How powerful could a hard sci-fi civilization be?

[easydoesit1]

According to the bottom of page 7 through the top of page 8 of the Essential Guide to Warfare:
"The first defenses were energy shields, originally designed to dissipate solar energy absorbed by hulls in deep space. Energy shields were soon refined into deflector shields, which could also defend against energy weapons. Deflector shields create layered force fields enveloping an object in a single field or series of intersecting fields, depending on the size of the object to be protected and the energy available to power the shield. Energy is diffused away from the point of contact and either absorbed by the shield or radiated away as waste heat."

Further down on page 8:
"Directing energy against single points can overload the defensive field, allowing projectiles or energy blasts to pass through before the shield can regenerate, or burning out the generator powering that section of the shield."

And here I am talking about overloading a section of the shield by directing energy against a single point of the defensive field. LOL.. checkmate

Congratulations. you've proven that shields can.. be knocked down in combat if you abuse them enough. I'm pretty sure this is a new and startling revelation and all, but it really doesn't support your pet theory given that, you know, it lacks anything resembling actual numbers and shit. So sorry try again.

Please note that your heat sinks and neutrino radiators are missing from how a shield works. Please also note that I am only talking about doing with a laser what it says I can do and what torpedo spheres do with torpedoes. If torpedo spheres which operate on microsecond timescales can open a microsecond wide hole in the shield b4 it regenerates then why can't a laser operating on femtosecond timescales not do the same?

[Batman]

That's interesting. And here I thought the heat thinks and neutrino radiators were an established part of Wars canon...like Connor mentioned several times.
Oh wait, they are.

[Simon_Jester]

I know some guys who know some guys that work on femtosecond lasers in real life. Hint: they are not all that energy-efficient; a lot of power goes in per unit of power that comes out. That makes the efficiency problem even worse; the laser picks up a lot of heat which cannot be removed on any significant timescale. Certainly not enough to let you keep tapping out femtosecond pulses every picosecond or two for a nanosecond.*
_________________

*Note: this is like saying "one-second pulses every half hour or so for a fortnight," only with all the time scales divided by 10^15. That should give you a relative sense of scales; a picosecond is WAY longer than a femtosecond, and so on.

[easydoesit1]

I know some guys who know some guys that work on femtosecond lasers in real life. Hint: they are not all that energy-efficient; a lot of power goes in per unit of power that comes out. That makes the efficiency problem even worse; the laser picks up a lot of heat which cannot be removed on any significant timescale. Certainly not enough to let you keep tapping out femtosecond pulses every picosecond or two for a nanosecond.*
_________________

*Note: this is like saying "one-second pulses every half hour or so for a fortnight," only with all the time scales divided by 10^15. That should give you a relative sense of scales; a picosecond is WAY longer than a femtosecond, and so on.

No one said anything about zapping out a pulse every picosecond or two for a nanosecond. But it is a nice strawman argument. If you go back in the thread the laser operates at 1 kilohertz.

That's interesting. And here I thought the heat thinks and neutrino radiators were an established part of Wars canon...like Connor mentioned several times.
Oh wait, they are.

We are talking about shield operation exclusively. But lets talk about heat sinks for a second.
The specific heat of Be is 1825 J/(kg.K). Let's say your Star Destroyer masses 1 billion metric tons and is a solid block of Be. Then 1*10^19 J will raise it's temperature by 5479.45 K. Oh, wait according to the ICS the Star Destroyer's reactor outputs that in 2 microseconds. Hence, once you turn on the reactor, your ship goes BOOM. By the way, radiators can't help you. If your radiator tries to radiate 1*10^19 J then 1*10^19 J of work will be done on the radiator. If it tries to do it in a microsecond then it goes BOOM. It still goes boom if you try to do it in a second. According to the ICS, Star Wars does not obey the laws of thermodynamics. If you want the energy output of a red dwarf star then you will get the mass state of a red dwarf star- your ship will be a plasma. Energy is the capacity to do work. If energy is present then work will be done on everything in contact with it. No process is 100% efficient. Waste heat will always be created. Thermodynamics imposes maximum values for how much energy a ship can produce without going BOOM and how much energy you can run through a weapons mount or anything else without it going BOOM. The ICS ignores thermodynamics in the figures it uses. So please don't talk about ICS physics breaking heat sinks (they don't have the mass to hold even an insignificant fraction of your reactor's power) and neutrino (the force carrier of the weak NUCLEAR force that is created in NUCLEAR reactions) radiators (we are going to get rid of heat by the use of the weak NUCLEAR force) in the context of a dispute on physics. As you end up saying that something that ignores physics can be used to justify why something that operates on physics can't work.

[Simon_Jester]

Hint: Easydoesit, I take it you are familiar with the idea of soft science fiction? In which technologies that we cannot design today are nonetheless imagined and placed into the setting? This is a very long-established literary tradition. I've seen a 1945 soft-SF story that predicted Google, for all practical purposes.

The imperial star destroyer's rated performance is based on what it does. Since it doesn't melt into a puddle of liquid every time it fires its own guns, presumably it has a heat sink capable of handling whatever waste heat it produces.

And if you're going to poke fun at lack of heat sinks, can you please explain where on Earth you get a kiloton/second output from a highly inefficient pulsed laser system? Where are your heat sinks for that? For that matter, how does the laser system itself handle it?

