Supership thought

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dstar
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Supership thought

Post by dstar »

There's a quote from Jeconais' "The Banishment of Uzumaki Naruto" which fits this idea quite well, I think:
Gai retreated to his normal pose. “The exploding tag was most...” he paused.

“Probably youthful,” Kurenai said thoughtfully. “For us, anyway. For our enemies, it would be very unyouthful.”

“Thank you,” Gai beamed at her. “Yes, most youthful, however, it was, perhaps, a small bit over the top.”
How many GRAF cannons could you fit on the hull of a supership? And what would be the correct collective noun for that many? An apocalypse of GRAF cannons? An armageddon?

I mean, if you can fit a GRAF cannon in the Aegis, I'm fairly sure that that means you could fit... probably thousands on a supership. And if you replace all the power generation with Karrine technology, you should be able to power them all as well.

Be expensive as hell, I'm sure, but it also seems to me like that would be the kind of thing that would be _necessary_ to fight the Syndicate on their home territory... because what they sent to our galaxy has to be their version of an expendable force.

In other words, it might not actually be over the top at all... in the words of Spike from BTVS, rather than overkill, it might be 'just enough kill'.

(You could actually make them even _more_ deadly by adding in gravity inducers to get the field up enough to allow a Megatron unit to fire _reusably_, and point them outwards instead of in... because unlike a GRAF cannon, Megatron units are small enough to be portable, so you could probably fit on tens or hundreds of thousandsof them.... The downside is that unless you could upsize them somewhat and get better range, you'd have to get into literal knife-fight range to use them, because their range is on the same order as the size of the ship. On the gripping hand, if you could detune them somewhat to get a wider spread at the cost of having, say, only a few hundred miles of range, you'd have one _HELL_ of an anti-fighter and anti-missile point defense. With, you know, probably anything smaller than a cruiser being considered a fighter for these purposes.)
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kyli
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Re: Supership thought

Post by kyli »

Kosigi has dozens (i think) of GRAF cannons mounted on it. I'd have to go back into Secession to check if it says how many. But they could only fire one or two at a time to avoid knocking the moon off its orbit. A supership doesnt have to worry about being knocked out of orbit. It can easily adjust. But that is a lot of backlash for a cannon to be able to do that. But while kosigi is hollow, it still has literary miles of armor, (two miles IIRC,) before u get to the hollow part. A supership wouldn't be that reinforced, especially with the syndicate focus on profit. I am sure a supership could handle dozens of cannons, but i doubt it could fire more then one or two at a time simply because of the stress the cannon would put on the superstructure of the ship. We are talking about enough energy in a backlash to possibly shift a moon in its orbit. But what they might be able to do instead is what they did on Kosigi and fire cannons one after the other. Since the GRAF cannons take so long to recharge, they just take turns firing them. So i think thousands or even hundreds of cannons is quite a strech but dozens probably isn't.
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SYED
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Re: Supership thought

Post by SYED »

With generations they might not even need that many Graf cannons, as they can warp space to redirect the beams when needed. They simply need enough to provide full coverage of fire for the ship
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Wolfee
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Re: Supership thought

Post by Wolfee »

House Karinne would probably be better of building they're own from scratch. Just using the materials from a captured one to recycle into they're own. The reason being is there would be SO many upgrades to make anyways... why not start from scratch.
lapland
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Re: Supership thought

Post by lapland »

The sheer time it takes to build the hull would be greater than gutting and rebuilding the inside. Most of the hull is solid highly compressed material. The inside already has pressurized atmosphere. The inside is subdivided into large segments. True there might be a lot of wasted material inside, and even on the surface of the hull, but if the foundation is sound it's usually much easier and faster to remodel than to build from scratch.
dstar
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Re: Supership thought

Post by dstar »

dstar wrote: And if you replace all the power generation with Karrine technology, you should be able to power them all as well.
....I just did some math.

In chapter 9, the surrendering superships are nine hours away from the nearest habitable planet. As Jason had to ask, I'm going to assume that the distance was at least the shortest possible earth-mars distance and possibly double that (well, actually, it could be even further, given the sheer size of space, but I'm assuming not because of what it does to the numbers).

This means that the superships can pull 20-40Gs of acceleration.

I seem to recall them mentioning somewhere that Syndicate/Coalition drives were around four times the size of Karrine drives.

That would imply that if you ripped out all the syndicate drives and replaced them with Karrine drives, you'd have a ship with 80-160Gs of acceleration.

And there's a throwaway comment in chapter nine that says the average KMS ship pulls 170G, so that sounds about right.

So you've fitted it with a few hundred GRAF cannon (the term we are looking for, boys and girls, is 'Gatling GRAF Cannon', and you may all laugh maniacally now), and it comes screaming in faster than a Syndicate battleship.

How much would it degrade performance for the Syndicate fleet when every single sailor needed to change pants at the same time after seeing that?
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