I think you should look up Particle Systems' excellent nineties space shooter "I-War" (Independence War for Americans)- that had a gimballed particle beam cannon (PBC) that tapped plasma directly from the ship's main power generator... which was a circular accelerator. In fact the round shape of the hero ship was defined by that accelerator taking up much of the main hull.There were even radiator fins at the aft end of the ship. Novel "shield" mechanic too. Seriously, it's less than a couple of quid from Gog, has a Newtonian physic system, a good story, an intro movie that's like a short episode of DS9 or B5 and, for the true geek, a really good old school manual with lots of crunchy little details. It was obviously a labour of love for it's British developers who obviously thought about everything and doesn't deserve it's lack of recognition.
A Question for you @Spacedock... If the relationship between speed and time dilation is asymptotic as you approach the speed of light.. Does a photo experience emission and collision as a single event??
My Favorite particle beam has to be the Charged Particle Cannon from the Zoids franchise. It's shown effected by gravity and energy shielding. With intense gravity bending the beam a lot, and standard earth gravity slightly bending it, almost imperceptibly. Often Zoids with a CPC are literally designed around the cannon
Fun fact, but the original creator of the Gundam series, Yoshiyuki Tomino originally intended to use standard realistic lasers but ultimately decided against it and went with particle beams instead as it would be more visually pleasing and he also felt like a weapon that hits instantly wouldn't be much fun.
And it's a good decision, instead of just normal EM tech, the idea of Minovsky Particles created so many scenarios, plot points and tech unique to Gundam
Halo 2 Legendary vs Jackal snipers demonstrated that quite well. Dead within a splitsecond with no indication from where it came sucked the fun out every time they appeared.
Not realizing that particle beams would hit so quickly that the difference between that and a laser is utterly meaningless. He simply portrayed them wildly incorrectly.
I love the variety of weapons in UC gundam, everyone uses a mixture of rockets, particle cannons, good old artillery shells and machine guns, or asteroids with bombs drilled into them (in the books anyway), and of course the ultimate weapon, a 22 mile long space station dropped on target.
And to further expand upon those weapons, you have the Gryps 2 colony laser, the asteroid Axis, the battleship Libra from Gundam Wing, the orbital laser cannon Memento Mori from 00.
I really wish there are newer sci fi anime that are similar to Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Seeing massive fleets slugging it out and out maneuvering one another while commanded by brilliant tacticians is just so amazing to watch !
Well, there is the LotGH remake Die Neue Thesis. It can't quite match the original in some areas but it blows it out the water in others. Particularly the visuals, world building and sheer spectacle.
@@jensonkiin3678 I am aware of the recent reboots of LoTGH, what I am hoping for is newer stories with similar scale of conflict. Space fleets vs Space fleets which renders solo heroics less important compared to a brilliant commander.
Have you seen space battleship Yamato? 2199 and 2202? 2202 story is something to be desired, but massive fleet battles are present 2199 has unique tactics and strategies
@@DJ_Bacca Saw it and quite liked it. Though it was primarily focused on a single hero ship, the battles were still quite spectacular ! (On a side note, I really love the impact those physical armor piercing shells the Yamato still uses lol, its just pure physical destruction and the poor targets that get hit just crumple like tin cans 😂😂😂)
@@jensonkiin3678 Well as far as the visuals are concerned, I would argue to the contrary - the new ship models are horrid over-detailed things without any of the artistic brilliance of the originals, the change from beams to slow projectiles is appalling from both aesthetic and consistency perspectives, and they didn't even get Yang Wen-Li's hair right.
@@terrelldurocher3330 5:16 - Yes, rapid vaporization coupled with modulated pulses = "lasers but it's set for hollow points" Spicy and destructive. 5:32 - But this is a Cancer EMP.
I remember in Battletech, PPC (particle cannons) were much more powerful than lasers. Which, I can see being true. However, in the game, the range for PPC's were shorter in comparison. I guess our understanding of energy weapons has greatly expanded since the 80's. lol
@@AluVixapede OMG yes they were!! If memory serves me right, they'd suffer damage AND heat saturation. On a mech that added heat was a killer! Got shut down for cooling more than once. lol Great to see a fellow Mechwarrior. =)
A tip from a German viewer: Bremsstrahlung is a word consisting of two words: brems (which is the "core" of the word "bremsen", meaning brake) and "Strahlung", meaning radiation. If you encounter two connected words in German, especially if they end / begin with the same letter, put a very tiny gap between these words when pronouncing them. That makes it a lot better to understand. Other than that, it's actually quite good. By the way: We are masters in connecting words that way with some officially used words having more than 60 letters!
To all the people that want to know what these very long words are: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (Roughly translates to Law on the transfer of tasks for the supervision of beef labeling). That's an actual law. Another one would be: Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung roughly meaning Real Estate Traffic Permit Transfer of Authority Ordinance. Both laws are very buerocratic and thus these words are not widely used.
We are quite happy to use compound words in Swedish too. But is not so weird since it is a Germanic language. The weird language here is actually English, that is also a Germanic language, do not use compound words that often. And even they are used in English, there tend to be shorter words, and it also not uncommon to write such word with a hyphen like the word hunter-gatherer.
This weapon system is also unique in doing almost no damage to a planetary surface under atmosphere as cosmic ray showers already strike atmospheres all the time. A particle beam would breakup and turn into a broad radiation spread over a large areas such that it would do basically no damage. This would have a profound effect on warfare if planetary bombardment isn't an option or takes specialized weapons to do.
So it's an anti-ship weapon of extreme range that you can safely spam at a planet without harming the planet and people below, while tearing ships/stations a new one? That'll be handy!
I'm not sure if it would do "basically no damage" Against armored and radiation-shielded targets, sure, it's worthless, but against "soft" targets, civilians, and the like, a disperse shower of ionizing radiation can be deadly.
Those cosmic rays shower space ships at all times too, a concentrated beam is a whole different ball game. It's like comparing a flashlight to a high powered laser.
I love how with particle beams you seem to use a lot of Universal Century Gundam stuff. Despite being derived from an in-universe handwavium (Minovsky particles), there's actually a fair amount of thought put into how the physics actually work.
that's what i dont get, by all means, gundam beam weapons shouldnt count for this, as they are literaly a material that does not exist, and uses completely diferent method of creation and delivery than described in the video. so while i love the fact they are using gundam footage, i just dont think it fits for this case.
@@marcosdheleno Actually it does. Minovsky particles are indeed a 'handwavium' type of deal, but they appear in-universe to be something akin to baryonic matter mixed with photons. Mind you its still technobable jargon, so we don't know 'for sure'. Though this is really only the case for UC particle weapons, as other Gundam timelines just... don't explain what exactly goes into their beam weapons for the most part.
The Sulaco from Aliens had a pair of Particle Beam Cannons, they were the big pylons running along her flanks. Interestingly, they were dual purpose, since at close range they could cut other ships clean in half, but at longer range, as the particles spread out, they lost their direct damage potential, but remained a useful weapon because they could fry the electronics on other ships, making them more vulnerable to the Sulaco's ASAT missiles
the Omega Class Destroyers from Babylon 5 had primary weapons of some form of particle cannon,, some fore, some aft. THe Nova Dreadnought had like 16 of the damn things because it didnthave the rotating mid section. The Narn G'Quan heavy cruiser had som enasty beams from its center, and we never saw what else it had. The Shadow Battlecruisers however, that purple beam was SO powerful it cut cut ANYTHING in half immediately. One can only wonder what esoteric scientific concept that race discovered in is many millions of years of existence.
Because they think it's children's cartoon. Except if you look past the giant robots, it's remarkably hard scifi. When a ship crew don vacuum suits prior to combat in case of hull breach, most people would consider that setting enough to qualify as hard scifi. When a ship crew not just don vacuum suits, but drain the air out prior to entering combat to prevent explosive decompression in the first place, that setting is either The Expanse or Gundam. Everything else is soft scifi in comparison. Not to mention it deals with heavy subjects like war, loss, trauma, and deeper philosophical subjects, as opposed to Star Trek's TV sitcom in space.
Yup, most people who enjoys western scifi think is silly war with giant robots, while they don't understand that's no magic gravity in gundam, no ftl, and solar system is big the war never reach beyond mars, i think msg is one of scifi that trying to use down to earth technology far before babylon 5, bsg, or th expanse.
@@georgedang449 Having a few cool elements doesn't make it hard scifi, sorry fam but you aren't getting away from "gundinium" and mechs fighting with melee weapons in space because some of the writers recognized decompression.
I'm a simple man I see perhaps the single greatest space opera/discourse of politics/anime ever created LOTGH(Legends of The Galactic Heroes)featured and I hit "like".
I notice a lot of clips from both the new and original Legend of Galactic Heroes, but you didn't mention the neutron beams that are the original canon there - which is a weapon that anyone who can do artificial gravity fields should be able to produce. While artificial gravity fields are kinda bonkers, it's common enough as a story element that lots of settings have that neutron beam door open to them.
Neutrons have a very short half life (~15 min), so whatever means of producing them in high amounts would require some massive shielding, regardless if they're accelerated immediately at near-light speed. Funny enough, while neutrons are normally invisible to naked eye, a macroscopic neutron beam will be very visible, due to the protons and electrons produced from the beta decay of neutrons yielding light from their interaction. And such a beam would be visible in space, since the radioactive decay process would give off light in all directions, unlike a laser beam in space.
