Explaining Kinetic Weapons in Space Combat
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
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Spacedock delves into the details and practicalities of kinetic weapons in space warfare.
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Look into nebulous: fleet command, really fun strategy game!
Accidentally had the vid on 0.5x because of spiffing brit, your intro sounds epic at 0.5x speed.
I'm slightly disappointed that you bring up Mass Effect and not use that one dialog conversation in Mass Effect 2 on how Sir Isaac Newton is the most dangerous son of a bitch in space.
Great video, but
1)why didn't you mention particle accelerators? They're also kinetic weapons and the ones that really can achieve percentage of "c" claims unlike magnetic accelerators.
2)I feel like the impact of guidance should be explored further or separately. People fail to understand why something like a laser is a medium range weapon that is effective by about a light, well, let's say, minute while slow moving in comparison to speed of light missiles are still long range. Because missiles can guide themselves for centuries or longer as long as they have propulsion and energy for guidance system. And if setting has FTL and shields, those can be mounted on local equivalent of antiship cruise missiles.
I really do love these kinds of videos - anything talking about realistic space combat that looks just as cool as the fake stuff we have been watching for years. I need a hit of that good Expanse stuff ASAP :)
So thanks for the video. I wish we had a game.
"The most obvious example is Mass Effect's mass effect... which affects mass."
Genius.
Very effectively.
Sir issac newton is the deadliest sonofabitch in space! we do NOT eyeball it!
@@Yora21 massively effective
Deadliest sonofabitch in space!
Wouldn't that technially be effecting weight? Since you can't physically add mass to an object.
Technically there are lower tech kinetics than chemical kinetics. Ballistas, catapults, trebuchets, bows, the humble sling, and the even humbler human arm are all technically kinetic weapons
And because there's no air resistance whatever you throw doesn't lose momentum.
So imagine the chaos if someone started to throw rocks at a starship.
@@shinyagumon7015 I worry about people throwing rocks
A space trebuchet is the ultimate destroyer of castle-class space stations!
Those are just mechanical as opposed to chemical kinetic weapons.
Another type he hasn't mentioned is gravity based weapons for hitting planetside targets. Nowthat I think about it that's especially curious since they saw usage in the Expanse in the bombardment of Earth.
Atl-atl For the Win! 👍
those glowing balls fired from Alliance Dreadnoughts are also Disruptor torpedoes, specifically designed as a "Screw your Kinetic Barriers, this is gonna hurt you no matter what." weapon.. So long as it hits, as it employs super-massive projectiles with incredibly heavy mass from mass effect fields, and they detonate with violently shifting mass effect fields, tearing the impact region apart.
Yep, the codex is clear how these torpedoes actually INCREASE the mass of the torpedoes to such a high degree they can punch through any kinetic barrier, but this also severely restricts maneuvering speed, making them a prime target for GARDIAN lasers and point defense fighters, so you have to fire huge volleys of them to have a chance at any getting through, or launch them at very close "knifefight" ranges...unfortunately at that range you're also a target for those lasers and fighters so it's only done by frigates or smaller craft that can maneuver effectively. Love the attention to detail in the ME universe and the consistent (mostly) depiction of the universe's tech within it's own rules...yeah they've got magical element zero to do most things, but it's not fantasy by any means.
And the example sued in the video is actualy Javelin tandem torpedo (apparently named after infantry ATGM of the same name, that uses a tandem warhead). Altho the cinemantics in the finale of ME1 did take if a bit fast and loose (no guardian lasers, despite being within range) sometimes torpedoes appear from strange places and Normandy having a guns, despite SR1 canonicaly being equipped only with guardan battery and a javelin torpedo launcher.
@@citamcicak Per the ME wiki: "Like all frigates, the Normandy is equipped with GARDIAN point defense lasers, kinetic barriers, and a spinal mass accelerator cannon. It may also be equipped with advanced Javelin dual disruptor torpedoes."
Sounds almost like an early version of the 40K Dark Age of Technology’s black hole gun, used by the Speranza in the “Mars trilogy” against an Eldar ship.
@@FreemanicParacusia Wasn't there something like a black hole gun in ME2, except man-portable?
Another issue with kinetics, as the Gunnery Sergeant from Mass Effect 2 explained, is that if the rounds miss, they'll keep going until they hit something, possibly something the person that fired them doesn't want them to hit.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space :P
Aye. While I think the Sergeant was overstating things a little (because he’s delivering a dressing-down to trigger-happy youngsters who need to learn to wait for their firing solutions), if you’re firing kinetic weapons in the vicinity of a planet, particularly if you’re not aiming directly away from the planet, some of those misses can easily head towards the planet and have a good chance of doing a lot of damage. Unlike missiles, these weapons might not be able to be scuttled after firing (depends on if they’re solid projectiles or explosive shells), and unlike energy weapons, their trajectories might not be easily predictable.
…which adds a certain horror to the big space battle in Mass Effect 3, taking place right over Reaper-occupied Earth. There’s a whole lot of metal up in that sky, and there’s a good chance that a lot of it isn’t going to stay up there…
As he said, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space
@@Wraithfighter That's probably an "Endor victory" -- win just enough to celebrate before going extinct.
@@Wraithfighter Mass Effect's guns are very high-velocity and low-calibre, there's at least a chance that most of the ordnance will burn up in re-entry. It's something that I consider to be an advantage of macron guns for harder sci-fi applications.
Getting rid of heat in space is only hard if you have to reject it at room temperature. If your gun is happy operating at 1000C, it'll cool almost as fast in space as it would cool on the earth. (T^4 scaling is very powerful) So most weapons would be made from high temperature "super alloys" to skip the need for radiators.
So energy loss due to radiation scales with temperature to the power of 4?
@@michaelguth4007 Yes, sir! It scales to a power of 4. But make sure you use "absolute" temperature units, like Kelvin or Rankine. Celsius and Fahrenheit will give incorrect answers. The equation to find the energy radiated by a surface is called the "Stefan-Boltzmann Law".
That's great if the gun was just floating by itself in space. But we tend to hook them up to moving platforms alongside volatile materials and fragile humans that don't handle fractions of 1000C very well.
Commonly known as radiative cooling in things like rocket engines, good enough for nozzle extensions or ones that don't need too much cooling. And it's the simplest
@@24680kong Thanks!
Also, the way you talked about heat dispersion made it sound like that's somehow uniquely a kinetic problem. Arguably, direct-energy weapons would have EVEN MORE waste heat to worry about
would there be a way to use waste heat as a weapon itself?
@@cernstormrunner7263, not unless you're planning on ramming the enemy. Radiating heat out into space is incredibly inefficient
As a mechwarrior series player, I learned this the hard way
@@TheAchilles26 yea but you can boil some propelan to take the heat
Yes but this video wasn't about those. Don't worry, laserstars will get talked about in due time!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
As usual, The Expanse kicking ass in regards to technological accuracy.
Heh heh, thermodynamics go reeeeeeeeeeeeeee, point is the Epstein drive breaks thermodynamics.
@@terrelldurocher3330 There are so many things that should not be possible, but still happen somewhere in space ... who knows :)
@@terrelldurocher3330 fake news
The Expanse is king and I have orgasm everytime I read/watch it.
@@terrelldurocher3330 That is the main thing where the setting breaks laws of physics and it is addressed and between the lines acknowledged. While it is handwavium its also the kind that is the building blocks of that setting. Realistic delta-v is very very limiting so it is the thing that allows for the entirety of solar system to be used and ships that are not mostly made of reaction mass.
I’ll be honest, I always thought the effects on the back of the PDCs in the expanse was the chemical propellant of the round being fired, and not it’s own rocket system; kinda like a recoilless rifle here on earth, just a bit more optimized.
That would be a massively simpler and more efficient solution. Especially since the rear exhaust of a recoiless rifle can be a rocket nozzle. Look at Rarefaction wave cannons, it's basically how to get higher velocity out of a recoiless rifle
That makes a lot more sense. There's a real life recoilless autocanon - the Rheinmetall RMK30.
It has three revolving chambers between the barrel and the exhaust cone. One chamber fires while another loads the next round, and the other ejects the previous round.
If they have a case less round that burns from the middle out. You avoid having those high speed casing going everywhere, which could be a massive hazard to later ships, as well as all round natural cancel out their recoil.
@@SpottedHares Many jet fighter guns feed spent cases back into the magazine, so there aren't any empty cases ejected outside the vehicle.
@@IsaacKuo But the Expanse is also set in the 'near' future where humans have technology that allows them to colonise the Solar System.
Caseless ammo is conceptually a reality in 2022, the US military were seriously looking at a caseless solution as part of their latest Next Gen Rifle project. Even the G11 prototype worked somewhat reliably back in the 90s.
I'm sure it's not too much of a stretch that humanity would make it mainstream in 300 years time. It's likely the next big leap in conventional ballistic firearms technology we will make in the next 20 years.
