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Post by Kage2020 on May 14, 2004 11:42:03 GMT -5
I think the best thing to go is work around this and just ignore what is patently ridiculous 'fluff'. I'm not keen on there being an obvious discrepancy between the 'fluff' - and therefore the RPG - and the wargame, but saying "Erm, their solar sails that kind of work on magnetic principles" just doesn't cut the mustard for me. So in this case no... But then again, even Imperial drive systems don't work how they're meant to in the 'fluff'... Kage
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Post by Sojourner on May 14, 2004 14:47:13 GMT -5
Suppose the sails work on neutrino capture? It's elegantly simple as we have no knowledge in the field but it's still perfectly plausible.
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Post by eustakos on May 14, 2004 15:57:21 GMT -5
either the eldar sail on warp-winds, or ignore the sail stuff, space sails are fine, but they cant compete with cinematic fusion rockets
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Post by zholud on May 14, 2004 16:10:12 GMT -5
I think the best thing to go is work around this and just ignore what is patently ridiculous 'fluff'. My point is more general – you stick to different kinds of rockets and the sole way to move in materium. Despite it is probably true I want you to show a wider picture. The keeping of anti-matter is equally hard if not harder problem than giant solar sail. However, you accept first and throw out the second. I still think that we should combine existing fluff on Eldar drives and logic in spite it is sometimes not that easy.
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Post by Kage2020 on May 15, 2004 7:57:39 GMT -5
Neutrinos... I've seen this suggestion before and while it works with greater elegance it still doesn't work that well... It still suffers from the same problem as photons, I'm afraid, though with the requirement that the eldar have the capability of trapping the buggers. And if they can do that then the suggestion would be that they have, essentially, the single best shields in the entire universe. Nothing anyone could throw at them would scratch one of their 'neutrino sail' ships.. Althougth, as you say, "we have no knowledge in the field", but just random thoughts on the subject indicate potential problems. The suggestion here is to keep the manifestations of that technology (i.e. the sails) and attribute different purposes to them. It would also necessarily allow the breaking away from the whole fore/main/mizzen-mast allowing, for example, the 'sails' that are indicated on Goodwin's original image of Biel-Tan. The point is that as represented solar sails do not work. They cannot work. Trying to stick to the image and introduce photos, neutrinos still doesn't take away that simple fact. Furthermore, attributing to 'warp winds' is equally problematic given the nature of the warp on the system level (i.e. the entire reason that there is a 'warp zone' in the first place). I'm afraid it's not a case of accepting the "first", just that the "second" doesn't work no matter what. We know that antimatter can be 'stored'. We also know that solar sails are a fantastically interesting piece of technology which when extended to the scale of the 40k universe just don't work. Heck, the only way that they would is if the entire mass of eldar spacecraft were reduced to all but zero... To maintain the image of the 40k universe on the RPG side of things, the singular best response is advocated by Minister. Reactionless drives which give them the edge of 'cinematic fusion rockets' as used by the Imperium. It's hellishly hard to outmanoeuvre the Imperium when it takes you four months to accelerate to 5ms -1! On the wargame side of things obviously we cannot touch anything. But that is less of a problem for me then the reverse seems true. Kage
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Post by zholud on May 15, 2004 11:34:47 GMT -5
I guess our debate is a little bit off, but still. You say that no sails because not enough thrust. I say that thrust depends on energy used per period of time, is it right? If the sails are almost unlimited in size (why not?) they may ‘net out’ almost unlimited amount of energy per period of time. Thus their thrust can be greatly above any before-determined amount. The exact type of particles they net out is of minor importance. Otherwise you should give an interpretation to ( ridiculous or not but official) material published on their thrusters, that’s it, BFG Eldar pirates part. In order to simplify your search, I’ll give extremely short quotes from there, just in order to point (not to proof! ) my position: “Eldar ships move by capturing stellar energy through their sails and using this to power their movement. The amount of energy they can capture and therefore the distance they can move, depends on their facing with regard to the nearest star.” Furthermore, the rules show movement as: “Eldar ship speed depends on its facing towards the sunward table edge. All Eldar ships have three speeds (for example, 10/20/30). The first is used if the sunward table edge is in the Eldar ship's front fire arc; the second is used if the sunward table edge is in its rear fire arc; and the third is used if the sunward table edge is in its left or right fire arcs.”If you want to use rockets, it’s your choice, but you should give an explanation on why they move with different speeds. I may safely bet that if BL will publish the description of Eldar ship manoeuvre, they will use these rules and descriptions. We are heretics, but to say Eldar ships don’t use their position relative to the star (note, I don’t say ‘they use solar sails’)’ is close to saying Emperor does not really fit to this grim darkness, so get rid of him.’why exactly they are unable to work? What is the limiting factor? I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that it can be stored. The problem is that to store it you have to border it with something. Energy fields do not work, neither do gravitational… they seems to be an extension of matter (due to Einsteinian energy-matter equivalence, or better to say identity) and thus causes annihilation as well.
