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Post by mofosyne on Jan 16, 2019 15:49:53 GMT
What would be an interesting thought to see if feasible... is if it makes sense to have a spaceship that is essentially an exposed truss, but with lots of droppods attached for planetary invasions.
You could then attach drop pods of various kinds useful for an invasion. I was thinking if it should be a liftoff capable spaceship, rather than a single use drop pod. But I think that considering the complexity and the amount of fuel you have to lug both ways, it makes sense to just fully commit to an invasion if you really want to do that. Else just nuke the planet would be the best option.
Hopefully a failed invasion doesn't lead to just killing all prisoners of war. Maybe there is a law of war in space still.
As for why carry multiple droppods? Because you don't necessarily want to focus all your invasion force on just one drop pods.
Some characteristics to consider: * Should this be like a hypersonic glider? * Droppods that breaks open in flight to expose atmospheric fighter jets, for the initial invasion phase. (Fighter jets are more suited than spaceship in atmosphere). * For places with liquid, should droppods be able to carry boats or maybe even aircraft carriers? * Perhaps cruise missiles can be deployed via this system? Or is it pointless if you can just use standard space to ground nukes (Like normal ICBMs)? * Decoy droppods made of aluminum foil balloons to confuse defence systems.
As for motivations for using this instead of just nuking the planet?: * Nukes are bad PR * Want to retain certain infrastructure (e.g. Planetary defence weapons). * Laws of war
How may this fit into CoAD gameplay? Maybe you need to defend the droppod carrier from land and space weapons, until it is able to deploy enough droppods to overwhelm land defence. The player characters may be able to control where to send the drop pods but aside from that, they don't have much control over the land invasion (Which would keep the complexity of the game low. No need to make this a full on RTS).
Maybe even after the pods have landed and a land battle is occurring, you may get the occasionally get a few request for an orbital strike (You guns or nukes has got to be pretty accurate in space right? Why not space to land as well?). Which would require you to get into position to provide a couple of orbital strikes, while fending off other spacecraft in space.
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Post by tepidbread on Jan 16, 2019 16:24:40 GMT
In Children of a Dead Earth, the Earth is dead. There are mostly moons and lower G planets. So, even suicide burning from orbit would be a fairly slow process. The drop pod would actively need to burn towards the planet then suicide burn to prevent it from smashing into the surface too fast. Given the logistical requirement for this (and the chance of them getting shot down) it may just be easier to nuke the planet/moon/asteroid from orbit with standard nukes take over whatever is left at a later point. The extra mass from a ton of drop ships would likely compromise a fleet's ability to evade enemies or hinder it's combat ability. No point in having an dedicated drop ship if it gets destroyed in orbit. Also nukes are much less effective in space or really thin atmospheres like Mars. It would be much easier to control what gets destroyed and what doesn't with nukes in space than on earth.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 16, 2019 17:36:23 GMT
Going to have to agree with tepidbread, at least in a general sense. Nukes and megameter ranged lasers in orbit are most likely what you would use to enforce blockades and foreign policy in a general sense, but at some point in the occupation you are probably also going to want 'boots on the ground' to enforce law. I put 'boots on the ground' in air quotes, because I think it would most likely be done with wheeled and/or bipedal drones wielding anything from tear gas to tasers to conventional guns. You could have a purpose built 'drone carrier' in orbit with dozens or hundreds of drone operators controlling hundreds to thousands of occupying drones. The drones could be anything from shoe box sized to human sized to small car sized depending on what specifically you needed them to do and what kind of operational range you needed them to have, which would be entirely dependent on what the infrastructure you are trying to occupy consists of. This is also highly dependent on how armed and/or resourceful and/or motivated the populace is, so this is all highly speculative.
A drone controller craft in low orbit with a small number of tiny relay satellites should only have milliseconds of latency with the ground, I see no reason to land human soldiers.
One drop pod or a small number should be plenty, it's not a lot of redundancy but you could land it kilometers away from the target with the orbiting fleets megameter lasers providing cover, and then 'march' the drones over to the target. The drop pod doesn't need to be in harms way, hidden missile batteries can be delt with by supporting laser fire, hidden railgun batteries would probably be a problem for any kind of landing craft at all if they somehow went unnoticed.
The 'drop pods' or 'drop ships' or 'drone landers' or whatever you want to call them would in some cases have to be purpose built. Most any atmosphere-less low gravity rock will be relatively easy to land on, but a floating colony in the upper atmosphere of Venus would require a purpose built lander. It could be reasonably assumed that a high altitude Venus colony might also have it's own low orbit space station as well as civilian launch infrastructure to move goods to and from the colony, in which case is might be a lot easier to board the orbital space station, cease the civilian landing craft, and then use it as your drone lander.
Small RTG's and/or beamed power will probably be your drones power source of choice. In the inner solar system you might be able to get away with solar collectors, either as prefabricated deploy-able recharging stations on the ground or as prefabricated deploy-able orbital beamed power satellites. Larger drones will probably always have RTG's and the drone controller craft itself should probably always be built with a reactor that can run for decades without refueling.
