3 ms·

Agreed. And just to add, the limiting factor is what kind of acceleration the occupants can handle. Even with magic anti-g fluid injectors replacing your blood

Agreed. And just to add, the limiting factor is what kind of acceleration the occupants can handle. Even with magic anti-g fluid injectors replacing your blood with marshmallows, it'll still take a long while to get up to 5% or 10% of light speed without turning into goo. Not minutes or hours anyway. Individual space battles might be measured in years, even in the participant's timeframe. "So who won that space battle out by Ceres?" "Dunno, it's only been 3 years."

grues-dinner 2y ago
Surely that just makes it even more lopsided to the guy who gets a missile off before you notice. Even if you can pull 20G before your brain explodes, if the missile does 100G (and even Sprint anti-ballistic-missile missiles in real life did that, in atmosphere, but admittedly not for long, they "only" reached 3.4km/s) then you may as well be standing still. Plus you only really have evasive capability in one axis, you can't leap to the side with any major acceleration in the last 100 milliseconds while the missile covers the last final 5km. 5-10% of light speed won't really change timeframes much (the Lorentz factor is like 0.5% at 0.1c). If there were a major fight that weren't just a sneak attack and involved fleet on fleet, I imagine it would look like swarms of super fast autonomous missiles rushing in and trying to take each other out faster then you could blink. Any that got through the opposing swarm would proceed to absolutely shred the squishy, slow human containers due to their speed and agility. We don't have those engines, so it would probably just be a bit like a modern naval engagement would be today: a long range missile fight between ships that have negligible speed relative to the missiles. Except there's no such thing as terminal velocity, the ships are made of tissue paper and your CIWS equivalent has orders of magnitude less time with the target in range.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  An interesting missile would be one that catches up to you, latches, and accelerates you to only 20 G or whatever is the minimum to kill you. Then when your crew is braindead it uses little maneuvering thrusters to spin you around and takes you back to the point of engagement, so your ship/secrets can be salvaged. I suppose a simple neutron bomb missile would be more efficient for this, and wouldn’t involve a long elliptic trip, so long as it didn’t fry your systems and data storage media. Edit: I asked ChatGPT and apparently there’s no sci-fi involving a missile that functions to latch and accelerate the target to enough Gs to kill the occupants. Did I invent this just now?
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    Yes, I think you did! It's a brilliantly diabolical design! It's not quite the same, but there's a short story by Alastair Reynolds (I think in Galactic North) where a missile forces a ship to run forever, chasing it out of the galaxy as the universe ages around them (I think).

grues-dinner 2y ago

Surely that just makes it even more lopsided to the guy who gets a missile off before you notice. Even if you can pull 20G before your brain explodes, if the missile does 100G (and even Sprint anti-ballistic-missile missiles in real life did that, in atmosphere, but admittedly not for long, they "only" reached 3.4km/s) then you may as well be standing still. Plus you only really have evasive capability in one axis, you can't leap to the side with any major acceleration in the last 100 milliseconds while the missile covers the last final 5km. 5-10% of light speed won't really change timeframes much (the Lorentz factor is like 0.5% at 0.1c). If there were a major fight that weren't just a sneak attack and involved fleet on fleet, I imagine it would look like swarms of super fast autonomous missiles rushing in and trying to take each other out faster then you could blink. Any that got through the opposing swarm would proceed to absolutely shred the squishy, slow human containers due to their speed and agility. We don't have those engines, so it would probably just be a bit like a modern naval engagement would be today: a long range missile fight between ships that have negligible speed relative to the missiles. Except there's no such thing as terminal velocity, the ships are made of tissue paper and your CIWS equivalent has orders of magnitude less time with the target in range.

unsupp0rted 2y ago
An interesting missile would be one that catches up to you, latches, and accelerates you to only 20 G or whatever is the minimum to kill you. Then when your crew is braindead it uses little maneuvering thrusters to spin you around and takes you back to the point of engagement, so your ship/secrets can be salvaged. I suppose a simple neutron bomb missile would be more efficient for this, and wouldn’t involve a long elliptic trip, so long as it didn’t fry your systems and data storage media. Edit: I asked ChatGPT and apparently there’s no sci-fi involving a missile that functions to latch and accelerate the target to enough Gs to kill the occupants. Did I invent this just now?
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Yes, I think you did! It's a brilliantly diabolical design! It's not quite the same, but there's a short story by Alastair Reynolds (I think in Galactic North) where a missile forces a ship to run forever, chasing it out of the galaxy as the universe ages around them (I think).