> Launch a barrage of electromagnetically accelerated crowbars at
> When the crowbars ablate in atmosphere, they expose their
You'd have to generate convincing PSB of an antimatter containment system that
wouldn't consume and broadcast enough energy to give significant advanced
warning. Plus if FT sensors are mass based, IR signature wouldn't matter. Plus
more, unless its albedo were effectively zero in all wavelengths (claoked), it
could be optically or near IR detected by a defense net. 253 Mathilde is
several times darker than Coal in all
VI-NIR
wavelengths, but readily detectable and observable by both Earthbased
telescopes and NEAR.
But then if we're allowing cloaked bombs (FT2 cloak), no planet is safe, no
matter what the rest of the space fleet can do..
> "Izenberg, Noam" wrote:
Well, it depends on how FTL works in Full Thrust. The basic book says that
"the forces generated by FTL drive units are very powerful and result in
spatial distortions that can be highly dangerous in close proximity to any
other mass, including other ships."
It does not give enough detail to judge how much damage
will be inflicted on ship/missile X when within Y kilometers
of a planet.
In other words: if the crowbar pops out of FTL about six milimeters above the
planetary defense base, the base doesn't have a chance.
But if FTL flight is impossible within an astronomical unit or so of a
planetary mass, it is still possible to figure out some way of getting some
nasty warheads delivered to planetary targets without significant advanced
warning. It may take some doing, though.
Here is Professor Apocalyse's patented "Catch me if you can" relativistic
warhead delivery system!
First you need space opera levels of power. Covering your innermost planet's
equator with solar cells should do.
Next you need a mass driver (some kind of magnetic linear accelerator) parked
outside of the FTL gravity limit, with an exceedingly long extension cord
plugged into the solar cells. A power transmission laser will do in a pinch.
Just don't get in its way...
Finally, you need your warhead carrier. All it needs is
[1] one outrageously high yield warhead, [2] one FTL drive
with enough of a power source to run it, and [3] enough computer control to
run things.
Step 1: The warhead enters the mass driver at the rear, at point "A". Step 2:
The mass driver accelerates the warhead. Step 3: The warhead emerges from the
mass driver from the front,
at point "B". Step 4: The warhead enters FTL flight, moves from point "B" to
point "A", and leaves FTL flight. Step 5: Go to Step 1.
Keep the warhead going through the cycle for a month or so, and it will be
moving at about 98% of the speed of light.
Actually, at this speed, the warhead becomes superfluous. A wad of belly
button lint travelling at 0.98c, penetrating the atmosphere will generate
enough gamma rays to vaporize everything within several hundred miles and make
a pool of lava with the same radius and many hundreds of feet deep.
Now you send it to the target planet.
It pops out of FTL space at one AU from the target planet. Transit time is
about 8 minutes.
However, a funny thing happens when you try to observe an object travelling at
0.98c with sensors using light, radio, or other sensors that travel at c. You
can *never* see where the object *is*, you can only see where it *was*.
Look at it this way: The warhead pops out of FTL flight at point X. At this
point it becomes visible.
Imagine a photon of light/radio/ultraviolet/whatever that
starts at point X with the warhead and is heading towards the target planet.
It is travelling at c. The warhead also starts at point X. It is travelling at
0.98c.
The photon will arrive at the target in 8 minutes. 9.6 seconds later the
warhead arrives.
So when the planetary defense base spots the warhead, it has 9.6 seconds to
react. It doesn't help to have picket ships posted in deep orbit. Their
warning messages are unlikely to arrive any sooner, and probably will arrive
after the warhead strikes. The picket ship cannot enter FTL and fly to the
planet because the probe emerges at the FTL limit, remember?
The planetary base's problems are not over. How does it interdict the blasted
thing?
One problem is that it can only see where the warhead was,
[quoted original message omitted]
Nyrath wrote
> Laserlight wrote:
You could come up with a number of 'real world' arguments why they aren't
being used or deployed:
If only one side has a doomsday weapon:
1) It could be a VERY serious risk to its own side, e.g. on the same planet a
biohazard or nuclear winter. In space, turning a star into a supernova would
fall under that category
2) The powerful side may prefer to get the planet reasonably intact: They want
the population as slaves, the biosphere livable or they find mining a solid
planet more economical than fishing in an asteroid belt.
