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Post by Kerr on Nov 7, 2017 18:17:06 GMT
Millions? Light pressure alone would result in a earth-mars hohmann in a 1000km error. The thing is, It doesn't have to be reliable, it works by fear of it working. It doesn't have to be missiles, just something simple that can operate in cold for long durations of time. Kirklin mines, blast launchers, casaba howitzers (extreme case). Pirates with nukes. Anyway, that's what I'm saying: the difference between trajectories of different ships transiting between the same destinations would require quite a lot of delta-v to correct. Kirklin mines on a specific trajectory have such a low chance of intercepting anything they are pointless. Also, the ability of the weapon platform to intercept its targets have to drive insurance payments up enough that it's not easier to just rely on insurance and tell authorities about any such demand. On the other hand, the system have to be sophisticated enough to avoid targets it rather wouldn't want to engage. Because if there is an attack on a warship, that draws attention to the criminals they would rather avoid. It also depends on the strike to be completely sudden, i.e. ship's on-board sensors unable to detect the weapon before it hits, because otherwise its trajectory will eventually betray the weapon platform itself. your intercepting a point at a time on a Hohmann orbit, you have more then twice the Dv needed to do a hohmann orbit I'm sorry, was that an answer to my question? I'm not sure I understand it, and if I do, I can't agree with it. Also, a missile with 15 km/s of delta-V and a cold gas thruster proposed earlier for stealth will have a mass ratio of 1.3 billion. So it is either insanely expensive, not stealthy or doesn't have as much delta-V (most likely two of those at once). Even a more modest 5 km/s will require a mass ratio of 1000. Define "pirates". Pirates with nukes says as much as humans with nukes, space pirates don't have any definition in this discussion. This entire idea is based on dichelbachs "Asteroid boom" scenario. Where asteroids are mined with very fragile ships, something like warships is just silly in such a scenario. It works on the simple principle, the same as somalian pirates, it's just cheaper to live with them them. All of this breaks down when you have sophisticated interplanetary travel with advanced sensors and weaponry.
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Post by EshaNas on Nov 7, 2017 18:20:32 GMT
500 years from now might be too much to predict with any certainty; OA has humanity in the nanotech age by then with at the least above-normal human intelligent AI.
If we're talking about 50 years from now, or even a 100, the average body - or cyborg body at least - might be prevalent; and electronic warfare and communications warfare might be so proficient to limit teleoperation or telecommunication with drones or so. And then we have to ask what is to fight for?
The rebellious colony is an archaic scenario. Unless Earth can arrive on Mars in days or hours, colonies won't exist; you either have bases ala Antarctica (and even those are a day away at most in an emergency, often less, though that's the benefit of jet power and global transport networks) or de-facto independent posts flying some flag of Earth or their own flag once they're self-sufficient.
By 2067, hopefully, we'll have a few manned space stations, probably another Skylab (3?), a Chinese station, a Russian station, and maybe a European or Indian station. Maybe a few civilian ones in earnest - the long awaited hotel, for example. A few bases and colonies on Mars, a base flying on Venus, a base and a spaceship factory or two on the Moon (and maybe even a space elevator there, golly!). We also probably would had visited the outer system in some HOPE mission or two.
That's not a lot to fight for. And we have to tie what happens on Earth to space still: a mid-century collapse of peak-oil or some such might severely impact humanity in space for the time being, for example.
2067 is not that far away. We've already seen how a advanced spatial presence can be delayed, if not outright destroyed, by politics on Earth. Fifty years ago, we were preparing to go to the moon. Now, we're preparing to go to Lunar orbit; with no manned presence on the Moon before the mid 2020s and no manned mars presence before the 2030s. A hopeful NASA estimate for HOPE put it in the 2040s. I doubt twenty years after that we would had done much more than a Venus base, a nuclear rocket, or so.
The time for that had long passed, IMO, when the Soviets failed to present a threat in further space with the N1 failures. If they had launched a man to the Moon, I could see the US dust off some plan for a Lunar base; thereof the Soviets might had done a manned Venus flyby or Martian landing by 1980, then we might had seen another base on Mars by the mid 80s or 90s; and then by *now* we could had been where we might be in two decades.
