Best ramming between spaceships

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WhiteLion
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Best ramming between spaceships

Post by WhiteLion » Thu Aug 22, 2019 3:43 pm

I was wondering for a long time how much a ship could withstand a collision. If a ship in a fight is cornered and decides to carry out a suicide attack how much would it damage the other? I remember the battle between Enterprise-E and Scimitar, practically Picard stalled a hopeless situation for him.

If you assess more extreme cases according to you in all the universes, is there a ship capable of blocking a drop of a 40k cruiser that are literally designed for repeated drops in naval combat? The ship has an adamantine armor several hundred meters thick, and the tip of the ship is even thicker and sharper, besides it has a ram-like awl with pure adamantine blades. All then seasoned with the fact that the ship reaches almost the speed of light (from the novels they report 0.9c) and has a mass of 31 million tons, that is how much energy develops? And if we consider the larger ships that reach 26km like the glorian class, or like the Abyss Class, the Hope, the Class buchephalus that are as big as continents?

1) The ships I saw in Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica have a maximum armor thickness of ten meters and made of resistant materials (Neutronio,Tritanio ecc) but not at the absolute apex of resistance. Instead I noticed that the 40k Ships are made with the most resistant material in existence which is the Adamantium, moreover they have a thickness of several tens of meters for the cruisers and several hundred meters for the Gloriana, the Abyss Classes, Ark Speranza , Bucephalus and Imperator Somnium which are as long as a continent literally, so I assume they have a much greater thickness.

2) While it is true that clashes with long-range weapons are preferred, I have noticed that in many episodes they do not disdain to use a collision attack even at the opening of the battle, rather it is used very often if one has the possibility. This coupled with the fact that they have the bow of the ship made of blade with a thickness of adamantium much higher than the rest of the ship, and to the fact that they mount a spear in pure adamantine with the tip at least 200 meters wide led me to think that the ships they are designed for a continuous use of this attack (and I have had proof of this from the fact that the ships that rally do not report damage in the clashes), while the other ships of trek, wars etc. use it as a last resort because for them it is a use for which the ship was not designed.

3) Then I reflected on the fact that on average it is not rare to see a little bit in all the universes that often ships in combat lose their shields because their energy budget is saturated, and it doesn't take much then.
But the energy developed by a ship with a similar tonnage that travels at "almost" the speed of light is titanic (if anyone knows how to do it I'd like to calculate it), so I think the energy limit of the shields would be quickly saturated and the armor of ST, SW, SG and BG is neither made of a material comparable to the Adamantius, nor of a comparable thickness, and the ships were not designed for frequent use of collisions in combat. Moreover many ships of 40k have the Adamantio lance made of blades affixed to cut off hulls of tens of meters of adamantine and protected by shields of the void.

- For the larger ship classes I then got an idea of ​​the armor resistance from the fighting in history, a Glorian Class alone can defeat an entire fleet of Imperium ships, so let's talk about cruisers like the Overlord and Retribution Class that with a single trip can Destroy an entire continent. To damage the shields of an Abyss Class, instead, prolonged bombardments of a Glorian Class, two orbital attack platforms and many other cruisers were necessary, we are talking about an impressive volume of fire, and only managed to undermine the shields. armor.

These are the assumptions that made me ask the question, since I was too vague I would like to limit the field a little by taking only a few direct clashes of ships that are more or less known:

Overlord class (5 km - 31 million tons - 0.9c - armor in adamantium of about ten meters) vs Star Destroyer / Enterprise-E / Daedalus / Galactica
Retribution Class (8km - weight in billions of tons - 0.9c - armor in adamantios of hundreds of meters) vs Star Destroyer / Enterprise-E / Daedalus / Galactica
Retribution Class vs. Super Star Destroyer Ex / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer
Gloriana Class (26km - unknown weight but you can make a proportion - 0.9c - armor in adamancy of several hundred meters) vs Ex Super Star Destroyer / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer /
Abyss Class (dimensions of a continent - proportional weight - 0.9c - armor in proportion) vs Super Star Destroyer Ex / Eclipse / Mega Star Destroyer /

I have tried to give various examples with known ships of varying sizes, what is your opinion in it?

