[Kraetos]

OMG I'm loving this thread. Space physics and military info in one place? Frakkin sweet.

Originally Posted by Kickaha One trick that may work if internally consistent with your FTL system... 'warp' a projectile at a ship. Rail gun + warp port = rail gun speeds, but it appears 1m off the enemy's hull. Whammo. Warp torpedo on the 'cheap'... make a warp 'tube' from the rail gun to the exit point, and slam that puppy down it. No internal engine sustaining the effect. More like a wormhole, really.

Reminds me of the seventh season DS9 episode with the transporting sniper rifle.

You'd have some serious targeting problems with jumping mass driver projectiles. With my FTL mechanisms it would be theoretically possible to get the projectile in real close, but if you're 10 light mins from the target, you don't have an accurate enough idea of where the target is (assuming you're facing a competent commander who varies his course randomly during combat). You'd have to lead the ship pretty severely and fire in a pretty wide dispersal pattern.

If you're close enough to get a firing solution, you've probably opened a hole in the enemy defense grid, and then there's really no need to warp the projectile, anyway.

Either way, my FTL method requires so much energy that it wouldn't be practical to waste it on a weapon that has a miniscule chance of hitting the target in the first place.

Eh, I may as well go into my FTL mechanisms at this point. (WARNING: long and ridiculous.)

The fundamental unit of FTL travel is a jump drive, just like BSG. The catch is twofold:

- Requires massive energy. To jump, you need to spend a considerable amount of time (an hour or two depending on the size of the ship) spinning up the drive. You need even more time if you're in a combat situation because of shields and weapons. Also, the shipboard computers need a considerable amount of time to run the jump calculations.

While it's theoretically possible to jump into a dense formation of enemy ships and blow them all to hell before they have a chance to react, c rears it's ugly head again: the further you are from the target, the harder it becomes to predict their location. (Indeed, in combat zones, competent commanders alter their course by a few degrees a few times an hour to prevent exactly that from happening.)

- Limited range. Get further out than half a light year and it becomes exponentially more difficult to plot a jump correctly. The further you try, the less accurate it gets. Additionally, the further you are from a star, the harder it is to make accurate jumps. You wouldn't want to move between stars using unassisted jumps; it's strictly for intersystem travel.

Moving a ship across a star system at .1 c takes quite a while. I figure that giving them the ability to jump around the solar system FTL opens up some interesting tactical scenarios, but it also supplies pitfalls for clumsy commanders. That's a recurring theme in the story: few officers fully grok the implications of lightspeed and relativity in combat. Most commanders are competent leaders and understand the theory of relativity, but a few stand out because they break the limitations of physics in creative ways. They truly think in those terms. Think Picard and the Picard Maneuver.

Which brings us to FTL option two: voidspace. Basically, if you're a certain distance from a star, and you jump using a specialized set of calculations, you enter an alternate dimension where gravity affects distance. In other words, the space between stars is compressed relative to the distance from the star. Get too close to a star and space gets expanded to the point where it'll tear the ship to pieces if you jump there. The tipping point is between the outer edge of a system's oort cloud and a few tenths of a lightyear away from the edge.

Average "speed" in voidspace, relative to the real universe, for a ship moving at .1, is 300c. Moving between two stars that are 12ly distant takes roughly 2 weeks. The further away from a star your ship is, the faster you go, because of the way gravity affects distance.

So, to move to another system, you jump to the voidspace jump zone, you spin the drives up again, and you jump into voidspace and go on your physics-defying merry way.

It's pretty off the wall, I know. My rationale for voidspace is that some poor sap accidentally discovered it with bad calculations, so understanding of it is completely limited to practical uses, and the theory behind it is beyond our grasp. Gravity is one of those things we don't really understand the cause of, so I feel like the combination adds the right air of pseudoscience without crossing the suspension of disbelief line.

It's really no more ridiculous than hyperspace in Babylon 5, where JMS states that distance in hyperspace is not linear, and hyperspace was discovered when they found a hyperspace gate abandoned in space - nobody knows who built the first one. Things just move at speed of plot in hyperspace. Plus, coming up with wacky ways to FTL that sound mysterious yet plausible with a little pseudoscience is something all SF authors need to take a crack at

But it opens a number of doors. It gives you a get out of jail free card if you want to make crazy shit happen in hyperspace. It gives my ships a method that's not too fast but not too slow to move between stars.

Which brings us to the third and final FTL method: the assisted jump. It allows instantaneous travel between stars, but there's a catch: you have to build a jumpgate at both ends of the jump. Because the jump distance is so much longer, it requires more energy, which means a matter/antimatter reactor, which are too big/expensive/volatile to be built on ships. Jumpgates are big, powerful, dangerous, and immobile.

With jumpgates, ships can move around their own territory with ease. But if they want to venture into enemy space, they're stuck moving at "only" 300c. It also means that friendly systems can reinforce quickly. Gates rotate their recognition codes on a regular but pseudorandom basis to prevent enemy ships from jumping into a friendly jumpgate. Star systems communicate with teeny probes that get shuffled between gates very frequently.

So, yeah. This is what I think about in my free time My other two unexplained cop-outs are interial dampers and artificial gravity. Pretty standard.

Disperse a sensor net around your ship, synced to ship movement. Have it some insane distance out, like 100Mm. Little tiny autonomic sensors that use FTL communications (I'm assuming you have that) back to the ship to alert it of incoming energy weapons at light speed, or sub-light weaponry. You could have a secondary grid of defensive weapons at say 1km out that would then react to the data from the sensor net. And this, folks, is why you want the geeks on *your* side.

As it stands, I don't give my ships the ability to communicate FTL. I thought about using tachyons and some hand waving and leaving it at that, but I think that the limitation of communicating at lightspeed adds more complexity (read: chaos) to combat.

That's still up for grabs, though, and is easy enough to change later. Tachyons are widely accepted as a pseudoscientifical way to communicate FTL.

Kick, if you haven't looked into The Lost Fleet, you should. I think you'd really like it... the implications of relativity and lightspeed in combat are incredibly fascinating.

Originally Posted by Enki USN surface ships are basically the same as AC's subs, with size and capability driving the seniority of the Captain. A Carrier or nuclear-capable Aegis cruiser will have a Captain (O-6) as the Captain, the carrier with a O-6/O-6 select as the XO, and the Cruiser with a very senior O-4, or a O-5 select as the XO. Destroyers and frigates have O-5s as Captains and O-4s as XOs, although that is in the process of changing and we will see the XOs being O-5 selects and rotating into the Captain job rather than CO/XO being two independently treated billets as they have been since time immemorial. ...snip... Tooling around not in combat or entering leaving port just take away CO/XO, the extra watch watchers and cut the fidgeters, nose-pickers and ass-scratchers down to a couple bodies.

Good stuff. I can't decide if I want a bridge and a CIC/CDC, or just a CIC which serves as both. What's the reasoning behind having them separate to begin with?

The TAO sounds like exactly what I was looking for as a tactical officer, he/she'd make a good main character. Is the navigator an officer or a noncom?

No carriers in space, unfortunately. Fighters are easy pickings for point defenses which are accurate enough to shoot mass driver projectiles out of the stars. If the fighters are fast enough to avoid point defenses, then relativistic distortion would render their targeting systems useless. Vipers and X-Wings look cool but they have zero grounding once you try and mesh physics and tactics. The closest thing to fighters I have are small stealth ships which are designed to deliver marine fireteams to damaged enemy ships.

Also, I agree with 709. I award you lulz for that last paragraph and for painting a good picture of the bridge