New Defense System 'Sand Screen"

[wbnc]

A frend and I were discussing something I sketched up and he commented it looked like a squid...and asked did it shoot out clouds of ink to protect itself.

I had an idea based off that comment. If a ship had ejectors distributed around a ship could it not in theory set up a cloud of sand particles that completely enveloped the ship and could be sustained for a period of time...say by using gravity, or magnetic force to trap the particles

There would be drawbacks for certain...you could not fire lasers out, and would have to extend any radar or lidar on probes beyond the screen. but if the particles ere properly doped with the right materials, and the cloud was dense enough it could block particle beams, and other energy weapons as well.

MY idea is that it would work like sand casters creating a field that absorbs (x)d6 per round, and regenerates each round without needing a gunner action. I would affect any laser, or particle beam( with an upgraded system)
Effect -2d6 per layer of Screen per round against all laser or particle attacks.multiple increments of the system can be installed to create a denser cloud but each layer costs ammo, and requires another set of dispensers.
Tonnage: based on hull tonnage 2% of hull tonnage.
Ammo: 1 barrel per 100 tons of ship per round

Advantages that can be added:
Protection form Plasma/fusion weapons (requires TL-14, and extra layers of protection)

Limitations
obscures radar and Lidar, unless using a modified sensor array: + 1 ton, and +1Mcr per sensor/ECM package the ship, modified sensors suffer -2 when in use due to backscatter and stray dust from the screen.

radical maneuvers limited while screen active...( need to work on this aspect) I am thinking that anything other than straight line flight/acceleration sheds portions of the screen and reduces protection so no evasion while protected.

Negates stealth hulls, effect, hampers ECM

It's really just an idea I am toying with fr my own use....but could use some feedback other angles on the system.

 

[hdan]

I'd say it's a sane idea - that's how sandcasters actually worked in the first edition of the game.
Well not including the "grav" part. If you maneuvered, you left the cloud. Though under that version, the cloud stayed on the "map", so it might still be between you and your opponent.

 

[phavoc]

You couldn't do it while you were under the effect of your drives. And you couldn't put up enough sand to stop an opponent from shooting around the cloud once you left it.

But while your drives are turned off and you had zero velocity it might work. An explosive missile salvo should be able to blow holes in it, or just ignore it.

Not sure it's a viable turtle defense. Maybe for a station it might work but that could be a lot of sand...

 

[wbnc]

You couldn't do it while you were under the effect of your drives. And you couldn't put up enough sand to stop an opponent from shooting around the cloud once you left it.

But while your drives are turned off and you had zero velocity it might work. An explosive missile salvo should be able to blow holes in it, or just ignore it.

Not sure it's a viable turtle defense. Maybe for a station it might work but that could be a lot of sand...

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 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.

need some brainstorming assistance here....
Since it ejects a new cloud of sand each round the and itself would be hanging with the ship fairly close. You know how far ahead of a ship you would need to eject the sand to give it coverage through a planned maneuver such as straight line thrust.so if you equipped it to constantly fire sand just ahead of the ship( relatively speaking) the cloud would expand ahead of the ship...leaving one heck of a trail of sand behind it.

Would increasing the amount of sand used per point of thrust be a good way to at least allow straight line thrust????

 

[Sigtrygg]

You have re-invented the defensive screens in T2300...

 

[wbnc]

You have re-invented the defensive screens in T2300...

could be I I haven't seen the material in a decade...a curse on leaky pipes in cheap apartments...a thousand curses on them!


I'm trying to figure out how to make it work in traveler....I'd be happy if someone already has them figured out...It would save me some time.

 

[phavoc]

I suppose you could put a metallic particle/ball bearing of sorts in the center of your sand particle and coat it with ablative layers of reflec. Then with projectors external on the hull you should be able to manipulate the field magnetically, making a wall or even shapes out of the particles. It would just require a number of very powerful emitters. Real question would be could you drag it along with you at speed. But to form it just open up the outlets and pump the mixture out and into your fields. Your emitters would possibly be vulnerable to damage, so as soon as you started taking external hits they may get destroyed.

 

[wbnc]

I suppose you could put a metallic particle/ball bearing of sorts in the center of your sand particle and coat it with ablative layers of reflec. Then with projectors external on the hull you should be able to manipulate the field magnetically, making a wall or even shapes out of the particles. It would just require a number of very powerful emitters. Real question would be could you drag it along with you at speed. But to form it just open up the outlets and pump the mixture out and into your fields. Your emitters would possibly be vulnerable to damage, so as soon as you started taking external hits they may get destroyed.

