newtonian motion

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by Quikngruvn:
Sorry, I got carried away..

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not at all. i understood your point from the begining, and it is totally valid. what you are overlooking is that while it requires exponentially more thrust for a larger ship to spin, it requires them both far more thrust to move, say, one sqare on the tactical grid. unless the square is not much greater in size than the ship its self.

lacking my old physics ledgers, I cant pull up formulae for you, but let me give it a shot extrapolating from some basic geometry (granted I slept through geometry yet paid attention through physics, but guess which one comes readily to mind 7 years later? danm that. odds are my math is going to be invalid, so feel free to point out any glaring flaws) what we need to do is get a feel for the scale of the game:

in order to get an idea of scale, we need some rough idea of what a square is on the tactical grid. while they seem to have sides with length equal to the lengh of their diagnal, we will presume for a moment that they are insted standard geometric squares and not these bizarre geometrically impossible things. we can extrapolate that each of the (roughly) 63 squares along the side of the tactical map is 1/63 of a strategic square, which is in turn 1/13th the diamater of the stellar system in question. given that pluto is roughly 5.9 billion KM from the sun at its average orbital distance, we can simplify and say that the average solar system in se4 is 10 billion km in diamater. 1/819 of this distance (which is the size of a tactical square) is roughly 12 million km.

The Nimitz class carrier displaces about 97 metric KT and is roughly 330 meters long. if we figure that our escort is about 1.5 times the mass then we can presume (okay, its a crappy presumption, but its the simplest way of doing it) that its length would increase arrithmetically to 495(or 500)meters, the baseship following at 5000 meters. (and those distances are generous condisering that space vessels could be far more dense than earth based surface-ships, since they dont need to worry about silly things like displacing water)

now, with the .5*pi*D formula to find the longest distance traveled in a rotation (or half-rotation, as it were), we come up with about 7850m for the baseship and 785m for the escort. just in case you think im nitpickingon the distances you chose, im NOT: this is just to give you as much distance as possible regarding comparative lenght of a turn (that is, it would have been far more beneficial to my point if i had simply kept your numbers). I am in complete agreement that the core of your arguement reamins the same, and remains unchallenged.

BUT, we have ships that appear to be capable of transversing a minimum (basic engines) of 6*12billion meters(escort) or 2*12billion meters in one turn, from a standing start. now the original point of the thread was that they can not accelerate beyond this, and they can accelerate in the oposite direction without overcoming their own momentum, but we have obviously lost track of that at this point.

now, while I grant you that my flippant referance to turning being 'free in space' was something akin to Cisco's flatulant claims that bandwidth is free, the gist of the argument remains the same. the ammount of thrust expended to rotate a ship, a distance of no more than 7,850 meters, is significantly less than that required to transverse the 12,000,000,000 meters in one square. therefore, turning has no right costing any movement points, and even if a baseship takes longer to do it than an escort, it will happen in a space of time that is completely miniscule compared to the space of time required for either of the two example ships to move one square.

now, to forestall any other attempts at wwf-smackdown-style acrobatics being purprotrated against my logic, let me forstall your arguements by saying that you could further deconstruct this by supposing that a turn consists of a ship accelerating for the first half of its movement and decelerating for the second half, thus removing the requirement for a ship to overcome momentum on a turn.. i dont know where that would really get us, but i can imagine someone trying to take it somewhere. furthermore, i could go on to deconstruct your turning argument by stating that due to the increased length of the base ship, you can apply thrust further from the axis of rotation and achieve more velocity per joule than if they were closer to the axis of rotation (as is the escort's). but since im not actually arguing against your point, i wont go into the proof.

I usually try to keep things light-hearted, so I have to appologize if I have inadvertently turned this discussion into a logical testosterone fest. furthermore, i have to appologize for my abhorant spelling and guestimated mathmatics. Since I have been in basic agreement with you from the start, you probably dont need to expend quite so much effort running rings around me while I am only attempting to stand still and point in a related direction.

I do want to encourage further disucssion though. I enjoy a friendly intelectual conversation, and i usually tend to have more to learn than i do to offer.

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)

[This message has been edited by Puke (edited 13 July 2001).]