phavoc said:
The hull armor factor makes the ships pretty tough compared to our ships today. They could take a lot of punishment, but just how much is unknown. I've never read any rules that talk about max safe reentry speeds for any ship hull type.
True though the High Guard ship option of Heat Shielding makes it very clear that a ship without it will burn up on re-entry without a functional gravitic drive. From that we can infer that no matter how much armor a ship has it just can't stand up to that kind of heat.
hiro said:
It got me thinking that with anti gravity, there is no need to maintain orbital velocity to maintain altitude. You simply use your grav drive to suspend the ship.
With no atmospheric braking required there wouldn't be any need for heat shields and if you look at the bean stalk idea, the speed of ascent and descent is constant, you just stick it in gear and go, slow and steady, the distances we're talking about aren't large, the speed of ascent/descent don't need to be high. At the equator Earth is spinning at something like 1000 mph so you would at some point need to match that speed but the math of that is a little beyond me.
The gist of it tho is that no ship with a grav based manoeuvre drive has need of atmospheric braking.
That's pretty much the conclusion I came to. Most ships don't have heat shielding because they simply slow down using the ships drive before re-entry, then use the gravitic drive to make a very controlled re-entry. The only question is, how slow are they going once they enter atmosphere. As I mentioned before and this is purely a guess-timate on my part, I'd say transonic speeds of around 1,000 to 1,700 kmph based on a) real world air craft not built for supersonic speeds and b) most ship designs in the "streamlined" category are far from the kind of streamlined you see with supersonic aircraft; YMMV. At 1,700 kmph an aircraft might get a skin temperature of 100 C, which for an armored hull probably wouldn't be any problem. When you get into the Mach 3-4 range aircraft are designed, as best I could find, to handle temperatures in the range of 600-800 C. Above that, the fastest (successful) aircraft on record did just over Mach 6 and had a liquid cooled nickel-titanium skin that could supposedly tolerate temperatures up to 1,925 C! (However, its worth noting that same test aircraft later failed in a test flight when said skin literally peeled off as it hit speeds close to 13,000 kmph, so... )
What mainly matters to me about this is establishing a rule of thumb that a ship like the Huntress or a Type S Scout could probably manage up to 1,700 kmph in atmosphere without problem. To go faster the ship would have to be even more streamlined and might also require heat shielding. I don't know how you would write rules to cover this, but if Mongoose wanted to tackle it I'd suggest adding a "super-streamlined" class that would look something like a SR-71 Blackbird, a J Type ship from Star Wars, or the NASA X-43 (which happens to be the craft who's skin peeled off I mentioned above). They could go faster, how much faster, I dunno, maybe Mach 6 or so seems reasonable. Going faster than the rated safe speed risks hull damage and possible hull breaches or some such.
Also, your geosynchronous orbital speed would be around 11,052 kmph, depending on exact altitude.
phavoc said:
So you gonna show us an animation of your Huntress doing all this Bardicheat?
I'm definitely considering it. There are two I would like to attempt, but as animation is something I'm still learning its more a question of having the skill level to pull it off. The first I'd like to do would be two dueling Huntress class ships firing at each other in a orbital space battle (complete with unrealistically slow laser blasts flying at each other 8) and maybe a laser hit on the hull and bits of molten armor flying/splattering away). The second I'd like to do is a fueling operation as a Huntress dips into the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, opens the fuel scoop flaps and begins skimming. This would include the turbulence in its wake and so forth. I know Blender's physics engine can do these things, its really just a matter of me learning to do it. I've been collecting tutorials on the various things I'll need to learn and I've got about 20 hrs of video ahead of me plus the actual time to set up the animations and render them.
Meanwhile I've not been able to work on it any this week due to my schedule. I'm hoping this weekend to get back to it and get the 3D model finished up with the rest of the small details and fiddly bits. Will post updates when I can.
Thanks for all the feedback and encouragement!
But yeah, I tried to give the pads enough size to give it stability when landing out in the wilderness. Also when I rig the model the landing gear will be adjustable so I can do scenes with it on uneven ground and adjust the gear to keep the ship level and stable.
