Weapons Suggestions

Hello again everyone, last post I made was on the Minecraft forum.

Most of my ideas pertain to weapons for ship to ship combat, some of which could be applied even to the small fighters.
Large Ship Weapons:
Missiles: I know they already have been agreed upon more or less, however I have some ideas (this is a repost from the MC Forum):

• Missiles could be crafted via a multi-crafting system (i.e. craft the engine, the warhead, and the body)
  Missiles need to be somehow guided (perhaps by a designator system on the front of the ship that fires an untextured phased block that designates the x,y,z point the missile must hit), and the missiles would be able to track. If the "beam" block misses, it should only go on for about 200 blocks or less, making missiles a short-mid range option. If possible, there should be a way that the missiles could track the position of the block hit by the designator "beam" block. If not, the least that should happen is that the missile should detonate at the set x,y,z coordinates to prevent friendly/unintended fire.
  
  
• Missiles should be vertically or horizontally fired, both requiring large enough hatches
  
  
• Multiple warheads
  Standard High Explosive (crafted with TNT)
  Kinetic (crafted with Titanium or a similar metal)
  Nuclear (crafted with a Nuke or Uranium if this mod will feature such materials)
  
  
• There should be a fire control block that manages every part of the firing process (opening hatches, arming missiles, designating the target, and finally launching the missiles)

Turrets: Turrets would be trickier, but perhaps do-able. My idea for turrets is that they would be used for anti-fighter/anti-transport usage, not for engaging larger ships. That said, here would be some possible mechanics:

• A control block could be designed to appear as a video monitor. Right clicking on said block would zoom out to a 3rd person view of the turret, and any movement of the mouse will rotate the turret.
  
  
• Turrets could come in two varieties
  Projectile (20-40mm cannons for those who like to use old-school bullets and shells)
  Energy Weapon (Lasers, Plasma, Photons; whatever fits the theme of the mod)
  
  
• The turrets don't have to be too fancy. They can be as simple as say a dome with a rotating barrel that sticks out of 'em.
  

Mines:

• Deploy-able by various light craft (perhaps not on large craft, since mine-spamming may become a problem). Craft ranging from Fighters/Bombers or transports to low to medium tonnage ships would be allowed to posses mine-layers.
  
  
• Several varieties:
  High Explosive (TNT-based)
  Nuclear (Uranium or Nuke Block based, again if available in the mod). Limit 3 per ship, no exceptions. Fighters/Bombers/Transports would not be capable of carrying nuke-mines.
  Plasma (Plasma coil added, again, if fitting the theme of the mod)
  EMP (Temporary disabling of flight controls, EMP coil could be a component)
  

Small Cannons: Similar to turrets, except slightly bigger and capable of slight damage to large ships, highly effective against just about everything else. Simply put, small cannons would be similar to machine guns in ship-to-ship combat. Yet as an anti-spacecraft weapons, they could be capable of destroying a craft in two shots.

• Ammunition types:
  80mm rounds - Once again, for those who prefer bullets and shells over lasers. Limited ammo, lower rate of fire, but high power.
  Energy - For those who like lasers. Ammunition could be tied to the ship's overall power, and lowered mobility could be the punishment for overuse. High rate of fire, (depending on power systems and power requirements) near-limitless ammunition, lower power/shot.
  

I don't come from a mod programming background, so I don't exactly know what is possible and what is pure fantasy. I just thought I'd share some thoughts. If I have anymore, I'll post 'em.

The majority of the weapons I read here were combustion-based (not including the missiles). I would think that there could instead be railguns, which would be far more effective against transports and corvettes that would not have a lot of armor to protect them. As for the missiles, I think there should only be 2 or 3 kinds: normal (which launch in pods, creating a swarm effect, much like the Archer missiles from Halo), energy (more like photon torpedoes), and nuclear (EXTREMELY long-range weapon of last resort, requiring scripts that restrict launches to certain targets, delay launches that may take out friendlies in the blast, require authorization by multiple players on the bridge, and can only be launched by designated flagships).