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Post by Destecado on May 15, 2004 12:15:50 GMT -5
A thought that i have been working on is that the wraithbone of the ships act as a harmonic trap. The interaction between the wraithbone and the warp is one of harmonic resonance. Sound can be broken up into sine waves that have different frequencies and amplitudes. Like other wave forms, sine waves can carry and transmit energy.
This theory deals with the distortion created between our reality and the warp. Wraithbone acts as a harmonic trap capacitor, trapping and storing the charged particles created by this distortion. If wraithbone has the properties of a crystal perhaps part of the shaping process is akin to tuning a musical instrument.
Rather than tuning it to create sound it is being tuned as a receptor or trap to accumulate the charged particles that are transmited at certain frequencies or certain sine waves.
Rather than relying on the solar winds to move the ships what if the "sails" are actually emitters, through which these stored ionizide particles are released. This would then propel the ship forward. Of course these sail like emitters would have the drawback (or benefit) of being effected by the solar winds.
If heading directly into a the wind (front fire arch) they encounter some resistance as it pushes against the emitters. When heading away from the sun, they gain some benefit like a tail wind does for a plane in the atmosphere. When coming in from the side, the solar wind is at its most adventageuos. It hit the greatest amount of surface are of the emitters and gives the ship extra thrust.
You may also be questioning how the ship can move as fast as it does based on the size of the emitters and the mass of the ship. I think I have a solution to this as well. The eldar have anti-grav technology. While it is not possible to change the mass of the ship, this technology could be used to lessen the weight of the ship.
It would take less thrust to move the "lighter" weight, ship than if it was at its actual full weight. By combining the two technologies the engines are then able to produce enough thrust to move massive objects. How does that sound?
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Post by Sojourner on May 15, 2004 13:42:19 GMT -5
Antimatter can be stored as plasma in the same way as matter.
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Post by zholud on May 15, 2004 16:39:57 GMT -5
Destecado, I think that your idea has a potential, despite I don’t 100% get the way of its work. I am fine with idea that those things that look like sails but are not sails (because real ones should be much larger and probably hardly detectable by mere imperial sensors). On anti-grav, there is a problem, whether they affect mass or weight. If the first – no more problems with solar wind at all… is they have less resting mass that a single photon, they will be moved by it to a light speed… alas, seems there is no mass-less anti-grav, and weightless is similar to some extent to underwater boat which can be just deep enough not to dive further or go up, but people inside are not in state of weightlessness… Sojourner from what I remember, (and I may be wrong) plasma is the state of matter, just like gas or solid state… just ionised one. Yes, it is somehow different because there are roughly equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles thus generally antimatter should be stable… but the amount of energy needed to change aggregate state of (anti)matter will take of more energy than you’ll get from annihilation. At least it may be the case. The positrons (anti-electrons) where achieved in the mid-50s, but they are never stored to my knowledge…
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Post by Kage2020 on May 15, 2004 17:40:22 GMT -5
zholud... The one thing that I am up on is the eldar 'fluff'. Or at least the craftworld eldar 'fluff', so there really is no need to post me quotes on the basis that you don't think that I've seen them! Saying that BL would question it or use the standard rules is not surprising. It's easy to state that you should use the narrative 'fluff', but harder to make it work. It quite simply doesn't work. Destecado... I'm afraid that the description you offer doesn't really do it for me. Kage
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Post by zholud on May 16, 2004 4:54:32 GMT -5
Kage, mon ami, relax… no need to be rude and set exclamation marks after your arguments. You probably feel like a lonely crusader on self-prescribed battle against absence of logic in GW works… but you are not alone I have not been sure that you actually read the abovementioned quotes, so I posted them. Because I always try to give info to anyone if I’m unsure he/she knows it. On your argument – it still cannot convince me. Sadly but true, your ” It quite simply doesn't work” is not very persuasive… at least for me. I beg you one again, please enlighten stupid me why exactly it cannot work? What does limit it? Why the limits are so limiting? I once again point to my general idea called high tech stone axe. I repeat it once more: - With the tech stone age humans had the stone axe was perfect thing, the ultimate tool and weapon. They cannot see anything to perfect it even further. Now with our tech we can do stone axes of better quality and much cheaper. However, we don’t because other options appeared, much superior to stone axe in the services they provide. Same with rockets – now we see them as ultimate tool which can be perfected only slightly by changing fuel type, but still sticking to the very idea of rocket. In future, especially that distant, the race, who developed for 60 million years can envision any rockets in the same way we envision stone exe. They can easily produce it if necessary, but other, unheard to us, options emerged, much better than rockets.
