Anti-ship flail in space? - Page 2 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Anti-ship flail in space?

   
Check out Hammerfight for inspiration on how you could control such a weapon. It is quite tricky. Great game btw.

Rather than attaching it on a chain, you could use a rigid rod and avoid colliding with it yourself. Gyroscopic forces could make it very difficult to navigate, though.

I would suggest having two such flails rotating in opposite directions, or at least a counter flywheel. Much easier to get it spinning, and the only limit to the amount of energy you can store in it is the tensile strength of the rod.

They could certainly do significant damage.

"Flail in space" has the same problems as any other melee weapon in space. The first and most obvious one is simply that distances are enormous. Even in a relatively tightly-confined zone, like planetary orbit, you're just not going to be very close to things very often - and when you want to get in close, you'll have to spend prohibitive amounts of energy to get there. Any currently-available method of propulsion means you probably only manage one intercept per vessel; unless you've got an Unobtainium powerplant, you might as well just acknowledge that your spaceship is in fact a missile.

The second problem is that in space, there's nowhere to plant your feet. That cripples your ability to deliver effective melee strikes, since the action of propelling your weapon forward pushes you backward just as hard (see pretty much every depiction of zero-g hand-to-hand fighting ever). On the ground (or on a horse), your feet (or the horse's hooves) provide traction which resists this effect, allowing your swings and thrusts to be effective.

The third problem is that in space, there's nowhere to plant your feet - this time after the hit. The force of impact works both ways, remember: not just from weapon to target but also from target to weapon, and then from the weapon back up to your own ship via whatever kind of attachment you're using. This is very likely to result in wildly unpredictable inputs to your course - and depending on the relative masses of attacker and target, could well be worse for the attacker. Also, here we've found an area where a flail/morningstar-type weapon would be significantly worse than most other melee weapons, as the combination of spiked striking surface and flexible connector raises the specter for the attacking vessel of not just one but multiple violent impulses (the impact itself; spikes eventually coming loose; one or two rounds of crack-the-whip as those work back up the flexible coupling) coming back from the weapon to send the ship careening madly off into the black.

Tldr: Melee weapons on spaceships are a Bad Idea. Flail/Morningstar-type melee weapons on spaceships are an Even Worse Idea than that.

Yeah, when you say it like that it does sound rather uneffective. To bad because it would be cool. :P

But would any melee-weapon work? Perhaps some where you just charge and don't have to stand steady. Like ramming your enemies with a plow that scatter thr debris out of harms way?

Quote:
Originally Posted by NorthernLight View Post
Yeah, when you say it like that it does sound rather uneffective. To bad because it would be cool. :P

But would any melee-weapon work? Perhaps some where you just charge and don't have to stand steady. Like ramming your enemies with a plow that scatter thr debris out of harms way?
Like an old-school ram bow? Wellll... In addition to the problems historically demonstrated by wet-navy use of the tactic (notably damaging your own ship and/or becoming inextricably entangled with the target), you have to figure that the powerplant on any spacecraft is going to be very energetic, and probably also very volatile: do you really want to be at Ground Zero when your target's reactor goes critical/enormous tank of self-oxidizing fuel lights off?

The big problem with a 'melee weapon' is the whole equal and opposite reaction thing. If it's a flail of any significant mass, then after it impacts with the target and then go flying off in a not-so-random-but-hard-to-predict direction. Then you have to regain control of it before you can make a second run. Even as actual weapons, flails are not primary weapons but made to counter certain defenses like shields or entangle sombody else's weapon.

If I were to take the idea of a flail and adapt it to ship combat, I would have a large mass attached to a docking release and a chain or cable connecting it to a grappler. Fire the grappler at an enemy ship and then release the mass. The unwieldy and unpredictable nature of the flail will then work against your opponent and make it very hard to maneuver and fire weapons, especially if the mass has a rocket engine at 90 degrees to the chain. Think of it more like a bola.

Alternatively, instead of a literal flail, you can mount engines and a remote control on an iron meteoroid and smash it into opponents. Effective against Capitol ships that can't maneuver out of the way as easy.

That sounds like a really good idea! Perhaps one could even just have a long chain with two grapplers and then fire them into two enemy ships or one ship and an asteorid. That should indeed make it somewhat harder for them to manuever.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Penchant View Post
Alternatively, instead of a literal flail, you can mount engines and a remote control on an iron meteoroid and smash it into opponents. Effective against Capitol ships that can't maneuver out of the way as easy.
Might as well use a guided missile at that point.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Philistine View Post
The second problem is that in space, there's nowhere to plant your feet. That cripples your ability to deliver effective melee strikes, since the action of propelling your weapon forward pushes you backward just as hard (see pretty much every depiction of zero-g hand-to-hand fighting ever). On the ground (or on a horse), your feet (or the horse's hooves) provide traction which resists this effect, allowing your swings and thrusts to be effective.
This isn't really an issue for flails, since they get their damage from kinetic energy and not from forward pushing. In space, you could even give it more energy with a reaction mass turning the other way, because you loose nothing to air resistance.

If the chain is long enough, and you have the kind of thrust and manoeuvrability
however unrealistic that may be at the moment
typically associated with space fights in SF, an automatic collision avoidance system can take care of the erratic rebound, and even use it for the next swing.

That's true of any melee weapon, including fists and feet; the problem remains that when you try to accelerate the weapon forward, you also accelerate yourself backward. It's a zero-sum game unless you have some kind of resistance to the rearward push.




 

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