Spherical Volume: 1000 Meter Diameter

[Fritz_Brown]

Well, a good reason for the use of volume (vs area) might be to avoid the kinds of calculations you have to make to get the surface area of a flattened sphere. Since you use volume for everything else....

Also, since armor (not shielding) would imply additional thickness, taking it out of the volume of the ship makes sense - otherwise, your ship would start as 100 dTons, and end as 116 dTons, which would then require recalculation (because you're using volume) for jump, manuever, etc. And, yes, there are some structural integrity issues included in that volume, too.

And, for a ship a kilometer across, I think 25m is probably not unrealistic (given no talk of bonded superdense, etc.). That's about 5% of the radius. I think that is a lower ratio than the Abrams has.

BTW, in reading last night (and I was tired), I couldn't find in HG where the armor impacts combat.

 

[mike wightman]

It provides a modifier on the damage tables, with sufficient levels of armour a ship can be immune to secondary weapons (apart from nuclear missiles and meson bays - both of which can be defended against by other means).

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Fritz88:
Well, a good reason for the use of volume (vs area) might be to avoid the kinds of calculations you have to make to get the surface area of a flattened sphere. Since you use volume for everything else....

A good point and probably the real reason, though as always with such methods it tends to break down at extremes as shown. Though we can debate even that.

Originally posted by Fritz88:
Also, since armor (not shielding) would imply additional thickness, taking it out of the volume of the ship makes sense - otherwise, your ship would start as 100 dTons, and end as 116 dTons, which would then require recalculation (because you're using volume) for jump, manuever, etc. And, yes, there are some structural integrity issues included in that volume, too.

And, for a ship a kilometer across, I think 25m is probably not unrealistic (given no talk of bonded superdense, etc.). That's about 5% of the radius. I think that is a lower ratio than the Abrams has.

Armor does not imply additional thickness. The thickness comes out of the same volume, just the internal "bubble" is smaller. It's not a matter of taking the hull volume and making it bigger because it's armored. At least that's the way I've always looked at it.

I think I can live with the idea of a ship that size needing a thick hull just for structural reasons, never mind armor. My problem is for an equal level of protection two ships of different volumes have a different thickness of armor. That's just wrong. 25cm of armor is 25cm of armor. Period. Each will stop the same attack to the same degree. For example the Armor Factor 15 on the 1000m diameter hull is some 28 meters thick, while the same protection on a 100m diameter hull* is only about 3 meters thick.

* about 39,000tons for those curious

 

[mike wightman]

Perhaps the solution would be to make armour a tonnage per armour point component instead of a percentage of hull per armour point one.

This would mean that only the multi kt ships could have the higher armour factors, thus giving a reason for building battleships...

 

[far-trader]

Hmm, I like that Sigg. Got any ballpark numbers you like that we could play with and see how they work?

Maybe something non-linear? So small ships can have some armor but to max out you need the really really big hulls.

 

[mike wightman]

Something along these lines:

AF 1-4 costs 10tons per armour factor x Armour TL%

e.g. armour factor 3 on a TL 10 ship would require
3 x 10 x 3 = 90t

AF 5-9 costs 100tons per armour factor x Armour TL%
e.g. armour factor 8 on a TL 12 ship would require
8 x 100 x 2 = 1600t

AF 10-14 costs 1000tons per armour factor x Armour TL%
e.g. armour factor 12 on a TL 14 ship would require
12 x 1000 x 1 = 12000t

Note that I haven't thought about this much or tried to balance anything, it's just a starting point.

 

[far-trader]

Quite, that's all I was looking for. Some launch point to spark the idea. I'll ponder and play with that for a bit.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Dan, I now see where you have an issue. Though, my point about additional thickness was to illustrate the simplicity argument, really. One rationalization might be that you need proportionally more volume for the same level of shielding because the normal stresses involved are that much greater. There is that much more air pressure trying to escape into vacuum, that much more susceptibility to rigidity problems, etc. So, to get the same amount of protection related to weapons fire, you need a proportionally "thicker" armor.

My first thought, Sigg, was, "That's the way it IS done." Then I realized you are providing a third dimension to the scaling - the AF. It makes sense to me, though my preference would be for a smaller scale. (BTW, thanks for the hint. I will try again, tonight, to find the dadgum thing.)

 

[TheEngineer]

Guess Dan hit the point, stating that armor thickness should be identical regardless of ship size or shape.

Sigg, thats somehow approaching the MT way to handle armor:
Armor Tonnage = Basic Hull Weight * Armor Factor Mod * TL Mod

What would be interesting for MT is to actually calculate back the armor thickness, as it is simply ignored here. Perhaps it might be quite reasonable to incorporate the "internal stress" factor here, too, so that the Armor tonnage calculated above is somehow distributed in a Hull part and an internal part....?

 

[JAFARR]

Originally posted by far-trader:
I know Andy is going to kick himself when he wakes up. It's nothing I haven't done myself, simple errors require complex minds

The 520 million the convertor threw out was the cubic measure of volume. In this case 500 meter radius so 520 million cubic meters as Chris calculated above. You just forgot to divide by your choice of cubic meters per displacement ton to arrive at the smaller 38ish million displacement tons.

Edited to correct the decimal place, didn't check Andy on that. Chris caught it but still seems to think below it's dtons?

DUH!!!
Maybe I should just go to sleep at night and post here in the AM. Then I might catch my own errors instead of accusing someone else of making some.