MAC/Railguns Suck [Space Engineers]

[@b.c.s.o4169]

well yeah they are stupid, why name a big gun after a burger that isnt really all that big

[@GetBrocked]

top comment.

[@catzilla9330]

Burgor

[@bluemoon1368]

Gold

[@cron1807]

Because it is a BIG MAC

[@davidmeigs2152]

Funny thought... I remember Big Mac's being larger in the 80's than the 90's, and larger in the 90's than the 00's, and so on... So, my thought here is; are they consistently shrinking or have I been steadily growing over the last forty years?

[@evandoerofthings6538]

I feel like The Expanse does a good job at portraying the use of a railgun, long range engagements are handed with torpedos, and railguns are used at much closer range.

[@Kallodus]

Such a good book and show in so many areas

[@CraigBrideau]

Yes, railguns are essentially backup weapons in the Expanse.

[@MeatyZeeg]

Same with David VanDyke's Stellar Conquest series, they use it for short range, or to shotgun blast a system while they are enroute to the system so that there is a storm of fuck leading the charge.

[@Kallodus]

@@MeatyZeeg sounds like another good series to check out

[@thatguyoverthere9634]

Weird since the rail guns don't loose power the farther they are sent so only using them for close range seems weird unless advanced targeting systems don't exist

[@alexhurd9843]

"A rod of tungsten is cheaper than a missile." The MAC cannon, much like the SPARTAN program, wasn't designed for the war we see on screen. They were both made from the point of superiority, and against rebel action. By the outbreak of the war against the Covenant, they were using what they already had, and had logistics to support. The UNSC, in its core lore, was caught with its pants down about the whole geocidal alien super threat. I wouldn't compare it to a sniper unit. I would mark it as more of an anti-material role: Cheap, destructive, easy to supply, devastating to anything insurrectionists could put together. Including other military ships, if it came to that. For how it is used throughout the halo games? Yea, they have serious scale issues on their specs and maneuvers. Although, war does make for strange uses of military equipment. There's stories of allied troops using the water cooling off their world wars era machine guns to brew tea, and of spending the time to sight in by angle and spotter, how to arch their ballistic trajectory up, and over into the far side's trenches. When all you have is a MAC cannon, well, its what you are going to shoot. And for considering the inability to accurately target MAC cannons for Halo? UNSC has a superior cyberwarfare capacity, which I'll give them a benefit of the doubt for. " I've hacked into the Covenant Battlenet. They're actually broadcasting tactical data on unencrypted channels" Halo, CE, second level as you enter the cave system, from Cortana. While Cortana certainly has main character status, and this is later on in the time line of the war itself, when it comes to ship to ship warfare: I feel like the UNSC has good odds on predicting where to, and masking the exact data of their own, targeting. Overall, I feel like MAC guns get overused throughout Halo, and that they systemically, should be a sign of the struggle and eventual overtaking in sense of scale that the various threats throughout the games represent. I would have loved to see a few instances where they fire a MAC round clean into a flood infested vessel... And it barely slows down. Punching through and through, but not killing it. Much like the sniper rifle did. Sadly, I don't think we see much fleet combat vs the flood on screen. Now in regards to greater sci fi, I feel like the archetype of "Oversized Railgun" exists under two contexts. Its something the consumer audience can easily understand. We don't need to be told the massive, person sized slug shot through space is going to do some damage. Large scale lasers? We have to see some impact results before we get a sense of scale. Crackling tesla coils? We don't know if it'll scratch the paint, or be a super weapon. Its a theatre ready weapon. Its also has good straight up, Ship Kill potential. If it hits, it hurts. To use the same examples again, Laser weaponry will cut and cut and cut, but you need to find something vital. You need to hit something, that the loss of, hurts the effectiveness of your target. Tesla coil, might find any and all weak points in the light hull, but the pressure hull? Terminology from irl submarines, light hull being the exterior shaping and armor, the pressure hull being the sensitive protection of crew and materials. Whereas the intrinsic, armor pentation of a large scale rail gun, puts good odds on causing damage across multiple systems. Over penetration, turning their systems into shrapnel, decompressing crew compartments, nicking a fuel line, any number of critical damages. Doing damage, is one thing. Doing Critical damage, is another. Yes, railguns are slow compared to lasers. Yes, railguns are sluggish, and literal slugs, compared to missiles. They should not be used as combat sniping weapons, and as the main gun, require explanation. But the real crime of sci fi, is that we don't see that explanation. That I have to write up how Halo is a story about humans with their pants down, fighting in the Aleutian islands when they trained their marines for deep deserts. I am tired of it, so there's my twenty cents.

[@Firesgone]

I'm pressing my comment sized like button.

[@ayumikuro3768]

Didn't they also use a lot of nuclear missiles in Halo? Or do I get my lore confused?

[@alexhurd9843]

@@ayumikuro3768 With appropriate doses of salt for "current lore" being a mess of contradictions between extra media sources. Be it novels, be it TV show. Generally, I default to what is seen and said in game... but largely, I've tried to blot out Halo 4 in my head and the subsequent games never held my interest as much as the classics. In space, Nuclear emissions are even easier to spot than planetside. Fun fact, for some of our first missile silos? Well photographic film is very reactive. It had to be, before the advent of digital cameras. Tourists could have a good bet spotting 'Sites of Interest' by little more than how their film would turn out. Now think about all the Stuff, dirt, concrete, lead paint, copper wires, etc etc, between the tourist and anything interesting. In space? All that stuff ain't there. It's a void. A cluttered void perhaps, but still a void. No atmosphere to disperse in. At most, your own ship... which means you are saturating yourself as a target for scanners. Now for Halo's lore directly? I'm going to point at Reach. The game, rather than any of the various Fall Of movies and books. Kat suggests recreating an 'industrial accident' instead of shoving a large enough nuke up the side port. Given that Reach was largely considered the home port of the navy, for all things refit, rearm, and relaxing on leave. Littered with ONI blacksites and industrial zones big enough to fit a Halcyon class cruiser, if it was in service? They could have gotten it. Maybe even squeeze in an extra mission to extract it. Instead, writers and characters decided to sacrifice slipstream capability, limiting further evacuation potential. Ergo, I'd see an implication of nukes of significance, not being considered standard equipment for the fleet. Why, might not nukes be in ample service, throughout the quote unqoute original Earth-Covenant war? The reason Noble team was on Reach. As I've outlined above, the SPARTAN program originates as counter insurgency. The Insurrectionists throughout the colonies, are considered to be such a threat to justify the Black Ops response. At a certain point when you are dealing with an Insurgency, as demonstrated by modern actions in the Ukrainian territory, what you supply your own soldierswith may be turned against them. Do you want to include the nuclear option in that? Are You, planning on irradiating the colony worlds? And then when the Covenant do show up, do start glassing planets, the panicked response of firing the biggest guns, the largest nukes... Barely made a dent. In war, making new logistics is too late. Building parts, to make the bits, to assemble the machine that prints your new bullets... takes time. Time that only goes further the more you need. How much do you think it takes to arm a Space Navy? In Halo 4, we see a more unified humanity. Brink of extinction, then recovery tends to do that... when the dissidents' homes are already casualties of the war. We also start seeing more nuclear devices. Notably when trying to stop the Didact, first from collecting the Composer, then from reaching Earth. In Halo 4, we also see the Infinity. As clear of a sign as any possible, that following the war the UNSC escalated production on anything to do with surviving another war. Including perhaps, the nuclear weapons we see throughout from there on. To be honest? I'd rather hear about any number of other explosive devices. There are more ways to make a blast, just slapping "super nuke" on the side of an encased football or torpedo feels its own brand of lazy.

[@ayumikuro3768]

@@alexhurd9843 Okay that's quite more than I asked for. I never played Halo, I am only vaguely familiar with the universe. So no nukes. Though I don't think emissions are that much of an issue, especially if you are in a system there is quite a lot of radiation around. Explosions in general are a weird thing in a vacuum. The damaging part is the pressure wave, which requires a medium. Which you don't really have in space. Conventional explosives might be better, since they generate their own hot gases. And throwing more hot gases at something should be better. The damage a nuke would do, would probably more be irradiation of the crew and throwing super hot fission products at the target. Maybe it could ionize the atmosphere inside the ship though, which would be really unpleasant. Or melt the hull. Though it would be more of a direct strike weapon and not really an area of effect, since the radiation would quickly dissipate. So yeah, I am not a huge fan of nukes in space either. Especially since lasers are clearly the better option for void combat. Lasers and kinetic impacters seem to be the only logical things for space warfare. Maybe self-stabilized plasma, since it would only slowly lose heat. But compared to the speed of a laser, a plasma ball or kinetic impacter sounds just not like a good idea.

[@ayumikuro3768]

@@alexhurd9843 Oh and about the accuracy, the video also seems to forget about inertia being a thing. And I don't really see a reason, why a ballistics computer shouldn't be able to take possible movements into account. It's not like a large ship (and railguns/coil guns seem to be more of a capital against capital ship weapon) can just instantly stop or change course. Not to mention how hard tracking a fast and relatively small object in the vastness of space would be. So that tungsten rod might take hours to arrive, but that doesn't mean it gets detected before impact. You would need quite a strong radar, which would also give away your position. More than any nuke would.

[@cron1807]

I completely agree. However, it is A: cool af B: moral. Enemies having a delet button is scary, and your team having a delet button gives super moral to troops

[@vadernation1233]

Yeah ngl this channel is getting on my nerves. What’s the point in victory if you’re not sick as fuck while doing so. Pure practicality is boring.

[@vedritmathias9193]

Morale Moral is wrong vs right Morale is...I suppose fighting spirit

[@lordmewthree7989]

Fires railgun "delet"

[@PrinceNewRomeo]

Morale?

[@talandar5773]

@Vedrit Mathias Wrong. You have a moral obligation to be as cool as possible in warfare or else you're a no-balls maidenless wimp

[@iain-duncan]

Heat is a way bigger issue than it is in the modern day! They are in space, and something almost every ship created ever in scifi ignores the need for radiators to dissipate heat.

[@GundamReviver]

It's one of the things I could really appreciate about the movie avatar, thst ship looked relatively well thought out.

[@slickrick8279]

In space ... where would you then dissipate the heat to from the radiator ... youd need a waste material to heat up to the point of sun surface temp ant then drop it in space to lose the heat other ways the heat wont leave your ship until its hot enough to let heat radiation get away

[@GundamReviver]

@@slickrick8279 know how a laser works? Radiate the heat off radiators as normal, but then bounce the heat radiation untill it's a straight line instead of going everywhere. Won't be perfect, won't be super efficient (probably) but could work..

[@iain-duncan]

@@slickrick8279 I am not smart enough to tell you that chief but I know that the ISS has more radiators than solar panels. Those big panels you see are mostly radiators, and that's just from heat from solar power and basic stuff. I assume the radiator is just helping to disperse the heat over a larger surface area facing outwards towards space

[@slickrick8279]

@@GundamReviver lasers are light particles that get someway fed to more power ... thats not the same as heat radiation

[@talinpeacy7222]

At 300,000 km away (about a light second) a 1 km long ship has just under a 0.0002 degree angular size. That would be like having a chain of 3 bacteria end to end about a meter in front of your sensor (the bacteria chain about 3000 nanometers long would be giving the same approximate return as the 1 km long ship sitting 300,000 km out) If we were to throw out a semi-modern naval warship as an example, the Iowa class battleship (270 meters long) is about 0.00005 degrees at 300,000. Never mind shooting at a target that far out, you'd barely be able to see them if you knew what to look for without catching false positives from random space debris and micro meteors striking or passing in front of the sensor. You'd need a massive ground based station staring at the region just to find it assuming it's doing nothing to actively obscure it's broad, if quiet, presence. Then there is the whole weapon system thing. Torpedoes would take hours to get there, needing to be the size of a small car to deliver a large enough payload to threaten a warship of that size, it doesn't matter if you send a thousand, they would be seen and likely either evaded or countered once they got close enough to pick off in the final hour of approach. Lasers trying to focus that far out without scattering into a flashlight would be little more threat than the sun already is. Annoying as it heats up the exterior a bit more, but fairly easy to disperse with cheap methods like chaff/smoke clouds or extra radiators. Whatever your weapon of choice, it's fairly easy to adapt to defeating super long range weapons in most cases so for an enemy who has likely developed counter measures exploiting the extreme precision needed to void a ship from far away, you might as well close in to a much more favorable distance and adapt your weapons for a brawl anyway and at those ranges, the MAC is supposed to basically break a ship or station in the opening volly anyway. Some of the halo books even mentioned fragmenting shredder rounds which turned the thing into a relativistic shotgun.