One thing I've never seen in the realm of cooling is just dumping the heat into your ammo. A 100kg ferrous slug can absorb something like 55Mj of heat energy before it goes liquid, and even more before it turns into a gas. So you could sink the heat into a coolant bath that happens to be where the ready ammo is stored, and then lob that near molten blob at the target. It takes heat from your ship and moves it into (and possibly through) the enemy ship. Then move the next round into the coolant bath reducing the temperature of the coolant as the ammo is moved into firing position. If you really really need to dump heat, you can let a few rounds sublimate into gas between you and the enemy ship. Nothing makes detection easy like trying to scan through a blob metal vapor between you and the target.
Yeah, trading heat is an amazingly effective way to kill an enemy ship. Pump enough and systems start to fail, joints and seals begin to melt, crew boil, and the enemy ship is forced to redirect resources to dumping their own heat somewhere. Trouble is, you would need either super conducting rounds that can transfer heat quickly and get fired fast enough you don't reintroduce a lot on your side, and hope they stick inside the enemy ship long enough to transfer said heat to them. Iron is relatively slow to heat and relatively slow to cool, but can hold an absolute TON of heat if you can get it to stick to the enemy that is a large heat load to introduce.
I have always loved the idea of weaponizing heat sinks, liquefying your ablative radiators to create a cloud of white hot metal vapour sounds so metal.
@@littlekong7685 Reinforce steel bands incase within high density ceramic casing. Ceramics have been used to protect from heat and to hold electric charge acids for close to a hundred years.
Over the years tests I read up on, ..
a.) High density steel disks/electromagnets to store electric charge incase within ceramic shells. Problem is thick copper hookup cables will start to melt at a given point.
Our current magnetic shielding can contain for brief moments of temperatures of 15,000 degree F.
Few years ago I seen a video of a magnetic thermal pulse cannon kicked off heat at 17,000 F, destroying the test chamber close to the size of a 50gal drum. The test was from spacecraft engine thrust to light fuel off behind the craft. Hotter the vapor gasses the quicker the engine can travel, doesn't help it that the engine exhaust melts down or fragments.
b.) Ceramic casings hold a mix or iron and tungsten to hold waste heat for star ship cloaking, and to reheat compress liquid methane to power steam generators.
We have a few moons of Jupiter that are frozen methane.
c.) Heavy equipment steel ball bearings can be the size of 1 and a half inches(4cm) across and weight it at 150lbs/73kilograms.
In short a 2in(5cm) 200lb sphere of hyper density thermite holds the same total particle weight of weapon grade protium, with a smaller mass and a h3ll of a lot more density.
Main reason thermite is not listed as an expl0ovize is because it holds no carbon to set off the 3,000 F degrees + oxygen burning within the casing.
Not saying it is nuclear unless it is compressed impl0ded. But that is a lot of mass waiting to return to normal gravity vapor volume.
Also thermite reactors for space is a lot easier to find the materials and quicker to process than asteroid mining uranium.
d.) Missile/oversize rocket computer controlled guided bullet. Magnetic casings for the mac cannon to inter react with, ceramic casing hold thermite charge amp up with current and then heat sink for deployment. After spending a few weeks reading up on Star Wars wiki, then reading other RPG computer weapons, Then reading Cold War weapons. In Star Wars, an ion/EMP missiles and a proton concussion missile are the same thing. It is just a suite case size Swan device fusion warhead with an electric booster to charge the liquid/ metalic compressed hydrogen gas. Other than the Fluff they write in Star Wars about not having ship damage from a hull hit on a ship or organic life. An ion/EMP missiles is still a proton missile. The decompression and vaporization of the torpedo/ missile fragments will damage everything around detonation point.
Another fun point, when things are Dropped, 3/4th of the force rises from the surface of strike zone cause that is how the vapor gasses expand. Star Wars missiles do 8d10x2dmg. But .. if missile goes off inside of the structure/ship surrounded by walls, floor, and ceiling ? Shouldn't the missile do three to four times the damage ?
Hey, it is a War Game, hench it is called Star Wars for a reason, push for the most tactical dmg.
2.) Been in more than a few sci-fi rpg where once we drop a Star Wars destroyer shields, instead of a killing blow, we just light off a few thermite charges to cover their sensor equipment and view ports with the equative of metal spray paint.
I didn't want to be the one to explain to Darth Vader on how the sensor domes were stolen off the bridge command section of his flag ship.
Thermokinetic ammunition :D
So I guess this can work for plasma based weapons fired by railguns ?
Send a blob of ionised gas through the rails, and the waste heat on the rails can further heat the plasma.
That blob of metal vapour would also make a dandy anti-LASER aerosol...the LASER beam would waste a lot of it's energy burning through the cloud...
Would even give some protection from REALLY fast railgun round or missiles (if it's moving fast enough, a slug hitting the metal mist would react like it just hit solid steel and the metal particles might detonate a missile's warhead)
That scene from Mass Effect 1 was most likely a pair of torpedos. They were fired on converging trajectories. Which is a key feature of the Javelin ship-to-ship Disruptor torpedo, which is designed to collide with each other just before impact. Multiplying the energy released. The use of these weapons would make sense in this situation as at the range they were fired from would be too close for the Cruiser to line up it's cannons. As for why they look like energy balls, it's for the same reason that slugs look like energy bolts. The game's age meant that the animation team didn't add a visual model of it's projectiles. So all you see is a glow
And yes. That was an Alliance Berlin-class Cruiser. Not a Dreadnought. ME1 actually didn't have a Dreadnought model
BTW, I also like how the ambiance is the soundtrack from Virmire in ME1
Glad to see I'm not the only one that spent to much time in ME codex
Spending too much time in ME3 Codex right now!!
Iirc one of the devs confirmed that that scene was supposed to have kinetics being used but the rendering of the scene got outsourced to a company that didn't know that and just used missiles instead.
While I was aware that there was a difference between coil and rail guns, I did not know the details. This has helped me understand why halo UNSC ships have both and differentiate between them
The U.S. Navy has videos on UA-cam of their experimental railgun. Check them out.
Same. It's also funny how a lot of sci-fi buffs don't know either.
From what I understand, coil guns pull projectiles forward while rail guns propel them forward.
Also, rail gun projectiles maintain contact with the rails while coil gun projectiles just float in the middle of the coil without touching.
@@oompalumpus699 additionally, coilguns require a ferromagnetic projectile, such as steel, whereas a railgun projectile only has to be conductive. this means you can fire liquids and plasmas out of a railgun (which was a real-world experimental weapons system, look up MARAUDER)
6:10 Magnetic saturation means that there is a limit to the amount of magnetic force can be applied to a material.
Then how do they levitate the frog?
@@Mike5Brown Organic material like living cells is very weakly diamagnetic, so a very strong external field (~16 T) can induce enough force to counteract gravity.
@@RamdomView So Magneto can technically move almost anything... great. 😳
Look up the Large Haydron collider to understand what they need in order to keep their magnets working.
It is the reason why ordinary motors, generators and transformers can use soft ferromagnetic iron cores to increase their efficiency but hypervelocity launchers, including railguns and coilguns, cannot. Instead, they work as "air cored" systems, and require much higher driving currents. This means they then exhibit much lower efficiencies, from energy wasted in resistive heating effect.
Presented for consideration: the Reaper main gun from Mass Effect.
It looked like a laser, but it was actually molten metal, accelerated to something like 1/4 light speed (I remember seeing the number, but can't find it offhand).
They term it a "magnetohydrodynamic" weapon.
It also serves a double purpose, the weapon itself is a cooling system for the ship. Excess heat is dumped into the projectile itself just prior to firing.
That would be a entertaining video to do content on! Reapers sure know how to not waste anything! From lifeforms to excess heat 😂
Reaper beams and the related Thanix cannons are a bit weird, sort of like a macro scale particle beam weapon. It's a relativistic jet of liquefied iron-uranium that functions more like a water jet cutter than a gun. One of the weirder kinetic weapon ideas.
@@icyknightmare4592 not really, its just a rapid fire molten machine gun when you really break it down. Admittedly with an insanely high muzzle velocity.
@@icyknightmare4592 think of it like fighting a tank by firing lava out of a fire hose.
There is concept called Helical Railgun, which combine coil guns and railguns. I also remember an idea of a round designed with a core that upon impact triggered a fusion reaction.
A nuke.
So, a nuke (H-bomb) launched at several times the speed of sound? No way that could go wrong.
@@BlackEpyon Yeah, imagine getting even a fizzle in your gunbarrel. Or a misalignment resulting in a non-critical but unfortunate smear of weapons-grade plutonium down the guts of your gun...
I'm not sure what a design built to ensure a boom instead of a fizzle would look like, either. Presumably the outer casing or outer layers of the penetrator would have to be a seriously efficient neutron reflector...
