My man said “back in East Germany” 😭 you sound a lot younger than we could assume from that statement lol. Makes sense why your videos are very well informed
if we could tow asteroids into orbit. then we could use those as a base for the platforms. especially if they are dense nickel iron asteroids. some of the materials are available in the asteroid. itll be very heavy to handle recoil. Also the nickel can protect against radiation
@Jonathan Graveline if I'm getting what you saying. You mean to throw asteroids at ships. If so, that won't work at all. Since it would take tok long for the asteriod to reach its target.
@@cameroncashatt692 n'a straight at a target on the ground like a ballistic missile. Not against ship. You don't need to grab asteroid, put them in orbit to then build a base with canon to protect earth. Just build the canon straight in space we don't need support for it and it's not very efficaces anyway because you needed plenty of them to cover all the earth. If it's what you want to do it's better to build shipward on the moon and in orbit close to mars so you can gather all the resources there and build mobile fleet that can move to intercept incoming treat far from earth. It's better resources management and the farther the combat the best chance we have to react afterward. I'm a pragmatic guys. I would love to see a Dyson sphere around the sun and mining colonie on other planète with the space in-between full of space ship. And why not take a moon somwere and make a death star while we are at it. We are so far away from that. The pressing treat to human civilisation right now more than ever is ourselves. If we can't settle the overpopulation, gaz in our atmosphere that is cooking literally all we have ever fought for and stick to using coal we are simply doom no mars project nothing. If we are lucky maybe the Asian can start the moon base soon enough maybe we can barely touch the dream of having human living on another space rock but at the rate we are going I don't think we will be there in 200 years it's gonna be so hot and violent here in 100 year it's goona be an apocalips by our standard of now. We will cling on like cockroach another 100 years at most we need to remedy that asap we should have started concretely doing thing 50 years ago but the past is the past...
A heavy platform will decrease the effect of recoil, but the same force is still applied. The orbit is altered (a tiny bit), but to correct will still require the same amount of propellant. A heavier base is more stable but also less manoeuvrable.
ArcFlash Labs have a few early types of Gauss Rifles that are man portable. They charge slowly and take a lot of power, while only being able to loose small projectiles, but they exist.
I think there is a case for having mac platforms in geosynchronous orbit over earth, mainly because you can tie the platform and its orbital elevator to one city. Hence all the different stations, like Cairo station for instance.
If we were to create something like a MAC cannon, it would be more along the lines of a "Rods from God" type idea but with magnetic assisted launch and would basically replace nukes.
8:52 I don't remember exactly where I heard this, but I remember that the power from the surface is transported to the platforms via giant lasers(?) I don't know if that could work, but it would explain why they are on a geosynchronous orbit
It would work, it's just ridiculously innefficient. You would have to send more power up than you need because some of it will be lost to scattering within the atmosphere.
@@celderian You could build the laser on the moon and power your platforms from there, but then they'd need to be in geosynchronous orbit with the moon.
@@rishidronadula7260 at a distance that’s far enough to be in geosynchronous orbit and be able to provide enough energy to rapidly fire an ENORMOUS railgun or gauss weapon and keep the station in orbit? Maybe I’m wrong but I’m really struggling to believe that would be the optimal solution
If you’re accelerating something to the fraction of the speed of light, you’re bound to create a little bit of plasma and you will indeed see a muzzle flash even in space since there’s still a hint of atmosphere up there in orbit as you mentioned.
True, I mainly meant the brilliant muzzle flash and almost tracer~esque rounds we see in game. Most likely they put them in there because they look cooler.
We have a very convenient Moon: 1 no friction 2 large size and very heavy. 3 Conveniently one side faces earth. You can build whatever size of weapon you want on Moon. Enemy uses earth to hide from moon weapons? Orbital mechanics ensures that you can curve your projectiles around earth to hit the enemy. And you get to say "that's NO moon! That is Battle Station! "
I actually think what they meant by transferring power to orbit was some kind of tether with a large microwave or tight beam laser emitter on it, with the subsequent receiving equipment located on a large disk on the weapons platform. That's really the only way. This was written before the art department drew up the battlestations.
The issue with these kinds of emmitter/reciever system is that it's very energy innefficient. Someone did some evonomic calculations on solar power sattelites way back, and it turned out that it was cheaper to just build a crapload of solar panels on the revcieving end instead, and skip the transmitter part, since the mass/energy ratio on the reviever wasn't going to be all that much better than solar unless you believe that frying anything that comes between the pair as an acceptable tradeoff.
