Ballistic Weapons: Yay or nay?

[unmerged(400937)]

Imagine delivering a semi-guided high speed kinetic slug with an ablative coating the strips away delivering a solid tungsten-carbide perpetrator though the hull of the ship.

what exactly are you thinking would cause the coating to strip away? most of the ways i can think of to get this to work are way more complex than just lobbing eight of the tungsten-carbide penetrators (which i assume you meant, hahah).

tyranny: you have to have a medium and a large mount weapon at the start of the game, no way around that.

 

[MadGelo]

how powerfull is that huge antiplanet gun against ships?

 

[brn4meplz]

what exactly are you thinking would cause the coating to strip away? most of the ways i can think of to get this to work are way more complex than just lobbing eight of the tungsten-carbide penetrators (which i assume you meant, hahah).

I think what he is describing is something akin to how a modern day APFSDS round works. Although it's process is assisted by friction. Though you could design the non-essential parts to strip away during the approach to terminal velocity or even during flight with some electronic assistance.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

how powerfull is that huge antiplanet gun against ships?

the siege driver? it murders everything in SOTS 1, not sure what the actual damage figures are because they're based on newtonian calculations like relative speed (so a target moving towards you takes more) and asteroid mass, not a set number.

Brn: if you eject the components, you're losing acceleration of the round from the fuel you consume to do that. like you say, in air it works fine because air friction takes care of it, but in space the shell is basically unnecessary. oh, and i don't think there is a terminal velocity, though i may be wrong about that.

 

[Ishantil]

Anaris: From Wikipedia: Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS)

"The sequence upon impact of the APDS projectile, for example the 120 mm L11, as used on the Chieftain tank, fired L15 APDS [3] (muzzle velocity 1370 m/s), goes as follows: the lightweight ballistic cap is crushed, the penetrating cap then strikes the armour, distributing the shock across the whole surface of the core's nose, reducing the initial shock experienced by the core, the steel sheath surrounding the core peels away, and the core goes on to penetrate the armour. The penetration of the L15 APDS is approximately 355 mm of rolled homogeneous armour at 1000 m."

A manner in which modern projectiles defeat armor. Obviously, it would be applied to weapons in SOTS2. Granted, I'm getting lost in the minutia, as this stuff has no affect on the game mechanics, other than to represent an armor defeating stat in the game.

Still, it's fun to talk about.

 

[brn4meplz]

Terminal velocity certainly wouldn't be the same as it is here, but you'd still have a maximum speed for your surroundings. Although it fluctuating would be pretty neat to watch long term.

I know magnetically accelerated components are much different from chemical projectiles. But I still think you could achieve a greater velocity through a designed shell casing that either assisted a speed ramp or even used a form of second stage booster.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

oh, that's just AP drivers; or at least, that's what i always thought.

brn: it has to have the same basic magnetic properties as the thing inside, i think, else the firing will strip it off. not impossible, but more difficult. the ejection of a booster is done under gravity, which pulls it away; you don't want it blowing off the back of your round using anything that isn't precise, or it'll cause the round to tumble, so that's another design problem, which means expense. at that stage, you're probably better off just mounting an engine on the actual round, like a magnetically-assisted gyrojet. without the weakness of the attachment points, it'll stand up to the stress of firing better.

but i'm not sure you'd gain an awful lot of speed, relative to railgun firing velocities, from it without some serious propellant; and if i'm thinking about it right this'd burn up mass, which would reduce the impact force (possibly by enough to counteract the benefit?).

as for terminal velocity, there IS one, but it's not relevant; a ship can infinitely approach but never reach the speed of light. other than that, you can go as fast as you want if you have fuel to accelerate.

as i understand it, the term technically refers to the maximum speed you can be accelerated to by gravity; even on earth, one can apply extra force to surpass the terminal velocity (a jet could fly downwards faster than terminal velocity, for example). how did you mean it?

 

[brn4meplz]

I used it slightly out of context. Rather then meaning the acceleration has reached 0 I used it to mean the maximum possible speed it could achieve.

While debating the merits of advanced munitions will remain only that(debates) I think it's feasible that even a more expensive munition could work even if the gain was marginal. We use expensive specialized munitions in modern combat for a slight battlefield gain. I think it's a safe assumption from Humanities perspective anyway that we will always pay for an edge.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

I used it slightly out of context. Rather then meaning the acceleration has reached 0 I used it to mean the maximum possible speed it could achieve.

oh, so you mean when it runs out of fuel from accelerating?

While debating the merits of advanced munitions will remain only that(debates) I think it's feasible that even a more expensive munition could work even if the gain was marginal. We use expensive specialized munitions in modern combat for a slight battlefield gain. I think it's a safe assumption from Humanities perspective anyway that we will always pay for an edge.

i was thinking on earth you're less likely to miss and are dealing with a much slower round (where a little extra penetration is a significant percentage increase), but i'm not sure that's true, so you might have a point there.

 

[unmerged(402700)]

We're making a rail gun, err... we've made a railgun, now we're weaponizing and compacting it.

We've made special bullets for it that don't explode.

We've also made high-explosive rounds and types of bullets for specific jobs. We like specialty.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

you can make a railgun at home, that's not really new information; see above.

 

[unmerged(402700)]

Alright the, we've made a REAL railgun that can be used in a 400 mile radius and has a speed of mach 7 at basic and can reach mach 10.

It is the MILITARY rail gun, the one that will be built, designed, optimized, and over time the tech will filter down to civilian sector for increased structural support and heat dissipation technologies and possibly mass drivers.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

yes. i know. did you know we've got a brain implant that can give you a half hour warning of an epileptic siezure, a direct brain-to-computer interface and are planning a space elevator?

like i said, what you're saying is not new information.

 

[unmerged(402700)]

The Orbital Elevator won't occur until nano-carbon research is in full scale.

Perhaps not to you, but it is to most.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

The Orbital Elevator won't occur until nano-carbon research is in full scale.

Perhaps not to you, but it is to most.

it's not news to either of the two people involved in the debate about future armour piercing railgun rounds you joined in, dude, and that should be fairly obvious from the fact it's a debate about future armour piercing railgun rounds.

and "nano-carbon" (i'm assuming you mean carbon nanotubes, not, say, graphene) research is already being done in quite a major way. there are technology companies marketing carbon nanotubes right now, and researching how to make them more consistently perfect is big money.

 

[unmerged(402700)]

Yeah, but not enough to make an Orbital Elevator, and as was debated a few days ago with me and a few others, I was wrong about it being soon, it'd take about 100 years barring new tech advancement because of the cost and the state of the world and the massive amount needed.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

a century? hahah, that's an impossible guess to make. you are not Kurzweil.

your assertion was that we'd have a space elevator when nanocarbon research was in full scale. there is a massive amount of research into nanocarbon currently. either that was a silly assertion to make since you discussed it a few days ago and come to a different conclusion, or, well, something else.

 

[unmerged(402700)]

Or perhaps you're incorrect and we don't have the economy, state of the world, or technological prowess to do so in our near or mid-future.

 

[unmerged(400937)]

Or perhaps you're incorrect and we don't have the economy, state of the world, or technological prowess to do so in our near or mid-future.

i can't be incorrect about that because i never claimed that. not making claims is the best defense against being wrong!

 

[unmerged(331487)]

We will.

China exists.