Astroidic Ships

[coldwar]

Having so many Design of Manufactoried Hull Vessels, I Wondered why there aren't many Astroid Designed Vessels. So far I've seen one Design.
After a thought Astroidic Vessels could be used as Piratiratical Vessels Preying on Scouts and Seekers hiding in an astroid field. In the same system is a Gas Giant Which the Pirates use Fuel Collecting Vessels and has one 100dton Jump capable vessel to sell goods stolen. A small Wreack plant rebuilds or dismantles the Captured Vessels.

If you hasve any other ideas what Astyroidic vessels may be used for or any designs just put them down.

 

[The Oz]

The most common use for asteroid ships that I have seen is as cheap, heavily armored planetary defense ships.

I've heard of scenarios with a pirate base on an asteroid, I don't think I've heard of a pirate asteroid ship before. Interesting idea.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

I like to use fairly large Asteroid Ships as mobil "secret bases", located somewhere in a belt or drifting at an orbits Lagrange positions.

AFIAK those rocks cannot be streamlined. That might decrease actual usability.

Regards,

Mert

 

[mike wightman]

There's the monitor in CT Supplement 9 and the asteroid ship in Expedition to Zhodane.
Then there is the "world" ship in the Sky Raiders finale.

 

[BetterThanLife]

One problem is finding enough space in an Asteroid. Regular Asteroid you lose 20% to hull Buffered Asteroid you lose 35%. Add a Jump 3 Drive to a buffered Asteroid and you are left with 30% of the Asteroid for everything else.

The second problem with Asteroid ships is you can't build them in series. No two Asteroids will be alike, even with the same displacement. Even with the same shape. Densities will be different. So Asteroid ships will, by definition, all be one offs.

The Third problem is specific to Piracy applications is refueling. Asteroid ships can't do wilderness refueling.

Since all vessels are equipped with Neutrino Sensors and all starships are powered by Fusion Plants, hiding as a rock in space from fleet sensors is not very effective. Hiding in plain sight, pretending to be a typical Merchant can be very effective, especially if your Corsair is a converted Sub-Trader of Sub-Liner. (I have built Q-Ships out of Sub-Liners, you don't want to try to board one of those if you are a typical 400T Corsair.

) People see what they expect to see, but when the sensors say there is something there they will come look.

Sticking your Rock ship in a Lagrange point might cause another problem. (Same as sticking a Space Station in a Lagrange point.) These locations are stable orbits and tend to collect lots of debris. You might think that is a good place to hide a ship but you will have all this crap banging off your hull on a regular basis.

It is an interesting use of Asteroid hulls though. I can see a big Asteroid, in the 50KTon+ range being used as a base but it would be fairly slow on both the helm and in Jump Space. But it could carry Corsairs, even SDBs to do the actual Piracy. Hmmmmmmm. Add a few workshops to replace Transponders, repair battle damage, some cargo space to transship cargo.... You would need a refueling shuttle, but I can see it. How do you shield the powerplant?

<Look out wicked GM with new idea.>

 

[Malenfant]

Two points about Asteroid ships:

1) "Asteroid" brings to mind this image of a HUGE rock tumbling through space, from the size of a mountain to something kilometres across. Just keep in mind that the ships that are hollowed out asteroids are really really small - nay, tiny - by comparison

. They're almost "chips off the old block".

2) The best asteroids to use for ship hulls would be the nickel-iron ones (since essentially you have a ready-made metal hull there). Stony hulls wouldn't be particularly resistant to damage. I can imagine there being a decent number of small nickel-iron objects around, but they'd be much rarer than the stony fragments.

The thing I can't really imagine is "hollowing out" the asteroid - I guess you'd have to do that specifically for the purpose of building a ship out of it. That might make it more expensive. If you're mining the asteroid, wouldn't you just set up huge mirrors to melt the thing instead probably, or carve off big chunks to take back to the refinery.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi Bhoins !

What about fuel cell operation for running in silent mode

(Just for LS, minimal gravity and some music).
Works well if youre "in position" and do not need manuever drives any more.
I totally agree that you have to find a pretty good location for your rock.

Malenfant, as a professional "spacer"..could there be any "save" locations in a asteroide belt anyway ?

 

[Malenfant]

you mean "safe" locations?

Sure. Asteroid belts are in fact very empty. They're not full of tumbling rocks and debris that ships have to dodge to pass through. Chances are you can't even see the nearest asteroid from one that you happen to be on, because it's so far away (and it's so small).

Think of it this way, total mass of material in the asteroid belt is far less than the mass of the earth. In fact, to quote Solstation:

It has been estimated that the total mass of the Main Asteroid Belt may total less than 1/1000th of the mass of the Earth. Indeed, if all asteroids down to the size of meter- or yard-sized boulders or less were combined together, the resulting object would measure less than 1,300 to 1,500 km (810 to 930 miles) across, which is less than one third to one half the diameter of the Earth's Moon.