@@robertharris6092 Not without breaking physics you can't. There is no amount of magical efficiency gain that can fix the issues with beaming power around. the loss is a factor of distance, energy density of the transmision beam, and whatever matter happens to be between the emitter and reciever. Just like internal combustion engines have a maximum allowable efficiency, so does em based energy transfer systems.
@@MrAntice hey dipshit, learn the difference between “breaking physics” and “breaking our current understanding of physics”. Relativity “broke” physics too
@@MrAntice This assumes that it is in the solar system. The power transmitters are on reach, a different solar system. It could be more efficient if the star is a red dwarf, rather than the sun. (I'm not sure if reach has a red dwarf, but we can't assume its the same as earth)
Its all about scale I met a guy back in the high school science fair, granted it was for a very large city science fair, who built a coil gun but it fired 9mm BBs
I just imagine Lord Hood in the bridge of one of the defence platforms asking Master Chief what he's doing on that foreign ship, and how all the crew seem to be gone... They're probably running around killing boarders, and probably fixing a million mechanical failures due to covenant fire. Imagine you lose some thrusters to plasma fire and now you have to rotate the entire platform to use other thrusters to fix your orbit after every shot...
12:03 So this reminds me on how railguns works in The Expanse, I think you should definitely check those out since they play such a huge role in ship to ship combat and orbital defense.
I think there’s a new redox battery that doesn’t need a membrane. If I remember right it’s two tanks that store energy. One tank is saltwater one is a proprietary electrolyte. Not sure if that kind of battery could advance enough to help solve some of the power issues you discussed, but it’s still intriguing.
The whole ground stations thing isn’t just hooking up a 100,000 km extension cord up to orbit. What would happen is the electricity would be transmitted via turning it into EM radiation targeted at a receiver on the station.
The names for "Increasing in height" when firing a payload into orbit is called the apoapsis The apoapsis is the furthest point in a orbit from the body. E.G The MAC rounds apoapsis increased. Also, The mac canons are in geostationary orbit, which is well above the zone that requires regular maintenance of orbits due to atmospheric drag
9:00 the power is beamed up through high frequency electromagnetic waves. While they do encounter resistance, at such high frequencies it would ionize and push out the atmosphere to reduce further drag over time. This also requires geosynchronous orbit because the beams can’t be angled through the atmosphere due to their size so they’d have to go straight up. 11:00 you hit another key point as to why you should have them so far out in geosynchronous orbit. These stations are flinging these massive titanium rounds at multiple percentages of the speed of light (which makes distance in aiming less of a concern). The recoil will be massive, likely so much so as to having them in anything but geosync would be willful neglect. Also in firing the guns simultaneously fire retro rockets (I am 99% certain this is cannon) that offset the force of the round but over a greater period of time (I believe it is the same period time as it takes to reload) so that the gun is more or less at the same trajectory as the previous shot. I don’t think you really want to make the gun smaller but definitely removing the troop staging points and making it a remote station is a big move. Maybe x10 it’s ammo storage, add thicker armor, and a few solar arrays to assist in the recharge process, but don’t make it smaller that only hurts performance.
I've just thought of something that halo has never thought of before. You know the orbital defense platforms? What if you place the reactor on the platform itself. Then maybe you could also give the ODP thrusters powered by the reactor to make it more mobile. You could also give it armour and shields to improve it's durability. Give it things like an FTL drive and crew accommodations for long voyages to allow it to not just be mobile, but also be capable of being deployed anywhere in the galaxy. I think I'm on to something here.
I assume you are just joking, but I would still like to point out that making defense platforms would be cheaper than an equivalently armed ship. Thus when making defenses for a system one can get some number of ships or twice or three times as many platforms. This goes for construction cost as well as ongoing costs such as maintenance and man power.
If I'm not mistaken in the lore the mac gun on the destroyers shoots at 4 percent the speed of light so I'm sure u could take the length of the rails and theoretical power needed and take a simi educated guess
Putting the orbital defense platforms I. Geosynchronous orbits means you have less gaps in your defenses. A higher orbit allows each platform to cover a larger area. It allows platforms to have interlocking sectors of fire.