The situation for warfare in space is tied directly to what happens on Earth to at least springboard it. The Martian Republic isn't going to fight Venus over the antimatter farms if neither exists. Anything that's too close to Earth can be shot down by a gen 4 fighter with a ASAT. Anything farther has to at least be capable of industrial and agricultural self-sufficiency *and* growth potential.
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Post by defacto on Nov 7, 2017 19:09:35 GMT
I don't think that it's too implausible to have a large-scale space economy with many thousands of people operating in space, if we assume a bootstrapping space economy. 2067 might be a bit early but that's hard to predict. What could we have predicted about the population of the american colonies in the year 1550, 50 years earlier? Not saying that our situation now is equivalent to 1500, but I think predicting the scope of a potential interplanetary economy in 2067 runs into the same problems. The question is if enough pieces (such as sourcing materials in space, reducing launch costs, etc.) fall into place to make deep space exploitation a serious business oportunity.
We've already partially conquered Earth Orbit, but a weather satellite on its own doesn't generate much interplanetary trade. That said, start space-based water sourcing and fuel depots, and suddenly stationkeeping services for satellites start to seem like a lucrative opportunity. And if the satellite orbits don't decay, need for maintainance and upgrades is going to increase, since satellites will not be as disposable. Of course, for that to be economical, we might need to have component production in space, and raw material sourcing... and now we have everything necessary to start wondering about the feasibility of orbital shipyards...
I think that this kind of bootstrapping economy is a completely necessary factor. The USA is not going to fund NASA until NASA builds a bunch of cool stuff that makes our world become COADE, and then we can have space adventures. Anything beyond the scope of limited prestige/science expeditions and beyond Earth orbit is going to have to pay for itself. But if it does pay for itself, there's the potential for very explosive growth and a very rapid exploitation of space, and then I think that we can have a serious interplanetary economy in the second half of this century. And if that society is anything like ours, I'm pretty sure that there will be spacelegs running about with guns too.
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Post by shiolle on Nov 7, 2017 20:06:45 GMT
Define "pirates". Pirates with nukes says as much as humans with nukes, space pirates don't have any definition in this discussion. Don't mind it. Whether those are some real racketeers or a government-sponsored terrorism or interdiction or whatever, nukes seemed like an needless overkill. Even governments don't arm every group of convenient 'liberty fighters' or 'volunteers' with nukes if they can avoid it. This entire idea is based on dichelbachs "Asteroid boom" scenario. Where asteroids are mined with very fragile ships, something like warships is just silly in such a scenario. It works on the simple principle, the same as somalian pirates, it's just cheaper to live with them them. All of this breaks down when you have sophisticated interplanetary travel with advanced sensors and weaponry. Au contraire, I think warships, or at least military involvement, make a lot of sense in this scenario. If you think about it, this weapon platform hunting civilian shipping is a lot like a submarine hunting maritime shipping. Who do you think corporations will turn to after the first attacks? If mining asteroids becomes a significant part of national economy, that nation will build means to protect it. It is what happened historically, and I don't think there are any reasons for it to be different in this scenario. Not being able to protect vital economic interests from a drone some shithead placed out there really sends the wrong message to your rivals on Earth and to your own citizen. Have you heard of Cod Wars? Apparently, involved people in the UK are mad about that even today. Fittingly, after the outbreak of piracy at the beginning of this decade, navies of various nations got involved and the number of attacks, not to mention successful attacks, declined sharply after that. Not to mention that in this case you can usually start investigating on Earth. Who proposed the deal? What kind of payment they required? Who made the hardware and how was it purchased? Regular investigation in other words.
