quote:Original post by Talroth ok, wings in space ARE useful,... but NOT aerofoils wings. Wings would be useful as weapon mounts, and mounts for thruster ports.
I wish I could find my friends article on space combat theory. As they were REAL theory, done for a paper in university after studing advanced propulsion, and space transportation physics,...
Also, the mass of an space fighter, well, it would depend on its role, and what sort of technologies it has. A larger kamakazi, or slower accelerating, heavy armored vechicle would want LOTS of mass, where as a lightweight fighter that relied on getting out of the way of shots would want as little as possible.
(Then there is the idea of inertia canceling fields, which would mean the mass wouldn''t mean shit as far as it getting around)
Hmm, you think you could ask him for that? I would love to read it!
I just call them heat radiators. ie: Large flat surfaces by which extra heat generated by the weapons/reactor is bled off into space. Even that is kinda stretching it, as you''d need a pretty large surface area to work as any sort of efficient radiator.
Or you could say the ships need wings because they are dual-purpose atmospheric and interstellar craft.
Talroth: A few friends and I were discussing this a while ago, and even got into an argument over the whole realistic physics space fighting deal. My friend''s argument was that fighters couldn''t catch up to cruisers or battleships due to engine sizes; Larger engine means better top speed. Of course, inertia is a big issue. The faster the ship goes, the more energy it requires to get it to that state, which means more mass. Which then needs bigger engines and more energy, and so on.
Personally, I liked the model used in Mission Critical. (Starring Michael Dorn, made back in the days when FMV games were still selling.) Cruisers and whatnot were slow and bulky and rarely fought side to side. Usually, they sent out drones -- small, AI controlled ships that could accelerate at hundreds of Gs, and manuever tightly. No way a living pilot would withstand those forces. The neat thing about that was that you sent your drones out, with whatever info you could feed them about the enemy''s position and possible tactics -- and then let the two sets of machines fight it out. The battle would be over in a heartbeat, and the loser would soon know it as their cruiser was hammered by the mobile drones.
You even got to control the drones in one fight, using an experimental nanobot system that would speed your brain up to machine-speeds.
Anyway, I always thought it was a pretty neat idea.
I thought it was really, really hard to shed heat in space. Vaccuum is an insulator, since there's no medium for convection, which means you basically have to vent something to change the temperature, or else find a way to shed it as light (which I guess counts as venting something).
Wings are good for reasons stated, as mounts for weapons and maneuvering thrusters. Inertia is always a concern, but with proper super-alloys and plasma boosters, you can fudge the math for that. A little jet farther from the center-of mass would be abble to effect rotation more efficiently, if a little more slowly. It would be just the thing for slight course adjustments on long flights. I'm more interested in the performance disparity between large and small craft.
Unless you're approaching light speed, the whole energy-mass conversion is a fairly minor concern, right? I thought that up to about .8C you'd barely notice the difference. I made that number up, but if I'm anywhere near right, you can just use Newtonian physics until you turn on the interstellar propulsion. So, you'd got a little craft with maybe 2000 kg of mass, and a big one with a million or so. It's been a while, but I think top speed for both would be asymptotic to C, so acceleration is all that changes. So as long as the ratio of mass to force is about the same, the ships should perform about the same.
That ratio is the important thing. If you've got a cruiser and a fighter at a dead stop in deep space, and the 2000 kg fighter has a propulsion of 2000 Newtons, it'll accelerate at 1m/s/s. A million kg cruiser with a million N of force, same acceleration. I'd say the important issue is maneuvering.
Torgue and tensile strength and such would require a larger ship to turn more slowly, right? If you try to whip a 3-km ship around at 2? radiens/second, you'll twist the maneuvering jets off, super-alloys or no. That little fighter, though, could spin like a top, with no adverse effects that a little Dramamine couldn't cure (incidentally, if you're going to have inertia-dampening fields, just put one around the cockpit to prevent the crushing G-forces from actually crushing the pilot). So, depending primarily on your designs, a cruiser could match or beat a fighter in a drag-race, which would facilitate escapes from fighter-riding pirates, but a frigate in a standing battle with a bunch of little stingers would need either a fighter escort of a whole boatload of turrets, or both. Missiles are good too, of course.