There are very few asteroids over 100km in size. So now spread all that over the perimeter of an orbit about 2 or 3 AU in radius, and you'll find that material has to be spread VERY thinly, and the chance of encountering any of it at random is very low. After all, the Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo and Cassini missions all made it straight through with no problem.

Even if the belt had more mass, the vast area over which its spread would still not result in crowded fields of tumbling rocks. Though occasionally a couple of asteroids will collide, and then you could locally get a cloud of debris as the asteroids dissassemble.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of asteroids are stony, and most of them seem to actually be "rubble piles" - just loose conglomerations of rocks and boulders held together by feeble gravity, with dust on top. if you go to the solstation link above, you'll see a picture of the asteroid Mathilde (here's a nifty flyby animation of it using images taken by NEAR)- looks solid enough doesn't it? But its density is so low that it's mostly empty space - it doesn't mean it's already hollow, it means that it's a big, loose pile of rocks with lots of gaps between them.

These "rubble piles" are going to be interesting things to mine (assuming people even bother mining stony asteroids). On the one hand, you can break them up easily into manageable chunks. On the other, you have to be careful how you handle them because of that.

(I've only ever heard of rubble piles as stony asteroids, but I imagine that it's possible to find icy or nickel-iron ones too)

There's a book called "Mining the sky" that would probably be very useful on the topic of asteroid mining and what they're actually like...

 

[Malenfant]

Having so many Design of Manufactoried Hull Vessels, I Wondered why there aren't many Astroid Designed Vessels. So far I've seen one Design.

One issue is that asteroids are actually a bit hard to get to. Usually, you don't find them immediately around habitable planets, though you'll find some that go past them on separate orbits around the star (like Toutatis just did the other day - it missed us by about a million km). So to build an asteroid ship, you have to actually go out and find a suitable asteroid to use instead of just building a normal ship from scratch in the starport. So that alone cuts down on their popularity - why go find an asteroid when you can build a new ship from scratch?

The other problem is that, assuming you find a suitable asteroid to use, you have to hollow it out (which takes a lot of time and money) and then install the stuff you want to put in it to make it a ship. You could either do that in a spacedock if you can cart the asteroid back to a planet's orbit, or you'll have to take your construction yard to the asteroid itself, which also adds expense.

Plus, with an ordinary spaceship, you can build bits in whatever order you please - you could make the jump drive, then the manoeuvre drive, and then build the hull around those. You can't do that with an asteroid hull - you can't just slot in a jump drive, you'll have to either build it inside the cavern you just hollowed out of the asteroid, or arrange things in such a way that you can get it into the hull without breaking the asteroid apart. This means that either you need a hell of a lot more planning (and expense), or the engineering equipment you install is going to have to be purpose built instead of a standard design.

So there are actually a lot of factors that count against asteroid hulls, which might explain why they're rare compared to purpose-built ships.

One instance where they might be more viable is if the construction facilities are around planets with rocky or iron ring systems. If you can find large enough chunks to use in the rings, then that might reduce a lot of the problems of actually getting to the asteroids, since they're right on the doorstep. But most of the particles in rings are quite fine - essentially you'd be taking out the small shepherd satellites to use as ships

.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Fuel Cells or Batteries. Depends on your operating parameters. Longer periods fuel cells. And it uses the same fuel as your Fusion plants. Hmmmm. Are there rules for cold starting a fusion plant?

Originally posted by TheEngineer:
Hi Bhoins !

What about fuel cell operation for running in silent mode

(Just for LS, minimal gravity and some music).
Works well if youre "in position" and do not need manuever drives any more.
I totally agree that you have to find a pretty good location for your rock.

Malenfant, as a professional "spacer"..could there be any "save" locations in a asteroide belt anyway ?

 

[Golan2072]

Another use would probably be early-TL (8 or 9) STL colony ships. When you don't have extensive shipbuilding facilities suitable for big ships, you have to take what Nature gives you - and hollow up an astroid. Sure, each astroid is unique, but at those TLs you'll probably send out a colony ship every several years anyway due to expenses and manofacturing capabilities.

 

[aramis]

The kinds of densities shown in films (especially, say, The Empire Strikes Back) would tend to occur only in certain particularly high-stability points, and only at certain parts even there.

Places like trojan points, and ring systems which are still relatively new. In short, hoth was probably NOT in an old stellar system, oir was in one where a moon was destroyed in (for star wars) historic time.

The Asteroid Belt doesn't even appear as a "Strand" on images; not enough density.