Aye, and with some of the weapons being combustion, that would ultimately be impossible in space with no oxygen available to complete the reaction.

The nuclear missile idea would be good, with authorization codes need to launch but to add realism into it, i would say not just an explosion with the particles from the TNT explosion, but a new animation / code along with it so that if you were looking at the explosion you could/ would be temporarily blinded and a bright sphere at the core of the explosion. no sound except for when a shock wave hits the ship and no / little amount of smoke/ dust.

Rail guns would be an optimal choice as the velocity of the projectile is at a fraction of the speed of light ( and with no friction to slow it down) even a small round can punch through a very thick hull.

One idea ( though possibly a little over the top and TOO futuristic) is the radiation bomb. This is a missile with a highly condensed, unstable core which when initiated and launched, the missile will shoot off and crash against the hull of the enemy ship ( if shields are up, no effect , but if the shields are down and there is no other radiation defense ( or a hole in the ship) then it will explode not as a fire/ forceful explosion but with enough concentrated radiation that any human in the radius of the missile will instantly die. ( this is useful for capturing a ship without overly damaging the whole integrity of the hull)

Personally I think that given the immense relative distances between ships in space, nuclear weapons are going to be pretty standard, as trying to make an impact kill at a range of a half-million klicks plus even with good guidance is very, very difficult, and the AoE of a nuke is necessary to ensure that so long as you hit within 20 kilometers, they'll be damaged. Another fascinating thing about the nukes ingame and IRL is that the radiation can be used to cause special rods of material such as hafnium to lase, creating immensely powerful x-ray lasers that can pretty much stab through anything ever conceived, included shields, armor and (of course) people and systems.

Another idea would be singularity and antimatter weaponry, harnessing two of the most powerful sources of destructive energy in the universe, in the forms of bombs and missiles, and later in the form of projectors that act like beam/bolt weapons, delivering death from close/long range with a higher rate of fire and without the possibility of interception.

Shiva wrote:

Another idea would be singularity and antimatter weaponry, harnessing two of the most powerful sources of destructive energy in the universe, in the forms of bombs and missiles, and later in the form of projectors that act like beam/bolt weapons, delivering death from close/long range with a higher rate of fire and without the possibility of interception.

I would think that a singularity (aka. black hole) weapon would be a true weapon of last resort due to the fact that, well, you're deploying an artificial black hole! If the mod gets some sort of tech tree, then I'd see singularity bombs and missiles at a VERY late stage. However, antimatter weaponry would probably be pretty common, considering that they would probably be developed before the technology is in place to control a matter-antimatter reaction (for reactors to power FTL engines, ie. warp drives, Slipspace engines). As for projector weapons, I definitely see something there. After all, in the Halo universe, Covenant capital ships carry a single energy projector, which takes most of its power to fire, but is capable of cutting clean through the target ship (as well as one or two ships behind that).

I actually believe that Close-Range combat will be very necessary in space battle situations. If you need to capture or attack a planet, you will have to move in close to be able to attack the ground structures or destroy defensive stations, as otherwise most weapons would be conceviable as useless. Attacking from long range will give the enemy more time to intercept the shots with.. say... suicide ships that stop the nuclear missiles. Moving in close or starting close would be an excellent position for an enemy, as all of the weapons will be able to fire without complicated targeting measures. And being closer means the shots impact sooner, and they are harder to be intercepted.

Something I don't think you guys are realizing, is that a single marble sized projectile propelled by a magnetic coil (railgun), coupled with virtually any modern cpu, could easily take down ANY missile even remotely conceiveable. Railguns and other energy or high speed weapons are generally better, even artillary could be countered by that same anti-missile system. In theory that system could even take down lightly armored craft.

I think that it may be wise to create a mind map of all features in the mod, before we find ourselves trying to simulate every conceivable aspect of the entire Universe.

