if we could tow asteroids into orbit. then we could use those as a base for the platforms. especially if they are dense nickel iron asteroids. some of the materials are available in the asteroid. itll be very heavy to handle recoil. Also the nickel can protect against radiation
@Jonathan Graveline if I'm getting what you saying. You mean to throw asteroids at ships. If so, that won't work at all. Since it would take tok long for the asteriod to reach its target.
@@cameroncashatt692 n'a straight at a target on the ground like a ballistic missile. Not against ship. You don't need to grab asteroid, put them in orbit to then build a base with canon to protect earth. Just build the canon straight in space we don't need support for it and it's not very efficaces anyway because you needed plenty of them to cover all the earth. If it's what you want to do it's better to build shipward on the moon and in orbit close to mars so you can gather all the resources there and build mobile fleet that can move to intercept incoming treat far from earth. It's better resources management and the farther the combat the best chance we have to react afterward. I'm a pragmatic guys. I would love to see a Dyson sphere around the sun and mining colonie on other planète with the space in-between full of space ship. And why not take a moon somwere and make a death star while we are at it. We are so far away from that. The pressing treat to human civilisation right now more than ever is ourselves. If we can't settle the overpopulation, gaz in our atmosphere that is cooking literally all we have ever fought for and stick to using coal we are simply doom no mars project nothing. If we are lucky maybe the Asian can start the moon base soon enough maybe we can barely touch the dream of having human living on another space rock but at the rate we are going I don't think we will be there in 200 years it's gonna be so hot and violent here in 100 year it's goona be an apocalips by our standard of now. We will cling on like cockroach another 100 years at most we need to remedy that asap we should have started concretely doing thing 50 years ago but the past is the past...
A heavy platform will decrease the effect of recoil, but the same force is still applied. The orbit is altered (a tiny bit), but to correct will still require the same amount of propellant. A heavier base is more stable but also less manoeuvrable.
My man said “back in East Germany” 😭 you sound a lot younger than we could assume from that statement lol. Makes sense why your videos are very well informed
I actually think what they meant by transferring power to orbit was some kind of tether with a large microwave or tight beam laser emitter on it, with the subsequent receiving equipment located on a large disk on the weapons platform. That's really the only way. This was written before the art department drew up the battlestations.
The issue with these kinds of emmitter/reciever system is that it's very energy innefficient. Someone did some evonomic calculations on solar power sattelites way back, and it turned out that it was cheaper to just build a crapload of solar panels on the revcieving end instead, and skip the transmitter part, since the mass/energy ratio on the reviever wasn't going to be all that much better than solar unless you believe that frying anything that comes between the pair as an acceptable tradeoff.
@@robertharris6092 Not without breaking physics you can't. There is no amount of magical efficiency gain that can fix the issues with beaming power around. the loss is a factor of distance, energy density of the transmision beam, and whatever matter happens to be between the emitter and reciever. Just like internal combustion engines have a maximum allowable efficiency, so does em based energy transfer systems.
@@MrAntice hey dipshit, learn the difference between “breaking physics” and “breaking our current understanding of physics”. Relativity “broke” physics too
@@MrAntice This assumes that it is in the solar system. The power transmitters are on reach, a different solar system. It could be more efficient if the star is a red dwarf, rather than the sun. (I'm not sure if reach has a red dwarf, but we can't assume its the same as earth)
ArcFlash Labs have a few early types of Gauss Rifles that are man portable. They charge slowly and take a lot of power, while only being able to loose small projectiles, but they exist.
I just imagine Lord Hood in the bridge of one of the defence platforms asking Master Chief what he's doing on that foreign ship, and how all the crew seem to be gone... They're probably running around killing boarders, and probably fixing a million mechanical failures due to covenant fire. Imagine you lose some thrusters to plasma fire and now you have to rotate the entire platform to use other thrusters to fix your orbit after every shot...
I think there is a case for having mac platforms in geosynchronous orbit over earth, mainly because you can tie the platform and its orbital elevator to one city. Hence all the different stations, like Cairo station for instance.
We have a very convenient Moon: 1 no friction 2 large size and very heavy. 3 Conveniently one side faces earth. You can build whatever size of weapon you want on Moon. Enemy uses earth to hide from moon weapons? Orbital mechanics ensures that you can curve your projectiles around earth to hit the enemy. And you get to say "that's NO moon! That is Battle Station! "
12:03 So this reminds me on how railguns works in The Expanse, I think you should definitely check those out since they play such a huge role in ship to ship combat and orbital defense.
8:52 I don't remember exactly where I heard this, but I remember that the power from the surface is transported to the platforms via giant lasers(?) I don't know if that could work, but it would explain why they are on a geosynchronous orbit
It would work, it's just ridiculously innefficient. You would have to send more power up than you need because some of it will be lost to scattering within the atmosphere.
@@Keestral You could build the laser on the moon and power your platforms from there, but then they'd need to be in geosynchronous orbit with the moon.
@@rishidronadula7260 at a distance that’s far enough to be in geosynchronous orbit and be able to provide enough energy to rapidly fire an ENORMOUS railgun or gauss weapon and keep the station in orbit? Maybe I’m wrong but I’m really struggling to believe that would be the optimal solution
9:00 the power is beamed up through high frequency electromagnetic waves. While they do encounter resistance, at such high frequencies it would ionize and push out the atmosphere to reduce further drag over time. This also requires geosynchronous orbit because the beams can’t be angled through the atmosphere due to their size so they’d have to go straight up. 11:00 you hit another key point as to why you should have them so far out in geosynchronous orbit. These stations are flinging these massive titanium rounds at multiple percentages of the speed of light (which makes distance in aiming less of a concern). The recoil will be massive, likely so much so as to having them in anything but geosync would be willful neglect. Also in firing the guns simultaneously fire retro rockets (I am 99% certain this is cannon) that offset the force of the round but over a greater period of time (I believe it is the same period time as it takes to reload) so that the gun is more or less at the same trajectory as the previous shot. I don’t think you really want to make the gun smaller but definitely removing the troop staging points and making it a remote station is a big move. Maybe x10 it’s ammo storage, add thicker armor, and a few solar arrays to assist in the recharge process, but don’t make it smaller that only hurts performance.
If we were to create something like a MAC cannon, it would be more along the lines of a "Rods from God" type idea but with magnetic assisted launch and would basically replace nukes.
As i understand it, the UNSC powers ODPs with groundside generator complexes. With the amount of energy required to fire the SMAC at .004 the speed of light, the generators would have to be massive. I could see it being more practical to generate power ground side and lasering it up then to greatly increase the size of the platform. Another reason i could see for this set up is security and/or political. The UEG had a rebel problem before the human-covenant war and IF some rebels somehow got control of a SMAC, the could use it against the planet or easily steal it unless 1. There was some sort of failsafe to keep the barrel away from the planet or 2. A way to disable the SMAC platform from the ground was available. Rebel groups had already nuked a city (the catalyst that pushed Halsey over the edge to make the spartans) so it would not be an unreasonable fear, especially with wide spread rebel infiltration or loyalties within most levels of the UEG and UNSC.
If you’re accelerating something to the fraction of the speed of light, you’re bound to create a little bit of plasma and you will indeed see a muzzle flash even in space since there’s still a hint of atmosphere up there in orbit as you mentioned.
True, I mainly meant the brilliant muzzle flash and almost tracer~esque rounds we see in game. Most likely they put them in there because they look cooler.
For an object that's supposed to protect the planet, having that object be more of a danger to the planet than whatever it is defending against is something to be avoided. Something that goes through the atmosphere regardless of its state with no resistance - like radiovaves or xrays can be used to beam the energy to a receiver on the station thus avoiding the possibility of turning the station into a nuclear asteroid in the event that something goes wrong. You would need an established no fly zone for them too, to prevent aircraft from being fried, boiled or irradiated (depending on the wavelength used by the project). For a no fly zone it helps when its stationary. That's why having the station fly all over and receive beams from multiple ground bases is impractical. The "aiming" nitpick is weird as well. Having the gun on a pivot would only reduce accuracy and structural integrity of the weapon. The crew would still experience the effects from adjusstments because there is nothing to brace the counterforce against other than a station itself. No matter how you spin it.
Not only have we already made handheld coilguns but it was pretty easy and they're readily available. As for orbital defense systems you don't really need to have an entire capacitor or Banks of chemical reactions or anyting with you. Just use the Earth's magneto sphere as a capacitor to self send a cable out from your ship. It reacts with the Earth's magneto sphere and makes the current able to the power Banks of real guns with today's technology it's completely feasible absolutely right now today.
9:32 directed laser energy transfer you would need a thermal/photon to electrical converter there would be some energy loss to atmospheric density scattering some light but a lot less than even something like the experimental superconductive graphing would have as a cable going up. it would make sense to have geostationary if you couldn't have the laser gimbal too much or you absolutely needed the thinnest path through atmosphere that the laser is going through to get the best transfer. Just don't have any ships orbit through that line because you've essentially got a directed energy weapon "cable". 11:50 I have to correct you on the station keeping height, 50 ish miles is the karman line 65 miles off the surface is the limit where you stop worrying about station keeping, source the international space station is at 60 miles up and it has to boost somewhere between once a week and once a month. You could correct the equal and opposite reaction problem with having a artificial backblast, maybe pumping coolant liquid over the coils very quickly while it fires and when that vaporizes into plasma it jets out the back of the gun? Coolant resupplies would be something required if that would be a solution, but when you look at falcon nine and the development of starship we will have efficient enough delivery systems to maintain that infrastructure. If the orbital defense platform was in geosynchronous orbit (not stationary because any shots towards the poles will make it wobble) and instead of having an on station reactor it had a reactor complex on the ground beaming lasers (maybe a radio laser if that's possible, to make the energy absorption easier) to power that platform and other platforms in the area (because why not make the stations easier to produce and have a lot of) you could use the photon pressure from multiple ground power stations cross powering the defense stations you could create a sort of orbit stabilizing force bowl. With multiple ground stations firing lasers at multiple defense platforms one could ramp up the power to a laser hitting a station in a particular direction to cancel out any drift from firing. Now I'm off to figure out if there is such thing as forcing radio waves into particles like we've done for the visible and near visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of lasers, because a laser you could just absorb with an array of hull mounted antennas would be an awesome energy transfer system in space because lack of melting any and every ship that flies through it or melting the receiver when you miss their specialized photonic thermal energy converter system. Apparently we have masers the microwave predecessor to the laser they were used for the first satellite communication and are currently atomic clocks, I couldn't find anything that could support or deny my idea of directly absorbed long wavelength masers other than the fact that constructing them currently is very complicated. So I kinda want someone from darpa to see this and start figuring out how to make a laser/maser that when shot at a ship just induces current instead of heating it up. Would be kind of interesting to equip on all of our spacecraft and just electrically insulate the outside hall from the inside so we can friendly fire before the ships go into combat as a sort of magnetic field based shielding and ramming weapon. "How is my whole ship a taser? Well you see my friend over there shooting me with very long wave length photon beams? That's pushing all the electrons on the surface of my ship into a fancy complicated dance that electrocuted your bioship and holds that plasma around mine."
