New Defense System 'Sand Screen"

[wbnc]

I've really never understood why these kinds of systems aren't standard in sci-fi games. I guess it's just not "sexy" enough compared to "a faintly glowing nimbus"
around a starship.

Oh it has i's drawbacks i understand especially against missile, or railguns Such things are only reliably stopped by not being where they are.

I don't see why you can't have the cloud also contain larger anti-missile "smart rocks." When they detect a mass on an intercept course with the ship they're around, they go to intercept whatever it is. It'd be more expensive and these would get used up.

I am trying to come up with a feasible(non handwaviuum powered) way to drag the sand with a ship as it moves. at least in a straight line fashion. My first impulse was to use a grav system of some sort, or a magnetic field.

iirc in Traveller, sandcaster clouds move with the ship initially because of electrostatic fields holding them together and shaping them. Later grav. I don't see why the same solution can't be used for your clouds. You're effectively only dealing with the velocity of the ship; there's effectively no atmosphere in space so there's no wind-resistance or anything like that.

If you can hold your cloud together, honestly, no laser is ever going to "use up"enough of the cloud for you to have to recharge the cloud during a combat. Compared to the mass of the defensive cloud, the amount of material vaporized by the incoming lasers would be negligible. With field-shaping, the cloud would fill in the spaces vaporized by lasers in less than a second.

It could even be reused - the ones in Traveller have some huge velocity to be deployed in a reasonable period of time. Yours might have be pre-deployed, taking long minutes or even an hour to fully deploy. On the other hand, it'd be cheap and easy to reuse.

The thing with such technology is that it is not perfect - the moment someone came out with a system like that, the first thing someone else would do would be to come up with an E/M weapon that'd disrupt the field that holds the cloud together, then deploy its own "wild" field to blow a hole in the shield. So you'd need to come up with rules for the anti-sandcaster weapon, too. Likely it'd be mounted on missiles, so the anti-sandcaster weapon would be suspectible to interception.

Of course, there's nothing except expense preventing you from putting a sandcaster on a missile to prevent the missile from being shot down so casually by lasers but again, I don't see why missiles in Traveller are not shot in salvoes with a few sandcaster missiles in the salvo to prevent those 10,000km range lasers from shooting them down...

Using a field of Electrostatic or magnetic energy to maintain the screen is what I was thinking would be the most likely way of holding the screen in place.

The need for the screen to recharge each round is a balance mechanism more that anything else. reasoning behind it would be that not only are lasers boiling off portions of the screen ut the screen is shedding material also as some material escapes the field due to it's low strength.

There are sandcutter missiles that work by generating a magnetic or static field to disperse,, or clump sand in High Guard, but they are fairly useless since it's just as easy to fire conventional missiles at the target and ignore the sand all together. It's the same with Pebble types sand canisters that can shoot down incoming missile, useful to a degree but it's easier to bring down missiles with laser fire.

Looking at the descriptions from 1st and 2nd editions, the game mechanics seem to favor a dispersing shotgun blast fired in the direction of an incoming laser. It fans out enough to form a temporary wall reducing but not always stopping the laser effect. It keeps dispersing quickly away from the point of ejection which explains why it's only good for one shot.

In order to envelope a ship in a sand screen as effective as a sand caster would mean huge numbers of sand canisters strategically placed all over the hull facing out. As soon as the ship moves, it will be out of the majority of the cloud. Not very sensible or economical.

A standing sad screen would be more efficient than simply lobbing sand out and hoping it gets i the way of a laser. I imagine in most cases the majority of sand fired is wasted on empty space since it is rapidly dispersing. my reasoning is that if you trapped he sand in a fairly concentrated area a few meters, or even centimeters thick at most the sand that would normally head off in a million directions would be trapped and fill in voids created by laser fire fairly rapidly. it would be imperfect and subject to gaps and thin points since accurately dispersing millions of small particles would be impossible, but the overall effect would be more like a standing veil.

If the system included some form of free standing field to contain the sand,The dispensers could be about anywhere on the ship. The sand would naturally try to find an area of lower density to fit into due to natural forces.

 

[Sigtrygg]

In most form of Traveller the sand cloud has the same vector as the ship that launched it. If the ship accelerates - changes vector, it loses the sand screen.
In T2300 because the ships are not accelerating they can maintain the screen around themselves.

Screens are used to provide ships with a measure of protection
from laser and particle beam weapons. A ship’s screen consists
of an electromagnetic field surrounding the ship and holding a
high density of extremely reflective particles When a laser encounters
the screen, the particles reflect and dissipate a significant
fraction of the light. However, the particles are not perfectly reflective,
and absorbing even a small percentage of the energy from
a laser weapon is sufficient to destroy the reflectivity of a particle.
At that point, the particle stops reflecting and begins absorbing
energy until (minute fractions of a second later) it vaporizes. Burning
through the dense layers of particles of a shield is possible,
but it considerably reduces the effectiveness of the weapon used
to do so.

 

[wbnc]

In most form of Traveller the sand cloud has the same vector as the ship that launched it. If the ship accelerates - changes vector, it loses the sand screen.
In T2300 because the ships are not accelerating they can maintain the screen around themselves.

Screens are used to provide ships with a measure of protection
from laser and particle beam weapons. A ship’s screen consists
of an electromagnetic field surrounding the ship and holding a
high density of extremely reflective particles When a laser encounters
the screen, the particles reflect and dissipate a significant
fraction of the light. However, the particles are not perfectly reflective,
and absorbing even a small percentage of the energy from
a laser weapon is sufficient to destroy the reflectivity of a particle.
At that point, the particle stops reflecting and begins absorbing
energy until (minute fractions of a second later) it vaporizes. Burning
through the dense layers of particles of a shield is possible,
but it considerably reduces the effectiveness of the weapon used
to do so.

I really need to go replace my versions of that game.........seems they had what I wanted all along..D'oh

 

[Condottiere]

Smokescreen as an option.