I think that as far as the changes in orbital mechanics, they would realistically have at least had a dumb AI per platform that handled accounting for such factors. Also as far as tethering a platform, we see orbital elevators so maybe they use a similar approach via the ground stations. Another alternative we might see in our world would be to have a geosynchronous platform above a solar array that would reflect sunlight to it but even that would still be pretty inefficient
Power transfer from ground stations wouldn't be via cables like on earth but via microwave with a large rectenna being placed on the MAC station to recieve and convert it back into power. You do have losses. I think the theoretical maximum efficiency still loses you about 20% of the power you push to space but it still actually has a lot of advantages. You don't need to miniaturise your power generation, it's easy to maintain your reactors both for staff and logisitics, you can stick them under a mountain for comparably cheap armor, your mac stations are smaller and easier to manoeuvre (just keep the rectenna facing down), and when you aren't using your mac cannons (which is most of the time) you can tie that power straight into grid subsidising the cost of your defense platforms. Incidentally, this also explains why they're geostationary - having a static power broadcaster is much cheaper and more reliable than a mobile one and if the cannon is always in the same spot relative to the ground, you can just build it so it's pointing at the right spot.
One potential way to power an orbital station from the ground could be through microwaves. More than a few orbital solar power generation proposals have the power load being transmitted to a ground installation via microwaves, so it stands to reason that the reverse should hold true.
The problem with macs as in halo is that they in reality they would be extremely impractical in ship to ship combat. Imagine someone having their pistol glued to their torso and trying to aim. And the mac station would also need to be dotted with hundreds of thrusters to allow it to aim in the first place
I don’t know, imagine trying to close weapons range and there is a 600 ton shell being launched at you every couple minutes to 30 seconds (recharge time depends on the ship and super MACs are 3000 tons). That’s a lot of hurt if you rush into an engagement and get so close that you can’t evade its velocity (up to 4% the speed of light). I can’t do the math but it would be interesting to think at what ranges and speeds you could evade that projectile
Missiles is better, fire faster, higher velocity, can tracking and homing itself to target, no need to aim, can fire a full salvo without exposing broadside, can place anywhere and fire anywhere no traverse speed limits, light weight and use less energy to operate. imagine having a big gun but ended up get sworm to death by small missiles frigate because it's too close and too fast to track and aim and target is not worth a shell. that's why we stop using big naval guns to fight and use VLS and tubes instead.
@@MutheiM_Marz misses even in halo, do not approach 4% the speed of light, most if not all UNSC ships carry missles or rockets, they're all nukes, but a multi ton rock traveling at a fraction the speed of light can produce a large explosion then a nuke.
@@MutheiM_Marz Okay, but you can still 'shoot down' a missile, even with an unprecise wide-area explosion. Missiles themselves can't (normally) take a hit from a countering system. But a MAC round, with its massive weight and insane speed... how are you going to stop that? The best you can do is to put a smaller ship in front of it, to maybe reduce the total impact energy or knock it off course
How I understood the orbital Super MAC platforms (especially those around Reach) was that power would be transferred from ground stations to orbit by directed electromagnetic fields or huge infrared lasers. By which they would power some sort of magnetic battery or heat capacitor that would fire the round. I thought the Fall of Reach book said that no aircraft or ships are allowed to fly in the atmosphere within several kilometers above and around the ground stations since the magnetic waves or whatever would fry all electronics on-board. This is tech 500+ years in the future so of course some things might seem incomprehensible to us
9:32 directed laser energy transfer you would need a thermal/photon to electrical converter there would be some energy loss to atmospheric density scattering some light but a lot less than even something like the experimental superconductive graphing would have as a cable going up. it would make sense to have geostationary if you couldn't have the laser gimbal too much or you absolutely needed the thinnest path through atmosphere that the laser is going through to get the best transfer. Just don't have any ships orbit through that line because you've essentially got a directed energy weapon "cable". 11:50 I have to correct you on the station keeping height, 50 ish miles is the karman line 65 miles off the surface is the limit where you stop worrying about station keeping, source the international space station is at 60 miles up and it has to boost somewhere between once a week and once a month. You could correct the equal and opposite reaction problem with having a artificial backblast, maybe pumping coolant liquid over the coils very quickly while it fires and when that vaporizes into plasma it jets out the back of the gun? Coolant resupplies would be something required if that would be a solution, but when you look at falcon nine and the development of starship we will have efficient enough delivery systems to maintain that infrastructure. If the orbital defense platform was in geosynchronous orbit (not stationary because any shots towards the poles will make it wobble) and instead of having an on station reactor it had a reactor complex on the ground beaming lasers (maybe a radio laser if that's possible, to make the energy absorption easier) to power that platform and other platforms in the area (because why not make the stations easier to produce and have a lot of) you could use the photon pressure from multiple ground power stations cross powering the defense stations you could create a sort of orbit stabilizing force bowl. With multiple ground stations firing lasers at multiple defense platforms one could ramp up the power to a laser hitting a station in a particular direction to cancel out any drift from firing. Now I'm off to figure out if there is such thing as forcing radio waves into particles like we've done for the visible and near visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of lasers, because a laser you could just absorb with an array of hull mounted antennas would be an awesome energy transfer system in space because lack of melting any and every ship that flies through it or melting the receiver when you miss their specialized photonic thermal energy converter system. Apparently we have masers the microwave predecessor to the laser they were used for the first satellite communication and are currently atomic clocks, I couldn't find anything that could support or deny my idea of directly absorbed long wavelength masers other than the fact that constructing them currently is very complicated. So I kinda want someone from darpa to see this and start figuring out how to make a laser/maser that when shot at a ship just induces current instead of heating it up. Would be kind of interesting to equip on all of our spacecraft and just electrically insulate the outside hall from the inside so we can friendly fire before the ships go into combat as a sort of magnetic field based shielding and ramming weapon. "How is my whole ship a taser? Well you see my friend over there shooting me with very long wave length photon beams? That's pushing all the electrons on the surface of my ship into a fancy complicated dance that electrocuted your bioship and holds that plasma around mine."
