First, let me say I'm not a fanboy. I could give a hoot about TV-show or movie spacecraft. However, I grew up on Traveller and while I can't enjoy it as an RPG anymore, the universe and theory interest me greatly in my spare time. That being said:
Traveller hull armor (and all ship structural material) is by necessity many orders of magnitude stronger than titanium steel. I postulate carbon-pressed superdense has a tensile strength of around 75 GPa and a hardness of about 16K on the Moh's scale, or 10 times harder than diamond. It's melting point (at least for the exterior hull) would need to be approximately 100,000 degrees K. Superdense would be manufactured to order in preformed panels and therefore cannot be customized or modified- ships with damaged hulls can be patched with carbotronex, a lighter material that can be softened and molded to shape before being treated with heat and an electrical current to stabilize the crystal structure. Once hardened carbotronex has properties orders of magnitude weaker than superdense, but still sufficient to survive most light-duty spacecraft operations. Carbotronex is essentially a electrically-conductive polymer epoxy that allows the current from the ship's hull-strengthening jump grid (or whatever passes for it in non-jump ships) to pass through it. Carbotronex would have a melting point far below that of superdense and it would be structurally weak by comparison- flexible and tough but far less hard, yet sufficient to allow re-entry, fuel-skimming and interstellar maneuver, but not sufficient to resist combat damage.
With this in mind, the power of starship weaponry, powered by even the smallest ship's reactor, must be awesome. A ship-borne 500MW laser or fusion gun would vaporize a modern MBT tank in one shot. Nothing in Striker's ordinance list would come close to the power of a starship weapon. Even a battlefield meson accelerator would be puny compared to the smallest starship meson weapon. But then again, the battlefield reactor would be a fraction of the size and very possibly require capacitors to charge before firing, unlike a starship. Moreover, starship weapons operate at ranges of light-seconds (i.e. hundreds of thousands of kilometers). Keep this in mind when factoring the damage multipliers. Then again, the deep meson gun site that protects planets would be even more terrifying- it would be the doomsday weapon on any world, capable of ending any battle in space or on the surface in one shot. But I digress...
The hull material postulate above is based on a rationalization of the parameters required for orbital re-entry, high-inertia maneuver and, most importantly, resist the impact of spaceborn debris. WithTraveller spacecraft, even a 1-G ship, can approach the speed of light in about a year and velocities for higher-G ships can be quite significant. Even the smallest micrometeroid could obliterate a spacecraft that had travelled in from the Oort cloud at high-G - and Traveller ships are supposed to be able to maneuver at high-G, even more immensely-stressful. Therefore, hull material for even a commercial ships would be astronomically powerful. This doesn't scramble Traveller tech much- efficient fusion power requires materials with similar strengths- it just assumes the gravity technology that permits antigrav propulsion and jump drive includes a lot of benefits we don't understand today, such as how to enhance the strong nuclear force in materials, though with fixed and predictable (i.e. preformed, uniform crystalline structure) matrices. These are well within the Einsteinian realm.
Presumably the armor in tv-movie ships would be even more powerful, given their higher-g capacity, but even they are done for the cameras- 6-g would be more than sufficient acceleration for any warship. The limits in Traveller seem arbitrary but I've always pegged them to the limits of inertial compensation, another critical (indeed, indispensable) technology, without which a spacecraft with greater than 1-G acceleration isn't even really practical.
Keep in mind the Traveller universe, even with its apparent limitations, includes the common, everyday and miniaturized use of fusion power, at temperatures in the millions of degrees and without messy radiation. To be practical, the understanding of high-strength materials would have to leap exponentially at TL9, to the point that we can't really conceive of the advances and can only place labels on things that could be lumped under the catch-all "unobtanium".
Traveller hull armor (and all ship structural material) is by necessity many orders of magnitude stronger than titanium steel. I postulate carbon-pressed superdense has a tensile strength of around 75 GPa and a hardness of about 16K on the Moh's scale, or 10 times harder than diamond. It's melting point (at least for the exterior hull) would need to be approximately 100,000 degrees K. Superdense would be manufactured to order in preformed panels and therefore cannot be customized or modified- ships with damaged hulls can be patched with carbotronex, a lighter material that can be softened and molded to shape before being treated with heat and an electrical current to stabilize the crystal structure. Once hardened carbotronex has properties orders of magnitude weaker than superdense, but still sufficient to survive most light-duty spacecraft operations. Carbotronex is essentially a electrically-conductive polymer epoxy that allows the current from the ship's hull-strengthening jump grid (or whatever passes for it in non-jump ships) to pass through it. Carbotronex would have a melting point far below that of superdense and it would be structurally weak by comparison- flexible and tough but far less hard, yet sufficient to allow re-entry, fuel-skimming and interstellar maneuver, but not sufficient to resist combat damage.
With this in mind, the power of starship weaponry, powered by even the smallest ship's reactor, must be awesome. A ship-borne 500MW laser or fusion gun would vaporize a modern MBT tank in one shot. Nothing in Striker's ordinance list would come close to the power of a starship weapon. Even a battlefield meson accelerator would be puny compared to the smallest starship meson weapon. But then again, the battlefield reactor would be a fraction of the size and very possibly require capacitors to charge before firing, unlike a starship. Moreover, starship weapons operate at ranges of light-seconds (i.e. hundreds of thousands of kilometers). Keep this in mind when factoring the damage multipliers. Then again, the deep meson gun site that protects planets would be even more terrifying- it would be the doomsday weapon on any world, capable of ending any battle in space or on the surface in one shot. But I digress...
The hull material postulate above is based on a rationalization of the parameters required for orbital re-entry, high-inertia maneuver and, most importantly, resist the impact of spaceborn debris. WithTraveller spacecraft, even a 1-G ship, can approach the speed of light in about a year and velocities for higher-G ships can be quite significant. Even the smallest micrometeroid could obliterate a spacecraft that had travelled in from the Oort cloud at high-G - and Traveller ships are supposed to be able to maneuver at high-G, even more immensely-stressful. Therefore, hull material for even a commercial ships would be astronomically powerful. This doesn't scramble Traveller tech much- efficient fusion power requires materials with similar strengths- it just assumes the gravity technology that permits antigrav propulsion and jump drive includes a lot of benefits we don't understand today, such as how to enhance the strong nuclear force in materials, though with fixed and predictable (i.e. preformed, uniform crystalline structure) matrices. These are well within the Einsteinian realm.
Presumably the armor in tv-movie ships would be even more powerful, given their higher-g capacity, but even they are done for the cameras- 6-g would be more than sufficient acceleration for any warship. The limits in Traveller seem arbitrary but I've always pegged them to the limits of inertial compensation, another critical (indeed, indispensable) technology, without which a spacecraft with greater than 1-G acceleration isn't even really practical.
Keep in mind the Traveller universe, even with its apparent limitations, includes the common, everyday and miniaturized use of fusion power, at temperatures in the millions of degrees and without messy radiation. To be practical, the understanding of high-strength materials would have to leap exponentially at TL9, to the point that we can't really conceive of the advances and can only place labels on things that could be lumped under the catch-all "unobtanium".