[@Max-ee3xw]

Something that may be worth considering is a stealth system using a slower magnetically accelerated torpedo that only fires its engines for final course correction to make identifying the torp and the location of the aggressor more difficult.

[@aurtosebaelheim5942]

From what I've remember it's virtually impossible to hide anything in space, any sort of thruster is going to be detectable from solar systems away (and bear in mind that you're using thrusters for turning as well as movement, no physics-breaking gyros in real life). Your enemy is going to know you're there and assume you're firing at them even if they can't detect the projectiles. Magnetically accelerating missiles makes sense to save on fuel though.

[@martinschano7267]

@@aurtosebaelheim5942 To be honest everything useful generates far more infrared radiation than any other object and in space where you don't have conduction or convection to get rid of all the heat generated by the simplest tasks like computing. Everything is just a bright torch.

[@GundamReviver]

@@martinschano7267 I mean, you could probably envision a way to hide that, make a 360 degree copper living around the damn thing and basically only expell radiation out fo a hole in the back, meaning no visible source will ever point at your enemy.. You will just not be able to brake. But seeing as your shooting at someone thats not much of an issue.

[@Ender240sxS13]

@@GundamReviver nope, still gonna be bright as a beacon compared to it's surroundings.

[@GundamReviver]

@@Ender240sxS13 how do you figure that exactly?

[@krispydspartan3910]

The Expanse uses its magnetically accelerated weapons according to specific rules. The ship mounted railguns fire a projectile that can near instantaneously erase a target within a 1000km bubble. Outside of that bubble, torpedoes are the optimal weapon. This rule exists because outside the 1000km the ships can quite easily dodge the railgun shot. The only time in the show that the railgun was used to hit a target outside the designated target range, the gunnery officer in question forced instead using torpedoes and the rail shot the enemy craft to fly straight into a hail of "Harmless" PDC rounds.

[@EchoNovemberDelter]

1000km? You mean 1000m?

[@krispydspartan3910]

@@EchoNovemberDelter no. In the expanse it is listed as 1000km.

[@EchoNovemberDelter]

@@krispydspartan3910 i don't want to say that in the shows it's 2km but In the shows it's 2 km Edit: at least in the Pella v roci battle, the pella keeps dodging within 2 km somehow

[@krispydspartan3910]

@@EchoNovemberDelter I have no clue where you sourced your info, but every source I checked, from the show, to the Wiki, to Spacedocks detailed video on how space combat within the show describes it as railguns engaging at 1000km, with PDC’s becoming viable at 5km

[@Daark_Karma]

@@EchoNovemberDelter it's 1000km. only 2km would be completely stupid. AND the PDC is canonically optimal at 5km

[@user-pc5sc7zi9j]

If we had point-perfect jumping preserving momentum the #1 weapon is going to be the kinetik bomb. aka "dropping out of hyperspace meters infront of your enemy going near lightspeed with a big pice of space rock strapped to your ship to slam-dunk onto the one of your enemy.

[@GetBrocked]

im not sure if that's badass, or completely lame. Probably both.

[@acetraker1988]

Star Wars the Last Jedi ruined space combat. Kinetic impactors = OP. A Chunk of metal + Ion engine x10,000 units W/ drone controls / auto targeting battering rams. Ruins most actual "fantasy" navel space concepts. Simply put the best weapon in space is nothing more than an Advanced Catapult. Yes point defence exist but when you got a relatively high mass object even travelling plausible sub-light speeds. However swam tactics will ruin you [insert naval clone ship].

[@user-pc5sc7zi9j]

@@GetBrocked Its like being shot from across the map. Badass to pull off and absolute bullshit to receive.

[@themecoptera9258]

1) if an object is traveling relativistically it doesn’t need to be heavy. Even a few dozen atoms going at 50% the speed of light would be very powerful, and in space you don’t lose as much when you make a shell smaller. 2) planetary bombardment. In our timeline several nations produced weapons entirely for shore bombardment, and we’re talking about energies that could send our civilization back to the Stone Age.

[@fabienherry6690]

Yeah disregarding a weapon entirely because "it can't hit moving target" feel like somebody saying bomb are useless cause the guy have time to get out

[@kinguKrimsn]

I kinda just think by the time you'd have the tech to make a MAC be effective in long range space combat you'd have probably already found the tech required to make something 100x more effective.

[@kevinkearney902]

But is it as cost effective? Lol

[@Tonatsi]

@@kevinkearney902 it's the military in space, relativistic speeds make it worth it

[@JohnTrustworthy]

Exactly. Let's say you have the capacitor technology to make a MAC that fires at 1% the speed of light. Why not use something that travels at 100% the speed of light, like a laser? Or if you are feeling fancy something that travels at 1000% the speed of light like a tachyon beam. MACs only make sense either as a short range nutcracker or as a siege weapon.

[@jackwalters5506]

@@JohnTrustworthy lasers probably wouldn't be very effective in combat, since they require prolonged contact on a single spot, and by there very nature a space ship would be well protected against heat, especially a ship designed for combat. Tachyon beams? That's a funny one, since, you know, they only exist in theory so assuming they can be weaponized is jumping the gun a little don't you think?

[@acouthyt2189]

@@JohnTrustworthy Most of the time, energy is imparted upon a target based on mass x velocity^2, and we're talking about sending a telephone pole-sized object near the speed of light in the vacuum of space in which there is no friction to slow it down. Only terrestrial bodies. Utilizing a cheap, long-range, relatively high mass, and high-speed projectile that can be fired within seconds of each other (with today's technology, see the US Navy and their rail gun). You'd likely to be able to fire two or more projectiles before a laser or another energy-based weapon would deal damage, and the fact there may now be a telephone pole chilling in your conventional ammo rack, which can explode. Is it that bad of an idea?

[@rus5281]

​In The Expanse, they have coined the term 'hammerlock range', that being the range at which the speed of the shot fired is too fast for the opposing ship to react. This tends to be around 1000 kilometers, for their railgun speeds. Even with such a comparatively short range with a universe that uses torch drives, Railguns are widely used because there are close quarters engagements are common, despite the massive range of missiles. Hell, they even use their point defense as direct fire weaponry, thanks to how utterly short the knife fight ranges are in said show. Here, it makes sense, as ships tend to be so mind-numbingly fast that hammerlock range can be achieved rather quickly- not necessarily relevant, but, The Expanse is an instance of railguns being potent in a reasonable manner. You did mention that the energy discharge would likely melt the ship instantaneously on something like a relativistic-speed railgun, but one has to consider the very sort of power they are throwing around in the first place. To have a torch drive, you aren't replicating the conditions of a star to throw out the back. You're actually replicating the conditions of a supernova. The raw amount of power and heat that these ships would throw out simply by turning on the engines means, either heat is ignored or they figured out how to clarketech their way out of it. I can't imagine there is much difference, set aside for the amount of time with which the energy is discharged. But, that's just for a single-shot railgun. Another thing to consider is the volley fire you mentioned earlier. Even if railguns did not scale with lasers in the sort of situation you are implying here, there's nothing saying you can't emulate the very concept of volley fire on a single ship. Rather than one massive 600 ton slug, fill your barrel with a cylinder of 6,000 10 kilogram slugs. Or 60,000 1 kilogram slugs. Have this bundle of sticks fragment halfway through the journey. You can't exactly miss if you cover literally every direction they could attempt to maneuver. The actually effective light-second laser versus the 0.02c (12000 km/s) railgun shot already implies a technological disparity. No laser is immediately effective at such a range- it's a combination of how much energy you pour into the beam and how good your lenses are. I can only imagine railguns would get better as lasers did. What boggles me is why everyone uses gigantic projectiles. One reasonably should be using something small to pour as much energy as they can into it. At which point, you get a much higher velocity with the same energy put in. Your aforementioned 600 million gigajoule railgun slug could have the same amount of kinetic energy, doing 99.2% the speed of light if it were 1 kilogram instead of 600 tons.

[@GetBrocked]

the issue with making small things go fast when talking about the speed of light is that it requires exponentially more energy the closer to C you get. So the dream of moving a dust particle the speed of light (which on paper would be quite easy) is actually impossible with our undstanding of math & physics

[@Jaydee-wd7wr]

While I agree with the sentiment, ships getting into Hammerlock range was not a common occurrence before the story, as far as I’m aware, the Donnager battle (Second battle in the story) was one of the first in history where ships got into range to actually fight with railguns and not just clip engines for boarding actions. Spacedock mention it here and as they were part of the Expanse TV team for the first season that’s about as reliable as you can get. (kzbin.info/www/bejne/j4SXp62lhtKSrtk)

[@EchoNovemberDelter]

@@Jaydee-wd7wr then why could the donnager dodge? Just wondering

[@georgeman27]

@@GetBrocked I wouldn't be so sure as to say impossible. We already accelerate protons to very close to C at Cern. Granted a proton is much smaller than a grain of dust, but the science and tech is still cutting edge. The issue is more time and length of the barrel. If you spread the energy load over half an hour, and millions of kilometers, you could accelerate the slugs to insane speed. If the future ship had a good sized particle accelerator, it could produce particle beam of much higher energy density than laser, and at some significant fraction of C. Of course that would still fail to hit anything that is deploying evasive maneuvers. Personally I cant see anything other than guided missiles to be effective at ranges more than 1 light second.

[@GetBrocked]

@@georgeman27 no it literally breaks the universe when we cross over from 99 to 100% of C. and you'll probably form a singularity. And it becomes utterly redic to accelerate anything non-sub atomic, as it requires absurd amounts of energy to even come close.

[@Nikiboo32]

from what i remember in halo missiles are normally the first things used in space engagements in halo because up until fighting the covenant missiles were adequate and the mac cannons were mostly there as a option once it was proved that the covenant had shield and the only things that could reliably overload/deplete their shields were the high yield MACs there importance was adjusted

[@falco919]

Tbf I’m skeptical of engagement distances. Firstly you have to acquire, track and lock onto a target with your targeting RADAR. RADAR can travel at the speed of light so if anything is more then 2 light seconds out (300K Kilometers roughly) you are dealing with 4 seconds of delay in the ping (cause the signal has to bounce back). Assuming your RADAR is powerful enough to detect a target with a RADAR reducing design, under evasive maneuvers, you’d struggle to lock on to a target. It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Assuming you lock on no problem (cause you have really good RADAR systems or you have deployed AWACS style aircraft); saturation attacks are less effective with distance and anything being powered by its own thrusters has a limited fuel to make adjustments. With that said, the more time a point Defense system has to analyze a threat the high it’s chances on effectively engaging it. Point defense systems are likely to be far better in space, not only cause of more advanced technology but intercepting a fast moving projectile in atmosphere is extremely difficult because the system can’t have perfect knowledge of atmospheric condition that effect how the intercepter and target will behave. Captains would have to make tough decisions regarding the likely hood of being able to hit a target. In fact, before Tommahawk missiles can be fired, the mission plan is uploaded into a computer that calculates the odds of a successful hit, if the chances are lower then 95% (or something like that) then it’s no go on the mission, because smart missiles like that are extremely expensive. Cheeper guided options exists but have limited range and maneuvering capabilities. You’d probably run out of missiles before you can get anywhere near saturating a proper naval air defense grid. Hence, why I believe engagements would be much much closer, using an array of weapons. MACs could serve as mid range anti capital ship weapons. Imo

[@whyareyoulookinghere9135]

Don’t forget about IR. Any main ship in space needs onboard power, which will come from nuclear or antimatter for a good amount of time, and those need tons of cooling. It would be like trying to find a lighthouse at night

[@falco919]

@@whyareyoulookinghere9135 IR would be terrible as a primary search arry. There is a lot of IR interference in space would leave you with a lot of blind spots, the problem IR has is that it can’t distinguish between distances of two hot sources of light. This is a massive problem even today for IR missiles that will often chase the sun or lock onto the ground in hot countries. You could hide in-front of a sun/planet and be completely invisible to IR, or use IR Blinding beacons to wash out enemy sensors, not to mention you can heavily suppress your IR signature to such a point that in the expanse of space I’m Skeptical you would even be able to find most military targets unless you could get an angle on their engines. Don’t get me wrong, I think IR has its place, I also think old school look outs/cameras will have a place. You could use long rage telescopes to get visual confirmation in case your sensors damaged/giving unclear or false readings or as a back up during general quarters to spot incoming fire the tracking RADAR might have missed. But you’d be super limited in how effective that would be, but it would be no less important than lookouts are now. Back to IR though, definitely could be used as a secondary fire control arry, shoot a really powerful IR laser at your target and have the guidance done that way, is perfectly valid. Although the above problems. It’s all swings and roundabouts really, Battlestar Galactic does a decent job of demonstrating what space combat might be like, with countermeasures an electronic warfare playing a significant role.