The MAC canons that were powered by ground stations were powered wirelessly, remotely powering stations does come at a percentage power loss, but it is far more impractical bringing the power source into space with the weapon. While low Earth orbit would increase the efficiency of power transfer, it also requires more power stations on the ground for coverage. The recoil of the guns would also make managing orbit very difficult since it's already close to the atmosphere, having it further out gives a chance for course correction. The most feasible long-distance wireless power transfer technology is laser power transmission, onto a high efficiency, actively cooled, photovoltaic receiver, achieving a theoretical maximum efficiency of 85%. It's the same tech we're trying to make for wirelessly powering the elevator on a space elevator tether. Wireless laser power transmission is also a good way to speed up and power spacecraft in a non-ftl universe, which also brings us back to the point of recoil. Ground based power stations give an endless "fuel" source for orbital correction, as every time the guns fire, their orbit would be altered. The action of giving power to the station would also actively keep it in orbit. In space, you can only cool radiatively, there's nothing to quickly grab and dispense of the heat, unless you actively dispense something that takes it; Heat fins for a reactor would make the station a bigger and more expensive target, with large solar arrays doing the same.
At 1:37, you said that the super Mac around reach are inpractible. Around Reach they have 20 of these super Mac, and 1 shot kill a covenant ship, (i don't talk about the little banshee, seraph fighter, phantom or spirit, no no, more like The Truth and Reconciliation from Halo CE or maybe ship a little bigger than that. In lore human need 4 equivalent ship to destroy 1 covenant ship, and generally speaking they willnlose 1-2, plus damage on at least 1 other of the 4 ships. So yeah the super mac, needs big reactor on the grounds, but they are way more powerful than their ship, and if I remember correctly they also have more range than covenant, or their own, ships.
I beleive that future railgun rails and projectiles could be coated in a layer of graphine, which is both electrically conductive and very low-friction
ground powerstations can be a thing if your species masters super capciters and room temp super conductors and has stuff like graphene easily on tap. long distance power transmission wouldnt be an issue. Propelling shells at a portion of light speed isnt that difficult when you actually look at it. If brute force isnt working, you arent using enough of it
Missiles are faster, can track and steering itself to target, no recoil and use less energy to operate. only downside is payload but we can use multiple missiles. that's why we don't use 356mm 410mm 460mm guns for long range engagement anymore. and HIMARS, MLRS start to get traction and fair share of use alongside 155mm.
A chemical reaction that power a single shot? A firearm shell made of graphene which generates electricity when the material is physically flexed. You need the material flex to be sufficient to powering propulsion of the round.
In a comment on the ground station subject. We do need to remember that with the Fall of Harvest book and the Forward Unto Dawn web series, space elevators are a thing in the halo universe. In order for a space elevator to work in the limited shots we get of forward unto dawn, they operated via an electromagnetic lift. For the distance to reach space, the power consumption would be enormous, it might be feasible to think that they'd use that enormous power generation for a ground base to also supply the orbital platform. I remember the orbital platform in fall of harvest having an onboard power generator but also having the ability to draw power from the surface as well
That's some interesting science I'm most definitely not qualified to speak on but I'll try. Firstly is trying to understand power generation and how they produce electricity. Things like nuclear reactors or coal power use heat to boil steam to turn turbines. Now steam doesn't rise in space due to low gravity. And thermal energy is extremely inefficient in terms of how much energy is lost due to thermodynamics. Solar panels are not efficient in today's standards. But that's also due to the atmosphere, in space they can be more effective, but are high maintenance. They're fragile and any amount of space dust can effect their generation. Now space is wild with thermodynamics. Since it's dependant on if you're in the sun or not, temperature can vary wildly. From -150 degrees Celsius in the shadow of Earth to 120 degrees Celsius in the sunlight (for the ISS). As such, using space as a thermal vent can be so fluctuating that it can be dangerous. This is where we'd steer towards theoretical power generation, but I'm not qualified or smart enough to think of things like that lol. We could use the decompression forces to vent atmosphere to spin a turbine but that's super mechanical and dangerous as well. And Newtonian physics would turn the exhaust into a thrust vector that can harm the orbit
We might be able to build the smaller Railgun platforms seen in the Expanse but without a Martian Congressional Republic to oppose there's still no point....except maybe shoot down meteors
@@pdawgsterling69 As far as I know there's no artificial gravity you can turn on and off, but they've figured out some pretty tricky stuff with electromagnets. Simulating gravity in space is pretty easy; accelerate or decelerate at 1G. Alternatively you could rotate with 1G of angular momentum.