[Connor MacLeod]

I find the interesting thing is that he's basically claimed he's proven his argument simply by constructing his little theoretical weapon, and yet he's failed to actually define SW tech to the degree to actually determine whether it works or not. As it stands on the evidence angle, we really don't know one way or another. I certainly can't claim it would NEVER work at all under any circumstances - lack of proof goes both ways - but it's also not something I'm really required to prove either since we have no reason to assume it WOULD work (again lack of proof.) It's certainly possible it would - the torpedo spheres are a possible indicator, as are certain other examples (like coordinated torpedo volleys from the X-wing novels, the plasma torpedoes from the Black Fleet Crisis, etc.) The problem is, however, is in the details - we'd have to work out a bunch of parameters to make such a comparison, and we simply don't have that data to even begin making even the vaguest guesstimates. Possible and probable are not even remotely the same things (and just to cover THAT angle, no I'm not saying we need to know with absolute clarity - but we don't have any indication that this is LIKELY. Only that it MAY be possible. Unless we're going to ignore SW canon and start assuming proton torpedoes and concussion missiles act on ray shields instead of particle shields.)

Another point is that apparently, energy doesn't matter to the shields as much as timing does. Basically you can dump any quantity of energy into the shield and completely bypass it so long as you shoot it at the target fast enough (again POWER ONLY). What if there are certain (minimum) energy thresholds to meet as well? Another big unknown that can impact this little super weapon. That was even factored into Mike's sink analogy I linked to earlier.

OH and even if the shields are bypassed, how about armor? How is THAT going to stand up to attacks? Bear in mind that certain technologies (like tensor fields, as well as particle shielding itself) can augment the structure in certain ways, and even ray shielding can interact with matter (the contact ray shielding that Slave-1 had as per WEG for example.) And that doesn't even count the 'powered' armor defenses that some vehicles have (mentioned for the ATTE and other vehicles in the AOTC ICS - its quite likely starshisp have a similar matter.)

Add to that he's not really defined in any detail how the weapon is constructed or works (which I believe is the thrust of Simon's argument) it becomes really interesting how quick he is to declare victory in this.

[Simon_Jester]

I think he's either very young, very wacky in the head, or possibly trolling. That has the look to me of a pile of random widely scattered ideas copy-pasted together without a strong underlying picture of what's going on. Perhaps he became aware of the heat sink problem on realistic spacecraft designs and decided that was all he needed to know. Sort of like this XKCD...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/two_party_system.png

[easydoesit1]

Hint: Easydoesit, I take it you are familiar with the idea of soft science fiction? In which technologies that we cannot design today are nonetheless imagined and placed into the setting? This is a very long-established literary tradition. I've seen a 1945 soft-SF story that predicted Google, for all practical purposes.

The imperial star destroyer's rated performance is based on what it does. Since it doesn't melt into a puddle of liquid every time it fires its own guns, presumably it has a heat sink capable of handling whatever waste heat it produces.

And if you're going to poke fun at lack of heat sinks, can you please explain where on Earth you get a kiloton/second output from a highly inefficient pulsed laser system? Where are your heat sinks for that? For that matter, how does the laser system itself handle it?

I know the Star Destroyer is soft scifi. I was willing to ignore that it doesn't melt into a puddle of liquid or go BOOM until there was the animated, oh but heat sinks! If you bring out thermodynamics (heat sinks and radiators) then I'll start going into thermodynamics to point out it can't have those same heat sinks that you reference. It seems fair to me but maybe you disagree. On a different note it might explain why you never see Star Destroyers throwing around ICS power levels- they could but their ship would go BOOM. It's kind of a it's a last stand or emergency type of thing.

As for my laser's heat sinks- 1 million metric tons of water-ice. With a 40 million metric ton ship you should be able to afford it. If the ship is nuclear thermal (even if nuke-thermal is a secondary engine like with antimatter main engine), the primary coolant could double as the fuel. So you could carry more. Or you could use used coolant to heat the fuel before it goes to the reactor through the use of a heat exchanger. The problem is not insurmountable for a kiloton/second system on a scifi sized warship. And I didn't even go into radiators including using the ships armor as a radiator.

I find the interesting thing is that he's basically claimed he's proven his argument simply by constructing his little theoretical weapon, and yet he's failed to actually define SW tech to the degree to actually determine whether it works or not. As it stands on the evidence angle, we really don't know one way or another. I certainly can't claim it would NEVER work at all under any circumstances - lack of proof goes both ways - but it's also not something I'm really required to prove either since we have no reason to assume it WOULD work (again lack of proof.) It's certainly possible it would - the torpedo spheres are a possible indicator, as are certain other examples (like coordinated torpedo volleys from the X-wing novels, the plasma torpedoes from the Black Fleet Crisis, etc.) The problem is, however, is in the details - we'd have to work out a bunch of parameters to make such a comparison, and we simply don't have that data to even begin making even the vaguest guesstimates. Possible and probable are not even remotely the same things (and just to cover THAT angle, no I'm not saying we need to know with absolute clarity - but we don't have any indication that this is LIKELY. Only that it MAY be possible. Unless we're going to ignore SW canon and start assuming proton torpedoes and concussion missiles act on ray shields instead of particle shields.)

Another point is that apparently, energy doesn't matter to the shields as much as timing does. Basically you can dump any quantity of energy into the shield and completely bypass it so long as you shoot it at the target fast enough (again POWER ONLY). What if there are certain (minimum) energy thresholds to meet as well? Another big unknown that can impact this little super weapon. That was even factored into Mike's sink analogy I linked to earlier.

OH and even if the shields are bypassed, how about armor? How is THAT going to stand up to attacks? Bear in mind that certain technologies (like tensor fields, as well as particle shielding itself) can augment the structure in certain ways, and even ray shielding can interact with matter (the contact ray shielding that Slave-1 had as per WEG for example.) And that doesn't even count the 'powered' armor defenses that some vehicles have (mentioned for the ATTE and other vehicles in the AOTC ICS - its quite likely starshisp have a similar matter.)