[@whyareyoulookinghere9135]

@@falco919 I disagree. Ships would be have huge, multi gigawatt radiators at temperatures likely past 2000k to get rid of the heat from their reactors. This is higher than the normal temperature of a jet engine exhaust. Additionally, heat seekers no longer have the problems you mentioned; you have to realize those missiles were early Cold War tech, stuff from the 50s, not from hundreds of years into the future. There isn’t much interference in space, it’s quite empty, and a large radiator will be very visible. There will likely be some radar to pick up initial sightings for the few scenarios where IR can’t work (though, even in front of the sun IR could still see a difference). Personally, I subscribe more to CoaDE’s version of space combat, minus the flares (missiles in that game are closer to 40s tech than 60s tech)

[@falco919]

@@whyareyoulookinghere9135 Under some circumstances modern IR weapons have been known to chase other heat sources. But it’s super rare. The issue is with the cameras Dynamic range, although, as processors have gotten more efficient and IR sensors more sensitive, this is increasingly less of a problem. But an unfiltered sun would washout even the best IR sensors, but who knows, perhaps by that point in time camera technology will be so good you could squeeze hundreds of stops of dynamic range out of a chip that can be put into a missile. Also unfiltered IR light in high doses can kill camera sensors, even IR ones. IR cameras are designed to work around the 1% of IR radiation that manages to pass though our atmosphere. And even that can be dangerous, now imagine staring right into a sun at (relative to space) point blank range, you would need one hell of an IR filter to stop the sensor from washing out. For example just today (I work with cinema cameras in the U.K.), on set we had to put in the strongest IR filters to protect the camera from the sun. Granted this is a visible light camera, but it’s the hardware that’s the problem and it’s all remarkably similar. This presents a paradox because you want your IR sensor to be as sensitive as possible to pick out subtle differences in heat across massive dynamic ranges, but you also have to protect it from the very thing it’s trying to detect. Perhaps in the future we will have invented ways around this problem, but currently if you point an IR camera at the sun on space, even from earths orbit, you’ll definitely do damage to the sensor. Also, you’d need to cool that reactor down to reasonable temperatures some how, or at least contain that heat to the core. Otherwise your crew would be super dead.

[@gobstomperbow3517]

Just watched this. I get the feeling like people assume mac rounds are unguided chucks of mass. The US army has been experimenting with guided 155mm excalibur rounds for years. The issue with guided artillery is making a tough enough guidance package small enough for artillery. Bit we have had proximity fuses since the 1940s. Mac's are large. And all you need is a small portion of the rounds to be magnetic so the coils could work on them. Say 10%. Use 5% of the round for guidance, and you can create whatever you want to come out. Like say a canister round, once it gets to within 50km of a target, it breaks apart and peppers a 5km large area with thousands of 100lb HE bomblets that overwhelm shields, fighters, point defense, and sensors. Other rounds can be used to. Like AP, thermobaric, HESH, cluster munitions, or MIRV.

[@delayed_control]

Replace them with ship-length clang cannons (aka piston jolt cannons) and suddenly they very much matter, they're much faster and more powerful than any dedicated weapon blocks you could use, the ability to break speed limit being the biggest thing.

[@boad6484]

but this video is more about the intirety of sci-fi. not just SE since I dont see halo for example having jolt guns XD thoug I do get your point about it being effective in SE since the SE universe itself does not make sense (2km weapon range engagements and an speedlimit)

[@Zankaroo]

Well bring SE back into it, I'm just gonna ignore your clang gun that will rip your ship apart and mod a weapon to have hit scan and 50x the dmg of the currently highest dmg weapon on the workshop.

[@proph7543]

The Halo MACs fire absurdly large projectiles, the infinity's rounds weigh thousands of tons. If they used significantly smaller projectiles they could fire significantly faster shells, although magnetic saturation caps this off.

[@GetBrocked]

you also have issues with firing something like say; a rice particle, with the same energy. As you approach the speed of light, it takes exponentially more energy, such that it's believed you'll basically start a singularity as you try to pass 99%

[@BlackRabbit223]

Fire the same mass just launch more projectiles in a spread like a shotgun, that way you can throw so many projectiles that it is impossible to dodge them all. Be effective defensively against missiles/torpedos too.

[@hypothalapotamus5293]

@@GetBrocked The Lorentz factor is gamma= 1/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2). v/c=0.04, gamma = 1.0008 --> Special relativity isn't noticeable to a normal person (lorentz factor barely deviates from one). v/c=0.5, gamma = 1.15 --> Something funny is happening. v/c=0.99, gamma = 7 --> It's getting very difficult to make particle go faster. v/c=0.999, gamma = 22 --> !!!! My point is that 4% of the speed of light is still in a regime where intuition from Newtonian physics is a reasonably good predictor.

[@GetBrocked]

@@hypothalapotamus5293 isn't that what I said above? "as you try to pass 99%" Also word Lortentz gives me math ptsd. So many nights doing lortentz transformations

[@hypothalapotamus5293]

@@GetBrocked Within the context of your comment, yes. Within the Broader scope of the video, it's debatable. I think that the commenter makes a pretty good point that if they're launching massive projectiles at 4% of the speed of light, they should be able to launch a smaller projectile much faster. If the engagement is occurring at Earth-moon distances, a 0.5 c projectile would take 2.5 seconds to hit, which is probably too fast for a big boat to dodge. Beyond Earth-moon distances and at interplanet scales, there is some question if they could actually detect a sufficiently stealthy enemy.

[@CrescentPHI]

The fact that tons of sci-fi universes have railguns and such be spinal or otherwise fixed weapons is another one of those issues. Smaller ships that could actually turn fast enough likely won't have the power generation for it. And large ships that do have the power generation will take ages to get on target. It's another one of those things that make the Expanse so good: fixed railguns are mounted on small ships that can turn on a dime, but more powerful ones are turret mounted on larger ships.

[@rommdan2716]

Gravity tech can solve that.

[@lfskyden]

That makes me think about the main gun of the SDF-01 Macross(of the Anime Macross) its main gun, is pretty much like a MAC, slow, takes forever to charge, to reload, and requires the Whole ship to literally transform to fire, and then you ask "How they Fire it???" They Fire it, after pretty much using a crapload of smaller ships (the Veritechs) to deal with the faster ships, and pretty much fire it like a naval cannon, aiming where they Believe the Enemy will be, not where it is, using smaller guns to force the enemy ship into that direction

[@massimocole9689]

At longer ranges you don't need to turn as fast to track a ship. If your target is 1000 km away turning by 1 degree changes you aim by 17 kilometers.

[@Darius-scifieart]

I see a big problem with this videos logic regarding engagement ranges being as far as 1 lunar distance or even one AU This video correctly notes that at that distance a railgun projectile would take several hours to arrive. But the idea that a missle would work better at these ranges is just as absurd. The Apollo rockets took 3 days to reach the moon. Even a tenth of that is far too long to be viable. In space every course correction requires propellant. Unlike the missile, the target ships engines would inevitably be far larger and therefore more efficient. With a far higher specific impulse and far more fuel to work with and therefore more Delta V. Even if your sci-fi universe has some BS that allows for infinite fuel, that tech likely could not be miniaturized. Or would be far too expensive to waste on a missle. Even if both were tracking each other constantly. The ship being targeted can change its orbit to a far greater degree than the missle and could rather easily put itself on a trajectory the missle can't reach by accelerating in any direction perpendicular to the missiles flight path. In reality space battles would probably be fought in LEO and would work more like jousting. Ships would close in on each other on different orbits intercepting each other briefly at thousands of meters per second. Using missles, or even mines, then guns. Fighting for a few minutes while their weapons are in range before disappearing over the horizon. Meeting again 90 minutes later

[@matthiuskoenig3378]

there is a japanese sci-fi series of books which describes space combat as similar to jousting like you have described. Banner of the Stars if you are familiar with it.

[@darkdragonsoul99]

The benefit of a hyper velocity impactor is it doesn't need to be very big so it's hard to track same can be said about missiles atleast when it come to tracking them in space. Hell if they are traveling on momentum alone you probably wouldn't know they were coming until the engines ignite. The real fight when it comes to space is entirely based on the sensors if you miss something being fired chances are by the time you notice it coming it's already too late.

[@dabs4270]

even if the ship has 100x more fuel than a missile that means it can only dodge 100 missiles, after that all other missiles would be able to reach it also if you have a super efficient fuel source the limiting problem might be acceleration instead of fuel reserves, and a missile would likely be able to accelerate far faster faster than a ship with fragile humans inside this same principle actually applies currently to air-to-air missiles, it has less fuel than a fighter jet but can pull a much higher acceleration so if the fighter is close enough the missile has a high chance of catching up and hitting it

[@Darius-scifieart]

@@matthiuskoenig3378 thanks for the recommendedation. I actually checked out banner/ crest of the stars.

[@Darius-scifieart]

@@dabs4270 The first line of your replydoesn't really make any sense to me. The quantity of fuel has nothing to do with the quantity of missiles to the ship can evade. My point is that. With chemical rockets especially in vacuum. efficiency, and range, rises with the size of the rocket. This is for many many reasons. Larger rocket bell nozzles are simply more efficient in vacuum. But even more important than that is the fuel tank. Larger tanks can carry a greater mass of fuel relative to the empty weight of the tank. That's just the square cube law at work. If you double the length of a fuel tank. The surface area is squared while the volume is cubed. Thus power to weight ratio is improved the larger the rocket is. So it does not matter therefore how many small missiles you've launched. If none of them has the required Delta V to intercept none of them will. Once we're talking about truly infinite fuel. Then yes interception is possible. But by that point we're talking about magic. Yes it is true that modern day supermaneuverable fighter aircraft can turn at lethal gs. But if we're talking about space, and the kinds of distances that take literal days to travel. Like traveling between the Earth and the Moon. There simply is no way to maintain a lethal level of acceleration for hours or days at a time with current tech

[@hughtonne1775]

The concept of Spinal mounted weapons, yeah that's a problem. I'm alway's bothered on why we aren't lobbing tiny Blackholes at the Covenant, or reviving up the Shaw-Fugikowa Drive to use as a Death Star Laser. Or something like a DovenBazil from Star Wars Yuzon Vong for defense. We have options

[@GetBrocked]

also why are we so afraid of using nukes? Like if the MAC 1/2 punch works, why not a nuke 1,2,3,4,5,6 punch? Nukes are cheap relatively speaking. And pack way more energy if we want. I think the glassing of planets will make us get over any fear/stigma of nukes

[@cron1807]

@@GetBrocked because radiation can be very bad when you are in a place already full of radiation. Just use the dakka technique. Bullets everywhere.

[@acetraker1988]

@@GetBrocked Also don't nukes make EMPs. What is an issue for your own ship... I not big on real life EMP shielding, if it exists or even if it could protect multiple nukes. Also radiation is also bad vs your own crew. To use nukes you have to account for friendly fire...

[@CATASTEROID934]

@@GetBrocked Nuclear warheads just don't behave the same in a vacuum as they do in an atmosphere, and we as a collective culture are only familiar with the representation of these weapons in an atmosphere where there's gas to conduct a blast wave. Children of a dead earth, a very hard science fiction game, depicts nuclear weapons in the form of strictly implosion-type pure fission or fusion boosted warheads fairly accurately and you have to detonate them almost touching the target to deliver a sufficient amount of energy in the form of EM radiation of various wavelengths to heat and ablate away whatever armour a target has and damage the components. They're deeply underwhelming, especially when a big laser or kinetic weapon can damage them into non-functionality before they even reach the target. It's especially hard when you have strict Delta V limits and have to perform unfavourable intercepts where the missiles delivering the payload might just squirt away all their propellant trying to correct for a target that's chosen to list gently to the left.

