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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 9471507" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Just throwing this out there for anyone to use in any work or at any table. Little sci-fantasy thing I was considering this morning during an insomnia fit.Space is really, really, inordinately, impossibly, big. Firing weapons across massive distances, even using predictive algorithms, is pretty stupid and dangerous... just not to your target. Consider that ships capable of traveling at light speed, being 1 second away from a collision course is approximately 186,000 miles distant. This gives us an absolutely insane engagement range where, nonetheless, it's entirely possible to collide with your opponent before either of you is fully aware of the impact since the resulting explosion at that speed will scatter the molecules of your brain before a synapse can fire.Firstly you have target acquisition to consider. Even with computer AI assistance at that distance a ship over 1km in length is smaller than the finest grain of sand. And it's in a space larger than the entire Earth. And you're trying to find it with a magnifying glass. But let's say you acquire your target. What weapons will you use?A Ballistic weapon (cannon, slug, asteroid launcher) is going to travel at a -very- small portion of light speed. And from that light second away might take hours or even days to arrive at it's target. Even at the -fastest- reasonable speed before the weapon turns to plasma you're looking at several minutes before it gets there! Way more than enough time to easily avoid the attack.Meanwhile a C-Fractional weapon (Lasers, Plasma, Ions, Phasers, Etc) is going to cover that light second fairly quickly. Not in -one- second (except for Lasers) but there's not a -ton- of time to dodge the incoming attack. 1.01 to 1.4 seconds or so, most likely, is still a pretty acceptable window to dodge a punch, though, especially with computer assistance.Now... you could fly much, much, closer to make your attack. In fact with Ballistics you'd need to be within a few hundred or thousand feet, at most, to avoid your target having time to get out of the way. MAYBE a kilometer, tops, with hypersonic weaponry. Similarly, your C-Fractional weapons would be equally effective at that range... but.Then we have to consider the many, many, forces outside of a starship that are constantly trying to kill everyone on board. Not just Radiation (though that's a huuuuuuuge part of it), but also things like micrometeors. And we should also specify that while a micrometeor the size of a pebble can punch a hole through a ship due to the insane speeds it can be traveling at, there's also fist sized objects you have to deal with, too. And again: Grain of Sand in the vastness of space.So you're going to have strong hulls reinforced against radiation. What's more, they're going to be reinforced against heat and energy discharges. Particularly if they're designed to travel inside of 1au from a system's star.There's tons of cosmic radiation out beyond the Kuiper belt that gets massively worse beyond the Oort cloud, it's true, with presumably incredibly deletrious effects to human existence, it's true. But consider that our star is neither that big nor that impressive. To visit and explore planets closer to the host star of a system would require a shielding system capable of withstanding absolutely MASSIVE plasma bursts and radiation fields that would melt your crew, otherwise.Truly, the extremes of space-travel are not for the faint hearted.So any ship capable of dealing with both the extremes of inner-orbit stellar travel and interstellar travel would have to have incredible shielding!... which would render most ballistics absolutely useless. After all, what is a kinetic projectile but a meteor to a starship? Whatever defenses the ship has against such objects while traveling at light speed will surely deflect and destroy any ballistic.And the radiation shielding, likely energy based, would need to be capable of dispersing solar flares and massive quantities of plasmatic energy and material while not melting, so your laser isn't going to do a damned thing to it.So... now we have giant, essentially invulnerable, interstellar starships whose only actual sincere threat to each other is light-speed, or even near-light, impact. Certainly plausible that some ships would engage in kamikaze runs... after all, even if someone seeks to avoid collision you can course-correct to try and ensure it.So how the hell do you do warfare between starships of this sheer magnitude and scale? Boarding actions.You send a piloted object large enough to reach the hull and with enough concentrated firepower at point blank range in a super-precise and sustained manner (literally clinging to the hull and burning through over time) to get through. And then you're on board where all the systems are accessible, and the crew are arrayed to fight back.And we're back to swashbuckling, me hearties!Laser pistols and laser swords are great and fine, but even a ballistic weapon in a corridor is deadly. A perfectly normal cutlass can hew human flesh and may be of greater use in a tightly contained fight once you're within reach to grapple and stab.[MEDIA=youtube]6u0vqD202Tw[/MEDIA]Enjoy!</blockquote>

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