What were they actually expecting to use the 5 inch naval turrets on?
Surely better to use the weight for point defence or moar nukes?
What were they actually expecting to use the 5 inch naval turrets on?
What were they actually expecting to use the 5 inch naval turrets on?
Surely better to use the weight for point defence or moar nukes?
Replace all three five inch guns with something juicier, like nuclear-powered railguns, Super-CWISesque point defense systems, or even MARAUDER (one of my very favorite highly successful publicly acknowledged projects which abruptly went dark decades ago).
Add secondary "battle" bridge amidships at the center of the main vessel.
Liberally coat forward cone with "Pykrete" or pykrete-like ice meters thick; spiral cooling hoses on the ice as you spray it down and freeze it in place, then use those pipes as heat exchangers so that your kinetic foreward ice shield essentially becomes an anti-heat battery so that you can pick between tanking shots with the shield or taking shots with the laser (melting the shield a little).
They were for point defense.
Read the Autumn Rain trilogy.
It was to be armed with Casaba howitzers too which are basically nuclear HEAT beams, so take that how you will
I think the naval turrets arent a bad idea for targets that are too big for the CIWS but not big enough to require total flaming nuclear holocaust death
>Liberally coat forward cone with "Pykrete" or pykrete-like ice meters thick;
Weight is a concern more than dollar expense. Unless the pykrete had very favorable properties and could easily be built and repaired in space you would choose a more refined lightweight armor solution.
Dead weight is bad on a spaceship that you want to accelerate.
>Dead weight is bad on a spaceship that you want to accelerate.
You're off course correct, but when they wrote the specs for the different ships using different sized pusher plates (not talking about the novel here, talking about the real project Orion) the nuclear pulse propulsion ships had so much deltav and so much thrust to weight that they actually didn't know what to do with all the weight allocation. The version that could get to Jupiter in six months (absolutely ridiculously fast) had a bunch of barber chairs weighting a ton apiece for the crew to get haircuts in during the flight included in the weight budget.
There was also a version of the ship that came in at 250 million tons that could get to proxima centauri and come to a stop there in some ridiculous time frame, 40 years I think. The numbers given in the project Orion book are absolutely bonkers, you should read it. So yeah strap an iceberg on top of the ship why the fuck not
>strap an iceberg on top of the ship why the fuck not
humans need water and water protects from radiation win win
Also random bits of space dust hitting the ship at high relative speed would spend all of their energy vaporizing the ice, and you can use it as a heat sink. It's more like win win win win
>gods buttplug
Ayy lmaos, duh. Sectoids are weak to high explosives.
in case anyones confused where this is from, the novels name is Footfall. The same authors also have other good works
The real thing proposed to JFK came before the fictional book.
authors of the book worked as aerospace engineer for boeing and as a presidential science advisor
Yeah, and he shilled nonstop about his tangential role in others' work to make himself look good. Same with the kinetic rods idea. Since nerds read the fictional nonsense instead of the actual ripped off engineering work they think he's creative lol.
Michael in Footfall is different, it has four space shuttles mounted to it as juryrigged space fighters, and uses 16" guns. The OP pic is a result of an actual government program to design a space battleship.
are they gonna put me in looney bin now because I can no longer tell truth from fiction??
Anon, you are posting in the looney bin.
yt search project Orion and the Deadalus drive. It's all real.
and now they're develping something called "DRACO" drive or something like that??? Dunno.
It's not from the book, the design was a real plan for orbital battleship under project orion
And they dug out those plans and used them in the book Footfall. Some scifi uses real world concepts and designs anon, especially the imaginary ones.
No I get that, but regardless the design didn't originate from the book
how are those ships supposed to decelerate when reaching their destination? This is as important as accelerating in space
Point backwards and lots of booms?
and moving through the center of the explosion wouldn't be a problem? Also, every deceleration nuke would have to be move faster than the ship in order to move away from it but in the direction of travel?
The ship is supposed to hit the explosion, that's what the pusher plate is for. The nukes are also designed to send all the plasma in one direction (they're called casaba-howitzer nukes), so as much energy as possible is deposited in the pusher plate.
And the nukes are ejected through a small hole in the pusher plate (that gets covered during detonations and then opens up again) at some speed, so they'll reach the optimal distance for detonation at precisely the right time regardless of the ship's current speed or direction of travel
Just want to chime in with another recommendation for Footfall.
One thing that Hollywood "alien invasion" stories never seem to get right is having a valid reason to invade. In Oblivion the alien wants water to make hydrogen to use in fuel cells. Uh, there's a whole fucking planet (more than one actually) made out of hydrogen. No need to invade Earth.
In Independence Day they're even more vague. They're here for "resources" - but if you can travel between the stars, you can harvest whatever you need from asteroids. It's easier than invading.
In Footfall, the aliens need a new home and they actually want to be allies with us, but a core part of their naturally evolved psychology is showing strength when meeting someone new. It literally never occurs to them that they could show up and just ask to live on Earth. They have to attack us and in their culture, one who attacks and loses is treated better than one who doesn't attack in the first place.
After a surrender, the victor goes over and puts his foot on the loser (this is where the title of the book comes from). Early in the book, humans keep surrendering and the aliens want to accept our surrender, but they keep crushing humans to death while trying to accomplish that. This makes the humans think the invaders are bloodthirsty savages.
There's a funny scene where an alien surrenders and the human (who has figured out this cultural practice) tries to accept his surrender by putting a foot on him and the alien can't help but laugh at how feeble it is ... but goes along with it anyway.
So yeah, good book. A lot of thought into the psychology of the aliens. Mote in God's Eye is another one that Pornell collaborated on where the psychology is really good.
That sounds like a fun read thanks anon
I think it was more of just "uh, you could put some guns on this if you wanted, here's a real gun for scale"
I dunno, 40 RPM per gun of proximity fused 5" out of a radar guided mount seems like pretty good point defense for a 1963 time frame. You aren't getting Phalanx.
there are literally 6 phalanx ciws on that drawing
They just used what they had. It was a bit of a bodge job because the aliens in Footfall had pretty much fucked up earth's manufacturing and transport system with pinpoint laser bombardments, asteroid strikes and continental tidal waves. The builders had a lot of space left and had some navy guns lying around in the port, so slapped them on.
Also, five inch solid shot shells are pretty hard to destroy with anti missile weapons and can do a hell of a lot of damage if you take into account that adding the minor speed the solid shells are fired at (1-2km per sec) to the addtional speed of the approaching battleship (100+ km per sec).as it chases down the slower alien mothership, would result in pretty devastating damage from even a single hit.
Can't they come up with a better propulsion system than "strap nuclear bombs to a rocket lmao"?
Nuclear salt is a continuous nuclear reaction instead of the short bursts of nuclear pulse, it works more like a conventional rocket only with fissile material instead of combustable material.
If launched from the poles and with the proper platting there is zero radioactive fallout produced that remains on earth when launching. You underestimate the ways in which you can tailor nuclear bombs.
The design is moronic, wasting energy to degrade the ship itself
The 5" gun was long range AA