Weapons Suggestions

Thermoberic bombs that hes talking about rely on air in the atmosphere to create a pressure wave by air getting sucked in to fuel the explosion then forced back out by it. That is not possible in any way in space or a vacuum ( witch space is ) and this is what tonyri is saying, just in a much more simple way.

Conventional warheads ( that your talking about ) do work just fine in space as they have an oxidizer, the difference between a Thermoberic bomb and a regular conventional warhead is Thermoberic bombs do not have an oxidizer.

I never said it would be the current type, I only meant something like it or similar to it. But the basic thing is some sort of weapon where its main effect would be a power shock wave in the fabric of space. (yes it is possible to create ripples in the very fabric of space).

well yeah, theoretically it is possible to rip the very fabric of time and space, doesn't mean we need to figure out how to do it in a game. I'm thinking that the best and easiest way to implement an explosive space projectile will be to modify the current TNT to have it simulate a shock wave explosion.

Reason for that, imo, would be that if I had to choose a weapon to use in space I'm going to either use A) a high speed dense metal projectile to simply punch through the defenses or B) I'd want to use a contained explosive device to direct energy at the target similar to how a shaped charge works.

In reality, rail guns or energy weapons would not be far fetched in the eyes of science. I think once man kind actually gets into space and inevitably brings war with it, it will not use guided missiles or explosives.

In game, I suppose it will depend on whether we are dealing with "real life" physics, or if we are dealing with computer game space physics, where its more like water than a void.

Oh so much... so so much wrong......

Do you know how ineffective a weapon designed to ripple the fabric of time and space would be? The sheer energy density would actually WEAKEN space itself! I'm not kidding, thats what their planning to use 100000+ years into the future for experimental inter-dimensional travel. Here, il give you a hint at the required energy density. Afaik, the highest energy density possible is actually matter, as they are interchangable, and do you know how much mass you would have to pack into a weapon to ripple space? Heres another hint, a sphere about the required size is below you right now. You could sooner just BLOW THE EFFIN SOLAR SYSTEM UP THAT THE ENEMY SHIP IS IN then RIPPLE SPACE around them. And even then it would probably do almost NOTHING to the ship.

OI vay, I hate to be so harsh, but I hate such bad ideas more. Please, please look something up before talking about it.

Thermobaric weapons are effective, yes, but due to the nature of spaceships they wouldn't be effective in allmost any case. The army uses Thermobaric bombs to clear out caves, because if the explosion can't reach them all then it depletes the majority of the oxygen in the cave. In space, this could work just fine if you got it into the ship, but you gotta account for the advanced automated atmosphereic systems, bulkheads that could quickly seal off areas, extra oxygen supplies or advanced oxygen recycling systems, and the fact that theres not going to be a whole lot of oxygen to burn in the first place unless the builders of the ship love big, unneeded, open spaces.

ectrimble20 wrote:

well yeah, theoretically it is possible to rip the very fabric of time and space, doesn't mean we need to figure out how to do it in a game. I'm thinking that the best and easiest way to implement an explosive space projectile will be to modify the current TNT to have it simulate a shock wave explosion.

Reason for that, imo, would be that if I had to choose a weapon to use in space I'm going to either use A) a high speed dense metal projectile to simply punch through the defenses or B) I'd want to use a contained explosive device to direct energy at the target similar to how a shaped charge works.

In reality, rail guns or energy weapons would not be far fetched in the eyes of science. I think once man kind actually gets into space and inevitably brings war with it, it will not use guided missiles or explosives.

In game, I suppose it will depend on whether we are dealing with "real life" physics, or if we are dealing with computer game space physics, where its more like water than a void.

I vote void. Although, could you clarifiy what the differences between the two would be?

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I vote void. Although, could you clarifiy what the differences between the two would be?

Void would be like space is now. Push an object with a little force, it will go forever or until it meets another force that has the required force to stop it.

Computer Game would be like how Eve is setup, where you have defined axis that can be used for orientation. You'd also has a friction modifier so that a ship that shuts off its engines will eventually come to a stop. It makes movement a little easier as it doesn't take two days of reverse thrusting to slow down from LTL speeds.

