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Old 12-01-2009, 04:24 AM
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MajorPo MajorPo is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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Deep space combat would be extremely unlikely given how big space is and how small ships are. The likelyhood of two ships coming even remotely close to each other is pretty small. Add to that the speeds and the blinking nature of stutterwarp and the odds of ever seeing another ship on your sensors would be very fractionally above zero.

In the gravity well I think that lasers would have a few distinct problems as Chalkline has clearly described. I remember that Traveller used to also have a defensive system called a sandcaster which threw out clouds of ablative and reflective dust which further reduced the effect of lasers.

I have read about another kind of laser called a shared quantum description beam. Basically the beam is made of entangled photons. Each photon is in a state of quantum entanglement with many other photons which gives it a kind of mass. The beam moves at slightly less than light speed but would hit with greater energy delivered over shorter periods of time. Sounds like just the thing for those pesky moving targets.

I also like the idea of MIRV style missiles. The many warheads can deploy to cover a broad arc of possible travel for the target. Remember they can continually accelerate towards their target so could reach some extreme speeds making it very hard to shoot them down quicky enough.

Wikipedia talks about a missile developed in the 70s, "A second shorter-range missile called Sprint with very high acceleration was added to handle warheads that evaded longer-ranged Spartan. Sprint was a very fast missile (some sources claimed it accelerated to 8,000 mph (13 000 km/h) within 4 seconds of flight—an average acceleration of 100 g) and had a smaller W66 enhanced radiation warhead in the 1-3 kiloton range for in-atmosphere interceptions."

Imagine what the 2300s could develop, plus the benefits of flying in a vacuum...
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