Official "Discuss the latest page" thread

[skythorn]

I quite agree Charles. The interior fittings are just loosely held in place unless you have multiple bulkheads scattered through the ship in the same way that battleships have bulkheads to hold water and air in the area that's damaged. If the front is disposable human living space and serves no military function, I can see the relevance in it being open and of little integrel strength.

But it makes for an awesome picture with the flared damaged elements visible from the outside. A very nice pose and beautiful detail being shown. I know it does not feel like it, we just see the finished picture, but there is some serious effort being gone into this being the picture it is.

Nicely done o' speaker of stories.

[allikat]

personel ? Admiral Novosi, she speaks in typos...
Personnel is the correct spelling..

Just waiting on the Scar crew to inform the Admiral of the jump sigs incoming, which could turn everything around.

[allikat]

Whoah, who's the new player? And who's a naughty player for using rail guns?
Seriously, wow.

[Knowles2]

Look like the admiral at least got a chance to now save some of the fleet now.


That look like the mysterious Sourishi Collective vessel we have seen.

I just found our one and only image of the Souri collective.
http://www.davidcsimon.com/crimsondark/index.php?view=comic&strip_id=178

Yep that a Souri collective behemoth. At least it look like one of there vessels to me. It seem they are even more confident of there vessels capabilities than the UTC sending in just one vessel to confront the entire Dirani and UTC fleet, not surprising considering they been probing UTC and Dirani space unopposed so far. I doubt the admiral fleet is in any position to fight right now through.

Are rail guns been ban from use by some treaty between the Dirani, UTC and Cirins.

[skythorn]

Wow - I had a similar feeling to that I had watching Londo and the Centari Mass Drivers in Bab5.

very impressive stuff to get rail gun momentum happening with mass. Does Mass beats Missiles beats Lasers?

[cbhacking]

In theory, railguns (or something like them) are near-ideal weapons for this sort of combat; with nothing to slow the projectiles down, you can put e=0.5*m*v^2 energy into accelerating them, and they'll hith the enemy with exactly that much energy at whatever range you please. If you are closing with the target, add the ship's velocity too (you'll lose a tiny bit of ship velocity, but velocity is lost as a function of momentum=m*v, and with very high v and very low m you can get an extremely large emount of e for a surprisingly low cost in momentum). It's hard to imagine any practical armor against such weapons, too; given that you can effectively put a couple seconds of reactor output into such a projectile (via capacitors, if you have enough of them), warheads are completley superfluous.

Of course, the "at whatever range" is the problem. Even boosting a projectile to ludicrous speed, a shot can miss and go flying off forever until it hits something. That's the downside of effectively infinite-ranged weapons. David has stated a few times that they're forbidden in the world of CD by some sort of universal agreement. Looks like somebody doesn't agree, though. The beam/plasma weapons traditionally used in CD - even the lances - have a maximum effective range (although I'm not sure how steep the fall-off is; if an enemy is at 95% of max effective range, do they take far less damage than one at 5% of max range?)

[NefariousDrO]

I'll never forget seeing a window from one of the space shuttles (I have no idea which one, it was many years ago) in a museum that had been nearly shattered by a tiny fleck of paint while in orbit. It looked like someone had shot a 6-inch thick bullet proof window with an insanely-powerful rifle. I had a hard time imagining how a little fleck of paint smaller than my pinkie fingernail could have done that much damage. The integrity of the cabin was very nearly lost by that impact. It had a huge effect on how I imagined combat in space. I started to think about what would happen if a tiny slug of depleted uranium or tungsten had been traveling at that speed... Yikes.

The downside of them is that the damage is somewhat contained in a way. If it simply punches through and moves on you only compromise a relatively small area of the ship, while an energy weapon can vaporize a larger area, and EMP-style weapons can disable electronics. I've seen speculative work done from back in the days of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program that was trying to design railgun projectiles that would come apart on or slightly before impact in order to spread the damage out over a wider area.

The Souri certainly don't mess around, but also clearly don't care about the long-term consequences of their actions because this will leave a large number of very high-speed projectiles racing around in that system for a very long time!

[allikat]

The damage of a beam weapon at range, would depend on 2 factors:
1- The design and focusing accuracy of the weapon (A weapon perfectly focused on the target will retain more damage at range)
2- The environment - How much space dust/debris is between the weapon and target to absorb or diffuse the energy.

In a vacuum, a ballistic weapon will not lose any significant energy until it hits something, or gets captured by a gravity well.
However, a mass driver projectile of such high energy will likely almost entirely vaporize on impact, leaving only fragments, a cloud of metallic vapour, and debris, none of which will have any more energy or velocity than debris from a regular missile strike.

It's not the pellets that hit, it's the ones that miss, flying around the system at massive speed. Obviously the Souri have a great setup for computing exact trajectories to be so accurate. Their calculations of the gravity well in which the battle is being fought have allowed such amazing accuracy.

Oh, nice spotting on the Souri ident, a well spotted clue from waaay back in the comic. Nice one

::face turns blue::

Friday, the 19th of October, 2007
We might see the Souri again someday, but don't hold your breath.

4 years, that would be a heck of a time to hold your breath...

[Dhraakellian]

Enter Trouble, stage right.

(Fortunately, it's trouble for the antagonists.)

I just found our one and only image of the Souri collective.
http://www.davidcsimon.com/crimsondark/index.php?view=comic&strip_id=178

Tanj frell. Upstaged by almost 24 hours. I knew I should've checked the forums before doing an archive search so late on the day of the update.

On the bright side, I was right about who the Alliance's mysterious friends were. It's nice to see someone knock the UTC off their high horse, although I imagine they and the Darani will likely try to propagandize a heavy negative spin on the use of projectile weapons.

Fortunately, they hit, and appear to have caused some 'splodey damage (either electrical or just very hot, by the color?) in the process. I think I buy allikat's explanation of vaporized projectiles no longer being a threat.

Rule 1 of banned-weapon war crimes: Don't Miss?

edit: I see five shots in the second salvo but only four hits from the first. Where's that fifth projectile?

[charles]

Certainly makes you wonder if these were the allies Novosi was talking about.

I should have figured this one. With the UTC involved and their technology THAT far ahead, the entire Cirin Alliance would never have stood a chance even if they did win this battle on their own by some mirracle. But bring in the collective and even if thats their only ship, its a game changer.

In a close-up, head-on fight, the Souri Collective could probably still obliterate most of this UTC and Darani fleet on it's own if size is an indicator, but it has the bonus of powerful projectile weapons which means it can sit well out of range from the energy weapons and obliterate them before they ever come near. Makes you wonder about their motives, but if they still remember bad things about the Earth Alliance, maybe their decision to become involved is due to the fact that the UTC (Which replaced the Earth Alliance) has taken offensive action and they were willing to sit back while the EA/UTC wasn't involved. Heck, maybe thats what they've been doing in Darani territory. Looking for UTC involvement *shrug*. I guess we're either going to find out soon, or they will remain enigmatic and disappear after obliterating the UTC ships... great opportunity to salvage some good technology if the UTC ships aren't completely obliterated.

Again, another option is that while the Darani haven't been in contact with the collective for over 200 years and not had any responses from their hails to the ship/s they've sighted, that doesn't mean the Cirin Alliance hasn't been in contact.