Add to that he's not really defined in any detail how the weapon is constructed or works (which I believe is the thrust of Simon's argument) it becomes really interesting how quick he is to declare victory in this.

Do the torpedo spheres, allow turbolaser bolts to pass through ray shields? The answer is yes. The reason is simple. Electromagnetic radiation would be released from the explosion which would affect the ray shields. The actual missile would be stopped by the particle shield, which would probably cause the detonator to realize it is time to explode. The particulate matter debris would be stopped by the particle shield while the energy released by the ray shield. This is not all that complicated. (However, there is a logical flaw in the separation of ray and particle shields as photons are particles-LOL)

I am only pointing out that energy shields don't make sense. That is the beginning, the middle, and the end pretty much of my argument. Armor is another can of worms bu,t it seems to me that the fact that I pointed out a logical flaw in the reasoning behind the fantasy technology of energy shields disturbs you for some reason. You have repeatedly pulled up examples in canon that shows that it may work. You however, don't want to admit that it will likely work. But tell me, does the fact that torpedoes explode and release rays of energy (photons) effect your stance on it being likely to work?

I think he's either very young, very wacky in the head, or possibly trolling. That has the look to me of a pile of random widely scattered ideas copy-pasted together without a strong underlying picture of what's going on. Perhaps he became aware of the heat sink problem on realistic spacecraft designs and decided that was all he needed to know. Sort of like this XKCD...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/two_party_system.png

Or perhaps he studied engineering in college and knows about heat sinks as a result? Again nice strawman argument. I see that is all that you have.

Edit: Simon since you are trolling, I'm done responding to you.

[Formless]

Why are you guys playing into this idiots game, anyway? All he is talking about is the technical aspects of the matchup, not the strategic level. Everyone else went to relativistic weapons for a reason-- they are strategic weapons. This guy wants to talk about engagements that won't happen, because there won't be a war. There will be a surrender as soon as the HARD civ puts two and two together, and realizes that the GE could have hyperspace missiles (and they do).

But anyway, its clear he has never read Mike's main website, flaws it may have.

On a different note it might explain why you never see Star Destroyers throwing around ICS power levels- they could but their ship would go BOOM.

I mean, fuck me, its like the Death Star blows up a fucking planet, and this guy thinks the ICS is out of line.

[Simon_Jester]

Formless, you're not wrong- and honestly, the only 'playing into this idiot's game' I'm considering here is the observation that his approach to science fiction makes him pointless to talk to. I know as much physics as he does, hopefully more; I find half-literate diatribes about how photons are particles coming from someone who never so much as glanced at quantum electrodynamics to be irritating.

So I say so, and that's about it.

I know the Star Destroyer is soft scifi. I was willing to ignore that it doesn't melt into a puddle of liquid or go BOOM until there was the animated, oh but heat sinks! If you bring out thermodynamics (heat sinks and radiators) then I'll start going into thermodynamics to point out it can't have those same heat sinks that you reference. It seems fair to me but maybe you disagree.

And if I start talking FTL drives, you'll start talking relativity? I find it very tiring to get physics lectures from amateurs. Professionals can be interesting, amateurs not so much.

You're caught out in the open between two good positions here. On the one hand you can kick back and relax and enjoy stuff in science fiction which features technologies we don't know how to build in real life. On the other you can show that you know physics, as opposed to just loudly repeating other people's talking points about OMG UBERHARD technology. Which would at least make you interesting.

Things "don't make sense" to you, blah blah, whatever. Argument from personal incredulity only makes sense for the fool.

Or perhaps he studied engineering in college and knows about heat sinks as a result? Again nice strawman argument. I see that is all that you have.

Edit: Simon since you are trolling, I'm done responding to you.

Your call.

[Connor MacLeod]

Why are you guys playing into this idiots game, anyway? All he is talking about is the technical aspects of the matchup, not the strategic level. Everyone else went to relativistic weapons for a reason-- they are strategic weapons. This guy wants to talk about engagements that won't happen, because there won't be a war.

He's not even talking technical details. He's talking gimmicks with a thin veneer of technical. If this were technical he would have gone into greater detail about the weapon AND how shields work and there'd be relevant quotes with proof. Instead it's purely based on his hypothetical weapons design and his interprtation of how SW shields work and thus 'checkmate'.

Edit: Oh yes, and when you point out the flaws in his argument, he accuses you of dishonesty or trolling.

Besides, I *did* bring up the fact SW ships don't even have to get into range of the hard civ at all - multiple ways they could do that in fact. So my ass was already covered

There will be a surrender as soon as the HARD civ puts two and two together, and realizes that the GE could have hyperspace missiles (and they do).

They don't even need to build a galaxy gun. Robot starfighters with hyperdrives (or you just build big missiles with the hyperdrives inside - either MIRV'ed or single warheads) could do the job just as well, and people can hardly argue that SW doesn't have robots OR hyperdrive equipped fighters now, can they?

[Formless]

Eh, fuck it, there is enough hilarity here I might as well poke holes in his own attempts at "plausibility".

As for my laser's heat sinks- 1 million metric tons of water-ice.

Cause, like, ice is REALLY COLD, right? BEST HEAT SINK EVER!

Or, you could use plenty of other materials that have much higher heat capacities per volume or weight than water. Like sodium salts, for instance. Or lead-bismuth. Or iron. Or murcury. Or silicon. Or basalt. You know, rock. Okay, so those are a bit rarer elements than water, but part of plausibility is showing the work to demonstrate that water is the best choice on multiple considerations.

