I'm just about done. This is going to be a brain dump about ship design. The special effects guys have it almost right. A space battle cruiser will need to preset as small a cross-section to the enemy as possible. If you compare the Prometheus to the Daedalus you see that when looking head on, the Daedalus presents a smaller cross section. That conning tower on the Prometheus would get shot off in just about any major space battle. It's gone in the Daedalus. And that front section looks like a chunk of armor. But I think they could do better.
Imagine a Star Destroyer from Star Wars. If you take that basic shape, make it smooth, and paint it black, that would probably be the ideal shape of a space battle cruiser. If shields go down, then the shape of the ship's armor would deflect quite a bit. The shape would also deflect radar and radar like sensors, giving it a form of stealth, enhanced by painting it in special purpose black stealth paint. And it would present a minimal cross-section in head to head combat.
You could make it smaller by getting rid of the fighters. Have two classes of battleships, a carrier and a destroyer. The destroyer should be easier/cheaper make. Think like a modern naval destroyer versus an aircraft carrier. Both types of ships would have cloak capability, and advanced weapons (energy cannons, rail guns, nuclear missiles, etc), but the destroyer would be relatively small and nimble. Send a handful destroyers with a carrier to some planet and you've got a force to be reckoned with. Imagine the destroyers swarming around a g'ould mothership punching real hard, and taking the occasional hit, while the carrier stays back a bit and launches fighters to take on the death gliders.
On to the fighters. The next generation of Tau'ri fighters should really deviate from the whole Death Glider aesthetic. Fighters should also present as little as possible cross-section. In fact, mini Star Destroyers would probably not be too far off the mark. Since we have anti-gravity (needed to launch the battle cruisers, cause rockets sure can't), and naquada generators, we put those in the fighters, and we can pretty much ignore aerodynamics. Although, the fighters will probably look more like some sort of lifting body if you want some concession to aerodynamics. I've read a lifting body described as a cone, cut in half. Add some winglets on the back, and it even looks mean. Since this is Star Gate, they should be small enough to fit through a gate. Wraith darts are fighters designed properly. Long and pointy, not really aerodynamic, and fits through a stargate. Tau'ri fighters wouldn't need the beaming tech, so, put in more weapons. Maybe some kind of missile to go with the energy weapons.
Well, maybe someone making a new sci-fi series will think along these lines in their ship design. Maybe, it's kind of annoying that George Lucas's team stumbled upon an almost ideal shape for space battle cruisers. Now no-else can use it.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
I Watch too much TV part II: or Why the Tau'ri kick Galactic Ass
Last time I got a little into the biology/disposition of the Ancient's versus modern humans. I thought the relationship between the Ancients and Humans we akin to the relationship between bonbos and chimpanzees. With both the Ancients and humans with a disposition somewhere in between our close ape cousins. With the Ancients more towards the bonobos and humans more towards chimpanzees in our respective dispositions. This makes the Ancients a little more laid back and co-operative with each other, and humans a little more belligerent and aggressive.
These are only small differences in personality, but it could lead to wildly different frames of mind when approaching problems. I think the Ancients had a relatively peaceful preindustrial growth. This led to a very swift development of their civilization. Where we have six thousand years of preindustrial history, what if the Ancients only have 3 thousand, or two thousand? Since they have little in the way of interpersonal conflicts, thanks to their bonobo like personalities, all problems then might become technological in nature.
The Ancients might not have developed much in the way of military theory or practice. We humans, constantly bickering and fighting have developed and entire field of knowledge around fighting and warfare. We have War Colleges. The Ancients might only have had rudimentary ideas about fighting. When they ran across the Wraith, they probably thought there must be some sort of technological solution to the Wraith problem. The Ancients just didn't think in tactics, only technology. This might explain why they came back to earth after colonizing the Pegasus galaxy. They found us humans, and saw that we thought differently from them, enough so that they probably tried to use us as a technical solution to the Wraith problem. That is, they interbred with some modern humans to introduce tactical thinking into themselves.