I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I read the books, but does it specifically say that the ground stations power the MAC cannons? I always thought/remembered them as being remote link control stations they used so they wouldn’t have to worry about losing soldiers in a boarding action. It’s literally just the gun and no habitat, any maintenance is done EVA. (Also, I can’t decide if this would make them a older single use platform and the larger ones like Cairo Station are newer, multi-role platforms or vice -versa). Like I said I haven’t read the books in a while so there’s a good chance I’m talking nonsense.
I thought the largest ones were just repurposed space elevators or space elevators with macs attached to the station with the power plants also powering local cities when not in uses for planetary defense.
i imagine that they could be powered by ground stations, this is far enough in the future that satellite solar panels could exist and they would operate on another semi modern tech of transferring electricity via laser beams, personally i would be more concerned by the Mac cannon instantly cooking the entire crew, and i think in reality the ship ai would calculate the trajectory taking advantage of the solar system's gravity to essentially sling rounds around planets so the guns never have to full face a target IE the game interplanetary
The only issue I can see with using the slingshot method is if the enemy ships detect the incoming rounds they could doge them easily, unless the round is self correcting. I'd say that the maximum effective range of a weapon would be two to five light seconds.
@Jake Baldwin I'm pretty certain that MAC rounds are solid chunks of metal, so nothing to give off a detectable signals that a ships sensors would be able to find.
@@jamesrogers1105 I was thinking more along the lines of tracking the shot via based on the enemy ship movement and energy buildup, since they have to align the ship in a specific way to aim the gun.
The concept for beaming solar energy from a geosynchronous solar array has been floated. Large solar panels in space that shoot microwave lasers to Earth. Those microwaves are captured and transferred back to electricity. It's possible, not really considered because that would mean huge microwave lasers in space that could be used as weapons. Use that in reverse and a planet side energy station could shoot microwave lasers to the MAC platforms to charge them up.
We wouldn't necessarily need any experimental weapons in order to build ODP's. Simple high-velocity cannons and missiles might be somewhat effective. The platforms would require some form of thrust in order to keep their positions in orbit, or to manoeuvre for advantage. No, we can't build space fortresses, but we could certainly build semi-autonomous defence systems in orbit.
Honestly a railgun will come first as its so much simpler and easier, also the tests with a railgun, as i recall, never actually recaptured the energy flow which should be possible to shortent the charge time quite a bit. They also used sleaves for the railgun that peal away after leaving the barrel.
you can use microwaves to send power to a station in orbit, the same can be done from space, a huge solar panel station colects power and sends it down using microwaves and it doesn't need to be very powerful, i read something about that ten year ago. as to the game the platforms around reach used ground stations about 20 that were devastation the covenant fleet the platforms around earth didn't acourding to warfleet, they had their own power source. the platforms in halo have artificial gravity, the people wouldn't be swung around.also every station has a set of trusters on the botomfiring for a few seconds to counter the recoil from the guns.
9:20 Nikola Tesla was working on wireless transfer of power across the Atlantic over 100 years ago. If it was theoretically possible then, it's definitely possible now with the technological advancements we've seen.
Biggest issue for RnD of these weapons is need. The need for such powerful weapons and practicality of making them largely drives the effort put into them. If there is a need that could be filled with railguns, boom: funding. But these weapons unfortunately suffer a similar problem as mechs: they don't fill any current military need or raise a new advantage.
Two part answer to that: 1: Yes, we _could._ 2: Why _should_ we? The satellites already destroy themselves into speeding projectiles that'll destroy more satellites just fine, you're only intentionally adding more debris that'll make it harder to put another satellite up there. If you even hit one, that is.
