With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[MagnumForce]

Always fun to see the Reach get wrecked, hope we get more of that for some time and it doesnt go to shot any time soon.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Can't tell exactly what it's armed with without using active sensors...
...of which there aren't any in this galaxy...

Click to shrink...

Thank you, corrected.

 

[Neruz]

How different are the Tau in this story? Like are the ethereals mind controlling their subjects, and stuff?

Click to shrink...

Ethereal mind influencing hormones are canon, though the exact extent of the influence is debatable.

 

[Mr Zoat]

How different are the Tau in this story? Like are the ethereals mind controlling their subjects, and stuff?

Click to shrink...

Basically, if you read the novel Fire Warrior, it's like that. Other tau calm down around them and are inclined to listen to what they say, but the Ethereals believe in the Greater Good just as much as the others and don't gainsay O's in their own fields.

 

[Duke Long]

29th April 2013
13:09 GMT

I keep my environmental shield under my power armour and engage my full stealth suite the instant I appear in the Reach system. Looking around with passive sensors and empathic vision shows… There's a large space station at the LaGrange point closest to the target planet.

Click to shrink...

'Lagrange'? But that's just based on a quick search.

 

[Mr Zoat]

'Lagrange'? But that's just based on a quick search.

Click to shrink...

Thank you, corrected.

 

[Ardy]

Getting more and more worried an effigy is going to get killed deep in reach space, and they won't be able to recover his biological remains before retreating so the reach start reverse engineering vitrumite bullshit

 

[rdfox]

Ah, yes. One reason most science fiction space combat takes place at knife-fight ranges. Too far and light-speed lag becomes a factor...

Click to shrink...

Interesting trivia note: Starting back around 1990, Star Trek actually started not only lampshading this, but giving what is, frankly, a very good in-universe pair of justifications for it. Starting with the TNG Technical Manual, they explained that phasers were a speed-of-light weapon and thus limited to an effective range of one light-second (or about the distance from the Earth to the Moon), not by parallax spread of the pencil beams causing their effective power to drop off to ineffectual levels at that range, but by the fact that an enemy that's maneuvering evasively is going to be making random movements--truly random, not following a predictable pattern--at random short intervals, and if the travel time is more than about one second, even the best targeting computer with predictive algorithms won't be able to keep the beam on target, so scoring hits at ranges of more than one light second is essentially impossible. (This also explains why, ever since, phasers haven't been used while at warp speed--a lightspeed weapon is pretty useless when you're moving FTL, after all.)

Meanwhile, photon torpedoes (and, later, quantum torpedoes) are... complex, yet it still justifies knife-fight range for them. They are self-propelled, self-guided weapons that use a subspace "sustainer" engine to power and steer them; this engine isn't a full warp drive and they can't go superluminal when fired at sublight speeds, but they can maintain a slowly decaying superluminal speed when fired at warp speed. More importantly, this engine requires matter and antimatter to power it... which is drawn from the torpedo's warhead. The further the torpedo has to go (and the more it has to maneuver) to reach its target, the smaller the burst will be when the warhead is triggered, so they have a limit on their maximum effective range, too. (Sadly, it's not a consistant limit--even in-universe, it varies with the speed you're going when you fire it and the direction of travel. After all, if you're fleeing someone at Warp 9 and they're pursuing at Warp 9.2, and you fire a torpedo aft at them, all the torpedo really needs to do is drop out of warp and then make relatively small maneuvers to let the other guy plow into it at a few thousand times the speed of light, with minimal propellant usage, so the range would be drawn as an ellipsoid around the firing ship with the radius at each theta angle varying with the speed of the ship at firing, the speed of the target, and the amount of maneuvering the torpedo has to make to reach that point.) So firing them at close range not only makes hitting easier, it makes them hit harder, too.

As a trivia note, the maximum theoretical yield of a TNG-era photon torpedo warhead, based on the TNG Tech Manual's quoted reactant mass of deuterium and antideuterium, works out to about 70 megatons if the magnetic containment fields are set for the optimum mix and thus complete annihilation of the reactant mass... which is a setting that the manual notes is actually prohibited for operational use by a number of interstellar strategic arms limitations treaties. Compare this to the 57 megaton yield that the largest nuclear weapon ever fired (the Tsar Bomba) had, the 100 megaton yield it was designed for (it was fired at reduced power for a "clean" test with minimized fallout, for both environmental and propaganda purposes), and the 1,000 megaton yield of the largest nuke ever devised, the Gigaton Bomb that US designers had roughly sketched out (though they didn't complete the design to a buildable state) as a next step in "one-upping" the Soviets in the Cold War. (The Gigaton Bomb was not going to be a deliverable weapon; the mass of fission and fusion fuel required meant that it would have basically just been a one-off dick enlarger, constructed in situ for the test. Even the Tsar Bomba was only barely deliverable as a weapon, and too large to be economically viable against any target that wasn't New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The only plausible use case for a Gigaton Bomb would be in a doomsday machine of the sort described in Dr. Strangelove, with all the same negatives that the movie pointed out. This, combined with the ongoing Limited Test Ban Treaty negotiations that were going to result in a treaty that would make it impossible to actually conduct a Gigaton Bomb test and thus making it pointless to actually construct, resulted in its cancellation well before the design progressed far beyond the "back of a napkin" feasibility study phase.)