The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums





warships and troop transports disguised as grapeships
#20
(02-10-2016, 05:06 AM)m.ellis Wrote: I should be able to post a draft soon.Smile

If a grapeship shuttlepod is 400 meters in diameter, and 1/20 the volume is a habitat module, there's room for over 130,000 beds. 16 pods gives a figure of 2.1 million personnel. Granted, I could have screwed up my math.

About this bit here...Earlier in the thread you posted the below as your description for the grapeships:

I recalculated the grapeship capacity based on OA info and picture: 2400 meter in length with 16 shuttle pods. w/o going into all the details, I estimated that a grapeship can carry over 2 million troops and support personnel, and 3200 ships can transport over 50 billion. My numbers might be way off.

Note that a ship length of 2400 meters means that the wormhole will need to be of greater than 1200 meters radius (significantly greater actually) in order to accommodate the ship. Otherwise, the ship will be shredded when the wormhole throat (which shrinks in all three dimensions when you are passing through it) contacts the ships and the resulting tidal forces spagetify it.

A wormohole large enough to accommodate a ship of this size is pretty significant by OA standards, which implies that the system it is connecting to is pretty signficant - which raises the question of just what the local population is (you haven't said, AFAIK) and how much infrastructure (and defensive firepower) is in place.

(02-10-2016, 05:06 AM)m.ellis Wrote: Humans and 'vecs. Assault battalions; military police, civil affairs and psychological warfare brigades; various supply and support units. A lot of the support is probably automated with humans and 'vecs and aioids supervising. The supporting battle fleet of autowar carriers is also disguised as grapeships ("Jane's Battleships," General-Admiral Jane Nakamura commanding).

Human assault battalions really don't make any sense in OA. Indeed humans are totally worthless in combat in OA unless they are hugely augmented. Vecs might be better in terms of physical capability, but dedicated automated hardware of tremendous capability and intelligence, but without sophonce is likely to beat the more generalized intelligence of a vec pretty easily as well.

There's also the question of how any of this is supposed to beat a transapient. Bear in mind that a single S1 can destroy entire solar systems and slaughter modosophonts by the quadrillions with only minor effort (and the modos will be utterly unable to stop it). You've mentioned that there will be transapients on the attacking side, but how are you going to depict that battle? And who is this General Nakamura? Certainly no modosophont can hold anything other than a ceremonial position of command in any kind of real military in the setting.

(02-10-2016, 05:06 AM)m.ellis Wrote: We've had gated communities in the USA for quite some time now. Keeps the riff-raff way. Therefore, a billgated community is a virtual version of this; in effect a very security-conscious virch residential community.

Like Rynn I don't think this is an appropriate name for the OA setting. The basic assumption it makes is that the 20th and 21st century is somehow of any real relevance to people living 10,000yrs from now. And we probably do too much of that already. Definitely not something we want to see any more of unless a hugely compelling argument can be made for it.

Todd
Reply


Messages In This Thread
RE: warships and troop transports disguised as grapeships - by Drashner1 - 02-10-2016, 09:39 AM

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)