The names for "Increasing in height" when firing a payload into orbit is called the apoapsis The apoapsis is the furthest point in a orbit from the body. E.G The MAC rounds apoapsis increased. Also, The mac canons are in geostationary orbit, which is well above the zone that requires regular maintenance of orbits due to atmospheric drag
Awesome video as usual! Thing i wanna point out is about powering ODP. It has nothing to do about Current or Power transfer for the gun from the ground. It has everything to do with Voltage transfer. As far as i know, also probably the most effective way, Capacitor banks are onboard of ODP. So the ground power station does not actually generate power for the gun itself. It generates the energy for capacitor banks onboard the gun. Power is then generated inside of the ODP via those charged capacitors. About why not put power station on board of ODP. This will end up as UNSC space ship. As all UNSC ships are actually the same ODP + power station (On way smaller power-level scale ofc). Everything else the ships has takes very small amount of space compared to MAC + power station. UNSC ships are all basicly ODP that have a powerstation on board and made to move. Of course way smaller in scale and power generation compared to ODP. As ODP is able to generate massive amount of kinetic energy via its large ground based power generators. In the Halo lore ODP power quality MAC's have only ever been installed on super carriers (not including Infinity atm, cos its made with Forerunner technology anyway). Those UNSC super carriers where 4+ km on lenght. While ODP is under 1.5km, and overall smaller than a UNSC Cruiser, while generating massively more amount of kinetic energy than a Cruiser. Scale of a power station is the main limitation why UNSC ships have way smaller MAC's than ODP's. Thats why ODP's do not have onboard powering stations. Be it 0.4c (retarded) or 0.04c (Installation 00 value) MAC velocity. Ground-based station is way more effective to power the capacitor banks. Very good point on why there have even people on board ODP's... Its weird. ODP's could be easily be automated via smart AI's, as every ODP needs one anyway for targeting calculations.
@@jaredhardegree8377 Yes i am aware of Covenant boarding the ODP's to disable them. But... That whole notion of action is just so dumb. UNSC frigates (Bulk of the UNSC fleet, as UNSC had 10+ frigates by nr# for every Cruiser/Carrier), as fast moving small ships, with shit-load of point defense, small caliber defense turrets. Should have been tasked to defend ODP's against boarding. One frigate has the capability of defending multiple ODP's from small boarding crafts. UNSC Frigate is not able, nor is it ment, to engage with MAC guns against Covenant capital ships. Instead ODP's serve that exact purpose (Like Drones = shoot few times and then die), which have by far the most amount of Covenant capital ship killing-power, were left alone, defend themselves via onboard UNSC Marines. (Lore writer error probably) Thats why frigates should have been tasked to defend ODP's from small boarding crafts. UNSC frigates actually outside of their mini-MAC guns do have massive amount of small caliber firepower against smaller vessels (Boarding craft in this context). With proper UNSC Frigate tasking. None of the Covenant boarding crafts should ever come close to ODP. Thats the reason why fully Automating ODP's would be the best course of action. (But Lore was written by a person, and people make mistakes so it makes sense why we have Coventant boarding course of action in Halo 2)
I think there’s a new redox battery that doesn’t need a membrane. If I remember right it’s two tanks that store energy. One tank is saltwater one is a proprietary electrolyte. Not sure if that kind of battery could advance enough to help solve some of the power issues you discussed, but it’s still intriguing.
At 1:37, you said that the super Mac around reach are inpractible. Around Reach they have 20 of these super Mac, and 1 shot kill a covenant ship, (i don't talk about the little banshee, seraph fighter, phantom or spirit, no no, more like The Truth and Reconciliation from Halo CE or maybe ship a little bigger than that. In lore human need 4 equivalent ship to destroy 1 covenant ship, and generally speaking they willnlose 1-2, plus damage on at least 1 other of the 4 ships. So yeah the super mac, needs big reactor on the grounds, but they are way more powerful than their ship, and if I remember correctly they also have more range than covenant, or their own, ships.
Power transfer from ground stations wouldn't be via cables like on earth but via microwave with a large rectenna being placed on the MAC station to recieve and convert it back into power. You do have losses. I think the theoretical maximum efficiency still loses you about 20% of the power you push to space but it still actually has a lot of advantages. You don't need to miniaturise your power generation, it's easy to maintain your reactors both for staff and logisitics, you can stick them under a mountain for comparably cheap armor, your mac stations are smaller and easier to manoeuvre (just keep the rectenna facing down), and when you aren't using your mac cannons (which is most of the time) you can tie that power straight into grid subsidising the cost of your defense platforms. Incidentally, this also explains why they're geostationary - having a static power broadcaster is much cheaper and more reliable than a mobile one and if the cannon is always in the same spot relative to the ground, you can just build it so it's pointing at the right spot.
Its all about scale I met a guy back in the high school science fair, granted it was for a very large city science fair, who built a coil gun but it fired 9mm BBs
A very interesting video, thoroughly enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the subject. I'd like to add my tuppence in. When we talk about getting a big thing moving very fast, physics does like to throw more problems at us. (Sidenote: there's an orbital warfare simulator called Children Of A Dead Earth, you can design your own railguns and coilguns and this is where I've found physics being a bitch. The equations in the sim are what is used IRL so, in theory it shouldn't be too far from reality) Coilguns are good for accelerating something large to a relatively low velocity, whereas railguns are good at getting something small moving very fast. With coilguns, when we try to get something moving fast we run into magnetic saturation of the projectile and no matter how much stronger we make the field it just won't make it go faster. The wasted energy just goes into heat in the coils. Solutions include longer barrels so we don't saturate the projectile, spread the magnetic field out; use a bigger slug, which will improve efficiency but won't get it going faster; or finding a material with a better saturation limit, which may be difficult or prohibitively expensive. With railguns, it boils down to heat and barrel erosion. Bigger slug means slug is in the barrel for longer, so more time for resistance to build heat up from the current. Try bumping the current up to increase the force, you'll increase the velocity but that'll mean more heat. One solution I've heard of but hasn't been researched much is the helical railgun. The rails twist around the barrel forming a coil. Actually this makes my head hurt a bit trying to think how this'll work. Not much research has gone into helical railguns either.
One potential way to power an orbital station from the ground could be through microwaves. More than a few orbital solar power generation proposals have the power load being transmitted to a ground installation via microwaves, so it stands to reason that the reverse should hold true.
Most spy satellites likely aren’t geostationary … if you launch your satellites in e.g. north-east direction you’ll cover the entire globe with a few satellites, and it becomes very hard for the enemy to hide from satellites that every once in a while get your secret lair in their camera range. Basically a geostationary spy sat would only be of interest for coordination work or for intercepting messages directed at close neighbor satellites.
I'd mention at 9:30 Cabezon says that some big MAC stations have ground stations. I have not read a HALO work with those but I would assume they would be using energy transmission not physical wires 100 miles long.
The whole ground stations thing isn’t just hooking up a 100,000 km extension cord up to orbit. What would happen is the electricity would be transmitted via turning it into EM radiation targeted at a receiver on the station.
I've just thought of something that halo has never thought of before. You know the orbital defense platforms? What if you place the reactor on the platform itself. Then maybe you could also give the ODP thrusters powered by the reactor to make it more mobile. You could also give it armour and shields to improve it's durability. Give it things like an FTL drive and crew accommodations for long voyages to allow it to not just be mobile, but also be capable of being deployed anywhere in the galaxy. I think I'm on to something here.
I assume you are just joking, but I would still like to point out that making defense platforms would be cheaper than an equivalently armed ship. Thus when making defenses for a system one can get some number of ships or twice or three times as many platforms. This goes for construction cost as well as ongoing costs such as maintenance and man power.
I think that as far as the changes in orbital mechanics, they would realistically have at least had a dumb AI per platform that handled accounting for such factors. Also as far as tethering a platform, we see orbital elevators so maybe they use a similar approach via the ground stations. Another alternative we might see in our world would be to have a geosynchronous platform above a solar array that would reflect sunlight to it but even that would still be pretty inefficient
Putting the orbital defense platforms I. Geosynchronous orbits means you have less gaps in your defenses. A higher orbit allows each platform to cover a larger area. It allows platforms to have interlocking sectors of fire.
ground powerstations can be a thing if your species masters super capciters and room temp super conductors and has stuff like graphene easily on tap. long distance power transmission wouldnt be an issue. Propelling shells at a portion of light speed isnt that difficult when you actually look at it. If brute force isnt working, you arent using enough of it
If I'm not mistaken in the lore the mac gun on the destroyers shoots at 4 percent the speed of light so I'm sure u could take the length of the rails and theoretical power needed and take a simi educated guess
Never mentioned firing the power source itself, something like shooting a super capacitor attached to a projectile, using the projectile power itself as it passes though the coils or rails. Doing something like that would save on weight, recharging and could enable conventional acceleration with the added benefits of electromagnetic boosting. Sorry for the comment necro.