I'd actually prefer the Computer Game style space, as it would be more practical and would also be a lot less frustrating to move around in. The void would piss people off because they'd be like "yeah lets go" hit their trusters for a second and then spend 20 min trying to adjust their trajectory only to be foiled by opposing forces and then to be foiled again by gravity lol. Anyone ever play an old game called Terminus? That had 3D 100% realistic space travel, that was rather interesting trying to have a dog fight between two small vessels as both are hurling through space at 1000KMps.

Is it possible to code a rail gun that grows in power depending on the amount of Electromagnetic Coil blocks that are around the projectile path?

yes I think it is possible. Just have the projectile entity interact with blocks surrounding it so that every time it passes a coil, its velocity variable increases. ( detecting on all sides of the projectile). The initial velocity would be the 'launcher' at a set speed followed by whatever distance and amount of railing and coils said builder wants.

lordhood117 wrote:

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.

(It's "Particle" Projector Cannons, btw.)

Could work. You'd need A) the plasma or particles to fire, B) the energy to fire them, and C) cooldown time, unless you want a melted barrel.

I know the topic has shifted from this but it would be near impossible to use antimatter anything, because the energy in the antimatter must be put into the antimatter to have it made. Meaning to explode one block or provide one block of thrust, you have to put in one block. To get two blocks worth, put in two blocks. Plus, to make antimatter, you have to have a huge and high upkeep facility like the Large Hadron Collider. This makes producing antimatter unfeasible.

daman200 wrote:

I know the topic has shifted from this but it would be near impossible to use antimatter anything, because the energy in the antimatter must be put into the antimatter to have it made. Meaning to explode one block or provide one block of thrust, you have to put in one block. To get two blocks worth, put in two blocks. Plus, to make antimatter, you have to have a huge and high upkeep facility like the Large Hadron Collider. This makes producing antimatter unfeasible.

Why not have a massive solar array on the planet, or a giant fusion reactor fueled by ocean water. Both would be impratical to use on a ship, both could be used to generate antimatter for use on a ship.

The problem with that is transporting said antimatter to the ship. Although I'd love to see a antimatter bomb, it would cost too much money. Seeing as a antimatter producing facility would be incredibly hard nearing impossible to build alone, what wages would be paid to your workers?



Edit: It might just be me that can't make a antimatter maker alone. I seem to have no patience.

daman200 wrote:

The problem with that is transporting said antimatter to the ship. Although I'd love to see a antimatter bomb, it would cost too much money. Seeing as a antimatter producing facility would be incredibly hard nearing impossible to build alone, what wages would be paid to your workers?



Edit: It might just be me that can't make a antimatter maker alone. I seem to have no patience.

Workers? Robots.

Also, no one knows what their wages might be if you used real people, because no one knows mow to generate antimatter in-mass. Whatever process is used could be mostly safe(think something like a particle collider except it cares less about measurements and more about colliding and collecting antimatter) or incredibly dangerous(a swarm of artifical micro-blackholes that antiparticles are collected from)


Using a particle accelerator might be kinda slow thought, because:

"The biggest limiting factor in the large-scale production of antimatter is the availability of antiprotons. Recent data released by CERN states that, when fully operational, their facilities are capable of producing 10000000 antiprotons per minute. Assuming a 100% conversion of antiprotons to antihydrogen, it would take 100 billion years to produce 1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen (approximately 6.02x1(1023 zeros) atoms of antihydrogen)."


And you could treat antimatter as fuel, you need much less to run a ship, and it's antimatter-using weapons, then you would think, being that just throwing a glob of antimatter at a enemy ship wouldn't be very efficent.

Also, I have a suggestion for a weapon: the Anti-matter Carpet Bomb.

Inside of its magnetic containment chamber it holds a small amount of liquid antimercury, which it carefully manipulates with electromagnets. When its time to release it's payload it spins the magnetic antiliquid and forms it into a disk, which is then shot out of the front of the casing. Once out of the fields that carefully maintained the disk shape it immediately breaks apart due to the spin, turning into a fine mist of millions of microscopic droplets that are individually as strong as a whole pound of c4 whenever it hits a target. This, obviously, does a massive amount of damage over a wide area; and is also impossible to use inside of a atmosphere.

It would be one of the few superweapons in the game, designed for taking out swarms of fighters or blasting wide holes in the armor of larger ships while leaving everything inside somewhat intact(since the droplets would each hit a single area of armor and not go any farther in).