Also, one million metric tons is ONE MILLION FUCKING METRIC TONS OF ICE. How exactly did you plan on building this Lovecraftian abomination of engineering, again? Space wizard welders-- oh, right, forgot your genre. And this is just the weapon's heat sink. What, are you planning on making it out of the Earth's ice caps? Going to convert Ceres into a starship now? Or Pluto? Manufacturing is not a small issue to gloss over. Its a major limiting factor when designing anything, especially weapons during peace time. Insert Strak Quote about Ultimate Expression of HARD sci-fi "intelligence" here.

And hey, one million tons of water? Go ahead. A spaceship whose heat sink alone weights millions of metric tons is going to have to work against an equal amount of momentum every time you need to maneuver it. Such as any time you take aim to shoot at a Star Destroyer. Good luck hitting anything!

And I didn't even go into radiators including using the ships armor as a radiator.

Now you just need to find a place to put the laser where the heat being radiated from the whole damn ship won't fry the optics.

Do you know what heat radiators are for, dumbfuck? Its not just "we need to get the heat away from the ship". That's as easy as blowing the ship up, assuming you don't care about the ship surviving to get another shot off. Hell, for some weapons that isn't actually a bad plan-- I'm fond of Casaba Howitzers and other bomb pumped laser weapons myself. But for a ship that presumably needs to get multiple shots off, radiators mean "we need the heat away from critical areas and components of the ship". Computers, any living quarters, sensors... point is, these things need protecting. Radiators and heat sinks are for protecting them from the ship's own power plant, armor is for protecting them from external dangers like weapons fire and impacts with debris.

Oh, and one of those components that needs protecting is the radiator itself, hence why Star Wars ships have magicked up a method of radiating heat away as neutrinos. Neutrino radiators can be put as deep into the spacecraft's hull as you like and get full protection from the armor and shields. If you have to radiate heat away as EM radiation, your going to need to put the radiators somewhere near the surface and the armor has to be transparent to whatever wavelength you expect to be radiating at. Which will probably mean using sub-optimal armor materials like glass or transparent aluminum. But if you don't, then the Star Destroyers (or even enemies from your own universe) will simply blow up your radiators and laugh as you either cook yourself to death, or shut down the reactor and surrender.

I am only pointing out that energy shields don't make sense. That is the beginning, the middle, and the end pretty much of my argument.

Star Wars has them anyway. Deal with it.








Here, since you obviously aren't very accustomed to thinking about soft sci-fi tech, here's two possible ways in which energy shields could make sense. Remember that "energy weapons" is a broad term which means "transfer of energy in forms other than kinetic energy". That energy can be transferred by particles other than photons, such as neutral particle beams. Turbolasers are often claimed to be "plasma" weapons by some authors, which if you know the problems with plasma weapons means that they are some sort of particle beam. The particle could be fictional, because this is soft sci-fi. It could even be the same mechanism that creates the force field.

Alternative #1. To protect against such weapons, the shields could simply create a "cloud" of particles or miniature force fields that causes the beam to de-cohere before it reaches the target. Such a strategy could in theory also be used against a laser. This essentially is like a passive form of point defense, but against energy weapons. It would explain why lasers and turbolasers in Star Wars frequently create a flak-burst effect in the movies-- the burst is a result of the beam de-cohering suddenly in space due to interacting with the shields. True, some percent of the energy or shots fired may reach the target, but this is also broadly consistent with the films where bolts hit supposedly shielded ships all the time.

Alternative #2. They could work like the shields in Shlock Mercenary. In that comic, shields are created gravitationally (which is a different form of dumb but for now lets roll with it), and the idea is much like cloaking devices. Bend spacetime around the ship and you can bend the beam around the ship, or in any direction you want. Star Wars could do something similar, but rather than gravity its Magic Force Fields doing the work that can be overcome because of their own, internal heat storage and radiation technologies are limited. This conveniently leads right back to Mike's analogy to filling a sink with water.

So there are ways in which it can make sense... once you accept the existence of force fields that can be projected into space. That's what makes it soft sci-fi. You have to suspend your disbelief.

[PeZook]

Formless, you're not wrong- and honestly, the only 'playing into this idiot's game' I'm considering here is the observation that his approach to science fiction makes him pointless to talk to. I know as much physics as he does, hopefully more; I find half-literate diatribes about how photons are particles coming from someone who never so much as glanced at quantum electrodynamics to be irritating.

Myself, I like how he rants and raves about how the shield would be physically unable to cope with the power of his laser, while conveniently ignoring the fact that his laser would suffer from the exact same issue, IE. waste heat being unable to move fast enough to be safely removed to a heat sink/radiator before destroying critical components of the weapon.

Which (though probably accidentally) would conveniently explain why the torpedo spheres use torpedoes to do their thing.

[Imperial528]

Yeah, I did a quick calculation using an ideal material (heat capacity of hydrogen, melting point of tungsten) the damn thing melts so fast that I doubt a laser would even come out of it, just some scattered photons as the thing crumples. There's no possible way to build such a laser with out current understanding of materials. It wouldn't survive.

[Connor MacLeod]

If you were probably goign to be building these uber-doomweapons it probably would make more sense and go with a 'bomb pumped' sort of weapon (laser or casaba howitzer like setup) as Formless said. The sorts of ludicrously powerful 'hard' civs being talked about have the sorts of mass/energy scale to probably pull that off sufficiently to threaten a Star Destroyer - assuming again STar Wars shields work like he purports they do that is. The best part of that idea is that even if those doomlasers don't work by 'femtosecond' doompulses of doomy laser doom, they could just go for the old brute-force approach by putting a bigger bomb behind it (or just using more of them to hit a single ship with.) We at least know THAT much would work if they put enough resources into it. Hey, it worked in Redemption Ark!

This all works for as long as it takes the Empire to figure out it doesn't have to get into range to threaten the civ at all and either just bombards them with their guns from beyond effective range (remember that gun range for Imperial starships can go from light minutes to AU depending on source and design.) or they just use some sort of hyperdrive-equipped delivery platform for large quantities of boom.