How I understood the orbital Super MAC platforms (especially those around Reach) was that power would be transferred from ground stations to orbit by directed electromagnetic fields or huge infrared lasers. By which they would power some sort of magnetic battery or heat capacitor that would fire the round. I thought the Fall of Reach book said that no aircraft or ships are allowed to fly in the atmosphere within several kilometers above and around the ground stations since the magnetic waves or whatever would fry all electronics on-board. This is tech 500+ years in the future so of course some things might seem incomprehensible to us
Missiles are faster, can track and steering itself to target, no recoil and use less energy to operate. only downside is payload but we can use multiple missiles. that's why we don't use 356mm 410mm 460mm guns for long range engagement anymore. and HIMARS, MLRS start to get traction and fair share of use alongside 155mm.
I believe the lore on ODP’s (Fall of Reach, Ghosts of Onyx) states that ground stations are paired with individual high intensity lasers which transfer the energy by firing said lasers at the ODP’s above them, with earth having 300 ODP’s in orbit an equal number of generators had to be built on earth in each major population centre. (Cairo, malta, athens) being 3 of the named ODP’s in Halo 2 (3 / 300). The idea being the ODP’s themselves are the capacitors they don’t generate power (except to run onboard computer and mechanical systems) thats why the ODP’s can fire 1 round every 3-9 seconds. Also to jump in on ODP velocities Johnson’s quote is: “At POINT four tenths the speed of light.” As in 0.4 tenths the speed of light NOT 4 tenths the speed of light, one requires astronomically more power generation than the other.
We could relatively easily make orbital railgun stations... I mean the 'ground based power generation' is stupid, but everything else is perfectly reasonable, if ludicrously expensive.
In a comment on the ground station subject. We do need to remember that with the Fall of Harvest book and the Forward Unto Dawn web series, space elevators are a thing in the halo universe. In order for a space elevator to work in the limited shots we get of forward unto dawn, they operated via an electromagnetic lift. For the distance to reach space, the power consumption would be enormous, it might be feasible to think that they'd use that enormous power generation for a ground base to also supply the orbital platform. I remember the orbital platform in fall of harvest having an onboard power generator but also having the ability to draw power from the surface as well
That's some interesting science I'm most definitely not qualified to speak on but I'll try. Firstly is trying to understand power generation and how they produce electricity. Things like nuclear reactors or coal power use heat to boil steam to turn turbines. Now steam doesn't rise in space due to low gravity. And thermal energy is extremely inefficient in terms of how much energy is lost due to thermodynamics. Solar panels are not efficient in today's standards. But that's also due to the atmosphere, in space they can be more effective, but are high maintenance. They're fragile and any amount of space dust can effect their generation. Now space is wild with thermodynamics. Since it's dependant on if you're in the sun or not, temperature can vary wildly. From -150 degrees Celsius in the shadow of Earth to 120 degrees Celsius in the sunlight (for the ISS). As such, using space as a thermal vent can be so fluctuating that it can be dangerous. This is where we'd steer towards theoretical power generation, but I'm not qualified or smart enough to think of things like that lol. We could use the decompression forces to vent atmosphere to spin a turbine but that's super mechanical and dangerous as well. And Newtonian physics would turn the exhaust into a thrust vector that can harm the orbit
The MAC canons that were powered by ground stations were powered wirelessly, remotely powering stations does come at a percentage power loss, but it is far more impractical bringing the power source into space with the weapon. While low Earth orbit would increase the efficiency of power transfer, it also requires more power stations on the ground for coverage. The recoil of the guns would also make managing orbit very difficult since it's already close to the atmosphere, having it further out gives a chance for course correction. The most feasible long-distance wireless power transfer technology is laser power transmission, onto a high efficiency, actively cooled, photovoltaic receiver, achieving a theoretical maximum efficiency of 85%. It's the same tech we're trying to make for wirelessly powering the elevator on a space elevator tether. Wireless laser power transmission is also a good way to speed up and power spacecraft in a non-ftl universe, which also brings us back to the point of recoil. Ground based power stations give an endless "fuel" source for orbital correction, as every time the guns fire, their orbit would be altered. The action of giving power to the station would also actively keep it in orbit. In space, you can only cool radiatively, there's nothing to quickly grab and dispense of the heat, unless you actively dispense something that takes it; Heat fins for a reactor would make the station a bigger and more expensive target, with large solar arrays doing the same.
It’s in geosynchronous orbit because it’s tied to a space elevator. You don’t want to add extra strain on the tether by having it responsible for continually accelerating the orbital platform so it doesn’t get de-orbited. For a space elevator for putting payload into orbit, it can be at a lower orbit, but for a space elevator that acts as a space port or houses a sizable orbital defense platform… that’s gonna have a much heavier station on the counterweight side of the space elevator.
The problem with macs as in halo is that they in reality they would be extremely impractical in ship to ship combat. Imagine someone having their pistol glued to their torso and trying to aim. And the mac station would also need to be dotted with hundreds of thrusters to allow it to aim in the first place
I don’t know, imagine trying to close weapons range and there is a 600 ton shell being launched at you every couple minutes to 30 seconds (recharge time depends on the ship and super MACs are 3000 tons). That’s a lot of hurt if you rush into an engagement and get so close that you can’t evade its velocity (up to 4% the speed of light). I can’t do the math but it would be interesting to think at what ranges and speeds you could evade that projectile
Missiles is better, fire faster, higher velocity, can tracking and homing itself to target, no need to aim, can fire a full salvo without exposing broadside, can place anywhere and fire anywhere no traverse speed limits, light weight and use less energy to operate. imagine having a big gun but ended up get sworm to death by small missiles frigate because it's too close and too fast to track and aim and target is not worth a shell. that's why we stop using big naval guns to fight and use VLS and tubes instead.
@@MutheiM_Marz misses even in halo, do not approach 4% the speed of light, most if not all UNSC ships carry missles or rockets, they're all nukes, but a multi ton rock traveling at a fraction the speed of light can produce a large explosion then a nuke.
@@MutheiM_Marz Okay, but you can still 'shoot down' a missile, even with an unprecise wide-area explosion. Missiles themselves can't (normally) take a hit from a countering system. But a MAC round, with its massive weight and insane speed... how are you going to stop that? The best you can do is to put a smaller ship in front of it, to maybe reduce the total impact energy or knock it off course
Didn't the ground power station use microwave beams to transmit the power to the station? There are transmission losses, sure. But I am POSSITIVE that the losses justify building the heavy reactors on the ground rather than in orbit.
Honestly, we probably could, considering we have coil gun tech. The big thing there would be needing something that would handle the recoil such as thrusters or being attached to something really massive.
the main reason the navy isint using rail guns is the wear and tear on the rails. next was the range. missiles can just shoot so much further. once the material science of the rails is good then we can see them all over since they are like an upgraded gun with no explosives needed
I beleive that future railgun rails and projectiles could be coated in a layer of graphine, which is both electrically conductive and very low-friction
You don't need a physical cable tethered to the defense platform in order to generate power. The best way to do it in this scenario would be with wireless energy transmission - namely lasers. It's actually one of the ideas behind the construction of a Dyson Swarm. Build solar or heat power plants in space and use it to power powerful lasers to transmit that energy down to Earth. Simply do the reverse in this case. You'd have some issues with laser diffusion, sure, but what you want is just the thermal radiation/heat of the laser to hit a collector on the station. Large Stirling engines, piezoelectrics, what have you - convert that heat into electrical power. There you go. Wireless transmission. And, as a bonus, any laser capable of doing this would also be useful as a planet-based communication laser array to tightbeam communications to vastly distant places.
@@pdawgsterling69 As far as I know there's no artificial gravity you can turn on and off, but they've figured out some pretty tricky stuff with electromagnets. Simulating gravity in space is pretty easy; accelerate or decelerate at 1G. Alternatively you could rotate with 1G of angular momentum.
A chemical reaction that power a single shot? A firearm shell made of graphene which generates electricity when the material is physically flexed. You need the material flex to be sufficient to powering propulsion of the round.
We might be able to build the smaller Railgun platforms seen in the Expanse but without a Martian Congressional Republic to oppose there's still no point....except maybe shoot down meteors
I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I read the books, but does it specifically say that the ground stations power the MAC cannons? I always thought/remembered them as being remote link control stations they used so they wouldn’t have to worry about losing soldiers in a boarding action. It’s literally just the gun and no habitat, any maintenance is done EVA. (Also, I can’t decide if this would make them a older single use platform and the larger ones like Cairo Station are newer, multi-role platforms or vice -versa). Like I said I haven’t read the books in a while so there’s a good chance I’m talking nonsense.
I thought the largest ones were just repurposed space elevators or space elevators with macs attached to the station with the power plants also powering local cities when not in uses for planetary defense.
MAc Guns are Coil guns. I'm pretty certain defence stations in halo have reaction thrusters for firing, and the point of a station over just a gun is you can also use it as a docking station think the ISS but with a huge coil gun attached to it.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitorMACs are big Coilguns. During the post-op report of UNSC Iroquois after the initial engagement on Sigma Octanus IV it was said she completely fried the coils on her twin MACs because of how fast she fired them to take out Covvie ships. Coils. The MAC is a Coilgun. They are not railguns.
i imagine that they could be powered by ground stations, this is far enough in the future that satellite solar panels could exist and they would operate on another semi modern tech of transferring electricity via laser beams, personally i would be more concerned by the Mac cannon instantly cooking the entire crew, and i think in reality the ship ai would calculate the trajectory taking advantage of the solar system's gravity to essentially sling rounds around planets so the guns never have to full face a target IE the game interplanetary
The only issue I can see with using the slingshot method is if the enemy ships detect the incoming rounds they could doge them easily, unless the round is self correcting. I'd say that the maximum effective range of a weapon would be two to five light seconds.
@Jake Baldwin I'm pretty certain that MAC rounds are solid chunks of metal, so nothing to give off a detectable signals that a ships sensors would be able to find.