[@GetBrocked]

@@CATASTEROID934 The DoD has done a lot of research on nukes in space. They're absolutely viable. The energy has to go somewhere; and if you impact a object, the effects will be devastating. Especially considering how small the weapon will be. You're right without a medium the range of the nuke will be smaller. But considering we're comparing it to a point impact of a projectile, that hardly matters.

[@cutecitty6114]

For the problem of low fire rate, you could theoretically use multiple capacitors so that while a capacitor is recharging other capacitors can be used to fire the MAC

[@whyareyoulookinghere9135]

Wouldn’t do much though, the firing times for a railgun/coilgun is close to or less than 1 second, having multiple capacitors would just slow things down as you couldn’t fit as many reactors

[@thepaperbagmask]

The spirit of fire could fire in quick succession by just putting more mac cannons lol

[@acetraker1988]

Change the context: while macs suck vs Ship2Ship. Couldn't they just be LR Siege Weapons. You have a large static target. hypothetical Moon Base/ Space Colony. An MACs are used to snipe the resource sectors, without getting in combat range. As your MAC ship can fire, the move away and go run and hide... the metal slug is going to hit somewhen later. SO speed to distance thing is not that big desire.

[@GetBrocked]

yeah I mentioned that. They're ideal for that

[@agentoranj5858]

You could just as easily push a rock towards it, there are usually plenty of those just floating around waiting for somebody to push them.

[@refoliation]

@@agentoranj5858 This but I don't think you can do it on such short notice as a railgun. But the time spent accelerating said rock might make a good intimidation display for your target to witness and then surrender. Actually I see any space naval combat that might arise being avoided by the party that sees it coming and knows it is inferior in the engagement. Essentially without any kind of static assets to protect I would guess that most would-be battle losers will anticipate their hypothetical loss and just decide to GTFO. Not unlike naval combat post radar - mostly a backstop threat that gives stakes to the endless system-prodding ballet that surface ships are used for today. Of course there will be the occasional "test" of the combat calculus (eg. a battle) but I would bet that GENERALLY, the space combat fights that will happen will be those where the outcome could not be easily predicted and BOTH forces chose to stay and die -pretty rare.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@GetBrocked that's actually for what the US Navy is researching them

[@darth_dan8886]

"Capacitors generally suck for long term power storage" - Well yes and no. Most types of capacitors do leak charge tens of times faster than batteries, but it's still takes many hours. And I'm not even going to mention supercaps... "Are also dangerous for ships in combat" - where is this even coming from? Unlike batteries, some types of which have been known to explode, a capacitor is just two plates of metal separated by a dielectric... Safest stuff ever. (Yes, I know that some classes of caps can "burst" into clouds of smoke, but these could be avoided in a space application, not to mention that venting some gas isn't nearly as big of a problem as, I don't know, _your main gun unable to fire anymore._

[@acanadianderg4035]

What about rail guns in The Expanse? The Expanse is by far the most realistic out of all sci fi series.

[@GetBrocked]

mentioned that in the description, yeah on a non maneuvering orbital target it makes sense

[@mrchallanged7118]

They have quite a few different examples of stations to object, station to ship, and ship to ship encounters that show a lot of the concerns you bring up. In the last season there is even a ship to ship encounter that shows active evasion of rail gun rounds. I think it might be a cool thing for you to look into as a follow up.

[@badgerwildgaming6908]

@@GetBrocked first battle with the donager showed the effectiveness of macs on small vs big ships. In a Mac fight agilitymakes more sense but then we're back at season 1 of wastland.

[@proph7543]

Why don't they use lasers more often?

[@acanadianderg4035]

@@proph7543 Because lasers aren't that good when ships are that far away. Not to mention lasers need lots of power which means big reactor, big radiators, big ship, easy target.

[@aurtosebaelheim5942]

It's highly dependant on the defensive measures present in the setting in question. If point defence/active protection is more than enough to nullify an equivalent volume of missiles then combat ranges will shrink to accommodate lasers. If lasers are too wimpy to be impactful then combat ranges will shrink once again to accommodate magnetic weaponry. This is basically what happened in Star Wars IIRC (legends canon, I know nothing about new-canon). Blaster weapons are absurdly powerful - the Darth Bane books mention a pistol capable of putting a dinnerplate-sized hole in a man and the Clone Trooper rifles also functioned as rocket launchers, yet we see people survive blaster shots because armour technology has kept pace. Lasers, missiles and kinetic weapons would have a much longer range than turbo'lasers'/capital ship blaster weapons but they just wouldn't do anything (or would be so space-inefficient that the advantages aren't worth it), thus ships fight in melee range.

[@classicfellow1059]

We have had to technology since the 80’s that could propel a spacecraft to 8% the speed of light, so I wouldn’t say it’s too unrealistic to have a ship 500 years in the future to do something similar. (Nuclear Salt Water Rocket) - if your interested

[@GetBrocked]

eh sorta? I mean you could get a conventional rocket to a fraction of the speed of light? the issue is how long it takes you. and that and other tech take a *really* long time to do so.

[@iain-duncan]

This is a very reductionist take on the idea. We can get to a percentage of the speed of light only over a great amount of time in a directly straight line, as force is generated from acceleration so you have to slowly build it up. Also turning, which is also acceleration, would instantly obliterate the craft.

[@classicfellow1059]

@@iain-duncan alot of these fleet combat hypotheses are reductionist, orbital mechanics is extremely complex, a ship doesn't simply fly towards a planet if it wants to get closer to it for example, it has to slow down its speed within the orbit to get closer, which is a fact that is always overlooked, (point opposite of its velocity when in orbit and attempted to slow down). Which also means that depending on where the combat takes place, one side can have an extremely unfair advantage, for both escaping and attacking. This means that fleet combate around a planet at increasingly long distances would be more and more complex and unpredictable, with ai certainly having to be in control of all the weapons as the projectiles would be affected by the planets gravity. Furthermore depending on the positions arohnd the planet one side would require more speed to hit a target, or they quite literally would have to shoot backwards to hit their target infront of them at long distance between the moon and earth for example.

[@iain-duncan]

@@classicfellow1059 very true yeah, it's definitely worth remembering that at least most of us are not at all specialized in physics enough to really make accurate claims about this. It's really all conjecture that could completely change with 10 years of technological development, or not change for the next 200

[@funtimewithfalco]

Do you know Mac is just the acronym for magnetic accelerated canon so I figured out that if you had a super magnetic accelerated canon that just means the acronym went from Mac to smac

[@maxjames8422]

Also Mac canon are locked weapons meaning where your ship is pointed is where Mac will head. Making it easy to move out of the way

[@MaticTheProto]

Unless your ship instead has the ability to rapidly produce guided missiles, in which case the enemy should probably consider praying

[@Gustav_Kuriga]

Not if the shell is guided post-firing.

[@dwaiquicge5681]

Oke point in favour of long ranges with point jumps, if you have a range advantage in some form then point jumping to maintain that advantage or even to provide that advantage by use defensively (hard for a missile to track through a point jump, let alone anything unguided)

[@purpledragon2508]

Another note on point jumping: if point jumping is a thing, that means you could just point jump a nuke to your enemy’s doorstep, instead of shooting them

[@K3rmit94]

*infinity* "I have a mac!!!!" *covenant super ship* "OK and?" *infinity* "......."

[@GetBrocked]

sorta lucky that the plasma torps in halo are so inconstant

[@K3rmit94]

@@GetBrocked and then had to open parts of their shields to fire as well.... if they were able to fire through their own shields.... infinity would have died

[@iain-duncan]

The infinity easily outclasses any covenant ship fielded, this isn't a good comparison at all. Plus, it never faced a "covenant super ship" either way.

[@K3rmit94]

@@iain-duncan *looks at that one mission when it legit rammed a covenant ship out of jump*

[@iain-duncan]

@@K3rmit94 I wouldn't call a CSS a super shop but its definitely very large. Bigger than anything the humans fielded before. The scene really did set the tone XD. I wish we got a longer cinematic of it in battle in Infinite

[@antilarge7860]

This guy has never read a single halo book and it shows. Good thing the internet gives everyone a voice to make videos about them!

[@EvilTwinn]

One thing that I think undermines your argument is the assertion that a MAC-style shot cannot be guided. Even modern railguns are planned to have guided rounds.

[@awesomefatBruceLee]

3:38 -(Looks at the Chandelier with its shells that split open into cruise missiles) Estovakia: "well, we can't all have nice things"

[@tomaspabon2484]

A thing people dont seem to mention enough is just how the hell do you bleed heat off of the ship? In the vaccumn of space, two out the three methods of heat transfer are kaput. Keeping a huge bank of magnets and capacitors supercooled is going to net you a lot of heat in the system. I imagine at that point the biggest danger to the ship is it cooking itself via its systems.

[@georgethompson1460]

Massive thermal radiators to radiate waste heat as IR energy. This is already needed for something like the ISS so anything that uses lots of power (like a drive) will need very large raidators.

[@tomaspabon2484]

@@georgethompson1460 Yeah, but the ISS is kinda optimized for minimal heat production and its banks are still huge. Mounting a huge, capacitor-powered, linear accelerator to a ship is going to require absolutely GIGANTIC radiators. Impractically large ones, really.

[@PyroMancer2k]

The issue with chemical propelled weapons isn't that eventually if you add to much it blows you up. The problem is the physics of chemical reactions. Regardless of how much you pack into the barrel the projectile speed is limited by the speed at which the chemical reaction expands. Thus putting in more propellant won't get you a faster projectile it will only allow you to fire larger rounds. When it comes to Nukes in space I don't think they will see much use, not because of Taboo like on Earth but instead because they are not every effective. What makes Nukes so devastating is the pressure wave they create in the air. In space their is no air and the result basically just a bit blast of radiation that is not likely to do much against an armored target. Heck nukes are so ineffective at actually damaging ships scientist have given serious consideration to using them to simply PUSH ships with designs like the Orion drive which basically drops Nukes out of the back of the ship and then rides the blast to increase the ship speed. Right now most of our stuff in space is like tissue paper where it can't take much of a hit. In the future we are likely to have ships with much better armor, you mention how they need to attach shaped charges to projectiles to penetrate curtain types of armor already. And you talk about how slow MAC travel time is yet it's a lot faster than conventional weapons or missiles. With enough point defense you could shoot down those missiles with that huge lead time. You mention that they won't slug it out like in Star Wars yet later mention they will launch fighters. If a MAC takes 30 seconds to cover that distance what kind of travel time is a Fighter gonna take? And won't that fighter be attacking it's target at "near point blank range" just like they do in Star Wars? Also won't the enemy have fighters of their own? Personally this sort of combat has me thinking the Wing Commander series where it was more carrier vs carrier style combat as the main ship tried to stay hidden and sent fighters out to engage in attacks. But even so smaller scale MAC on fighters to penetrate hulls on large ships or shoot down enemy fighters. When it comes to missiles they are another item which has its use clouded by our perception of their function on a planet with air. Missiles use fins on the side to help steer them to their target. In space they can't do this, any change in direction will require a LOT more fuel than the missiles on Earth do when tracking a target. This means that they will either need to be fired close to their target or need a lot of fuel. Also they will likely be easier to shoot down because unless they are wasting a lot of fuel to engage in evasive action they will be mostly going straight. Also you assume that Ship to Ship will be the only type of combat. If you are attacking a Space Station which can't dodge easily or a Base located on a Planet/Moon then having a high powered MAC could be a great weapon to out range their conventional missiles, fighters, and etc. But the biggest reason I think your wrong is they are already building MAC weapons right now. They wouldn't be doing that if they didn't have some role that traditional weapons can't fill. So claiming that won't have them in the future and instead revert back to more conventional weapons seems a bit off. I mean sure some Sci-Fi universes completely misrepresent them because they are not written by scientist. And using a game like Stellaris which is not meant to be at scale, I mean heck you have starbases and ship that are bigger than some moons and planets. It's like complaining the Tanks in the Civilizations games are bigger than cities. It's just petty and using a strawman to highlight your argument.

