• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Crashing ships as weapons

Which types of worlds could be expected to have anti-C ship systems?

It requires a combination of a early warning system and a high yield missile battery capable of vaporising/diverting the ship. A, B and probably C ports would have them, as well as Hi-Pop, high value targets (military base systems).

Would D & E ports have anything like that given they are little more than a portable cabin, a nav beacon and a garden hose for unrefined fuel?

X's would be a mixed bag depending on their nature .
 
I suppose for D and E starports it would depend on system defenses. Minerals being dug up, there might be some firepower there to protect it. Just some folks setteling a new world, probably not so much.
 
aramis said:
You misread my meaning.
More clearly:
If you jump in, and your engines indicate you've mroe than 7 days burn needed to come to rest relative, andyour course indicates you're going to impact the planet, they are not going to care a whit why. THey will vaporize your, declare you a terrorist, and give your passengers posthumous purple hearts....
Click to expand...

Ah. Yes, I think I pretty much agree with that. There might be some mitigating circumstances such as if it will still take an entire day to reach the planet then they may give the ship some time to alter course but I would imagine that if you emerge from jumpspace with an extremely high velocity and it looks like you could impact a planet they are going to immediately begin taking action (because as you said, you simply don't have relative velocity differences of stars and planets that would account for such high speeds which means something funny is going on with people emerging with that much speed).
 
aramis said:
...
If you jump in, and your engines indicate you've mroe than 7 days burn needed to come to rest relative, andyour course indicates you're going to impact the planet, they are not going to care a whit why. THey will vaporize your, declare you a terrorist, and give your passengers posthumous purple hearts...
Click to expand...

Nah. When Bloodwell did that, they vaporized her and called it a mistake. ;)
 
In my head, I'm writing a (one-shot) scenario where the players control the only starship within interception distances of an incoming threat. Basically a suicide mission that will save millions of people.
 
Adam Dray said:
In my head, I'm writing a (one-shot) scenario where the players control the only starship within interception distances of an incoming threat. Basically a suicide mission that will save millions of people.
Click to expand...

Sounds like an episode of Star Trek. The Expanse. Stargate SG-1 ... :)
 
mike wightman said:
The magic reactionless maneuver drive is the problem. We can handwave requiring massive amounts of front armour to withstand impacts with dust as you approach 0.9c, that sort of thing.
Click to expand...

One old handwave is that there is a "speed limit" for M-drives. It usually never comes into play (if you're manoeuvring at "sensible" speeds), but the faster you go, the more you run into it.

The metagame reason we all know. The in-game explanation, OTOH, was something like this: Remember the old rubber-sheet model of gravity? Think of it like this: your thrusters are grabbing onto the sheet and dragging you up the sides of it. Your "magic" thrusters really are not magical at all - there really is something to push against, and it turns into a drag effect the faster you go. If you're using this form of propulsion technology, it turns out there IS a speed limit.

BTW, don't know if anyone (Leonard, maybe?) ever suggested what the max velocity should be.
 
Adam Dray said:
What's the usual answer for the problem of ships accelerating to near-C speeds and smashing into cities on planets?

If you have meson weapons, great. If not? Is it really that easy to obliterate an entire civilization by ramming a reasonably small starship into a planet at 0.9C?
Click to expand...

I think one of the things you didn't get in some of the other posts is that you need a lot of fuel mass to accelerate you up to C, and then one you've done that you've lost a lot of mass. And then one you've done that you're ship may not have the explosive impact that you think it might.

And if you're using something like a warp drive, then (using "real physics") you pass through the planet because that way a warp drive works is to disassemble space in front of the ship to create a "bubble" of "outside reality" which your vessel uses to transit from A to B. When you drop out of warp you then come back into universal reality. In other words there's no real speed involved.

Just my physics side exercising itself.
 
BG: Several flaws with your argument:

  1. Excepting TNE, almost all post-CT ships use T-plates, which don't burn fuel.
    • Even in CT, it's only in Beltstrike that we see the fuel for maneuver... and even then, it's weeks.
  2. Every version of warp drive I've seen in SF interacts with normal matter.
    • Authors are pretty consistent with the Star Trek Style "Move a bubble of space with you"
    • The real science says that an interactive warp bubble is likely to be the real mode, if we can find the needed "Exotic Materials"
 
Blue Ghost said:
I think one of the things you didn't get in some of the other posts is that you need a lot of fuel mass to accelerate you up to C, and then one you've done that you've lost a lot of mass. And then one you've done that you're ship may not have the explosive impact that you think it might.