@@sargon6000 i wonder if you would get a redshift/blueshift from the neutrons going at relativistic speeds, radio out the back gamma rays out the front and only a certain angle from the beam would you see visible light.
@@sargon6000 what other byproducts are we looking at in the decay are we looking at and how much per gram of neutrons. I am asking because I am trying to write a story where the "hero ship" has a neutron cannon as a last resort. really would like to know what the damage would look like if a neutron beam hit, know any source I can look at?
@@rommdan2716 True, but only at short ranges. No isotope of any element that has such a short half-life can be accumulated in macroscopic amounts, it would explode from the heat generated by the decay. So the neutron generator has to produce neutrons at high relativistic speeds from the start, that way the time dilation is there from the start. Maybe some controlled liniar stellar implosion-like mechanism?
One of the most close to reality weapon that has been used by sci-fi novelist for a very long time. And I didn't expect The Legend of the Galactic Heroes has it spot on particle beams and its shielding system.
I always loved the positron "shock cannons" from Space Battleship Yamato. All the advantages of electron beams with the addition of antimatter annihilation. Also, love the Noveria music. I'd imagine they'd research this.
There gotta be mass-effect based particle accelerators somewhere on the planet used for research. It's a bit weird that (outside the Collectors) they're only really mentioned as being used to make anti-matter for fuel, but I guess particle beams don't fit the vibe of the setting. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@hoojiwana The Protheans must have also had them given they had the ability to mass produce particle rifles, but, yeah. You'd think the Citadel species would have a more diverse arms catalog than just guns, lasers, and missiles.
An interesting bit of passive lore that I noticed regarding the shock cannons in 2199 is that in the first space battle the primitive Earth ships actually still use shock cannons, but instead of using them as their main guns they use them as a spinal mounted super weapon similar to what the wave motion gone would eventually become. Then with the Yamato, and the newer Earth vessels in 2202, shock cannons are the main gun and wave motion tech is used for the spinal mounted super weapon. Shows a sort of technological progression.
May you please put all of these videos into a playlist? Also, maybe cover other non-weapon systems as well, and/or a comparison between them once you cover all of the weapon types: for when you might use one vs the other.
It's rather exotic, but one of my favorite forms of Particle Accelerator Weapon has always been the Beast particle beam emitter from Homeworld: Cataclysm. This was never remastered like the first game due to the fact that the original code was lost, so the license-holders decided to make the game "non-canon", but it may be the best of the series. In it, the Beast would infect targets either by physical contact or via a particle beam which used infectious nanocells of its own material, which would tear through a ship's crew and assimilate them all into bio-electric circuitry to turn the ship into a Beast lifeform that can either do the same, create missiles with the same biological payload, or at least allow the Beast to turn attacking ships into allies. Honestly, you guys should do a series of videos that covers all of the existing Homeworld games, as it would be a massive and fascinating content source.
I love seeing you guys using clips from Gundam. I'd love to see some videos on the Pegasus class, the Salamis class and the Magellan. Or the many Zeon ship classes. I really like those ship designs. I also really like how even in the original gundam series, when they would go into combat, the crew would put on their EV suits, in case you get sucked out into space, like the equivalent of wearing a lifejacket. The only series I can remember off-hand that does that is the expanse.
im not a fan of zeon's ship designs for the most part, from UC, i would actually like more the "not stupid" designs from the zanscare empire, things like the squid class, or the amalthea class.
I was not expecting so much _Mobile Suit Gundam_ in a Spacedock video, much less _Legend of Galactic Heroes,_ but then, particle beams are the primary energy weapons in those settings.
@@jmsmith.91 For the original OAV series (which is amazing), you need to start with the _My Conquest is the Sea of Stars_ movie. Then watch _Overture to a New War_ which is a remake/expansion on the first couple episodes of the main OVA series. Then the main series which is 110 episodes. I'm not sure exactly where you can find it right now, it might be uploaded online somewhere. But I definitely suggest the older/original series first. If you can't watch that one, the new adaptation _Legend of the Galactic Heries: Die Neue These_ is available to stream on Crunchyroll, I believe.
@@jmsmith.91 I think _My Conquest is the Sea of Stars_ and _Overture to a New War_ are uploaded by someone here on YT right now. As for the main OVA series, I believe it is available on HIDIVE and I think someone has uploaded it to BitChute as well (both should be easy to find with a simple Google search) -- otherwise you may have to sail the high seas. Hope that is helpful.
@@jmsmith.91 yeah I would skip ep 1+2 (maybe 3 don't remember) and watch overture to a new war instead. 1+2 have notoriously bad pacing, and it's made stranger as they deviate and are slower than the novels. It's the one part that is better in the reboot series, tho the loss of classical score and questionable character design decisions leaves the old OVAs as the better adaptation. The books are also pretty good, a weird deviation is they adapted the 1st books prologue... halfway through the series. It works with the documentary style presentation of the series... by being a documentary inside of the documentary of a fictional universe. It's more a history dump meant to show the political circumstances which led to the current condition of the empire and free planets alliance.
The Doomsday Machine's antiproton beam has to be at the top end of destructive potential for particle beams. That's one planet-killer weapon I have no trouble believing would be capable of carving up worlds into bite-size chunks.
Blue Noah's main cannon is an antiproton projector, which comes with a mandatory coherent magnetic field projector to move air away from the path of the beam when firing it in planetside battles. Without the field, that weapon would be a spectacular way to suicide the ship along with a good chunk of planet around it.
I always loved the Particle Projectile Cannon (PPC) in the Battletech/MechWarrior franchise. Hard hitting but you need to manage your heat (hard to put radiators on big chunky armored vehicles) I believe Babylon 5 small arms are also particle projectile weapons, makes you think about the metal used to protect the station as it was mentioned that some areas where death traps for PPG fire (thus great traps for a party of mutineers)
I vaguely remember them mentioning that EarthForce issued PPGs as standard-issue small arms because they don't penetrate heavy plating (like ship or station hulls) nearly as well as projectile weapons do. That said, there are plenty of times when someone needes to get through the heavy, inches-thick door to someone's quarters in a hurry, and a quick barrage of PPG fire against the door does the job just fine. Assuming the doors are made of some space-alloy similar to steel in durability, I can't think of many man-portable rifles that would be able to punch through that much metal that quickly. There are a few, but they're less "rifles" the way we'd normally think of an armed soldier with a personal weapon, and more "man-portable autocannons" the length of a small car. Also, since this "blow the door" order is often to rescue someone trapped inside, they obviously don't have much worry about radiation from the PPGs.
@@tba113 They also had sections of the station with alloys that bounced the PPG fire, not certain how exactly as they never explain it other than to say it exists. From memory it was used in the docking bay area's of the station, probably to protect against the launch thrusters of the various ships docked there. Wouldn't want radiation from ships coming and going to kill your dock workers after all.
PPC's from Battletech are one of my favourite weapons in the entire IP, who doesn't love charged ions and/or protons that come out as man made lightning? It's Particle *Projector* Cannon by the way.
Seriously, the visual appearance of the unseen Warhammer and Marauder drew a lot of people to the franchise in the 80's. PPCs were the biggest baddest weapon in the game (along with AC/20's, but those are too short ranged to be considered cool) until they officially introduced level 2 stuff with the 3050 timeline.
Ah yes.. the good ol' PPC. Or its bigger and meaner cousing the Naval PPC - although those are probably essentially extinct by now (FedCom Civil War - don't care about what came after)
For my setting, there is a weapon called a "pulsar" that is a double-barreled, over and under particle cannon. One barrel shoots electrons, the other shoots antiprotons. In this case, the beams don't repel each other, but attract, because of different charges. So the barrels have a slight gimble to them, so they can "arrange" to have the intersection of the beams occur at a specific range. The beams are also pulsed to the beat of the plasma bloom, to maximize matter-antimatter reaction. But why even have an electron beam? Because it helps "blow away" the plasma bloom, increasing the interaction deeper into the target. Otherwise you can actually have antimatter "splash" away from the target surface. Think of a 1 kt bomb going off every second, in a line, or burrowing a hole. Hence the nickname, "Satan's Blowtorch"
Oh that is so cool! I haven't seen many weapons like that. The only one I can remember is the annihilator beam from Metroid Prime 2. Though, what's the point of wasting energy firing matter along with your antimatter weapon when your target is probably made of matter to begin with?
@@EdKolis to keep the separate beams collimated across distance, they will attract each other, keeping "Bloom" to a minimum, but not until a predetermined point, at which their mutual anhilation is assured.
The Legend of Galactic Heroes (the video thumbnail) is kinda unique for how many ships were deployed in single battle (I mean, how could they find enough resources to throw half a million ships into battle and still walk it off?) And more importantly, how could fleet commander manage that amount of ships without getting information overload?
I don't know how they did it in Legend of Galactic Heroes but realisticly you just have to industrialise a significant part of one or more star systems idialy with heavy automation, but you would want to do so any way to pump out enough rescources, ships and habitats for civilian use, so millions of ships with wartime production should be easy even with just a few well developed systems, especially if the ships are to some degree automated too.
