Well, AIs and their stances on things was just something that popped into my head. Wondered, thought I'd throw it out there for other people to wonder about too.
As for weapons... well, yes, I full well expect that there'll be people making hardtech stuff thanks to 'wavium materials or powersources. I know damned well *I'm* doing so; hell, my fenspace alter-ego's job/hobby could be said to consist of using wavetech related techniques to make well-engineered one-off hardtech things, some of which may just happen to be sharp or capable of dispensing pieces of metal. And god knows that I've brought up all sorts of truly abominable abuses for the stuff to the thread creator on IRC (hey, he knew what'd happen when he linked this in-channel!)
The way I see it though, is that the handwavium-enhanced hulls of anything truly spaceworthy are going to be beyond most hardtech methods of cracking. F'rex, yeah, with effectively unlimited power provided by wavetech means one of the big problems with railguns is solved... which leaves questions of switching, projectile welding to rails, armature design, and a thousand and one other big problems remaining. As of a couple years ago, the speed record for state of the art, DoD funded railguns is 16km/sec for a .1 gram projectile... which sounds impressively fast until you consider that it's only twice as fast as the average orbital velocity of the space shuttle, and it's been established that even average ships have micrometeorite protection. Considering that none of us have the resources to come up with something like that in hardtech, and wavetech won't work... well, see the first sentence of this paragraph. Nukes would likely work, but... I shouldn't have to go into this so I won't.![[Image: wink.gif]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/wink.gif)
Speeddrive things repurposed as hittiles obviously do work, and it gives me the willies. I'm almost tempted to propose something along the lines of it just not working without the terminal guidance of something sentient; the wavetech uses collision avoidance unless there's someting to force it not to, so you can use the ramming speed technique if you're willing to sacrifice an AI that you went and created. Arbitrary rationale, but you get the idea.
Feinan's last statement I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think that drives to the heart of the whole thing. A lot of us, myself included, think that highly advanced weaponry is nifty for its own sake; others of us are paranoid to some degree or another, or whatever other reason. No problem with that. But once we move onto the realm of people thinking of cleverer roundabout ways to use wavetech to crack open ships and cause mass destruction in a premeditated fashion, the whole thing sorta moves from "fen in a new frontier with the freedom to create nifty things and thumbing their noses at authority who misguidedly fear them" to "fen getting on an out and out war footing to the extent that the normals are *justified* in worrying". Which doesn't seem nearly as fun.
Anyhoo, just my... well, I'm past two cents by now, aren't I.
As for weapons... well, yes, I full well expect that there'll be people making hardtech stuff thanks to 'wavium materials or powersources. I know damned well *I'm* doing so; hell, my fenspace alter-ego's job/hobby could be said to consist of using wavetech related techniques to make well-engineered one-off hardtech things, some of which may just happen to be sharp or capable of dispensing pieces of metal. And god knows that I've brought up all sorts of truly abominable abuses for the stuff to the thread creator on IRC (hey, he knew what'd happen when he linked this in-channel!)
The way I see it though, is that the handwavium-enhanced hulls of anything truly spaceworthy are going to be beyond most hardtech methods of cracking. F'rex, yeah, with effectively unlimited power provided by wavetech means one of the big problems with railguns is solved... which leaves questions of switching, projectile welding to rails, armature design, and a thousand and one other big problems remaining. As of a couple years ago, the speed record for state of the art, DoD funded railguns is 16km/sec for a .1 gram projectile... which sounds impressively fast until you consider that it's only twice as fast as the average orbital velocity of the space shuttle, and it's been established that even average ships have micrometeorite protection. Considering that none of us have the resources to come up with something like that in hardtech, and wavetech won't work... well, see the first sentence of this paragraph. Nukes would likely work, but... I shouldn't have to go into this so I won't.
Speeddrive things repurposed as hittiles obviously do work, and it gives me the willies. I'm almost tempted to propose something along the lines of it just not working without the terminal guidance of something sentient; the wavetech uses collision avoidance unless there's someting to force it not to, so you can use the ramming speed technique if you're willing to sacrifice an AI that you went and created. Arbitrary rationale, but you get the idea.
Feinan's last statement I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think that drives to the heart of the whole thing. A lot of us, myself included, think that highly advanced weaponry is nifty for its own sake; others of us are paranoid to some degree or another, or whatever other reason. No problem with that. But once we move onto the realm of people thinking of cleverer roundabout ways to use wavetech to crack open ships and cause mass destruction in a premeditated fashion, the whole thing sorta moves from "fen in a new frontier with the freedom to create nifty things and thumbing their noses at authority who misguidedly fear them" to "fen getting on an out and out war footing to the extent that the normals are *justified* in worrying". Which doesn't seem nearly as fun.
Anyhoo, just my... well, I'm past two cents by now, aren't I.