@@jamesrogers1105 I was thinking more along the lines of tracking the shot via based on the enemy ship movement and energy buildup, since they have to align the ship in a specific way to aim the gun.
We could make some rudimentary surface to orbit projectile weapons but they would be high maintenance and expensive with very little motivation to do so. It's cheaper and more effective to just launch weapons into orbit via rocket systems and use them up there, but even then, it probably wouldn't be worth the cost until someone else has weapons up there, never mind the backlash of being the first one to have purpose built weapons up there on standby.
Also I have a recommendation for you to try mass effect technology because I love the lore about all the ships and biotic stuff and I like it if you make a video on that
Honestly a railgun will come first as its so much simpler and easier, also the tests with a railgun, as i recall, never actually recaptured the energy flow which should be possible to shortent the charge time quite a bit. They also used sleaves for the railgun that peal away after leaving the barrel.
We wouldn't necessarily need any experimental weapons in order to build ODP's. Simple high-velocity cannons and missiles might be somewhat effective. The platforms would require some form of thrust in order to keep their positions in orbit, or to manoeuvre for advantage. No, we can't build space fortresses, but we could certainly build semi-autonomous defence systems in orbit.
The defense platforms could use either fission or fusion reactors and use the space debris that’s currently in orbit as projectiles. If they use fission reactors than the spent rods could be turned into projectiles. If they use fusion reactors than they could collect stellar gas and trash to convert into fuel.
you can use microwaves to send power to a station in orbit, the same can be done from space, a huge solar panel station colects power and sends it down using microwaves and it doesn't need to be very powerful, i read something about that ten year ago. as to the game the platforms around reach used ground stations about 20 that were devastation the covenant fleet the platforms around earth didn't acourding to warfleet, they had their own power source. the platforms in halo have artificial gravity, the people wouldn't be swung around.also every station has a set of trusters on the botomfiring for a few seconds to counter the recoil from the guns.
If I recall basic physics correctly, it is that all light is made of photons. They act as both waves and particles. They have energy. Toss enough of them into a concentrated beam/ray/shape and you have enough energy to do real damage. Though it probably involves some whacky quantum physics too. I’m not smart enough to comprehend such mad science.
I imagine this single use portable railgun battery and I can only imagine using it like a bomb. When your power supply is a better weapon by itself than the railgun you slot it into 🤣
The concept for beaming solar energy from a geosynchronous solar array has been floated. Large solar panels in space that shoot microwave lasers to Earth. Those microwaves are captured and transferred back to electricity. It's possible, not really considered because that would mean huge microwave lasers in space that could be used as weapons. Use that in reverse and a planet side energy station could shoot microwave lasers to the MAC platforms to charge them up.
9:20 Nikola Tesla was working on wireless transfer of power across the Atlantic over 100 years ago. If it was theoretically possible then, it's definitely possible now with the technological advancements we've seen.
Biggest issue for RnD of these weapons is need. The need for such powerful weapons and practicality of making them largely drives the effort put into them. If there is a need that could be filled with railguns, boom: funding. But these weapons unfortunately suffer a similar problem as mechs: they don't fill any current military need or raise a new advantage.
Great video! Moving power from earth to orbit is not actually that hard. We have been experimenting with it for a very long time. Essentially, there’s a power station on the ground, and all of the energy gets put into a laser. Which itself is a form of energy. You can laser from the ground to space and the orbital platform has a receiver that can accept that laser energy. It is not efficient yet. But probably the same time mac canons become viable the laser issue will most likely be solved.
I would argue that it's more an issue of heat dissipation. If the fusion plant was on the platform, it would have to dissipate the insane heat of the Gun and the reactor; while if the reactor was on the ground, it could just be bigger to make more power to overcome the transmission losses and more easily dump waste heat into the atmosphere.
You can also use microwaves, and even use massive solar panels in orbit to tight beam that power down to any point on the planet with many such structures.
Hundreds of kilometers of atmosphere would disperse the laser(It would very wasteful), it only makes sense in vacuum, Lasers still disperse, but not as much.
Two part answer to that: 1: Yes, we _could._ 2: Why _should_ we? The satellites already destroy themselves into speeding projectiles that'll destroy more satellites just fine, you're only intentionally adding more debris that'll make it harder to put another satellite up there. If you even hit one, that is.
Batterys are being better like graphene and borophene and possibly we could use a superconductor in the future, other ways is quantum battery bs (I have no clue), and with ship-based ones, we already have a mini nuclear reactor under development and results are promising and with fusion on the cusp of development, railguns are feasible if we just develop the technology and china is already close to finishing.
The reason the orbital MAC canon's work, is that their isn't any reaction pushing them back. The magnets are able to accelerate the slug without any friction.
The magnets still exert a force. By propelling the munition through magnetic fields, they experience an equal but opposite force through said magnetic field as well. It's not about friction so much as it's about equaling forces out.
There are two problem with rail or gauss guns targeting into space First if its on the surface of a planet by the time the round gets into orbit it would have slowed down massively trying to escape the planets gravity well. Second if its orbiting a planet when the weapon is fired the gun will be traveling as much backward as the round is going forward. There are two weapons that work well in space and that are missiles and energy weapons as neither one would have to much of an affect by Newton's Third Law of Action & Reaction that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction on the firing platform be that a ship, a space station, or an orbiting weapon platform.
you mentioned geosynchronous orbit for the halo rings then defined what a geostationary orbit is. a geo synchronous orbit has an object pass over the same point above the object it is orbiting every time it completes an orbit in earth's case 24 hours (rounded)
We might be saying the same thing, a geosynchrous orbit has an orbital period of 24 hours so it more or less would appear stationary from the surface, as it orbits at the same angular rate as the earth spins. A geostationary orbit is also equatorial, off plane geosynchrous orbits would make little figure 8s from the surface.
@@TheBigCabezon but isnt a geosynchronous orbit that is on the same angular plane as the rotation of the parent body geostationary then? you could argue that getting a *perfect* geostationary orbit is nearly impossible therefore making it synchronous as then it would pass over the same point on the surface of the parent body every time it completes an orbit instead of literally hovering above the same point to an observer.
From my understanding, something that has accelerated through a magnetic field that doesn’t create friction because the object is suspended by the field itself shouldn’t create recoil, correct me if I’m wrong, but there should be no recall whatsoever from something, even at the size of a Mac Cannon
There would still be an equal but opposite force on the magnetic field (think of holding two magnets against each other). The station would experience a force in the opposite direction due to the force against the coil's magnetic fields.
There is also question of "why we would need one?" It's not like we are facing a threat of alien invasion. And i don't think they would be that much useful to protecting earth against asteroids, changing trajectory would be much safer solution. We don't have one united earth "government/society" so the next question is "who will be putting in charge". And wouldn't he use it to enforce his will to the rest of the word
I'm sorry, but when MAC already stands for "Magnetic Accelerator Cannon", saying "MAC cannon" is like saying "Sahara Desert"... which literally translates to "Desert Desert"
Gauss cannons are not the same as coil guns and they are typically confused with each other. The key difference between a coil gun and Gauss cannon is that the Gauss cannon doesn't have any electricity in its use. Basically a Gauss cannon is a line of magnetic pices lined up on a slope with the projectile on one end with a weight that is typically magnetic in its self that you drop along the the path of the slope to throw your projectile at great speeds. This is the best way to describe what the difference between the launching systems are.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor I understand that however it doesn't make them correct about what they are saying and quite often it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what they are talking about.
That treaty will probably be as worthless as the paper it's printed on once major powers see a practical and cost-effective way to put potential weapons into orbit.
if we could tow asteroids into orbit. then we could use those as a base for the platforms. especially if they are dense nickel iron asteroids. some of the materials are available in the asteroid. itll be very heavy to handle recoil. Also the nickel can protect against radiation
If we could do that we just need to chug them into orbit calculating the trajectory for targeting. Way less expensive and unthinkable destruction.
@Jonathan Graveline if I'm getting what you saying. You mean to throw asteroids at ships. If so, that won't work at all. Since it would take tok long for the asteriod to reach its target.
@@cameroncashatt692 n'a straight at a target on the ground like a ballistic missile. Not against ship. You don't need to grab asteroid, put them in orbit to then build a base with canon to protect earth. Just build the canon straight in space we don't need support for it and it's not very efficaces anyway because you needed plenty of them to cover all the earth.
If it's what you want to do it's better to build shipward on the moon and in orbit close to mars so you can gather all the resources there and build mobile fleet that can move to intercept incoming treat far from earth.
It's better resources management and the farther the combat the best chance we have to react afterward. I'm a pragmatic guys. I would love to see a Dyson sphere around the sun and mining colonie on other planète with the space in-between full of space ship. And why not take a moon somwere and make a death star while we are at it. We are so far away from that. The pressing treat to human civilisation right now more than ever is ourselves.
If we can't settle the overpopulation, gaz in our atmosphere that is cooking literally all we have ever fought for and stick to using coal we are simply doom no mars project nothing. If we are lucky maybe the Asian can start the moon base soon enough maybe we can barely touch the dream of having human living on another space rock but at the rate we are going I don't think we will be there in 200 years it's gonna be so hot and violent here in 100 year it's goona be an apocalips by our standard of now. We will cling on like cockroach another 100 years at most we need to remedy that asap we should have started concretely doing thing 50 years ago but the past is the past...
Given the velocities involved we could just shot them from earths surface and the slug woudl barely slow down.
A heavy platform will decrease the effect of recoil, but the same force is still applied. The orbit is altered (a tiny bit), but to correct will still require the same amount of propellant. A heavier base is more stable but also less manoeuvrable.
My man said “back in East Germany” 😭 you sound a lot younger than we could assume from that statement lol. Makes sense why your videos are very well informed
He sounds like he’s in his late 20s
That’s only 30 some odd years ago and people still called it east till abt the 2000s so if say abt 40s
@@spencer4685 he sounds like hes in his 20s though.
East Germany is still the Eastern half of Germany.. It's just not a different country anymore.