[Vendetta]

I think we may have reached peak fatnerd now.

Either that or it happened ages ago and this is a sign of the doom that is to come to useful discourse.

I mean it's not like whether the SF is hard or soft actually does anything to its ability convey drama or especially thematic elements. For instance, the Downstreamers in Stephen Baxter's Manifold series are a deep future hard-sf civilisation that control the sum energy total of at least one galaxy, possibly others (not just dyson spheres enclosing stars, the stars are all burned out, they're farming black holes to serve their energy needs now). But that's not important to the story. What's important to the story is the theme behind everything the Downstreamers do, seen via the tiny snapshots of how their civilisation changes over millennia, which is the drive and ingenuity to survive an increasingly hostile universe in the face of inevitable entropy. You could cover the same theme with almost no sci-fi elements using, for instance, a culture facing their environment undergoing desertification and having to use creativity and bloody minded determination in the face of dwindling water supplies not energy supplies.

Y'see, there's a sad tendency among especially hard sf fatnerds to conflate how hard the SF is with how good the story is and that's really not the case. The important thing isn't whether the SF is viagra hard but how the SF elements are used to enhance the story and to convey what the story is trying to say.

As an example of where a hard SF element really does enhance the story, the time delays of relativistic non-FTL travel in The Forever War enhance the feeling of alienation every time Mandella returns from a tour of duty by massively exaggerating* the cultural shift that Haldeman experienced on returning from Vietnam. But that rarely happens in hard SF, and the biggest hard SF fatnerds basically don't notice when it happens because concept like story and theme are literally beyond their capacity.


* Exaggeration is one of the greatest storytelling advantages of fantasy and SF. By isolating something and exaggerating it using something that doesn't or can't really exist you can examine that thing in the framework of a story about the exaggeration you're making, like relativity and social change in The Forever War.

[easydoesit1]

Cause, like, ice is REALLY COLD, right? BEST HEAT SINK EVER!

Or, you could use plenty of other materials that have much higher heat capacities per volume or weight than water. Like sodium salts, for instance. Or lead-bismuth. Or iron. Or murcury. Or silicon. Or basalt. You know, rock. Okay, so those are a bit rarer elements than water, but part of plausibility is showing the work to demonstrate that water is the best choice on multiple considerations.

Reasons for water: high specific heat, can be used for propellant, and is highly abundant in space. So if you have to jettison some, you can always find more.

Also, one million metric tons is ONE MILLION FUCKING METRIC TONS OF ICE. How exactly did you plan on building this Lovecraftian abomination of engineering, again? Space wizard welders-- oh, right, forgot your genre. And this is just the weapon's heat sink. What, are you planning on making it out of the Earth's ice caps? Going to convert Ceres into a starship now? Or Pluto? Manufacturing is not a small issue to gloss over. Its a major limiting factor when designing anything, especially weapons during peace time. Insert Strak Quote about Ultimate Expression of HARD sci-fi "intelligence" here.

The question is how powerful a physics abiding STL civilization could become given enough time. AI means you can make a Von Neumann architecture (self replicating completely automated manufacturing complex) in space. So the industrial capacity is there.

And hey, one million tons of water? Go ahead. A spaceship whose heat sink alone weights millions of metric tons is going to have to work against an equal amount of momentum every time you need to maneuver it. Such as any time you take aim to shoot at a Star Destroyer. Good luck hitting anything!

Turret moves. Ship doesn't need to.

Now you just need to find a place to put the laser where the heat being radiated from the whole damn ship won't fry the optics.

Do you know what heat radiators are for, dumbfuck? Its not just "we need to get the heat away from the ship". That's as easy as blowing the ship up, assuming you don't care about the ship surviving to get another shot off. Hell, for some weapons that isn't actually a bad plan-- I'm fond of Casaba Howitzers and other bomb pumped laser weapons myself. But for a ship that presumably needs to get multiple shots off, radiators mean "we need the heat away from critical areas and components of the ship". Computers, any living quarters, sensors... point is, these things need protecting. Radiators and heat sinks are for protecting them from the ship's own power plant, armor is for protecting them from external dangers like weapons fire and impacts with debris.

Oh, and one of those components that needs protecting is the radiator itself, hence why Star Wars ships have magicked up a method of radiating heat away as neutrinos. Neutrino radiators can be put as deep into the spacecraft's hull as you like and get full protection from the armor and shields. If you have to radiate heat away as EM radiation, your going to need to put the radiators somewhere near the surface and the armor has to be transparent to whatever wavelength you expect to be radiating at. Which will probably mean using sub-optimal armor materials like glass or transparent aluminum. But if you don't, then the Star Destroyers (or even enemies from your own universe) will simply blow up your radiators and laugh as you either cook yourself to death, or shut down the reactor and surrender.

The question I responded to was about what would I use for a heat sink. I used more water than was needed and pointed out that I didn't even go into radiators. By the way on a sufficiently large craft, you can run coolant lines through the armor and use it to radiate some heat away. You can also armor radiators with quartz.

Star Wars has them anyway. Deal with it.

I am dealing with it, or didn't you notice.

Here, since you obviously aren't very accustomed to thinking about soft sci-fi tech, here's two possible ways in which energy shields could make sense.

My, my own mind reader who knows so much about me and what I am accustomed to dealing with. Are you going to send me a birthday cake too?

Remember that "energy weapons" is a broad term which means "transfer of energy in forms other than kinetic energy". That energy can be transferred by particles other than photons, such as neutral particle beams. Turbolasers are often claimed to be "plasma" weapons by some authors, which if you know the problems with plasma weapons means that they are some sort of particle beam. The particle could be fictional, because this is soft sci-fi. It could even be the same mechanism that creates the force field.