The Pegasus galaxy is full of Ancient tech that is impressive, but tactically half-assed. The Ancients, for thousands, upon thousands of years never ran across a problem that couldn't be solved with some new tech, or re-application of existing tech, even social issues could be resolved with new tech. Then they met the Wraith, and they were stuck thinking tech, but the Wraith are corrupted Ancients, and have all the Ancient's knowledge and know how. And the Wraith were and are just as smart as the Ancients and can come up with their own new stuff. The Ancients for the first time were presented with something that new tech couldn't fix. The Ancients were at war and couldn't think like generals. This is why the Wraith run the Pegasus galaxy even though the Ancients did, indeed, have better stuff. This is why I think there may have been a small human/ancient breeding program. And that program is why not all the ancient descendants in the Pegasus galaxy have "the ancient gene", even though they should ostensibly be Ancients.
Now we get to humans being ass kickers and name takers. We humans do think tactically. For most of our history we've been at each other's throats. Since the g'ould blend with their hosts (some more than others, see the tok'ra), our temperaments are a small part of the reason they are so obnoxiously evil. As the song goes, "every single one of us, the devil inside". Combined with the g'oulds' use of those sarcophaguses which upsets brain chemistry and makes them maniacs, it's like a perfect storm of badness. When the StarGate program started we only had our "primitive" weapons and our tactics. Yet we found that our weapons are effective against g'ould weapons. Our tactics appear to be superior to jaffa tactics.
On the other hand, the jaffa we trained to instill fear in defenseless populations, and to die in war with other jaffa. The g'ould reproduce prodigiously. The System Lords are known to eat the larval g'ould. But there can only be so many System Lords, and every jaffa carries a potential usurper. So g'ould tactics are for fear and population control. They need slaves to make and mine stuff, they need jaffa to control the slaves, but too many jaffa is a problem, so...off to war with a rival g'ould. If you win you get more territory. If you lose, you've gotten rid of excess jaffa and larvae. It's harsh, cruel, merciless, and very g'ould.
The jaffa use those ridiculous staff weapons. They can't be aimed accurately. When you fire them, the discharge gives away your position. Jaffa apparently don't have snipers. Their "armor" appears to be solely for intimidation rather than protection, judging by how easily a staff weapon or Terran assault rifle kills a jaffa. They also use those death gliders. Worthless in air-to-air combat; they appear to be wholly sub-sonic, and are used primarily as ground support. They fire larger versions of staff weapons at ground targets. The main advantage to g'ould weapons is that they don't need to be reloaded.
Human tactics are very different. Our modern weapons have been honed by centuries of conflict. Our tactics have changed as our technology evolved. By the time the tau'ri first walked through the stargate, our tactics were better than those used by the jaffa and their g'ould masters. This is mainly due to our goals being very different. We fight to win, not burn off excess population. Human weapons are on par with g'ould weapons because our weapons are designed to kill, not terrorize. G'ould are all flash with just enough substance to keep people guessing. If the g'ould ever started thinking like a tau'ri weapons designer, we'd be in trouble.
Now the tau'ri have the technology to make interstellar warships. And so far, our tactics are helping to make up for our inferior technology. Although, the humans appear to be making significant progress. The new Daedalus class ships don't have that large target, er, I mean, conning tower toward the rear. The Daedalus class has gone up against g'ould motherships and survived. With upgrades from the Asgard, they've taken on the Wraith and come back alive. If the tau'ri can start mass producing them then, they'd be a force to be reckoned with. The tau'ri can start thinking about tactics using fleets of the vessels.
Humans have done some serious damage to the political power structure in the Milky Way, just by being smart, belligerent, and aggressive. Not by being technologically advanced, but just thinking about how to fight properly. Now the tau'ri are starting to get the technology. The galaxy isn't going to be the same. Unfortunately, in a few centuries, the people of the tau'ri will stop being satisfied with their home planet and start conquering the other worlds in the galaxy. If they don't turn on each other first. May the ascended beings protect those that get in the way of a galactic scale tau'ri war.
These are only small differences in personality, but it could lead to wildly different frames of mind when approaching problems. I think the Ancients had a relatively peaceful preindustrial growth. This led to a very swift development of their civilization. Where we have six thousand years of preindustrial history, what if the Ancients only have 3 thousand, or two thousand? Since they have little in the way of interpersonal conflicts, thanks to their bonobo like personalities, all problems then might become technological in nature.
