while the other side has high pressure... Kinda like on earth, higher altitude = less pressure & less air to breath.

mmh.. currently reading the Prefect - and i want a conjoiner-drive, want it here, want it now..

@HeavyLancer: wow. information overload. Quite a lot of info to sort through but I've already found some cool stuff (like accel/decel travel being called "brachistochrone" trajectories)

@echoone: Well I had some crazy ideas that came to me after a conversation with my dad about forces, specifically the electro-magnetic force -- which is the same force that allows our fingers to contact and apply pressure to other surfaces.

This led to the far-fetched idea that electro-magnetic fields could be controlled by our body chemistry (neurons in the nervous system) sounded really neat for an RPG I could set in a sci-fi setting. Add in aliens and wormholes and unobtanium though and everything seemed to get a little too fantastical for science fiction so I wanted to add in realistic elements.

So I started to think about possibilities of space travel and combat in the future both for the novel concept of what could possibly be and for ideas to create a solid setting for a story.

@TradeMark: If you're traveling at 1g, you'd "fall" (the ship would hit you) as fast as you would on earth because the acceleration is constant. Granted if you were on a really "long" ship you could easily fall and die but I think ships would most likely be segmented so 1.) you don't fall too far down the stairs/ladder and 2.) were a hull breach to occur it wouldn't kill everyone.

For civilian ships though I wouldn't really imagine "long" ships but more like a ufo flat shape. the "front" would second as a hydrogen collector (similar to the Bussard Ramjet mentioned earlier -- which I had a similar idea before I even heard of it oddly enough) and the bottom would house the exhaust to propel the ship forwards and give it its artificial gravity.

I really hadn't thought about pressure, but I suppose air would tend to be more dense at the "bottom" than at the top but using sectionally separated ships the pressure could be easily maintained much like current passenger planes.

@KaiserJ: Wormholes would be the effective "teleportation". Instead of functioning like Star Trek, they would function much more like "A Wrinkle in Time". I imagine them as a hole kept open by some circular building powered by the sun pouring enough energy into the hole to keep it open at all times. On the other side of the hole would be another solar system, possibly inhabited by aliens. Of course this is quickly wandering into fantastical speculation.

@PicassoCT: I'll definitely have to read more about conjoiner drives to help our unimaginative progeny survive

If you really wanted to get into some sci fi ideas for this subject, I say that you would really have to have some very advanced technology that could cause people to basically teleport too. The characters would need to be able to rearrange space matter so that they could safely teleport to another location.

The absence of gravity is another huge problem. The human body is not adapted to really live for extremely long periods of time in low gravity conditions. The people could develop muscular weakness, space dementia, and animals that have produced offspring in space have had offspring that are mutated.

If a colony were to be built on the moon, I don't think that simply having a dome on the moon to simulate the atmosphere would work. For one thing, if a moonquake were to occur (the moon's crust is still active), the dome could be damaged and the colony could be destroyed, not to mention the possibility of what could happen if a large meteor were to crash into it. Advanced robots are definitely the way to go.