Alternative #1. To protect against such weapons, the shields could simply create a "cloud" of particles or miniature force fields that causes the beam to de-cohere before it reaches the target. Such a strategy could in theory also be used against a laser. This essentially is like a passive form of point defense, but against energy weapons. It would explain why lasers and turbolasers in Star Wars frequently create a flak-burst effect in the movies-- the burst is a result of the beam de-cohering suddenly in space due to interacting with the shields. True, some percent of the energy or shots fired may reach the target, but this is also broadly consistent with the films where bolts hit supposedly shielded ships all the time.

Alternative #2. They could work like the shields in Shlock Mercenary. In that comic, shields are created gravitationally (which is a different form of dumb but for now lets roll with it), and the idea is much like cloaking devices. Bend spacetime around the ship and you can bend the beam around the ship, or in any direction you want. Star Wars could do something similar, but rather than gravity its Magic Force Fields doing the work that can be overcome because of their own, internal heat storage and radiation technologies are limited. This conveniently leads right back to Mike's analogy to filling a sink with water.

So there are ways in which it can make sense... once you accept the existence of force fields that can be projected into space. That's what makes it soft sci-fi. You have to suspend your disbelief.

I suspended disbelief to accept 1*10^24 J power figures for the shields and that the shields existed. Then I described a way to penetrate said shields based on their heat dissipation rate that they are supposed to have.

What is it about these forums that debaters have to resort to ad hominem attacks and strawman arguments? If you don't agree then we can agree to not agree. It is a very simple solution.

If you were probably goign to be building these uber-doomweapons it probably would make more sense and go with a 'bomb pumped' sort of weapon (laser or casaba howitzer like setup) as Formless said. The sorts of ludicrously powerful 'hard' civs being talked about have the sorts of mass/energy scale to probably pull that off sufficiently to threaten a Star Destroyer - assuming again STar Wars shields work like he purports they do that is. The best part of that idea is that even if those doomlasers don't work by 'femtosecond' doompulses of doomy laser doom, they could just go for the old brute-force approach by putting a bigger bomb behind it (or just using more of them to hit a single ship with.) We at least know THAT much would work if they put enough resources into it. Hey, it worked in Redemption Ark!

I never said that you couldn't take this approach. You could in fact simply have automated mines or combat wasp from Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy scattered about a star system. The only thing with a bomb pumped laser or a casba howitzer is decoherence at long ranges.

Yeah, I did a quick calculation using an ideal material (heat capacity of hydrogen, melting point of tungsten) the damn thing melts so fast that I doubt a laser would even come out of it, just some scattered photons as the thing crumples. There's no possible way to build such a laser with out current understanding of materials. It wouldn't survive.

How big was the laser in your calculations? You do realize that I'm not talking about 5 cm across mirror but a 5 cm across spot size at the target? Meaning that the laser focuses the beam on a point 5 cm across.

[Imperial528]

Actually, I used the entire ship mass of 40 million metric tons you put up a bit ago, and assumed that heat transferred equally to all of it. The ships you said you could mount the lasers on. From my calcs they melted before your net output could even touch the ISD's shield dissipation rate.

[easydoesit1]

Since some people either don't read whole threads or only read what they want, I will quote myself.

Oh, and I don't care about Star Wars fighting a non-specified HARD SCi FI civilization. My original comments that you responded to were about how using energy to create shields was a waste and the fact that shields do not give an advanced civilization an advantage. I also asked the question of why would an advanced civilization even bother building them.

My other comments about a HARD SCI FI civilization that were directed at the op, repeatedly have the word ridiculousness in them. Since you are apparently unable to grasp inference, let me say this in a way even you can understand. There is NO LIMIT to how RIDICULOUS you can make a physics abiding STL civilization based on the laws of physics as we currently understand them. You can convert the entire mass of a galaxy into whatever you want. In fact why stop at a galaxy when you can take over the entire galactic supercluster for absolute RIDICULOUSNESS? The problem is AI. If you have it then absolute RIDICULOUS things become feasible. For instance, a type 3 civilization could build a fleet equivalent to 10 billion solar masses. So okay what do you do against an invasion of 1*10^30 starships? The very question is ridiculous.

In many ways Star Wars, Star Trek, and other scifi doesn't go far enough in the logical extension of the technology they portray. The Empire should be almost infinitely more powerful than it is portrayed in the movies. You don't need space magic (the force) to build a star forge. Why isn't there one in each of at least millions of systems. They have the technology required to build them but they don't do it. Heck Star Trek even has the technology to do it but doesn't. Nevertheless, as the series are displayed you could plausibly create a HARD SCI FI civilization that though limited to STL could still reach such RIDICULOUS proportions that it could win through just being too RIDICULOUS as long as Star Wars or Star Trek keeps operating within the confines of their current behavior.

As a closing point. You are arguing from an in universe perspective. I am arguing from a real world out of universe perspective in which fiction is really fiction. The real world explanation for why Star Wars or Star Trek doesn't have uber shield penetrating lasers is that the writers didn't think about it. That doesn't make Star Wars bad. It just makes it entertaining fiction.

Oh, and for all the mind readers, I am a Star Wars Fan. My mother had all 3 movies on VHS. I grew up watching them several times a year. I am also a Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, Firefly, Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda, Stargate SG:1, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek: Enterprise, Farscape, and Dune fan. As for books, David Weber is my favorite scifi author. I am a science fiction fan period. If the story line is halfway decent I'm satisfied. I am not biased against so called soft scifi. I have watched it my entire life!

