Weaponry and Defencive Technologies

To satisfy those pesky urges for world domination, the folks at various arms corporations around the world have cooked up all sorts of methods to convince the opponent to see things your way. Or not at all, if you'd prefer! Of course, those among us who prefer to keep our presence on this mortal plane will be glad to know that these same companies have also crafted ways to stop the beams of flowery sunshine and rocks of immense speed and power directed by your opponent.

Weapons in space generally fall into one of three categories: energy weapons, kinetic energy weapons, and missiles. The last two both use physical objects to do damage, but a missile is self-propelled.

Energy weapons, generally, are the most expensive to set up and require maintenance--not to mention a fair bit of technological advancement. They also produce a great deal of heat for your ship to deal with. They also lose lethality with range. There is, however, an advantage to lasers and their directed-energy cousins: they will never run out of ammunition. The endurance of these weapons is unending, so long as heat radiators are up and the reactor running to provide electricity (and as long as the laser is given downtime and maitenance). They cause damage by heating things up to the point of vapourization, explosions, and the combined effect of industrial cutting torches and grenades, all in one, as well as, sometimes, added radiation effects.

• Lasers use coherent light. They can be mounted as weapons on starships quite easily, have a theoretical maximum efficiency of 65% (with about 40% being realized in the field), and are the standard directed energy weapon Sector-wide. They can even be minimized down to usability as rifles, but that is beyond the scope of this document.
  
• Bomb-Pumped X-Ray and Gamma Ray Lasers use a nuclear weapon--one of the few good sources of x-rays on this scale--to get a bunch of small lasers to give one nice zap before getting incinerated. These are one-shot weapons, but terrifyingly effective. It's best to hook up a hundred or more lasers to one bomb, if possible.
  
• Free Electron X-Ray and Gamma Ray Lasers are terrifying death-beams at ranges of one light-hour, radiation-killing unhardened ships even at that range. Before going out that far, you can easily vapourize things. The disadvantage is the money, advancement, and size required--an acceleration ring of one kilometre in diameter is necessary. Sorry, Dr. Evil!
  
• Particle Beams aren't actually directed energy weapons. They behave somewhat similarly to one, however, producing a beam of charged particles. These are nasty weapons, which do damage through a mix of direct damage (the particles have mass and do hurt), heat, and finally Bremsstrahlung, which is a nasty form of radiation that occurs when the particles slow down--say, after hitting you. If no precautions are taken, an observer on the far side of the target ship could make a gruesome x-ray photo of everyone inside. For CH purposes, however, you can cut armour with these also.

Kinetic energy weapons are the cheapest effective weapon available, and exploit the natural tendency of things to break when hit very, very hard. This involves placing a very, very fast moving shell inside of the enemy ship, which basically means cannons. Not a muzzle loading pirate's cannon, of course, but a tough-as-nails railgun or other such state of the art long-range bulldozer! Of course, if an enemy is going fast enough, and they hit a stationary piece of metal, that's cheaper and just as well.

• Coilguns use magnetic coils to pull and push the projectile along the barrel. This results in an incredible punch at an affordable price, not to mention lesser power consumption than an equivalent railgun. They are, however, large weapons due to power switches and need bracing on the coils; they're under forces attempting to rend them apart.
  
• Railguns use two highly charged rails plus a projectile to strike an arc and pull the projectile along at insane speeds using Lorentz force. The maximum speed of a railgun's projectile? Six kilometres per second. The problem--that's a lot of barrel wear. You'll have to repair it after every shot or three. Also, can you say "power hog"? The railguns of the universe will also require large amounts of bracing.

Now, for some types of munitions.

• Solid Shells are the cheapest weapons possible, and possibly the most effective. If a shell is moving quickly enough, this is all you need to cause incredible damage.
  
• Burst Charge Shells fly into enemy ships, same as ever--but after penetrating armour, they begin bursting into thousands of tiny projectiles, resulting in greater damage inside the ship, not unlike a shotgun blast. Commence to screaming.
  
• Nuclear Warheads just cause havoc, as you should all know. In space, however, they have an effective radius of about a kilometre from point of impact, so they're not "fire and forget". Most of the blast will be x-rays.
  
• Mines sit there and wait to be ran into. If the opponent is going at an appreciable speed, his ship may soon be noseless. Keep in mind that these could also explode, which may be useful if he's going slow. Another thing: these can be made undetectable to thermal imaging (by being very cold) and left in a place for decades.
  