But what about a moving firefight? Two cruisers moving side-by-side would be the same as two cruisers sitting still, but non-miraculous interplanetary travel is probably best achieved using the system Heinlein describes in some of his stories, including "Have Space Suit, Will Travel": A gradual acceleration to the mid-way-point is followed by a skew-flip (180 degrees of yaw) and then the use of those same thrusters to decelerate as you approach the destination. So, a battle between two constantly-accelerating bodies could quickly leave their direction-changing fighters in the dust. What then?
I think you need to formulate a total physical (or metaphysical) basis for your ships' locomotion, and them work gameplay into that. There's a lot of great research material out there, and a lot of it is in the form of highly entertaining science fiction, so you should have little trouble staying focussed. "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is actually in the "Juvenile" section of my library. If kids read that instead of Harry Potter, they'd learn about physics and biochemistry instead of muggles. Heck, Heinlein spends two pages working out a high-school-level physics problem step-by-step, like in a textbook.
[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on January 4, 2004 9:55:51 PM]
Unless you''re approaching light speed, the whole energy-mass conversion is a fairly minor concern, right? I thought that up to about .8C you''d barely notice the difference. I made that number up, but if I''m anywhere near right, you can just use Newtonian physics until you turn on the interstellar propulsion. So, you''d got a little craft with maybe 2000 kg of mass, and a big one with a million or so. It''s been a while, but I think top speed for both would be asymptotic to C, so acceleration is all that changes. So as long as the ratio of mass to force is about the same, the ships should perform about the same.
[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on January 4, 2004 9:55:51 PM]
quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage I thought it was really, really hard to shed heat in space. Vaccuum is an insulator, since there''s no medium for convection, which means you basically have to vent something to change the temperature, or else find a way to shed it as light (which I guess counts as venting something).
Wings are good for reasons stated, as mounts for weapons and maneuvering thrusters. Inertia is always a concern, but with proper super-alloys and plasma boosters, you can fudge the math for that. A little jet farther from the center-of mass would be abble to effect rotation more efficiently, if a little more slowly. It would be just the thing for slight course adjustments on long flights. I''m more interested in the performance disparity between large and small craft.
Unless you''re approaching light speed, the whole energy-mass conversion is a fairly minor concern, right? I thought that up to about .8C you''d barely notice the difference. I made that number up, but if I''m anywhere near right, you can just use Newtonian physics until you turn on the interstellar propulsion. So, you''d got a little craft with maybe 2000 kg of mass, and a big one with a million or so. It''s been a while, but I think top speed for both would be asymptotic to C, so acceleration is all that changes. So as long as the ratio of mass to force is about the same, the ships should perform about the same.
That ratio is the important thing. If you''ve got a cruiser and a fighter at a dead stop in deep space, and the 2000 kg fighter has a propulsion of 2000 Newtons, it''ll accelerate at 1m/s/s. A million kg cruiser with a million N of force, same acceleration. I''d say the important issue is maneuvering.
Torgue and tensile strength and such would require a larger ship to turn more slowly, right? If you try to whip a 3-km ship around at 2? radiens/second, you''ll twist the maneuvering jets off, super-alloys or no. That little fighter, though, could spin like a top, with no adverse effects that a little Dramamine couldn''t cure (incidentally, if you''re going to have inertia-dampening fields, just put one around the cockpit to prevent the crushing G-forces from actually crushing the pilot). So, depending primarily on your designs, a cruiser could match or beat a fighter in a drag-race, which would facilitate escapes from fighter-riding pirates, but a frigate in a standing battle with a bunch of little stingers would need either a fighter escort of a whole boatload of turrets, or both. Missiles are good too, of course.
