Ship Design Philosophy

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Planetary Aerospace Defence Missile

G. Four Light PAD missiles, two standard missiles or one heavy missile take up one ton.

H. Going by standard practice, costs listed are per tonne.

I. I'd find a crashed planetoid, drill a hole into it, and install missile launchers.

J. King David's Planetoid.

K. Or just a tall mountain.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Planetary Aerospace Defence Missile

L. Launchers are four times the size of their respective missile.

M. Mobile variants are fifty percent larger.

N. Light mobile should probably cost one and three quarters megastarbux, not two and a half.

O. X being static, y doubling.

P. Static being half weight times megastarbux, plus one.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

1. Turrets can only be installed on hardpoints, not firmpoints.

2. ... even alongside combat weapons.

3. That does seem ambiguous, but probably means you can a have mixture of point defence and standard turrets, on different hardpoints.

4. Advantage seems it weighs half, and only costs a quarter of a megastarbux, half a double, but a tad more than a single.

5. Technological level is nine, so you could say it's within the ballpark.

6. Seriously, pop up should have been an option.

7. And bullets.

8. A dual turret doesn't seem to cost more.

9. To be fair, there's only so much you can stuff in seven cubic metres.

 

[Condottiere]

Starwarships: ROCINANTE V PELLA | A desperate fight as the Roci is ambushed by the free navy | The Expanse

GENERIC GREETINGS, and welcome to science insanity. Today we're covering the battle from season 6 episode 3 of the expanse. The rocinante is ambushed by three free navy ships led by Marco Inaros himself. A stunning and desperate battle ensues where out main characters tapdance right on marcos oh so punchable face~

Want to support SCI? Check out our patreon to get access to our content a day early and send some space bucks out our way to improve the channel:
patreon.com/ScienceInsanity

0:00 Intro
0:44 Patreon Shill
1:12 Background Situation
3:43 Opposing forces
4:35 battle begins
6:57 Railguns explained
8:13 Battle Continues
11:10 NERD INTERCEPT
13:10 Battle concludes
15:26 Aftermath
17:09 Outro

1. Politeness costs nothing.

2. Scorched earth.

3. So radio silence is relative stealth?

4. Technicals.

5. Take out the unarmoured opponents.

6. In theory, range calculations includes the opponent closing it.

7. Predictability.

8. Bullets could be too small to be tracked.

9. Disengage the safeties.

A. Check if ordnance is armed.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

A. In some cases this may be a dual weapon but it makes a single attack with all features.

B. In what cases?

C. Does the cost of the turret, itself, increase?

D. That is, a dual point defence laser is considered a single weapon with two tubes.

E. That would be, with all the features, plus half a point of damage per half dice.

F. Whereas, I'm pretty sure, you'd want an anti aircraft weapon system to have a higher degree of accuracy.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

A. I have to remind the reader that for this weapon system, you have an automatic plus two to THAC0.

B. Range is short, but total power requirement for the point defence laser/turret is two, compared to five for a medium range beam laser/single turret.

C. Technological level is one lower, cost, damage, accuracy, and weight are halved.

D. Comparatively, the pulse laser has long range, costs four times as much, requires four times as much energy, and inflicts four times more damage.

E. You get the laser drill earlier, it costs one tenth of a megastarbux less, quadruple damage, and has armour piercing four.

F. However, it's less accurate at minus three, and it's range is adjacent.

 

[Condottiere]

Inspiration : Deathworld

Deathworld by Harry Harrison (1925)

Part 1: • Deathworld - Part...
Part 2: • Deathworld- Part ...
Part 3: • Deathworld - Part...
Part 4: • Deathworld - Part...

Jason dinAlit, an inhabitant of the planet Porgostrosaand, is a fast talking, conniving, tough as nails, gun toting gambler whose ethics wax and wane with each planet he travels to. He also has amazing psionic abilities which means he is gifted with a variety of psychic abilities including telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis and a host of other interesting capabilities. He is not above using these to tip the odds in his favor while gambling. A chance meeting with Kerk Pyrrus who is the Ambassador of planet Pyrrus ends up with dinAlit traveling back with the Ambassador to Pyrrus.