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Post by Kerr on Nov 7, 2017 20:26:14 GMT
Define "pirates". Pirates with nukes says as much as humans with nukes, space pirates don't have any definition in this discussion. Don't mind it. Whether those are some real racketeers or a government-sponsored terrorism or interdiction or whatever, nukes seemed like an needless overkill. Even governments don't arm every group of convenient 'liberty fighters' or 'volunteers' with nukes if they can avoid it. This entire idea is based on dichelbachs "Asteroid boom" scenario. Where asteroids are mined with very fragile ships, something like warships is just silly in such a scenario. It works on the simple principle, the same as somalian pirates, it's just cheaper to live with them them. All of this breaks down when you have sophisticated interplanetary travel with advanced sensors and weaponry. Au contraire, I think warships, or at least military involvement, make a lot of sense in this scenario. If you think about it, this weapon platform hunting civilian shipping is a lot like a submarine hunting maritime shipping. Who do you think corporations will turn to after the first attacks? If mining asteroids becomes a significant part of national economy, that nation will build means to protect it. It is what happened historically, and I don't think there are any reasons for it to be different in this scenario. Not being able to protect vital economic interests from a drone some shithead placed out there really sends the wrong message to your rivals on Earth and to your own citizen. Have you heard of Cod Wars? Apparently, involved people in the UK are mad about that even today. Fittingly, after the outbreak of piracy at the beginning of this decade, navies of various nations got involved and the number of attacks, not to mention successful attacks, declined sharply after that. Not to mention that in this case you can usually start investigating on Earth. Who proposed the deal? What kind of payment they required? Who made the hardware and how was it purchased? Regular investigation in other words. I ask for your definition, if asteroid mining becomes a significant part of national economics wouldn't you say it would become sophisticated interplanetary trade/travel?
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Post by omnipotentvoid on Nov 7, 2017 20:41:27 GMT
Don't mind it. Whether those are some real racketeers or a government-sponsored terrorism or interdiction or whatever, nukes seemed like an needless overkill. Even governments don't arm every group of convenient 'liberty fighters' or 'volunteers' with nukes if they can avoid it. Au contraire, I think warships, or at least military involvement, make a lot of sense in this scenario. If you think about it, this weapon platform hunting civilian shipping is a lot like a submarine hunting maritime shipping. Who do you think corporations will turn to after the first attacks? If mining asteroids becomes a significant part of national economy, that nation will build means to protect it. It is what happened historically, and I don't think there are any reasons for it to be different in this scenario. Not being able to protect vital economic interests from a drone some shithead placed out there really sends the wrong message to your rivals on Earth and to your own citizen. Have you heard of Cod Wars? Apparently, involved people in the UK are mad about that even today. Fittingly, after the outbreak of piracy at the beginning of this decade, navies of various nations got involved and the number of attacks, not to mention successful attacks, declined sharply after that. Not to mention that in this case you can usually start investigating on Earth. Who proposed the deal? What kind of payment they required? Who made the hardware and how was it purchased? Regular investigation in other words. I ask for your definition, if asteroid mining becomes a significant part of national economics wouldn't you say it would become sophisticated interplanetary trade/travel? The moment asteroid mining becomes significant, is the moment it becomes more sensible to start prioritizing space stations over planets. Significant mining activity means that technology has advanced enough to allow for planet independant life support and like I said, it's significantly easier just to mine and use resources outside of gravity wells. That means stations clustered around high resource areas, all of them with laser defense grids tracking anything larger than a pebble within 100km. Not an ideal environment for piracy.
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Post by shiolle on Nov 7, 2017 21:45:07 GMT
I ask for your definition, if asteroid mining becomes a significant part of national economics wouldn't you say it would become sophisticated interplanetary trade/travel? Definition of piracy? I think I would go with something like this: "Space piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence upon a space craft or space installation by a another ship or through target's communication channels with the goal of stealing cargo, the ship itself or other valuable items or properties." Regarding your question, the answer is no. Asteroid mining can become a significant part of national economy without significant human presence in space. P.S. On the topic of near-future space exploitation I can't recommend enough the boardgame called High Frontier. Made by an astronomer Phil Eklund, it has all our favorite engine technologies like NSWR, Orion, light sails, etc. and a very clever Solar System map. It may be too costly to get a physical copy, but there are multiple PC implementations for Vassal, Tabletop Simulator and CyberBoard.