In itself as a weapon the ramming is not really ideal, obviously if you can it is better to resort to standard weapons, mine was just a curiosity to have a chat.

(excuse me ever for my english please)

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by 2046 » Sun Aug 25, 2019 3:21 am

I have a couple of links that may be of ancillary interest . . .

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWwarpram.html

http://st-v-sw.net/STSWweakhull.html

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by WhiteLion » Sun Aug 25, 2019 9:53 pm

excellent links, really well made and detailed, thanks a lot, from what I see in the links the resistance of the ships of SW and ST is remarkable, but at this point my ciriosità increases.
If they have reported similar damage from such small objects, logically they could never survive an impact of a larger ship at 0.7-0.9c speeds.
For example, a galaxy class (mass of 4,500,000 tons) traveling at 0.9c would have an enormously higher energy than the jemadar ship or asteroid seen in the examples provided by the links above. The Galaxy or Star Destroyer if the links are reliable as calculations would be destroyed in one shot.

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by 2046 » Wed Aug 28, 2019 3:38 am

Basically, yes. Short of trying to imagine some sort of "5mph bumper" problem where the ships could withstand high speed hits but take ridiculous damage from low speed ones (good luck making that work), it seems neither side has ships that can deal with serious kamikaze ships when unshielded.

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by WhiteLion » Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:44 pm

I found Canon 40k material that could give a real answer based on an event that actually occurred. During the Horus Heresy the planet Calth was attacked and despite being heavily shielded both the port and numerous ships were destroyed by a single ship. It was not even a cruiser, but a simple transport nicknamed Campanile. Traveling at relativistic speed He literally vaporized every ship he touched.
Even when the shields ran out, it took many other collisions and vaporized enemy ships to do damage to the ship.
The ship in question was a transport ship, having armor a few meters thick and not made for naval combat, if it were a cruiser the armor would have been several tens of meters thick, and if it were was a Battleship would have had a thickness of several hundred meters, moreover in adamantio and would have been provided with the bow with sharp blade (much thicker than the rest of the armor) and the spear under the bow both in adamantio.

Moreover, even the weight would have been different, a few million-ton transport ship launched at relativistic speed has much less energy than a 30 million-ton cruiser, or a multi-billion-ton Battleship.

From what we read the 40k ships are able to sustain many consecutive collisions without problems, moreover the bumped ships were not simply destroyed, but by how we read vaporized.

Being canon material is an officially recognized fact.

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by 2046 » Thu Aug 29, 2019 6:27 pm

That sounds . . . weird. As it played in my brain, "vaporized every ship he touched" should've had a total touched-ship count of one.

Basically, it makes it sound like one car smashed through every other car in a parking lot . . . an impossibility unless the one car is KITT from Knight Rider. The projectile car would be as damaged as the targets. Maybe if the projectile car is going fast enough it can pull a Holdo and impart sufficient velocity on target cars to turn them into new, less energetic projectiles, but it won't be the original projectile touching every car.

Time dilation effects won't help, either, not that there's much going on at .9c.

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by WhiteLion » Thu Aug 29, 2019 10:28 pm

You're trying to make a scientific sense to 40k, it's impossible, it's not Star Trek or StarGate that at least try to maintain a certain plausibility. Warhammer 40k is a scifi-fantasy hybrid in which there is no connection between events and realism.
We only know that the scene that I described to you is canon, so it really happened and the events went according to what was written, and everything is recognized as official by the authors of the series.

I leave you the complete quote from Horus Heresy, the destruction of Calth:

"The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.

The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.

Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.

There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.

Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.

It does not hit Calth.

There is something in the way.

The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.
It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.

It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.

Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.

The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.
The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.
The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.

Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.

Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea. "

This is only a part, before being destroyed it vaporizes two other ships and several buildings of Calth. I recommend it as a reading, it is quite compelling and full of action.

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Re: Best ramming between spaceships

Post by Tarrant1 » Tue Jul 13, 2021 11:31 am

Wow) Great things

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