Talk:AF: Armada of Freedom/@comment-11181609-20141122215311/@comment-11135771-20141123003718

Feedback from me about your new tech:

Seeking Bullets: Okay, these can exist. There have been IRL experiments on producing them after all. However, there have to be some compromises an limitations for the sake of realism.

First, there must be limits to the maneuverability of the bullets. They will not turn quickly. You will still have to shoot in the general direction of the target for the bullets to have any chance of hitting it, so you can't for example hit a ship underneath yours with top mounted guns.

Secondly, you have to figure out how the bullets are going to actually turn. There are two ways to do this (unless you can think of another way); fins or RCS thrusters (which would probably also have fins).

If you decide to go with only fins, you've basically got a missile-shaped bullet with a little targeting chip inside it which allows the fins to adjust so that the bullet steers toward the target. These would be more expensive than conventional rounds (although considering that a 204cm round is probably already pretty expensive, I suppose it would only add a tiny amount by comparison), be able to steer only in atmosphere, and have rather limited turning ability. They would be able to track targets and adjust their course a bit, but at short range against fast moving targets they would be no better than normal bullets.

The other opinion would be to go with adding steering thrusters to the bullet (and probably some fins too because fins are good). This would have everything the fin-only design would, as well as a bunch of small RCS thrusters, a fuel tank, and a forward-facing thruster. These would essentially be non-explosive missiles that do damage through pure kinetic energy. They would be much, much more expensive than normal ammunition, but also work in space as well as atmosphere and have fairly good steering ability. Even close, fast moving targets would be made much easier to hit than with regular bullets, although still somewhat difficult depending on the specifics.

You would still want to fire them toward the target though (I'm assuming they are fired like normal bullets, ie gunpowder is used to provide their initial velocity), because if they are facing away from the target and you want them to hit it, they will have to turn around and do a retrograde engine burn to decelerate to a stop, and then continue burning their engines to accelerate toward the target. Depending on the size of the fuel tank, that probably means they will just plain run out of fuel before hitting (maybe even before stopping), or at least hit at very low speed. Bascially, no matter what you do you'll never be able to have your bullets shoot in the opposite direction and still hit. Sorry. However, they will still be able to hit if aimed within, say, sixty degrees (just an estimate there; it really depends on how much fuel they have) of the target or so, but the closer to the target you aim, the more fuel they will have to adjust their course.

The big consideration with kinetic missiles (that's what I'm calling the thruster-steered bullets henceforth) is how much fuel you want to give them. The more fuel you have, the more they will be able to steer. Additionally, more fuel means that you can fire them at a further angle from the intended target and they will still hit at a decent velocity, since after course correcting they will be able to burn their main engine for longer to get back up to high speed (mostly applicable in space; in atmosphere even with a lot of fuel you would need to aim fairly close to your target to hit it at a good velocity). The downside to adding more fuel is that the bullets will cost more and be larger, as well as slower. Larger, slower bullets mean that your bullets can be shot down by anti-missile defenses, and depending on just how slow they are, they will do less damage against armored targets. Potentially another concern would be that to have a lot of fuel, you would have to make the bullets large enough that you would have very limited amounts of ammunition you could store, and so running out mid-battle could become a very real possibility. Also, lots of fuel means very explody ammo storage if it gets hit.

So, I just realized that was a total wall of text. Sorry about that. In short (but please also read the long version if you want to know how to use your weapons effectively), you need to tell us a few things. First, how do your bullets steer? Are they steered only by fins (atmosphere-only steering, very limited maneuverability, fairly cheap), or by fins and thrusters (steering in vacuum and atmosphere, good maneuverability, expensive)? If you decide to make them use fins and thrusters, you also should say how much fuel they have (just say it as something like "bullet can fire main forward thruster for [insert number here] seconds, or one turning thruster for [insert number here] seconds".

Biological Regeneration (I promise not to text wall as much for this one): Well, seeing as is is the first research we've heard it mentioned that Armadia is doing in this field of science (bioengineering), I'd recommend making something a little less powerful. I quite like the idea, it's just that something which can bring a guy back from the brink of death to full health in two days is a bit much for your first venture into this sort of tech.

Two ideas on what you can do with this. First, you could just come up with a different-but-related technology which is less advanced, and have that instead. Then, you can develop the tech you mentioned in, say, a few months realtime. Alternatively, you can keep this tech but make it less powerful. Say, maybe two weeks instead of two days to heal someone back from near-death. Later on, you can either just leave this as is and keep it as a sort of stepping stone tech and then continue to come up with more advanced tech in the same field, or just mention having improved the tech to the level you want it at.