Had a miltech/tonnage question, and I didn't want to make anyone wade through the old topic, so...

anyway, I have a character wit a rather unusual warship, that only he can use, and then only because his rather unusual metatalent handily covers for a variety of missing peices that most would consider to be critical. To whit, it has no life support, no hydrogen banks for its fusion reactor, and while it is a fighter, its armaments consist entirely of two torpedo tubes with a magazine large enough for one torpedo. The cockpit is single-man and cramped, run primarily through a headjack system that's been obsolete forthe past hundred years. There are no ducts for engineering access, nor any openspace except the cockpit itself. You could conceivably cram a second person into the cockpit in an emergency and still fight (Wow, direct neural control! You're my new best friend.) but it wouldn't be at all comfortable for the passenger. Two would be right out, unless one of them wanted to hang on to the outside. The computer and electronics are about as good as you can get with open-market tech, optimized for size first and power second. It has no landing gear, docking clamps, or airlock of any kind. It's stripped to the bone.

Now, due to limitations on the way he carts the thing around, he wants to keep it as small and light as he possibly can (not surprisingly, it's a custom design, and he has some control over it) but at the same time, combat effectiveness is important. If it is possible, I'd like to fit the thing with impellers (beta node), with merchantman-strength sidewalls, and perhaps even a weak compensator, but I am unskilled at figuring out how much mass that would take, given the other stuff that isn't in there, that most impeller ships have, like fuel and life support.

The theory here, by the way, is this...beta nodes and merchant sidewalls are painfully weak from an impeller warship perspective, but if this is doable on something in scale with a tie fighter, they'll give it an amazing advantage over its peers in dogfights and the like. They'll also likely do passing fair at dealing with the flyswatters on the larger ships themselves. On the other hand, I do want to maintain believability, and it's other forms of propulsion wouldn't work.

Likely a good place to start on the size requirements would be the pinnaces kept on board most ships, but I don't have any of the books in which they might have been discussed. If anyone has On Basilisk Station, that's probably got something.

Also,if anyone has a reference on manticoran/havenite missile size, that would help.

Thank you.

Fibula

Impeller nodes can apparently be just about any size at all - there are canon examples of wedge-head shoulder-launched SAMs - so their mass requirements must be in proportion to the total size of the carrying craft. Assuming you can find the juice to power the things, there's no problem there.

Going from the quoted figure for the length of a Ghost Rider missile, and its apparent size relative to the others in that little image gallery, I'd guesstimate that a light impeller missile, as carried by a DD or CL, is about eight, ten meters long and one and a half to three across. And about a hundred and fifty tons of mass - obviously very dense.

Pinnaces are apparently about the same length and shape as a 747 or equivalent plane. They're probably a lot denser, though, so call it about 500 tons.

So. Bottom end mass estimate would be about two hundred tons for the spaceframe - and that's with box launchers and no sidewalls - and an additional three hundred for two missiles.

With proper missile tubes and sidewall protection, mmm, 700 to 900 empty, 1000-1200, loaded.

Also keep in mind that by impellers require a very specific hull form to work - you -must- build a spindle of a given length-width ratio.

Either way, given the apparent size of your intended ship, there wouldn't be room for two missile tubes in the forward hull, and likewise not enough distance between either side of the hull - even at its widest point - to include a full launch tube. So, if you wanted two missile tubes, you'd have to have one fore and one aft.

Compensators don't exist in the Spiral - Juraiian type drives just don't play fair with Newton. Unfortunately for ship designers, those mass savings are eaten up by the fact that both Spiral impellers and Spiral sidewalls are much bigger power hogs than the canon versions - which means that ships need much bigger reactors.

Oh, and, howinthehell does he do maintenece on this thing if there aren't any access panels?

Blessed be.
Nathan Baxter

You swallow the no fuel, no enviro, no docking, no landing gear whole, and balk at the lack of access panels? Well, anyway, the character here is Eat-Man, other wise known as Bolt Crank (with hints that his real name may be Leon.) his esper talent is that he carts around a very specialized pocket of hyperspace with him. Anything non-food that he eats goes into it, and he can eat anything. Anything he eats in pieces gets reassembled. Anything he eats broken gets repaired. I figure he has a mechanically oriented, very tidy spirit living in there. He can, at any time, extrude anything that he's eaten before through his hands - although if he's eaten it in pieces, he could have been fooled as to what it was. He has displayed the ability to extrude through thin metal walls, as well, and maintains enough of a tie to hyper that if he doesn't move too much, most of the thing's weight is supported. He has a tendency to eat vaguely man-portable artillery pieces, use them once, and then drop them, because it's not worth the effort to actually lug them anywhere.