IRL humanity _has_ deployed low-yield nuclear-armed terminal phase anti-ballistic missiles, designed to accelerate at over 100 _g_ to Mach 10 in a couple seconds. And the neutron bombs used those were of course thermonuclear, with all the fiddly-ness of thermonuclear weapons design. But that's a far cry from the acceleration of a useful railgun or even a traditional large-bore naval gun, unless strictly being used as a low-power launch tube to give a missile a runnimg start.
@@ReptilianLepton Given the amount of energy this kind of weapon uses, a misalignment would be catastrophic no matter what kind of ordinance you're using.
They actually did have a 16-inch nuclear shell that was made to be fired from the main guns of an Iowa class battleship, but it was never used.
You could use the “gun” style of nuclear weapon, like used in Little Boy, but using the momentum of the projectile on impact to trigger fission (I know it’s not exactly what you were talking about). Then there are the metal state hydrogen weapons from Alistair Reynolds books. Doesn’t trigger fission, but causes massive explosions as the hydrogen violently expands into a gas.
the expanse is probably the greatest sci fi show ever made
I'd argue its my favourite sci-fi period. The entire thing. Books, show, all of it together
Keep meaning to sit down and watch it haven’t had the chance to yet
@@fucky889 if you haven't, dive into the books! They really compliment each other as media.
nah
"Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space!"
Badass Gunnery Sergeant in ME2
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire a husk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.
Recruit: Sir, yes sir!"
@@simplygreen5832 I love this scene because in Stellaris you can have a random event of your science ship suffering a grazing shot from a mass driver originating from another galaxy.
I cringed a bit at the ship from expanse(never seen the show other than clips like this) trying to tow another firing its gun blindly into space in a clip in this video. I was thinking "Dont those idiots know it will hit something eventually?"
@@filanfyretracker Extremely unrealistic for humans to not consider hypothetical consequences to hypothetical others on, hypothetically, astronomical time scales. ;)
@@filanfyretracker the shot from the railgun would be no more dangerous than any other piece of space debris, infact since it was launched away from the planet it has a much lower chance of being in a high traffic area
Omg I never new The Expanse had those tiny rockets on all their PDC's. That's an amazing little detail.
Expanse is one of the shows that need three or four rewatches before one can say he noticed all the small little details - like that ship passing another drive plume gets armor heated to red or that certain plot important torpedoes glow different colour and blips out. A lot of these details are blink and you miss it.
Not the only one...watched it multiple times now and never noticed that.
i thought the rounds were all rocket-propelled to be coil-less? like their small arms are rocket-propelled armor piercing rounds to keep the small arms from pushing you around in zero-g
@@onthefence928 rocket propelled projectiles wouldnt make sense unless the rocket activates after it leaves the barrel cus i think rocket motors in the barrel would warp and crack the barrel unless its too thick to be practical as a gun
@@Cdre_Satori I loved the Nauvoo melting its army of drones as it departed, what an awesome visual.
The Heavy Mass Cannon in Sidonia always feels so satisfyingly stupid big even if not super effective against their specific enemies.
Something I always found strange about Stargate SG-1, is that the Asgard claim that the idea of kinetic energy weapons just never occurred to them.WHAT! HOW!
Did they just never see an asteroid hit a planet, and be like "WOW look how Powerful! We should use something like that against the replicators."
scratch that, have they never thrown a rock
Well, I think the Statement is outright wrong, even if the asgard telking it believe in it.
The solution is in the super high technology Level they achiev3d for thousends of years.
They lost the capability to think in low tech terms.
One example. I am from a small City, with no public transportation. Some years ago a friend of mine, who grow up in that big City I am living now, had an appointment in another part of the City and told me she cant get where as public Transport was fown that day and calling a Taxi failed as they was just all busy.
I told her, its just 1.2km, how about walking?
You see the point? Her thinking was limitrd by the frame of her life experience.
I think the asgard with their over technologized culture just forgot the existance of simple solution as they are outside of their thinking frame. Since thousends of years.
Now Thor say Agard never put exploding shells in a Barrel to fire pieces of matter or something like this......
But what I need to highly respect is that he did not throw the Ideas of that low tech earthlings away, but accepted that they can think in a way he can not.
Its always ridiculous. Like, couldnt Thor just ask Hammond for a crate of P90 or something?
@@eight-cloudspurple5871 They did ask Sam
I interpreted the statement as meaning it had never occurred to the Asard to propel a projectile with what we know as gunpowder. The speaker never indicated that it had not occurred to them to use some other kind of chemical explosive or another projectile propulsion method.
In hypervelocity(km/s range) collision, thick slab of metal armor behaves like they're liquid, rippling and spalling heavily.
IRL hypervelocity protection against small debris is called whipple shield, which is multiple thin aluminium sheets with space between them. As the material near impact site have enough energy transferred to them to rip electrons right out of the atom, they are vaporized into plasma. Ideally, as the debris hits the first layer, vaporizing itself along with small part of the shield, the resulting plasma is spread across larger area and fails to penetrate the second layer. This is obviously not going to help with freight train sized monstrosity hurled from a spinal gun, or traditional m/s speed projectiles. Depending on technology level, this may make chemical gun drones viable.
Overpenetration was problem in WW2 naval and it will be problem in space warfare since if your projectile exits the back of your target, it means it has kinetic(and chemical if it's naval AP shell, which had HE fillings anyways to tear into the good stuff) energy that is not transferred to the target. You want your shell to penetrate once, expend all energy and stay in there. Good historical example would be Battle off Samar, where the virtually armorless destroyers, escorts and escort carriers from US side had been mistakenly identified as larger classes and had AP shells shot at them from an entire battleship taskforce. One DD may have had direct hit from *Yamato* and kept going, carriers had hits but only one was sunk(not counting the first Kamikaze victim after disengagement), and sinkings happened largely after the Japanese switched to HE. Not to say you can shrug off a hole blown through the entire structure, but will do less damage over limited area than it should have.
Yeah, penetration is good, but in space those holes are relative. You might poke a hole and remove an unoccupied crew section of bunks (Who cares), or you can stop a shell inside the superstructure and blow out an entire bulkhead and breach seals in an entire gun section. Even in modern warships there is a lot of empty space wrapped around systems and structure.
And as another poster has said, heat can be added into the equation. The longer that red hot ball of plasma/liquid metal/white hot slug sits inside the enemy hull, the more heat it can transfer, and the more damage that heat can do to the ship as a whole, almost regardless of size.
Another interesting armour concept is essentially fabric net or jelly armour. It flexes and wobbles and gives, absorbing the energy slowly over a (relatively) large space, and remains undamaged once the projectile energy has been absorbed and the object is either stopped, or deflected. Disadvantage here is space used, but this is relative as solid armour would have to be thicker than jelly armour. Wipple shields are effective, but ablative, you need to replace those cells eventually as you run the risk of projectiles finding those gaps and bypassing the first few layers and retaining enough energy to do damage to the hull.
Very cool thing about whipple shields: Your ship will look like hell after a battle. Would look great on screen.
Overpenetrating will not be a problem in space because it will cause the target ship to lose atmosphere or if the ship was depressurised before combat so it'll require repairs before it can be pressurised again.
@@combomaster666 Penetration means the projectile hit the target, spent energy punching through the armor, and transferred all its remaining kinetic energy into whatever is inside, elevating it to higher energy state(i.e. doing damage).
Overpenetration means it hit the target, went through the armor, dealt some damage but still had enough unspent energy that could have be used to wreck insides, wasted some of that punching a second hole through the backside armor, and ran away with the remaining energy in a trajectory that has militarily negligible chance of hitting another target. It has worse performance in almost every aspect except the spectacle. Note that both case had the interior breached which will cause depressurization if occured in same area.
Depressurization as you described is a minor inconvenience and will not, by itself, cause mission-kill or destruction of the ship. If it does, especially when the battle damage is expected to routinely cause depressurization, you have a severely flawed ship design.
Overpenetration is not going to happen in hypervelocity impacts. Penetration depth is not affected by projectile velocity, only by density and length. And while there's no reason to make projectile so large that they could overpenetrate, even if you did, the energy they dump on the way is still massive (determined by how thick the material is that gets penetrated). Punching clean holes happens when a projectile has a lot of energy but is relatively slow, so the material being hit will deform. When the kinetic energy involved is well above the vaporization energy of the material, it's impossible.
For a point of reference about just *how much damn power* railguns need:
My high school physics teacher told us a story about a past student who'd tried to build one to move a paperclip. At first, the guy tried hooking all the power sources(transformer-like things meant to keep steady current in labs) in the lab to it; the paperclip did not move. The next day, he brought in a car battery. That *barely* managed to get the paperclip to slowly flip its way down the rails.
That's why railguns are usually fired using capacitors. The guns only need a relatively short but strong burst of current.
Working in our electrical laboratory, some colleagues and I once built a 2" square bored proof-of-principle railgun, using 2"x(1/2)" busbars as rails and a commercial 10,000A 6V DC electrolysis power supply. That worked well enough to accelerate a 2" cube of plastic and an armature of copper strips to a velocity of roughly 10m/s.
