Neutronium Hull Plating

[buck rogers]

I'm trying to design Neutronium Hull Plating. I think the cost would be prohibitive for players to have so its only for the characters to encounter not have. Below are the stats. what do you guys think? Am I on the right track?
Hull Plating, Neutronium-based
Description: Any ship that is equipped with a neutronium hull which masses nearly a hundred times more than an M class planet. This means that in order for the hull plating to be practical the ship’s hull plating must exist partially in subspace. This is accomplished through an advanced gravity nullifier field (GNF) generator that operates on a similar principle as the space-time driver coil in impulse drives. Without this GNF technology any vessel would simply implode as the spaceframe and systems inside the hull would compress under the intense pressure exerted on them from the density of the hull. It has no need for shields as this hull plating renders it invulnerable to conventional attack. The density of neutronium is about 3.16x1018 kg/m3.
Rules: Neutronium Hull Plating has the following statistics, Protection/Threshold: 5/15 It does not have a strength value as it does not require power. Transporting or scanning through Neutronium is not possible.

[Ergi]

I like it, especially because there is also a way to destroy it, but this almost guarantees cliche´.

Chaotica: "Don't press that button! Guards!"

Additional inspiration can be found here:


Evil Overlord List

[Balok]

The GNF also serves the darn important function of making it possible for the crew (or instruments) to survive. The gravity at the surface of an appreciable quantity of neutronium would be very high indeed...

[Typhonis 1]

Actually you could create neutronium impregnated armor the armor has tiny amounts of neutronium alloyed into it providing the protection needed while maintaining a decent weight.

This is how they do it in Star Wars

[buck rogers]

True I thought about the Star Wars way too. But then I didn't think that quite fit the pemise of the type of hull plating shown in Star Trek episodes like the Doomsday machine in TOS. I tend to think of the type of armor described Star Wars as hybrid alloy combined with other elements which I suspect possibly counter the effects of gravity naturally. This is just conjecture of course but who knows. I have always felt when it comes to "Science Fiction" Technology its easier to just do it now and explain how it works it later. Because its not real anyway As far as we know

[Typhonis 1]

Hack they don1t bother with technobabael as far as Wars is concerened till Incredible Cross Sections came olut and Lucasfilm has decalred them as cannon as the film novelizations.

[Balok]

Keep in mind when you talk about "alloying" neutronium with anything, you're talking some fairly stretched out rubber science. Neutronium, aka collapsed matter, has no electrons. It's just neutrons, packed into a lattice. It won't alloy with anything, not in the traditional sense.

Also, a thimblefull of neutronium weighs on the order of tons. By the time you get enough to provide a ship with any measure of real protection, you're talking about a significant mass.

It's possible that the Doomsday Machine's tractor beam was actually the gravitation pull of its own immense mass, focused frontwards to pull in matter from destroyed suns. Some of the mass might also have been used to compress that matter to the point where it began fusing on its own. So, in that case, the defensive properties of the material may have been a happy coincidence.

[Phantom]

Question.

Why is it necessary to give Neutronium Plating a Protection and Threshold value? To quote Spock in the "Doomsday Machine" "there is no know why to blast through the hull..."

[buck rogers]

Yeah well a threshold of 15 means that not a whole lot is going to hurt it, and as for Spock's comment. If all you had was the Enterpise's puny phasers you'd probably say the same thing he did if you had to go up against that thing. If a nuke can take it out then we know its insides can't be super tough. Hense the theory about how the thing was constructed. Personally I think pure neutronium is impossible refine with out some sort of technilogical intervention to keep the mass down. So I devised a method to achive that goal As for the Star Wars way I see nothing wrong with their way either. As far as our limited science can understand its impossible to forge neutronium into an alloy. But in the Science Fictional realm of Star Wars and Star trek it all seems perfectly logical that some type of material would actually counter the mass of neutronium, bring the mass down. What's wrong with that idea, is it any more far fetched that building a three kilometer long robot made outta the stuff, hell bent on destroying the universe.

[Tobian]

I like this idea alot actually. It makes sense which is the main problem with using the concept of nutronium in the first place.

Has it ever been explicitly expressed that Nutronium "is" condensed neutrons, such as that which is formed at the centre of a Neutron Star, or simply an extremelly heavy element, which has a massvie relative ammount of Neutrons. Perhaps Nutronium is a material which is made from such material but has an actual (extremelly large) periodic table placement. it could be that for some reason it is able to sustain a crystaline latice, which can occur extremelly unusually in the heart of super massive stars, much like Latinum Disentenide does, or is manufactured via extremely advanced technology.

