Here’s a snippet:
[quote]Let’s say you have a nuclear salt water rocket propelled warship with a mass ratio of 5, which will give it a delta V of 8,421 km/s, and you want to bomb New York. If you expend all your propellant in a single burn in the direction of Earth and then launch a 1 ton missile into New York City it will impact with the energy equal to an 8.48 megaton bomb. Consider that to be able to saturate the PD of enemy warships your ship will probably carry several hundred such missiles. In other words, forget about New York, you can singlehandedly devastate the entire United States. And this is peanuts compared to what you can do if you really want to make a splash: crash your ship into the planet along with your missiles. If your ship weighs 10,000 tons it will impact with a force of 84.8 gigatons.
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O_O
I pretty much managed to predict most of the stuff in there, nice to see that confirmed. What I seem to have underestimated is the result of the impact of kinetic missiles, so it’s time to resuscitate this thread!
A missile which after using up all its fuel has a mass of only 1kg which collides with an enemy craft with a speed difference of 20km/sec has the kinetic energy of ~48kilotons of TNT, equal to around two and a half Fat Man nukes. There’s probably not a single material in the world that can stand against such an impact, but that doesn’t necessarily imply a one-hit-kill as the essay assumes. What’s important is the amount of energy that’s actually lost (e.g. converted to heat) in the impact. A kinetic projectile hitting a solar panel isn’t going to cause a nuclear explosion. It’s most likely going to disintegrate the solar panel and possibly severely damage whatever part of the ship that it was attached to, but it’s far from a one-hit-kill. We simply can’t assume that all the kinetic energy of the projectile is converted to heat. We can however assume that the projectile will probably either vaporize or simply break up into millions of fragments no matter how slightly it touches anything at that speed. It would seem as if the important number here is how much speed the projectile loses by penetrating the target. It would actually make perfect sense to design the missile to essentially be round. A spherical missile would require less materials for its volume (for fuel), while reducing the penetration effect compared to a long and narrow missile (maximizing kinetic energy to heat conversion on impact).
A very interesting way of handling damage in the game would be to give each component of the ship a health value and a heat value. Once heat is above a certain threshold, health starts going down. Some components (fuel tanks, missile storages, reactors, etc) may even instantly explode if they become too hot, so cooling them is a priority. Rail guns, gauss cannons, lasers, reactors and engines all heat up their respective components. Heat in turn slowly spreads to nearby components, while components facing space radiates heat away from the ship. A laser hitting an enemy ship would not inherently do any damage. It would simply heat up whatever ship component it hits, so heat shielding and cooling would be an important aspect of the game. However, missiles can also be made to damage using the heat system. An impact from a projectile in essence just heats up whatever it hits, so why not just simply add a (large) amount of heat based on the speed lost by the projectile when passing through said component? The area-of-effect explosion of the impact will then essentially be handled by the heat spread system, pretty much detonating anything that can detonate in the ship. Both nuclear explosions and explosions caused by ship components detonating would work the same way; just dump a shitload of heat in said component. HYPE!
Any further ideas?