Dr. Mackeroth wrote:

I think that it may be wise to create a mind map of all features in the mod, before we find ourselves trying to simulate every conceivable aspect of the entire Universe.

I think that this is a good Idea. We should get a Google Docs thing so that we can collaborate and everyone can work in real time.

Edit: We can use this one for now. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qtXqBjrTLyb5XMliWy4Yx4cCcB1Aqnq-MqQRo-GmLwI/edit

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Something I don't think you guys are realizing, is that a single marble sized projectile propelled by a magnetic coil (railgun), coupled with virtually any modern cpu, could easily take down ANY missile even remotely conceiveable. Railguns and other energy or high speed weapons are generally better, even artillary could be countered by that same anti-missile system. In theory that system could even take down lightly armored craft.

And what happens when said projectile is itself moving at a considerable fraction of light speed - and that your sensors have to see it first to shoot at it, anyway? When it's dodging, because whoever fired that missile knows that if they can shoot it out of space with a magnetic railgun or a point-defense laser, they want to make it harder than hell for you to do the same.

You guys aren't really going to make me code near-light speed anti-missile balistics, right?

...Okay

Very simply shooting holes in sillyness. No, dear Frosty, we won't crack the whip that hard....

... unless you want to do that?

If I remember correctly, don't arrows stop mid air when they hit the edge of your rendered view? Will this limitation stop the server from calculating missiles when they got far away from people?

It's a built-in limiter on entities to keep them from crashing the game in unloaded chunks. Outside of their operational range, they don't execute their onTick() routine, which in turn means they can't move around. It's easy to circumvent simply by executing onTick() with an external manager. Of course, you still have to take care that the entity can function properly in an unloaded chunk, but that's doable, too. Especially in space.

tonyri wrote:

I think that this is a good Idea. We should get a Google Docs thing so that we can collaborate and everyone can work in real time.

Edit: We can use this one for now. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qtXqBjrTLyb5XMliWy4Yx4cCcB1Aqnq-MqQRo-GmLwI/edit

It's in "view only" mode right now.

Shiva wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Something I don't think you guys are realizing, is that a single marble sized projectile propelled by a magnetic coil (railgun), coupled with virtually any modern cpu, could easily take down ANY missile even remotely conceiveable. Railguns and other energy or high speed weapons are generally better, even artillary could be countered by that same anti-missile system. In theory that system could even take down lightly armored craft.

And what happens when said projectile is itself moving at a considerable fraction of light speed - and that your sensors have to see it first to shoot at it, anyway? When it's dodging, because whoever fired that missile knows that if they can shoot it out of space with a magnetic railgun or a point-defense laser, they want to make it harder than hell for you to do the same.

While thats all true, I think your underestimating the strength of modern CPUs. Most applications take MUCH more processing power then you think, a raw CPU can perform BILLIONS of calculations a second, that could include easily scanning the starry sky for patterns of dissapearing stars, looking for engine flares, calculating trajectorys, and finally computing proper firing position and coil strength. And it doesn't need to be too accurate either, when I said marbles, I meant literal marbles. With a proper loading system it could fire as fast as a machine gun, and a storage just 5x5x5 blocks in size could hold tens of thosands of those easy-to-mass-produce marbles.

As for missile speeds, I doubt one coul ever reach .01c and still be cost effective, reliable, and powerfull at the same time.

There's still a problem with having a projectile-based system like a Gauss gun, like you described: ammo, and it's limited. With such a high-ROF system, all those marbles could be exhausted in a matter of minutes, if not seconds depending on how many threats the ship encounters at a time (look up the rate of fire of the Phalanx anti-missile system if you want a real-world example of how fast a system's ammo can be depleted). However, small lasers would be just as effective in a point defense role. Almost instantaneous results, no extra fire control programming needed to account for the path of the missile (leading the target), and the only "ammo" needed is gas (as in the second-highest state of matter), although the type of gas would depend on the type of laser. However, since more of the gas can be held in the same size of storage unit that you described, more threats can be neutralized. Also, such chemicals would be far easier and cheaper to manufacture than the marbles because the materials needed are far more plentiful than, say, iron. The only major drawback would be that lasers would probably drain more power from the ship, but unless you're planning to keep your ship's capacitors charged for a hasty retreat, more power could always be diverted from the engines.