The Ancients might not have developed much in the way of military theory or practice. We humans, constantly bickering and fighting have developed and entire field of knowledge around fighting and warfare. We have War Colleges. The Ancients might only have had rudimentary ideas about fighting. When they ran across the Wraith, they probably thought there must be some sort of technological solution to the Wraith problem. The Ancients just didn't think in tactics, only technology. This might explain why they came back to earth after colonizing the Pegasus galaxy. They found us humans, and saw that we thought differently from them, enough so that they probably tried to use us as a technical solution to the Wraith problem. That is, they interbred with some modern humans to introduce tactical thinking into themselves.
The Pegasus galaxy is full of Ancient tech that is impressive, but tactically half-assed. The Ancients, for thousands, upon thousands of years never ran across a problem that couldn't be solved with some new tech, or re-application of existing tech, even social issues could be resolved with new tech. Then they met the Wraith, and they were stuck thinking tech, but the Wraith are corrupted Ancients, and have all the Ancient's knowledge and know how. And the Wraith were and are just as smart as the Ancients and can come up with their own new stuff. The Ancients for the first time were presented with something that new tech couldn't fix. The Ancients were at war and couldn't think like generals. This is why the Wraith run the Pegasus galaxy even though the Ancients did, indeed, have better stuff. This is why I think there may have been a small human/ancient breeding program. And that program is why not all the ancient descendants in the Pegasus galaxy have "the ancient gene", even though they should ostensibly be Ancients.
Now we get to humans being ass kickers and name takers. We humans do think tactically. For most of our history we've been at each other's throats. Since the g'ould blend with their hosts (some more than others, see the tok'ra), our temperaments are a small part of the reason they are so obnoxiously evil. As the song goes, "every single one of us, the devil inside". Combined with the g'oulds' use of those sarcophaguses which upsets brain chemistry and makes them maniacs, it's like a perfect storm of badness. When the StarGate program started we only had our "primitive" weapons and our tactics. Yet we found that our weapons are effective against g'ould weapons. Our tactics appear to be superior to jaffa tactics.
On the other hand, the jaffa we trained to instill fear in defenseless populations, and to die in war with other jaffa. The g'ould reproduce prodigiously. The System Lords are known to eat the larval g'ould. But there can only be so many System Lords, and every jaffa carries a potential usurper. So g'ould tactics are for fear and population control. They need slaves to make and mine stuff, they need jaffa to control the slaves, but too many jaffa is a problem, so...off to war with a rival g'ould. If you win you get more territory. If you lose, you've gotten rid of excess jaffa and larvae. It's harsh, cruel, merciless, and very g'ould.
The jaffa use those ridiculous staff weapons. They can't be aimed accurately. When you fire them, the discharge gives away your position. Jaffa apparently don't have snipers. Their "armor" appears to be solely for intimidation rather than protection, judging by how easily a staff weapon or Terran assault rifle kills a jaffa. They also use those death gliders. Worthless in air-to-air combat; they appear to be wholly sub-sonic, and are used primarily as ground support. They fire larger versions of staff weapons at ground targets. The main advantage to g'ould weapons is that they don't need to be reloaded.
Human tactics are very different. Our modern weapons have been honed by centuries of conflict. Our tactics have changed as our technology evolved. By the time the tau'ri first walked through the stargate, our tactics were better than those used by the jaffa and their g'ould masters. This is mainly due to our goals being very different. We fight to win, not burn off excess population. Human weapons are on par with g'ould weapons because our weapons are designed to kill, not terrorize. G'ould are all flash with just enough substance to keep people guessing. If the g'ould ever started thinking like a tau'ri weapons designer, we'd be in trouble.
Now the tau'ri have the technology to make interstellar warships. And so far, our tactics are helping to make up for our inferior technology. Although, the humans appear to be making significant progress. The new Daedalus class ships don't have that large target, er, I mean, conning tower toward the rear. The Daedalus class has gone up against g'ould motherships and survived. With upgrades from the Asgard, they've taken on the Wraith and come back alive. If the tau'ri can start mass producing them then, they'd be a force to be reckoned with. The tau'ri can start thinking about tactics using fleets of the vessels.