[@citizensoldier4778]

I enjoyed the video, but I would generally disagree that "MACs" or other kinetic energy weapons would "suck" in space. MACs would not be inaccurate, Space doesn't tend to have obstacles like oceans do (horizon, storms, etc) and we can expect fire control systems to continue to improve as they have since WWII, if a sensor set can find a ship, and isn't jammed you can expect a kinetic weapon to generally be on target we do this all the time with current technology, we're just launching satellites and probes not kinetic weapons. "MACs are too slow" relative to what? everything in space is "slow" and the distances are massive, however this is not an unbounded problem. Lasers, the only currently practical energy weapon, lose focus over distance which limits their range. Kinetic weapons have effectively unlimited range, but can be evaded. Missiles are guided, but the slowest of all weapons, the longer they fly the more likely they are to be detected, intercepted, and destroyed. One could argue that if ships are so fast there will be ships, or drones, using that speed to get within the effective range for kinetic weapons. They would carry just enough ablative armor to resist lasers going in, carry just enough point defense or ECM to evade the missiles and use their kinetic weapons (the MAC/railgun) at point blank range to destroy the target before their defenses fail. Swarm attacks may even count on much of the swarm being destroyed because you only need a few hits with something like a MAC to utterly destroy a target. The Expanse does a pretty good job of showing how things like Railguns (MAC equivalent) and guided weapons would probably exist in distinct, but relevant, niches. In modern times, it's why stealth jets still carry guns. Furthermore, current magnetic accelerators demonstrate that in the future no practical amount of armor will be capable of defending from kinetic weaponry, which means that compared to lasers and missiles if a MAC hits the battle generally ends. "Movement in space is 3D" This is correct, but it is *not* unlimited. fiction generally does a terrible job of describing space battles because to do so effectively relies on a fairly involved understanding of orbital mechanics. In reality even with the ability to thrust as hard and as long as you want in any direction doing so has a fair chance of literally ripping your ship apart from the stress. Movement in space is actually somewhat predictable and limited, and the more "realistic" the universe the more true that becomes. "Running the numbers on halo battles" If FTL exists in a setting, none of the numbers work, that doesn't invalidate the MAC, it shows that writers have to compromise and that writers in general, are not aerospace engineers (I am one) and have a poor grasp on the massive scale of space. for halo in particular the UNSC ships are *tiny* Keyes's ship in the battle you cite is a halberd-class destroyer, it's about 500m long and masses under 2 million metric tons. the smallest a Cov destroyer tends to be closer to 1,500m long and mass just under 100 million metric tons. One might argue the UNSC MACs punch up rather well but it's also not a setting where we have enough information to really "run the numbers" most of the analysis I've read has to make a ton of assumptions just to get the starting values needed.

[@juladrake9890]

I don't think he disagrees with you, he specifically called out macs as point defense or close combat weapons, this is more about the Railgun as the main gun on a capital ship, that is intended to shoot over a relatively big distance, not about the general case of the tech of magnetic exalerators.

[@nomms]

You need to change your velocity by a tiny amount to dodge a kinetic weapon shot at you from 100,000km. It's why balistics are irrelevant in space beyond point defense. Hell even modern navies are largely moving to a missle based arsenal, and away from kinetic weapons. A missle can be shot out of a cannon, use a booster, or both have a smaller size and heat signature, then accelerate at a target when close. Guided weaponery is the only viable weaponery when engaging over large distances. This is doubley true when with even modern missles we can have payloads deliver many times the energy on target than anything kinetic could while simultaneously having signifigantly less mass.

[@egoalter1276]

Missiles are very slow, and will get eaten by bd before getting within range. Lasers suffer from beam diffraction, and arnt prectical beyond a few thousand km. Meanwhile the only thing limiting kinetic weaponry is availible energy input. Projectile mass can be decrease to favour velocity, railgun circuits can be closed through ppasme rails eliminating friction, coilgun projectiles can be magnetically suspended. In reality the only question that remains is how heavy a projectile can you accelerate to 99%c in your ships length, and still shot a hundred of them.a second. Currently we do this with single molecules in the various particle accelerator rings, but there is nothing stopping us from scaling it up, or sacrificing some velocity to get macroscopic projectiles.

[@Cyberbro665]

Yeah irc UNSC sensor tech is ridiculous, they can track a warthog sized object that's like ten light minutes away with ease. The sensor tech makes the MAC's viable for hitting moving targets at far distances.

[@egoalter1276]

@@Cyberbro665 You dont need ridiculous sensor tech for that. We can do that now.

[@Spaceman-on9cg]

The Pillar of Autumn could fire 3 MAC rounds without recharge and in rapid succession if needed. It could penetrate covenant vessels well above its weight class in a single volley.

[@rebaav]

I enjoyed the Honor Harrington universe portrayal of space combat, gravitic lances, gravity shields, nuke pumped x-ray beam torpedoe warheads, Grasers, when tech has advanced such that space itself becomes malleable then combat is competitive reality origami. I look forward to the next vid in this series. :)

[@sethgilcrist8088]

You forgot to mention the missiles are all small gravity drives running at what 100 G five hundred g. The impeller drive is fucking nuts and I love it. They really thought it out. And fuck grav lances I remember the Mess they made out of her first ship

[@purpledragon2508]

I feel like the usefulness of a Mac would be more suited for bombardment rather than active battle. For things with predictable trajectories, like knocking out stations or ground facilities. In that role, it would be a very economical tool for that, and it would make sense to lug one or two around in a fleet for that purpose

[@davee902]

i had the same thought: a siege weapon rather than for maneuvering combat

[@azulaspencer]

potentially a little bit of criticism...? if i recall correctly, IRL and assuming a high level of technological advancement, coilguns require longer barrels to achieve destructive velocity but as they dont have to contend with rail friction, the upper limits of the velocity are not as capped as they are on a railgun and they are not subjected to rail degradation. Railgun on the otherhand, can achieve a destructive velocity without requiring a massively long barrel thanks to the mechanics of their function. I would posit that a spinally mounted railgun is less efficient the bigger the ship compared to a coilgun and is far more applicable to a turreted weapon mount. also...I see why you didnt use IRL battleships and went with a 50 cal instead, what with the Iowa's having a 30 second travel time for a 24 km engagement. That said, given that IRL battleships could hit a target at 24 km despite the 30 second travel time thanks to their targeting systems, and that targeting systems are only getting more sophisticated as we advance in tech, the inability and uselessness of MAC type weapons is clearly very relevant to Space Engineers but not necessarily to IRL with a similar tech level.

[@Maeldruin]

I'd like to see more "Missiles" which are just engines strapped to some chunk of metal so they can constantly accelerate, and guide themselves to their target for a kinetic weapon system. It seems like these would be really cheap to produce, safe to store, and very effective if engine speeds can get them to a high speed fairly quickly. In the Lost Fleet series they encounter what are essentially what I just described. Fleets in Lost Fleet tend to fly through each other on attack runs,, and they use unguided kinetic projectiles (Grapeshot, in universe) at very close range. They're pretty clear on grapeshot only being effective in close range, otherwise they rely on missiles or "hell lances" (particle beams).

[@bcbc2524]

Kinetic missiles are surprisingly unapplied in sci-fi for what i can only assume is ignorance as to their existence. Ironically given the video we're under, this works best when magnetically launched, if only for a good push-off. But Kinetic missiles, or KKVs are the logical middlepoint as they can accelerate themselves a good deal further then you could logically do with an innert projectile, and still track enemies, or preform orbital maneuvers for long range strikes. While being made out of heavy metals like osmium or tungsten, make them incredibly resilient to PD fire, as opposed to normal missiles. Their a pretty neat niche of weapons when applied properly. The application of ball-baring weapons and particle beams is a pretty interesting side for a sci-fi series to take tho, haven't heard of lost fleet but i get the impression its relatively well researched.

[@TheAchilles26]

@@bcbc2524, the author of Lost Fleet was a ship driver in the US Navy

[@jackwalters5506]

I wouldn't necessarily say that "more missiles" is a solution. In space there is no radar horizon, and no atmospheric bloom for lasers. That would mean that the defender would be able to engage the missiles much earlier, much more accurately, and much more effectively. Laser point defense could very easily be so effective in space that throwing more point defence to counter more missiles will always be more effective then throwing more missiles, which would mean that the only option is to close into closer ranges and use weapons which can't be intercepted

[@egoalter1276]

Lasers do attenuate in space. It is a fundamental property of coherent radiation, that it does not remain paralell in lerpetuity, but fans out, and thus loses energy flux. Gigawatt output range lasers for example start to fall below the energy flux metal can just black body radiate away before it melts at around the 2-4 million kilometer distance, if you are not willing to build parabola mirrors for the emitters above 100m in diameter. Of course in theory you could have aluminum foul mirrors a million kilometers in diameter, and shine your laser across planetary orbits and still retain lethal energy flux, but these would be large, slow and voulnerable things, requiring both great power input, and great logistical support. More like strategic ballistic missiles than a direct weapon. This is to say effective laser combat range is unlikely to go much beyond a few Mm. Still, building missile swarms that can cross a thousand kilometers before they get wiped out might still be unfeasable. Here on earth they really only have to worry about the last 20-40, and that still entails swarms of potentially hundreds. In space you might be talking about 10 thousand missiles just to get through pd.

[@danielboatright8887]

A guided MAC round would be pretty easy for longer ranged engagements, but it would only be able to make small changes to trajectory.

[@raxamonbathory8633]

"The concept of nuclear weapons being taboo in space is probably incorrect..." - Uhm...Outer Space Treaty of 1966? Nuclear weapons in space are about as taboo as it gets last I knew? The Moon Treaty of 79, also?

[@GetBrocked]

this is pretty far future. I don't think humans 300 years from now care. The whole premise of what you listed was preventing the weaponizing of space. And considering, we're talking about warships in space...

[@Savsgames]

The MACs I enjoy the most are Mass Effect's spinal cannons. Using some technobabble and a mcguffin material (Eezo), a projectile's mass can be reduced within a field of energy, fired out of that field at break-neck speeds, and then it's mass snaps back to reality while still going at that speed.

[@AH-ym4ro]

they also fire very fast, like an alliance dreadnought fires its main gun every 5 second

[@impguardwarhamer]

the problem with railguns, and this is in both modern application as well as theoretically in space, is that the electronic firing mechanism ruling out any kind of terminal guidance or explosive payload. Unless it's going at some colossal ludicrous speed any realistic railgun round is gonna make a neat hole in the front and back of whatever ship it hits and not do alot of damage to actual components. Of cause there are questions that can be raised on the balance of offensive missiles to missile interceptors and in a given setting you can present a scenario where missiles arn't particularly powerful, but in this setting you may find that conventional gunpowder cannons are going to be more useful than electronic guns. Also side point lasers kinda suck at range too.

[@GetBrocked]

yeah this actually started as a lasers suck as weapons in space... as does plasma... it was quite the heated convo

[@tackyinbention6248]

@@GetBrocked I believe that lasers would fulfil the role of point defense/CIWS as their effectiveness increases drastically as range gets closer, and because it's well a direct energy weapon they would probably have increased accuracy. All these combined I believe would make laser weapons excellent point defense/CIWS

[@GetBrocked]

@@tackyinbention6248 probably. Would depend on tech, and how good/strong/big weapons /fighters you're engaging

[@mobiuscoreindustries]

Yep I entirely support this. Effectiveness on a maneuvering target at extreme ranges (and we are talking dozens of seconds of flight) is really bad due to the imposibility to maneuver, however its not entirely useless if you are operating with automated aiming because you do get to strike at ranges only shared by guided missiles, which are MUCH slower to get there and vulnerable to interception and counter-battery For example, for my space engineers planetary defense grid, railguns open up first at their maximum ranges being capable of sustained fire with relatively little cost. At 50km distance its likely your enemy can't even see what is shooting up at him (and in SE its in the quite literal sense too) and the goal is pretty simple: force the enemy into constant evasive actions from targets he cannot shoot back at. The closer he gets, the more likely one of the shots will connect and damage will be applied. But once the enemy gets closed to regular engagement ranges THEN I unveil the guided ammo which can then score the killing blow, all in an effort to prevent the enemy from getting into range where he can start inflicting damage on my infrastructure. This is of course within space engineer's relatively limited ship speeds and range of engagements, but aslo form a resource saving costs as custom missiles that can outrange most of the standard weapons there are quite expensie so they are only reserved to engage either in ambushes or against driven targets that have confirmed their intention of engagment

[@voneror]

Guided projectile can be isolated from rails and "sabot". Real problem is going to be peak acceleration.

