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[RedWarrior0]

So we stick the whitenoise sensor jammer onto the coffee cup and use it when the range decreases.

I'm in the MAD camp. Sure, they can stop or deflect a single hundred ton shot going at .75c, but can they sufficiently deal with ten? A hundred? A thousand? How about a hundred thousand?

PPE: Mention that instead of guns at close range, you're using artillery at long range, as well.

[Mech#4]

I'm sure I've read something about plating used on the international space station that has a gap between it and the hull of the station. The idea is; any micro meteors that hit the plating go through that, but expel all of their force piercing the plate and so just bounce off the hull underneath.
If someone was the fire a shell at a target, you could just put big plates of metal in space designed to absorb the initial impact, after which it would be slow enough to not be a major issue.

[Cthulhu]

Now that I think about it, since the RKV is unmanned and disposable, and there's not really any friction in space, if you're not making it self-propelled it wouldn't be too tough to cool it down to background levels.  It's hard to speculate on future tech, but this thing is starting to look untrackable even before you take relativity bullshit into account.

So yeah, that's why RKVs are the be-all end-all of warfare and the ultimate test of a species's fitness to survive.  Most weapons can be mitigated somehow.  As soon as you turn the key on one of these things you've irrevocably destroyed a civilization.

Pseudoedit:  Yeah, I'm not sure about that, Mech.  For smaller projectiles maybe, but we're getting into impractical amounts of shielding if we hope to deal with anything serious.  Our hypothetical RKV would convert a chunk of it to energy and keep going through with slightly less mass.

[Scoops Novel]

I still doubt this is a sufficient explanation for the Fermi paradox. En mass colonization would be an inevitable consequence.

[10ebbor10]

I'm sure I've read something about plating used on the international space station that has a gap between it and the hull of the station. The idea is; any micro meteors that hit the plating go through that, but expel all of their force piercing the plate and so just bounce off the hull underneath.
If someone was the fire a shell at a target, you could just put big plates of metal in space designed to absorb the initial impact, after which it would be slow enough to not be a major issue.

The idea is that the micrometeroids fracture when they hit the plating, resulting in the energy being spread out over a large part of the hull, allowing it whistand the impact. The hull is not strong enough. I though that was just an idea, and that is was never actually completely implemented.

As for the steel plate idea. You can always shoot around them. Unless you construct an entire shell, which is silly. Besides, with relativistic weaponry, it's not about slowing the thing down. After the first hits it turns into plasma,which then quickly dissipates, resulting in a short but harmless bombardement with Oh-my-God particles.

Also, as for sensing relativistic weaponry. Remember that communication is limited to lightspeed too. So if a 0.5 c object is coming in, and you detect it at Pluto, it's halfway to Earth by the time you get the message.

Also, 100 ton relativistic shells are silly. At 0.1 c you'd need the mass- energy equivalent of 500 kg antimatter to propel them. (Calculated using newtonian mechanics, so the real energy requirement is far larger.)


Also, all of this would be redundant if something as warp is possible. It allows fast travel without the kinetic energy.

Now that I think about it, since the RKV is unmanned and disposable, and there's not really any friction in space, if you're not making it self-propelled it wouldn't be too tough to cool it down to background levels.  It's hard to speculate on future tech, but this thing is starting to look untrackable even before you take relativity bullshit into account.

So yeah, that's why RKVs are the be-all end-all of warfare and the ultimate test of a species's fitness to survive.  Most weapons can be mitigated somehow.  As soon as you turn the key on one of these things you've irrevocably destroyed a civilization.

The RKV obscures background radiation. A smart computer system might be able to scan the entire sky fast enough to see it coming, but there would be a high fail chance (was it a variable star, or the thing rushing by?) and even if it got it there wouldn't be any time left.

I still doubt this is a sufficient explanation for the Fermi paradox. En mass colonization would be an inevitable consequence.

How many civilizations would reach this level. Nearly none, I suppose.