I actually think what they meant by transferring power to orbit was some kind of tether with a large microwave or tight beam laser emitter on it, with the subsequent receiving equipment located on a large disk on the weapons platform. That's really the only way. This was written before the art department drew up the battlestations.
The issue with these kinds of emmitter/reciever system is that it's very energy innefficient.
Someone did some evonomic calculations on solar power sattelites way back, and it turned out that it was cheaper to just build a crapload of solar panels on the revcieving end instead, and skip the transmitter part, since the mass/energy ratio on the reviever wasn't going to be all that much better than solar unless you believe that frying anything that comes between the pair as an acceptable tradeoff.
@@MrAntice id hope in 500 years wede figure out a way to do it more efficiently.
@@robertharris6092 Not without breaking physics you can't.
There is no amount of magical efficiency gain that can fix the issues with beaming power around. the loss is a factor of distance, energy density of the transmision beam, and whatever matter happens to be between the emitter and reciever.
Just like internal combustion engines have a maximum allowable efficiency, so does em based energy transfer systems.
@@MrAntice hey dipshit, learn the difference between “breaking physics” and “breaking our current understanding of physics”. Relativity “broke” physics too
@@MrAntice This assumes that it is in the solar system. The power transmitters are on reach, a different solar system. It could be more efficient if the star is a red dwarf, rather than the sun. (I'm not sure if reach has a red dwarf, but we can't assume its the same as earth)
ArcFlash Labs have a few early types of Gauss Rifles that are man portable. They charge slowly and take a lot of power, while only being able to loose small projectiles, but they exist.
That’s just what’s known to the public. One or more of the major world powers probably have something more advanced.
Forgotten weapons did 2 videos on them using them in a competition setting
kentucky ballstics or demolition ranch did a video of some elctromagnetic guns...
I'm a welder and even I'm afraid to hold on to anything with enough DC current to fire a *supersonic* projectile.
I just imagine Lord Hood in the bridge of one of the defence platforms asking Master Chief what he's doing on that foreign ship, and how all the crew seem to be gone...
They're probably running around killing boarders, and probably fixing a million mechanical failures due to covenant fire.
Imagine you lose some thrusters to plasma fire and now you have to rotate the entire platform to use other thrusters to fix your orbit after every shot...
I think there is a case for having mac platforms in geosynchronous orbit over earth, mainly because you can tie the platform and its orbital elevator to one city. Hence all the different stations, like Cairo station for instance.
The MAC platforms don’t have elevators
We have a very convenient Moon:
1 no friction 2 large size and very heavy. 3 Conveniently one side faces earth. You can build whatever size of weapon you want on Moon. Enemy uses earth to hide from moon weapons? Orbital mechanics ensures that you can curve your projectiles around earth to hit the enemy. And you get to say "that's NO moon! That is Battle Station! "
12:03 So this reminds me on how railguns works in The Expanse, I think you should definitely check those out since they play such a huge role in ship to ship combat and orbital defense.
8:52 I don't remember exactly where I heard this, but I remember that the power from the surface is transported to the platforms via giant lasers(?) I don't know if that could work, but it would explain why they are on a geosynchronous orbit
It would work, it's just ridiculously innefficient. You would have to send more power up than you need because some of it will be lost to scattering within the atmosphere.
@@Keestral You could build the laser on the moon and power your platforms from there, but then they'd need to be in geosynchronous orbit with the moon.
@@Keestral microwave power transmission could work, as it can pass through atmosphere decently well
@@rishidronadula7260 at a distance that’s far enough to be in geosynchronous orbit and be able to provide enough energy to rapidly fire an ENORMOUS railgun or gauss weapon and keep the station in orbit? Maybe I’m wrong but I’m really struggling to believe that would be the optimal solution
9:00 the power is beamed up through high frequency electromagnetic waves. While they do encounter resistance, at such high frequencies it would ionize and push out the atmosphere to reduce further drag over time. This also requires geosynchronous orbit because the beams can’t be angled through the atmosphere due to their size so they’d have to go straight up.
11:00 you hit another key point as to why you should have them so far out in geosynchronous orbit. These stations are flinging these massive titanium rounds at multiple percentages of the speed of light (which makes distance in aiming less of a concern). The recoil will be massive, likely so much so as to having them in anything but geosync would be willful neglect. Also in firing the guns simultaneously fire retro rockets (I am 99% certain this is cannon) that offset the force of the round but over a greater period of time (I believe it is the same period time as it takes to reload) so that the gun is more or less at the same trajectory as the previous shot.
I don’t think you really want to make the gun smaller but definitely removing the troop staging points and making it a remote station is a big move. Maybe x10 it’s ammo storage, add thicker armor, and a few solar arrays to assist in the recharge process, but don’t make it smaller that only hurts performance.
If we were to create something like a MAC cannon, it would be more along the lines of a "Rods from God" type idea but with magnetic assisted launch and would basically replace nukes.
Or put it on the ground and use it to shoot at things in space.
Rods from God isn't that super effective when it comes to area of effect from what I recall. They're more like hyper bunker busters than city busters.
As i understand it, the UNSC powers ODPs with groundside generator complexes. With the amount of energy required to fire the SMAC at .004 the speed of light, the generators would have to be massive. I could see it being more practical to generate power ground side and lasering it up then to greatly increase the size of the platform.
Another reason i could see for this set up is security and/or political. The UEG had a rebel problem before the human-covenant war and IF some rebels somehow got control of a SMAC, the could use it against the planet or easily steal it unless 1. There was some sort of failsafe to keep the barrel away from the planet or 2. A way to disable the SMAC platform from the ground was available. Rebel groups had already nuked a city (the catalyst that pushed Halsey over the edge to make the spartans) so it would not be an unreasonable fear, especially with wide spread rebel infiltration or loyalties within most levels of the UEG and UNSC.
If you’re accelerating something to the fraction of the speed of light, you’re bound to create a little bit of plasma and you will indeed see a muzzle flash even in space since there’s still a hint of atmosphere up there in orbit as you mentioned.
True, I mainly meant the brilliant muzzle flash and almost tracer~esque rounds we see in game. Most likely they put them in there because they look cooler.
For an object that's supposed to protect the planet, having that object be more of a danger to the planet than whatever it is defending against is something to be avoided. Something that goes through the atmosphere regardless of its state with no resistance - like radiovaves or xrays can be used to beam the energy to a receiver on the station thus avoiding the possibility of turning the station into a nuclear asteroid in the event that something goes wrong.
You would need an established no fly zone for them too, to prevent aircraft from being fried, boiled or irradiated (depending on the wavelength used by the project). For a no fly zone it helps when its stationary. That's why having the station fly all over and receive beams from multiple ground bases is impractical.
The "aiming" nitpick is weird as well. Having the gun on a pivot would only reduce accuracy and structural integrity of the weapon. The crew would still experience the effects from adjusstments because there is nothing to brace the counterforce against other than a station itself. No matter how you spin it.
We had working Plasma cannons in 1992
And they were very destructive apparently.
oh, the beauty of MARAUDER, for when DARPA gets its hands on a blank check
Not only have we already made handheld coilguns but it was pretty easy and they're readily available. As for orbital defense systems you don't really need to have an entire capacitor or Banks of chemical reactions or anyting with you. Just use the Earth's magneto sphere as a capacitor to self send a cable out from your ship. It reacts with the Earth's magneto sphere and makes the current able to the power Banks of real guns with today's technology it's completely feasible absolutely right now today.
Yea nasa wants you to forget allll about that tethered sat experiment...
9:32 directed laser energy transfer you would need a thermal/photon to electrical converter there would be some energy loss to atmospheric density scattering some light but a lot less than even something like the experimental superconductive graphing would have as a cable going up. it would make sense to have geostationary if you couldn't have the laser gimbal too much or you absolutely needed the thinnest path through atmosphere that the laser is going through to get the best transfer. Just don't have any ships orbit through that line because you've essentially got a directed energy weapon "cable".
11:50 I have to correct you on the station keeping height, 50 ish miles is the karman line 65 miles off the surface is the limit where you stop worrying about station keeping, source the international space station is at 60 miles up and it has to boost somewhere between once a week and once a month. You could correct the equal and opposite reaction problem with having a artificial backblast, maybe pumping coolant liquid over the coils very quickly while it fires and when that vaporizes into plasma it jets out the back of the gun? Coolant resupplies would be something required if that would be a solution, but when you look at falcon nine and the development of starship we will have efficient enough delivery systems to maintain that infrastructure.
If the orbital defense platform was in geosynchronous orbit (not stationary because any shots towards the poles will make it wobble) and instead of having an on station reactor it had a reactor complex on the ground beaming lasers (maybe a radio laser if that's possible, to make the energy absorption easier) to power that platform and other platforms in the area (because why not make the stations easier to produce and have a lot of) you could use the photon pressure from multiple ground power stations cross powering the defense stations you could create a sort of orbit stabilizing force bowl. With multiple ground stations firing lasers at multiple defense platforms one could ramp up the power to a laser hitting a station in a particular direction to cancel out any drift from firing.
Now I'm off to figure out if there is such thing as forcing radio waves into particles like we've done for the visible and near visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of lasers, because a laser you could just absorb with an array of hull mounted antennas would be an awesome energy transfer system in space because lack of melting any and every ship that flies through it or melting the receiver when you miss their specialized photonic thermal energy converter system.
Apparently we have masers the microwave predecessor to the laser they were used for the first satellite communication and are currently atomic clocks, I couldn't find anything that could support or deny my idea of directly absorbed long wavelength masers other than the fact that constructing them currently is very complicated. So I kinda want someone from darpa to see this and start figuring out how to make a laser/maser that when shot at a ship just induces current instead of heating it up. Would be kind of interesting to equip on all of our spacecraft and just electrically insulate the outside hall from the inside so we can friendly fire before the ships go into combat as a sort of magnetic field based shielding and ramming weapon. "How is my whole ship a taser? Well you see my friend over there shooting me with very long wave length photon beams? That's pushing all the electrons on the surface of my ship into a fancy complicated dance that electrocuted your bioship and holds that plasma around mine."
