I am fascinated as to why, in the 26th century, you would ever use railguns to accelerate kinetic projectiles. It requires such an insane amount of energy to accelerate to relativistic velocities that you could definitely utilize all that power for something far more useful as a weapon. For a 1 kg object to achieve just 50% of lightspeed you need, assuming 100% efficiency, 14 terajoules. This is asinine! It's so wasteful! If you have that much energy to throw around you're far better off using it for a warhead or a hyperluminal equivalent to a cruise missile.
Speaking of which, any kind of weapon utilizing slower than light speeds seems far outdated for a battlefield where one can travel dozens of times faster than information itself. The distances in space are so vast that it would take years for a relativistic weapon to hit anything at what would, for a hyperluminal weapon, be point-blank range.
Please, if you would be so inclined, tell me what technologies, advances, doctrine or treaties justify the use of kinetics. I would be fascinated to hear all that.
Also, I'm interested as to how sensors work in this setting. Surely they're not still using primitive radar and infrared when hyperluminal velocities are commonplace? Perhaps they have stealthy probes left orbiting interstellar asteroids in enormous constellations, communicating with their parent ships through some kind of stream of tiny, hyperluminal messenger craft? Or do they bend spacetime in some other way, pissing off Einstein on purpose just to be able to see? Or are all militaries and combatants stuck in a fog of war thicker than ever before in the history of humanity, only able to see in a hopelessly tiny sphere around them, with aiming and self defense more akin to guesswork than predicting where your enemies will be?
Please tell me, I'm dying to know.
Thanks for the ask, and sorry for taking 3 days to get back to you, I rarely use tumblr and barely know how to use it in the first place.
I’m going to address your questions one by one here
1: on why use railguns to accelerate impactors to relativistic speeds
Yeah, your right, this one isn’t very well thought out I’m still largely a newbie to hard sci fi and all that kinda stuff, and I made this 10 days ago when I was first learning about all of it, all of this stuff is subject to change, for example my earlier post about the Superluminal Communications Relays is already outdated to the current lore
For now the Relativistic impactors are still in the lore, just not accelerated by railguns, I’m still working on that stuff
2: on your question as to why anyone would use slower than light weapons
It varies really, not all warfare is fought from light years away, while yes inter-system warfare has happened with just FTL weapons, think something like the Cold War between two solar systems, both arming up with hyperluminal warheads, but in a lot of cases people fight over specific things, like planets, Lagrange points, etc, and in those cases, it comes in handy to have slower than light weapons, otherwise it’d be like bringing a sniper rifle to a shootout, yeah it’ll work, but the guy with the smaller, easier to deal with gun will probably win.
That doesn’t mean that they don’t rely on FTL in close quarters (light seconds to minutes) battles, smaller more maneuverable warcrafts, gunships, armed with sub light speed weapons but possessing a warp drive can detach from their parent Warcraft and engage enemy crafts, these gunships are around the size of our real world naval boats.
Also the fact threat hyperluminal warheads are extremely expensive to make
(Idk if I explained that right, tell me if you need more clarification, though said clarification probably isn’t enough since see above, I’m still a newbie :p)
I’ve already covered this type of thing before with the Superluminal Communications Relays, military versions of these do exist, tiny, stealthy hyperluminal probes flying around the battlefield, with those that survived returning to friendly fleets to feed information back to them, it goes beyond that too, it’s. Whole messy system using all kinds of things, all of it timed with their plasma field generators to provide for the perfect instance where probes, signals, etc, can enter within the warcrafts field for collection and processing.
And yes, like you mentioned in some cases warp drives are used to bend space in such a way that it provides a viewing angle at enemy fleets, not for visual viewing, but like signals and shit and whatnot.
This part of the stuff isn’t really my forte as you can probably tell
Anyway my head hurts, goodnight!
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