You may wonder exactly why it causes it to form droplets, instead of just launching the whole glob at a ship, well it turns out that launching a solid or liquid(or gas or plasma) mass of antimatter at anything is inefficent, what antimatter collides with the matter would just react and push 99% of the rest away, wasting it. With microdroplets they react completely(or nearly so) because each individual drop hits a target too fast for it to push itself away, and it won't push the other droplets away, only to the side.

You could always try to use it in a atmosphere, but the results would... vary. It might react just enough with the air to keep it away from the droplets, and it would still work somewhat, or the disk would just reform into a glob once the reactions compress it back together and you would have thosands of explosions going on for a few minutes that wouldn't do much to anything that isn' t within 5 feet of it.

Buggy1997123 wrote:

1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen (approximately 6.02x1(1023 zeros) atoms of antihydrogen)."

You could always try to use it in a atmosphere, but the results would... vary. It might react just enough with the air to keep it away from the droplets, and it would still work somewhat, or the disk would just reform into a glob once the reactions compress it back together and you would have thosands of explosions going on for a few minutes that wouldn't do much to anything that isn' t within 5 feet of it.

Im sorry, but this was bugging me. 1 mole or 1 gram of hydrogen / anti hydrogen is 6.02 x 10^23 atoms, not 6.02 x 10^1023 atoms.

Other than that mishap, your idea of the antimatter carpet bomb is great. Very effective in space, though with the last comment, it would only be moderately effective if the container did not open until it was close to the target, as all the atmosphere, heck, all atoms that are matter would react to it ( which causes mayham in the atom scale because 1 antimurcury can react with 80 hydrogen atoms ( leaving 121 antineutrons to react with other things) so one can see how messed up an interaction can get with other chemicals.

Though that chemistry stuff isnt needed in the game, it sort makes you respect how complex antimatter is.
My apologies, I went on a tangent.

GroundBurg_Coder13 wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen (approximately 6.02x1(1023 zeros) atoms of antihydrogen)."

You could always try to use it in a atmosphere, but the results would... vary. It might react just enough with the air to keep it away from the droplets, and it would still work somewhat, or the disk would just reform into a glob once the reactions compress it back together and you would have thosands of explosions going on for a few minutes that wouldn't do much to anything that isn' t within 5 feet of it.

Im sorry, but this was bugging me. 1 mole or 1 gram of hydrogen / anti hydrogen is 6.02 x 10^23 atoms, not 6.02 x 10^1023 atoms.

Other than that mishap, your idea of the antimatter carpet bomb is great. Very effective in space, though with the last comment, it would only be moderately effective if the container did not open until it was close to the target, as all the atmosphere, heck, all atoms that are matter would react to it ( which causes mayham in the atom scale because 1 antimurcury can react with 80 hydrogen atoms ( leaving 121 antineutrons to react with other things) so one can see how messed up an interaction can get with other chemicals.

Though that chemistry stuff isnt needed in the game, it sort makes you respect how complex antimatter is.
My apologies, I went on a tangent.

Yeah, I didn't account for chemical effects, and the 1023 zero thing was because I couldn't copy it off of Wikipedia correctly and I didn't want to waste too much time correcting it manually because I wanted to finish the next post of my Dev Log. Although its not quite a Dev Log if im not actually developing anything.

Idea's are half our battle buggy, code is just code

Anyway, my input. Anti-matter = no. Just my opinion but what makes you think that a particle that we know little about and mostly theorize about today will be a viable power/weapon source ever? It states right on the Wiki page that the US department of whatever said it would cost $62.5 trillion (yes with a T) dollars to produce 1 gram of anti-hydrogen. Somehow I don't think we'd want to put that kinda money into something that we're just going to be blowing up or using for power.

Since this is a weapons post, I wont go into my thoughts on using anti-matter for power, I'll just say I don't think anti-matter would make a viable weapon simply due to the amount of energy needed to create and store it without blowing yourself into atomic particles. I'm not saying we couldn't make it a super expensive end game weapon, but to me, it just doesn't make since to concentrate on any kind of super weapon.