Humans have done some serious damage to the political power structure in the Milky Way, just by being smart, belligerent, and aggressive. Not by being technologically advanced, but just thinking about how to fight properly. Now the tau'ri are starting to get the technology. The galaxy isn't going to be the same. Unfortunately, in a few centuries, the people of the tau'ri will stop being satisfied with their home planet and start conquering the other worlds in the galaxy. If they don't turn on each other first. May the ascended beings protect those that get in the way of a galactic scale tau'ri war.
I watch way too much TV part I: or Farscape SG1 takes up too much of my life.
I watch way too much TV
Like, for instance, I think tau'ri tech is almost up to the same level needed to make a startgate. And stargates don't need as much tech as we would think. Let me try to explain this. In show lore, the ancients built the stargates. On the show, I think I see evidence of three technology levels for the ancients. I call them low, medium, and high (creative, eh?). I'll start at the beginning and move through the different levels of tech.
Imagine if you will, the Ancients are an older hominid species from earth. I think they have a disposition more akin to current bonobos, while we have a disposition more akin to chimpanzees. Bonobos are noted for thier peaceful social structure, with conflicts often resolved using sex. Chimpanzees are noted for their aggressive behavior and personal conflicts resulting in fighting. Bonobos apparently don't go to war, like chimpanzees have been observed to do. Modern humans seem to behave like a mix of bonobo and chimp, but I think more toward the chimp side. The Ancients, I would imagine also behave like a mix of bonobo and chimp, but more toward the bonobo side. This makes the Ancients more lovers than fighters. It also helps explain how they were able to populate, not just one galaxy, but at least three (in the show, the Ancients were crawling all over the Milky Way, the Pegasus Galaxy and whatever galaxy the Ori are from). They were constantly having sex to resolve personal conflicts. And with multiple galaxies of growing room, and resources, there was no need for birth control or self control really.
Anyway, the point being they evolved on earth. Being so similar to us humans, they probably developed a high tech society relatively swiftly. No going to war on a constant basis would allow them to develop tech even more quickly. What with not having to worry about their civilization falling apart because of invading forces. What's taken us six millennia to achieve, they might have achieved in two. They went from mud huts, to writing and cities, to agriculture, to complex machines and advanced metal working, to the industrial revolution very, very fast.
This brings me to the Ancient level of tech known as "low". They figured out the basics of hyperspace and probably sent relatively slow ships to nearby stars. They also figured out how to make the ring transporter system. Other things of note, their computer interaction consisted of pushing stone cubes to various levels into a panel. Then they figured out how to make a wormhole. Apparently the wormholes have some property that only allows energy to move through. Not a problem they have ring transporters, that transform matter to energy and back again, just squirt the energy from a specialized ring transporter through a wormhole and blammo, near instant transport from one side of the galaxy to another. It should be noted, that these very early stargates were developed when their tech was just slightly higher than ours.
I think the earliest DHD's built by the Ancients had that goofy as hell stone pushing interface. But that's ok, there were only a few worlds to go to anyway. They were probably sending unmanned probes with these simple gates via slow hyperspace. The kind of hyperspace described by T'ealc in the first season, where it takes years to travel between the stars.
Now we get to some evidence. An Ancient fell in love with Sam, and de-ascended, and built a star gate in Sam's basement, with parts he ordered on e-bay. So our technology is almost on par with Ancient Low tech. We just don't know the physics yet to come up with a theory to build one yet, but we're probably close, since we're able to make some sense of the stargates, and are able to build our own DHD. The scientists in StarGate command probably DO have the physics and math to build a star gate, but don't because it would be pointless.
So after the Ancients have sent slow probes and primitive gates to a few worlds, they run across deposits of Naquada. They are probably able to synthesize a few atoms at a time here on earth, but it takes horrendous amounts of energy. They just mine the stuff on a couple of their colony worlds, and are suddenly swimming in high grade energy. Now they can build high speed hyper drives, and explore the galaxy on manned ships. Now they start thinking about MASS producing stargates. By this time they've got those (still quite goofy) control crystals. So they design a new DHD, something smaller, and sleeker, and a new stargate. They start roaming the galaxy with manned and unmanned vessels and drop stargates and DHDs everywhere. These are for future explorers and colonists to use. This is the era of the the Ancient's Medium tech. Mass produced stargates, crystals instead of stones on their computers, fast hyper drives. The G'ould seem to be straddling low and medium at the beginning of the series, and are apparently firmly in the medium level when Anubis is defeated.
