The Kzinti lesson

[Nene]

"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

So our ship's drives will propel us rapidly to hundreds of m/s, spewing incandescent plasma and fusion products as they do. Yet the drive plume from a ship does no damage.

The risk is even acknowledged on landing pads with the blast deflectors. Also take into account maxim 24; "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun."

So shouldn't the plume do something? Thermal damage to shields or hull? Internal overheating?

 

[damon8r351]

300 meters a second is only about 670 miles an hour, which is just about the cruising speed of an FA-18 Hornet at military power (aka not afterburner). A 747-8 is only about 50 tons less than the hull weight of a Python and they can cruise at 570 mph. What I'm saying is that these engines are probably very similar in performance to jet engines of today, and I don't think shields and hulls built to withstand micro-meteor impacts at relativistic speeds are going to be much affected that way. JBDs around the pads are built for the benefit of human ground crew and support equipment, which are a lot more squishy than ship hulls. As for supercruise, it's based on the principles of the theoretical Alcubierre drive, which is reactionless so there's no plume. Space contracts and expands around the ship, "squeezing" toward its destination.

 

[Nene]

You ever seen the mess that jet blast makes of things?

Also bear in mind that the jet blast is also greatly diluted by the atmosphere, especially in high-bypass engines, whereas the thrust from our engines is a collimated plume of plasma. There's a lot of energy contained in that plasma, and plasma conducts heat really well into what it touches.

Our shields and hull don't really see much in the way of relativistic velocity impacts, since our drive systems artificially limit our velocities. They would still offer protection, but if you compare a laser with a couple of MW output to a thruster with a couple of MW output, what's the difference?

Supercruise is an entire other beast too. It's also way more dangerous than our ship's drive. Although space looks empty, it's not. In deep space you have about one particle per cubic metre. As our ships pass through space, they're constantly compressing space in front of us, stretching it around the sides, and expanding it behind us. That means that any particle in the space that we pass through gets caught up in the compressed space in front of us, and squished into it. Now some of them escape down the sides, which I think is why we see those sparkling plumes of ships in supercruise, but the rest of them stay squeezed up front. Now what happens when your ship stops? There should be a burst of mixed radiation and particles flung in all directions from the front of a ship. The longer you've been in supercruise, the more massive this blast would be, because the more you've collected. Now I guess Frontier could apply some Handwavium to it, and say that all the particles a ship collects are funnelled down the sides to form that plume, but a ship dropping out of frameshift should be something that's legitimately scary.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes. There are a lot of areas where Elite Dangerous doesn't match reality, and conservation of energy is one of them. Probably a good thing, since being unable to take off without your drive plume counting as an attack on the station is fairly important.

The kinetic energy of even a small ship even at the limited speeds is well into the giga-joule range, so ramming does substantially less damage than it should - and by conservation of momentum, the drive plume needed to accelerate it to those speeds in a few seconds should also do a considerable amount of damage to anything nearby.

That said, a huge beam laser does 41.4 MJ of damage to its target (ignoring resistances) per second.
That same beam laser only draws 2.61MW from the power plant and 8.2MW from the power distributor to do this ... so where does the other 30MW come from?
For that matter, a 6A power distributor recharges weapons at a rate of 5.2 MW ... but only draws 0.82MW from the power plant to do so.

 

[CMDR_DeltaAgent26]

300 meters a second is only about 670 miles an hour, which is just about the cruising speed of an FA-18 Hornet at military power (aka not afterburner). A 747-8 is only about 50 tons less than the hull weight of a Python and they can cruise at 570 mph. What I'm saying is that these engines are probably very similar in performance to jet engines of today, and I don't think shields and hulls built to withstand micro-meteor impacts at relativistic speeds are going to be much affected that way. JBDs around the pads are built for the benefit of human ground crew and support equipment, which are a lot more squishy than ship hulls. As for supercruise, it's based on the principles of the theoretical Alcubierre drive, which is reactionless so there's no plume. Space contracts and expands around the ship, "squeezing" toward its destination.

ok, so if i's reactionless, why the hell am I blinded by the ships in front of me, with the huge comet like tails?
and the brightness of the engines is the same or greater than that of a star?

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

+1 for blocking the toastrack then melting all the ships queued up behind me when I hit boost

 

[Nene]

That said, a huge beam laser does 41.4 MJ of damage to its target (ignoring resistances) per second.
That same beam laser only draws 2.61MW from the power plant and 8.2MW from the power distributor to do this ... so where does the other 30MW come from?

The 41.4 MJ is the energy required to block it, I thought? Rather than matching the incoming energy 1:1

For that matter, a 6A power distributor recharges weapons at a rate of 5.2 MW ... but only draws 0.82MW from the power plant to do so.

Er .. well .. capacitors! uh .. magnets?

ok, so if i's reactionless, why the hell am I blinded by the ships in front of me, with the huge comet like tails?
and the brightness of the engines is the same or greater than that of a star?

Like I said before, I think this is all the particles that your ship has collected in the bow shock sliding down the sides to form a plume.

 

[Iskariot]

"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

So our ship's drives will propel us rapidly to hundreds of m/s, spewing incandescent plasma and fusion products as they do. Yet the drive plume from a ship does no damage.

The risk is even acknowledged on landing pads with the blast deflectors. Also take into account maxim 24; "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun."

So shouldn't the plume do something? Thermal damage to shields or hull? Internal overheating?

David Braben talked about this in early dev vids. He seemed a proponent of ship exhaust doing damage.

Wasn't this the case in the X-wing and TIE fighter games too when you flew to close to the thrusters of big ships?

I would love this to be the case in ED.