Here he discovers to his shock that everything on Pyrrus is predatory. Large creatures attack small ones, while smaller ones are armed with deadly neurotoxins. The plants are all carnivorous, while life evolves at lightning speed on the planet. In the course of his explorations of this terrible planet, dinAlit meets a strange race of humans called “grubbers” who live on the fringes of the city. The rest of the book follows dinAlit's exploits.

The Deathworld series by Harry Harrison began with his first published novel Deathworld in 1960. Two more books were followed by a short story, entitled The Mothballed Planet and feature the hero, Jason dinAlit. All the books deal with Jason's encounters with hostile civilizations on other planets. Harrison also wrote the Stainless Steel Rat series, another popular set of books that deal with a comic character called Slippery Slim or the Stainless Steel Rat. His books are known for their nonstop action, larger than life heroes and strange and weird sci-fi descriptions.

Harrison was a gifted artist and began his career as an illustrator with EC Comics and their series Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. He had a brief career as a ghostwriter in which he authored several books, most notable being one of the popular The Saint series featuring Leslie Charteris' famous hero. Later he wrote for several syndicated comics and finally struck out on his own with his debut short story, Rock River which was published in 1951.

In the fifties and sixties, he remained firmly entrenched as the writer of the Flash Gordon comic strip. His novel Make Room, Make Room, which was remade as the Hollywood film Soylent Green showed his concern for the environment. He was also a great antiwar thinker.

As an intergalactic space adventure, Deathworld is indeed a superb read, with many of the features coming eerily true in today's world.

 

[Condottiere]

Starwarships: How to Survive a Space Battle (Shields, Armor, Point Defence)

Spacedock delves into the various means of surviving a space battle in this week's thought piece.

1. Outrun a missile.

2. Flak screens.

3. Thicc.

4. Density.

5. Ripple shields.

6. Ogres.

7. Redundancy.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

G. So we have our basic point defence laser at technological level nine.

H. Apparently, you could replace a weapon system with it, in a normal turret.

H. Presumably, that would be single, double, triple, but not quadruple.

J. Mixed turret rules apply, if there is no homogeneity.

K. Which if fully switched, would be loss of accuracy, in favour of plus two for damage.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

L. Though that's half a dice, so damage is actually plus one, and definitely not worth it.

M. If you could install a beam laser on a point defence turret, you have accuracy plus six.

N. Medium range, four power points, one dice and half a megastarbux.

O. A firmpoint variant would be adjacent range, three power points, same damage, same cost.

P. Point defence turrets are seemingly barebones, so you're likely stuck at one (default turret) weapon system, though I imagine you could have a single rail for a missile, or a mortar for a sand canister.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

Q. The dual point defence laser gets you an extra point of accuracy, at double the cost.

R. The gatling variant needs a point more power, but your accuracy is up by two and you have double damage, at triple the cost.

S. The heavy point defence laser has triple damage at quadruple the cost and a power point more.

T. Range is up to medium, but if you exceed short, you lose all accuracy bonus.

U. I'm going to guess customizing long range would yield a similar result for all point defence lasers.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Accommodations, Engineering, and Are Star Trek's Holodecks Impossible Tech?

- CHAPTERS -
00:00 Intro
00:54 Sponsored Segment
02:15 History & Mechanics
10:15 Real-World Basis
16:45 Outro

1. Projection and force fields.

2. Precision shaped and fine control.

3. Well, we have inertial compensators.

4. Treadmill.

5. Training and recreation.

6. I think a rather more complex ray tracing mechanism.

7. Includes tactile, audio and visual effects; I suppose olfactory, though taste seems somewhat far fetched.

8. We do have magnetic bottles, and apparently, personal force fields.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Armaments and Point Defence Weapons

V. Verdict, not really worth it, considering the alternatives.

W. One option would be for a long duration space station, drawing power from solar panels, as point defence against missiles and the occasional meteor.

X. Extra large freighters only concerned with point defence probably have better odds at hitting stuff with these lasers spread evenly across the entire hull, then default beam lasers concentrated in one or two spots.

