Comment by HankB99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HankB99 | Hacker News Reader

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I've always been a bit disappointed in the weapons available far into the future. I tried watching one series and the opening scene involved good guys shooting at bad guys and hiding behind boulders and such. It just looked so much like the conflict sequence in High Noon. I couldn't watch further. And they still suffered from the "good guy bullets" vs. "bad guy bullets" phenomenon. A good guy can run unscathed (or with superficial wounds, at worst) through a hail of "bad guy bullets." Then they turn and fire three "good guy bullets" and five bad guys drop. Even my current favorite "The Expanse" has a lot of human aimed weapons. I expect that in the future that any weapons that fire a projectile would have an aiming system that would put the projectile dead on the target unless the target can take evasive action once a ballistic projectile is in flight. But really, I'd expect projectiles to be replaced by directed energy weapons by then. Maybe Star Trek gets that right with Phasors. Do Phasors ever miss? (Check that - should be Phasers. Phasors are weapons used by college math and physics professors.)

Besides The Expanse, which gets a lot of the technical implications on space battle right, there are some other examples. One that comes to mind would be Aerotech, the aerospace rule set from Classic battletech. hard to play as a table top, but in space it works with vectors, thrust and accelaration. And orientation of craft in space. You can even realative speed at the beginning of a scenarion in different vectors. As I said, hard to keep track off but quite realistic.

Another, non-game example of where weapons tech can take you, is Perry Rhoadan. german science fiction started in the 60s. Perry Rhoadan becomes immortal and leads humanity, and for periods the whole galaxy, for thousands of years. There you see actual technological progress, often stolen from other races. It leads to a point where a deus ex was used by authors to reign it back in (hyperspace resistance increased rendering everything too advanced useless). Point is, at the height of it, single shot starship weapons had aroud 2,000 GT TNT equivalent of energy, ships carried a lot of them which had and could be aimed at almost light speed to single point (in the physical sense as they had multilayered shields that could only be penetrated by point-fire, every "point" of the shiled had the same strength). i only wondered how ground combat would look like, as the battle armor and robots carried the same tech. I would assume a city would be reduced to sub-atomar dust within the first 10 minutes of an engangement or so.

but from a technical point of view it made sense, same for power generation and computers (even if computers also got the actual processing power development wrong). Nice thing, they used real world ISO units for the most part, not like start trek which just throwns around units to sound scientific.

Some ship examples: Accelaration: up to 980 km/sec^2, overlight factor up to 60 million, energy directly from hyperspace. So you can see why that, from an authors perspective, had to be rained in. when travel to the next couple of galaxies can be done in a private yacht, things get a little bit to crazy.

EDIT: Typos, a lot... Sorry for that!

> Do Phasors ever miss?

They miss, and they miss a lot. Firefights in Star Trek look mostly like firefights everywhere else - beams and bolts flying through the air, and every now and then someone gets hit.

One interesting aspect is that TNG-era phasers used by protagonists don't even look like practical weapons. I read somewhere that this was intentional design decision - Starfleet was supposed to be about peace and exploration, so they didn't want the protagonists carrying something recognizable as a gun. Star Trek back-tracked a bit from that later on, with introduction of phaser rifles that look not unlike something you could really see on a battlefield of the future. But back to the TNG phasers - because they're shaped more like a flat flashlight than a gun, they really must be tough to aim. I mean, try taking a laser pointer and hitting something a couple meters away from you with the first click of the button. It's hard. In my headcanon, phasers must run some sophisticated auto-targeting systems - otherwise, the feats of accuracy seen on the screen would be impossible.

Hand-held Phasers were also so small to show the power of the technology of the 24th century. Gene Roddenberry insisted indeed that they should not look like a pistol.

Source: Star Trek Design, by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

I have always explained it away in my head that the hand held phasers have some kind of feedback loop you learn while practicing. I.e. they have some kind of guiding or balancing mechanism, but it's not automatic, which is why you have all these training sessions on holodeck with Riker or whomever.

By the way, this is also what I love about a lot of Star Trek tech. Humans are mostly in the loop. (I am sure it's just a product of the times it was created, but I love it.) Reports are brought on PADDs walking to the captain, not emailing the captain. The computer is explicitly instructed to scan for people, it's not keeping tabs of everyone at all times. If you lose your badge, your are generally not tracked anymore. (No implants.) The badge is not always in recording or transmission mode. Sickbay does not have CCTV system always on. And so one. It seems like a culture which long ago decided on a trade-off between surveillance and privacy, and it's not the same we choosing right now.

But if I keep thinking in-universe style, the Star Trek / Federation culture on surveillance could have come from some hard won failures earlier on.

In a more realistic space battle scenario weapons would have to be able to miss. You would pick your engagement range based on it. It's kind of like sword fighting in that sense: you want to be close to the enemy, but far away enough that you can react to their attacks. The only reason that it wouldn't work this way would be if you had some incredible shields/armor/defensive measure of some kind that would protect you.

The future would likely include lasers as some kind of a weapon, which indicates to me that engagement ranges would be so massive that even light will have a significant amount of travel time.

The expanse is very Low tech in SF terms, certainly when building top end Traveller forces you tend to have individual point defence built into the armour.

Ok at that point the avionics fit for a fire team would buy a small starship.

If I remember correctly, in Banks "Against a Dark Background", space battles must follow strict rules including no-AI assistance. But there are cheaters.

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