Essentially, then, the fighter is designed so that he can exit a ship in-system, through whatever means, extrude the thing around him, dogfight with the ridiculous size to power ratios that the design allows, crashland on a nearby planet, and then, time permitting, disassemble it and eat it for later use. It's not intended to exist in the real world for long enough to break down, and if it does break down, it's either in combat or reentry - in which case he's got better things to do with his time than grab a wrench.

He takes care of the enviro by alternately venting some of the used air into space and replacing it with an oxy/helium mix from his fingers. Yes, most people would find the sudden pressure changes hideously unpleasant. Bolt's a bit of a stoic.

I've decided to limit his powers a bit, in order to keep him frombeing too overpowered, and to make the way he acts in his comics make sense. Indigestion sets in if he carries around too much mass for too long. He tends, then, to keep some basic emergency supplies on hand at all times (about what you could fit into a large hiking backpack) and eat for what he figures he'll need otherwise. He's almost always eating, but he tends to use things within a very short period of time after he finishes them.

In order to stay consistent with that, and to keep him from needing months on end to eat the thing, I'd like to keep it down to about the size range of star wars/wing commander fightercraft, though possibly the upper part of that range. The design calls for some form of self-propelled ordinance, as his ability to do without a proper magazine makes them tremendously effective for the space requirements. Okay - so full sized impeller missiles are Right Out. They're too big to eat in any numbers anyway. What would be more appropriate? I'm looking for something small enough that a single healthy person could carry one without too much difficulty, and powerful enough to take out other fightercraft, and at least have a chance of damaging somewhat larger ships. Internal guidance systems would be good, but are not required. I'd try with the man-portable impeller heads, but I doubt they're generally available across the spiral.

Thank you

Fibula

Oh, and I am very sorry about the double-posting.

>Oh, and I am very sorry about the double-posting.

Ist nichts.

Does Bolt's metatalent consider an empty magazine as a problem to be fixed, or can he just store lots and lots of ammunition?

If the latter, and assuming that he can also power whatever it is he pulls out, he'd probably be better off with a bigass energy weapon.

My though/suggestion, as a fellow writer rather than the LE, would be an exosuit - a heavy, spacegoing power armor, with some kind of heavy plasma gun or beam cannon.

Blessed be.
Nathan Baxter

According to the manga he has to eat the ammo as well. I presume that once his talent has dealt with guns, he has a -relatively- limited capacity.

e.g. if he only has a pistol then he can carry around as much ammo as he wants. If he just ate his ship then he can only carry around a limited number of missiles.

Just my 2 penceworth.

Nathan:

- He just stores lots and lots of ammunition. His talent does allow him to spawn through thin metal objects, though - like spawning a bullet directly into a gun. Thus, he has thin shells over the magazine on one side and the generator on the other within easy reach of the captain's chair. The headjack lets him keep his hands free to fill them.
- He can't just pump out power - the best he can do is either fuel or batteries. Getting rid of the empties in combat might be a bit challenging, and draining off the power supply wouldn't let him exploit his advantage quite as much as I'd like him to. The idea here is that people looking on from outside the ship should be shocked at the amount of destructive power he's fitting into the frame.
- exosuit doesn't quite feel right. Also has rather limited mobility. Granted, the ability to fire in any direction is nice, but without the valkyrie fly-change-fire-change-fly tactic, it's still, to my mind, tactically inferior, particularly if you've got guided ordinance. Also, and I admit I hadn't mentioned this, the job he's eating it for entails going out to fight, and then doing a controlled crashlanding onto a probably hostile planet after the forces he is with have been defeated. He doesn't want them to lose, and he'll try very hard to keep them from losing, but he doesn't expect to succeed. Fighterstyle is significantly better for reentry and controlled crash than exosuit.

For that matter, this is a one-use-only ship, and while Bolt has some fairly impressive resources, he's not made of money. Actuaters and joint articulation take money.

Thank you, though. You have provided a bit of useful inspiration.

Drakensis:
- is true, he has a limit (at least my version, though it's a soft limit enforced by stomach pain more than anything else) and this is one distinct reason I'm trying to keep the size of the thing down. Price is another. If you check out the size of the spirit sheild he's lugging around in second course, meal two, though (indigestion) you'll notice that he should have space for something about the size of an x-wing or two with plenty left over for missiles/torps/whatever of appropriate scale.

Thanks for the perspectives. Keep 'em coming if you got 'em.

Fibula