A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

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travists
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A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Slow at work today and I came across something interesting in Wikipedia.
The Shiva Star project.
Particularly, how it describes the projects use on the MARAUDER experimental weapon. Lots of guns already, some more unlockables would be nice, but right now I just thought I'd share. Not a feature request. Yet, anyway...
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by TBeholder »

travists wrote:Slow at work today and I came across something interesting in Wikipedia.
The Shiva Star project.
Well, yeah, z-pinch works... BTW, it's one of the reasons limiting EM throwers, though not as bad as, say, hilarity that happens when the circuit breaks.
travists wrote:Particularly, how it describes the projects use on the MARAUDER experimental weapon. Lots of guns already, some more unlockables would be nice, but right now I just thought I'd share. Not a feature request. Yet, anyway...
...as to throwing "plasma toroids" - well, yeah, leave it to wikipedia to dig out some New Science™ with serious face. :wink:
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Had some time and did some digging. Don't like Wikipedia?
How about Wired Magazine?
Or maybe The U.S. government's own Office of Scientific and Technical Information?

The project is real enough, the physics is relatively sound, especially in the vacuum of space. The conspiracy theorists have blown it way out of proportion, but it is at least possible. While I like the new take on a leach type gun, I really like the ring-bolt idea. I do not recall seeing any balls fired by energy guns in the game. Its all rays and line segments. Something more than just color to differentiate guns would be nice.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by TBeholder »

travists wrote:Had some time and did some digging. Don't like Wikipedia?
How about Wired Magazine?
They're good. Left funnies in place and tagged the thing "Science!" so it can be found. 'Course, it links to rumorpedia all over.
travists wrote: Or maybe The U.S. government's own Office of Scientific and Technical Information?
Well, yeah. Remember SDI? Explaining to the people who vote on the value of Pi why developing beam technologies and suchlike looks like a good idea is hard, so show them some Lucas and funny pictures, it works.
It's just that snake oil and vacuum oil aren't the same thing. :wink:
travists wrote: The project is real enough, the physics is relatively sound, especially in the vacuum of space.
Uh, there's no physics at all. Just "toroids" and trekky in-jokes. Conversely, if someone achieved anything both stable and controllable, there wouldn't be "wildly different theories of ball lightning", etc.
The physics of the matter looks very simple: "if plasma was that easy to stabilize, no one would try to jump through the loops with z-pinch and much more complicated solutions". :)
That is, generating short-living ball lightning -like glows in a dustless can is one thing, but trying to do with plasma anything bigger and more complex than a torch or arc is a long story, and it's full of "almost working" Tokamaks and their precursors. Because anything that remotely looks stable and/or moving plasma physics forward, is tried for climbing Kardashev's scale.
In other words, clinging for old and tested confinement concepts is a rather vicious physics in-joke: obviously, "tested" here means "didn't quite do it once we fired this up for real" - the moment it isn't so, heavy water will be the most used fuel in the world. Currently the holy grail is where it was 50 years ago: very close, only one "little" plasma instability away.
I suspect this inspired Nanoplague, BTW - the blasted thing looks almost like it mocks everyone intentionally.
Something more sneaky, probably involving juggling with plasma waves (and that's a long story in itself) - maybe. Not an electrified vortex cannon - or anything else gas-based, at any rate.
travists wrote: I do not recall seeing any balls fired by energy guns in the game. Its all rays and line segments. Something more than just color to differentiate guns would be nice.
Bolts are funny-shaped, they just tend to move fast and be seen more or less along the main axis.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Well, looked good I'll trust you PHd. that it is utterly imposible and violates every law of physics to have it stable for the ten seconds to reach the target.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Ok, got flustered there for a minute, about ready to have the whole topic deleted on account of my flaming idiot status. Everything I can find (lots of .edu sites) says that plasma toroids exist and is an active field of research. Forcing a charged gas to take a specific shape is no big trick. It's keeping it stable once it leaves your device that is lacking. I personally doubt that it will ever remain stable enough for self-sustained energy production. You want that plasma to stay confined long term, keep the magnets on! I just want it to stay together long enough to hit a target in a vacuum that is within 1km or so. As for the marauder project? It died, from a records standpoint, in the mid 90's now I have no way of knowing if it was deemed "impractical with today's technology", impossible, or they had a breakthrough and went deep underground. I suspect the first. It did exist. Then again, so did "Project Stargate" and all science has on ESP is enough interesting outliers to be unable to totally dismiss it and keep grant money flowing. I just like the concept and the idea of throwing glowing donuts at your target.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Hey, the crash tookout the reboot. Any way to get the down n' dirty on why you can't fire a laser from earth to pluto to kill a starship?
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by pheonixstorm »

Atmosphere. Would suck the laser power dry , or mostly, before it hit space.

In space.. who knows what would get in the way and cause the same issues.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by klauss »

In space, diffraction (and there's diffraction even in vacuum, see diffraction-limit imaging on the wikipedia), will spread the beam to a very large area, reducing its strength considerably. At that distance, it would encompass pluto, charon and who knows what else. Think about it: from here to the moon, diffraction widens the laser disc to a 3km-wide area.
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Re: A new gun, but to undeveloped for anywhere else.

Post by travists »

Yeah, and something about aperture size and wave self interference...
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