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Post by EshaNas on Nov 8, 2017 12:19:06 GMT
With SSTOs; we could see a mix of environmentalism and consumption demanding off-world metal mining, if not even production, all to return to Earth. Especially if there's still a huge disparity in living standards and demand is high to drive development and consumption. (Though this would be far more logical with space elevators or skyhooks, as SSTOs can still, well, burn up on re-entry or explode or bounce off and are limited in cargo capacity).
It would require a mix of culture and economics and politics, but you could have a few dirty rocks providing for Earth quite easily; so long as you get huge SSTOs or metallic hydrogen or some sort of ubercarbon nanotube to make a elevator allowing for easy imports. Voila, now you have something to fight over/hinder with consequences that can easily spiral out of control (Oh, no, the Synoecism is targeting the space elevator itself in a burnt-earth strategy! We need to stop them!).
There's also the related Space Guard/Orbit Guard setup where moving all these rocks around makes some call for fleets of coast-guard esque vessels watching each other and the trajectory of any rock being moved/mined out of mistrust and redundancy and safety.
That doesn't circle back to infantry, of course, unless the asteroids are a pain to get to in the first place and thus capturing them outright with a few specialized units might be worth the trouble, but it does allow for space warfare and thievery of goods.
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Post by treptoplax on Nov 8, 2017 16:26:09 GMT
So much of this depends on details of politics that'll be influenced by tech in ways that are hard to forsee even if we knew what the technology was.
For example, if there's heavy taxation on shipments of goods to far-flung regions, we might see smugglers who would be reluctant to call on the Navy for assistance, and a Navy which is more-or-less OK with pirates who keep their heads down acting as an alternative minimum tax on the smugglers without the Navy having to get their hands dirty or expend limited budgets patrolling ignorant and ungrateful backwaters.
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Post by dichebach on Nov 8, 2017 19:58:59 GMT
If it is completely impractical is debatable. Everything is debatable, but given something resembling COADE I think it's pretty obvious (with the reasoning above) that it is completel y impractical for pirates and only very marginally maybe practical for someone with a large amount of resources, like a nation. I'm really grasping at straws to find some kind of near-future setting where this type of piracy would be even marginally practical. It's just so completely riddled with failure points and sensitive. Space combined with the technology needed for space travel simply lends itself too well for surveillance and control for this to be possible without some serious magitech/plot-tech.
I could maybe imagine some other types of criminality that could work, based in messy environments like the inside of a station (still a lot easier to control than something on Earth), or maybe some really forlorn-hope style stuff where the people doing the crime don't expect to survive but do it for some cause... I do think that space criminality might be a possibility, just not your brand of piracy.
You accept the near future solar system ecology as portrayed in Children of a Dead Earth as gospel. Not everyone does. It is a great and fun game, and much of the engineering and physics stuff are incredibly rigorous. Beyond that, it is no more "realistic" than the Fallout Universe, no offense meant to Qswitched. It is a work of fiction and the solar system ecology it portrays is strictly fictional.
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Post by Kerr on Nov 8, 2017 20:29:43 GMT
Everything is debatable, but given something resembling COADE I think it's pretty obvious (with the reasoning above) that it is completel y impractical for pirates and only very marginally maybe practical for someone with a large amount of resources, like a nation. I'm really grasping at straws to find some kind of near-future setting where this type of piracy would be even marginally practical. It's just so completely riddled with failure points and sensitive. Space combined with the technology needed for space travel simply lends itself too well for surveillance and control for this to be possible without some serious magitech/plot-tech.
I could maybe imagine some other types of criminality that could work, based in messy environments like the inside of a station (still a lot easier to control than something on Earth), or maybe some really forlorn-hope style stuff where the people doing the crime don't expect to survive but do it for some cause... I do think that space criminality might be a possibility, just not your brand of piracy.