3) The superior side are so kind-hearted that they voluntarily refrain
from using it - which would make them alien indeed :-(
If both sides have comparable capabilites (and if each wants to survive the
war)the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD) might stop their use:
1) Put your doomsday weapon on hair-trigger alert. As soon as your
sensors show something approaching that looks like an enemy doomsday
warhead, shoot back. - The risks of this are obvious and perhaps just
enough to support a disarmament treaty.
2) Put them in an obscure, safe place (the Kuiper belt, perhaps?), add dead
man's handle circuitry. If the machine hasn't received its regular
hourly message from Earth - BANG.
They might be used if: Both sides are fanatical enough to incinerate each
other OR: We are discussing star empires so large they can treat single
planets as expendable cannon foddder.
None of which makes for a nice world - or a nice game :-( .
Greetings Karl Heinz
> On 12-Jun-00 at 21:38, Laserlight (laserlight@quixnet.net) wrote:
Hmmm, won't work?
I'm not a physicist (and I don't play one at work either) however...
The energy required to accelerate this crowbar is prohibative. Why do you
think ships usually start combat at slow speeds and top out at 40 or so?
This anti-matter crowbar would be visible from way out and I'm not
even sure you could put it on a ballistic path to hit its target. Any particle
it happened to encounter on its way in would be converted to energy, which
would be massive amounts of detectable radiation and would also affect the
path of the crowbar.
My personal favorite: Sure, the technology exists to make make
Anti-Matter, it just takes artificially creating the atoms, which
requires an input of energy greater than the energy produced by
expending the anti-matter.
Political: The UN has a policy, any Political Entity caught using weapons of
mass destruction on a populated system will have their space capabilities
removed, with force if necessary. Doctrine extends to the point that if this
can be affectively resisted the UN will use any required force to accomplish
this mission, including weapons of mass destruction such as the top secret
Planet Buster Bomb. Normally this would not be required though as violation of
this law is considered a war against humanity and the UN will extract leaders
who order this and place them before a war crimes tribunal with the end goal
usually being the death penalty.
Need more?
Roger hit it right I believe. Even if these crowbars were physically
impossible, there is a high probability of some sort of large scale
destructive weapon that couldn't be stopped existing in some form. The reason
that we can mostly ignore such devices is definatly political. Does anyone
remember an old Avalon Hill board game called "Freedom in the Galaxy"? In this
game the Empire could create atrocity units (such nasties as Planetary
Destablizers that stoped the planet's rotation and killing everything on the
planet). The problem with using such weapons was the political ramifications.
All nearby systems had huge negative political shifts against you, and any
planet that was owned by the same race as the planet you decimated went to the
brink of rebellion. The other side (the Rebels) did not possess such devices,
but still the Empire was kept in check in using them. Except in extreme cases
(such as taking out the Rebel base)
using such a weapon was counter-productive. No use having an Empire if
there is no actual real-estate left. Of course, there could be some
races that are on a Genocide mission to erradicate all life...everywhere. And
that could make for a very interesting Many against One campaign. Just another
thought...
Mark
> -----Original Message-----
[quoted original message omitted]
> Mark Harvey wrote:
And
> that could make for a very interesting Many against One campaign.
That reminds me of another SPI classic: Star Force.
G'day
> On this note, I was thinking of a way to have an alien race invade
Depends why they're invading Earth in many ways and what type of culture
they have. One reason maybe if they're 'intellectually' superior and believe
they're taking us over for our own good. Compound this with political or
societal issues at home that mean they have to answer for the way the planet
is subdued and then there's a lot of restraints on them. You could end up with
a case where our losses are as demoralising to them as
their own.
Cheers
Beth
> Anybody got any other ideas.
To take the opposite side of the moral spectrum: The alien invader finding a
world with a biochemically compatible biology may not wish to waste a protean
source.