The names for "Increasing in height" when firing a payload into orbit is called the apoapsis
The apoapsis is the furthest point in a orbit from the body.
E.G The MAC rounds apoapsis increased.
Also, The mac canons are in geostationary orbit, which is well above the zone that requires regular maintenance of orbits due to atmospheric drag
My answer: Yes
Should we: Yes
Why should we: *Yes*
Yes
Awesome video as usual! Thing i wanna point out is about powering ODP.
It has nothing to do about Current or Power transfer for the gun from the ground. It has everything to do with Voltage transfer. As far as i know, also probably the most effective way, Capacitor banks are onboard of ODP. So the ground power station does not actually generate power for the gun itself. It generates the energy for capacitor banks onboard the gun. Power is then generated inside of the ODP via those charged capacitors.
About why not put power station on board of ODP. This will end up as UNSC space ship. As all UNSC ships are actually the same ODP + power station (On way smaller power-level scale ofc). Everything else the ships has takes very small amount of space compared to MAC + power station. UNSC ships are all basicly ODP that have a powerstation on board and made to move.
Of course way smaller in scale and power generation compared to ODP. As ODP is able to generate massive amount of kinetic energy via its large ground based power generators.
In the Halo lore ODP power quality MAC's have only ever been installed on super carriers (not including Infinity atm, cos its made with Forerunner technology anyway). Those UNSC super carriers where 4+ km on lenght. While ODP is under 1.5km, and overall smaller than a UNSC Cruiser, while generating massively more amount of kinetic energy than a Cruiser.
Scale of a power station is the main limitation why UNSC ships have way smaller MAC's than ODP's. Thats why ODP's do not have onboard powering stations. Be it 0.4c (retarded) or 0.04c (Installation 00 value) MAC velocity. Ground-based station is way more effective to power the capacitor banks.
Very good point on why there have even people on board ODP's... Its weird. ODP's could be easily be automated via smart AI's, as every ODP needs one anyway for targeting calculations.
The Marines on board the orbital defense platforms are obviously to prevent boarding actions as seen in Halo 2, where they're introduced.
@@jaredhardegree8377 Yes i am aware of Covenant boarding the ODP's to disable them. But... That whole notion of action is just so dumb.
UNSC frigates (Bulk of the UNSC fleet, as UNSC had 10+ frigates by nr# for every Cruiser/Carrier), as fast moving small ships, with shit-load of point defense, small caliber defense turrets. Should have been tasked to defend ODP's against boarding. One frigate has the capability of defending multiple ODP's from small boarding crafts.
UNSC Frigate is not able, nor is it ment, to engage with MAC guns against Covenant capital ships. Instead ODP's serve that exact purpose (Like Drones = shoot few times and then die), which have by far the most amount of Covenant capital ship killing-power, were left alone, defend themselves via onboard UNSC Marines. (Lore writer error probably)
Thats why frigates should have been tasked to defend ODP's from small boarding crafts. UNSC frigates actually outside of their mini-MAC guns do have massive amount of small caliber firepower against smaller vessels (Boarding craft in this context).
With proper UNSC Frigate tasking. None of the Covenant boarding crafts should ever come close to ODP. Thats the reason why fully Automating ODP's would be the best course of action. (But Lore was written by a person, and people make mistakes so it makes sense why we have Coventant boarding course of action in Halo 2)
I think there’s a new redox battery that doesn’t need a membrane. If I remember right it’s two tanks that store energy. One tank is saltwater one is a proprietary electrolyte.
Not sure if that kind of battery could advance enough to help solve some of the power issues you discussed, but it’s still intriguing.
At 1:37, you said that the super Mac around reach are inpractible.
Around Reach they have 20 of these super Mac, and 1 shot kill a covenant ship, (i don't talk about the little banshee, seraph fighter, phantom or spirit, no no, more like The Truth and Reconciliation from Halo CE or maybe ship a little bigger than that.
In lore human need 4 equivalent ship to destroy 1 covenant ship, and generally speaking they willnlose 1-2, plus damage on at least 1 other of the 4 ships.
So yeah the super mac, needs big reactor on the grounds, but they are way more powerful than their ship, and if I remember correctly they also have more range than covenant, or their own, ships.
Power transfer from ground stations wouldn't be via cables like on earth but via microwave with a large rectenna being placed on the MAC station to recieve and convert it back into power.
You do have losses. I think the theoretical maximum efficiency still loses you about 20% of the power you push to space but it still actually has a lot of advantages.
You don't need to miniaturise your power generation, it's easy to maintain your reactors both for staff and logisitics, you can stick them under a mountain for comparably cheap armor, your mac stations are smaller and easier to manoeuvre (just keep the rectenna facing down), and when you aren't using your mac cannons (which is most of the time) you can tie that power straight into grid subsidising the cost of your defense platforms.
Incidentally, this also explains why they're geostationary - having a static power broadcaster is much cheaper and more reliable than a mobile one and if the cannon is always in the same spot relative to the ground, you can just build it so it's pointing at the right spot.
Its all about scale I met a guy back in the high school science fair, granted it was for a very large city science fair, who built a coil gun but it fired 9mm BBs
The size of the projectiles doesn't really matter. Only the speed
@@peger both are equally important.
A very interesting video, thoroughly enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the subject.
I'd like to add my tuppence in. When we talk about getting a big thing moving very fast, physics does like to throw more problems at us. (Sidenote: there's an orbital warfare simulator called Children Of A Dead Earth, you can design your own railguns and coilguns and this is where I've found physics being a bitch. The equations in the sim are what is used IRL so, in theory it shouldn't be too far from reality)
Coilguns are good for accelerating something large to a relatively low velocity, whereas railguns are good at getting something small moving very fast.
With coilguns, when we try to get something moving fast we run into magnetic saturation of the projectile and no matter how much stronger we make the field it just won't make it go faster. The wasted energy just goes into heat in the coils. Solutions include longer barrels so we don't saturate the projectile, spread the magnetic field out; use a bigger slug, which will improve efficiency but won't get it going faster; or finding a material with a better saturation limit, which may be difficult or prohibitively expensive.
With railguns, it boils down to heat and barrel erosion. Bigger slug means slug is in the barrel for longer, so more time for resistance to build heat up from the current. Try bumping the current up to increase the force, you'll increase the velocity but that'll mean more heat.
One solution I've heard of but hasn't been researched much is the helical railgun. The rails twist around the barrel forming a coil. Actually this makes my head hurt a bit trying to think how this'll work. Not much research has gone into helical railguns either.
One potential way to power an orbital station from the ground could be through microwaves. More than a few orbital solar power generation proposals have the power load being transmitted to a ground installation via microwaves, so it stands to reason that the reverse should hold true.
Most spy satellites likely aren’t geostationary … if you launch your satellites in e.g. north-east direction you’ll cover the entire globe with a few satellites, and it becomes very hard for the enemy to hide from satellites that every once in a while get your secret lair in their camera range. Basically a geostationary spy sat would only be of interest for coordination work or for intercepting messages directed at close neighbor satellites.
I'd mention at 9:30 Cabezon says that some big MAC stations have ground stations. I have not read a HALO work with those but I would assume they would be using energy transmission not physical wires 100 miles long.
The whole ground stations thing isn’t just hooking up a 100,000 km extension cord up to orbit. What would happen is the electricity would be transmitted via turning it into EM radiation targeted at a receiver on the station.
That’s crazy, I didn’t know that was possible. At the levels required what type of radiation would we be looking at in the field above the emitter?
I've just thought of something that halo has never thought of before. You know the orbital defense platforms? What if you place the reactor on the platform itself. Then maybe you could also give the ODP thrusters powered by the reactor to make it more mobile. You could also give it armour and shields to improve it's durability. Give it things like an FTL drive and crew accommodations for long voyages to allow it to not just be mobile, but also be capable of being deployed anywhere in the galaxy.
I think I'm on to something here.
I assume you are just joking, but I would still like to point out that making defense platforms would be cheaper than an equivalently armed ship. Thus when making defenses for a system one can get some number of ships or twice or three times as many platforms. This goes for construction cost as well as ongoing costs such as maintenance and man power.
I see you are also a man of Czech culture Chris
This was awesome! Definitely worth a sub!
Awesome, thank you!
What I love about topics like this one is its a treasure trove of nerdy contemplation.
I think that as far as the changes in orbital mechanics, they would realistically have at least had a dumb AI per platform that handled accounting for such factors.
Also as far as tethering a platform, we see orbital elevators so maybe they use a similar approach via the ground stations. Another alternative we might see in our world would be to have a geosynchronous platform above a solar array that would reflect sunlight to it but even that would still be pretty inefficient
Putting the orbital defense platforms I. Geosynchronous orbits means you have less gaps in your defenses. A higher orbit allows each platform to cover a larger area. It allows platforms to have interlocking sectors of fire.
ground powerstations can be a thing if your species masters super capciters and room temp super conductors and has stuff like graphene easily on tap. long distance power transmission wouldnt be an issue. Propelling shells at a portion of light speed isnt that difficult when you actually look at it. If brute force isnt working, you arent using enough of it
Great video! I like it when you make videos of things to see if we could make it today!
Glad you enjoy it!
If I'm not mistaken in the lore the mac gun on the destroyers shoots at 4 percent the speed of light so I'm sure u could take the length of the rails and theoretical power needed and take a simi educated guess
Never mentioned firing the power source itself, something like shooting a super capacitor attached to a projectile, using the projectile power itself as it passes though the coils or rails. Doing something like that would save on weight, recharging and could enable conventional acceleration with the added benefits of electromagnetic boosting. Sorry for the comment necro.
me, a nerd: "how 'bout a Gatling Railgun system"
How I understood the orbital Super MAC platforms (especially those around Reach) was that power would be transferred from ground stations to orbit by directed electromagnetic fields or huge infrared lasers. By which they would power some sort of magnetic battery or heat capacitor that would fire the round. I thought the Fall of Reach book said that no aircraft or ships are allowed to fly in the atmosphere within several kilometers above and around the ground stations since the magnetic waves or whatever would fry all electronics on-board. This is tech 500+ years in the future so of course some things might seem incomprehensible to us
Missiles are faster, can track and steering itself to target, no recoil and use less energy to operate. only downside is payload but we can use multiple missiles. that's why we don't use 356mm 410mm 460mm guns for long range engagement anymore. and HIMARS, MLRS start to get traction and fair share of use alongside 155mm.
