> Samuel Penn writes:
@:) The big problem in space is delta-vee - or rather the lack of it.
And note that this problem gets worse the closer to present-day
reality you get. Today we have basically zero delta-v once we're in
space. Certainly not nearly enough to avoid missiles or railgun bullets or
whatever.
I would guess that space combat will have to start out (if it starts soon)
with extremely fragile ships, presumably not designed or poorly designed for
space combat, which are completely incapable of withstanding any weapon's
attack. Since the ships are likely to be difficult to replace, I would think
the first goal would be building effective countermeasures. I don't know just
what these would be but I will suggest some ideas with an eye towards getting
people's
creative juices flowing - that will in turn get me a cool game of
earth-orbital combat in 2050 or maybe 2100 without me doing any work.
So on January 1, 2050, the inhabitants of the Mir space station, vengeful
because their Khazak (Byelorussian?) government has decided to let them die up
there rather than paying the US to fund a rescue mission, direct their
external maintainence robot to expend all of its fuel and place it on a
carefully calculated trajectory... one which crosses paths with Space Station
Alpha.
What happens next? How do our heroic astronauts save their station (launched
only three years ago due to budget constraints)? If that (heavy) robot runs
into the station it will cause severe, possibly fatal damage. Even if it
doesn't, it will throw the station's solar
panels out of alignment - and without power the station will have to
be abandoned.
So what happens? And whatever happens, how does the DOD make it into a weapon
within the decade and start a war? Preferably one resolvable by Full Thrust,
with whatever modifications are required.
They spend $897,249,452,455,455.56 on a system that never works. This
bankrupts the US. A general declairs martial law. Civil war breaks out...Say,
why does this sound familiar?
Brian Bell pdga6560@csi.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/pdga6560/fthome.html
Includes the Full Thrust Ship Registry Is your ship design here?
> Joachim Heck writes:
@:) [ Space Station Fred is in danger!]
@:) What happens next? How do our heroic astronauts save their
@:) station (launched only three years ago due to budget constraints)? @:) If
that (heavy) robot runs into the station it will cause severe, @:) possibly
fatal damage. Even if it doesn't, it will throw the
@:) station's solar panels out of alignment - and without power the
@:) station will have to be abandoned.
Here are my thoughts on this and I'd appreciate any input people have as to
the likely evolution of space weaponry.
Options to save SS Alf:
1) ground-based laser attack on incoming projectile (service robot):
I don't know whether a really powerful laser will be available in 50 years but
I guess it's possible. Standard tactic in that case would be to hit the
projectile, heat it very rapidly and let the exploding metal sides of the
thing push it off its collision course with our dear space station.
2) anti-projectile projectile:
Our intrepid spacefarers could jury-rig their own "missile" and launch
it at the incoming one. This might cause a lot of debris to head their way
which might not be what they're looking for.
3) anti-projectile cloud:
The station could vent gas or water (or fuel, whatever) in a cloud between it
and the incoming object. At typical orbital speeds I don't guess this would
cause a lot of damage to the object. Maybe it would slow it down or change its
orbit?
4) move: Assuming congress decided to include thrusters on Fred, it could
presumably get out of the way. Or could it? I don't know what kind of
manouverability a space station would have and I don't expect it would be
much. On the other hand, space, even low Earth orbit, is quite large and it
might not take much movement to get out of the way of an unguided projectile.
Ok, so we have ground attack, "missile" attack, defensive "shield" and
manouver. These things would all be relatively easy to represent in FT. I
suppose what I'm thinking of is a floating map, where one table edge
represents the earth's atmosphere. Ships move by default along a line parallel
to this table edge. If you want to keep track
of the distance moved you could get different ground-based
installations to be available at different times, which might be interesting.
Presumably they would get a AA megabattery or some such. As for the ships I
would probably outfit them with C batteries and missiles since I can't really
come up with a good excuse to use bigger batteries (railguns might be
plausible, I suppose).
What I don't know is
a) how much thrust to give these ships (not much, I guess)
b) how to handle orbital thrust effects (go faster - go higher)
c) how to handle momentum from weapons fire d) whether this would ever
actually be interesting.