Not half million, their avarage fleet battle are like 15k vs 15k ship. But there are like really big battle like reinhard fleet vs the lippstad coalition, the final battle are very massive with 100k ships vs +50k ships
They are pretty massive ships too and large crew compliments. On each side of a 15k vs. 15k ship battle are several million people. Finding a barren rock, strip mining its resources, and sending those resources to automated factories feels like the simpler end of the equation. Makes you wonder about the logistics of keeping the roaming death balls fed.
@@pierrelindgren5727f i remember, during the Alliance Second invesion Arc, There's a scene where a local asteroid factory os ships hás been attacked by imperial forces, It seems to produçe ships at very low time for the Alliance, si maybe the factores are automated in both sides
Love it, Hooj. The sci-fi story I’m currently working on uses p-beams (lots of notes from Atomic Rockets in the planning stages) as the main ship-to ship heavy weapons.
I really like how you guys describe the science through the lens of fictional storytelling. It’s a unique weave of information that is quite interesting!
When I was in high school in the 1990s, I was making up a fictional sci-fi setting that was Robotech and Star Trek inspired space opera. My primary civilization used particle beams that were heavily "compressed" so as to fire a incredibly dense beam at low relativistic speeds.
Honestly, when it comes to naming relativistic electron beams, I think some good name choices could be "Dilators", "Lorentz Projectors", "Einstein Beams", or "Extreme Lorentz Factor Relativistic Ion Technology" if you absolutely need an acronym. ELFRIT Batteries sound nice, imo. Or Elfrit Lances. Elfrit Projectors? Something like that.
Wasn't aware of the radiation effects as this is something rarely talked about in scifi shows with most of the time being a plot specific factor with a weapon with the intent to cause radiation or some other combining factor. Makes the idea of space combat all the more terrifying.
The sheer amount of radiation shielding required for crewed interplanetary flight means most spaceships wouldn't really be threatened by most radiation
@@TheAchilles26 That is one of the reasons we see armour in the meters thick category in shows like Babylon 5 on top of electromagnetic defence grids and interceptor arrays. The amount of defences you NEED on a space ship that will travel outside of a solar system, just to travel safely is rather significant.
Oh yeah, the radiation effects are fun. You have the potential to put a photographic plate behind the enemy vessel and get a nice X-ray image of the crew dying horribly from radiation poisoning.
Worth mentioning here, at least when talking about the defensive aspect is the 2013 Space Pirate Captain Harlock movie. The way some of the ships deal with incoming attacks present a nice visual (not to mention the space combat in that movie being glorious) to go along with it.
I've never actually given particle weapons too much credit due to being too high tech for a semi realistic sci fi setting, but I'm actually very impressed by the plausible applications you can use
They're not actually that high tech! It's entirely possible to make a weaponized UREB with today's accelerator tech (though it will be really big an awkward and unreliable, but those are engineering issues that could be solved in practice)
particle accelerator weapons are probably the most brutal things in scifi because they function like a laser except they also have this immense fountain of near lightspeed particles carried with them
gundam really nailed particle beams the various shields and armors they used and then the super weapons there was a gundam two massive ships and a planet base that had these supr huge beam cannons that could wipe a planet off the map
OP should do a video on the x-ray "guns" used by the fortresses in this series. I remember seeing someone claim that the firing method of Iserlohn fortress (bouncing the x-ray beam off of its mirror-like metal exterior) is within the realm of plausible.
Good job pointing out these types of weapons also affect all the other technologies around them. Defensive tech grows just as fast as the offensive weapons. Another thing to consider is the size of the weapon's footprint within a ship. This also determines if it can be placed in a turret or if the whole ships has to point at the enemy.
@@xyztogrutamamenchi7894 Graviton-stuff, I know, as we know it from StarTrek and Star Wars and many other stuff. But even with that, electromagnetism is much easier to handle. You need an insane amount of Gravity to bring a particle up to relativistic speeds. Basically, you need a black hole (which can actually serve as a Tachyon generator, if you follow the theories of Recami et. al).
@@elshid6046 it is impossible to say which methode is easier without us even knowing how gravity accelerators would work. And while small particle accelerators are not a problem particle accelerators big enough to be used as weapons on spaceships would need unholy amounts of energy that you would need to store somewhere. Electric and magnetic fields of this magnitude have a lot of problems and secondary effects.
Your suggestion for two different possible doctrines using particle weapons remind me of differing naval doctrines over time- The heavily armoured ships slugging it out (old battleship style) vs a more "don't let the big ships get hit" (modern carriers) Would be interesting to see a setting with the two methods facing off in asymmetrical warfare
Excellent review! I wouldn't toss out the mesons quite so quickly, and have to mention "Investigation of the Possibility of Using Nuclear Magnetic Spin Alignment". The WORST possible particle beam? A full KAZINTI where you drop into the battle with engines on full- spraying your opponents with a relativistic beam of spin-aligned neutrons. A similar and equally nasty version is using a basic particle accelerator to hit a target and create a spray of neutral mesons, kaon and pions. Ultra-nasty neutral particles that travel right through most shielding, and then allows you to use their relativistic velocity as a timer fuse so they decay from neutral particle to x-ray or neutron sputtering gamma-ray AFTER passing through any defenses.
I always loved weapons in sci-fi. I did my 3rd year physics dissertation on the subject 😁🖖 Particle beams are always going to require more input energy for less firepower than kinetic or self propelled weapons, but in space, even high velocity projectiles could take minutes to reach a target that has long since repositioned.
If your projectile needs minutes to reach the target, then one of three things is the case: 1. Your projectile is a missile/torpedo/whatever capable of course correction to pursue the target through evasive maneuvers. 2. Your target is in a fixed orbit and incapable of dodging, like a planet or sufficiently massive space station 3. They a outside your effective range. Do not waste ammo shooting at them.
I mainly use these in my Space Opera setting. During the 90's,when Star Trek Tech fans when tell me that Star Trek Tech was unbeatable. I would tell them I don't use lasers, I use particle beams. That would shut them up. Also love that you are using scene from Gundam,and Legend of the Galactic Heroes (I am a huge Star Wars fan, but this Anime beats Star Wars hands down.)
As one of your German frequent viewers, you almost nailed "Bremsstrahlung". Only mistake was that the "s" in "...strahlung" becomes "sch" (pronounced like english sh) because it is followed by a "t". Brilliant and informative video again!
Ramiel from Evangelion had a Proton Particle Beam powered by an inner Torus Reactor, it might not be as powerful as some other fictions, but it was still capable of absolutely deleting entire mountains ( in the Rebuild anyways)
heh, I remember the issues Particle Accelerators have in From the Depth game (where you build your warships and weapons from the scratch in quite a detailed simulation environment). Having a long accelerator tube with crazy damage potential twisted inside your combat ship is fun until someone damages it... Thern it becomes a problem for you moreso then for the enemy. So you either mount it on fast paper thin crafts (that are hard to hit), or mount it under several layers or armor (to protect the delicate thing from shots AND protect you ship from it if tubing is damaged) and you try to design the particle accelerator the way as to minimize chances beam from the broken one will hit critical parts inside the ship.
One of the examples shown, the Mass Effect Collector beam, is actually interesting in that it uses chargeless heavy particles, as far as I remember, relying mostly on that physical impact. It's more a magetohydrodynamic weapon than a true particle beam in that sense. And I think chargeless particles really do have their niche, even if they're harder to accelerate. The recombination-on-emiasion technique sounds interesting, especially if heavy cations are used in conjunction with deeionizing electrons. The electrons would do barely anything to alter beam course, but wouldn be significant to combat static bloom.
In Babylon 5 the humans use something called an X-Ray Particle Laser, you can imagine just how nasty that thing can be. All of their capital ships have a dozen or so meters of armour thickness, electromagnetic defence fields and interceptor arrays just for protection.
I was thinking this was going to go in the direction of 'lightning guns' or particle-projection-cannons (basically, also lighting guns) from other universes...I did not foresee them being basically insta-radiation-sickness-cancer guns. Damn. Nice work
UREBs feel like a good candidate for a wave motion gun style spinal mount super weapons. They have the range and damage potential, but require very powerful linear accelerators, and correspondingly large power supplies, restricting them to large spinal mounts and preventing the setting from turning into a mess with overpowered beams everywhere.
I believe the old Traveller RPG series used particle beams on their bigger ships. They were used mostly to disable ships by killing the crew with high-energy radiation. (It's been A LOT OF YEARS so the memory is foggy.)
you've done a video about kinetic weapons, laser weapons, and now particle weapons. I would love to see a plasma weapon video and see if it's as deadly as halo makes it out to be and how it compares to other weapon types
I second this. Would love to see a plasma weapon video. I'm currently constructing my own sci-fi race and was planning on using plasma weapons as the 'newest of the new' tech in their arsenal, both in projectile 'torpedo' form and in some sort of beam form. I'm kinda iffy on the science of how to make a plasma beam weapon though, or if it's even possible. Don't wanna just resort to "space magic" and call it a day, ya know? I like my stuff to be grounded somewhat in reality.
@@AgentFrosty, I don't know how plasma works for you but if you have a way to make plasma projektiles and want to have beams too than why not make beams like rapid fire projektiles but without seperating them. I could also imagine it like a sort of produktion line cotinuously producing plasma in a stream though it would probably need some wind up time.
