Drifter Interactions And Relations

Yes. This bears repeating. They can fire them at will. It does take down the overshield, but it has happened. Not just to Empress Jamyl, but it has happened on a SERAPH fleet.

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Well, the technology required to build it is trivially available, and in many cases the difficulty in obtaining it lies in the fact that it hasn’t been used in centuries, so you have to build everything from scratch. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very purposeful engineering. However, modern equivalents are also much easier to fit. Take the energy storage for example - the damn air tanks are so much larger than present day capacitors it’s almost unbearable. I guess having an infomorph style pilot also eschews the need for life support systems on board and the likes.

So, they have inbuilt functionality that can reroute power from the shield to the weapons system. Potentially melting the ship if things mess up is not a design flaw, it’s a feature!

Perhaps you should cover your ships with the equivalent of a mirror finish, or a modern equivalent of ancient ‘dazzle’ camoflage. Something to disrupt such optical targetting.

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Eh, if the engineering is solid it’s not going to fail until the fight is lost anyway.

I’m sure their designs can be improved upon, but from where I’m standing the current design looks exceedingly efficient at what it does. When there’s a nail, you grab or make a hammer. Besides, it can’t be overstated how unbelievably powerful it is to be able to drop a few hundred battleships on a location, fire Doomsdays and then just saunter off untouched. For us to do something even remotely similar, it requires vessels, fits and fuel at prices - and construction time, materials etc - orders of magnitude greater, that also remains exceedingly vulnerable after the fact. And we can’t do it in highsec either, and our ranges are incredibly short.

The logistics and strategic advantage on display is just… I could very easily rub one out over this, just sayin’.

Having mirrored coating would still not conceal a physical object.

You know, with all of my critique regarding cutting corners, improving upon the design would break it. I mean, using the formula for isothermic storage pressurised at 700 bars with an ambient pressure of 1 bar gives us

70.0 MPa × 1 m3 × ln(0.1 MPa/70.0 MPa) + (70.0 MPa - 0.1 MPa) x 1 m3 = -352.3 MEGAjoules per cubic metre. For comparison, storing 3200 GIGAjoules using that system would take 3 200 000/352.3 = ~9083 cubic metres. Compare to the Navy Cap Booster 3200 which is a paltry 96 cubic metres and you get a ratio of ~94.61. That’s right, our modern capacitor storage methods are 94 times better. To extrapolate, in order to fire the doomsday once in a manner that would be at parity with the Drifter battleships ONCE I currently need storage capacity of 47 899 cubic metres.

So the logical conclusion would be to throw out the outdated liquid air storage system and install modern capacitor circuits, right? Except that when you do that, you no longer have the material that enables you to fire your weapon. So you need the air stored on board anyway. Logically, at that point you’d swap out the plasma weapons system for a modernised antimatter beam one. However, that’d mean that you can’t use the redirect power from the overshield to the weapons systems “feature” in the same manner any more, essentially robbing you of your miniature doomsday. It’s driving me crazy.

I swear, I’ll find out exactly how they made it work, and when I do…

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I’m sorry, what? I believe you are in the wrong room, my good fellow.

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So what you are suggesting is the Drifters are not anything new. In fact, they are hella-old to have used such antiquated tech together to make something so cheap and powerful. But we cannot come close to replicating it because they’ve rigged it in such a jankey way that its nearly impossible to recreate, like art from a bygone era.

And any changes to it would make it impossible to operate.

Do the Sleepers rely on similar designs to that?

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Strictly, we don’t know enough speculate on construction time or prices.

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Honestly, it feels a bit silly to definitively state that the Drifters are simply using some sort of steampunk plasma weapons colored with Argon - if it were all really so simple, wouldn’t you think there would be a way to counter it by now? And what of their propulsion, if the rest is so simple?

From any of the studies done on their weapons and propulsion systems, even without us being able to understand their source operating principles, it’s abundantly clear that the Drifters’ weapons utilize various form of spatial manipulation and shearing to properly function.

dk0msb5

Their turrets, along with their primary weapon, are suspected to draw from the host ship’s warp core in order to operate - spectral analysis and spatial topographic monitoring near-certainly show that the effects of an offensively-based warping of space, along with the energies released in the process, are what cause damage unable to be fitted into the standard “spectrum” typically measured.

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From what I’m seeing in that image, it seems less like space warping and more like directed thermal energy. The pattern of heat distribution suggests a combination of laser (the straight line) and directed plasma (the lightning effect in conic distribution).

What equipment are you using to collect that image? IR sensory equipment?

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The object firing also bears no resemblence to a Drifter battleship. I mean, we’ve all seen them fire that DD at 135+ degrees to the ship’s primary axis.

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I included that old spectral analysis more to show it off than anything, honestly - it’s part of an old, as-of-yet incomplete project dealing with analysis of Drifter systems.