For a ball park estimate of the current needed in A, multiply the required velocity in m/s by the square root of the projectile mass in kg and then divide by the square root of the inductance of the railgun rails in Henries.
Evaluating the last quantity is hard, so we can use an approximation of 5E-7 Henries/m for the inductance per unit length of an ideal 2 rail railgun.
With those data, we'd need about 1 million amps to accelerate a 10kg mass to 1000 m/s along a 20m long barrel.
@@derekp2674 This is one of the reasons why I think railguns as a concept are very overrated and hardly worth investment.
The amount of Stargate, Halo and The Expanse shots with ME1 music made this a very nice video to watch !
I didn’t notice that the guns in The Expanse had counter thrusters before. My respect for that show swells on this day!
Agreed, that was so cool
The Cardinal Rule of Sci-fi writing : 'Be consistent within your own universe.'
Another issue with exposed rails in railguns is the danger of stuff like dust and moisture getting in between them, with the extreme currents, speeds and precision involved. As for recoil- Since propellant does add to a chemgun's recoil, then a railgun that doesn't use an armature sabot(like some real designs) would at least avoid that. Also, since kinetic energy scales differently than momentum, a faster projectile will produce a smaller amount of recoil than a slower heavier one with the same energy. So although a railgun would certainly have recoil, it can have proportionally less, depending on design. However this raises other issues(apart from general high velocity difficulties), like replacing the gentle push of the recoil we know with a more violent jolt and harmful vibrations, or the question of how much momentum the projectile actually needs to be effective. I've also seen a misconception that railguns must have extremely high recoil, which makes the mistake of assuming they have to be extremely powerful to be worth using.
8:20 "PDC's have little rockets on the back to counter recoil"
Holy shit I never noticed that. I love The Expanse's attention to detail!
I'd love to hear your thoughts on nuclear weapons in space.
Nuclear weapons aren't nearly as effective in space as they are in atmospheres, since there is no compression of air to create a shockwave and you already have a high degree of radiation and heat to protect against, negating most of the effective destructive force of the weapon. You pretty much need accurate delivery of the weapon directly onto the target to do damage, at which point it's not much better than any other number of less bulky, risky and expensive weapons you can put on a ship.
@@compmanio36 nuclear-induced EMP also requires significant background magnetic field and tends to not generate in space.
It does have about as much as AoE effect one can expect from space however, and thermal radiation should fry a lot of things depending on how hard science you're going. Sensors, engine bells(very thin IRL and needs coolant flow through), radiators(by definition cannot be thermal-shielded), etc.
Nukes in space would have an entirely different set of use cases than in atmosphere. compmanio36 is largely correct, but that's just in the context of using a nuke as a weapon directly. A much more practical use of nukes is the bomb pumped x-ray laser. I'm oversimplifying, but it essentially turns the flash of a fusion bomb into a laser pulse. Put the laser emitter and a nuke on a missile, or lay the system as a mine, and you can hit a target thousands of km away. Not a reusable weapon, but it would be very powerful.
Another possibility is to use nuclear charges the same way we use chemical explosives to propel projectiles. The same idea as the laser can be employed as the explosive element of a hypervelocity light gas gun, or to spray a cloud of shrapnel at high velocity like a shotgun or claymore. Nukes may not have much blast effect in space, but a giant nuclear fragmentation grenade will give ships a bad day.
A third solution, if you have the super strong materials to make it work, is to use nukes to power a recoilless rifle. Put a projectile in the front, countermass in the back, and detonate a fusion bomb between them. That's something that could be mounted on a ship or station, assuming you have the tech to make a gun that can handle the power of a fusion bomb more than once.
Nukes could also be used defensively to destroy or deflect incoming weapons, or to blind enemy sensors.
@@icyknightmare4592 and there's interesting political angle to consider, because that's city killer yields you're throwing out like candies.
@@clockworkowl6248 A culture that can do that can probably build world-devastating bombs in significant quantities. Never mind the space battle -- just shotgun a swarm of Tunguska-level shells in the general direction of the base planet, like an Ender Wiggin tactic.
I love this quasi series about different spacecraft components.
It's so informative.
One thing with kinetic weapons that with softer ammunition you can dump energy into a target better (like hollow point bullets for handguns) or just poke small holes in the target depending on what you are fighting
Or a soft shell and hard core, it would be the best of both worlds.
A good point about consistency at the end, it doesn't really matter if your scifi story is scientifically realistic as long as it's consistent about how unrealistic it is. My favorite example of this is SBY 2199.
I’ll never get tired of that Roci v Pella combat footage. 👌🏻
As for the Rocinante's PDC's, I actually believe they use the Recoilless system used more rarely in kinetic weapons, like the Carl Gustav anti-materiel rifle.
That would sap a very large amount of velocity from the round, and I'm not sure everything lines up properly for that. Maybe you're right though.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
No, they use conventional caseless rounds. When the pdcs are fired you can see a small air thruster activate to counteract the recoil
The PDCs (while looking cool) are a somewhat terrible concept for a space gun.
The main reason beeing: a gatling-type-gun is air cooled. Only one barrel is actively involved in the fireing process, all other barrels have time to cool down while spinning. But in space the heat can't get away from the barrels (atleast not fast enough). So heat would build up and sooner or later the PDC would look like wet noodles attached to a spinning mixer..
Now you might argue that they are cooled in some way, but then why bother with the added complexity of more stuff in your gun? Single barreled auto-cannons in aircrafts today can match the speed of a gatling-gun and are used because of less weight, less bulk and less complexity. Surely those things matter in a spacecraft too?
@@Kremit_the_Forg You forget that electronically driven gattling guns also provide increased reliability, since a single barrel being destroyed or overheated does not mean an essential defence system stops firing - the other barrels will continue to fire when reaching the firing position.
@@Kremit_the_Forg Yeah, they probably went for "spinning is much cooler than not spinning".
Funny enough, even Stargate had that issue. In the season 1 finale of Atlantis, SGC sends a bunch of artillery-sized railguns to defend Atlantis, that apparently were initially designed for Prometheus, and presumably Daedalus, and they look like a futuristic howitzer, except they seem to fire pencil-sized caliber rounds. Then in Daedalus Variations, the railguns seen on the alternate Daedalus are just Phalanx-like Gatling guns. Sure, it was from an alternate universe, but even so, there's no reason why a Gatling gun would be better than a howitzer-like gun, since both were capable of firing continuous salvos.
There was something in the Mass Effect codex about at short "knife fight" range like the battle of the Citadel, the warships won't use the spinal mounted mass accelerators, possibly because they become hard to aim at that range, and instead drop "disruptor" torpedoes that use mass effect fields to pierce enemy shields and detonate directly against the hull.
So now you get to introduce disruptor ships *and* disruptor destroyers as protectors for the capital ships!
@@fish3977Disruptor torpedoes are standard on any Human ship of frigate size or greater Except Dreadnoughts at the time of the first/second games, but bolt on single shots for defensive work against frigates where being tested and where implemented during/immediately before ME3. They (post first contact, because nobody else was crazy enough to develop them) were increasingly popular with all Xeno forces
8:18 I know the Expanse wiki says that PDCs use thrusters to counteract recoil, but recoilless weapons exist in real life. All they do is allow the expanding gas from the gunpowder to exhaust in the opposite direction of the bullet, so PDCs in the expanse are look like they are doing that and don't need thrusters.
Isn't that basically how a rocket launcher works?
@@shinyagumon7015 yes actually, Recoilless "Gun" instead of "Rifle" because they have no rifling, but that's just minor specificities, regardless they work the same way
according to the books,they use both versions,the recoil -free version is newer and rare and some form of advantage they learned from protomolecule tech. (like the food-idea prax forwarded to amos in the show,based on protomolecule tech)
@@aikrichter5403 If the books actually say some use thrusters, it would be a paradox like how TOS Star Trek communicators are obsolete compared to present day smartphones. It also seems redundant since the ships themselves have thrusters.
@@Gpz0 If you allowed the recoil from the multiple PDCs to just affect the ship it would make steering the ship almost impossible. 4 guns firing in multiple directions would make your ship spin in random directions.
You neglected to mention weaponised tractor beams. Never underestimate the usefulness of being able to grab a bunch of space debris and fling it at your opponent, either as a sort of grape-shot or like hurling a boulder depending on what you throw
Love this series and cannot wait for the next. Also, I enjoy seeing the clips from Legend of the Galactic Heroes in recent episodes. One of my favorite sci-fi series, that I think definitely needs more love.
Thank you, I finally know what to search for. If I have one issue it's that the visuals aren't credited so I have no idea if I see sth. that might interest me.
Yes
Ooooh! That BSG grab at the end gave me goosebumps!
"What do ya hear?"
*plink tink tink tink*
"Nothin' but the rain!"