But what about a moving firefight? Two cruisers moving side-by-side would be the same as two cruisers sitting still, but non-miraculous interplanetary travel is probably best achieved using the system Heinlein describes in some of his stories, including "Have Space Suit, Will Travel": A gradual acceleration to the mid-way-point is followed by a skew-flip (180 degrees of yaw) and then the use of those same thrusters to decelerate as you approach the destination. So, a battle between two constantly-accelerating bodies could quickly leave their direction-changing fighters in the dust. What then?
I think you need to formulate a total physical (or metaphysical) basis for your ships'' locomotion, and them work gameplay into that. There''s a lot of great research material out there, and a lot of it is in the form of highly entertaining science fiction, so you should have little trouble staying focussed. "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is actually in the "Juvenile" section of my library. If kids read that instead of Harry Potter, they''d learn about physics and biochemistry instead of muggles. Heck, Heinlein spends two pages working out a high-school-level physics problem step-by-step, like in a textbook.
[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on January 4, 2004 9:55:51 PM]
Speaking of space oriented science fiction, have you ever read any of the "Honor Harrington" books by "David Webber"? He has a few interesting ideas on how space ships would actually manuver and fight. One of the common things seems to be that the majority of fighting is done via missles at long range, either with or without war heads (the war head adds blast radius, or even a nuke wouldn''t add much to the kinetic impact from a missle at .8c), and the ships are large, with the smallest being a 16 man ship of a few thousand tons.
This whole thread just reminded me of those books and how good they are =]
Iron Chef: Yeah, that''s why I said kinda. It is indeed hard to radiate heat into space; In fact, in a game I am working on, the shields vent super-heated plasma into space in order to lessen the temperature difference. Of course, this is just sematic word play, as the player doesn''t need to worry about real life considerations such as coolant levels. I could just as easily say the magic shield crystals need time to cool off, but I prefer the hard sf flavor!
Indepence War had another nifty system for ship movement, though it was mostly optimized for ships of destroyer size and larger. Normal plasma-ion thrusters for normal fighting, coupled with a linear displacement drive for long intrastellar distances. (Flying from Earth to Mars, for example.) And on top of that, a warp drive that only worked at Lagrange points for interstellar travel. And, indeed, ship battles were mostly fought with missiles. There were shields, but they worked like ray projectors that destroyed anything approaching the ship along a certain vector. (Though they were gimbaled and would track enemy ships.)
But anyway -- unless you''re going for a nearly accurate sim, you could just fudge the factors a lot. For example, you could say that the ships use some kind of funky gravatronic drive that makes them fly around in space just like normal air-based fighters do. Or toss in forcefields or neutrinos Star Trek fashion and say they can do all kinds of non-realistic things.
I always liked simple kinetic flight for spaceships. Escape velocity did it very well. You just rotated your ship to face the direction in which you wanted to accelerate, and simple 2D vector kinematics adjusted your velocity. There was a key that would align you directly opposite your current velocity, so you could stop to dock or board, and an "autosteer) button that would point you at your target, be it ship or planet. It actually facilitated a Heinlein-esque system for covering distances, because you could use the autosteer to get a bearing on your destination, cruise until you approached it, and then us the "reverse" button to do a skew-flip and decelerate. That game had top-speed limitations, but if they were relaxed a little bit you could cover huge distances without difficulty.
Implementing that in 3D wouldn''t be too bad, and it would be easy to design ships with a main engine and a handful of "maneuvering jets". Especially with AI control, it would make for crisp maneuvers, all manner of strafing tactics, and feasible retreats, since a rapidly-accelerating capital ship would be able to easily outpace most pursuers, while dealing with any following weapons.
Another thing: Is any one willing to help me design an engine for this RTS, I really want to make an RTS specific engine since me and a friend (awsome modeler by the way) have the supplys and the knowledge to make (or break) RTS's we would like a reusable platform!