If you wanted my opinion, I would think that an Anti-matter nuke would be more viable as the principal of a nuclear explosion is what is taking place when anti and matter combine. The atomic structure of the atom is destroyed releasing a sizable amount of energy, so if you take a set amount of anti-matter and a set amount of opposite matter, suspend them in an electrical field, then fire them and on impact with the target launch the matter and anti-matter into one another, you'd probably do a better job of creating a ship killing weapon, especially in the vacuum of space where a conventional explosive is less effective. But yeah, I just made up the physics on that one, so flame away if I'm completely wrong lol.

ectrimble20 wrote:

Idea's are half our battle buggy, code is just code

Anyway, my input. Anti-matter = no. Just my opinion but what makes you think that a particle that we know little about and mostly theorize about today will be a viable power/weapon source ever? It states right on the Wiki page that the US department of whatever said it would cost $62.5 trillion (yes with a T) dollars to produce 1 gram of anti-hydrogen. Somehow I don't think we'd want to put that kinda money into something that we're just going to be blowing up or using for power.

Since this is a weapons post, I wont go into my thoughts on using anti-matter for power, I'll just say I don't think anti-matter would make a viable weapon simply due to the amount of energy needed to create and store it without blowing yourself into atomic particles. I'm not saying we couldn't make it a super expensive end game weapon, but to me, it just doesn't make since to concentrate on any kind of super weapon.

If you wanted my opinion, I would think that an Anti-matter nuke would be more viable as the principal of a nuclear explosion is what is taking place when anti and matter combine. The atomic structure of the atom is destroyed releasing a sizable amount of energy, so if you take a set amount of anti-matter and a set amount of opposite matter, suspend them in an electrical field, then fire them and on impact with the target launch the matter and anti-matter into one another, you'd probably do a better job of creating a ship killing weapon, especially in the vacuum of space where a conventional explosive is less effective. But yeah, I just made up the physics on that one, so flame away if I'm completely wrong lol.

Well, as far as antimatter goes, it is the future, and that means there are a few potental sources that could be acessed that can't be acessed now. Simple planetary generation probably isn't possible, but a station built far enough away from a blackhole to not implode could potentally gather antimatter(probably in the form of hawking radiation) as it has been shown that blackholes produce antimatter. How exactly is not entirely known, but if all else fails theres a pretty big cloud in the center of the galaxy that could be acessed: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/15/antimatter_black_hole_collapsar_neutron_star_unexpected/

It could be a high-tier powersource or weapon material, with combustion, fission, fusion, or whatever coming before it.

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but if all else fails theres a pretty big cloud in the center of the galaxy that could be acessed

hummmmm I'm sensing some high tier mining operation stuff there.. might be fun

Hooray for science!

Back to weps, why not go simple and have lasers, railguns, missiles, and maybe, maybe, some "Doomsday" or "Super" weapons.

(Idea for a doomsday (easter egg ship only) - Fires a barrage of high-explosive missiles. Won't kill anything, but it'll severely torque it.

The simpler ones will be incorporated, those are the premise of practically every futuristic thing out there.

As for the super-weapons... face it, we are doing this within the constraints of humanity (designing with human ideals behind us). All through history there has been some sort of 'super-weapon' or at least the constant evolution of killing devices in which the super-weapon was born. In the future, I highly doubt that this will be different. That is why they are planned to be added... not to mention that they are pretty fraken awesome!

I think there should be a "bunker buster" weapons. If this isn't too hard to program, (I'm not a mod maker,) it could be launched at a ship and burrow through the ship, exploding only when it reaches the control chair. There could also be a variant, where instead of exploding, it just leaves a cloud of mustard or chlorine gas, killing the pilot and leaving the control chair intact. Although there might be a few holes from it reaching the chair.

Bunker buster type weapons aren't too hard just set it as a projectile until it contacts something then start a timer until it "goes off".

Mkay, I assume we're aware that anyone with enough nukes would be able to wipe all life from the face of a planet. That won't be possible, will it? I mean, it's not very fair if one server is totally inhabitable.

Misticblade7 wrote:

Mkay, I assume we're aware that anyone with enough nukes would be able to wipe all life from the face of a planet. That won't be possible, will it? I mean, it's not very fair if one server is totally inhabitable.

M.A.D.

If the s**t starts hitting the fan, I'm not going down alone.

There are a lot of things that could wipe out all life on a planet. Like someone flying a hugegantic(yes, hugegantic) ship into it, the explosion could possibly completely destroy smaller planets if its going fast enough.

That might be kind of hard on the computer, even with preprocessing. Crashing ships will do an impressive amount of damage to the countryside, but it won't be on the planetary scale.