I am kinda impressed you managed to do that video without a mention to the instructor speech in Mass Effect ("That is why we do not eye-ball it!") 😀
Here I was thinking "there was an early commercial coilgun shown on Forgotten Weapons", and what do you know? Mere moments later, we have footage of Ian playing with the GR-1 Anvil.
Also, while the time between shots on a gauss gun is a drawback compared to the relative effectiveness of modern bullet-based guns, I imagine a stopgap for the tech would be similar to the stopgap used in the era of pre-mechanized guns: have multiple barrels. That way, even if your top-range coilgun can only fire at max power every 0.3 seconds, having six barrels that fire one after the other would theoretically boost the array's rate of fire to 1200 rounds per minute. Though with that said, more barrels makes the gun heavier, bulkier, and in the case of gauss guns more energy-hungry, so multi-barrel gauss weapons would probably need to be emplaced, or perhaps connected to some sort of portable power source.
Multiple barrels is not a good solution. The slow refire time of the gauss gun is due to the recharge time of the capacitors, to which adding more barrels does nothing. Unless you add extra capacitors for each barrel, but then you've got a gun that's six times heavier and bulkier, and has a different point of impact depending on which barrel just fired, or, in the case of a rotary barrel system, the headache that is a rotary barrel system.
No, the solution is faster charging capacitors.
Huh, surprised to see Gundam clips on here. May there be some looks into mecha in the future?
Otherwise, very good vid, and while I do love me some LAZOOOORS, railguns and autocannons are always fun.
I mean Gundam just loves to use kinect weapons in Space Combat.
Like every other time there's another Colony getting dropped on Earth.
Love how you guys are consistently bringing in more and more Gundam as an example. I do recall how many people think, and many still do, that rail guns don't produce any recoil. If only that were true.
Aw Gundam a show where a 18 meter tall 60tonne mech (so the size of a modern twin engine jet with the wait of a modern tank) weapon options include a 120mm machine gun with 100 round magazines (M1 Abrams carries 40 120mm shells) or either a 280mm (11inch), 360mm (14inch) or 880mm (34.6inch) rocket launcher a single 880mm rocket is going to weigh 4 tonnes.
The Dom has a 20tonne weight limit on extras and carries a rocket launcher with multiple 5 round clips of 880mm rockets where each rocket weighs at least 4 tonnes plus because it's a fucking big 880mm rocket I mean the rockets could be made of waxed paper and filled with hydrogen but I doubt it.
Though the 120mm machine gun with 100 round clips is still the text book example of 'these writers have no idea how big and heavy a single shell is'.
@@Ushio01 Suits get lighter as advances in metallurgy happen.
Miss opportunity is when he brought up railguns, could've used a clip of the Atlas Gundam.
@@SwiftGundam Weight isn't necessarily the real issue it's volume a 120mm shell is large physically large and 100 of them in a single magazine carrier by an F-15 sized mech?
The scale is just so wrong.
Humanity has what 5000 years of using various metals weight reduction isn't that extreme.
Other newer mech anime and video games never go as large as UC Gundam does.
Gundam Seed drops the machine gun to 76mm with a mere 30 round magazine for example.
Any idea which Gundam series the clip from ~1:20 is from?
@@nickkremer72 gundam: the origin
Thanks for explaining the railguns from The Expanse. I’m watching it fully for the first time and it was bugging me that what seemed to be energy weapons were being called railguns. Didn’t know about the plasma coating. Thanks for clearing that up.
I once had an idea for a kinetic shell in a setting of mine designed to destroy heavily armored capital ships.
It was a tandem nuclear warhead with a small(think Davy Crockett) warhead used for a nuclear shaped charge to poke a hole for a much larger warhead to then fly through the hole and detonate inside of the ship, in its atmosphere and underneath its armor.
One of my favorite kinetic weapon sequences in sci-fi was in The Risen Empire where literal sand was used since at the velocities it can be attained in space, it became lethal.
"...but something small going very, very fast is more likely to poke tiny pinholes in key systems that don't react well to such a poking..." This is one of the greatest sentences ever spoken! EPICLOLZ
Despite the subject matter not being of particular interest to me, this turned out to be one of my favourite videos on your channel.
You presented everything so well and accessibly and entertainingly, and the clips from Window Of Opportunity gave me great joy.
"Guns and rocket engines are basically the same thing, but just optimized for different outcomes. One makes use of the recoil, the other makes use of the projectile." Blew my mind.
Thanks for the education!💜
I have long been a fan of kinetic weapons in sci-fi. They seem really underused, like as if an energy weapon is somehow the ultimate and only tool of attack. Maybe over point blank range but energy streams will disperse yet a bolt of steel fired at x% c will not. Its going to keep coming and when it hits something, its not going to be fun. I also like the idea of whats essentially an asteroid hitting a shield and crushing the shield emitters in their place. I used to create little space stories and stuff in a roleplay group, I loved finding ways to make kinetic great again
In space combat kinetic weapons would be for point blank fighting and for attacking fixed movement targets like planets, stations etc. If you have a point blank fight with another ship you have probably already seriously screwed up to let it get that close.
@@Immudzen Forcing an engagement is very hard in space to begin with, pretty much all conflicts are going to occur around objectives that can't be moved.
It's the 'hitting something' that is kinetics failing. In my own space setting, large bore railguns are mainly used for orbital bombardment (since a city can't get out of the way). They're old tech, but still brutally effective tech: while 'modern' starships cook each other with lasers at hundreds of kilometers apart, it's largely considered suicide to get to within 12-24 km of an enemy warship, as those ancient 'bombardment' rail guns will still happily put a 100 kg slug straight through your fancy battleship as if it were made of tissue paper.
Beyond that range, though, a ship would have to be 'trying' to get hit by a round since they'd have at least 1 second to move out of the way.
Part of why I loved the MAC guns in halo the UNSC built it's ships around it's weapon
@@agentoranj5858 Yes it is very hard to force an engagement. You would also need objectives that you need to take intact because if it can't be moved just throw rocks at it from extreme range if you want it destroyed.
If you want to engage some kind of defense forces that are following a semi predictable path a multi-stage missile can still work. You fire the first stage from extreme range and then allow them to coast and if one of them gets close enough it activates the second drive stage for final attack. That allows attacking FAR outside the range of kinetic or energy weapons and has been used quite effectively in some hard scifi series.
I never noticed recoil dumpening jets on PDC´s... Just another cherry on the cake in terms of already huge attention to detail Expanse has.
“Poke pinholes through key system which don’t react well to such a poking”
Hunt for Red October reference!
**inside a nuclear submarine’s nuclear ballistic missile launch bay**
“Ryan, most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.”
*bulletsh
It’s the little things like the retro thrusters on PDCs that make me love the The Expanse. Such attention to detail.
This type of video has to be my favorite on the channel, even though I love everything else too
While not purely kinetic, one device that would deal kinetic damage is to artificially influence mass like in mass effect. Artificially add more mass to a target to the point it has a gravity well of several Gs then "drop" a kinetic payload to the target. The target feels the crushing force of multiple earth gravitys then is properly crushed by a big tungsten rod.
In the game space engineers, gravity cannons are pretty competitive because you can have a ships worth of mass in a projectile the size of a car
That is a cool idea, but I feel the issue would be to hit the same area of the target repeatedly to have the intended effect. Striking an entire ship with a gravity well may prove either impracticalnor disasterous depending on context.
A better alternative for me would be to use gravity well as an ability for capital ships. You overload and exert the ships on board anti-gravity field outwards and 'pull' nearby ships towards you whether it be friend or foe. This could use in conjunction with point-blank FTL exit for shock and awe effect.
Granted, such ships would have to be automated because an organic crew would not survive such maneouvre.
Love seeing the Gundam footage! Eastern and Western scifi ought to shake hands more often
Though what form should it take if eastern and western sci-fi were to get involved with each other more often?
@@marrqi7wini54 honestly a great start would just be to put more mecha in stuff, along with other similarly eastern tropes/concepts of course, and learn from the properties and stories that have included them before. Mecha in general provides an excellent and nuanced hologram of Eastern scifi concepts in general.
Ie. It is a deep, storied, and highly varied genre
Hard scifi/Real Robot with Gundam, Votoms, and patlabor
Fantasy scifi/Super Robot with Mazinger, Zords, and true classics like Jet-Jaguar
And of course the stories that exist somewhere in between like Evangelion and Macross, along with the many others that I could name and whom others should be quick to add
The concepts and narratives of these stories and franchises should be drawn from like any other classic or contemporary scifi property is drawn from, with consideration and respect, because they are dope
You can see some great examples of contemporary western mecha a result as well, with TTRPGs like Lancer which has a truly awesome mix of western and eastern scifi concepts, as well as the storied Battletech/Mech-Warrior franchise(s), and of course the Titans in Warhammer 40k (which were MUCH better before they shrunk them down don't @me, warlords are so shrimpy now) and especially the Tau Battle-Suits
In conclusion:
If they are 2 meters tall or 200 meters tall Big Robots are COOOOL, and there are so so many shows and manga that AMAZINGLY explore some super interesting concepts. Read them, watch them, and let them inspire you!