This series just taught me how much I love weapons in general. I have a problem Edit: now I can't tell if it's my love for weapons or just the way this fellow describes things. It's just so good.
My dad worked at Hughes aircraft as a optics inspector back in the 80's and 90's. I was playing Doom one day and he was talking with me about it. I thought nothing of it at the time. He came home from work the next day and said that he talked to some of the engineering guys about it. He said that they said plasma weapons are less like firing a gun and more like "squirting" a charged fluid out of the thing. They said that if used in a atmosphere it would "splatter" on contact with the air and just set everything on fire. Gun and Doom guy included. What stuck with me was how he said the engineers referred to the process like it was very messy. Probably because tests had already been done and made a mess of things.
"An ultra-relativistic electron beam (UREB) is a particle beam of electrons that are traveling very close to the speed of light. Although electrons are electrostatically repulsive, because of Special Relativity, and more-specifically the combined effects of Lorentz contraction and time dilation, the electron beam can stay quite coherent over long distances. This makes UREBs a formidable weapon, better than other kinds of particle beam-and indeed the current expected "meta" for primary ship-to-ship weapon." Thanks Pinbot. As it turns out, if you just fire electrons or protons close enough to the speed of light, their effective range improves. In fact if you fire them close enough to the speed of light they easily become much longer ranged than lasers. At some distance (still easily within the weapon's range), your ability to point the weapon straight and precisely identifying the enemy will become more of a problem and you'll have to wiggle the weapon around a bunch ("sweep"). ...as it turns out, I posted this right before Spacedock mentioned this. If you want a cooler name, I love to call them Electron Lances
Detailed analysis of futuristic, sci-fi space opera weapons. I think I found a new channel to love. But how long should the particle accelerator cannon be? Or how big should the "ring" of the particle accelerator be? In our world we have very large diameter ring-shaped accelerators, how much is it possible or plausible/realistic to miniaturize them?
"I've seen things you wouldn't beleive. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulders of Orion... I've seen C-beams glitter in the darness of the Tanhausser Gate...!" -Davidson, "Blade Runner"
I always like the idea of particle beams as an alternative to laser weapons simply because it avoids problems of not having any mass like not being practically able to penetrate beyond the surface, or not making things like aircraft obsolete cause you don't have to lead your target. I always thought of it like shooting an incredibly long and thin bolt of particle which would impact the target a lot like a high explosive anti tank round and do damage that way.
I'm still waiting for an episode on EMP type weapons used in space combat. a weapon designed specifically for disabling ship systems, either to make them easier to destroy or to subdue the people inside the ship, like I think an EMP weapon would go well for a policing ships especially if they need to knock out a ships systems for boarding
Realistically, though, EMPs don't tend to just disable devices for a short period as often portrayed by Hollywood. They destroy electronic circuits. Hit an unshielded ship with an EMP and it's basically just an inert lump of metal. Repairing it would consist of towing it to a repair facility and completely replacing every microprocessor on board. It'd almost be cheaper to just buy a new ship.
@@DrakeAurum well it could just be used to disable the ship and then they can just capture the crew, like if it’s a pirate vessel trying to flee, hit them with a few EMP missiles or something and then just board the ship and capture the crew
Wouldn't the gamma radiation from electron particle beams have a similar effect? It'd damage the electronics, and melt the organic crew, perfect for disabling before a boarding action (just make sure your boarding crew is well-shielded)
You can use particle beams for that! Electronics do not react well to being sprayed down with charged particles and high energy photons, but you can't use that for policing because well... people don't react well to that either! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
What is interesting about particle weapons are the more exotic and interesting kind. Anti matter beams. Beams of strange matter. Beams that can collide to create extremly small black holes that than explode. Beams that create fission or fusion events on the armor of the enemy.
In my somewhat soft sci-fi, I've used charged particle beams. I argued in it that point-defence technology would (in direct battles) render missiles obsolete, and I've never liked lasers. In this setting, ships would deploy electromagnets on long tethers from ships in the direction of the enemy, which would then deflect incoming beams without affecting the mothership all too much. I never bothered figuring out if this would actually make sense, but I still really like the idea of 'raising the shields' involving physically moving these magnets far away from the ship.
I am thrilled to see you guys coming into contact with the original LoGH! That said, neat video, though you guys seem to dismiss aspects of neutron beams. Although not directly interactable like proton or electron, neutron can be directly influenced, either by gravity (which might be plausible in series with gravitation manipulation), or some level of quantum mumbo jumbo.
Thank you guys for another interesting episode. I'd like to watch LotGH one of these days based on all the good things I've heard about it. Is it on any streaming services in the US? Thanks in advance for any answers! Merry Christmas out there everybody! ✝️🎄
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I love the background music. Would you happen to know where I can find it?
I think you should look up Particle Systems' excellent nineties space shooter "I-War" (Independence War for Americans)- that had a gimballed particle beam cannon (PBC) that tapped plasma directly from the ship's main power generator... which was a circular accelerator. In fact the round shape of the hero ship was defined by that accelerator taking up much of the main hull.There were even radiator fins at the aft end of the ship. Novel "shield" mechanic too.
Seriously, it's less than a couple of quid from Gog, has a Newtonian physic system, a good story, an intro movie that's like a short episode of DS9 or B5 and, for the true geek, a really good old school manual with lots of crunchy little details.
It was obviously a labour of love for it's British developers who obviously thought about everything and doesn't deserve it's lack of recognition.
A Question for you @Spacedock... If the relationship between speed and time dilation is asymptotic as you approach the speed of light.. Does a photo experience emission and collision as a single event??
wanna say, please look into battletech. this video reminded me of it because we love our particle projection cannons.
My Favorite particle beam has to be the Charged Particle Cannon from the Zoids franchise. It's shown effected by gravity and energy shielding. With intense gravity bending the beam a lot, and standard earth gravity slightly bending it, almost imperceptibly. Often Zoids with a CPC are literally designed around the cannon
Fun fact, but the original creator of the Gundam series, Yoshiyuki Tomino originally intended to use standard realistic lasers but ultimately decided against it and went with particle beams instead as it would be more visually pleasing and he also felt like a weapon that hits instantly wouldn't be much fun.
And it's a good decision, instead of just normal EM tech, the idea of Minovsky Particles created so many scenarios, plot points and tech unique to Gundam
Halo 2 Legendary vs Jackal snipers demonstrated that quite well. Dead within a splitsecond with no indication from where it came sucked the fun out every time they appeared.
@@SturmgeschuetzIV well tbh that wasn't meant for you to enjoy, that was meant for the people who wanted to be challenged by the game.
Not realizing that particle beams would hit so quickly that the difference between that and a laser is utterly meaningless. He simply portrayed them wildly incorrectly.
@@midgetydeath in human scale ranges yes they're practically instantaneous . in space however that's completely different.
I love the variety of weapons in UC gundam, everyone uses a mixture of rockets, particle cannons, good old artillery shells and machine guns, or asteroids with bombs drilled into them (in the books anyway), and of course the ultimate weapon, a 22 mile long space station dropped on target.
And to further expand upon those weapons, you have the Gryps 2 colony laser, the asteroid Axis, the battleship Libra from Gundam Wing, the orbital laser cannon Memento Mori from 00.
Mirrors.
The ultimate anti fascist weapon.
Just show them how cringe they are.
@@NewtypeCommander and we've yet to even begin talking about the REAL heavy hitters...
@@Galdenberry_Lamphuck That would require fascists to have a sense of shame first.
@@margotpreston true true but its best they get lasered knowing how much we hate them.
...at some point can we just get Spacedock to do a series of videos on Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Absolutely agree
The entire setting is realistic/sensical, not just the tech, but also politics, philosophy, and even life decisions of individuals.
Yes please 😊
Exactly I've been asking this for the past year
YESSSS
I really wish there are newer sci fi anime that are similar to Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Seeing massive fleets slugging it out and out maneuvering one another while commanded by brilliant tacticians is just so amazing to watch !
Well, there is the LotGH remake Die Neue Thesis. It can't quite match the original in some areas but it blows it out the water in others. Particularly the visuals, world building and sheer spectacle.
@@jensonkiin3678 I am aware of the recent reboots of LoTGH, what I am hoping for is newer stories with similar scale of conflict. Space fleets vs Space fleets which renders solo heroics less important compared to a brilliant commander.
Have you seen space battleship Yamato? 2199 and 2202? 2202 story is something to be desired, but massive fleet battles are present 2199 has unique tactics and strategies
@@DJ_Bacca Saw it and quite liked it. Though it was primarily focused on a single hero ship, the battles were still quite spectacular !
(On a side note, I really love the impact those physical armor piercing shells the Yamato still uses lol, its just pure physical destruction and the poor targets that get hit just crumple like tin cans 😂😂😂)
@@jensonkiin3678 Well as far as the visuals are concerned, I would argue to the contrary - the new ship models are horrid over-detailed things without any of the artistic brilliance of the originals, the change from beams to slow projectiles is appalling from both aesthetic and consistency perspectives, and they didn't even get Yang Wen-Li's hair right.
I've always felt particle beams are potentially BRUTAL in contrast to lasers.
Eh. Lasers to be actual weapons would have enough energy to blow shut up as it causes whatever it hits to expand
@@terrelldurocher3330 5:16 - Yes, rapid vaporization coupled with modulated pulses = "lasers but it's set for hollow points"
Spicy and destructive.