The defense platforms could use either fission or fusion reactors and use the space debris that’s currently in orbit as projectiles. If they use fission reactors than the spent rods could be turned into projectiles. If they use fusion reactors than they could collect stellar gas and trash to convert into fuel.
If I recall basic physics correctly, it is that all light is made of photons. They act as both waves and particles. They have energy. Toss enough of them into a concentrated beam/ray/shape and you have enough energy to do real damage. Though it probably involves some whacky quantum physics too. I’m not smart enough to comprehend such mad science.
Batterys are being better like graphene and borophene and possibly we could use a superconductor in the future, other ways is quantum battery bs (I have no clue), and with ship-based ones, we already have a mini nuclear reactor under development and results are promising and with fusion on the cusp of development, railguns are feasible if we just develop the technology and china is already close to finishing.
you mentioned geosynchronous orbit for the halo rings then defined what a geostationary orbit is. a geo synchronous orbit has an object pass over the same point above the object it is orbiting every time it completes an orbit in earth's case 24 hours (rounded)
We might be saying the same thing, a geosynchrous orbit has an orbital period of 24 hours so it more or less would appear stationary from the surface, as it orbits at the same angular rate as the earth spins. A geostationary orbit is also equatorial, off plane geosynchrous orbits would make little figure 8s from the surface.
@@TheBigCabezon but isnt a geosynchronous orbit that is on the same angular plane as the rotation of the parent body geostationary then? you could argue that getting a *perfect* geostationary orbit is nearly impossible therefore making it synchronous as then it would pass over the same point on the surface of the parent body every time it completes an orbit instead of literally hovering above the same point to an observer.
There are two problem with rail or gauss guns targeting into space First if its on the surface of a planet by the time the round gets into orbit it would have slowed down massively trying to escape the planets gravity well. Second if its orbiting a planet when the weapon is fired the gun will be traveling as much backward as the round is going forward. There are two weapons that work well in space and that are missiles and energy weapons as neither one would have to much of an affect by Newton's Third Law of Action & Reaction that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction on the firing platform be that a ship, a space station, or an orbiting weapon platform.
There is also question of "why we would need one?" It's not like we are facing a threat of alien invasion. And i don't think they would be that much useful to protecting earth against asteroids, changing trajectory would be much safer solution. We don't have one united earth "government/society" so the next question is "who will be putting in charge". And wouldn't he use it to enforce his will to the rest of the word
Gauss cannons are not the same as coil guns and they are typically confused with each other. The key difference between a coil gun and Gauss cannon is that the Gauss cannon doesn't have any electricity in its use. Basically a Gauss cannon is a line of magnetic pices lined up on a slope with the projectile on one end with a weight that is typically magnetic in its self that you drop along the the path of the slope to throw your projectile at great speeds. This is the best way to describe what the difference between the launching systems are.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor I understand that however it doesn't make them correct about what they are saying and quite often it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what they are talking about.
Also I have a recommendation for you to try mass effect technology because I love the lore about all the ships and biotic stuff and I like it if you make a video on that
To be fair those were the stupidly powerful Erod class ODPs over Reach. The ones over Earth are the older, smaller Moncton class, and they are self sufficient with their power supply. The Erod class ODPs were just stupid. Wireless power transmission over that much distance and up through atmosphere is an awful idea. It'd be so inefficient, the transmitted power would be attenuating in the atmosphere and probably boiling it off as the battle went on, and the power broadcasts are both giant beacons alerting the enemy to the location of the ground generator as well as giant vulnerabilities to the ODP itself if a ship slips past and interrupts the broadcast.
The reason the orbital MAC canon's work, is that their isn't any reaction pushing them back. The magnets are able to accelerate the slug without any friction.
The magnets still exert a force. By propelling the munition through magnetic fields, they experience an equal but opposite force through said magnetic field as well. It's not about friction so much as it's about equaling forces out.
Solid state batteries. Toyota is creating it. It can hold more power then any EV battery can and it won't blow up on you. It can also hold a charger longer. Think someone was trying to make a liquid metal battery? But I'm not sure.
I am still heavily amused by people saying mac cannon because Mac is an abbreviation for Magnetic Accelerator Cannon. There has been debate that the M stands for Magnetic and the AC is for ACcelerator. Ultimately all semantics but still amusing.
Great video. Just for the record, you called BAe systems (the company that developed the real life rail gun) an American company, BAe Systems stands for British Aerospace Systems and the company comes from London England. Not an American company, very British.
@@TheBigCabezon yeah easy mistake that anyone could make ahaha. Amazing video though, love how much you research everything and how detailed everything is.