Y. Yachts could use them when grounded, or safari craft, as perimeter defence, against curious critters.

Z. For freetrader sized spaceships, this would be more like space debris defence.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Engineering, Take Off, and Manoeuvre Drive Factor One

A traveller weighing 68kg in New Zealand could lose up to 3g when in the Maldives or Canada’s Hudson Bay, where there are areas of lower relative-gravity. The difference is not massive, around 1/25,000 of your bodyweight, but it’s a start.

What it does tell us is that the makeup of the planet is very different under foot, affecting the weight and gravitational force on the surface.

Satellites from Nasa’s GRACE mission (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) have been mapping the differences for years. While ocean measuring stations have suggested there is a difference the use of satellite imaging to measure water density has allowed Nasa to build high definition of gravity.

The lowest gravity on the planet is found at the southern tip of Sri Lanka and parts of the Indian Ocean east of the Maldives. North Canada around the Hudson Bay area is also an area of low gravity.

The difference is thought to be down to the thickness of the Earth’s crust and the volume of molten rock and magma, beneath the surface.

“The Canadian anomaly has been known for a long time,” said Dan Britt, director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science. The physicist from the University of Florida told the Daily Mail, it is now thought that the changes came about during the last Ice Age when enormous glaciers pressed down on the Earth’s surface.

Nasa reveals why you'll lose weight on a holiday to Sri Lanka, but not Borneo

Weight gain is a common complaint of holidaymakers. Now you can blame the planet.

www.nzherald.co.nz

Now we know where to place the starports for all those free traders with manoeuvre drive factor one.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Mass and weight are different things...

 

[Condottiere]

In this specific case, what we're looking for is a (slight) difference in the effective gravity field, that will permit an upward push with factor one drives, either manoeuvre or reactive.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Bridges and Specialist Control Centres

1. Podularization reminded me of that other feature introduced.

2. The vagueness of the rules and usage tends to make it just easier to ignore it, rather than trying to figure out how it works, or fits within the ecosystem of starwarship design.

3. You need a more complete list of functions that actually can be improved by a dice modifier of one.

4. Outside of emergency manoeuvring, does a minus two dice modifier also apply to that specialized function outside of their specific (wired) hull and/or hull section (so far identified only as pods)?

5. Presumably, also works with breakaway hulls.

6. Costs are the same as a small bridge option.

7. Half the pods are listed as thirty tonne small bridges costing one hundred thirty megastarbux.

8. We don't have thirty tonne bridges, and twenty six hundred tonnes, halved, is six and a half megastarbux.

9. However, I have an idea, and it's time to drag up this concept from the murky quagmire it inhabits.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Bridges and Specialist Control Centres

A. Interestingly enough, a command bridge is an add on to an existing bridge, presumably default.

B. Though it's described as existing, so could be smaller.

C. Coincidentally, forty tonnes in a minimum five kilotonne plus hull, at thirty megastarbux for a dice modifier of plus one to Tactics/naval.

D. In theory, why not a three tonne (smaller) bridge, in a ninety nine tonne pod, for that plus one in Tactics/naval, at a quarter of a megastarbux?

E. Or, perhaps more balanced, an add on for a ten tonne bridge in a hundred tonne hull, total fifty tonnes, at thirty and a half megastarbux?

F. It's worth considering, since there probably would be a command centre for just plain Tactics/military.

 

[Condottiere]

Starships: Engineering and Top Ten Sci-Fi FTL Systems

Spacedock breaks down ten of sci-fi's most interesting faster than light propulsion systems.

Ours sound quaint.

Comparatively inexpensive.

 

[Condottiere]

Inspiration: The Complex History of Star Trek's Cat People

The Caitians are a felinoid alien species in Star Trek. First introduced in The Animated Series, there have been a few named Caitian characters on screen. But what all do we know about their biology, history, and culture, as well as that of their cousins, the Kzinti?

- CHAPTERS -
00:00 Intro
01:14 Caitians Overview
05:11 Kzinti Biology & History
08:21 Kzinti Politics & Culture
09:56 Kzinti Homeworld
10:52 Final Thoughts
12:03 Outro

1. Aslan/human hydrids, catgirls.

2. Don't insult Aslans, make sure they're dead.