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Rappanui wrote:The ships are actually programmed to not allow such a result, their drives shut down.. it would take a Mad man to do that. It would also require manual plotting and manual acceleration setting.

Like it would be that hard to reprogram a ship (even if it DID have such safeguards) so it could function as a NLS kinetic kill missile, and it wouldn't require any suicide pilots an automated guidance system could do the job just fine. Given there are a few scattered references to ships accidentally ramming and destroying planets due to guidance system malfunctions clearly they don't have engine shut-offs to prevent something like that from happening, even if they did safeties do fail, they aren't perfect after all.

Given the level of artificial intelligence available even in Heroes Unlimited let alone more advanced settings like Phase world it wouldn't be any problem at all to create such self-guided missiles, not that you require such since something large enough moving near the speed of light would be nearly impossible to destroy in such a fashion that not even NLS debris manages to reach the target.

Seems bad if your tramp fighters have power plants that explode into world killing fireballs. That's what you guys are making it sound like, anyway.

Rappanui wrote:the calculations required to hit a target with an FTL missile would take a long time, just to gather data required. (Orbital Period, etc etc, ... you'd need either a cosmic awareness or a long time with telescopic observation to calcualte all that. in short, it's not something you do while in Light range of a planet.

Bit easier for STL, and if you have decent navigational sensors, or astronomical sensors, plotting where the planet will be should be fairly easy. Just in case, though, it's a good idea of pack your hold full of massive cargoes(like big rocks or near-neutronium metal ingots) that you can then kick out as you close in on your target, to produce a relativistic 'shotgun' blast effect. Hell, your anti-missile chaff or sand will do quite nicely for sandblasting any ships in the area.

Rappanui wrote:the calculations required to hit a target with an FTL missile would take a long time, just to gather data required. (Orbital Period, etc etc, ... you'd need either a cosmic awareness or a long time with telescopic observation to calcualte all that. in short, it's not something you do while in Light range of a planet.

Considering we manage to launch probes throughout our solar system with a great deal of accuracy in spite of our primitive level of technology in comparison that's not a big deal for people in a super-tech civilization to pull off, where what we consider a super-computer comes in laptop size.

Rappanui wrote:also, there's a very huge possibility that the ship will explode while trying to "port" within a light second into a planet... there's a big risk that the whole thing just converts into pure energy (fusion critical mass) before being able to hit anything)

You act as if all that energy somehow is completely harmless which it wouldn't be, or that it wouldn't keep moving towards the planet since that's the direction the original matter was traveling in.

Alrik Vas wrote:Seems bad if your tramp fighters have power plants that explode into world killing fireballs. That's what you guys are making it sound like, anyway.

The power plants don't explode into world-killing fireballs, it's all about basic physics of an object moving at near light speeds when it impacts another object as all that kinetic energy gets converted into a massive release of destructive energy.

Rappanui wrote:at the VERY least, they would need to observe the planets for at least an hour to a day, depending on how long it takes for their ship to reach Near light speed (and if it's not properly protected it will DISINTEGRATE before hitting anything. )

If they didn't have the means of protecting ships from that kind of thing they wouldn't be a space-fairing setting anyway, with force field technology alone being ubiquitous. You also keep acting as if somehow things just stop dead in space when they explode or are somehow destroyed instead of continuing on in the direction they were going at the speed they were originally going at. They don't stop they keep moving even if they are moving at near light speeds since there is no drag in space. The setting may not take these things into account (due to Palladium generally avoiding even discussion of powerful deadly possibilities for things to keep things nerfed, like no one using actual nuclear weapons even in suitable situations) but they're still possibilities.

Rappanui wrote:generally When things explode trying to reach ftl... their mass disintregrates into light... Not energy beams....especially when the ftl they are using involves hyperspace or fold space, there is an avenue where the waste mass goes.....

I doubt there's such a generality involved, and when things get converted into energy it generally covers the spectrum including hard radiation not just light. Plus it's not like intense levels of light aren't harmless, they are, and having your planet hit by a burst of hard radiation or extreme levels of light is not going to do well by it.

Nightmask wrote:[

I doubt there's such a generality involved, and when things get converted into energy it generally covers the spectrum including hard radiation not just light. Plus it's not like intense levels of light aren't harmless, they are, and having your planet hit by a burst of hard radiation or extreme levels of light is not going to do well by it.

Twinkle, twinkle, gammashine...