I believe the lore on ODP’s (Fall of Reach, Ghosts of Onyx) states that ground stations are paired with individual high intensity lasers which transfer the energy by firing said lasers at the ODP’s above them, with earth having 300 ODP’s in orbit an equal number of generators had to be built on earth in each major population centre. (Cairo, malta, athens) being 3 of the named ODP’s in Halo 2 (3 / 300).
The idea being the ODP’s themselves are the capacitors they don’t generate power (except to run onboard computer and mechanical systems) thats why the ODP’s can fire 1 round every 3-9 seconds.
Also to jump in on ODP velocities Johnson’s quote is: “At POINT four tenths the speed of light.” As in 0.4 tenths the speed of light NOT 4 tenths the speed of light, one requires astronomically more power generation than the other.
We could relatively easily make orbital railgun stations... I mean the 'ground based power generation' is stupid, but everything else is perfectly reasonable, if ludicrously expensive.
Yes we can
Reagen Star Wars initiative
The most similar thing we could quickly make like in Halo
Space based weaponry
In a comment on the ground station subject. We do need to remember that with the Fall of Harvest book and the Forward Unto Dawn web series, space elevators are a thing in the halo universe. In order for a space elevator to work in the limited shots we get of forward unto dawn, they operated via an electromagnetic lift. For the distance to reach space, the power consumption would be enormous, it might be feasible to think that they'd use that enormous power generation for a ground base to also supply the orbital platform.
I remember the orbital platform in fall of harvest having an onboard power generator but also having the ability to draw power from the surface as well
My question is couldn’t they use the vacuum of space to help lower the energy requirements?
That's some interesting science I'm most definitely not qualified to speak on but I'll try.
Firstly is trying to understand power generation and how they produce electricity. Things like nuclear reactors or coal power use heat to boil steam to turn turbines. Now steam doesn't rise in space due to low gravity. And thermal energy is extremely inefficient in terms of how much energy is lost due to thermodynamics. Solar panels are not efficient in today's standards. But that's also due to the atmosphere, in space they can be more effective, but are high maintenance. They're fragile and any amount of space dust can effect their generation.
Now space is wild with thermodynamics. Since it's dependant on if you're in the sun or not, temperature can vary wildly. From -150 degrees Celsius in the shadow of Earth to 120 degrees Celsius in the sunlight (for the ISS). As such, using space as a thermal vent can be so fluctuating that it can be dangerous.
This is where we'd steer towards theoretical power generation, but I'm not qualified or smart enough to think of things like that lol. We could use the decompression forces to vent atmosphere to spin a turbine but that's super mechanical and dangerous as well. And Newtonian physics would turn the exhaust into a thrust vector that can harm the orbit
The MAC canons that were powered by ground stations were powered wirelessly, remotely powering stations does come at a percentage power loss, but it is far more impractical bringing the power source into space with the weapon. While low Earth orbit would increase the efficiency of power transfer, it also requires more power stations on the ground for coverage. The recoil of the guns would also make managing orbit very difficult since it's already close to the atmosphere, having it further out gives a chance for course correction.
The most feasible long-distance wireless power transfer technology is laser power transmission, onto a high efficiency, actively cooled, photovoltaic receiver, achieving a theoretical maximum efficiency of 85%. It's the same tech we're trying to make for wirelessly powering the elevator on a space elevator tether.
Wireless laser power transmission is also a good way to speed up and power spacecraft in a non-ftl universe, which also brings us back to the point of recoil. Ground based power stations give an endless "fuel" source for orbital correction, as every time the guns fire, their orbit would be altered. The action of giving power to the station would also actively keep it in orbit.
In space, you can only cool radiatively, there's nothing to quickly grab and dispense of the heat, unless you actively dispense something that takes it; Heat fins for a reactor would make the station a bigger and more expensive target, with large solar arrays doing the same.
Cool video man!
It’s in geosynchronous orbit because it’s tied to a space elevator. You don’t want to add extra strain on the tether by having it responsible for continually accelerating the orbital platform so it doesn’t get de-orbited. For a space elevator for putting payload into orbit, it can be at a lower orbit, but for a space elevator that acts as a space port or houses a sizable orbital defense platform… that’s gonna have a much heavier station on the counterweight side of the space elevator.
The problem with macs as in halo is that they in reality they would be extremely impractical in ship to ship combat. Imagine someone having their pistol glued to their torso and trying to aim. And the mac station would also need to be dotted with hundreds of thrusters to allow it to aim in the first place
I don’t know, imagine trying to close weapons range and there is a 600 ton shell being launched at you every couple minutes to 30 seconds (recharge time depends on the ship and super MACs are 3000 tons). That’s a lot of hurt if you rush into an engagement and get so close that you can’t evade its velocity (up to 4% the speed of light). I can’t do the math but it would be interesting to think at what ranges and speeds you could evade that projectile
Missiles is better, fire faster, higher velocity, can tracking and homing itself to target, no need to aim, can fire a full salvo without exposing broadside, can place anywhere and fire anywhere no traverse speed limits, light weight and use less energy to operate. imagine having a big gun but ended up get sworm to death by small missiles frigate because it's too close and too fast to track and aim and target is not worth a shell. that's why we stop using big naval guns to fight and use VLS and tubes instead.
@@MutheiM_Marz misses even in halo, do not approach 4% the speed of light, most if not all UNSC ships carry missles or rockets, they're all nukes, but a multi ton rock traveling at a fraction the speed of light can produce a large explosion then a nuke.
@@MutheiM_Marz Okay, but you can still 'shoot down' a missile, even with an unprecise wide-area explosion. Missiles themselves can't (normally) take a hit from a countering system. But a MAC round, with its massive weight and insane speed... how are you going to stop that? The best you can do is to put a smaller ship in front of it, to maybe reduce the total impact energy or knock it off course
Didn't the ground power station use microwave beams to transmit the power to the station?
There are transmission losses, sure. But I am POSSITIVE that the losses justify building the heavy reactors on the ground rather than in orbit.
Honestly, we probably could, considering we have coil gun tech. The big thing there would be needing something that would handle the recoil such as thrusters or being attached to something really massive.
the main reason the navy isint using rail guns is the wear and tear on the rails. next was the range. missiles can just shoot so much further. once the material science of the rails is good then we can see them all over since they are like an upgraded gun with no explosives needed
it's in geocync orbit because of the power source that's on the ground so it needs to be directly above that
Also, if it's orbiting the planet instead of staying in one place it would be even harder to aim and would move into and out of the engagement zone
I beleive that future railgun rails and projectiles could be coated in a layer of graphine, which is both electrically conductive and very low-friction
You don't need a physical cable tethered to the defense platform in order to generate power. The best way to do it in this scenario would be with wireless energy transmission - namely lasers. It's actually one of the ideas behind the construction of a Dyson Swarm. Build solar or heat power plants in space and use it to power powerful lasers to transmit that energy down to Earth. Simply do the reverse in this case. You'd have some issues with laser diffusion, sure, but what you want is just the thermal radiation/heat of the laser to hit a collector on the station. Large Stirling engines, piezoelectrics, what have you - convert that heat into electrical power. There you go. Wireless transmission. And, as a bonus, any laser capable of doing this would also be useful as a planet-based communication laser array to tightbeam communications to vastly distant places.
I’d like to see you make a video on if we could make artificial gravity
I think they’ve already proven that we can, it’s just not efficient for us to do it on a large scale yet
I wonder what applications we could use for artificial gravity?
@@pdawgsterling69 As far as I know there's no artificial gravity you can turn on and off, but they've figured out some pretty tricky stuff with electromagnets.
Simulating gravity in space is pretty easy; accelerate or decelerate at 1G. Alternatively you could rotate with 1G of angular momentum.
Centrifugal force. Easy.
A chemical reaction that power a single shot? A firearm shell made of graphene which generates electricity when the material is physically flexed. You need the material flex to be sufficient to powering propulsion of the round.
We might be able to build the smaller Railgun platforms seen in the Expanse but without a Martian Congressional Republic to oppose there's still no point....except maybe shoot down meteors
To transport energy from a planet to an orbiting station you could beam it up with a laser. Something using X-rays or infrared or uv rays.
I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I read the books, but does it specifically say that the ground stations power the MAC cannons? I always thought/remembered them as being remote link control stations they used so they wouldn’t have to worry about losing soldiers in a boarding action. It’s literally just the gun and no habitat, any maintenance is done EVA. (Also, I can’t decide if this would make them a older single use platform and the larger ones like Cairo Station are newer, multi-role platforms or vice -versa). Like I said I haven’t read the books in a while so there’s a good chance I’m talking nonsense.
Some of the largest ones it's said they were powered from the ground, or at least that's how I interpreted it.
Okay, thank you. Like I said it’s been a long while since I read Fall of Reach and First Strike.
I thought the largest ones were just repurposed space elevators or space elevators with macs attached to the station with the power plants also powering local cities when not in uses for planetary defense.
Yes that was very specifically why the spartans were deployed in the books.
MAc Guns are Coil guns. I'm pretty certain defence stations in halo have reaction thrusters for firing, and the point of a station over just a gun is you can also use it as a docking station think the ISS but with a huge coil gun attached to it.
I think the MAC guns in Halo are actually railguns, but that's a distinction without much of a difference.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitorMACs are big Coilguns. During the post-op report of UNSC Iroquois after the initial engagement on Sigma Octanus IV it was said she completely fried the coils on her twin MACs because of how fast she fired them to take out Covvie ships. Coils. The MAC is a Coilgun. They are not railguns.
i imagine that they could be powered by ground stations, this is far enough in the future that satellite solar panels could exist and they would operate on another semi modern tech of transferring electricity via laser beams, personally i would be more concerned by the Mac cannon instantly cooking the entire crew, and i think in reality the ship ai would calculate the trajectory taking advantage of the solar system's gravity to essentially sling rounds around planets so the guns never have to full face a target IE the game interplanetary
The only issue I can see with using the slingshot method is if the enemy ships detect the incoming rounds they could doge them easily, unless the round is self correcting.
