01-08-2007, 01:47 AM
Quote:Nonononono! Forcefield tubes (which I am against, but I don't consider that relevant to my argument) are not in the slightest bit neccessary for boarding operations.
If we didn't, the whole first season goes out the window because we can't have plausible space battles against those Boskonians that Haruhi's so worried about... I think what's already been written pretty much forces us to have them as "easily duplicated".
A physical hatch with plasma cutters ringing it and sprayers for some sort of, of fast hardening putty for a pressure seal could do just as well - fly up, ram, latch on, then fire up your cutters to slice the hull open and charge.
For that matter, you could probably do without the pressure seal and hatch if you were willing to stick your marines in armored space suits and let them swim over on their ownsomes.
There's also the Nautilus approach - armored prow, hatch right behind, anti-shock field for your crew and a whole lotta relative velocity.
Finally, I've suggested this before and it kinda sank without a trace, but I've got what I think is a fairly simple way to allow space dogfights and such.
See, the gravitational effects of a major body eventually snap a Speed Drive's maximum speed down to 'fast highway' levels, right? By saying that other drive fields can have the same effect, we force our ships into close proximity at relatively low velocities - ie...
A smaller ship approaches a larger. At a distance determined by their combined mass, they go to atmospheric speed, and stay there until they can get far enough apart to 'disentangle' their drive fields. If this distance is, as I would suggest, no more than a few times visual range, and if there's something in the 'wavium's safety protocols that tries to nuke the range of any hardtech weapon firing through their drive fields (ie, increasing the dissipation rate of a particle beam or something - probably this means that they end up losing energy in all directions and radiating flashily as they fire) then we've got everything we need for a dogfight dropped right in our laps.
That's if both ships are small and lightly armored. Large, tough ships will end up exchanging broadsides or something close to them, and mismatched opponents will have something like a kamikaze scenario to deal with as the boarding craft, by virtue of their size, simply aren't tough enough to stand up to the kind of weapon you can build into a larger hull.
Ja, -n
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