You accept the near future solar system ecology as portrayed in Children of a Dead Earth as gospel. Not everyone does. It is a great and fun game, and much of the engineering and physics stuff are incredibly rigorous. Beyond that, it is no more "realistic" than the Fallout Universe, no offense meant to Qswitched. It is a work of fiction and the solar system ecology it portrays is strictly fictional. Damn, didn't know CDE is as realistic as sprinting around with 436lbs of equipment, while wearing an blue overall and firing nuclear footballs around like a maniac, eating dozens of 200 year old packeted dishes to heal yourself from a .50 BMG wound, and punching a genetically modified 3 meter tall soldier with a mech suit as tough as an tank to death with your bare hands. All in the same day.
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Post by dichebach on Nov 8, 2017 21:19:45 GMT
You accept the near future solar system ecology as portrayed in Children of a Dead Earth as gospel. Not everyone does. It is a great and fun game, and much of the engineering and physics stuff are incredibly rigorous. Beyond that, it is no more "realistic" than the Fallout Universe, no offense meant to Qswitched. It is a work of fiction and the solar system ecology it portrays is strictly fictional. Damn, didn't know CDE is as realistic as sprinting around with 436lbs of equipment, while wearing an blue overall and firing nuclear footballs around like a maniac, eating dozens of 200 year old packeted dishes to heal yourself from a .50 BMG wound, and punching a genetically modified 3 meter tall soldier with a mech suit as tough as an tank to death with your bare hands. All in the same day. Well what do you think those 150 million citizens living on Luna are up to!? 436 lbs should be no problem if you are well-fed on a diet of pond-scum derivatives and have spent enough time on the micro-gee bicycle!
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Post by Kerr on Nov 8, 2017 21:45:00 GMT
Damn, didn't know CDE is as realistic as sprinting around with 436lbs of equipment, while wearing an blue overall and firing nuclear footballs around like a maniac, eating dozens of 200 year old packeted dishes to heal yourself from a .50 BMG wound, and punching a genetically modified 3 meter tall soldier with a mech suit as tough as an tank to death with your bare hands. All in the same day. Well what do you think those 150 million citizens living on Luna are up to!? 436 lbs should be no problem if you are well-fed on a diet of pond-scum derivatives and have spent enough time on the micro-gee bicycle! Standing with 436lbs shouldn't be that hard, but moving with it is as much hard on Luna than Anywhere Else in the solar system.
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Post by defacto on Nov 8, 2017 21:45:12 GMT
You accept the near future solar system ecology as portrayed in Children of a Dead Earth as gospel. Not everyone does. It is a great and fun game, and much of the engineering and physics stuff are incredibly rigorous. Beyond that, it is no more "realistic" than the Fallout Universe, no offense meant to Qswitched. It is a work of fiction and the solar system ecology it portrays is strictly fictional. If there's no people in space, there's not going to be people with guns in space either. I think a well-populated solar system like that in COADE is required for the concept of space infantry to make sense. I'm not sure what you mean with me 'accepting' something, I certainly don't think that it necessarily is the future, but assuming it is a prerequisite for this discussion, IMO.
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Post by EshaNas on Nov 9, 2017 1:44:55 GMT
So much of this depends on details of politics that'll be influenced by tech in ways that are hard to forsee even if we knew what the technology was. For example, if there's heavy taxation on shipments of goods to far-flung regions, we might see smugglers who would be reluctant to call on the Navy for assistance, and a Navy which is more-or-less OK with pirates who keep their heads down acting as an alternative minimum tax on the smugglers without the Navy having to get their hands dirty or expend limited budgets patrolling ignorant and ungrateful backwaters. It is fortunate that politics, cultures, motivations, and personal quirks driving people - all which influence each other in some sort of order - are far more known than humanity in space as a whole. One can pick a date to split off from and draw up a scenario quite easily and readily. Maybe environmentalism really did kick off in the 70s, maybe the Soviets didn't muck up their manned programs and the US/capitalist world kept on pushing forward, maybe the BIS shoved a man into a V2 or so rocket right after the war for reasons, maybe the Nazis took to space than burning down Europe, maybe Musk or some unknown visionary really did kick off New Space, so on and so on.
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