realistic space flight

[Cinniuint]

Am building ships for a campaign that will be a combination of diplomatic battles and ship to ship battles. I am trying to figure out how to build a realistic sublight drive for use during combat. Obviously, (I hope) this needs to begin with changes to the rules for flight in space.

 

Has anyone worked on this before? Any suggestions would be welcome.

 

Cinn

[Cancer]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Are you planning on your ship combat happening within a star system using Known Physics , with interstellar travel being a combat-free handwave zone, or is your interstellar travel sub-light as well?

[Xavier Onassiss]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Yes, just recently we were discussing that very subject in this thread.

 

Hopefully there's some useful ideas for you there.

[Nevenall]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Also Star Hero has some pretty extensive discussions of this kinda thing.

[Cinniuint]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Posted by Cancer:

 

Are you planning on your ship combat happening within a star system using Known Physics , with interstellar travel being a combat-free handwave zone, or is your interstellar travel sub-light as well?

 

Yes, realistic physics, & FTL and EDM. Normal space only for combat, and no FTL or EDM from inside roughly the orbit of Jupiter so that any combat near anything of importance requires a commitment to see the combat through to the end.

 

I am basing combat mostly on the Honor Harrington novels by David Weber. That means combat at extreme ranges, with several levels of mega-scale. (about +1 1/2 mega-scale range and up to +1/2 mega-scaled explosions). Each player is designing the tech for a different race, so this may have to change, depending on what everyone comes up with. I know one player is building around absorbtion feeding into his attack, but no other details.

 

Cinn

[Cinniuint]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Yes' date=' just recently we were discussing that very subject in this thread.

 

Hopefully there's some useful ideas for you there.

 

Yes, that was a bit helpful. I have used the drift token method before, and like it. I am afraid I have no sympathy for clueless gamers who can't figure out the drift system. If they don't get it right, then they miss the chance to attack, and their enemies get the choice of attacking them in the more favorable hex of the correct one and the one they placed themselves in.

 

I think that there are two separate aspects to maneuvering in space. Thrust and attitude control. These can be represented by flight and flight skill levels. I like to use 12 facings rather than 6, so that the ship can face the side or the corner of the hex. I am thinking that a ship can turn 30° each phase, +30° for each skill level up to 180°. Rotation on axis of thrust for free, or as per turn. (Rotation on axis can be important to bring new weapons to bear, or to present partial coverage defenses and ablative defenses.)

 

Realistic thrust requires some calculation, but it works out to your inches of flight is your acceleration. 5" of flight with a 12 SPD works out to just over 1G acceleration. Or 20" with a SPD of 3, whatever. The normal rules for flight acceleration have to be thrown out. They just don't work.

 

Will have to see what we can do. I am looking to have ships capable of acceleration at 100 G's or more. A hit that takes out your drive is not as bad as a hit that takes out your artificial gravity.

[Cancer]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Sounds like you're doing 2-D space battles, then? Strictly planar encounters?

 

(Yeah, I know, doing 3-D is hard. I don't have a solution for that. The only regular polyhedron that fills space is the cube, though you could fill space with either hexagonal prisms or mixtures of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. One of my stray ambitions is to figure out a way to do Newtonian physics, 3-D space combat right, but that's going to require computational aid. And a versatile enough way to provide a representation of 3-D positions and motions from arbitrary POV ... again, that takes computational aid, and it may take new display technology as well.)

 

At accelerations of up to 100 gee's, what are you using for your map scale (meters or km per hex) and your time scale (1 turn = ? seconds)? And what are the typical size and mass of the ships? (The point of those questions is to get a handle on the power levels implied in your real-space drives; acceleration of 1 gee on a 1000-ton ship -- Space Shuttle scale -- requires about 10^15 watts of engine power.) If you handwave that power in the same way as your interstellar EDM drive works, that's OK.

[dmjalund]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Can 100g acceleration be considered realistic? You need rubbeery science to make the pilots survive such accelerations. - or restrict such to drone fighters, even then having tech resistant enough to handle changes in acceleration on that order is tough to imagine

[Xavier Onassiss]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Can 100g acceleration be considered realistic? You need rubbeery science to make the pilots survive such accelerations. - or restrict such to drone fighters' date=' even then having tech resistant enough to handle changes in acceleration on that order is tough to imagine[/quote']

 

See post #5: the OP is basing space combat in his campaign on Weber's Harrington novels. So that would be Yes, there's rubber science involved, and 100 G's is actually rather tame....

[Cinniuint]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Slight shift. The GM has pushed the tech up, and the game 10's of 1000's of years into the future. Terran Empire alone is 4 galaxies, with alone in the Milky Way. I don't think the GM has a clue as to the scale he is building on, but he is young, and doesn't read a lot. He has been watching Babylon 5, so that and some video game are his primary inspirations. (earlier plan had the Protoss as the primary villains. I don't know about spelling, but the name should mean something to some of you out there)

 

Anyway, he thinks that beam weapons are the way to go, and views my torpedo systems as primitive and clunky. I told him a beam can't reach any real kind of range if it is fired from a platform that has disturbances such a a creature with a beating heart to throw off its aim, where as a torpedo can maneuver at the end of its run to increase its chance of hitting its target, even at extreme ranges of several light minutes. ( Of course if the enemy has stabilizers, such as we have to day on cameras, to reduce vibrational interference, then I may be in trouble. In fact, I may be dead long before my missiles arrive on target) C'est le mort.

 

And yes, the science is rubbery. But I hope it is reasonably self consistent. The idea of realistic in science fiction is to either a) follow physics, or make up physics that makes sense and allows for the suspension of disbelief and follow that physics.

[Tasha]

Re: realistic space flight

 

Slight shift. The GM has pushed the tech up, and the game 10's of 1000's of years into the future. Terran Empire alone is 4 galaxies, with alone in the Milky Way. I don't think the GM has a clue as to the scale he is building on, but he is young, and doesn't read a lot. He has been watching Babylon 5, so that and some video game are his primary inspirations. (earlier plan had the Protoss as the primary villains. I don't know about spelling, but the name should mean something to some of you out there)

 

Anyway, he thinks that beam weapons are the way to go, and views my torpedo systems as primitive and clunky. I told him a beam can't reach any real kind of range if it is fired from a platform that has disturbances such a a creature with a beating heart to throw off its aim, where as a torpedo can maneuver at the end of its run to increase its chance of hitting its target, even at extreme ranges of several light minutes. ( Of course if the enemy has stabilizers, such as we have to day on cameras, to reduce vibrational interference, then I may be in trouble. In fact, I may be dead long before my missiles arrive on target) C'est le mort.

 

And yes, the science is rubbery. But I hope it is reasonably self consistent. The idea of realistic in science fiction is to either a) follow physics, or make up physics that makes sense and allows for the suspension of disbelief and follow that physics.

 

Send him here http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.php

 

Project Rho is a great place to get a grounding in what is realistic for SciFi. Once you have an idea of what is realistic, then you can start to decide how you want to ignore real physics in your SciFi game. That site also has a great set of maps for both the Real galaxy, but also maps for many SciFi universes.