...

Just my physics side exercising itself.
Click to expand...

You're forgetting kinetic energy. Forget fuel mass for a minute (I've been assuming Traveller had reactionless drives, which decreases the required mass by a lot, but sure, you still need fuel to move). The ship is converting fuel to velocity, which is kinetic energy, which is 1/2 mv^2 joules (for m in kg and v in m/s).

If we get our ship up to a paltry 0.01c before impact, that's 0.5 * m * (2.998e+8 m/s / 100)^2 = 4.5e+9 joules of energy per kg of mass of the ship. Smash that into a planet.

At 2% of the speed of light, that quadruples the kinetic energy. At 3%, 8 times the joules. And so on.
 
aramis said:
. . .
  • Every version of warp drive I've seen in SF interacts with normal matter.
    • Authors are pretty consistent with the Star Trek Style "Move a bubble of space with you"
    • The real science says that an interactive warp bubble is likely to be the real mode, if we can find the needed "Exotic Materials"
Click to expand...

Except that when you are using such modes you do not theoretically increase the kinetic energy of the ship. The same bit of physics trickery that allows the ship to 'exceed' the speed of light also prevents it from gaining massive amounts of kinetic energy (essentially, because space is being warped the ship itself is not moving or is moving at a more reasonable subluminal velocity).

Now what the effect of the space warping field is when it intersects a planet is a whole different matter of conjecture, but for right now and for the purposes of a game we could easily handwave it away and say that when the field intersects a massive body the physics cause the entire field to collapse making the ship vanish. Thus suicide runs on planets would result in nothing at all happening to the planet but the ship vanishing from normal space never to return.

That's a bit beyond talking about how the Imperium might handle such things, however, because in the canonical Traveller universe ships don't use such a drive.
 
Adam Dray said:
. . .If we get our ship up to a paltry 0.01c before impact, that's 0.5 * m * (2.998e+8 m/s / 100)^2 = 4.5e+9 joules of energy per kg of mass of the ship. Smash that into a planet. . .
Click to expand...
That is 'only' the explosive force of 1 ton of TNT (roughly). That means 1 ton of mass becomes the equivalent of a 1 kiloton weapon and 1000 tons of mass becomes the equivalent of a 1 megaton weapon.

While these are serious amounts of energy and would devastate cities they aren't going to be cracking any planets. The asteroid that cause the Chicxulub crater is estimated to have delivered around 1e+23 joules and even it didn't wipe out all life on Earth. A Tigress class dreadnought would only generate around 9e+18 joules of energy or .001% of the energy that the Chicxulub asteroid had. Again, it would be a serious, probably crippling, impact to the people living there but it would not be a planet killer in any fashion.
 
Actually, it looks like there was an error in your formula (and subsequently my following numbers). 1 kg of mass at .01C has approximately 4.5e+12 joules of energy, so three orders of magnitude more than your initial figure. 1 ton of mass becomes the equivalent of a 1 megaton weapon and the crashing Tigress would have about 1% of the energy of the Chicxulub asteroid.

Of course these amounts of energy are still far to small to destroy a planet. Even if you get the Tigress up to 10x that speed (.1c) you will only be reproducing the Chicxulub asteroid's impact, which again was not a planet killer (though it would inflict horrific damage).
 
A tigress is about 5,000,000 tons metric. 5E9 kg.
Roughly five teratons equivalent.

And IIRC, Chicxalub killed some 70% of life on the planet...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

T
Wiki Discussion: Ship Mission Codes
2 3 4
Replies
61
Views
2K
tjoneslo
T
V
Old Gods Sectors
Replies
7
Views
558
vegascat
V
Rigel Stardin
  • Article Article
Non OTU: Coti Build 2: Dragon MAC-33 Courier
Replies
7
Views
691
Dragoner
Dragoner
B
LHyd (and CHON) Sources
Replies
1
Views
1K
whartung
W
D
Travelling in The Fringe - A Near Space interpretation
3 4 5
Replies
93
Views
11K
Diveguy
D
Back
Top