(PS:Read/watch Knights of Sidonia and don't tell me that isn't some of the dopest shit!)
(PPS:anyone who wants to start talking about how tanks are better:Bro we get it lmao, legs are complicated and mechs suck blah blah, you don't have to comment just... Walk away 😜)
@@Shrimp_Rider ever heard of Logh? It's an 90s anime series but the space battle are beautiful (especially the movies) and one of the very few sci-fi that accurately portray the scale of space battle (most fleet is the size of zentradi fleet from SDF macross i.e 10000+ ships)
@@kevinbayu7621 Legands of Galactic Heros is a classic! I I'll be checking it out from the start for the first time soon, ive only seen bits and pieces of the show and remake which were pretty awesome already
@@Shrimp_Rider Doesn't Sidonia have one of the most brutal depictions of a mass driver? That shit was awesome.
Great to see some Ace Combat recognition! The Stonehenge Turret Network isn't a pure railgun though, it's a hybrid chemical railgun using a chemical first stage and rails as the second stage as mentioned later in the video.
9:38 The reason why you want chemical first stage for rail guns is that its very inefficient when the bullet's slow. Like a motor, rail guns have low impedance at low speed. So you'll be dumping very high current into the thing while the bullet is barely pushed by the tiny bit of barrel behind it. Anything that gives the bullet some initial velocity will greatly reduce its power consumption.
Also, I can't find where in the video it this, the plasma coming out from the rail gun isn't just barrel extension. In a rail gun you'll want the bullet to conduct electricity without touching the barrel. If it does it either grinds against it or gets welded on to it. So usually rail gun fills its barrel with plasma before lunch to conduct electricity to the bullet without the barrel touching it. This is the plasma that flys out with the bullet.
I like the induction style of coilgun where instead of coils ahead pulling a ferrous bullet forward, it’s behind pushing an inductive bullet forward. The barrel would be ferromagnetic.
I like to imagine the big coils where the machine gun receiver and the shell casing are- M2 style baby!
For high velocities, ferromagnetic materials cannot be used and "air cored" induction coilguns are the best systems to use.
The expanse really changed how we perceive space battles in movies
Looking forward to the DEW section, those are some of my favorite weapons in sci-fi like with PPCs in Btech, Hellances in Lost Fleet, or Neutron Beam Cannons in Legend of the Galactic Heroes
PPCs look cool, but have you ever felt the need to level a small planet? Arrow IV all the way.
And to think, some mad bastard decided to mount one on an Urbie.
@@chrisbingley lol Nah, bro, that's what Naval PPCs are for, especially the Heavy variety.
If spacedock ever did a gundam video. I'll lose my mind. In a good way.
Snazzy!
I can't tell you how much I appreciate seeing something like this and *NOT* having it just crammed full of Trek stuff end to end. Granted, Trek always uses gee-gosh-wow ray guns (With the exception of Kirk's bamboo mortar) so it wouldn't fit the theme anyway, but I'm *still* grateful because yours is one of the few channels nattering about technical stuff that seems even *aware* that something other than Trek and Star Wars exists. So: Thank you!
Yea, and it is getting better. We are for example now starting to see more Eastern properties as well such as Legend of Galactic Heroes and Gundam, something so many others just ignore.
Honorable mention to Mass Effect 2. WHen you first get to the Citadell, some crewmen are scorned for not waiting for a targeting solution. (An object in motion, stays in motion. :) )
I like how the game Stellaris does ship weapons: Kinetic weapons ignore energy shields, but is countered by armor.
Except they aren't. Kinetic weapons do more damage to shields and reduced damage to armor. Explosive weapons (missiles/torpedos) ignore shields but also do full or more damage to armor (not countered).
Never thought I'd see forgotten weapons in a spacedock video.
My preference for long range is missiles. For an energy weapon once you are a few light seconds away the weapon will be ineffective because ships will be constantly moving. For missiles you could use a multi-stage engine or an initial boost for the launcher and allow the missile to run without drive or an extended period of time, which makes them very hard to detect, and then ignites the rocker for terminal attacks. This was used very effectively in the Honor Harrington series.
Also in mass effect x alien fanfic
I love that you discussed the issues of heat management in space. Media that glosses over this or assumes that since space is cold you can simply radiate it away, piss me off.
Regardless of kinetic bullets losing energy if fired backwards: any ship in persuit that matches it's speed will put all that energy right back into the equasion, as it travels towards the bullets
All velocities are relative. Two ships moving at the same speed are effectively stationary in relation to each other. Shooting forward or backwards makes no difference.
If they both also accelerate at the same rate, then shooting back is indeed more effective than forward, because ship speeds will have increased between firing and impact. But if they are close enough to make dodging nontrivial, I think that difference will be tiny because the time is so short.
That bit at 8:20 is such a cool detail, I never knew the guns had little thrusters on the back
Great video! I loved the explanation of coilguns, I've always been kinda confused what the difference is between them and railguns and this really cleared that up.
Interestingly, I noticed a lot of shots of Stonehenge from the Ace Combat series in the railgun section of the video. An obscure fact about Stonehenge; it's not a completely "true" railgun! The initial firing of the shell actually uses a standard chemical propellant akin to a naval cannon, the electromagnetic rails only serve to further accelerate the shell even faster! It's not a big thing, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention :). Once again, thanks for the great content!
So perfect for 9:36? :D
Speaking of the “Dropping a rock out of your space ship” type weapon, in the book “The Risen Empire,” the Empire makes use of “sand caster” drones to lay clouds of diamond dust which will grind down any small craft passing through them at high velocity (and I’m talking relativistic speed of a significant portion of the speed of light), and will damage exposed components on larger, more heavily armored craft.
I've never been so excited about railguns before, well done!
I like the Battlezone 2 soundtrack for your intro and outro! It's surprises me how many sci-fi nerds haven't heard of or played that franchise.
I rather like the idea of combining chemical and electromagnetic, but doing it in the opposite order, in other words, using a railgun or especially a coilgun to launch a rocket projectile that continues te accelerate after firing.
There's probably some circumstance where that type of gun would shine. But the projectiles would be miniature rockets (missiles?), and most of the time it's cheaper to just spam the dakka.
@@pills- The projectile would basically be an unguided rocket, with no warhead. This would be in an effort to increase velocity, therefore increasing effective range and impact energy.
@@pills- Rocket Assisted artillery are already a current technology, and even though it is more expensive than a conventional shell. its still way cheaper than a guided missile.
@@thitsugaya1224 TL:DR Missiles and bullets cover each other's weaknesses well, and the need for an intermediate projectile in space that can do the role of both but not as good as either would be extremely niche.
Now the long version:
"Velocity", "effective range", and "impact energy" are planetary ways of thinking about warfare and don't translate well into the distances and speeds of space warfare.
Effective range in space for an unguided projectile is entirely determined by how well you can aim and how well the enemy can evade. Doesn't matter how fast your projectile goes, if the enemy can see you firing it (read: always) and has a few minutes to adjust their course, it will miss.
Velocity is almost useless in space combat, as a spacecraft can accelerate to the velocity of a bullet if they're travelling in the same direction. Acceleration is what matters, and the change of velocity when one object meets another.
Impact energy is also rather useless unless the enemy craft has the mass of an asteroid (read: slow) or your projectile is traveling at the speed of an atmospheric bullet (read: slow). Once you get up to orbital velocities, projectiles will just punch holes in a spacecraft regardless of armor. A good parallel is how steel plate armor for knights fell out of use when firearms became common. It might even be better NOT to armor spacecraft to prevent spalling and having things ricochet around inside the craft.
@@pills- I'm not sure you quite understood my reasoning. The whole point is to fire a "dumb" projectile at near railgun velocity, the reasoning is that it has greater effective range, not because it will eventually lose velocity, but because the faster it moves the further it goes in a shorter amount of time, reducing the enemy's ability to react.
Something moving at higher velocity also carries more energy to strike the target. While you're right in saying that a stern chase renders your forward guns less effective, being chased actually increases the effectiveness of your rear guns. Furthermore, it's highly unlikely that most manned spacecraft will have the Delta V to do anything but run away if fired on, if they even have that much. You make a decent point about armor, however, sloping or rounding armor does increase it's effectiveness by increasing the chances of shots glancing off, it would have that effect on both projectile and energy weapons. Adding sacrificial storage compartments to the outer sections and placing the armor inside the core of the ship around the vitals and crew compartments would probably work best, not unlike the "protected" cruisers of the late 19th century.
Oh my god I never even noticed the RCS thrusters on the back of The Expanse's PDCs
Re: recoil on chem weapons - The gas pushes the bullet forward, and the gas pushes the gun backwards. It’s not wrong to frame it this way, since the gas is really the medium that expresses Newton’s 3rd Law.