5:32 - But this is a Cancer EMP.
I remember in Battletech, PPC (particle cannons) were much more powerful than lasers. Which, I can see being true. However, in the game, the range for PPC's were shorter in comparison.
I guess our understanding of energy weapons has greatly expanded since the 80's. lol
@@endy5enduros307 AYyyyy! Yessss. PPCs Heavy, hot, limited range .. but if you scored a hit, they were in for a bad time.
@@AluVixapede OMG yes they were!! If memory serves me right, they'd suffer damage AND heat saturation. On a mech that added heat was a killer! Got shut down for cooling more than once. lol
Great to see a fellow Mechwarrior. =)
A tip from a German viewer: Bremsstrahlung is a word consisting of two words: brems (which is the "core" of the word "bremsen", meaning brake) and "Strahlung", meaning radiation. If you encounter two connected words in German, especially if they end / begin with the same letter, put a very tiny gap between these words when pronouncing them. That makes it a lot better to understand. Other than that, it's actually quite good.
By the way: We are masters in connecting words that way with some officially used words having more than 60 letters!
To all the people that want to know what these very long words are: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (Roughly translates to Law on the transfer of tasks for the supervision of beef labeling). That's an actual law. Another one would be: Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung roughly meaning Real Estate Traffic Permit Transfer of Authority Ordinance. Both laws are very buerocratic and thus these words are not widely used.
@@elshid6046 That is good information to know and also completely insane. Thank you for sharing! 🤓
We are quite happy to use compound words in Swedish too. But is not so weird since it is a Germanic language.
The weird language here is actually English, that is also a Germanic language, do not use compound words that often. And even they are used in English, there tend to be shorter words, and it also not uncommon to write such word with a hyphen like the word hunter-gatherer.
@@gregoryvn3 ...aaand that's Germany for you!
Sauce: native german speaker ^^
As someone who did a semester in Germany as an exchange student, there are more exceptions to any grammar rule than there are instances of it.
Can't remember if you already done it, but a mini series explaining different types of engines would be cool too
this! engines for spacecraft and scifi engines in general
@@beepbeepbananas Warped space powered by a quantum tap. Sounds yummy to me!!
There’s a video on propulsion systems in sci fi.
@@cadenvanvalkenburg6718 Explicitly FTL Travel, as I recall.
@@JerichoDeath There is another one specifically on sublight propulsion as well.
This weapon system is also unique in doing almost no damage to a planetary surface under atmosphere as cosmic ray showers already strike atmospheres all the time. A particle beam would breakup and turn into a broad radiation spread over a large areas such that it would do basically no damage. This would have a profound effect on warfare if planetary bombardment isn't an option or takes specialized weapons to do.
So it's an anti-ship weapon of extreme range that you can safely spam at a planet without harming the planet and people below, while tearing ships/stations a new one? That'll be handy!
Looks like ideal orbital-based (or Moon-based) weapons for planetary defense against incoming invading fleet.
I'm not sure if it would do "basically no damage"
Against armored and radiation-shielded targets, sure, it's worthless, but against "soft" targets, civilians, and the like, a disperse shower of ionizing radiation can be deadly.
Those cosmic rays shower space ships at all times too, a concentrated beam is a whole different ball game. It's like comparing a flashlight to a high powered laser.
Orbital bombardment is already an overstated concern to begin with.
I love how with particle beams you seem to use a lot of Universal Century Gundam stuff. Despite being derived from an in-universe handwavium (Minovsky particles), there's actually a fair amount of thought put into how the physics actually work.
that's what i dont get, by all means, gundam beam weapons shouldnt count for this, as they are literaly a material that does not exist, and uses completely diferent method of creation and delivery than described in the video. so while i love the fact they are using gundam footage, i just dont think it fits for this case.
@@marcosdheleno Actually it does. Minovsky particles are indeed a 'handwavium' type of deal, but they appear in-universe to be something akin to baryonic matter mixed with photons. Mind you its still technobable jargon, so we don't know 'for sure'. Though this is really only the case for UC particle weapons, as other Gundam timelines just... don't explain what exactly goes into their beam weapons for the most part.
Showing Legend of the Galactic Heroes always gets some bonus points from me.
The Sulaco from Aliens had a pair of Particle Beam Cannons, they were the big pylons running along her flanks. Interestingly, they were dual purpose, since at close range they could cut other ships clean in half, but at longer range, as the particles spread out, they lost their direct damage potential, but remained a useful weapon because they could fry the electronics on other ships, making them more vulnerable to the Sulaco's ASAT missiles
Honestly sounds like tech the UNSC from Halo would have liked
@@UNSCPILOT They probably would have had an easier time with the covenant.
@@UNSCPILOTnot all that surprising considering how much Halo borrowed from Aliens. Especially from _The Library_ onwards.
the Omega Class Destroyers from Babylon 5 had primary weapons of some form of particle cannon,, some fore, some aft. THe Nova Dreadnought had like 16 of the damn things because it didnthave the rotating mid section.
The Narn G'Quan heavy cruiser had som enasty beams from its center, and we never saw what else it had.
The Shadow Battlecruisers however, that purple beam was SO powerful it cut cut ANYTHING in half immediately. One can only wonder what esoteric scientific concept that race discovered in is many millions of years of existence.
More Mobile Suit Gundam is always nice to see. It feels like a lot of the big sci-fi youtubers seem to stay away from the franchise
Lawyers for sure. Same was true for Robotech/Macross sadly.......
Because they think it's children's cartoon. Except if you look past the giant robots, it's remarkably hard scifi. When a ship crew don vacuum suits prior to combat in case of hull breach, most people would consider that setting enough to qualify as hard scifi. When a ship crew not just don vacuum suits, but drain the air out prior to entering combat to prevent explosive decompression in the first place, that setting is either The Expanse or Gundam. Everything else is soft scifi in comparison. Not to mention it deals with heavy subjects like war, loss, trauma, and deeper philosophical subjects, as opposed to Star Trek's TV sitcom in space.
Yup, most people who enjoys western scifi think is silly war with giant robots, while they don't understand that's no magic gravity in gundam, no ftl, and solar system is big the war never reach beyond mars, i think msg is one of scifi that trying to use down to earth technology far before babylon 5, bsg, or th expanse.
@@georgedang449 Having a few cool elements doesn't make it hard scifi, sorry fam but you aren't getting away from "gundinium" and mechs fighting with melee weapons in space because some of the writers recognized decompression.
@@techno_tuna "gundanium" is from wing, a much less hard scu-fi universe. The whacky sci-fi thing of UC is definetly newtypes lol
I'm a simple man I see perhaps the single greatest space opera/discourse of politics/anime ever created LOTGH(Legends of The Galactic Heroes)featured and I hit "like".
I started reading the books and I love them
Yeah, but they have no alien characters so nay
@@rommdan2716 So you don't like Dune either I take it?
@@DeathBYDesign666 I know it's an important piece of science fiction culture, but alien characters are my hyperfixation and I can't help myself
@@rommdan2716 Fair enough I guess, I think there is room for all types however.
Love it when Spacedock has anything Mobile Suit Gundam related. Really hoping for a Space dock Universal Century Mobile Suit series.
That alone could give them a few years of content if they actually go in full depth.
@@GeoRyukaiser A whole can of worms that may seem intimidating for most western sci-fi channels to delve into
@@AdotLOM intimidating?
@@edmarespaniola4241too much content to tackle especially if someone is not that well verse in the content.
I notice a lot of clips from both the new and original Legend of Galactic Heroes, but you didn't mention the neutron beams that are the original canon there - which is a weapon that anyone who can do artificial gravity fields should be able to produce.
While artificial gravity fields are kinda bonkers, it's common enough as a story element that lots of settings have that neutron beam door open to them.
Neutrons have a very short half life (~15 min), so whatever means of producing them in high amounts would require some massive shielding, regardless if they're accelerated immediately at near-light speed. Funny enough, while neutrons are normally invisible to naked eye, a macroscopic neutron beam will be very visible, due to the protons and electrons produced from the beta decay of neutrons yielding light from their interaction. And such a beam would be visible in space, since the radioactive decay process would give off light in all directions, unlike a laser beam in space.
@@sargon6000 Time dilation could help with those 15 minutes.
@@sargon6000 i wonder if you would get a redshift/blueshift from the neutrons going at relativistic speeds, radio out the back gamma rays out the front and only a certain angle from the beam would you see visible light.
@@sargon6000 what other byproducts are we looking at in the decay are we looking at and how much per gram of neutrons. I am asking because I am trying to write a story where the "hero ship" has a neutron cannon as a last resort. really would like to know what the damage would look like if a neutron beam hit, know any source I can look at?
@@rommdan2716 True, but only at short ranges. No isotope of any element that has such a short half-life can be accumulated in macroscopic amounts, it would explode from the heat generated by the decay. So the neutron generator has to produce neutrons at high relativistic speeds from the start, that way the time dilation is there from the start. Maybe some controlled liniar stellar implosion-like mechanism?
One of the most close to reality weapon that has been used by sci-fi novelist for a very long time. And I didn't expect The Legend of the Galactic Heroes has it spot on particle beams and its shielding system.