[RedKing]

I think the answer in terms of defense is going to rely less on engineering and more on physics. Using some repulsive/deflective effect rather than a chunk of metal. If we can create magnetic bottles to hold antimatter (albeit it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to do so), we can create some kind of electromagnetic deflector system. The key to this (as well as the key to relativistic offense) is ridiculous amounts of energy. So if we have the energy to accelerate something to .99c, we should in theory have the energy to decelerate something from .99c.

So until we get reliable fusion reactors, I'm not too worried about the scale-up.


On a related tangent, it's pretty damn cool that the next class of American supercarriers is replacing the traditional steam-piston catapults with what is essentially a railgun.

The induction motor requires a large amount of electric energy in just a few seconds — more than the ship's own power source can provide. EMALS' energy-storage subsystem draws power from the ship and stores it kinetically on rotors of four disk alternators.[4] Each rotor can store more than 100 megajoules, and can be recharged within 45 seconds of a launch, faster than steam catapults.

That's one potential engineering solution to the "ridiculous amounts of energy" requirement -- bigass capacitors. I mean, you're talking about a shipboard system that can burn 400 MJ per use, and is tied into the nuke reactor that drives the ship. Same principle could be harnessed to drive high-yield mass drivers, directed energy weapons, etc. Scale up, and you could have cannons on small moons where much of the moon is housing reactors and capacitor grids designed to produce bursts in the terajoule-petajoule range, all for firing relativistic mass drivers. It's like the LHC, but with a gun barrel attached. 

You'd want to do it somewhere without much gravity and with no atmosphere -- not only to reduce drag on the projectile, but because firing something through an atmosphere at relativistic speed is going to have significant side-effects, like producing a large column of high-energy plasma 25 miles high in your atmosphere, and probably obliterating the gun site in the process.

[Scoops Novel]

How much energy would you need for warp though? I'm fairy confident that's enough for sub-relativistic travel, and isn't that all you need?

Very, very interesting point about slowing things down, but I'm less then confident about it.

[i2amroy]

Personally for space combat I don't see a lot of ship-to-ship combat going on at all, simply because it is so dang hard to get near your enemy. I mean even if you assume a combat area just occupying the space between the surface of the earth and the distance of the moon's orbit, you could easily fit several billion spaceships the size of New York and not even fill up half the space. And even if you could manage to get a lock on and target a ship moving quickly through that space, you would need some serious processing power to even have a hope of hitting your target, since you would need to know where they were going to be by the time that your missile actually arrived at the target. To quote the words of Scotty:

It's like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.

I mean the sheer travel time required for a missile to move from one ship to another means that the other ship gets a fair amount of time to dodge or intercept it, so you end up with two different ships flying quickly, neither of which is able to harm the other one.

As such the end result is probably that the majority of combat is relegated to planet side, since ships can hurt each other in space and planets are so dang large that it's almost impossible to set up any sort of barrier that prevents the enemy from landing on your planet (Though you could probably provide enough cover to limit the amount of troops they were able to land.

And for purposes of relativistic weaponry they only are applicable if you don't care about anything on the planet you are destroying. As such if the cause of fighting is over resources or anything similar you can't just pull an asteroid, accelerate it, and slam it into your target since it will annihilate precisely what you are fighting over.

And really your best defense against any sort of relativistic weaponry will be inhabiting multiple planets. If your have enough planets that some of your people are guaranteed to survive then you could ensure the mutual destruction of whoever attacked you. You could even have some "deadman trigger" type of relativistic weapons just floating out in space, similar to what we currently have with our nuclear submarines. These would be nigh-impossible to find, since the only active parts of them would be a tiny receiver and other then that it would be identical to any other asteroid out there. As such you would have guaranteed counter-strike capabilities, thus ensuring the non-use of any relativistic weaponry.

[PTTG??]

First off, let's define the terrain of "space".