[@darth_dan8886]

"Heat is overstated as an issue" - remember, we are talking about spacecraft here. In atmosphere, our 3 main hear dispersion methods are: direct transfer to a medium (liquid or gas, given how on Earth both are abundant, or even solids if you're close to the ground), convection (heat transfer via moving streams of heated fluid and replacing it with a cooler one, a logical extension of the first), and radiation (infrared light every heated object emits). I think the physical intuition of an average person is quite sufficient to know that the latter is the least efficient and takes up the smallest percentage of heat transfer.... But in space, that is the ONLY way to cool your vessel available. So yes. Heat regulation IS a major problem when engineering a spacecraft, and adding a set of electromagnets that may dump potentially megajoules of heat periodically (depending on the current involved) - could be quite a big issue.

[@talinpeacy7222]

Now I'm thinking about the viability of a literal thermal lance. Imagine heat pumps redirecting the heat from long range lasers in series to dump an absurd amount of heat to an external parabola shaped radiator to up the thermal radiation rate to an absurd degree. Basically a space flame thrower. IR radiation has a similar if not same speed as visible spectrum light, right? As long as the radiator material doesn't fully melt and has a high enough radiation rate, I imagine it would solve two problems at once, both expelling heat and acting as a wide area heat lamp on whatever section of space the enemy is in. I haven't really spent much time familiarizing myself with radiant cooling but my understanding is that a high melting point, low thermal mass material would be dumping heat like crazy before it melted and the shape would help direct the majority in somewhat the same direction. I remember reading a book about a space expedition which basically used sail-like radiators ejecting liquid metal and recapturing it after it cooled in space like a feed tape before running it through a nuclear powered thermal electric generator to reheat. Technically the high heat was cycled through multiple TEGs running at different temperatures but perhaps even concepts like that could be used.

[@darth_dan8886]

​@@talinpeacy7222 There's a couple issues with the concept. First off, if you're using long range lasers as your weapon, which you are cooling, your enemy is likely way beyond the range of whatever parabolic radiator you may have installed on your ship. Just something to note. Second, out of the 3 heat transfer methods - conduction, convection and radiation - radiation is the least efficient. In other words, the radiator, being attached to your ship by something solid, will be dumping more heat through that solid connection than it will be radiating into space. IR radiation IS, in fact, light. Light in a different spectrum than what is percieved by human eye, but light nonetheless. Black body radiation is a decent approximation in most cases, you can look up Wien's law to see what wavelength will the body radiate at which temperature. There is two main issues with delivering heat from your ship to the enemy's in a weaponizable fashion, though. Firstly, as I already touched on, localizing that heat. Ideally that'd not even be a parabola, it'd be a point source. But keeping heat contained in a small volume (heat is quantified as q = C*m*dT, in other words if you have the same amount of heat in a material with the same heat capacity, reducing the mass of said material will cause temperature to increase) is a whole challenge of its own. As the temperature of your heat "core" increases, the heat strives more and more to spread to the rest of the ship. At some point, an equilibrium is reached: your heat pumps pump in as much heat as is flowing back out. Mind you, the pumps aren't 100% efficient and generate heat of their own in process. The second issue is focusing the energy. "By default", your tight concentration of heat will radiate in a rather uniform 360 degree sphere. Your enemy, if we're being generous here, occupies like 0.5 of these 360 degrees. So by not using a system of lenses to focus that heat on this 0.5 degree sector you're losing impossibly huge percentage of the energy into open space. If you do get ~90% of the energy directed and focused into a point on the surface of your enemy ship, that is your thermal lance. Probably not quite as effective as your average laser, but a weapon nonetheless. now there is one factor that could elevate this from an expensive and useless gimmick into a viable weapon. There's been Nobel-prize-winning technique to cool single atoms by turning them into temporary lasers, provoking them to emit more heat than it normally would. In a distant future with FTL travel being a thing, extending such techniques to create whole metasurfaces or even metacrystals that can momentarily emit a lot of their heat buildup doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. And if it is, your thermal lance suddenly becomes a lot more of an appealing idea. As for the "heat lamp" part, I feel like this will be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. As established, EVERY ship radiates heat. So by using a heat lamp, you just radiate _more_ heat. Make yourself an easier target. The benefit of lighting up an odd stealth ship and hoping it reflects just right for you to detect it is negligible. The liquid metal cooling is great for a few reasons. First off, the phase transition itself takes A LOT of heat energy. So start with solid, turn into liquid. Second, you get to radiate heat with something other than your hull. Third, when you spray droplets of liquid metal, you get a much larger surface area that helps with radiation. The challenge is still to collect it all afterwards - and to hope it's been out long enough to solidify.

[@NinjaEsprit]

Honestly the only reason the US navy was gunning for the rail gun was to regain the power of classic battle ships but at greater range and to reduce the space needed to store ammo. Conventional ammo has a limited range and require twice the space than the actual projectile to store. But it's not a super weapon. It's just an upgraded version of kinetic weapons. Unfortunately I think they scraped the project because even our strongest materials the gun just kills itself with the recoil. The only way around that is making it longer and harder to wield.

[@overmon]

Even as a kid I though it was weird that the human ships fight Napoleon style without energy shields to make it work (rotate with another ship when your shields are low).

[@JohnTrustworthy]

The problem of sci-fi writers is that they treat MAC/Railguns as pulse lasers and they treat pulse lasers as beam lasers and they treat beam lasers as particle beams and they...

[@egirlSkeletor]

the expanse nails this by making railguns an explicit CQB weapons system used for ranges where torpedoes stop being effective

[@WingsAboveCS]

tbh in the context of space engineers i use them all the time as a first strike. I attatch several of them on the outside of the ship, all loaded with a single shot. When i see an enemy i shoot, and let the railguns fly away through recoil, this makes it so they dont take up any energy during combat and automaticaly ditches them as soon as they're not usefull anymore.

[@xx_gamer_xx8315]

I disagree with some points. Cost: The low cost and complexity of projectiles is one of the most appealing aspects of a magnetic cannon. Compared to tandem explosive charges or even normal composite cannon shells they are pretty simple. Made using only metal and perhaps plastic. Basically an APDS without the gunpowder. Heat: Heat would absolutely be a large problem with any gun system on a spacecraft. It is already one of the biggest problems in designing a spacecraft today, as there is no atmosphere for heat to dissipate into. The question then is whether or not a MAC would produce more heat than conventional weaponry, wich i have no answer to. Yes, a MAC would be worthless at long range, but so would every other weapons system. Unguided projectiles would have travel times that are too long, missiles and torpedoes would be easily defeated by laser point defence systems, and lasers as anti capital weapons is just infeasible.

[@TheLostDefender]

I imagine a Laser would be good at lancing off sensitive equipment, like sensors or antennas

[@fabienherry6690]

@@TheLostDefender Yeah this totally go pass the main thing in war : shit aren't going as plan like a neet battle board. You have information gathering stop that need to be done ect. Assuming that a ship would be moving 100% of the time in a random manner is ridiculous

[@BallMuncher555]

@@TheLostDefender lasers lose accuracy over distance. You’d need to put in a lot of energy to not only get an accurate laser shot but one that does significant damage.

[@Elifre]

There's a variation on this that works pretty well, which is a macron. Instead of firing one big projectile relatively slowly, you instead fire thousands of tiny projectiles really quickly. Individual shots don't do a lot, but they do crater armor and let the next shot dig a bit deeper and so on. Fired in small streams they would be hard to detect since you're basically looking for atoms. Fired in big clouds would be basically impossible to avoid with projectiles going .99c. By the time you see the shot, it's almost about to hit you.

[@voneror]

In long range naval combat projectile comes at an angle (in extreme cases almost perpendicularly) to plane of displacement. Because displacing toward/away from the shooter doesn't matter in the 3d enviroment, just as in long range naval combat target dodges in 2d. Problem with traditional sf spinal em gun is that it follows naval gun logic which simply doesn't translates into space. Low rate of fire with large shells, because only large shells can damage enemy vessel. @ 30km/s every projectile that hits is going to blow a crater in armor. Smaller projectile will make smaller crater, but no matter how small no projectile will ever fail to deliver damage. Smaller the projectile, smaller can be hit rate to still consistently hit enemy. Smaller projectilles also take less energy to accelerate. Smaller projectille are harded to detect and deflect. Because you are mixing real life and (very) soft sf, some of the conclusions you arive at are nonsensical. Obviously even extreamly high velocity em gun would struggle to hit targets around moon from LEO, but depending on how good at dodging those targets are even lasers would start to strugle (1.3s time to target, at a target that already had 1.3s to move). This on top of layering assumptions which are entirely based on setting (like effectiveness and range of missiles.).

[@cdgonepotatoes4219]

It really depends on the universe the technology is being used in: If fuel is a concern, you may catch a ship by forcing it to course correct constantly until both its tanks and its missile racks are dry, or you may be able to conceal both your and the projectile's presence.

[@boad6484]

honestly, sci-fi with realism mixed in becomes kinda underwhelming/boring fast. lot of things most people like to get removed instantly because it would not make sense: - like stealth technology would be near impossible to implement given that radars get a huge upgrade in space given that there is no atmosphere, - planetary sieges would just be a navy threatening to throw an asteroid down on a planet and no landing craft would be needed - lasers could be quite devastating but are unrealistic to be used since a missile is just way cheaper - missiles would be the most standard weapon in every engagement - best counter for missiles would just be other missiles - EMP would be impossible to pull off since a spaceship to fly in space already needs to be extremely EMP resistant - sound and (flaming) explosions won't be there (apart from the interior pressurized bits in your ship) - G-forces would be the most deadly thing to a space crew - and the idea of having humans on combat spaceships in general is kinda goofy. especially something like fighters - and now I even get told my precious rail guns will not function as I imagined 😢 I'm just going to enjoy my space engineers/halo/star wars sci-fi where shooting red lightning at 10km max range as an offensive weapon would be functional XD. way more fun XD although a game/movie that follows this more realistic universe would actually be kinda cool to play/experience once edit: oof just realized this comment is way too long also, I'm absolutely no expert I just watch a lot of youtube

[@PaintedBirds]

Lasers wouldn't work. Congrats you now gave the enemy hull a possibly discolored spot and rose the hull temp a fraction of a degree. If you could maintain the beam (which is unlikely in combat when ships are moving constantly) you might be able to just penetrate the surface of the hull, and then reach the layer that makes sure nothing gets too hot or too cold. But your best bet would be plasma, and even that really doesn't work on enemy ships. Realistic scifi is something where it would probably be quite impressive if it could figure out how to properly compete with the Star Trek meta that has been built for what scifi should be.

[@acetraker1988]

So the TLDR: is IRL space combat is just a bunch of Mass Produced Missile Boat Drones... An the human control staff in a Small/Medium Ship with decent Communications/Sensors/Mobility.

[@prime_resistor]

I'll contend planetary invasions being unrealistic. There are all sorts of possible political, social, and economic reasons why you wouldn't want to wipe out a planet's population for refusing to immediately surrender. For example. there may be treaties against mass planetary bombardment to avoid escalating a conflict in a way that would cause a lot of loss of life of noncombatants on both sides, in the same way that modern nations have agreed to not use nuclear weapons.

[@VestedUTuber]

@@prime_resistor Realistically, you wouldn't be trying to eradicate the local population anyway. The focus of an invasion would be to secure a planetside objective or at most establish a beachead on the planet.

[@nguyenten6877]

Planetary invasions or sieges would still most likely happen, if your objective would be too capture or to rescue a high ranking military official or political figure it's going to be a bit harder if you fucking break the planet they are on, if you wanted the planetside facilities that your enemy has already built again again it's slightly harder to use them if you blew up the planet.

[@YourArmsGone]

Nothing in the Halo universe makes sense when you look at it closely, but spinal mac guns can make sense in some ways with some changes. It all depends on the projectile speed, combat ranges, and thruster power for ships and missiles. If missiles are easy to detect and disable it won't matter how good their range is, but a 1kg projectile going .02c is going to be awfully hard to dodge if ships can only accelerate at a couple gees.

[@MozTS]

Problem is there are no fixed installations in space engineers and you can’t accurately bombard planetary bases from space

[@WornyTheHun]

Yes you can. Not with the new railgun. But with oldschool gravity railgun.

[@varistheranger865]

I know capacitors can explode but so can gunpowder, ammo racks can explode. Also with gunpowder isn’t it impossible to accelerate rounds past a max speed based on the expansion rate of the gasses? Additionally isn’t it really hard to use explosive propelled weapons because they can weld themselves to uselessness? Massive rail guns may be useless but they would still be more effective than massive cannons, anything that’s too late is going to be ineffective.