If I list it as part of the weapons/screens armament then a critical hit could take out the ejectors. Loss of power would drop the emitters creating the magnetic field.

I think possibly a 20 (+ 5 per say....500 tons pt) power requirement would be enough to run the field emitters. And make it taxing to smaller ships...the cost and volume of the system, and the volume of the sand to feed it should make it a fairly prcey system but a constant 2d+ reduction in laser and particle beam damage would be worth it.

 

[phavoc]

It would depend on how redundant the emitters and ejectors are. And that would depend upon size of them. So it could be that there is enough redundancy for it to take 2-3 hits before it's completely knocked out. Maybe a hit degrades performance by say 20%?

 

[Infojunky]

Limitations
obscures radar

WHY?

 

[Condottiere]

Mobile nanobots, as opposed to dumb crystals.

 

[wbnc]

Mobile nanobots, as opposed to dumb crystals.

now thats an idea nano machines could form a solid barrier rather than a cloud of loose particles.

Limitations
obscures radar

WHY?

because there is a cloud of highly reflective dust thick enough to absorb megajoules of energy between in front of the sensor array. unless you push you'r antenna outside the cloud it's trying to see though a literal sandstorm.

 

[Infojunky]

because there is a cloud of highly reflective dust thick enough to absorb megajoules of energy between in front of the sensor array. unless you push you'r antenna outside the cloud it's trying to see though a literal sandstorm.

Is it a solid wall of sand? Or just a cloud?

Remember Radar reflects off of objects that are equal to and/or larger than than said beams wavelength. Thus a cloud of sand would be pretty much invisible to most radar....

 

[Torbyne]

If it is dense enough to block a laser than it is effectively a solid, even if the individual grains can be manipulated into different shapes. To a radar it would appear as a massive signature.

 

[phavoc]

Didn't there used to be sandcutter missile rounds that could be used on something like this, to blast holes or split it all up?

 

[AndrewW]

Didn't there used to be sandcutter missile rounds that could be used on something like this, to blast holes or split it all up?

Sandcutter rounds for the sandcaster:

Sandcutter: Sandcutter rounds fire a hail of electromagnets into the midst of an enemy sand cloud. These magnets cause the sand to coagulate, reducing the effective protection. A successful use of a sandcutter shot halves the protection offered by a sand cloud. Sandcutters are usually fired in concert with a beam attack. They do not provide protection against laser fire.

 

[Infojunky]

If it is dense enough to block a laser than it is effectively a solid, even if the individual grains can be manipulated into different shapes. To a radar it would appear as a massive signature.

Why would you think that? In that it still is a issue of wavelengths, Lasers have very small wavelengths and rely on a mass of coherent photons in a packet to do damage, sand while small is generally larger that the wavelength of the individual wavefront that is each photon, thus is able block/absorb a portion of the packet. Furthermore the energy of deposited by the blocked/absorbed photon may vaporize said grain of sand creating a energetic cloud that can interact with other photons in the packet causing them to lose coherency thus degrading the damaging ability of the packet even further. While Radar uses much larger wavelengths, think meters vs the Nanometers that is light, and as such to reflect a radar pulse you need a target that is sized according to the wavelength.

 

[wbnc]

If it is dense enough to block a laser than it is effectively a solid, even if the individual grains can be manipulated into different shapes. To a radar it would appear as a massive signature.

Why would you think that? In that it still is a issue of wavelengths, Lasers have very small wavelengths and rely on a mass of coherent photons in a packet to do damage, sand while small is generally larger that the wavelength of the individual wavefront that is each photon, thus is able block/absorb a portion of the packet. Furthermore the energy of deposited by the blocked/absorbed photon may vaporize said grain of sand creating a energetic cloud that can interact with other photons in the packet causing them to lose coherency thus degrading the damaging ability of the packet even further. While Radar uses much larger wavelengths, think meters vs the Nanometers that is light, and as such to reflect a radar pulse you need a target that is sized according to the wavelength.

only problem is that Sandstorms, and volcanic ash, do effect radar performance, and the static charge built up within the dust clouds create additional degradation. and the sand cloud is using density of material until it is almost a solid object to directed energy. otherwise the laser would slip between the particles not impact them. its not a sine particle that the radar has to see through its a WALL of them

 

[Epicenter]

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...

 

[Reynard]

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.