Inertial Dampening
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This is a "Stub", or a short article with little useful information. Any editor with more information about this subject is invited to help improve it.
The Confederacy received a special technology from the Darjee for handling the effects of acceleration and inertia on ships that we refer to as 'inertial dampening. It does not entirely remove all effects, but mitigates them significantly.
Description
We have tools against inertia, however, and the Sa'arm don't -- or, rather, they didn't until they captured and disassembled Confederacy ships, and they still don't know what they got... Inertial compensators reduce the effects of acceleration in a manner dependent upon the installation (big ships can really jack things down to 1% or so, but most vessels only do about 10% -- again a trade-off between the cost in mass of the generator and the effects. Merchant vessels like the Aurora tended to use compensator in a limited way during boost up to hyperdrive velocities and not like them during approach to a system due to the 'jinking' that occurs when a ship running under compensators hits a particle moving at relativistic velocities. A particle-deflecting field called a Nav Shield is generally used for this purpose. Obviously, scaled up, THIS has military uses -- but it's not tremendously effective against directed energy weapons, although it will tend to attenuate the particle content. The Darjee don't really see the benefit of being able to manuever at 90 gravities -- but we do...
A force field that acts on a volume will act equally on all objects in that volume. If a spaceship is attracted to a planet by gravity, no one in the ship will feel that pull because they are directly acted upon the same amount as the deck. You will only feel an acceleration if a force acts on one part, like the back of a ship, and that force is not compensated by magic/technology. Thus, if your ship's engines can force 20g of acceleration on your ship's mass, but your crew can only handle 2g of perceived acceleration, if your compensators can only cancel 16g then you should not run your engines at full power; you are restricted to 18g true acceleration.
Technology Limitations
On 11/24/2013, the following was posted as an arguing-point on the authors' email list. It was not intended as the end of the argument, but The Thinking Horndog posted a 'Rubber-Stamp "APPROVED"' email so it's canon now:
- 100g compensation limit due to magic/technology
- 200g acceleration limit due to force/mass from engines and ship
- 101g normal limit for large craft with people walking around
- 103g normal limit for small craft with accel couches for basically 'ever'
- 110-120g for small craft, short maneuvers
- 130-150g for small craft, for short-term combat
- up to 180g for small craft, for very short time if pilot is willing to accept crippling injuries or death.
This was not intended as the ultimate ever; someday someone will come up with better magic/technology. However, for our current (Years 0-15) technology level, that 100 and 200 is the theoretical upper limit. No ships even approached either limit when we started. We didn't get close to these limits until we started designing small craft for combat (space fighters and bombers). Eventually, our later designs for larger ships, the ones with 3rd and 4th generation drives, also gained the ability to accelerate like this.
For comparison, the original ship-killer missiles that the Patricians and Europas launched accelerated at 100g for 100 seconds, so any vessel that can maintain 101g for at least that long can outrun such a missile. As long as they detect the missile before it can accelerate to a speed too high to avoid, that is.
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