Intergalactic Summit

I dispute the microwarp field theory because in-built capacitors in the circuit boards and power routers of a typical projectile turret machinery will not discharge the burst of energy required to generate a microwarp field. Do you have any idea how much energy is required to create a depleted vacuum bubble for every single projectile, where the smallest is the size of your forearm? You need a dedicated capacitor for that.

Not to mention the modern microwarpdrive actually works with the warp core in our ships to generate a limited depleted vacuum bubble to move at velocities exceeding what is achievable with an afterburner. That simply doesn't work with our turrets. If you want to do that with projectiles, you will need a warp core and a microwarpdrive in every single shell.

And no, I have no idea what kind of magic the chemists did to our shell propellant. You lead target, you fire the goddamn thing and the damn thing will hit the target a split-second later assuming that the recoil, tracking and trajectory calculations didn't screw up.

Hang on, are you suggesting that we have a miniaturised warp core and microwarpdrive inside all the shells?



What sick bastard puts children in a warship?

Valid concern, but the enduring question of our time is what idiots put them in capsules.

Do you seriously mean that the ship main capacitor is irrelevant and similar to... mere, single electronic capacitors ? The ship capacitor is the only capacitor ensemble that is able to store such amounts of energy... I really do not know how to explain that better, but that sounds obvious...

You keep avoiding answering the simple paradox that if your theory was correct, then it would make no sense either to use the ship main capacitor to begin with, if you just had to pull your energy off the main powergrid and its lesser electronic capacitors.

For the propellant in itself, I can not answer for the Matari. I am no Matari ship engineer.

Except that that's not the case. Why do you think that's the case?

Sure, it's this big prominent yellow thing in the middle of your piloting interface so I can see why you'd focus on it, but do you seriously mean to tell me that you think the only ship systems that exist are the ones you can see in your HUD?

Capsuleer or not, your ship is heavily automated. You don't need to devote attention to the atmospheric system, the water purifier, the deck gravity plating or every screen, monitor or volumetric projection on the ship.

Likewise, you don't need to know about the power systems in your guns because they're not relevant to you as the commander. All that matters from your perspective is "Do I have enough PG and CPU for these things?"

Stop fixating on your ship's central capacitor as if it's the only example of power storage in the entire vehicle. It's not.

Powergrid to keep the modules running. Capacitor's stored energy used for burst of energy discharges. How is that difficult to understand?

Think of it this way. You use energy from the powergrid to turn on a hybrid blaster turret and all its support machinery, from loaders to mag-clamps to conveyors ferrying the ammunition to the weapons and targeting computers and etc. If you use that same powergrid to provide the additional energy to activate the magnetic rails and to convert the matter inside each canister into plasma you won't be able to fire the weapon at all. All you get is a power failure for your trouble.

Here's a short calculation to illustrate the point:

An Incursus fires one Light Neutron Blaster II. Each time the Light Neutron Blaster II uses an additional 1.4161 GJ to fire. It takes 4s to fire each turret once. We assume that the time it takes for 4s to drive 1.4161 GJ needed to fire a Light Neutron Blaster II.

That means it requires:
1.4161 GJ x 4s = 5.6614 GW.
to fire the turrets each time.

That's 5,661.4 MW for each turret. The usable energy an Incursus' reactor can output is 45MW. That's not enough energy to fire from 1 turret, let alone 3!

So where did all that energy required to fire a Light Neutron Blaster II come from? Stored energy from the capacitor obviously!

The reason why projectile and missile weapons systems do not draw any energy from the capacitors to propel their munitions into somebody else's hull is because the energy required to do so is already stored...IN THE CASE/FUEL TANKS! You just need to divert a small amount of energy from the power grid, via circuit controls (usually an intricate network of transistors within the firing mechanism), to provide the spark inside the munitions to convert the stored energy into the kinetic energy needed to send the munitions into the bad guy's face. No stored energy from capacitor needed.

Also to avoid confusion about the 45MW, that 45MW is the amount of energy available to activate the modules AFTER you take out the energy required to activate the warp drive, the in-built defense and damage control systems, thrusters/engines, ship capacitors, sensor systems, drone controls (if applicable) and all the already-available support machinery.

You may as well be trying to demonstrate to me that bananas are an excellent foodstuff because muesli bars can burn. Every statistic you just listed may be completely accurate, but any relationship between them and the point being discussed is, at best, tangential.

Blasters are not autocannons. The two types of guns behave in very different ways, and what each one needs in order to function correctly will similarly vary.