I always loved the positron "shock cannons" from Space Battleship Yamato. All the advantages of electron beams with the addition of antimatter annihilation.
Also, love the Noveria music. I'd imagine they'd research this.
There gotta be mass-effect based particle accelerators somewhere on the planet used for research. It's a bit weird that (outside the Collectors) they're only really mentioned as being used to make anti-matter for fuel, but I guess particle beams don't fit the vibe of the setting.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Spacedock would rather drop dead than talk about SBY
@hoojiwana The Protheans must have also had them given they had the ability to mass produce particle rifles, but, yeah. You'd think the Citadel species would have a more diverse arms catalog than just guns, lasers, and missiles.
An interesting bit of passive lore that I noticed regarding the shock cannons in 2199 is that in the first space battle the primitive Earth ships actually still use shock cannons, but instead of using them as their main guns they use them as a spinal mounted super weapon similar to what the wave motion gone would eventually become. Then with the Yamato, and the newer Earth vessels in 2202, shock cannons are the main gun and wave motion tech is used for the spinal mounted super weapon. Shows a sort of technological progression.
May you please put all of these videos into a playlist? Also, maybe cover other non-weapon systems as well, and/or a comparison between them once you cover all of the weapon types: for when you might use one vs the other.
We just got a playlist of the weapon videos put together.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@hoojiwana oh, must have missed it. Thanks.
I love more than anything that you led with Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
Log(H+), also known as pH, but someone has to be negative about it.
It's rather exotic, but one of my favorite forms of Particle Accelerator Weapon has always been the Beast particle beam emitter from Homeworld: Cataclysm. This was never remastered like the first game due to the fact that the original code was lost, so the license-holders decided to make the game "non-canon", but it may be the best of the series. In it, the Beast would infect targets either by physical contact or via a particle beam which used infectious nanocells of its own material, which would tear through a ship's crew and assimilate them all into bio-electric circuitry to turn the ship into a Beast lifeform that can either do the same, create missiles with the same biological payload, or at least allow the Beast to turn attacking ships into allies. Honestly, you guys should do a series of videos that covers all of the existing Homeworld games, as it would be a massive and fascinating content source.
I love seeing you guys using clips from Gundam. I'd love to see some videos on the Pegasus class, the Salamis class and the Magellan. Or the many Zeon ship classes. I really like those ship designs. I also really like how even in the original gundam series, when they would go into combat, the crew would put on their EV suits, in case you get sucked out into space, like the equivalent of wearing a lifejacket. The only series I can remember off-hand that does that is the expanse.
im not a fan of zeon's ship designs for the most part, from UC, i would actually like more the "not stupid" designs from the zanscare empire, things like the squid class, or the amalthea class.
I was not expecting so much _Mobile Suit Gundam_ in a Spacedock video, much less _Legend of Galactic Heroes,_ but then, particle beams are the primary energy weapons in those settings.
Great video as always. Love seeing LoGH getting more love. It is a highly underrated series.
How do I watch and where do I start?
@@jmsmith.91 For the original OAV series (which is amazing), you need to start with the _My Conquest is the Sea of Stars_ movie. Then watch _Overture to a New War_ which is a remake/expansion on the first couple episodes of the main OVA series. Then the main series which is 110 episodes. I'm not sure exactly where you can find it right now, it might be uploaded online somewhere. But I definitely suggest the older/original series first.
If you can't watch that one, the new adaptation _Legend of the Galactic Heries: Die Neue These_ is available to stream on Crunchyroll, I believe.
@@CitroChannel thank you! I’m trying to find the original show from the 80s
@@jmsmith.91 I think _My Conquest is the Sea of Stars_ and _Overture to a New War_ are uploaded by someone here on YT right now. As for the main OVA series, I believe it is available on HIDIVE and I think someone has uploaded it to BitChute as well (both should be easy to find with a simple Google search) -- otherwise you may have to sail the high seas.
Hope that is helpful.
@@jmsmith.91 yeah I would skip ep 1+2 (maybe 3 don't remember) and watch overture to a new war instead. 1+2 have notoriously bad pacing, and it's made stranger as they deviate and are slower than the novels. It's the one part that is better in the reboot series, tho the loss of classical score and questionable character design decisions leaves the old OVAs as the better adaptation.
The books are also pretty good, a weird deviation is they adapted the 1st books prologue... halfway through the series. It works with the documentary style presentation of the series... by being a documentary inside of the documentary of a fictional universe. It's more a history dump meant to show the political circumstances which led to the current condition of the empire and free planets alliance.
The Doomsday Machine's antiproton beam has to be at the top end of destructive potential for particle beams. That's one planet-killer weapon I have no trouble believing would be capable of carving up worlds into bite-size chunks.
Pure anti proton..ABSOLUTELY PURE..none of that Chinese shit with the postrons mixed in
Blue Noah's main cannon is an antiproton projector, which comes with a mandatory coherent magnetic field projector to move air away from the path of the beam when firing it in planetside battles. Without the field, that weapon would be a spectacular way to suicide the ship along with a good chunk of planet around it.
@@ObatongoSensei Fine, for those willing to go the Kamikaze route
I always loved the Particle Projectile Cannon (PPC) in the Battletech/MechWarrior franchise. Hard hitting but you need to manage your heat (hard to put radiators on big chunky armored vehicles) I believe Babylon 5 small arms are also particle projectile weapons, makes you think about the metal used to protect the station as it was mentioned that some areas where death traps for PPG fire (thus great traps for a party of mutineers)
I vaguely remember them mentioning that EarthForce issued PPGs as standard-issue small arms because they don't penetrate heavy plating (like ship or station hulls) nearly as well as projectile weapons do.
That said, there are plenty of times when someone needes to get through the heavy, inches-thick door to someone's quarters in a hurry, and a quick barrage of PPG fire against the door does the job just fine. Assuming the doors are made of some space-alloy similar to steel in durability, I can't think of many man-portable rifles that would be able to punch through that much metal that quickly. There are a few, but they're less "rifles" the way we'd normally think of an armed soldier with a personal weapon, and more "man-portable autocannons" the length of a small car.
Also, since this "blow the door" order is often to rescue someone trapped inside, they obviously don't have much worry about radiation from the PPGs.
@@tba113 They also had sections of the station with alloys that bounced the PPG fire, not certain how exactly as they never explain it other than to say it exists. From memory it was used in the docking bay area's of the station, probably to protect against the launch thrusters of the various ships docked there. Wouldn't want radiation from ships coming and going to kill your dock workers after all.
PPC's from Battletech are one of my favourite weapons in the entire IP, who doesn't love charged ions and/or protons that come out as man made lightning?
It's Particle *Projector* Cannon by the way.
Seriously, the visual appearance of the unseen Warhammer and Marauder drew a lot of people to the franchise in the 80's. PPCs were the biggest baddest weapon in the game (along with AC/20's, but those are too short ranged to be considered cool) until they officially introduced level 2 stuff with the 3050 timeline.
Ah yes.. the good ol' PPC. Or its bigger and meaner cousing the Naval PPC - although those are probably essentially extinct by now (FedCom Civil War - don't care about what came after)
Loving the use of Legend of Galactic Heroes footage. Wonderful anime, highly recommended if you have the patience to sit through 100+ episodes.
Absolutely loving the Legend of the Galactic Heroes footage that's been showing up lately. Brilliant show, both the original and the new series ❤️
For my setting, there is a weapon called a "pulsar" that is a double-barreled, over and under particle cannon. One barrel shoots electrons, the other shoots antiprotons. In this case, the beams don't repel each other, but attract, because of different charges. So the barrels have a slight gimble to them, so they can "arrange" to have the intersection of the beams occur at a specific range. The beams are also pulsed to the beat of the plasma bloom, to maximize matter-antimatter reaction. But why even have an electron beam? Because it helps "blow away" the plasma bloom, increasing the interaction deeper into the target. Otherwise you can actually have antimatter "splash" away from the target surface. Think of a 1 kt bomb going off every second, in a line, or burrowing a hole. Hence the nickname, "Satan's Blowtorch"
Oh that is so cool! I haven't seen many weapons like that. The only one I can remember is the annihilator beam from Metroid Prime 2. Though, what's the point of wasting energy firing matter along with your antimatter weapon when your target is probably made of matter to begin with?
Thats a really cool concept. Are there any in universe defenses against it other than "Don't be hit"
@@EdKolis to keep the separate beams collimated across distance, they will attract each other, keeping "Bloom" to a minimum, but not until a predetermined point, at which their mutual anhilation is assured.
The Legend of Galactic Heroes (the video thumbnail) is kinda unique for how many ships were deployed in single battle (I mean, how could they find enough resources to throw half a million ships into battle and still walk it off?)
And more importantly, how could fleet commander manage that amount of ships without getting information overload?
Large AI controlled factories operating in near asteroid belts for material.
I don't know how they did it in Legend of Galactic Heroes but realisticly you just have to industrialise a significant part of one or more star systems idialy with heavy automation, but you would want to do so any way to pump out enough rescources, ships and habitats for civilian use, so millions of ships with wartime production should be easy even with just a few well developed systems, especially if the ships are to some degree automated too.