[@GetBrocked]

yeah I mention they'd make sense as PD, or secondaries. Far better than chemical powdered weapon in that role

[@kolotiti]

Nice video as always :) When you combine space combat with realism it looses most cool stuff :D It is like dogfights in ww2 compared to modern times where you fire rockets 40 km or more away from enemy.

[@cptnoname]

I have to say I strongly disagree with the assertion that heat is not a big deal. Effective dissipation of heat will **always** be the biggest problem on a space warship.

[@twowheelfrenzy]

Reminds me of the legacy fleet trilogy. In the books the ships move so fast in space, they litterally strafe one another in the blnk of an eye.

[@colonel__klink7548]

On the mag vs gunpowder barrel length discussion: gunpowder granules and chemical content is adjusted with the expected barrel length in mind. Propellant intended for pistol cartridges burns faster than propellant for rifle and large bore burns even slower (shotguns being the exception.) The end goal is regardless of the barrel length the propellant burns the whole length but no more. Old fashioned black powder stops burning outside of the confined space so overloading really is hard to notice but with modern propellant it keeps burning and so if you take a cartridge like the 7 62x54r intended for a full length rifle and put it in a carbine you get a big ol fireball and go deaf witb every shot!

[@TARMHeLL]

this is like asmr vids, but its just a guy talking about spaceship warfare, i feel so relaxed now.

[@b.a.sbadassugar5007]

some of the ships in this serie look so good, you should show more of them, like a ship tour

[@nottebello]

I love these types of videos. Pretty much what got me hooked on the channel. I'm interested to see how you would break down battles and different fleet combinations. What ships work good together or if having 3 of the same class and type do better. I'm assuming that the server dictates that more then anything so as the series continues we will get to see more.

[@GetBrocked]

we have a hard cap of 4/5 ships per side in a battle representing "squadrons" we rarely go over that outside of special occasions. So most formations are designed around that. You basically have the Death squadron (Stack all slots with cruisers or even battleships) Heavy (2 cruisers, 2 destroyers) Standard (1 Cruisers 3 Destroyers) Light (4 Destroyers) Light(er) (3 Destroyers -1 Frigate) The majority of heavy lifting is done by the Standard Squadron (hence the name) because it's the best ratio when cruisers are hard to come by. It still has the potential to beat heaver squadrons, while not taking up to many resources theater wide.

[@nottebello]

Oh cool, I remember you saying something about having caps on ships per side in a video. SE wouldn't like it other wise.

[@lukemills237]

Something to note: to get ten times the muzzle velocity on an accelerator type weapon, you need 100 times the length.

[@miseee007]

They would be great at orbital bombardment or any static target due to their low cost ammunition and have a easy time through point defence or AA missile systems.

[@GetBrocked]

I would agree with the orbital bombardment part. Cost... meh? A MAC would easily be a large, if not the majority the cost of a warship. And a brick of tungsten is not cheap. Missiles are expensive as well, but in a era where million ton warships are the norm, I have a feeling it doesn't matter.

[@miseee007]

@@GetBrocked I mean its not super cheap, just the ammo being cheaper than explosives, but when considering the cost of the weapon itself it is really expensive especially when comparing it to the "Rods of God" dropping large metal rods from a satellite is way cheaper and with similar results, also the ammo can be extremely cheap it could be a Lead core enveloped in a layer of ceramics to act as a heat shield.

[@Sol_Invictus777]

I completely agree a Mac would be more suitable as a kind of planetary or moon seige weapon, but I feel the price of making the Mac would make the price of the ammo not as important when compared to other weapon systems

[@miseee007]

@@Sol_Invictus777 Yeah, and also why spend energy on accelerating the projectile at all if we are talking about orbital specifically when gravity will do the job for free, that would work on planets but not on sieges vs space stations or moon stations.

[@catzilla9330]

“If it has a rail gun, it is worth none” -sun tzu, the art of war

[@Kakarot64.]

"I know not what weapons World War I, World War II or World War III will be fought with but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" -Sun Tzu, The Art Of War.

[@VeilingSun]

On the lag time on weapons in the vast distances of space. There was a 4X RTS game called Star Ruler where this was, to me, kinda addressed. That game allowed you to set the size of the ships your shipyards built (and the size of the shipyards too!). Material and building time pending. It was possible to build humongous ships, larger than the moon to act like a fleet anchor or a sole fighting ship, or quick response ship. Everything would scale up, the armor, the damage from the guns, the speed, and most pertinent- the range of its weapons. While not that very impressive with projectile weapons, lasers were hit-scan, and there would be a phase in the game where these gigantic ships come out that would always be measured by its eponymous name "FTL lasers phase". The name given because the lasers are obviously travelling faster than light, and engaging targets beyond visual sight, where visual sight is the time it takes for light to bounce off the ship that just jumped in in reaching the eyes of the targeting ship. It's crazy to think about. You can't see the ship that just jumped in because it takes light several seconds from bouncing off the ship to reach your ship, and it is blasting you. Technically stealth in space. One other thing that you could do is maybe create a slinging chamber inside the ship. It's like a MAC but instead of accelerating a projectile along a row of magnets, it would be a donut of magnets or a chamber of magnets spinning the projectile faster and faster and releasing it once it was fast enough. Of course, the release would be immensely dangerous. Any screwup and the very expensive setup would probably have to be scrapped, and that's if it goes roughly in the direction of the outside of the ship. If it were to release in the other direction... One thing that could mitigate this would be to do it at a much slower rate, like fast, but no where near a fraction of the speed of light, but make the projectile a missile that has its own delta V to further accelerate or correct its path. Literally the best of both worlds of MAC and Missile projectile-wise, though the cost of infrastructure is unknown. On the issue of power, a steady rate of power form the reactor would probably constitute a far larger percentage of the energy required. The buildup would be much slower and more gradual than a sudden full release of power that a traditional MAC would require, possibly only requiring a fraction of the capacitance infrastructure.

[@kathyness1]

Laser systems will most likely be the go to weapons, literally speed of light, and you are taking advantage of a spacecrafts biggest weakness, it's inability to effectively radiate heat away, like you don't even need to cut with your laser you just need to heat it up enough to cook everything inside

[@Sol_Invictus777]

Ya I could see that but while your cooking your enemies your also generating a lot of heat from all the energy being used. And the fact you would need a lot of energy to make a laser powerful enough to continuously heat their ship keep it on target at great distances, probably you would have to keep it at the same spot on the ship as well so you would have to be very accurate. But I like the sound of cooking your enemies alive

[@athrinel87]

The speed of light is actually quite slow when talking about distances. Your laser has to remain on target, a target which definitely won't be stationary, and has ample opportunity to dodge before your laser makes a hit. Long range duels get boring fast. It'll be up to who has the best PD versus missile guidance systems. Engagements will take hours, with 20 or 30 minutes to figure out if you hit anything. At close range a laser could be a good PD weapon, but a cheap powder projectile spread in a volley might be a better bet versus missiles.

[@BirdTho]

You need the Honor Harrington royal navy missile cluster pods and the bomb-pumped lasers: Pod - you launch a pod with a targeting computer at the enemy, then the pod deploys missiles which have better tracking thanks to the pod. (somehow) Bomb-pumped lasers - Missile fired doesn't have the intention of hitting, but rather fires a laser with power generated by a bomb or instant reaction system. One used, but the missile aims at the target, then fires. So the missile doesn't have to physically hit the target.

[@hollowhusk5166]

There's some reasons why MAC cannons are so used in halo 1) they're the only weapon beside nukes capable of destroying a covenant vessel's shields with a modicum of consistency 2) covenant point-defense is extremely advanced, meaning most missile weaponry won't get through 3) UNSC vessel have really advanced targeting computer and smart AIs to further improve their effectiveness, granting a decent precision to anything below extreme range

[@stalwartteakettlepotato9879]

Another possible scenario depending on how refined your FTL tech is, is that it would become the ultimate long range weapon. If it's feasible to build a FTL torpedo and it is precise enough to appear next to the enemy suddenly all engagmets become absurdly long range.

[@NinjaEsprit]

Now an interesting question would be. Having a rail gun launched missile. Kinda like a bomber jet with an anti ship missile just faster and bigger? It probably wouldn't be as violently launched ad a typical rail gun but just enough to get the missile to speed and out aways before the booster of the missile was activated. Giving it greater range and possibly either make if faster or a heavier payload because it's using less fuel to accelerate to it's target. Thoughts?

[@patroclusilliad233]

Would love to see the sort of data you would get if you added the kinetic devastation mod and nuclear explosions mod to the server and see how people played around with that. It has honestly been very interesting listening to these reports and see how a videogame basically confirms realworld issues and statistics. Honestly the MAC/Railgun, seems like its a stealth ship's weapon if nothing else.

[@GetBrocked]

yeah, while it's not 1:1 some things IRL would be different. It's a good sandbox to bring up the questions in the first place.

[@fabienherry6690]

You can't underestimate the ability to strike at a static target ! "Guided" missile and artillery are only usefull when the target is stationary with it's position revealed.

[@gabewaters6178]

Quick question, when it comes to the discussion of space weapons, how do you feel about the lance artillery and macro cannons, etc. of the 40k universe. Granted we are talking 10s of thousands of years into the future with these also.

[@elijahgrimm8052]

Laser weapons move at light speed and a huge battery of them could be effective. If you're not shearing through armor, you're heating up the hull so much that at a certain point the crew starts roasting like potatoes wrapped in foil. Macro batteries again are using volley fire, so calculating the likely course of a ship and then a few permutations of where it could be in a given time, given patterns of course correction and such means your chance to hit goes up a fair bit. They would be fairly effective.

[@PaintedBirds]

@@elijahgrimm8052 On the other hand, consider the scale of the vessels, and the fact that they likely already have heatsinks for all those guns and giant thrusters and everything. It would take a ton to heat up the vessel and it just wouldn't have the force necessary to do anything until reaching FTL or being made of something more solid than photons or superheated gas (plasma)

[@iain-duncan]

40k technology is moreso magic than science

[@PaintedBirds]

@@iain-duncan That does complicate many things, and means that 40k should probably be in a seperate catagory than scifi, falling into Science Fantasy or Space Opera instead. It also means that the rules of their weapons don't need to follow the rules of physics.

[@iain-duncan]

@@PaintedBirds exactly yeah. 40k is a great genre but it's not one for scientific discussions haha

[@Miniputt_999]

Did this upset me? No i laughed Is MAC/Railgun usless? Yes Does this sorta ruin my plans to build a Cruiser having 8 1500mm as main weapons? Yes Did the part with the math cook my brain? Absolutley Really enjoyed the video thou :)

[@GetBrocked]

it cooked my brain too, because I swear I had to swap between imperial and metric about 50 times

[@Miniputt_999]

i could not have handled the swap between imperial and metric xD

[@MartyrBrown]

Without watching the video initially, I agree immediately. MACs are cool as hell, but not very useful. Even in Halo lore they weren't effective against Covenant shields. They had to be fired in salvos with the MACs of other ships in squadron formation. Even then, they weren't guaranteed a hit, let alone a kill. The process of aiming a MAC takes control away from the helm, which is needed for general formation and combat maneuvering, and it takes processing power from a shipboard AI (the only thing capable of aiming a MAC accurately at long ranges) which could be used in other ways, such as point defense, navigation, tactical statistics, damage control, standard communications and shipboard broadcasts, etc. MACs are also only surprising the the enemy the first time they encounter them, at which time they become entirely predictable. See a MAC pointing towards your fleet? Move laterally to avoid their bow. Send in your fast, agile ships to harass and displace the enemy while your heavies close to engagement range for killing blows. The issue of circumstance out-pacing contemporary military doctrine is an issue faced not only in real life, but in science fiction, too.

[@JunohProductions]

As someone that only played Halo years ago and didn't know what a MAC was, thanks for the explanation.

[@Bananabob3]

I generally use these in fighter launch tubes on my carriers so the fighters don’t need to worry about their acceleration until they need to change direction. I do use mass drivers to launch cargo carriers coated in light armour and decoys to gut enemy vessels though

[@darth_dan8886]

"Other weapon systems are going to kill you before you get into range" - do elaborate. What kind of weapon systems do you have in mind that can outpace a MAC? MAC's main advantage is its velocity. If it takes a MAC projectile 5 minutes to reach a target, it'll take a torpedo at least 15. And lasers are infamously ineffective at long ranges, so the only weapon that can "outpace" a MAC in velocity will do laughable amounts of damage. Regarding your point about dodging: a projectile doesn't need to be a certain absolute velocity to guarantee a hit. _It just needs to be fast enough to hit BEFORE the ship can change its acceleration enough to not be at the intercept point your targeting predicted. So if your 200m ship can accelerate at, say, 30m/s^2, a weapon that takes 3.3 seconds to reach it would be literally impossible to dodge.