With regard to the threshold comment - at the end of the day - "the thing has to have a tail pipe" - and by ramming in huge ammounts of energy you are effectivelly fiding gaps in the armour which you can exploit. if the GNF generator for whatever reason was damaged or destroyed, you better get out of there quicly! Personally I think it should have a slightly higher defense than 5 - possibly only 8 or 9 - to represent it's armour plating nature, and because it partially resides within a subspace fold, which could add to the difficulty of hitting it.

FLicking through the ships tables there are still a couple of ships which could actually scratch this armour - for example a D'Deridex with the miltiweapon attach could - just.

I'm also wondering how you alocate 'structure' points to a vessel with Neutronium Armour. Because if you have that much mass you are effectivelly saying it has alot of structure too. Perhaps working it in a system like Ablative armour, the ship/thing can sustain a heck of a lot of punishment - however you only have to do enough criticals to take the GNF offline and kablowie ;-)

[capnhayes]

I would say give the ship its normal amount of structure as per its size. The protection seems apropriate since hitting the ship shouldn't be a real big problem only penetrating the threshold of the armor.

[capnhayes]

The GNF does seem to be a good achillies heel for ships with this armor. After all the characters should have some hope of overcoming it.

[Tobian]

Yes it would be somewhat of a problem: Should a plate of the armour beging to malfunction, then it would collapse in on it's self giving alot of structural damage to the ship.

Perhaps in that sense the armour would have a damage track - I would estimate it as an E or maybe an F as an advanced culture (I.e. like the Borg has an F) - you could put it on the shileds location on the hit table.

I was also thinking that you could have specialised manouvers to eject damaged sections of the hull as it was approaching critical failure.. Perhaps the last 3 blocks on the dammage tracks would prompt this - But on the converse side, you could try and hit your oponent with them! (that would be a nasty surprise for them!) Perhaps you could take something along the lines of - TN=15+damageX2 taken - to eject a section before it inflicts 10 PT's of structural dammage on the shipwhen it collapses in on it's self. - then - TN=15+targets protection - to hit an alien vessel for the same effect. (10 penetration, with no effect from shields - as in a gravimetric shear)

Of course reaching 0 on the dammage track would mean complete collapse of the ship into a wee ball!

Very few ships could yield a penetration of 15 - so it would be a very hard ship to damage - and dangerous when it was!

i was also thinking one handy point about the armour is it would probably be immune to tractor beams, or could be made to be so, because the real mass of the vessel was so much more than its points suggest!

[Balok]

Neutronium is a purely informal term. The problem is that we don't know exactly *what* happens at those densities. Neutronium may be a sea of neutrons, or it may be something more exotic, like quarks.

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That said, you can make neutronium whatever you want it to be. Do remember that "The Doomsday Machine" was written back in 1966 or so, when less was know about the states of matter.

Personally, I would say that it is impossible to penetrate neutronium of any substantial thickness. The reason that an exploding starship worked on the Doomsday Machine was that certain parts of it could *not* be protected by neutronium -- parts of the inner mechanism that needed to interact with the larger universe, for example.

One might further speculate that the Doomsday device was damaged from it's long journey -- otherwise it could not have been defeated in this manner. It's difficult to imagine that a race sophisticated enough to craft a hull of neutronium would be foolish enough not to realize there was a glaring vulnerability in the form of the unshielded mechanisms.

One might account for this in the following ways:

1. Continuous exposure to space and/or fusion radiation damaged and eventually destroyed the overload cutouts that would normally shield the inner mechanisum against anything volatile, like a large bomb.
2. The computer that provided higher order guidance failed at some point, leaving the mechanism controlled by subprocessors -- operating more or less as a man in a coma -- capable of sustaining life in a sense/react way, but not capable of judgement.
3. The computer that provided higher order guidance was tired of its mission of destruction, and wished to die. It was fully aware of what Kirk was doing -- and cooperated in its own destruction.

I've toyed with the idea of bringing back a Doomsday Machine for my players, but haven't come up with a story I like well enough, yet. It seems likely that the two sides were more or less evenly matched, or else why create this monster? So, what happened to the one the other side built???