Not half million, their avarage fleet battle are like 15k vs 15k ship. But there are like really big battle like reinhard fleet vs the lippstad coalition, the final battle are very massive with 100k ships vs +50k ships
They are pretty massive ships too and large crew compliments. On each side of a 15k vs. 15k ship battle are several million people. Finding a barren rock, strip mining its resources, and sending those resources to automated factories feels like the simpler end of the equation.
Makes you wonder about the logistics of keeping the roaming death balls fed.
@@pierrelindgren5727f i remember, during the Alliance Second invesion Arc, There's a scene where a local asteroid factory os ships hás been attacked by imperial forces, It seems to produçe ships at very low time for the Alliance, si maybe the factores are automated in both sides
Love it, Hooj. The sci-fi story I’m currently working on uses p-beams (lots of notes from Atomic Rockets in the planning stages) as the main ship-to ship heavy weapons.
Ahh, Atomic Rockets, a great source/reference. 🚀
Aha! Thank you for labeling all the sources, very nice
Thank you for the video, You've made me reconsider the feasibility for particle weapons for my hard-ish sci-fi book I write in my spare time.
I really like how you guys describe the science through the lens of fictional storytelling. It’s a unique weave of information that is quite interesting!
When I was in high school in the 1990s, I was making up a fictional sci-fi setting that was Robotech and Star Trek inspired space opera. My primary civilization used particle beams that were heavily "compressed" so as to fire a incredibly dense beam at low relativistic speeds.
Honestly, when it comes to naming relativistic electron beams, I think some good name choices could be "Dilators", "Lorentz Projectors", "Einstein Beams", or "Extreme Lorentz Factor Relativistic Ion Technology" if you absolutely need an acronym. ELFRIT Batteries sound nice, imo. Or Elfrit Lances. Elfrit Projectors? Something like that.
4:54 That Home Alone scream made it so much better :D
Wasn't aware of the radiation effects as this is something rarely talked about in scifi shows with most of the time being a plot specific factor with a weapon with the intent to cause radiation or some other combining factor. Makes the idea of space combat all the more terrifying.
Wait until you hear about high-end spaceship propulsion
The sheer amount of radiation shielding required for crewed interplanetary flight means most spaceships wouldn't really be threatened by most radiation
@@TheAchilles26 That is one of the reasons we see armour in the meters thick category in shows like Babylon 5 on top of electromagnetic defence grids and interceptor arrays. The amount of defences you NEED on a space ship that will travel outside of a solar system, just to travel safely is rather significant.
Oh yeah, the radiation effects are fun. You have the potential to put a photographic plate behind the enemy vessel and get a nice X-ray image of the crew dying horribly from radiation poisoning.
@@Ishlacorrin I'm not even talking outside of a solar system, I'm talking outside Earth's magnetic field
Worth mentioning here, at least when talking about the defensive aspect is the 2013 Space Pirate Captain Harlock movie. The way some of the ships deal with incoming attacks present a nice visual (not to mention the space combat in that movie being glorious) to go along with it.
The 2013 Harlock film was weird. Especially in the final act.
@@khandimahn9687 Weird but still damned pretty.
I've never actually given particle weapons too much credit due to being too high tech for a semi realistic sci fi setting, but I'm actually very impressed by the plausible applications you can use
They're not actually that high tech! It's entirely possible to make a weaponized UREB with today's accelerator tech (though it will be really big an awkward and unreliable, but those are engineering issues that could be solved in practice)
@@IgnisDomini97 indeed. I was worried they were much too complicated
Interesting idea to make it so they sterilize ships though
LOGH/LOTGH is one of the greatest achievements of humanity.
Stop neglecting Space Battleship Yamato! The new series deserves love!
You began and ended this video with gundam footage...Perfect!
particle accelerator weapons are probably the most brutal things in scifi because they function like a laser except they also have this immense fountain of near lightspeed particles carried with them
litterally a sand blaster at atomic scale and particle shower aftermath behave like a shotgun shell at the point of impact.
@@quantranhong1092 and the braking radiation
gundam really nailed particle beams the various shields and armors they used and then the super weapons there was a gundam two massive ships and a planet base that had these supr huge beam cannons that could wipe a planet off the map
OP should do a video on the x-ray "guns" used by the fortresses in this series. I remember seeing someone claim that the firing method of Iserlohn fortress (bouncing the x-ray beam off of its mirror-like metal exterior) is within the realm of plausible.
Thanks for including the titles of the shows with each clip!
Finally Legend of the Galactic Heroes gets some proper regognition
Good job pointing out these types of weapons also affect all the other technologies around them. Defensive tech grows just as fast as the offensive weapons. Another thing to consider is the size of the weapon's footprint within a ship. This also determines if it can be placed in a turret or if the whole ships has to point at the enemy.
Gravitational accelerated particle beams are an interesting option since you can use neutral particles to increase the impact and also the range
Where to take the gravity from? Moons, Planets, Stars, Black Holes? Electromagnetism is much better to handle.
@@elshid6046 space Magic aka lore
e.g. gravity generators like a lot of sci-fi has in their deck plating
@@xyztogrutamamenchi7894 Graviton-stuff, I know, as we know it from StarTrek and Star Wars and many other stuff. But even with that, electromagnetism is much easier to handle. You need an insane amount of Gravity to bring a particle up to relativistic speeds. Basically, you need a black hole (which can actually serve as a Tachyon generator, if you follow the theories of Recami et. al).
@@elshid6046 it is impossible to say which methode is easier without us even knowing how gravity accelerators would work.
And while small particle accelerators are not a problem particle accelerators big enough to be used as weapons on spaceships would need unholy amounts of energy that you would need to store somewhere. Electric and magnetic fields of this magnitude have a lot of problems and secondary effects.
At that point, why not just shoot beams of gravity waves?
Your suggestion for two different possible doctrines using particle weapons remind me of differing naval doctrines over time-
The heavily armoured ships slugging it out (old battleship style) vs a more "don't let the big ships get hit" (modern carriers)
Would be interesting to see a setting with the two methods facing off in asymmetrical warfare
Excellent review! I wouldn't toss out the mesons quite so quickly, and have to mention "Investigation of the Possibility of Using Nuclear Magnetic Spin Alignment".
The WORST possible particle beam? A full KAZINTI where you drop into the battle with engines on full- spraying your opponents with a relativistic beam of spin-aligned neutrons.
A similar and equally nasty version is using a basic particle accelerator to hit a target and create a spray of neutral mesons, kaon and pions. Ultra-nasty neutral particles that travel right through most shielding, and then allows you to use their relativistic velocity as a timer fuse so they decay from neutral particle to x-ray or neutron sputtering gamma-ray AFTER passing through any defenses.
I always loved weapons in sci-fi. I did my 3rd year physics dissertation on the subject 😁🖖
Particle beams are always going to require more input energy for less firepower than kinetic or self propelled weapons, but in space, even high velocity projectiles could take minutes to reach a target that has long since repositioned.
Gurren Lagann has probabilistic missiles that can be launched backwards in time
@@mb9484 How does the time-travel-stuff work?
@@elshid6046 It works because of Spiral Power, space magic based on the indominable human spirit
If your projectile needs minutes to reach the target, then one of three things is the case:
1. Your projectile is a missile/torpedo/whatever capable of course correction to pursue the target through evasive maneuvers.
2. Your target is in a fixed orbit and incapable of dodging, like a planet or sufficiently massive space station
3. They a outside your effective range. Do not waste ammo shooting at them.
Finally! Titles of images/clips used in the video!!! I can now go and watch a ton of new stuff! And as always, thanks for the great vids!
I mainly use these in my Space Opera setting. During the 90's,when Star Trek Tech fans when tell me that Star Trek Tech was unbeatable. I would tell them I don't use lasers, I use particle beams. That would shut them up.
Also love that you are using scene from Gundam,and Legend of the Galactic Heroes (I am a huge Star Wars fan, but this Anime beats Star Wars hands down.)
As one of your German frequent viewers, you almost nailed "Bremsstrahlung". Only mistake was that the "s" in "...strahlung" becomes "sch" (pronounced like english sh) because it is followed by a "t". Brilliant and informative video again!
Ramiel from Evangelion had a Proton Particle Beam powered by an inner Torus Reactor, it might not be as powerful as some other fictions, but it was still capable of absolutely deleting entire mountains ( in the Rebuild anyways)
heh, I remember the issues Particle Accelerators have in From the Depth game (where you build your warships and weapons from the scratch in quite a detailed simulation environment). Having a long accelerator tube with crazy damage potential twisted inside your combat ship is fun until someone damages it... Thern it becomes a problem for you moreso then for the enemy. So you either mount it on fast paper thin crafts (that are hard to hit), or mount it under several layers or armor (to protect the delicate thing from shots AND protect you ship from it if tubing is damaged) and you try to design the particle accelerator the way as to minimize chances beam from the broken one will hit critical parts inside the ship.
One of the examples shown, the Mass Effect Collector beam, is actually interesting in that it uses chargeless heavy particles, as far as I remember, relying mostly on that physical impact. It's more a magetohydrodynamic weapon than a true particle beam in that sense. And I think chargeless particles really do have their niche, even if they're harder to accelerate. The recombination-on-emiasion technique sounds interesting, especially if heavy cations are used in conjunction with deeionizing electrons. The electrons would do barely anything to alter beam course, but wouldn be significant to combat static bloom.
Really nice use of the battlezone 2 soundtrack for your intro!