The question is not whether can. It is rather, what is the best way to do it. If the objective is to keep a foreign invasion from happening, we could just send up a bunch of very large debris into orbit, in a rocket, then blow the rocket up in orbit. We do that enough times, and we will have a very effective shield around our planet, which will shred any incoming craft. Also "orbital bombardment" is stupid. An enemy wouldn't have to be in orbit to bombard our planet. They could do that from literally anywhere, they could park their fleet in orbit above Mars, then fire their ship weapons this way, The projectile or whatever they use to do the bombardment will travel all the way here from there, and still enter our atmosphere with all the ferocity they would enter from orbit with. But with this method, they are much safer, as they wouldn't have to deal with us at all, or our weapons; as pathetic as they are. Yeah, our weapons are pathetic. Look at our nuclear weapons! I wouldn't even classify a nuclear weapon as "bad" in terms of weapons. There are many weapons WAY worse, and far more effective at killing humans than a nuclear weapons are. And those are the ones we have made. A technologically advanced race that has the technological ability to launch and complete a mission across interstellar space is technologically advanced enough to know just how weak our weapons are. Nuclear weapons may scare you, but they aren't going to be scaring them at all.
Damn I missed that haha, anytime I think background noise may pollute the recording I immediately repeat myself (I record in one single, long take) I usually trim out the duplicates because it's obvious but missed that one. Embarrassing.
@@TheBigCabezon I think you can cut the duplicate section using RU-vid tools without taking down the video or anything, but I'll leave that up to you. Just wanted you to be aware in case you did wanna fix it.
Prox shells don't kill through shock waves, they typically have smaller ones than HE. Prox kills through fragments, which is incredibly useful for something like a MAC round. At very high muzzle velocities, you already know the round will punch through a ship (minus shielding) so instead you have the shell explode into smaller fragments prior to impact so it penetrates but doesn't pass through. This ensures all kinetic energy is passed to the target. Think of it like a regular bullet, 7.62 rounds had a habit of passing through (clean wounds), lighter rounds like 5.56 tumble after they hit your body creating some gnarly exit wounds. Same concept.
@Cabezon ships in halo have shields and ARMORED hulls, without explosives they need mass to cause damage, using a MaAC round that explodes and showers the target in sharpnel isnt going to do anything except scratch the paint. And 5.56 rounds tumble after a certain distance due to instabilities in their flight path, 7.62 rounds will probably do the same just at a longer distance.
@@jamesrogers1105 you don't need mass to kill, you need kinetic energy. That's how shaped charges can take out armored vehicles. Insane velocity. I 100% guarantee if you accelerated small rods to a significant velocity they would cut through any armor you can think of.
@Cabezon smaller the mass the more speed needed, the larger the mass, the less speed needed, if you drop a telephone pole sized chunk of tungsten and a 1x1x1ft block of tungston from low orbit the larger on will do more damage even though they will have near the same velocity, that being somewhere below 9.8 m/s
For quite a while, I've had an idea to mitigate the problem of coilgun projectiles going right through the target, doing little damage. I call it PMDP, Perpendicular Mesh Disk Projectile. Shoot projectiles made of essentially steel wool, or wire mesh, coiled up into a rod, and imparted a spin to make them spread out an spread the damage over a larger area, dump all the energy into the target and prevent over-penetration. An added benefit would be that the projectile that is spread out so much, would be much harder to shoot down with lasers, let alone missiles and counter-projectiles. Also, what would be a narrow miss with a solid rod, could still be a hit with a perpendicular mesh disk. Such a projectile, depending on the area and mesh density, to the enemy radar, either would be harder to detect or would seem to be a much larger object, potentially masking the radar signature of whatever you send behind the PMDP, or that of your ship/station/installation
Its a shame that we don’t design the rails to be disposable or have multiple barrels to allow for cooling like a mini gun to minimize damage to the barrels. But there are probably reasons the military hasn’t done this.
Missiles will probably always have their place in warhead delivery but kinetic weapons might be a viable counter to missiles due to the potential velocities they can reach vs what we can do with chemical fuels today. Missiles will never go away because no country will want to make a nuclear powered rail gun that is basically impossible to disarm once fired
@@pdawgsterling69 Current chemical rounds anyway. There is research on different types of propellants to increase the speed of projectiles. Look up the RU-vidr Spookton if you're interested.
@@pdawgsterling69 Whenever we finally get into space I could see some countries using space debris as a weapon. Like they could use high level math to calculate where they need to drop some junk in order for it to fall to earth and strike a city. Probably couldn’t get precise enough to hit a specific building, but what’s that matter when you can wipe out the city?