I meant that I reckon people assume *all* the recoil comes from the gas following the bullet out, without realising that the mass of the bullet is in the equation too. So they think railguns, which (bar the Expanse) don't have gas, so they don't have recoil, which is incorrect.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana worse yet, they do have gas from all the rails and projectile ablating...
@@hoojiwana Video footage of modern large experimental railguns, like the BAe/US Navy project, clearly shows recoil and the use of a recoil buffer. But early laboratory railguns (and perhaps also modern home builds) were (or are) so heavy relative to their projecile momentum that recoil management is not an important consideration.
Railgun champions have also argued that there would be less recoil for any given duty, because of the absence of any momentum transfer to any escaping propellant gases.
Those last two factors may have lead to the rise of a no-recoil myth.
Also, in the late 1980s, a few academics also disagreed about how and where recoil forces would appear on railgun circuits. This involved championing the out dated Ampere force law instead of the more conventionally accepted Lorentz force.
A neat idea that came to mind for the cooling issue: Having a "heatsink ship" as part of your fleet. This could be a completely automated vessel filled with coolant (possibly water from asteroids), that doesn't necessarily need to be in combat. It could even be a station for ships to come to, dock, connect a few tubes and proceed to dump their heat into the "heatsink ship" using it's coolant. Once a certain heat threshold is met, this ship could go and either dump the coolant and refill it, go to an asteroid belt and dump it into an asteroid or use it to melt some water ice asteroid to get rid of it. Then repeat the cycle of receiving heat from other vessels.
This is just an idea that should be more fleshed out before use, and I have no idea if it's even viable. Like I said, just an idea that seemed neat in the minute.
Video suggestion:
Different types and ways of manuevering e.g fast attack, like burning all the way to a target to get there quick but then you zoom straight past them like when the free navy was defending the ring gate, or different types of evasive manuvers and taking the effectiveness of your defense into account etc, think it would be cool
An additional note regarding rear-firing kinetic weapons in various types of space combat; as stated, kinetic weapons fire has recoil, the bigger the gun the bigger the recoil (very basically, at least). Firing backwards from your flight path means the recoil isn't having a negative impact on velocity. Moreover, if you had directional control over the weapon (meaning, turreted, not fixed) you could potentially use it to "side-step" incoming fire by taking some shots at or near right angles to the ship.
I've heard several people mention that the plasma "rails" in the expanse but that doesn't make sense, as you've noted rail guns need bracing due to the enormous force involved but a gas plasma has neither bracing nor rigidity so it would be immediately dispersed moving it away from the power source and have no effect.
What make more sense to me is that plasma we see is simply the metal lubricant heated to high temperature due to friction. Now I'm not sure if the lubricant should travel forward due to Lorenz effect or backward due to the recoil. I think the former make more sense but the later would explain the splash of plasma that happens every time the gun is fired.
The other thing about rail gun being just two rails is if we take the electromagnetic pump which is essentially a rail gun to move liquids, it would make more sense to put electromagnet their to increase the efficiency of the gun.
I've come to think quench guns make more sense. you don't have to deal with the friction of object moving at hundreds or thousands of kilometre per second rubbing against each other, and since you don't have to rigidly connect all the coils, as opposed to a rail that has to be a single piece, you can setup more advanced recoil absorption by not only having the gun move backwards but actually have it shorten as well. They would also be easier to keep cool to super conduct since their isn't any direct contact with something comparatively hot. We could even imagine a plasma boosting mechanism were rings of plasma with a current flowing through them, similar to how NMR permanent magnets work, are sent forward and calibrated to disperse just as the projectile fly past them.
You had a lot of fun writing this and choosing the clips
I suppose another issue with kinetic weapons (although far less of a concern if you're working in hard sci fi) is if your target is sufficiently armoured. Like the Lanky Seedships from Frontlines, 3km long, mostly extremely tough biological armour and ridculously structuraly sound the seed ships didn't really care about anything short of a full sized starship ramming them at thousands of m/s as far as kinetics went.
Depending on how realistic you want to be, it's extremely difficult to protect against kinetic weapons in space because of the relative velocities involved.
Realistically, any 'armor' capable of withstanding a less than full sized starship ramming them at thousands of m/s is 1) impossible to work with, and 2) completely immune to anything any energy weapon can cook up, too.
@@dembones5005 If you want realism pretty much the all or nothing style of armor is what you're going to have, realistically it's impossible to completely armor a ship, so you armor the vitals.
The Colony Drop was one hell of a kinetic weapon XD
I would love to see this channel do a take on the Legend of the Galactic Heroes ships and battles. Would be interesting.
LOGH Is a great series of space opera with Gray and Gray morality intriguing characters and politics
I have so much to say on this topic.
1. I like the idea of a three or four pronged railgun. It solves your open barrel problem while still showing viewers that this isn't just another chemical gun
2. I wonder if a coil-rail gun would work. It sure looks cool when I imagine it.
3. I have a new idea for a magnetic gun; the magnetic repulsor gun. You have a very strong magnet in the back of the gun & another magnetic in the projectile that is oppositely charged & some kind of material that blocks the magnetic field. When you remove it, they repulse each other & the bullet flies away. I'm no physicist and can't prove this, just a cool idea that I though of.
10:00 - I would have the coils and rails hollow which liquid nitrogen passes through to not only increase their conductivity, but rather to keep the rails and could from melting.
And when passing through the rails/coils, they instantly boil and has to be vented immediately which can potentially be out the back to counter recoil.
And then the Lorentz forces would rip the pipes apart instead of them being solid material. EM weapons are just really really tricky
Love the SG-1 Window of Opportunity confused clips inter dispersed in the video
I still say energy weapons are way cooler, but each to his own. Also, I always wondered what that "chemrail" gun from Elysium was. That's actually how the Terran guns work in StarCraft as well.
I totally didn't notice the PDCs in The Expanse having thrusters on their backs for compensation. God DAMN I love that show!
I suspect the actual reasons they use kinetics in The Expanse is more about storytelling than realism. Firstly, they can have the added suspense of running out of ammo as a ticking clock. Secondly, because it's a lot more theatrical to have missiles and ships dodging streams of tracerfire in close-quarters whereas dodging or surviving missiles and lasers at those ranges isn't really a thing in a hard SF setting without shields unless you want something far less visually impressive like ECM and ECCM attacking and defending fire control radar signals to make the missiles and lasers theatrically miss by inches.
It's definitely storytelling; In one of the back of the book interviews, one of the writers responded with an emphatic 'no' to the question of whether or not they considered The Expanse to be hard sci-fi.
Ships in the Expanse probably don't have enough power output to use laser weapon that could match the railgun. A single shot from even a light rail gun will penetrate multiple decks on capital ships and go straight through smaller ones. Whereas laser would have to be kept on target before it can melt the armour. Apart from Donnager class all Expanse ships have to cut drive to power up the railgun and it still has few seconds of charge up, no way it could maintain the continuous power output to use battle lasers.
@@combomaster666 In the books, Thoth Station had internal anti-personnel laser turrets that were quickly countered with smoke grenades.
_Starts looking at the Orion Missiles from Marko Kloos' Frontline series._
Chemical kinetic weapons can also have increased speeds using a number of obscure ideals or by just using the good old trick of just making the barrel very long compared to the bore size, a longer gun means a faster bullet, on the German panzer 4 from WWII the difference is quite noticeable from the early to late versions of the 7.5cm KWK guns
the original guns (7.5cm KWK 37 L/24) had a short length of 24 times the caliber which led to a very slow muzzle velocity of only about 450 m/s maximum, the later versions of the gun (7.5cm KWK 40 L/48) had a barrel twice as long at a caliber length which leads to higher muzzle velocities of 750 (standard ammo) to 950 m/s (APCR (Wikipedia pages for the guns mentioned were used as a source)
Other guns such as the Zis2 and Zis 4 reached even faster speeds close to 1000m/s according to Wikipedia, but I couldn't find exact numbers per each shot, this was due to its tremendous caliber length of 71
Another way to further increase it is by using a squeeze-bore firearm, i only know of one example of this which is the 2.8cm Schwere Panzerbuchse 41 (heavy antitank rifle 41 spzbc41, the name is kinda wrong since the caliber makes it more of a cannon) this gun took a special 2.8cm shell and the shell was crushed down in the barrel to a caliber of 2cm which makes the shot go up to 1400 m/s on standard ammo which is remarkably fast and leads to excellent armor piercing capabilities on the standard APCR shells but lackluster capacity on the 2.8cm frag rounds which go fast but lack filling.
Cannon ammo can also increase velocity, the best example is APFSDS or Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot ammo which can go much faster in a gun by being a smaller, lighter projectile with a sabot, a discarded part of the ammo, this fits the small projectile in the bore to get the energy out of the gun and into the smaller projectile, the M829a2 APFSDS ammo of the M1a1 Abrams MBT apparently goes 1675m/s according to Wikipedia (the gun on the M1a1 is a caliber length 44 gun) which means it's a little over 2 times the velocity of the APHE standard ammo of the older German long guns with 48 caliber length. APFSDS has disadvantages however in the lack of post penetration effects such as explosive filler which many of the guns from earlier all have in differing amounts.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, longer barrel relative to caliber = better speed, squeeze-bore guns do weird stuff with bullets and have even more speed, special ammo has best speed even out of what should be slow.