I hadn’t even thought about the extra X-rays, even though I’ve seen all the fears about CRTs and X-rays, so… yeah. Pretty good weapon.
In Babylon 5 the humans use something called an X-Ray Particle Laser, you can imagine just how nasty that thing can be. All of their capital ships have a dozen or so meters of armour thickness, electromagnetic defence fields and interceptor arrays just for protection.
I was thinking this was going to go in the direction of 'lightning guns' or particle-projection-cannons (basically, also lighting guns) from other universes...I did not foresee them being basically insta-radiation-sickness-cancer guns. Damn. Nice work
Digging all of the Gundam content in this video. It would be nice if we could see some stuff to help outsiders wade in to the franchise.
Thanks for including the show/source of your clips - I've wasted far too much time trying to figure them out in the past.
UREBs feel like a good candidate for a wave motion gun style spinal mount super weapons. They have the range and damage potential, but require very powerful linear accelerators, and correspondingly large power supplies, restricting them to large spinal mounts and preventing the setting from turning into a mess with overpowered beams everywhere.
The Ion Cannons in Homeworld are literally this; it takes up an entire frigate.
I like how every little piece of the video has a reference. Everyone should do that.
Love the Battlezone II music - one of my favorite games.
I believe the old Traveller RPG series used particle beams on their bigger ships. They were used mostly to disable ships by killing the crew with high-energy radiation. (It's been A LOT OF YEARS so the memory is foggy.)
Thank you so much for adding captions to your clips!!!
I'm surprised he mentioned the Meson Cannons from Ace Combat X. Not just a major part of the game, but one of the best missions too!
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you've done a video about kinetic weapons, laser weapons, and now particle weapons. I would love to see a plasma weapon video and see if it's as deadly as halo makes it out to be and how it compares to other weapon types
I second this. Would love to see a plasma weapon video. I'm currently constructing my own sci-fi race and was planning on using plasma weapons as the 'newest of the new' tech in their arsenal, both in projectile 'torpedo' form and in some sort of beam form. I'm kinda iffy on the science of how to make a plasma beam weapon though, or if it's even possible. Don't wanna just resort to "space magic" and call it a day, ya know? I like my stuff to be grounded somewhat in reality.
@@AgentFrosty, I don't know how plasma works for you but if you have a way to make plasma projektiles and want to have beams too than why not make beams like rapid fire projektiles but without seperating them. I could also imagine it like a sort of produktion line cotinuously producing plasma in a stream though it would probably need some wind up time.
@@AgentFrosty mech basically a phone store military
This series just taught me how much I love weapons in general. I have a problem
Edit: now I can't tell if it's my love for weapons or just the way this fellow describes things. It's just so good.
Can you do a video on the Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I love the show and you use loads of clips from it. I would like to know your opinions on it.
My dad worked at Hughes aircraft as a optics inspector back in the 80's and 90's. I was playing Doom one day and he was talking with me about it. I thought nothing of it at the time. He came home from work the next day and said that he talked to some of the engineering guys about it. He said that they said plasma weapons are less like firing a gun and more like "squirting" a charged fluid out of the thing. They said that if used in a atmosphere it would "splatter" on contact with the air and just set everything on fire. Gun and Doom guy included. What stuck with me was how he said the engineers referred to the process like it was very messy. Probably because tests had already been done and made a mess of things.
Could you use multiple particle emitters to make different particles that repel each other as a means to accelerate them?
isnt that basically a "beam" railgun?
Thank u so much for including the names of the shows!
Can you talk about wormholes and hyperdrives being used in combat to get closer to enemy ships?
"An ultra-relativistic electron beam (UREB) is a particle beam of electrons that are traveling very close to the speed of light. Although electrons are electrostatically repulsive, because of Special Relativity, and more-specifically the combined effects of Lorentz contraction and time dilation, the electron beam can stay quite coherent over long distances. This makes UREBs a formidable weapon, better than other kinds of particle beam-and indeed the current expected "meta" for primary ship-to-ship weapon." Thanks Pinbot.
As it turns out, if you just fire electrons or protons close enough to the speed of light, their effective range improves. In fact if you fire them close enough to the speed of light they easily become much longer ranged than lasers. At some distance (still easily within the weapon's range), your ability to point the weapon straight and precisely identifying the enemy will become more of a problem and you'll have to wiggle the weapon around a bunch ("sweep").
...as it turns out, I posted this right before Spacedock mentioned this.
If you want a cooler name, I love to call them Electron Lances
Loving this series! :D
Detailed analysis of futuristic, sci-fi space opera weapons.
I think I found a new channel to love.
But how long should the particle accelerator cannon be? Or how big should the "ring" of the particle accelerator be? In our world we have very large diameter ring-shaped accelerators, how much is it possible or plausible/realistic to miniaturize them?
Most critically, an author needs to know what specific particle they're using in the story to accurately capture the effects.
"I've seen things you wouldn't beleive. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulders of Orion... I've seen C-beams glitter in the darness of the Tanhausser Gate...!"
-Davidson, "Blade Runner"
Time...........to die.............
Best scifi movie of all time.
it's so good Legends of The Galactic Heroes featured
I always like the idea of particle beams as an alternative to laser weapons simply because it avoids problems of not having any mass like not being practically able to penetrate beyond the surface, or not making things like aircraft obsolete cause you don't have to lead your target. I always thought of it like shooting an incredibly long and thin bolt of particle which would impact the target a lot like a high explosive anti tank round and do damage that way.
Particle projector cannon of battletech is in this family I think. Causes impact, heat and eletrical interference on the target struck.
All those clips from Gundam The Origin make me wanna rewatch it. The Battle of Loum is one of the most enjoyable sci-fi space battles out there imo
ERPPC's in each arm of a Mad Cat with extra ER Lasers and LRM 20's works wonders.
I was looking for a Battletech reference in the video, but nope.
Overpriced Clanner trash, I can fit out almost four Awesome 8Q for the same C-bills ans still go out for dinner.😜
@@katarjin They will also fill my scrapyard very easily, all while not even scratching my paint job.
@@katarjin But is that dinner at Taco Bell or dinner at a place having crisply ironed linen napkins? 🤔😉
this is the exact kind of content i need in my life
I'm still waiting for an episode on EMP type weapons used in space combat.
a weapon designed specifically for disabling ship systems, either to make them easier to destroy or to subdue the people inside the ship, like I think an EMP weapon would go well for a policing ships especially if they need to knock out a ships systems for boarding
Realistically, though, EMPs don't tend to just disable devices for a short period as often portrayed by Hollywood. They destroy electronic circuits. Hit an unshielded ship with an EMP and it's basically just an inert lump of metal. Repairing it would consist of towing it to a repair facility and completely replacing every microprocessor on board. It'd almost be cheaper to just buy a new ship.
@@DrakeAurum well it could just be used to disable the ship and then they can just capture the crew, like if it’s a pirate vessel trying to flee, hit them with a few EMP missiles or something and then just board the ship and capture the crew
Wouldn't the gamma radiation from electron particle beams have a similar effect? It'd damage the electronics, and melt the organic crew, perfect for disabling before a boarding action (just make sure your boarding crew is well-shielded)
@@jamesm783 but what if you want to take the crew of the enemy ship alive
You can use particle beams for that! Electronics do not react well to being sprayed down with charged particles and high energy photons, but you can't use that for policing because well... people don't react well to that either!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
*takes a bucketload of notes*
You guys are getting a direct reference & thanks in the novel I'm working on (that and Atomic Rockets).
Battletech bois giggling at the notion that particle weapons are just made for big space ships.
What is interesting about particle weapons are the more exotic and interesting kind. Anti matter beams. Beams of strange matter. Beams that can collide to create extremly small black holes that than explode. Beams that create fission or fusion events on the armor of the enemy.
Medium lasers may be the arguably the most efficient energy weapon in Battletech, but you can't beat PPCs for damage, heat, and range.
There’s a reason I prefer the stock Awesome to an Atlas.
@@templarw20 ...Its in the name.
PPCs just feel better,
I love learning about realistic sci-fi, and your explanations are well put and easy to understand. Subscribed
The Dielectric armor reminds me of the polarized hull plating from star trek enterprise.
In my somewhat soft sci-fi, I've used charged particle beams. I argued in it that point-defence technology would (in direct battles) render missiles obsolete, and I've never liked lasers. In this setting, ships would deploy electromagnets on long tethers from ships in the direction of the enemy, which would then deflect incoming beams without affecting the mothership all too much. I never bothered figuring out if this would actually make sense, but I still really like the idea of 'raising the shields' involving physically moving these magnets far away from the ship.
As soon as I saw the thumbnail I had to do a double take. At first glance I thought it said "practical beams" 🤣.
I am thrilled to see you guys coming into contact with the original LoGH! That said, neat video, though you guys seem to dismiss aspects of neutron beams. Although not directly interactable like proton or electron, neutron can be directly influenced, either by gravity (which might be plausible in series with gravitation manipulation), or some level of quantum mumbo jumbo.
Thank you guys for another interesting episode. I'd like to watch LotGH one of these days based on all the good things I've heard about it. Is it on any streaming services in the US? Thanks in advance for any answers!
Merry Christmas out there everybody! ✝️🎄
Crunchyroll is streaming the remake of LotGH while HIDVE is streaming the original version.