• Missiles, but there's some special notes on those.

Missiles, simply, are munitions that propel themselves. They can be released and accelerate on their own, or a coilgun (not a railgun, most likely) can be used to get them up to speed first. In any case, a missile can follow its target, and assuming that it doesn't run out of gas, it will always hit. This also assumes that the enemy does not blast your missile out of the sky; this is "point defence" and will be discussed later. Another advantage of missiles is heat; they don't heat your ship up, as they can be pushed off with springs or other non-intensive methods.

Typically the warhead of a missile will be a nuclear one, but cheaper, faster-launched missiles can be guided kinetic weapons instead. Perhaps you could use thermite. In any case, these are perfect weapons to use if you want a small ship to do damage.

The enemy has opened fire upon your vessel with all manner of death-rays and kinetic-energy disassemblers. You're in deep trouble, or at least, you would be were it not for these trusty pieces of machinery.

Compartmentalization is a defence used since guns first appeared. If the ship is divided into plenty of smaller boxes, it won't all depressurize if it's punctured. Divide the ship into compartments, seal the ones that get zapped with pressure-tight bulkheads (doors), and keep shooting. Not only can you isolate compartments this way, but all the extra structural supports can be a major help.

Armour jumps to mind immediately. It masses a lot, but it can be invaluable, especially against energy weapons. When facing off against a high-velocity round, armour gets in the way and stops it. Simple in concept. In execution, you will require armour against lasers, armour against kinetic weapons, and armour against radiation and Bremsstrahlung. Especially that last one.

Armour against kinetic weapons would likely take a form similar to modern tank armour, though with much denser and better materials. Reactive armour may or may not be a good idea also, if you're willing to install expendables and pay the price. Against a hypervelocity weapon--say, most forms of railguns--a Whipple shield may be necessary. When a projectile moving that fast hits the plate of armour, it vapourizes into plasma; leave a gap of vacuum between the Whipple shield and the actual hull to let it dissipate.

Anti-laser armour would not be reflective. Instead, it would resist heat damage, not flake away under the beams of flowery sunshine, and have a high vapourization energy.

Against radiation, the armour type you need varies. Against particle radiation--which create that nasty Bremsstrahlung I was talking about--you'll want something with lots of hydrogen in it--special composites, water, paraffin wax, or even propellant tanks (assuming you're using hydrogen). Against gamma rays or x-rays, a very dense material such as tungsten or lead is advisable--but keep it away from those particles, because x-rays can result from particles striking such materials.

Therefore, have paraffin on the outside to sift out the charged particles and take the rays with a layer of lead past that. And after all that, have some anti-kinetic and anti-laser armour. Yeah. Or, if you're feeling particularly cheap, it might be a good idea to simply not armour the non-crew parts of the ship against radiation, provided you don't mind the cleanup afterwards.

Shields exist, but not in the form envisioned by Star Trek or Star Wars. Instead, there exist Kinetic Energy Barriers, which serve one function: to transfer the would-be kinetic energy of a hit to the barrier generator. This means that the projectile stops mid-flight and the energy involved is dealt with by the generator.

What this means is that if a projectile moves in at one kilometre per second, the generator moves the opposite direction at one kilometre per second. If, however, there are two generators, each moves the opposite direction at five hundred metres per second, and so on. This is called energy division, and it is necessary.

Each shot also removes some of the energy in the generator's capacitor. Current models cannot be actively charged ,and so the rate of drain can exceed the rate of resupply; the generators can fail by lack of energy. They can also fail by being pushed, violently, out of place; this is why they will be mounted securely.

What this means is that there are various configurations of shield generators. Turn them all on, and they all drain energy, but you're safe from heavy hitters; otherwise, rotate groups to conserve energy.

In terms of aesthetics and practicalities, flashes are produced at the surface of the shield bubble when it activates; the bubble exists above the surface of the hull, conforming to its basic shape. Almost all shields work from outside, but will not stop outgoing munitions. Also, all shields will be tuned not to intercept very slow objects. Dreadnaughts may have up to five generators. More begin to become too expensive and complex.

Note, obviously, that KEBs do nothing to stop directed energy weaponry or radiation--only solid objects.

Decoys and stealth (or lack thereof) post.