@@itzyaboimemez2074 There was a actual railgun, the army replaced the radio, hull machine gun with a second engine and power systems. then they created the first SABOT round for it and when they shot it the rail exploded and almost kill 3 people including the man who was it biggest supporter. No it wasn't the T34 Calliope.
And if that were actually true, the second engine and the likes, it would been impractical since every Sherman needed to be quick and easy to build, maintain, and remove broken parts. Not only that, every Sherman tank are needed in the front, which is why most modified Shermans still have the same chassis, hull, and others because they needed then to be quick and easy to modify. It would have been more practical if they use the M6 Heavy tank because of its large hull and turret, which can fit those that you have mentioned, or a new tank all together.
If you are going to mention Spookston, then don't cause I already watched his "America's First Railgun Tank" video. I highly advise not to truly believe that video because there are little to no files or documents to fully support his "Railgun Sherman". I like Spookston's videos, its informative like ConeofArc. But I would take it with a grain of salt.
MAC cannon is like ATM machine. ATM is automatic teller machine. ATM Machone means you're saying automatic teller machine machine. MAC is Magnetic Accelerator Cannon. So MAC Cannon is Magnetic Accelerator Cannon Cannon. I know I'm nitpicking, but it is redundant.
in Halo games, especially in 2 and Reach, I really think those platform located in low orbit, but they still say they are in geo-orbit, which is interesting, guess because in the background story, the generator located on the ground. Also, I feel their mass of ammunition for MAC is too heavy, which not match the condition of year in 26th century.
There is no recoil from a coil gun. You've made a common mistake when thinking about Newtonian forces. Launching a bullet either in a normal gun or a coil gun isn't an action, it's a reaction.
There is recoil... Forces always balance out, so if use magnetic forces in a coilgun to propel a round, there's also a force back against the magnets. You can easily go pick some up at a store and demo this for yourself.
Beamed power absolutely makes sense for using ground based power installations for orbital defense platforms, and would also explain why they're in a stationary orbit. It would make them easier to target with the beam. I enjoy most of your videos, but you're very off the mark with this one.
Beaming that much power through the atmosphere would cause blooming, where gas becomes ionized and turns to plasma. This leads to massive losses due to heat and distortion of the beam. There's no reason to go through all that when you could have a nuclear reactor in orbit. It just doesn't make sense.
He's not at all. To be fair hes being.....fair. "beaming" the needed energy to those platforms would be stupid. Even if the macs yields and power requirements were actually reasonable, it would still be pointless using ground based energy units to power them, ESPECIALLY haveing them in a stationary orbit. I'm sorry but I'll say this all day, the macs in halo are 40k levels of fatacy weapons.
@@TheBigCabezon It's relevant, because a commercially available linear accelerator of any type is only really a tipping off point, and an old one at that (speaking of the E-Gun" As for the GR-1, it has a similar capability as a .22 long if I remember correctly, which -is- lethal. Again, it's already old news. As technology continues to miniaturize, more powerful versions of both of these weapons will become standardized. The interesting point in fact about both of these weapons however, is something most science fiction weapons do not take into account, which in those instances, make them impractical in the extreme, and that is round capacity. Both of these weapon concepts feature a magazine feed, which is integral to military application. (Bolt action will be at a huge disadvantage against a burst rifle for example.) You can handwave the Halo versions of these weapons all you want with regard to fire rates and ammo capacities, but ultimately such thigs are more or less irrelevant to a game. This isn't even considering the actual military trials for much more robust versions of a linear accelerator, which are viable, in a sense, in that they totally work as intended. There are however, two main issues to such a weapon platform, that keep it from being standardized by any major military power. First: There is a saying, "Keep it simple stupid". The more complex you make a weapon, the more likely it is to fail over extended use. It's why you don't see many modern militaries using Bullpup weapons, despite the inherent advantages a bullpup rifle has. Coil guns, rail guns, gauss rifles... They are all -incredibly- complex pieces of hardware, that have innumerable points of failure. a soldier with a broken weapon is a casualty waiting to happen, and thus, simply a wasted resource. Second: The cost. Never minding the initial cost to construct a single weapon platform, the ammunition for such weapons would be expensive and difficult to maintain. Counter intuitive, yes, due to the ease at which one can find Iron, or its related alloys. However, the standard ballistics used as of now, benefit, from being difficult to degrade (via natural processes such as corrosion), and come with a reduced cost over volume (lead is hilariously cheap). At the moment, the only real benefit a ferromagnetic sabot would have over a bullet, is that there isn't a chance for the sabot to explode.