It is entirely possible that, given some wierd circumstances, it might be possible, it's still mathematically unlikely... something sufficiently massive to populate even a Solar Orbit 0 to "Visible" density is likely to coalesce... or become depopulated by internal collision knocking member chunks inbound. (in fact, it's been postulated that our own asteroid belt was depopulated by up to 50% by this very mechanism already, and it appears that it still goes on.)

But that's a serious digression. A Million Td asteroid would be roughly a 150m sphere. (4/3PiR^3, right?)

a 1km asteroid is about 37 million tons displacement.

Most miners would probably be working on the 1-2km chunks...

 

[Antony]

I did an asteroid monitor using FF&S1 with the hull designed according to FF&S2

www.skaran.net/Banners/equipment/Craft/Misc/guardian.html

What this shows is that using Heplar thrusters asteroid ships are both slow and heavy fuel guzzlers. This is due entirely to the mass of the hull shell. With other rule systems, MT springs to mind, Asteroid ships are much more practical.

 

[coldwar]

Remember many astroids themselves produce small amounts of fusion power thought decay so using a neutrino Scanner to tell one real astroid to and astroidic ship will be hard.
Another thing astroids are made of a mixture of metals or rock, staying with the metal astroid heavy metals go to the centre eg lead which can be used to coat the inside lining of areas using Fusion power reducing the Neutrino signature's alot so it looks more like a real astroid. Therefore the astroid itself is a manufactory source of materials many will not be in an ore state eg Iron. So only varyous equipment needs bringing to the site. Also Starship parts are made in segments Typically a Jump drive will come in at least 2 parts a capictor and the drive(up to 5 tons) Large drives will be split into there different segments themselves eg Thruster,Transisters etc to make for easier storage as people don't move something that is 6x30x60 metres weighting around 40 real tons on one vehicle from a factory to the Starport.
So all parts will easilibly moved into place withen the astroid(very low gravity). Once they get the heavy stuff in they can start working on the Deck Frames. Lay the decks except the lower deck. Bring in the Grav Units lay them in and lay the last deck( remembering to leave parts of the decks removable for Wireing). And the continue as normally building a Ship.

Puting a Jump dirve into on Personally i do not want to put one in due to your'll need to make the jump grid before each jump due to it is an astroid so the surface may change slightly so the Jump grid will need changing each time. So no Jump caperable astroids when I design them.

I've finished a design of a 16000ton Buffered Astroid and i have'nt used over 9500tons(i've got about 4000 tons of un mined Astroid left and it has 6 Small Fighters, 4 heavy Fighters, 2 Fuel Scoops, 2 Multi Purpose Gigs and a 1500ton Cargo vessel(non-capital vessel). 1x1000ton cargo Hold, 1x1000 ton ship dissamlbe area. and has a Resepectable firepower. I'll but the designs up next week

 

[The Oz]

Deathwisher:

The neutrinos produced by decay of radioactive elements (which is what I think you were talking about) have a different energy than the neutrinos produced from nuclear fusion (like a star or a starship power plant) so they can be told apart. Also, the decay of radioactive elements doesn't produce that many neutrinos, while a fusion plant would produce a =flood= of neutrinos.

And you'd need a lot more lead (or anything else material) to shield neutrinos; one of their basic characteristics is that they tend to pass through matter without stopping. I remember reading somewhere that you would need =lightyears= of lead to be sure of stopping neutrinos.

So TheEngineer is right; the way to hide your fusion-powered asteroid ship is to be able to turn off the fusion plant when you need to and run on some less-detectable backup.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Deathwisher:
[QB] Remember many astroids themselves produce small amounts of fusion power thought decay so using a neutrino Scanner to tell one real astroid to and astroidic ship will be hard.

Not quite. Though most asteroids will have some tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes in them, it certainly can't be called "fusion power" since decay is technically a kind of fission. And as others pointed out, the decay rate is much much lower than the rate produced by a fusion reactor (I'm not even sure that decay actually produced neutrinos anyway).

Another thing astroids are made of a mixture of metals or rock, staying with the metal astroid heavy metals go to the centre eg lead which can be used to coat the inside lining of areas using Fusion power reducing the Neutrino signature's alot so it looks more like a real astroid.

Nope. Some of the bigger asteroids (Vesta- or Ceres-sized) are large enough to have differentiated into a metal core and rocky exterior because they had enough radioactives in them when they formed to melt the interior, but most are nowhere near big enough for that. Plus the metal asteroids are literally at least 99% nickel and iron, with only tiny amounts of anything else. The stony asteroids are basically just lumps of rock.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Actually from what I understand of Neutrinos is that they are faster than light particles and nothing blocks them. We can't currently observe them directly but can measure their effect in places where they have been slowed down significantly, like in the bottom of deep mines in pools of water. Lead alone isn't likely to shield Neutrinos under that situation. Superdense alloys won't even be able to shield much.
Now I may be remembering wrong on this but it seems to me that is what I read on them.