The warping of space is along the actual “beam” path of the turrets, which you can observe very prominently when watching them fire on targets. The base generation of the actual offensive effect generates considerable excess heat, which is also very likely the case for Drifter propulsion tech, as well as their unique shield+sword “doomsday” - all of which seems to be very neatly dissipated through a system that includes prominent heat sinks along the sides of each ship. Seeing as sleeper tech has strong bases in mitigating heat damage and handling its emission, this all goes along nicely with that portion of what seems to be a part of the base Drifter design philosophy.

And Arrendis - it’s a Drifter turret, all of which appear to operate on a very similar principle to that of their primary weapon.

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Watched some footages of the Lux Kontos weapons platform in operation. I believe that ‘space warping’ effect is likely achieved using gravity manipulation to direct the plasma component of the beam at the target, instead of the usual temporary magnetic field commonly used in hybrid blasters. This may explain how the Lux Kontos is able to achieve such ranges. Part of the damage inflicted is by the shearing force of that intensely manipulated gravity field (enough to warp space-time to such a dramatic degree).

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So, to sum up:

  1. We don’t know how their ships and weapons work.

  2. We don’t know how to communicate with them.

  3. We don’t know what the motivation behind their actions is.

  4. We don’t know if they are even human, or a blasphemous AI.

Is that about right ?

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Yes, it is that simple. It bears repeating that I have rebuilt a working proof of concept turret. It’s not like the principles used are magic or anything, they are very well understood by people that would build stuff. So far, the only hangup would be the size, which puts me back at square one. Make no mistake, getting to the right design is just a matter of time.

The laser/directed plasma is actually consistant with the green laser targetting/plasma beam model I’ve produced. Take it as you will.

The turrets are not directly attached to the hull, the way that they levitate naer it can be easily achieved by… maglev. Yes, the same stuff that’s used in high-speed trains planetside. Except that it’s easier to balance, since there’s very little gravitational pull to offset the magnetic field that’s anchoring the turrets to the ship.

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Seeing that the heat signature of the laser matches that of the directed plasma, no, I do not think that those are targetting lasers at all, but part of the damage-dealing component of the weapon.

I also like to point out that I observed a ‘bending’ in light around the beam in the footages of the turret in operation. This, I believe, indicates the usage of strong gravitational force to direct the plasma at the target.

In turn, this makes me rather curious about the Drifter battleship’s power generator technology. How did the Drifters draw that much power from subspace for this to be possible, all the while maintaining what looked to be as a low-powered microwarpdrive propulsion unit and its shield subsystem?

I don’t mean to conceal, we have cloaks for that. You suggested that their targeting is largely optical based using laser rangefinding. Confuse the laser with mirror coatings at odd angles, nano-black coatings to absorb most incident light etc, etc. If nothing else it may at least slow down or disrupt the accuracy of their targeting systems.

In terms of their weapon systems, if they are using some kind of warp based effect would it be possible to retask warp scram or disruptors to have a more localized effect? Much like a tracking disruptor messes with our turrets we could use a more focused scram to disrupt the turret traversing the hull and/or the actual weapon effect.

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The laser is dual-purpose, as it’s also used to shift the gases into the plasma charge, which is shaped by magnetic fields which disperse the light, creating the visual effect.

Don’t believe me? You can build one yourself, it’s nothing remotely complicated.

Perhaps you’re unfamiliar how taking a snapshot with a laser works. The system measures the distance to a multitude of points at which the laser terminates, creating the snapshot. Reaching a mirror would do nothing to impact that capability whatsoever.

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It would if the reflective surface (mirrored was a bad choice of words) was at an oblique angle. If the laser does not reflect back to the receiver it does not register as a strike. I’m thinking more in terms of how ancient ‘stealth’ technologies would reduce a radar signal (for instance), scatter the signal to reduce the returned image. Since we are spaceborn we aren’t concerned about aerodynamics and can put any assortment of reflectors, deflectors, light traps etc to confuse the targeting.

I wasn’t just talking about the visible flashes of the weapon bending. That bending was a given considering that plasma generates light and are charged particles. I am referring to objects behind the beam appearing distorted and bent. You need an exceptionally strong electromagnetic field to generate this kind of effect, due to the fact that light has no charge or mass and the electromagnetic force having to disrupt quantum vacuum to indirectly bend the light.

Edit: Oh, right, you mentioned the argon gas that is being superheated by the laser into plasma. The gas can refract the light from objects behind it. I need more coffee. I’m going to check that footage again to see if there’s any bending of light from objects at the periphery of the beam.

Edit. Again: Inconclusive just by looking at visuals. Distortion similar to what’s generated by the propelling spikes of the Drifter battleships but it’s hard to tell if this is indeed the same thing (space-time distortion) distorting the light or it’s just very high concentration of argon gas. I need some better visuals and probably instruments that aren’t my own eyeballs to determine what I am observing.

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