Official "Discuss the latest page" thread

[Knowles2]

Well I was right the bridgers were not Cirins tech. and it obsolete technology, one got to ask how the collective seem to have jump so far ahead of the rest of humanity technologically, even ahead of UTC and Earth. but I do not think we will find out before the end of this chapter which is a shame.

I wonder if we will learn what the Souri ultimate plan is, we can presume it more than just aiding the Cirins.

Now me being evil, I would love it, if this was a plan by the UTC to expose the Souri involvement in the war and capture one of there Behemoth. An a few UTC battle ships jump out right behind the Behemouth.

I could see them making a strange demand in return for there help , perhaps requesting that Whisper be transferred to there ship and them taking off with out any explanation being the last couple of pages of this chapter, with the Scrab with the Admiral permission and help taking off after them, after she force the crew to hand over Whisper.

I did not think the Cirins were that out match to be defeated in less than a month through, one got to think that there economy and nation is not as strong as they like to make out. An the Darani must be superior in every area.

[allikat]

Would someone pass me a trolley jack or anti-grav lifter? I need to pick my jaw up from the floor...

[SoulWager]

A railgun projectile need not be magnetic at all, only conductive. The induced magnetic field is what actually propels the projectile, and the bigger problem is finding something durable to use as your rails. From the comment about entry and exit points, these are NOT high velocity railguns, which means the projectiles have high mass and relatively low velocity. Probably something like an ingot of tungsten impacting at 1~20 km/s.

That said, CD is not hard scifi, with rule of cool and plot demands outweighing scientific accuracy. MST3K mantra applies in full.

[NefariousDrO]

There's an interesting video of a railgun under development by a company with the very cool name of "General Atomics"
http://www.military.com/video/guns/nava ... 431955001/

What's impressive is watching their projectile punch through a steel armor plate and keep on going as if nothing had happened.

[NefariousDrO]

What's even more scary is they have a video of a next-generation cruise missile that is capable of acquiring its own targets. The missile is locked onto a radar profile and then fired, it drops down to skim over the ground and stay below the target's own radar defenses, then pops up as approaches the original target's distance, re-aquires the target based on its own radar readings and strikes, with only 1.5 seconds to acquire that target. Human pilots are being taken out of the equation, folks, and I think we all recognize the dangers in that development! This makes the Souri Collective's ignoring of a basic safety measure alot more meaningful to me. The Cirin, the Daranir, and the UTC all plan to live in the places they may be fighting over, so they don't want to leave lots of dangerous ordinance flying around at scary speeds. The Souri don't seem to be bound by that restriction, so whatever agenda they may have, taking up residence in this system seems pretty unlikely.

[Dhraakellian]

What's the Souri Collective's interest in this?

The hypothesis I've been harboring since the identity confirmation in the previous strip is that the Cirin Alliance is/will be seeking to join the Collective in much the same way that the Republic of Daranir has been seeking to join the Coalition.

The Cirin, the Daranir, and the UTC all plan to live in the places they may be fighting over, so they don't want to leave lots of dangerous ordinance flying around at scary speeds. The Souri don't seem to be bound by that restriction, so whatever agenda they may have, taking up residence in this system seems pretty unlikely.

This might make my hypothesis a little less likely.

From the comment about entry and exit points, these are NOT high velocity railguns, which means the projectiles have high mass and relatively low velocity. Probably something like an ingot of tungsten impacting at 1~20 km/s.

But this makes me hopeful that the projectiles had room for out-of-range self destruct charges

On the other hand, with Rule of Cool in effect, perhaps the Souri targeting systems are just. that. good.

[SoulWager]

From the comment about entry and exit points, these are NOT high velocity railguns, which means the projectiles have high mass and relatively low velocity. Probably something like an ingot of tungsten impacting at 1~20 km/s.

But this makes me hopeful that the projectiles had room for out-of-range self destruct charges

self destruct a railgun round? that would make it thousands of times more dangerous, because you'd have to track all the pieces of shrapnel instead of one big lump of metal.

Mistargeted railguns or not, the aftermath of a space battle is a whole mess of orbits that aren't safe for ANYONE. Depending on how densely the orbits are populated, might even spark some Kessler Syndrome.

[Mercy Machine]

I have to ask... Is this is a bilingual joke, and/or a stealth shout-out? A huge ship from the Souri Collective? Souri? Souris is the French word for mouse or mice! And the mice were the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

From the comment about entry and exit points, these are NOT high velocity railguns, which means the projectiles have high mass and relatively low velocity. Probably something like an ingot of tungsten impacting at 1~20 km/s.

Famously, an object impacting at 3 km/sec delivers kinetic energy roughly equal to its mass in TNT. If you're going to be shot with a projectile of those velocities, you'd better hope and pray that it doesn't hit anything solid. Like, for example, armour or your ship's nuclear reactor... The problem of "what happens to the projectiles that miss" would be fairly trivial compared with that of filling space will a bazillion orbital-velocity bits of scrap from any space-battle.

[allikat]

Rail gun projectile shrapnel would likely be below the maximum size that normal ship armour is designed to cope with. Remembering that every ship has to cope with dust at anything up to relativistic velocities, as well as space debris of all kinds.
Noting that a ship may be moving at significant velocities, any impact with fast moving space debris could well be disastrous without armour. So even civilian ships will have enough plating on the hull to ward off all but the largest debris, and hope to have scanners sufficient to detect anything that is big enough to be dangerous.
Another point: Projectiles designed to fragment are massively more efficient at transferring their kinetic energy to the target, a fine thing in space combat. A small projectile at near light speed may well punch through a corridor's worth of rooms and out the other side, but if it shatters on impact, it could very well take out several decks.

[Knowles2]

Nice explosions.
So the Daranir and the UTC are in full retreat. So either we are coming to the end of the chapter or the Daranir/ UTC have a back up plan. Sadly I think we are coming to the end of the chapter.

I know exactly why they do not do ship to ship communications, in case there someone like Whisper on the other end of that communications, and we know how she likes to play with new computer systems. If I was a ship commander I would not be to happy with ship to ship communications.