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Post by Sojourner on May 16, 2004 12:12:25 GMT -5
zholud - yep; you are. Sorry.
Antimatter is identical to regular matter in every way except that there isn't much of it, and its properties are a perfect opposite. In practice this makes little difference except that all charge-based forces act in the opposite direction. In a magnetic containment field this doesn't matter; you can still store antinuclei in an ionised state in a magnetic field. They will also fuse in exactly the same way if you get enough of them, but there wouldn't be much of a point.
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Post by Kage2020 on May 16, 2004 15:11:58 GMT -5
On your argument – it still cannot convince me. Sadly but true, your ” It quite simply doesn't work” is not very persuasive… at least for me. It has nothing to do with stupidity, zholud and my apologies for the lack of smilies in the last post... To be honest, however, I'm not a physicist. I used to be but the more interesting questions draw me away... So I'm afraid that I must use what I have which, in this case, are the strange abstractions from RPGs. Bad as that is, I would just find it time consuming to go into the detailed physics of the situation. With that in mind, and again since I've cited this before, eldar wraithships based upon rough guestimates of dimensions from the models (assuming roughly analogous with the original dimensions of the Gothic battlecruiser at ~3km).,suggest that the total surface area of the sails is somewhere in the realm of 2km 2. Using RPG figures, which seem entirely reasonable all things considered, suggest that the total 'thrust' generated by this area of solar sail (i.e. it is actually being 'powered' by a solar wind in terms of motive power, not electrical power) is around 11 kg. 11 kg of thrust on a ship which likely masses in the hundreds of millions of billions of tonnes... well, it isn't really conducive for a 'highly manoueverable' sublight drive system. The proper guestimates are found in another thread, probably in the Eldar board. I must admit to thinking that you would have read it... (With that said, the fusion drives of that same RPG are quite low powered based upon what reading I have been able to do...) The change of momentum that can be generated by eldar wraithship 'solar sails' can in no way compare to that which can be created by fusion rockets (read: plasma engines). To get a high acceleration you'd need a solar sail with millions of square miles of sails, and I'm pretty sure that the eldar wraithships aren't quite that big. Even GW logic isn't that bad. So, no, it would not work as described. Yes, solar sails would work but the eldar ships would take ages to accelerate to a reasonable 'speed' let alone be incapable of outmanoeuvering an Imperial vessel operating a fusion rocket. Hell, even a chemical rocket outperforms the solar sail in this regard. The "pulp" physics therefore defines a situation where the 'fluff' is untenable. Of course, since the alternative is 'grav drives' it would be quite interesting to suggest an alternative and entirely "artificial" mechanic by which a similar effect could be represented as a feature of proximity to gravitational fields... The 2300AD universe has a device call the 'stutterwarp drive' whose efficiencies drop significantly within a given distance of a gravitational body. This could perhaps be used as an explanatory mechanism, but it would still be difficult to replicate the entirely dubious situation perpetuated by the Age of Sail imagery of solar sails and how 40k naval conflicts occur... Kage
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Post by Sojourner on May 17, 2004 10:47:52 GMT -5
Ok, how about a more scientific explanation of my idea...
Eldar solar sails are coated in neutronium, a very thin layer of nuclear matter which forms a boundary impassable to practically all known particles. This allows the Eldar vessels to harness the power of the neutrino flux given off by the nearest star. The fine filaments of the sails can be rotated to face the star and thus expose the absorbing surfaces to the maximum number of neutrinos. The filaments are struck by solar particles which energise the filaments and cause the particle jet fired between the plates to be deflected in the vector in which thrust is desired.
How's that? A bit woolly, but you get the idea.
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Post by Kage2020 on May 17, 2004 11:29:30 GMT -5
Yes, but not only are the sails going to be ridiculously massive (and I'm not talking about spatial distance here) but one has to question the nature of eldar armour if they can play around with nuetronium... While it is one of the more novel solutions, ranked second only to your "power cell" argument (which was a great solution if it didn't make sense to the race as a whole), it still doesn't work based upon what limited information I understand about neutronium... Of course, one could just argue that wraithbone is impenetratable to neutrinos but I would be incredibly dubious about stating such things... Kage
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