Actually, I used the entire ship mass of 40 million metric tons you put up a bit ago, and assumed that heat transferred equally to all of it. The ships you said you could mount the lasers on. From my calcs they melted before your net output could even touch the ISD's shield dissipation rate.

This is what happens when you don't read a thread. I am not now or ever talking about pumping 1*10^24 joules through a laser. My whole point was in attacking the shield on a femtosecond scale. At that scale, the ISD's shield dissipation rate reduces to 1 gigajoule/1 femtosecond. I'm talking about firing 1000 5 gigajoule/ 1 femtosecond pulses at the ISD per second. That is 5 terajoules/second. Assumed a 20% efficiency rate so I need 25 terajoules per second of power output but assume 50% of that is waste heat. So I need a total of 50 terawatts of power every second. That is what the argument is about. Can I do what torpedo spheres do on a smaller timescale and over a smaller area of the shield with less energy than they use but have the same result?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Could you please cite a paper or article for your claim about water being abundant in space? I know there is a whole lot of different materials out their but water IIRC tends to be found in occasional and rare nebulae.

Also, for your little model of ISD's melting upthread, why did you use Berylium as an example material?

[Formless]

Reasons for water: high specific heat, can be used for propellant,

Okay, stop. You don't use your fucking heat sink for your main goddamn weapon as propellant. That's just stupid. Are you trying to get the ship to overheat?

and is highly abundant in space. So if you have to jettison some, you can always find more.

This means jack shit. Abundance in space for anything is so goddamn low that we only say water is highly abundant in relative terms. In other words, its common out in the oort cloud. You aren't going to run off to find comets when you are being shot at by Star Destroyers, retard. That's tactically insane.

Furthermore, you have to use propellant to get propellant. So wasting it in the first place is retarded, because you might not get it back. And once the Star Destroyer captains figure out that water of all things is your achilles heel, they'll just start blowing up any comet you get near, and watch and laugh as the vapor dissipates and blows away in the solar wind.

You just revealed an astounding ignorance of both propulsion science, space science, and tactical considerations all in a mere two sentences. Congratulations. You have perfected the zen of moron.

The question is how powerful a physics abiding STL civilization could become given enough time. AI means you can make a Von Neumann architecture (self replicating completely automated manufacturing complex) in space. So the industrial capacity is there.

This is literally the most idiotic leap in logic regarding Artificial Intelligence wanking I have ever seen in my life. How did you come to this conclusion? Some sort of divination involving semen? God, now i can't even get my own disgusting imagery out of my head, its that stupid.

Von Neuman architecture may just be a pipe dream of people who don't understand how BIG and EMPTY space is. I can't even begin to explain how little matter is there by volume on average. The human mind just can't grasp how empty that is, its literally like taking a fish out of water. A deep sea fish, one of those fish that explodes if it isn't under high pressures.

And you think AI automatically gives you manufacturing capacity. I weep for your future, you dumb, zomboid creature that mimics humanity.

Turret moves. Ship doesn't need to.

At the energies you are working at, any mirrior you put in front of it will just have a hole burnt through it by the big honking fempto-laser. So no, you aren't going to have a turret here, assuming you even have a laser. Methinks you spent a little too much time figuring out how much energy you needed and too little time figuring out whether or not your own ship could handle it.

The question I responded to was about what would I use for a heat sink. I used more water than was needed and pointed out that I didn't even go into radiators. By the way on a sufficiently large craft, you can run coolant lines through the armor and use it to radiate some heat away.

WE don't even know how much water-ice you actually need, because you haven't explained the working mechanisms of your laser to us. Go back and show us your math.

Also, you don't want to waste coolant either, because if that stuff gets thrown away from the ship... bah, fuck it, why am I even bothering to explain this to you? You don't even understand how manufacturing works. Or propulsion works. OR space works.

I am dealing with it, or didn't you notice.

I noticed you ignore every post explaining how Star Wars actually does things, and ignored the ICS despite the fact Mike has had the calculations on his website for over ten fucking years, all based solely on what is seen onscreen at the highest levels of Star Wars canon. I noticed that you consistently mus-represent Torpedo Spheres when anyone can look them up on wookiepedia and see that you are either ignorant or lying about how they function. I noticed that you completely forgot that the planet Alderaan didn't blow itself up in the very first goddamn Star Wars film.

To me, this isn't about Star Wars, because I could just call for you to read the forum policies requiring that you show evidence for claims you make. The only reason I bothered giving alternative explanations for how energy shields could work in the context of Star Wars is that you obviously have no idea how the Soft Sci-Fi genre works, and I hoped the lessen would be illustrative.

What is it about these forums that debaters have to resort to ad hominem attacks and strawman arguments? If you don't agree then we can agree to not agree. It is a very simple solution.

Grow a Thick Skin. People are allowed to insult each other and use profanity on these forums. Do not run to a moderator or dismiss someone's argument just because he's insulting or rude. The best way to respond to a rude person is to show him up by producing a better argument than he can.

Does that answer your question?

As for strawman fallacies, please provide proof that you have been misrepresented, or shove it up your gigantic asshole. That word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

[Formless]

Since some people either don't read whole threads or only read what they want, I will quote myself.

Oh, and I don't care about Star Wars fighting a non-specified HARD SCi FI civilization. My original comments that you responded to were about how using energy to create shields was a waste and the fact that shields do not give an advanced civilization an advantage. I also asked the question of why would an advanced civilization even bother building them.

Then why the hell did you build this elaborate mental model of how you think Star Wars Shielding works, and a frankly insane spacecraft/laser platform specifically to defeat Star Destroyers?