[@jll5446]

well the thing is, a missile has things like guidance while a MAC does not. I honestly would think of it like say an Anti-tank missile vs a modern tank shell. Within the tank shell's effective range, it's probably going to win (if we are assuming both parties have spotted eachother) as the shell is much faster than a missile. However, at extremely long ranges, suddenly the ATGM is arguably more effective just due to the ability to change it's trajectory. Plus, it's probably much easier to increase the missile's payload. You just slap on some more explosive at the cost of speed and range. (in space sure projectiles just keep going, but a missile needs fuel to manuver) If you want to increase your effective range you just slap on more fuel. To make a MAC gun more powerful, you have to add more energy, which means more reactors and more capacitors and what not. Against small and manuverable targets, MACs would be useless at range while missiles could still mostly work. Against slow and large targets, MACs would be powerful, yes, but a missile could probably deliver better performance. However, usually slow and large targets are powerfully armed and won't just stand there, but they would use things like missles or other weapons. And this isnt even getting into the weird kinetic energy missiles, which actually have existed for quite a bit of time. Granted, I do think that a railgun could fire guided munitions, but it'd have to be pretty fucking long in order to not apply so much force that it destroys the guidance system. After all, work is basically force times distance. and we really just want a higher amount of work done. Also most importantly: missiles can be mounted on fucking anything

[@darth_dan8886]

​@@jll5446 Missiles cost a lot, with sensitive guidance electronics and whatnot. A MAC shell is just a lump of metal. You can afford to refire it often. I would also argue that against small maneuvereable targets, missiles (long range capital missiles in particular) are useless, as a heavier missile has worse turn rate and can be easily outmaneuvered; meanwhile with a MAC my the time you know you need to dodge, the hit or miss is already decided. Kinetic missiles and the fact you can mount missiles on smaller craft definitely give them a niche, as a weapon to allow a smaller ship to deal real damage to a larger one. Just like that anti-tank missile gives infantry and aircraft a chance against a tank.

[@Gustav_Kuriga]

@@jll5446 assuming you can't put the equivalent of RCS on a MAC projectile.

[@jll5446]

@@Gustav_Kuriga yeah, but you have the issue of having to enlongen the barrel, in order to apply more work without substantially increasing force

[@jll5446]

@@darth_dan8886 small issue, if youre using a heavy missile against a small target, I would argue that isnt really the missile's fault but rather the user's fault. France probably never thought about using an exocet against a fighter jet. The point about kinetic missiles was that the whole high velocity part is not exclusive to MACs

[@Skwisgar2322]

Point C against gunpowder in infinitely long barrels the flamefront speed of the deflagrating powder. This can only move at the speed of sound. The reason bullets can be supersonic is because, in the temperature and pressure conditions in the barrel during firing those velocities are subsonic. the actual physics involved it somewhat complicated involving the mass, expansion ratio, burn rate, and density of the powder and the mass, coefficient of kinetic friction between the bullet and barrel, the diameter of the barrel, and many other factors. Currently the limit for smokeless powder is around 4600-5000fps.

[@tep1003]

One of the few sci-fi pieces of media that actually takes physics into account with regards to space battles is the "Expeditionary Force" book series. They have railguns, which are commonly not effective for ship to ship combat except at close distances because speed of light is actually acknowledged in the series and the engagements take place light seconds to light minutes apart, meaning the sensor data is outdated by the time that ships are detected and a railgun shot at that distance is going to hit where the ship was, not where it is. In the book series, railguns are often used for planetary bombardment rather than ship to ship combat (unless close range).

[@beilno2890]

What are they using to fight at those distances? I can see missiles tracking out farther than a MAC's effective range to track, but as they are much slower even their range is limited. While space may be huge effective range of weapons will dictate engagement range. If defenses at long range make using long range weapons ineffectual, then combat ranges will shrink and will probably enter the range which mac guns/ rail guns are effective.

[@thefanfir]

Rail guns and Coil guns (what are commonly collectively called gauss guns) use electromagnetic forces to propel a projectile, they are otherwise entirely different; and neither of them *need* naturally occurring magnets. Coil guns use electromagnetic (a piece of ferromagnetic material that becomes magnetic while electric current is moving through it) coils to attract the projectile towards the coil, once the projectile reaches the coil it is turned off and the projectile continues it's projectile motion. Multiple coils can be made in sequence to allow more acceleration. The coilgun is more energy efficient than the railgun, but as it relies on the carful timing of the electromagnets, and it relies on all the parts that properly time the electromagnets, it tends to break easier and be more fragile. Rail guns work by running a ridiculously powerful current from one rail across an armature (which is either the projectile or propels the projectile) to the other rail to complete the circuit. The Lorentz force generated behind the armature to propel it forward. That's it, just a ridiculous amount of energy two electrically conductive rails, and an electrically conductive armature is all you need (Naturally occurring magnets can be placed by the rails in specific orientations to increase the force on the armature by the magnetic fields to generate more force), though it is usually easier to generate that power over time and put it in capacitors and releasing it once you've achieved the proper amount of energy than it is to continuously generate that amount of power. It should also be noted that very little of the electrical energy is converted into kinetic energy, it would theoretically be possible to reuse the energy from the first shot to decrease how long it would take to recharge the capacitors. I'd say it's quite likely for rail guns to feature in space as they can propel projectiles much faster than conventional guns. And just like we have ICBM's, cruise missiles, and strike craft in today's age, we still use conventional guns for point defense and close range work. Similarly, you probably won't see coaxially mounted railguns, or even the gaint battleship turrets of yor, but something more akin to the 20mm-40mm cannons of today.

[@Duncecap64]

lol I feel like the Expanse might be a good show for alot of comparisons you make. in this case Rail guns are secondary weapons in the Expanse, are only effective against stationary targets or targets considered in "Hammer lock" range (considered < 1000 KM) which the ship cannot have time to dodge. most are spinal due to recoil (Epstien drives will fire for a brief moment to counteract recoil if not under thrust already) or if they are not its for massive battleships which have them on turrets. Torpedoes (Missiles) are still the primary weapon and generally also use evasive multi directional attacks to score hits

[@RevanX77]

If you're introducing such physics breaking fantasy technology as feasible energy and fuel and travel and maneuverability in space to begin with, it doesn't matter how "unrealistic" this one idea is when you've already suspended your disbelief this much.

[@lukasstaar6860]

Regarding the interception: it becomes even easier, because a projectile going that fast is going to violently explode the instant it hits *anything*, so even if the intercepting projectile is slow and small, it will still completely obliterate the MAC projectile just from its own kinetic energy

[@Gustav_Kuriga]

You're assuming you have the capabilities to intercept it in the first place, or that the entire thing would be converted into energy.

[@danielboatright8887]

MACs are long ranged weapons in a short ranged game. A quality sensor/radar mod and settings so NPCs only spawn at longer ranges could make them useful for bombardment and long ranged engagements, well that and setting railguns to longer ranges.

[@gmradio2436]

I can see a case for M.A.C.s as siege weapons. Planets tend to not dodge and M.A.C. nature as coil guns means that the payload can be scaled with capacitor charge.

[@zeph6182]

It all depends on a lot of factors tbh. What FTL technology looks like (which is why combat in Star Wars is at such close ranges, FTL travel tends to drop people very close to each other since everyone is basically using the same infrastructure to FTL and only navigate between celestial bodies really), what energy creation and heat dispersion tech looks like, and what propulsion tech looks like, with perhaps a bonus consideration for what "radar" tech looks like. If we have no heat or energy limitations I imagine it'll be high intensity lasers or particle beams which will *really* put in some work but only traveling at the speed of light (about 300,000km/s) that still gives "projectiles" a really long travel time comparatively. But with these types of weapons I almost want to say that it's possibly to project them at a slightly wider angle to have a 100% hit rate, but I'm not sure. I'm also pretty sure that in the vacuum of space these sorts of weapons *will* continue on, and their destructive power is really insane.

[@jenniferstewarts4851]

Gunpowder guns CAN work like MAC's. There ARE cases and examples of guns that either use "multi-stage" charges, where the first charge goes off starting the shell moving, then at set delays down the barrel more and more powder goes off creating an increase and in pressure but never exceeding the base critical pressure of the barrel. The other example of this actually mimic's the MAC... with MULTIPLE ignition points along the barrel, where as the slug passes 1, the pressure spikes at that point and sets off that powder charge. Unlike the first example where all the powder is at the base, this one you can just keep adding on more barrel segments, and as the shell passes the next segment, a new charge goes off. An example of this style is/was the V3 cannon.

[@thefinalsurvivur6161]

I know I'm very late to the party, but another issue as far as heating is that things tend to stop being magnetic as soon as they melt, meaning in order to pour enough energy into a sabot to accelerate it to "reasonable speeds", you would have to spread out the load over a very, very long barrel. One game that seems to get these weapons right is Children of a Dead Earth. It uses basically modern day technology, and "standard" engagements with lasers, railguns, or coilguns typically max out at 100 to 200 km, generally with railgun sabots no larger than 50 grams and coilgun sabots not larger than 1 kilogram, with the exception of flak rounds, and maximum velocities almost never exceeding 20km/s.

[@gibbhartin643]

prevideo beliefs: the main stupid bit I think is the sheer scale of ONE barrel, and the fact that it is not a turreted weapon despite it's size. you literally are moving your largest weak spot to face down your enemies and if it misses good luck in like the next minute while trying to get a lock on the target with that giant excuse of a bolt, it is like swords for there is a limited size that is required for effective sword usage for mobility and doing everything right PostVideo beliefs: I didn't even consider the temperature and the energy cost but yah that would be major issues along side the just distance

[@Texasplit]

I would say likely the ONLY advantage would be that your ships magazine doesn’t explode (just started the video so if this is covered in it I’m not aware)

[@ShuRugal]

in the Halo books, MAC fires were basically only effective in three scenarios: 1: the enemy has decided to attempt a boarding action 2: the MACs have been assembled into an old-earth musketeer-style firing line and volley fire is used to saturate a specific area of space 3: individual MAC shots coordinated to arrive at the same time as massed missile fires, hopefully catching the enemy focusing on the missiles. Even then, the books made it pretty clear that the Covenant were most struck by MACs out of arrogance more than anything. At multiple points, it is observed that Covenant ships accept a MAC shot in trade for a more favorable firing position, choosing to rely on their shields to tank the blow.

[@markskarr2257]

Long-distance MAC shots are against "immobile" targets: Planets, moons, _cities._ Otherwise, if it can move, it will.

[@hadrianbuiltawall9531]

In a series of books (the Lost fleet), Macs/railguns were instant kill weapons against anything they could hit. However, travel times could be measured in days so anything that could see the projectile and move would do so. This meant they could only be used against things that either couldn't move or had a stable, consistent movement like planets, satellites and uncontrolled ships. This had the novel situation of making military space stations pointless since even if they could be made near invulnerable to conventional weapons (due to absolutely no limits on armour, weapons, etc), Macs were city killers who left 200ft holes in planets and could not be protected against. The known occasion of a station not been destroyed by an on target MAC round was when a junior officer repairing a half-built dreadnought used the same ship to push the station the short distance necessary to make the shot miss.

[@fabienherry6690]

Yeah information war would be CRAZY in that setting : anything that doesn't move and get spotted is dead

[@exilestudios9546]

Rail guns may not be great long rage weapons but they would be amazing long range cargo delivery systems between planets in a solar system. all you would need to do is put your desired cargo in a container that can be fired from a railgun, check your math to math to make sure your cargo will intercept your desired planets orbit and remain in orbit and then fire. if you use the real orbits mod for space engineers you can test this principal yourself using gravity launchers its really freaking cool!

[@pessimisticnihilist3691]

I do agree that it can get a payload from A to B very fast, but what you have to keep in mind is that getting the payload to its destination is useless unless you can slow it down to a point where it can be caught. Think about it, how is a cargo load going to be good for anything if it flies by its destination or crashes into it. This would be less of an issue for space to planet transport, but if the projectile is moving too fast then it would burn up in atmosphere.