(short gun) KWK37 l/24 - 385m/s (APHE) 450 m/s (HEAT)
(long gun) KWK40 l/48 - 750 on normal ammo, 950m/s on APCR
(very long gun) ZiS-2 (caliber length 71) - 1000m/s (needs proper numbers)
(squeeze-bore)SPzBc 41 - 1400m/s
(modern ammo)M829a2 in 120mm l44 gun - 1675m/s
note the M829a2 has the advantage of being made a full 80 years after the service of these other guns that didn't have access to ammo like APFSDS and modern gun improvements.
All of the info comes from Wikipedia, if any of this is incorrect and you have a source to show otherwise, please inform me, i will make corrections as needed
If you made it this far thanks for reading
8:18 WHAT. How did I never notice this?! Once again, I'm so impressed by The Expanse.
They’re not energy balls. They’re disruptor torpedos that use mass effect fields to increase their mass to bypass shields and to inflict greater damage to their targets.
I'm glad you mentioned the hybrid chemical-propellant/electromagnetic designs. It's not clear exactly how they work, but the Terran Marine Corps' C-14 'Impaler' gauss rifles from Starcraft use such a hybrid system. They use gunpowder (or some future-tech derivative of it) in brass cartridges and eject spent casings, but the projectiles achieve hypersonic speeds and the standard infantry weapons are described as "gauss rifles", suggesting some sort of coilgun system built into the barrel.
9:24 That has always bugged me as it simply doesn't work as it would violate the conservation of energy.
Kinetic energy is the product of mass and velocity.
If you have a fixed amount of energy to pump into a projectile, you can either make a smaller projectile go faster or a more massive one go slower. Both will have the same amount of kinetic energy.
If you lower the projectile's mass in the gun and accellerate to a certain velocity, it will have X kinetic energy acording to the formula half the mass times velocity squared.
Once your projectile leaves the gun's mass effect field it will "regain" its true mass but it will also retain the same amount of kinetic energy. Same energy but more mass means lower velocity.
Thus, the projectile would instantainiously decellerate to the apropriate velocity.
There are 2 relevant conservation laws here: energy and momentum are both conserved in our universe. With the mass effect mechanism only one of those can be preserved. mv^2 versus mv. Changing mass by 4 times and keeping mv^2 equal means 1/2 the speed thus net gain of momentum by factor of 2. So even by keeping energy conserved physics gets broken.
@@elkopetten2706 thats the nature of the ME system, it breaks the rules of physics, but thats how the universe itself works. If this were to meet the rules however, the energy pumped into the round is fixed, so the moment the round left the ME field, and its mass increased, it would actually slow the projectile right down. However if your smart you could actually do it the other way around, drastically increase the mass of the round when in the weapon, meaning it has a lower muzzle velocity (making it easier to control and apply energy to it), and the moment it leaves the field it would instead rapidly increase velocity as its mass falls. In reality however this would likely just cause the round to explode in some sort of nuclear reaction as that instant energy transference would rip it appart at an atomic level.
@@cgi2002 true that physics gets broken either way. Despite the loss in speed the particle will have increased momentum. Basically allowing you to change the ‘ammo-type’ by exchanging speed for momentum. High-velocity AP round versus slugs. Greater momentum means a larger ‘push’ on impact, and in general low velocity collisions are more effective in energy transfer. So even a lower kinetic energy may still net a bigger impact
Im so glad he mentioned ETC and CLGG guns, i really want to see more of those in science fiction
Coilguns are actually incredibly slow weapons, as inherent self-induction of coils means they can't be switched fast enough
That why the highest projectile velocities to date have been obtained with very low mass projectiles in single stage coilguns, sometimes known as flyer plate systems. At Oxford in the UK, First Light Fusion are using this type of system for impact fusion research. Their website deliberately refers to it as "railgun like" because they know almost no-one has heard of flyer plate experiments.
@@derekp2674 well, you can also think of the large hadron collider as a big coilgun
@@tedarcher9120 I think that view skips over the useful terminology difference between a gun and a particle accelerator.
@@derekp2674 anyway, I think Casaba Howitzers are the most useful armaments for spaceships with relatively low technology
@@tedarcher9120 I had to look those up on Wikipedia, because I had never heard of them before. From the physics involved, I doubt that they would be easily to realise in practice or effective at anything other than short ranges. As regards available energy density, nuclear fission is a far superior source to chemical propellers. But most of the energy released by fission is in the kinetic energy of the fission products. So this is easily captured as heat to power steam turbines but much harder to apply to other applications. More direct means of electric power generation would be a boon for nuclear energy sources and might then readily power all kinds of power hungry devices.
Thx for mentioning mass effect. Out of all the sci-fi, that game series really decided to 'all in' kinetic weapons
'A slug lightened by a mass effect field can be accelerated to greater speeds, permitting projectile velocities that were previously unobtainable. If accelerated to a high enough velocity, a simple paint chip can impact with the same destructive force as a nuclear weapon. However, mass accelerators produce recoil equal to their impact energy. This is mitigated somewhat by the mass effect fields that rounds are suspended within, but weapon recoil is still the prime limiting factor on slug velocity.' ~Mass Effect Codex~
"Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb." ~ME2~
The gunnery chief forgot the only apropriate word if you areat the receiving end of such a weapon: "Ouch"
Ouch
I was sort of brainstorming a Sci Fi race a while back that made extensive use of hypervelocity guns. They were a machine race, and instead of using missiles that are slower and can be jammed, or lasers that have huge power requirements, they just used guns because theres no air pressure or wind in space, so the round would just go straight. Combined with good scanners and a sufficiently powerful enough targeting computer, which they have, and they van almost never miss their target.
About combining chemical power with railguns. By increasing the speed of the projectile
as it enters between the rails, the damage to the rails is significantly reduced. It also prevents the projectile from being welded to the rails by the intense heat.
The funny thing about kinetic weapons is that, by 5km/s (but consistently do so at velocities of 10km/s or more), they don't 'penetrate', they _explode_ on things, hence the term 'solid state explosions'. To give you an idea, at 10km/s, you'll have an explosion roughly 11 times the object's mass in TNT.
Fun addition: Electrothermal Chemical propellants in your guns can push those projectiles to velocities between 2-4km/s with ease.
Also, Cold Gas Guns are... pretty useless. They need an oxidizer _and_ a combustible gas (in many RL versions, oxygen and hydrogen, both are pretty horrid, largely due to just _how much_ volume they eat up... for example, the volume of 1 ton of liquid hydrogen (~13.5-14m^3) is used _as a basic unit of volume_ for the _Traveller_ Tabletop SciFi RPG setting (the humble dTon, which is ~14m^3 each)) to function. So, you'll be hauling a pair of _massive_ tanks for the propellant (because hydrogen loses out on every chemical combustion race, only in _nuclear_ reactions does it win anything).
All this stuff about the way high velocity impacts liquidate armor they hit, and hypervelocity impacts exploding I did consider talking about (with a reference to the Venture Stars whipple shields), but didn't just to keep things moving along. Might return to the topic in future though!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Firstly, Cold Gas is meant as Gas that is pressurized and using the pressure. So a Cold Gas thruster does no chemical reaction for propulsion, purely the kinetic energy of the propelled gas.
Secondly, your "Solid State Explosion" is not really that true. In space you get more than 10 km/s hits once in a while, and tends towards penetrating until loss of energy (like most projectiles), and there is certainly no hard limit on that. The explosive force in terms of projectiles comes primarily from a kinetically exhausted object reaching the point where clean penetration is not possible anymore, and the object starts splintering, splattering and delivering the remaining kinetic energy. Kinda like meteors actually. A meteor hitting a brick wall will not explode, regardless of velocity, it will likely penetrate rather cleanly through with less velocity and then do the "explosion" at the end.
If things purely exploded at relative velocities of 10 km/s the universe would look rather significantly different.
@@hoojiwana wow, I got a reply by the Stardock team! A first for me. :)
With that fanboying out of the way...
... that would be great to have a video about, because people apparently can't wrap their heads around the concepts...
@@SioxerNikita my understanding is that you'll need the two gases _anyway_ to make it really work, given some of the experiments that the US Army did back in the day...
@@TheTrueAdept Cold Gas propellant you can do with any pressurized gas. You are not relying on ignition at all.
You have a pressurized tank? Open it up, it produces thrust. Congratulation you just made a Cold Gas thruster.
Hook the same tank to a cylinder and accelerate something, you have a Cold Gas weapon. The actual gas used is irrelevant to whether it is cold gas or not, and you certainly don't want to use two gasses that can ignite when combined. That defeats the entire point.