True, I forgot to account for the fact that future lasers arn't the size of a house. Wait, I thought the gas used lasers was only used for lazing, and isn't used up in the process.

Ok, then forget the gas storage. Still, one battery of lasers would need a pretty big capacitor bank to draw power from. Also, I just remembered another possible directed-energy weapon that could be used for a variety of situations, depending on its size and type: plasma-based weapons.
In the Battletech universe, there are "Plasma Projection Cannons," or "PPCs," which shoot a plasma "projectile" at a target. They're very accurate, powerful, and are effective at introducing a lot of heat to one specific area. In the Mechwarrior video game series, PPCs are well-known for their high heat output. Combined with other energy weapons, they can heat an enemy BattleMech to the point that its computer initiates an emergency shutdown so its reactor doesn't overload. The only major flaw in using PPCs is that the 'Mech/ship/whatever using them needs to be able to withstand and dissipate the heat generated by firing the weapon. There is room for tech advancement here because PPCs can also be developed into ER (Extended Range) PPCs, Light PPCs, and even large-scale Plasma Cannons.
In Halo, the Covenant use plasma torpedoes, which are really large concentrations of plasma propelled and guided by an artificial electromagnetic field that is controlled by the ship's gunnery officer. Basically, it's a giant blob of plasma turned into a powerful guided missile. One well-placed plasma torpedo can wreck just about any ship, shielded or not. However, their EM fields can be jammed by other ships equipped with the same type of weapon by using another EM field, allowing the targeted ship to either destroy the torpedo or even turn it against the attackers. The accuracy of the weapon can be dramatically increased by installing a gunnery AI onboard the ship. Also, with the development of the proper EM confinement algorithms, the weapon can be turned into a plasma beam weapon, which is basically a plasma scalpel for slicing open entire ships. While the beam takes more plasma to use, it dramatically enhances its destructiveness.

Or, my more favorite version of the plasma cannon... the Hellbore. A plasma cannon normally fit on warships (and the dreadnought-weight versions of that same weapon are mounted on 32k ton+ Bolo Battlespace Superiority Tanks, all marks from XV to L) that uses a small shard of hydrogen "ammo" cryogenically supercooled, that is caused to begin fusion by a laser, a magnetic projector encasing the resultant plasma in a magnetic "bottle" and flinging it a considerable range at just under lightspeed.

And as to the subject of missiles - give them long enough (I never said chemical missiles... but those too) and they can get up to .8c... or haven't you ever heard of a comet (travels far faster than .01c).

Shiva wrote:

Or, my more favorite version of the plasma cannon... the Hellbore. A plasma cannon normally fit on warships (and the dreadnought-weight versions of that same weapon are mounted on 32k ton+ Bolo Battlespace Superiority Tanks, all marks from XV to L) that uses a small shard of hydrogen "ammo" cryogenically supercooled, that is caused to begin fusion by a laser, a magnetic projector encasing the resultant plasma in a magnetic "bottle" and flinging it a considerable range at just under lightspeed.

And as to the subject of missiles - give them long enough (I never said chemical missiles... but those too) and they can get up to .8c... or haven't you ever heard of a comet (travels far faster than .01c).

But they wouldn't be pratical, they ether would be too expensive with the required technology to get to that speed, or carry too little payload to be effective as a weapon.


Btw, offtopic, is it just me or am I posting so often that im killing the forum?

