Talk:Enceladus Aerospace Fleet/@comment-11135771-20150605153519

Technology Update:

After significant research, antimatter beam technology has been successfully created and implemented in our ships. These weapons use electromagnetic coils to fire a stream of ferromagnetic antimatter particles at velocities approaching the speed of light. Energy consumed by the coils is within acceptable ranges despite the extremely high velocities, as there is only a very small amount of mass which needs to be moved. The damage output of antimatter beam weapons significantly exceeds all other known armaments of the same size. There are however some notable disadvantages of these weapons. Due to the nature of antimatter, they cannot be fired while within an atmosphere without instantly destroying themselves (and likely whatever they are attached to). Firing into an atmosphere from outside is however possible, as the destruction of the atmospheric gases in the path of the beam means that they can "drill" through - though this does reduce their effectiveness somewhat. The other drawback of these weapons is the fact that they draw their ammunition from the same antimatter generator as is used for the ship's reactor. As such, firing them continuously for an extended period can deplete reactor power.

Hypersonic missiles have been completed and brought into service with good results in testing scenarios. These missiles use miniaturized versions of our interplanetary sublight drives to achieve extremely high velocities compared to ordinary missiles - refitted MCMs can reach up to Mach Six. This provides a significant advantage against anti-missile systems, which have difficulty tracking targets moving as quickly as this technology allows. Missiles ranges are mostly unaffected - the increased fuel consumption combined with the increased velocity even out to no significant net change in maximum range. The propulsion unit for any of our current missile designs can be substituted for this new design, albeit at a higher cost per unit. The one drawback to this system is the fact that accelerating a missile to such high speeds severely reduces its maneuvering ability - as such, missiles using this propulsion system are less effective against more agile targets.

Blink technology has been successfully reverse-engineered from the remains of the Prometheus Corporation fleet which attacked some time ago. This upgrade to our warp drives allows ships to make short-range warp jumps of a few kilometres distance with a significantly reduced cooldown period between jumps, in addition to retaining normal functionality. Research into further improving the cooldown period of blink systems is currently underway.

Research on cloaking is in progress. Several other forces have developed optical camouflage systems for their ships, and we are looking into implementing these in our designs as well. Current prototypes are achieving a high degree of success, although we are still looking to reduce power consumption.

Slipspace storage systems are being developed based on the UAC's slipspace drives. These should effectively allow the creation of a box (or other container) to be made in such a way that it can generate a portal to a fixed slipspace coordinate within it, allowing for said box to contain an infinite number of items within it. Additionally, any objects put into a slipspace storage unit would become effective weightless as far as the carrier is concerned - a normal human could carry a slipspace container holding a main battle tank, provided that the opening was large enough for the tank to exit it. I fear however that we will not be able to prevent such technology from being extremely expensive to produce.

All ship classes have been fitted with one ventral-mounted antimatter beam weapon, and all vessels which carry missiles have had 1/4 of their ammunition of each missile type upgraded to hypersonic drive variants. Warp drives on all ships currently in service have been retrofitted with blink capabilities.

- Head Researcher Adam Quinton