The only problem with that is that it implies that the PanOceanian fleet is larger than the Yu Jing fleet, and what little comparison info we have suggests the opposite.
Fluorine-19 and all the other positron emitting radioisotopes would like to have a little chat. Positron Emission Tomography has been a thing for a long time.
Hrm. That's actually kinda weird then. I mean, the usual reason for going with smaller ships is because each ship is cheaper, so you can have more of them than the faction with the bigger/better ships. Dates back to the French 'jeune ecole' from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. However, I'm not sure it really still applies, since these days the systems are the expensive part of the ship, not the bare hull. Though technology tends to get more compact as it advances, so it's possible that the PanO stuff just takes less volume.
We don't currently have functional, stable, usable antimatter which can be put to industrial applications or the testing of new hardware because the creation of, and handling of, and sustaining of, that antimatter is the current project. Better?
"We don't currently have industrial supplies of antimatter," is really the key point that makes antimatter unobtanium. Sure, we can produce laboratory quantities of the stuff, even enough for doing rather exotic medical tests with it, but that's it. We can't make enough antimatter to send a Valkyrie-class rocket to Pandora to go see the smurfcats. If we could make enough antimatter to send a rocket to Pandora, antimatter sure as hell wouldn't be unobtainium. For that matter, if we could make enough antimatter to send a rocket to Pandora, Earth would not be in the Energy Crisis it was claimed to be in for the movie.
I still think you are using unobtanium wrong :-P If it can really exist, in the real world (and especially if it's within reach, like antimatter) then that's not how I am familiar with the word being used. Which doesn't usually bother me, but you made definitions of this stuff an important element in your argument about the setting so that makes it important even if it wouldn't otherwise be.
Then what do you (and other engineers) call something that we cannot make in quantities sufficient for the purpose in question, but which does exist?
"Future materials" is the most common usage I've come across. As in, we can't use that now... but we sure as hell will soon.
You would need a very different design then, since the main gun (mounted as a spinal weapon, in the "cap" of the station) wouldn't want to be always rotating, and when it comes to rotational gravity, well, the same thing said about circulars apply: stopping and starting takes too much fuel, so you simply keep them rotating. So if every time battle stations are called the rotation is stopped... well XD
It would not correspond with Wotan's defence Platforms then, I think (I have just tried to access Wotan's page to no avail, it's in "economy mode" for me at least), but I don't think it is the best arrangement. Besides, I think those platforms were more "gun emplacements" without habitational facilities...
Wotan's defense platforms look a lot like a Tau sniper drone, and I can find pictures of those: The disk section has two counter-rotating hab wheels in it. If you didn't have counter-rotating hab wheels, the entire station would spin opposite the wheel. But having the two wheels rotating in opposite directions allows you to quickly and cheaply re-orient your main gun in the plane of your disk. You might even be able to re-orient the main gun just by pumping water from the edge of the disk to the center. You'd want a constellation of 3 of those 'gun-drones' to allow one to quickly fire in any direction, they'd all be 90deg from each other: One disk parallel to the planet's surface, one parallel to the ecliptic (orbital plane), and one perpendicular to the ecliptic. Due to gyroscopic effects, it would be very difficult to change the axis of rotation of any of those stations at all. I will admit, combat damage would be a potentially terrifying thing if you kept the centrifuges spinning. I'm assuming Teseum, carbon nanotubes, and other exotics to hold the centrifuges together despite relatively minor damage. Massive damage (like a kinetic strike to the reactor) would kill the whole station anyway.
The PanO defence platforms in question. A lot closer to the EARLIER (pre-release) tau gun drone artwork (they got redone quite a few times before they settled on the final design).
Now that I look at them again I'm less convinced those are rotating sections anyway. But if they were, the guns wouldn't be affected by that.
Nope, the "umbrella" looks a lot like armor to me, with the habitable sections under it. if there were any, the rotation circles would be under both armor and gun, I think. I mean, if the enemy were to gain some height over the gun station he could fire to the "squishy" things... Horizontally yeah... but there is also the vertical plane, both up AND down. And you would need to "clamp" the gun to one of the rotating systems, and that creates stress (and decelerates said ring, so you need to do it carefully). It doesn't seem... elegant to me :S Anyway, for it to trully be a battle-oriented design, it would need to have a half-sphere of armor, with the gun protruding through the middle, and the habitat sections inside, closer to the center, to avoid small variations in position from distant enemies to let them snipe critical systems. And of course, those stations need means to move even if it's slow, to avoid kinetic strikes of 1kg bearings at a fraction of c from outside their engagement radius.