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Shiva wrote:

Or, my more favorite version of the plasma cannon... the Hellbore. A plasma cannon normally fit on warships (and the dreadnought-weight versions of that same weapon are mounted on 32k ton+ Bolo Battlespace Superiority Tanks, all marks from XV to L) that uses a small shard of hydrogen "ammo" cryogenically supercooled, that is caused to begin fusion by a laser, a magnetic projector encasing the resultant plasma in a magnetic "bottle" and flinging it a considerable range at just under lightspeed.

And as to the subject of missiles - give them long enough (I never said chemical missiles... but those too) and they can get up to .8c... or haven't you ever heard of a comet (travels far faster than .01c).

But they wouldn't be pratical, they ether would be too expensive with the required technology to get to that speed, or carry too little payload to be effective as a weapon.


Btw, offtopic, is it just me or am I posting so often that im killing the forum?

Buggy, at any goodly speed, you don't need a payload to hurt something when you hit it. Nuclear warheads, also, are not actually all that physically large, for all their destructiveness. The only reason our rockets are so large is that we MIRV our nukes, allowing us to strike more targets with one launch. So payload isn't much of an issue. You are also thinking only of what rockets today are like. The most likely case is that, once we're able to build a space cruiser, it will probably be cheap enough to make just about anything, weapons-wise, because propulsion will have advanced to a point at which planet-to-orbit travel is relatively easy. You can stuff an insanely powerful drive system into a missile (as they do IRL, given that your average AA missile is three-to-five times faster than your average jet) so long as you don't expect the drive system to last for a terribly long time. A minute of acceleration, in vacuum, can lend a very, very tremendous velocity to something such as a missile, and an RCS bus (what the Shuttles and other spacecraft use for fine-maneuvering) can allow it to steer itself after burnout.

Shiva wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Shiva wrote:

Or, my more favorite version of the plasma cannon... the Hellbore. A plasma cannon normally fit on warships (and the dreadnought-weight versions of that same weapon are mounted on 32k ton+ Bolo Battlespace Superiority Tanks, all marks from XV to L) that uses a small shard of hydrogen "ammo" cryogenically supercooled, that is caused to begin fusion by a laser, a magnetic projector encasing the resultant plasma in a magnetic "bottle" and flinging it a considerable range at just under lightspeed.

And as to the subject of missiles - give them long enough (I never said chemical missiles... but those too) and they can get up to .8c... or haven't you ever heard of a comet (travels far faster than .01c).

But they wouldn't be pratical, they ether would be too expensive with the required technology to get to that speed, or carry too little payload to be effective as a weapon.


Btw, offtopic, is it just me or am I posting so often that im killing the forum?

Buggy, at any goodly speed, you don't need a payload to hurt something when you hit it. Nuclear warheads, also, are not actually all that physically large, for all their destructiveness. The only reason our rockets are so large is that we MIRV our nukes, allowing us to strike more targets with one launch. So payload isn't much of an issue. You are also thinking only of what rockets today are like. The most likely case is that, once we're able to build a space cruiser, it will probably be cheap enough to make just about anything, weapons-wise, because propulsion will have advanced to a point at which planet-to-orbit travel is relatively easy. You can stuff an insanely powerful drive system into a missile (as they do IRL, given that your average AA missile is three-to-five times faster than your average jet) so long as you don't expect the drive system to last for a terribly long time. A minute of acceleration, in vacuum, can lend a very, very tremendous velocity to something such as a missile, and an RCS bus (what the Shuttles and other spacecraft use for fine-maneuvering) can allow it to steer itself after burnout.

Ok... well good point I have no counter arguement

No, payloads are not necessary for massive damage! Take a say... Super-compressed iron "Rod" with a basic flight correction computer, and drop it from a spaceship from orbit altitude. Even with friction, an aerodynamic design will allow it to attain massive speedsdue to gravitational acceleration. The larger the planet, and, therefore the more gravity, the faster it will fly. When it hits the ground, it would have the force of 10 nuclear warheads on impact. This would actually be much more efficient than even a nuclear warhead, as the materials needed for a warhead are more expensive than steel.