I'd say that the maximum effective range of a weapon would be two to five light seconds.
@Jake Baldwin I'm pretty certain that MAC rounds are solid chunks of metal, so nothing to give off a detectable signals that a ships sensors would be able to find.
@@jamesrogers1105 I was thinking more along the lines of tracking the shot via based on the enemy ship movement and energy buildup, since they have to align the ship in a specific way to aim the gun.
We could make some rudimentary surface to orbit projectile weapons but they would be high maintenance and expensive with very little motivation to do so. It's cheaper and more effective to just launch weapons into orbit via rocket systems and use them up there, but even then, it probably wouldn't be worth the cost until someone else has weapons up there, never mind the backlash of being the first one to have purpose built weapons up there on standby.
Pretty sure there are international agreements about not putting weapons into orbit
Also I have a recommendation for you to try mass effect technology because I love the lore about all the ships and biotic stuff and I like it if you make a video on that
Honestly a railgun will come first as its so much simpler and easier, also the tests with a railgun, as i recall, never actually recaptured the energy flow which should be possible to shortent the charge time quite a bit. They also used sleaves for the railgun that peal away after leaving the barrel.
We wouldn't necessarily need any experimental weapons in order to build ODP's. Simple high-velocity cannons and missiles might be somewhat effective. The platforms would require some form of thrust in order to keep their positions in orbit, or to manoeuvre for advantage. No, we can't build space fortresses, but we could certainly build semi-autonomous defence systems in orbit.
I think that if we made a Coil Rifle it would be only used either by designated snipers or would be a stationary weapon emplacement like a Minigun.
The defense platforms could use either fission or fusion reactors and use the space debris that’s currently in orbit as projectiles. If they use fission reactors than the spent rods could be turned into projectiles. If they use fusion reactors than they could collect stellar gas and trash to convert into fuel.
you can use microwaves to send power to a station in orbit, the same can be done from space, a huge solar panel station colects power and sends it down using microwaves and it doesn't need to be very powerful, i read something about that ten year ago.
as to the game the platforms around reach used ground stations about 20 that were devastation the covenant fleet the platforms around earth didn't acourding to warfleet, they had their own power source.
the platforms in halo have artificial gravity, the people wouldn't be swung around.also every station has a set of trusters on the botomfiring for a few seconds to counter the recoil from the guns.
Can you do a video on forerunner weapons/hard light weapons I want to know the science behind that
If I recall basic physics correctly, it is that all light is made of photons. They act as both waves and particles. They have energy. Toss enough of them into a concentrated beam/ray/shape and you have enough energy to do real damage.
Though it probably involves some whacky quantum physics too. I’m not smart enough to comprehend such mad science.
I imagine this single use portable railgun battery and I can only imagine using it like a bomb. When your power supply is a better weapon by itself than the railgun you slot it into 🤣
We already have the beginnings of transferring power wirelessly...
it's stated in the books, that the power supply is superconductive
The concept for beaming solar energy from a geosynchronous solar array has been floated. Large solar panels in space that shoot microwave lasers to Earth. Those microwaves are captured and transferred back to electricity. It's possible, not really considered because that would mean huge microwave lasers in space that could be used as weapons.
Use that in reverse and a planet side energy station could shoot microwave lasers to the MAC platforms to charge them up.
Its always the power source... we just need our own real life ark reactor and we are good to go for sci-fi weapons and tech XD
9:20 Nikola Tesla was working on wireless transfer of power across the Atlantic over 100 years ago.
If it was theoretically possible then, it's definitely possible now with the technological advancements we've seen.
Biggest issue for RnD of these weapons is need. The need for such powerful weapons and practicality of making them largely drives the effort put into them. If there is a need that could be filled with railguns, boom: funding. But these weapons unfortunately suffer a similar problem as mechs: they don't fill any current military need or raise a new advantage.
Hope you enjoy *your* weekend Cabezon
Great video! Moving power from earth to orbit is not actually that hard. We have been experimenting with it for a very long time. Essentially, there’s a power station on the ground, and all of the energy gets put into a laser. Which itself is a form of energy. You can laser from the ground to space and the orbital platform has a receiver that can accept that laser energy. It is not efficient yet. But probably the same time mac canons become viable the laser issue will most likely be solved.
I would argue that it's more an issue of heat dissipation. If the fusion plant was on the platform, it would have to dissipate the insane heat of the Gun and the reactor; while if the reactor was on the ground, it could just be bigger to make more power to overcome the transmission losses and more easily dump waste heat into the atmosphere.
You can also use microwaves, and even use massive solar panels in orbit to tight beam that power down to any point on the planet with many such structures.
Hundreds of kilometers of atmosphere would disperse the laser(It would very wasteful), it only makes sense in vacuum, Lasers still disperse, but not as much.
Two part answer to that:
1: Yes, we _could._
2: Why _should_ we? The satellites already destroy themselves into speeding projectiles that'll destroy more satellites just fine, you're only intentionally adding more debris that'll make it harder to put another satellite up there. If you even hit one, that is.
The mammoth cannon always bugged me, it looked like it would destroy half the vehicle when it's fired from where it's placed.
Why when Hell is a bigger threat and we have them right under our feet
When i shipped out to basic, the orbital defense grid was all theory and politics....
Batterys are being better like graphene and borophene and possibly we could use a superconductor in the future, other ways is quantum battery bs (I have no clue), and with ship-based ones, we already have a mini nuclear reactor under development and results are promising and with fusion on the cusp of development, railguns are feasible if we just develop the technology and china is already close to finishing.
The reason the orbital MAC canon's work, is that their isn't any reaction pushing them back. The magnets are able to accelerate the slug without any friction.
The magnets still exert a force. By propelling the munition through magnetic fields, they experience an equal but opposite force through said magnetic field as well. It's not about friction so much as it's about equaling forces out.
@@TheBigCabezon gottcha, thanks!
There are two problem with rail or gauss guns targeting into space
First if its on the surface of a planet by the time the round gets into orbit it would have slowed down massively trying to escape the planets gravity well.
Second if its orbiting a planet when the weapon is fired the gun will be traveling as much backward as the round is going forward.
There are two weapons that work well in space and that are missiles and energy weapons as neither one would have to much of an affect by Newton's Third Law of Action & Reaction that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction on the firing platform be that a ship, a space station, or an orbiting weapon platform.
Nuclear diamond batteries are being developed that could help
Maybe for smaller one, but the same size as the one on the series will need more money and resources
you mentioned geosynchronous orbit for the halo rings then defined what a geostationary orbit is. a geo synchronous orbit has an object pass over the same point above the object it is orbiting every time it completes an orbit in earth's case 24 hours (rounded)
We might be saying the same thing, a geosynchrous orbit has an orbital period of 24 hours so it more or less would appear stationary from the surface, as it orbits at the same angular rate as the earth spins. A geostationary orbit is also equatorial, off plane geosynchrous orbits would make little figure 8s from the surface.
@@TheBigCabezon but isnt a geosynchronous orbit that is on the same angular plane as the rotation of the parent body geostationary then? you could argue that getting a *perfect* geostationary orbit is nearly impossible therefore making it synchronous as then it would pass over the same point on the surface of the parent body every time it completes an orbit instead of literally hovering above the same point to an observer.
From my understanding, something that has accelerated through a magnetic field that doesn’t create friction because the object is suspended by the field itself shouldn’t create recoil, correct me if I’m wrong, but there should be no recall whatsoever from something, even at the size of a Mac Cannon
There would still be an equal but opposite force on the magnetic field (think of holding two magnets against each other). The station would experience a force in the opposite direction due to the force against the coil's magnetic fields.
Lasers can be used to transfer power to orbit the us army is currently looking into this
There is also question of "why we would need one?" It's not like we are facing a threat of alien invasion. And i don't think they would be that much useful to protecting earth against asteroids, changing trajectory would be much safer solution.
We don't have one united earth "government/society" so the next question is "who will be putting in charge". And wouldn't he use it to enforce his will to the rest of the word
I'm sorry, but when MAC already stands for "Magnetic Accelerator Cannon", saying "MAC cannon" is like saying "Sahara Desert"... which literally translates to "Desert Desert"
Gauss cannons are not the same as coil guns and they are typically confused with each other. The key difference between a coil gun and Gauss cannon is that the Gauss cannon doesn't have any electricity in its use. Basically a Gauss cannon is a line of magnetic pices lined up on a slope with the projectile on one end with a weight that is typically magnetic in its self that you drop along the the path of the slope to throw your projectile at great speeds. This is the best way to describe what the difference between the launching systems are.
A lot of people use "Gauss gun" as a catchall term for "any magnetic accelerator"
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor I understand that however it doesn't make them correct about what they are saying and quite often it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what they are talking about.
@@jedstanaland2897 In Warhammer 40K "Gauss weapons" are vacuum cleaners that suck you up molecule by molecule. Wrap your head around that
This guy is so entertaining
Before I watch the video I'm pretty sure we already have naval railguns. I think the issue is they are way too difficult to maintain at the moment.
good topic! its interesting!
Ist ja cool. dass du gesagt hattest, dass du das letzte mal das thema in deiner DDR Schulzeit hattest ;-) hehehe welcome bro...
Glad you think so!
you can actually buy a functional coil gun rifle; it only has bb gun velocity tho
we can make the odin sati light from cod ghosts im sure we already have them in orbit
With the 1968 Space Treaty, no, as apace is strictly prohibited from being weaponized in ANY capacity.
That treaty will probably be as worthless as the paper it's printed on once major powers see a practical and cost-effective way to put potential weapons into orbit.
@@marrqi7wini54 rod of God