Also, you have your method backwards, hence why it was not a strawman for me to explain alternative models for Star Wars energy shielding. You are trying to fit a preconceived mental model of how you think or want Star Wars technology to work onto the visual evidence present in Star Wars. Everyone else is starting from what the GE/OR actually has according to the movies and secondary Canon, and working from there to figure out the method to their madness. They have energy shields, ergo they must find energy shields to be useful in defending their spacecraft from energy weapons, because that's exactly what we fucking see in the films and novels. If you don't like that, you obviously don't understand Soft sci-fi any better than you understand Hard sci-fi.

My other comments about a HARD SCI FI civilization that were directed at the op, repeatedly have the word ridiculousness in them. Since you are apparently unable to grasp inference, let me say this in a way even you can understand. There is NO LIMIT to how RIDICULOUS you can make a physics abiding STL civilization based on the laws of physics as we currently understand them.

No, because based on this logic its entirely possible for a rocket engine to accelerate beyond the speed of light (no warp drive trickery, just a normal rocket engine), just as long as the civilization has had enough TIME to advance. Based on this logic, with enough TIME such a civilization can make a telescope so big it can spot God's hiding place out beyond the boundries of the third dimension. According to this logic, entropy can be defeated with enough TIME and development.

But it can't. These are all examples of the No Limits fallacy. Civilizations go through periods of stagnation. Laws of physics are constant. The distribution of matter in the universe cannot be changed through sheer determination. Von Neuman architecture cannot be created with happy thoughts even if there is a super-duper compoooter thinking them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

And I know you are going to vomit rage that you said that you aren't violating the laws of physics. Except that you totally have violated materials science with your friken doom laser, and if you have the laws of physics, you have to accept all the other sciences that stem from them.

Using the word ridiculous just concedes that point.

Oh, and for all the mind readers, I am a Star Wars Fan. My mother had all 3 movies on VHS. I grew up watching them several times a year. I am also a Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, Firefly, Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda, Stargate SG:1, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek: Enterprise, Farscape, and Dune fan. As for books, David Weber is my favorite scifi author. I am a science fiction fan period. If the story line is halfway decent I'm satisfied. I am not biased against so called soft scifi. I have watched it my entire life!

Oh, now this is comedy gold. I was debating to myself whether to even bother responding to you any further, but then you decided to try posting your Science Fiction Nerd Credentials, and man, I laughed so hard I vomited all over my keyboard.

You didn't find this webboard by accident. We know that because... you are posting here.

[Imperial528]

This is what happens when you don't read a thread. I am not now or ever talking about pumping 1*10^24 joules through a laser. My whole point was in attacking the shield on a femtosecond scale. At that scale, the ISD's shield dissipation rate reduces to 1 gigajoule/1 femtosecond. I'm talking about firing 1000 5 gigajoule/ 1 femtosecond pulses at the ISD per second. That is 5 terajoules/second. Assumed a 20% efficiency rate so I need 25 terajoules per second of power output but assume 50% of that is waste heat. So I need a total of 50 terawatts of power every second. That is what the argument is about. Can I do what torpedo spheres do on a smaller timescale and over a smaller area of the shield with less energy than they use but have the same result?

Oh, I read the thread. You really could do with making your ideas clearer though. Formatting would be a nice start. So would proper grammar and overall slower pace.

Anyway, using those numbers, your ship fares significantly better (firing continuously it would take 8 minutes to melt the ship, if I read your post correctly). However, this also more clearly illustrates the big problem with your laser. Each pulse is going to be less than a ton of TNT (0.239006 tons, to be precise), and if you're firing 1,000,000 pulses per second*, you won't hit the ISD's shield capacity for about 1.16 days of continuous firing. Which, by the way, melts your ship first.

Now, as you have pointed out, the pulses are shorter than the time required for the heat to get to a sink. However, we do not know if the shield itself is capable of holding the heat or if there are physical sinks, or both. I would wager that the shield can hold some, as it can radiate the heat. If the shield can hold any significant amount of energy by itself, even as low as 1/64th of the total (375 megaton's worth, or 1.569E+18 joules), your plan falls flat.

Even if it can't, and it does penetrate the shield, you still run into the problem of the ship's armor. Namely, you're shining a 5cm spot on a ship that is 1.6km in length and roughly triangular. Before you can burn through anything important, they can probably shoot at you, too, and I guarantee that you won't survive that. I'm having a hard time right now finding quantification on Imperial armor, which is mostly from analysis of AT-ATs on Hoth (at least, that's the page I've been search for). However, the capabilities of materials in SW are far superior to any observed material in real life, so in a brute force match, I'm sure that the ISD would win, even if you can punch 5cm holes in its shields.

In any case, this doesn't deal with the fact that the ISD can destroy you faster than you can destroy it, and it can always run out a few light minutes and saturate your position (and any possible positions) with flak fire and guided missiles and see if you exploded.

*I gather from your post that you'll be firing 1000 pulses at one spot on the shields of the ISD, each pulse having a duration of 1 femtosecond, and you are firing that array of pulses 1000 times per second, as per your earlier statement of the laser's frequency.

[Batman]

Let's assume for the moment that his uber laser of doom really works and that it can really penetrate an ISD's shields. How, exactly, is he going to land a hit? UNlike easydoesit1s 'hard' SciFi civilisation the ISD has FTL sensors and several thousand g's worth of linear acceleration. They see he's about to shoot, they simply go elsewhere.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Wait...wait...FIVE CENTIMETERS?

Is that really it? Or is that just a number you're using Imp? (Note, all this tech stuff is over my head, so I'm just mildly watching this thread)

Because a 5cm spot on a mile-long ship ain't going to do much will it? Unless you literally hit something extremely important, and the ISD doesn't just barely move to where you're LASER O' DOOM (TM) just hits a random spot on the hull, while shooting at said laser.

EDIT: I'm assuming that 5cm, does mean five centimeters, since I can't think of anything else it could mean.