Have I not said that the spun sections are completely inside the hull? Constellation of a minimum of 3 gun platforms. One is horizontal to the planet, can't shoot at the planet at all. Two more are vertical to the planet but are at 90deg to each other, so one can fire at any point along the equator and the other fires pole-to-pole). 3 gun platforms is pretty much a minimum, depends on how much gun deflection you can get with magnetic force. No. The axle that both centrifuges rotate around is attached to the gun. If the gun was attached anywhere but the axle, it's spin at whatever the hell RPM and you wouldn't be able to use the centrifuges as gyros to point the gun with them. Worse, the gun would only be able to fire at predictable times as it spun around (The Death Star will be in range in 5 minutes...). Based on the engines CB says are in use, most spaceships and habitats suffer from the Every Gram Counts rule (only the antimatter-powered ships don't). So a half-sphere of armor would be much more mass than necessary. And 'sniping critical systems' depends on which systems are critical. I assume that the power reactors and stuff are in microgravity with the gun. The habitat sections are not short-term critical if all we're talking about is relatively small holes in them. Orbital-correction thrusters are required for anything in space. Even Hubble or the International Space Station (actually, the ISS uses an immense amount of fuel trying to stay in orbit, if we stopped refueling it'd fall out of orbit in less than a year due to atmospheric drag!)
In the case of platforms in orbit near a celestial body, yeah... but we are talking about space stations in the entry route from the black hole, in there it is best to be as close as possible so the enemy cannot leave your effective range (yet far away enough that you won't be slagged by an unexpected Alpha Strike), and it would seem silly, at least since Wotan, to not assume that the CA will have some intelligence of the position (not to mention the other nations will have it, thanks to "friendly" cargo captans). Not really, you are imparting centrifugal force to the sphere (in a way that does not need to be the same the habs are spinning/counterspinning), that is not the same thing as displacing the mass of the station. Besides, they don't need big engines (nor huge tanks of fuel!) since the basic design of a space station is to remain where it is. I would say that the maritime analogy nowadays would be a drilling platform able to move itself, but a military version would have an armored hull and slightly bigger engines. Talking about some engines that allow the station to move its full size to "dodge" some projectiles launched from an enemy ship at max speed (to which the projectile's own engines will add speed!), that requires more than maneuvering thrusters (those it will still have, just not for this), but not engines as powerful as those that move ships in reasonable times between planets.
@xagroth everything iin space is moving, being stationary is in relation to a celestial object. To put a space station "stationary" near a wormhole would mean you can match the wormhole's orbit speed with the military station and that would also require wormholes to follow the same laws of physics as the spacestation does - and considering wormholes as a concept doesn't I think it's not a stretch at all to assume it doesn't have a stable orbit that a space station can match nor a mass that the space station can orbit. That means continually spending fuel or having stable orbits for continual coverage by several stations. A literally rotating guard duty. The offshore platform analogy falls flat because the continent of Eurasia isn't continually trying to pull the platform towards the rocky cliffs of Svalbard and the oil fields aren't continually moving around the continent in an elliptical orbit.
Lagrange points, maybe? Sorry, why? Space does not remove speed the way things in atmosphere do. Once you reach a speed, you mostly keep that speed. Which means that, unless the black hole "changes the speed of its movement", your station will be decomissioned before it gets out of its position around the black hole... Not ot mention that, if you need it, you just place that station close enough to the black hole that its gravity pulls the station enough to keep her at the same relative distance... (oh, wait, Lagrange Point again!) To fully answer this I would need more knowledge than I think the situation deserves (about black holes), and of the setting, its interactions with Black Holes (more than "Minotaur drives are used to cross a black hole and exit through another"). Anyway, placing a space station in a stable point around a celestial object is ridiculously simple. It is not done today with space stations, simply because placing the International Space Station in a Lagrange Point means having to reach it everytime with the supply runs (instead of just high orbit and use the centrifugal force to compensate for the gravity... the same way the Moon does about Earth, incidentally), besides other considerations I can't think about atm. Anyway, the underlying principle of the universe is that ALL can be reduced to math. If a Wormhole has an orbit, you CAN place something in orbit of the wormhole, be it stationary or not, you just need to calculate the position.