This medium level of tech is what the Ancients used to build Atlantis and colonize the Pegasus galaxy. But it being a new galaxy they redesigned the stargates and DHD's with new tech, like zero point energy modules. The Ancients and the Wraith use some late medium tech, but it's not their high level of tech. The Ancients didn't get into their high level stuff until around the time they came back from the Pegasus galaxy. And right before they ascended.
The Ancients high tech level is noted with almost living machines, direct mind-computer interfaces, and, ultrafast hyper drives. The Asgard have hyper drives that allow them to traverse intergalactic distances in minutes. The Ancients made the replicators which are arguably alive, and their repositories of knowledge inject knowledge directly into your brain. The Asgard use similar brain tech to move between computer storage and clones. But after acquiring all that knowledge the ancients still succumbed to a rampant plague of some sort. I wonder if it was an STD and the Ancient's rampant sexual promiscuity might be responsible for their demise. But probably not. It was probably some kind of anti-wraith (maybe) weapon, or they were doing research into ascension that backfired and released the plague that decimated them.
Apparently after reaching the high level of tech, a species either ascends or does something horribly stupid to itself and it destroys itself. It happened to the Ancients. And it happened to the Asgard. They released a plague that would kill them if they let it. But they couldn't ascend because they weren't biological anymore. They were more like consciences stored in high-bio-tech robots. Their civilization was stagnant, dead. When they realized this they decided to end their existence and give their knowledge to the tau'ri, probably in the hopes that we wouldn't repeat their same fundamental mistake.
Those are the three levels of tech used in the StarGate universe. Tau'ri are at a low, low level, the Gould are in a medium low, the wraith are at kind of a high medium, and the Asgard were at a low high level.
Next Time I'll get into why the Ancients suck at warfare, or, why we are able to kick butt on a galactic scale.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
It's all part of my Sci-Fi fantasy
I just had a horibly wonderful dream. What if the EM drive is real? And what if Robert Bussard can build his fusion reactor? Why, we'd have at least our solar system opened up to us, and we'd be able to send probes to the nearby stars in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable amount of money.
However, that EM drive is really iffy. Some might say flakey. An impossible fraud. Still, he has equations to explain its operation and there's enough on the site that I think someone would be able to replicate his device and results. It supposedly converts microwave energy directly into thrust/momentum somehow. Anybody with money and knowhow should be able to make one. I don't have any money, but I think I could go to Home Depot or Lowes and get the parts to make one. Basically it's just a sealed copper tube hooked up to a magnetron.
I have much more confidence in the fusion reactor that Dr Bussard describes. He uses electrostatic fields to confine and squish a plasma to fuse hydrogren. Most research today is focusing on using magnetic fields to confine a plasma, but that doesn't work too well. Dr Bussard took a concept call a 'fusor' which uses an electrified grid to create a 'well' of electrostatic potential which traps ions, and then basically got rid of the grid. These fusors are incredibly simple devices. High school students have been known to build these types of fusion reactors. And they are sold comercially as neutron sources. But because the metal grid stops the electrons needed to create the well potential they suck up more power than they create.
Bussard and his team managed to get rid of the grid by capturing the electrons in a magnetic field. This works fairly well because electrons weigh practically nothing. Then the electrons create the potential well, which attracts the ions, and then the ions bump into each other, occasionally getting married and spewing off some child energy which this reactor can by its very desgin directly tap into and convert to electricty. High voltage DC. Very high voltage DC...fusors typically run in the tens of thousands of volts. All Dr. Bussard needs is $200 million to build and test a full size reactor.
Imagine if someone builds both that fusion reactor and working high perormance EM drive. We could take the power straight from the fusion generator and pump it into EM drive and get insane acceleration and top speeds. Cheap access to space. Manned missions to Jupiter in a week. A month to Saturn. No explody rockets. Just us humans, crawling all over the solar system like a bad case of crabs.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
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