A potentially interesting and tangentially related topic is fleet tenders. There will probably at some point need to be ships (either purpose built or commandeered from the civilian merchant fleet) for the purpose of restocking warships super optimized 6 month run time reactors with fissile fuel, for rotating out crews after months or years of service, and for restocking rations.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 16, 2019 18:03:05 GMT
* Droppods that breaks open in flight to expose atmospheric fighter jets, for the initial invasion phase. (Fighter jets are more suited than spaceship in atmosphere). * For places with liquid, should droppods be able to carry boats or maybe even aircraft carriers? * Want to retain certain infrastructure (e.g. Planetary defence weapons). How may this fit into CoAD gameplay? Maybe you need to defend the droppod carrier from land and space weapons, until it is able to deploy enough droppods to overwhelm land defence. The player characters may be able to control where to send the drop pods but aside from that, they don't have much control over the land invasion (Which would keep the complexity of the game low. No need to make this a full on RTS). Maybe even after the pods have landed and a land battle is occurring, you may get the occasionally get a few request for an orbital strike (You guns or nukes has got to be pretty accurate in space right? Why not space to land as well?). Which would require you to get into position to provide a couple of orbital strikes, while fending off other spacecraft in space. First* Well unless the atmosphere you are dropping into contains an oxidiser you can forget air breathing engines, unless you want specifically air breathing NTR's (which are a thing that have been tested.) Unless the atmosphere is dense like Earths or Venuses winged craft still don't make much sense, though you could probably find applications for high altitude balloons on Mars.
Second* That would only be a concern at all on Earth and Titan, unless you did some pretty major teraforming. Even then Titan isn't completely covered like Earth, it has a few large lakes and one river that we are currently aware of.
Third* The planetary defenses are probably going to be shooting at you, the only infrastructure you would want to retain are going to be civilian in nature. Mining, launch systems, factories, housing, workforce, power plants, ect.. Ceasing civilian infrastructure alone is plenty of reason to not break everything if the local population doesn't want to be nuked, and the local population probably won't want to be nuked.
As for implementation into game play: Good luck? There are sooooooooooo many variables to consider here that I wouldn't even know where to begin constructing this system. This is a whole other game in itself.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 17, 2019 21:47:29 GMT
Classical planetary invasions will be exceptional circumstances for spacefaring civilisations; if possible, it's probably preferable to live in space habitats. Both these habs and most natural celestial bodies are low-gravity enough that assaulting them is similar to boarding a ship, with contained atmosphere in enclosed spaces. Large atmospheric planets like Earth are a separate case demanding speciality equipment; the low number of such bodies in the Solar System makes this scenario slightly out of scope for CDE. Having surface installations like missile silos added as a new unit type would be good, but the implementation of direct combat with them into the simulation doesn't strike me as entirely feasible.
For assaulting large planets, minimalist trusswork ships with pods would be adequate as they needn't arrive until warships have defeated the planetary defences, but it may make more sense to have capital ship sized aircraft (imagine a mating of the Space Shuttle and Airbus Beluga) that can land large payloads in one go, then either return (from Titan and Venus sky colonies) or be dismantled and their parts used for other things (on Earth and Venus surface). When you perform a landing you need a concentration of forces to maintain a small perimeter able to repel attacks from local ground forces before expanding via received reinforcements, so the decentralised nature of drop pods isn't required unless you're doing special forces. Most planets will have spaceports with mass driver facilities, I guess; this is an obvious locus of attack if they can be captured intact. The majority of firepower supporting an invasion can come directly from warships in orbit, which enjoy a perfect view of the enemy and can just dump munitions on them the moment anything fires or moves; anything from basic kinetics and lasers to guided space-to-air missiles; even minelayers to deny avenues of counterattack (see CBU-89/B). This completely frees the landing forces from needing artillery or attack aircraft, so they can be formed up entirely of direct assault groups. I think it's probable that the majority of planetary resistance would occur in orbit without the involvement of landing forces, with the defender rapidly collapsing and capitulating if their ability to resist spacecraft is broken.