Originally posted by Deathwisher:
Remember many astroids themselves produce small amounts of fusion power thought decay so using a neutrino Scanner to tell one real astroid to and astroidic ship will be hard.
Another thing astroids are made of a mixture of metals or rock, staying with the metal astroid heavy metals go to the centre eg lead which can be used to coat the inside lining of areas using Fusion power reducing the Neutrino signature's alot so it looks more like a real astroid. Therefore the astroid itself is a manufactory source of materials many will not be in an ore state eg Iron. So only varyous equipment needs bringing to the site. Also Starship parts are made in segments Typically a Jump drive will come in at least 2 parts a capictor and the drive(up to 5 tons) Large drives will be split into there different segments themselves eg Thruster,Transisters etc to make for easier storage as people don't move something that is 6x30x60 metres weighting around 40 real tons on one vehicle from a factory to the Starport.
So all parts will easilibly moved into place withen the astroid(very low gravity). Once they get the heavy stuff in they can start working on the Deck Frames. Lay the decks except the lower deck. Bring in the Grav Units lay them in and lay the last deck( remembering to leave parts of the decks removable for Wireing). And the continue as normally building a Ship.

Puting a Jump dirve into on Personally i do not want to put one in due to your'll need to make the jump grid before each jump due to it is an astroid so the surface may change slightly so the Jump grid will need changing each time. So no Jump caperable astroids when I design them.

I've finished a design of a 16000ton Buffered Astroid and i have'nt used over 9500tons(i've got about 4000 tons of un mined Astroid left and it has 6 Small Fighters, 4 heavy Fighters, 2 Fuel Scoops, 2 Multi Purpose Gigs and a 1500ton Cargo vessel(non-capital vessel). 1x1000ton cargo Hold, 1x1000 ton ship dissamlbe area. and has a Resepectable firepower. I'll but the designs up next week

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Bhoins:
[QB] Actually from what I understand of Neutrinos is that they are faster than light particles and nothing blocks them. We can't currently observe them directly but can measure their effect in places where they have been slowed down significantly, like in the bottom of deep mines in pools of water. Lead alone isn't likely to shield Neutrinos under that situation. Superdense alloys won't even be able to shield much.
Now I may be remembering wrong on this but it seems to me that is what I read on them.

You'd be remembering wrong (VERY wrong in fact ).

Neutrinos are certainly not faster-than-light (that's Tachyons, which are entirely theoretical).

They can be blocked, but you need a hell of a lot of matter(TM) to block them.

They can be detected though, and the detectors are huge pools of water/bleach that are buried deep in the Earth. They are buried so that the earth above blocks out all the other particles that could confuse the detector. The idea is that you fill a big tank with lots of water - essentially, a bazillion atoms of the stuff - and then line the tank with extremely sensitive (and expensive, and fragile) detectors. So you have trillions of neutrinos sleeting through the tank from every direction (not just the sun, you get them from other stars and especially supernovae), and with that many passing through the probabilities are such that at least a few are bound to interact with SOMETHING - and some do. What happens is that the odd neutrino is stopped and absorbed by an atom of hydrogen, oxygen or whatever else is in the water, which releases a photon - a miniscule flash of light. The detectors pick that up, and that's how we know the neutrinos are there.

When something big happens (like a supernova), you get a whole lot MORE neutrinos coming in all at once from a certain direction, which sets off more flashes, and you can detect what direction the supernova is (especially if you use different detectors around the world).

To confuse things, neutrinos actually come in three "flavours" that have different levels of interaction with matter.

Hrm. You know, explaining all this, it seems that neutrinos actually sound more like the "mesons" in a meson gun... except that somehow they're tweaked to all interact with matter at a target point and make an explosion.

If you want more info, you can find it at:
http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/neutrino.html (check the links at the top of the page too)


EDIT: BTW, Bhoins, could you please not include the entire text of the post you're replying to at the bottom of the message? It gets annoying to scroll past it, especially when you're replying to a long message.

 

[PBI]

The major drawback with asteroid hulls, for me, is that they're unstreamlined, which then forces me to include carried craft (fuel shuttles) which increases cost and also results in slower reaction time (that's the same reason I never bother with unstreamlined hulls for any starship design, either).

As system defence vessels, asteroids are marginally more effective than as starships, but, still, you end up with that whole business of them being unstreamlined being a pain.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Actually looking up Neutrinos, They aren't the faster than light particles, that is Tachyons but they are measures in deep mines in passing in bodies of liquids. SO I did remember partially correctly. But the main point is still valid Lead isn't likely to block Neutrinos.