There is Interplanetary space, which is <99.9999999% of the solar system. To approach anyone else in this region in such a way as to remain nearby for a significant amount of time would require absurd quantities of reaction mass, because you would essentially need to fly to where they are now, then come to a stop, then reverse course until you are on the same trajectory as they are. Not at all practical if you want to participate in any kind of "battle". Unless, of course, you were departing from the same place and time as your enemy was, in which case, why wait until you're in deep space to attack them?

Therefore, the only interplanetary space combat that is likely is very-long-range high-velocity bombardment from planetside facilities; that is, you build missiles which accelerate, strike the incoming ships, and don't even worry about deceleration at the target.

Fleets approaching a target would no doubt be aware of this potential, and thus would have active defenses against incoming missiles, such as "flak bubbles", a cloud of fine debris that detonates or deflects incoming missiles, or point-defense lasers such as the problematic "star wars" system we've already attempted, just without the problems of atmospheric diffraction.

All in all, there might be a several-month-long period of missiles deflecting missiles over very long ranges. Perhaps there would be absolutely no fleet movement until one sides' missile systems were disabled by stealth actions- as how we currently do not bring in our air power until we have destroyed enemy anti-air systems.

However, this all assumes warfare in the Interplanetary zone. Space is far more complex than that. Once you approach a planet of any size, and let's consider the earth as a default for this, space stratifies into various orbits with specific delta-v requirements to move from one to the other. You could easily get into and hold a position relative to an enemy and engage in complex tactics to force them to expend delta-v so that a later attack strikes them low on fuel, or position yourself so that incoming fire might risk hitting a useful satellite. The complexities of orbital navigation are quite diverse and are most likely where tacticians are going to be making real innovations in space.

[10ebbor10]

 

How much energy would you need for warp though? I'm fairy confident that's enough for sub-relativistic travel, and isn't that all you need?

Very, very interesting point about slowing things down, but I'm less then confident about it.

In order to estabilish a warp field you'd need to mass energy equivalent of  a small sattelite. (One time input, I believe). That's using the new theories, the old theories required the mass energy equivalent of Jupiter.

[10ebbor10]

I think the answer in terms of defense is going to rely less on engineering and more on physics. Using some repulsive/deflective effect rather than a chunk of metal. If we can create magnetic bottles to hold antimatter (albeit it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to do so), we can create some kind of electromagnetic deflector system. The key to this (as well as the key to relativistic offense) is ridiculous amounts of energy. So if we have the energy to accelerate something to .99c, we should in theory have the energy to decelerate something from .99c.

The energy needed to produce an elecromagnetic effect as large as that is far large than what is required for launching it. (You creating a giant magnetic bubble, in place of a few local fields). Besides, not everything is magnetic. An enemy could get an almost neutral charge shell, and you'd have some serious trouble stopping it.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid your system is going to negatively affect your planets and the sun. We're talking about things several orders of magnitude stronger than the sons magnetical field.

[RedKing]

I was using electromagnetic as an example. There are plenty of other repulsive/deflective forces that could potentially be harnessed if energy is not a constraining factor, or if we're willing to suspend disbelief a bit to assume practical applications of theoretical physics. I just spent an hour or so wikiwalking through particle physics entries, and while much of it (okay, nearly all of it) went WAY over my head, I found the bit about neutrino masses and the seesaw mechanism to be rather fascinating. If I understand it correctly, and you had some practical way to do this...if you could invert the spin chirality of neutrinos in a given region, theoretically the masses of those particles might suddenly balloon very high, with associated increase in local energy and even warping gravity. The Sun outputs a ridiculous number of neutrinos every second.

I rather like the idea of a beam that could turn sunlight into "hard light", even if I'm probably mucking up the physics and we still have no realistic way to pull it off.

[Loud Whispers]

Unless you construct an entire shell, which is silly.

Construct an entire shell around your planet. You control your entire biosphere as well as providing your defense.

If anyone fires at you, crash your planet into theirs.

Profit.

[Scoops Novel]

... a fitting end.

[Flare]

There's always the option of gently nudging them off into the sun. If we had the tech to control gravatics to a point where solid spheres can be constructed around planets, we probably don't even need to come into physical contact with them at all.