Andy A
[quoted original message omitted]
G'day,
> I was thinking along the lines of racial
Reminds me of a show I watched a bit about a decade or so ago (which means its
a bit fuzzy) now, where a ship of refugees or something end up on Earth
(they're aliens who are all spotty with bald heads and the its the males
who get pregnant or something) and one of them ends up as a cop or
something....(I think it was so they could do lots of stories with racism as
the them, without the partner being black) sorry like I said a bit fuzzy. But
it does present the germ of an idea, maybe planets such as ours aren't that
common after all or at least not in this part of the galaxy
(I
take it you're not using the GZGverse and so we don't have to worry about
keeping to all that stuff right?). Thus these guys had to find a new home and
this is it and even though they don't want to cause harm (they just want a
place to live), if they don't get a toe hold here they're in big
trouble because there's no where else and/or they running low on
essentials. Its fine for them to be transported for a while packed like
sardines but its not something even they can manage for any great length of
time and definitely not forever.
> Or maybe they have a
Beyond the need for gravity for correct growth and maintenance of organs
(though I'm not sure if your aliens have developed artificial grav yet),
many native peoples of today feel this way. In fact many of us must feel
this way in some way otherwise camping and nature holidays wouldn't be so
popular.
> Is their any way such a need would evolve or could be engineered into
That's another issue entirely, though quite possible. If they need some sort
of visual, thermal, gravitational or other environmental cue for reproduction
or some significant life history transformations (metamorphosis, moulting etc)
then it may well be imperative for them to
all pile out once in a while so what needs to happen can happen. They needn't
even stay around then, maybe they just need to borrow the back woods for a few
decades so they can get the next generation going and then they'll be off
again (that in itself could be considered an unreasonable
enough request by some quarters of human society and so cause a conflict....
then again maybe I'm being too cynical).
> Or you could just have them land and start shooting, and never open
That's OK with all the creative minds around here you shouldn't have to fall
back on that one;)
Cheers
Beth
> >Or you could just have them land and start shooting, and never open
> fall back on that one ;)
I read a novel a few years back (don't remember title) in which Earth was
pasted by an alien race. Actually, Earth getting pasted happened in the
first chapter (they hit us with a big rock at near lightspeed) - and the
story was about the (very few) survivors. Turned out that the aliens didn't
bear us any particular malice, they just figured that in the end, any species
capable of interstellar expansion would become a threat to species survival
'cause any species that fights its' way off planet is an agressive one, so
they'd better whack us before we figured out to whack them. We hadn't made it
out of our solar system yet, but they had received our tv broadcasts, and saw
in our popular "science fiction" that the galaxy
was filled with either human-like races we befriended, or non-human-like
races we warred with. And humans were always leaders... So, kaboom. The
writers were pretty into that sort of hard-core deterministic philosophy
-
that by definition any species capable of expansion will be a threat. And any
species that *might* become capable of expansion will become a threat, so
blast them too.
> >On this note, I was thinking of a way to have an alien race invade
Anyway, the
> >only way I could think of to keep the aliens form just dropping some
If you don't mind something off the wall, Harry Turtledove wrote another pair
of stories: "The Road Not Taken" and
"Herbig-Haro".
You see, you are making the assumption that a species that has FTL
automatically has a tech edge. This might not be so.
In those stories, there is a simple experiment that can be done that leads to
a scientific discovery that yields both FTL flight and antigravity.
A *very* simple experiment.
Most starfairing races think the ultimate in weapontry is the flintlock rifle.
There are some races with bronze starships because they don't know how to
smelt iron.
The trouble with this experiment is that it sends
> adrian.johnson@sympatico.ca wrote:
THE KILLING STAR by Charles Peligrino and George Zebrowski.
Out of print but I really reccomend this book.
The gist of it was in the Three Laws of Alien Interaction.
[1] Wimps don't get to be the top species on a planet.
[2] Aliens will consider their survival to be more important
than our survival.
> >Or you could just have them land and start shooting, and never open
The
> writers were pretty into that sort of hard-core deterministic
And
> any species that *might* become capable of expansion will become a
Footfall, by Larry Niven, I think. (I can't be sure, though; my copy seems to
have gone walkabout.)
- Sam
> I read a novel a few years back (don't remember title) in
that the galaxy
> was filled with either human-like races we befriended, or
Sam Reynolds suggested:
> Footfall, by Larry Niven, I think. (I can't be sure, though;
Footfall certainly had aliens and a big rock, but the rest of the description
makes me pretty sure that wasn't it. It's not like there's a dearth of aliens
with big rocks out there.
> Sam Reynolds suggested:
_A Killing Star_, by George Pelligrino. Fantastic book, one of my
favorites, right up there with Resnick's _Kirinyaga_.