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Post by gyratron on Jan 20, 2019 2:59:01 GMT
I don't think space to ground fire support will be quite so omnipotent as you imagine, though it could certainly be important. First, space battleships will not have a perfect view of the enemy- they can't see soldiers hiding in buildings or forests and will likely have difficulty finding targets even in the open if there is a lot of ground clutter or bad weather, or indeed if they are hiding among civilians. Even if you can see something to shoot at it (perhaps with the help of airborne recon drones) the ability of artillery or airborne CAS to respond in seconds is still valuable, when in the worst case a spacecraft might take half an hour or more to lob a missile down. If the defender has access to surface to space missiles then they can potentially force space support ships to retreat to higher orbits where response times and laser effectiveness will be even worse.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 20, 2019 5:42:18 GMT
I don't think space to ground fire support will be quite so omnipotent as you imagine, though it could certainly be important. First, space battleships will not have a perfect view of the enemy- they can't see soldiers hiding in buildings or forests and will likely have difficulty finding targets even in the open if there is a lot of ground clutter or bad weather, or indeed if they are hiding among civilians. Even if you can see something to shoot at it (perhaps with the help of airborne recon drones) the ability of artillery or airborne CAS to respond in seconds is still valuable, when in the worst case a spacecraft might take half an hour or more to lob a missile down. If the defender has access to surface to space missiles then they can potentially force space support ships to retreat to higher orbits where response times and laser effectiveness will be even worse. True, but the drop ship landing the drone troops can relay all of the appropriate targeting information that would be needed to the orbital fleet. If you could build an orbital ship that was all seeing it could probably also do most of your low level law enforcement from orbit by individually targeting lawbreakers with particle beams. I still think flying drones would be most worth their mass in the applications of surveillance, ground drones handling enforcement, and the orbital fleet providing fire support. The main advantages of making all of your artillery orbital is trying to out range counter battery fire and give your point defenses as much warning as possible, and having the fast response time to anywhere on the planet you are in low orbit of. Plus atmospheric flying drones or ground drones moving hundreds of tons of equipment around doesn't sound very efficient.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 20, 2019 7:04:01 GMT
I don't think space to ground fire support will be quite so omnipotent as you imagine, though it could certainly be important. First, space battleships will not have a perfect view of the enemy- they can't see soldiers hiding in buildings or forests and will likely have difficulty finding targets even in the open if there is a lot of ground clutter or bad weather, or indeed if they are hiding among civilians. Even if you can see something to shoot at it (perhaps with the help of airborne recon drones) the ability of artillery or airborne CAS to respond in seconds is still valuable, when in the worst case a spacecraft might take half an hour or more to lob a missile down. If the defender has access to surface to space missiles then they can potentially force space support ships to retreat to higher orbits where response times and laser effectiveness will be even worse. Imagine all the advantages of air superiority with the firepower and staying power of naval assets. It's not omnipotent, but it is very promising. I agree that lobbing missiles has a lot of lag time, so it seems mostly useful against hardened emplacements or stationary targets. Orbital laser beams pretty much instantly reach their targets though.
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Post by Anon1 on Jan 21, 2019 18:16:29 GMT
What would be an interesting thought to see if feasible... is if it makes sense to have a spaceship that is essentially an exposed truss, but with lots of droppods attached for planetary invasions. You could then attach drop pods of various kinds useful for an invasion. I was thinking if it should be a liftoff capable spaceship, rather than a single use drop pod. But I think that considering the complexity and the amount of fuel you have to lug both ways, it makes sense to just fully commit to an invasion if you really want to do that. Else just nuke the planet would be the best option. Hopefully a failed invasion doesn't lead to just killing all prisoners of war. Maybe there is a law of war in space still. As for why carry multiple droppods? Because you don't necessarily want to focus all your invasion force on just one drop pods. Some characteristics to consider: * Should this be like a hypersonic glider? * Droppods that breaks open in flight to expose atmospheric fighter jets, for the initial invasion phase. (Fighter jets are more suited than spaceship in atmosphere). * For places with liquid, should droppods be able to carry boats or maybe even aircraft carriers? * Perhaps cruise missiles can be deployed via this system? Or is it pointless if you can just use standard space to ground nukes (Like normal ICBMs)? * Decoy droppods made of aluminum foil balloons to confuse defence systems. As for motivations for using this instead of just nuking the planet?: * Nukes are bad PR * Want to retain certain infrastructure (e.g. Planetary defence weapons). * Laws of war How may this fit into CoAD gameplay? Maybe you need to defend the droppod carrier from land and space weapons, until it is able to deploy enough droppods to overwhelm land defence. The player characters may be able to control where to send the drop pods but aside from that, they don't have much control over the land invasion (Which would keep the complexity of the game low. No need to make this a full on RTS). Maybe even after the pods have landed and a land battle is occurring, you may get the occasionally get a few request for an orbital strike (You guns or nukes has got to be pretty accurate in space right? Why not space to land as well?). Which would require you to get into position to provide a couple of orbital strikes, while fending off other spacecraft in space. A) No one is going to go around nuking planets unless you are fighting aliens, in which case you are talking about interstellar spaceships with ludicrous power levels.
B) It is mostly pointless as DEWs from nuclear powered spacecraft are destructive enough. C) Every spaceship will carry the space equivalent of helicopters. Spaceships will not land, but will have a need to ferry supplies and personnel from ship to planet/station/moon/base/whatever, and to do inspections of civilian craft or boarding operations. This means that they will all have some capacity to land ground troops. If you arm these helicopter equivalent shuttles then you have dropships of scifi-lore.
D) You are not going to land ground troops until after planetary defenses have been suppressed unless you hate your ground troops and don't care about unnecessary loses.
E) The main battle for a planet or whatever will happen in orbit. Ground troops are for mop up operations and securing positive control over anything that you don't want to vaporize. F) Orbital bombardment of the drop zone to clear away any hidden defenders will precede any deployment of ground troops.
G) You will land away from population centers to create a beachhead that you can expand.
Nukes and megameter ranged lasers in orbit are most likely what you would use to enforce blockades and foreign policy in a general sense,
A) The term megameter is so annoying. Does anyone know anyone that actually uses that term in real life? B) Nukes in space are prohibited by international law and I don't see that changing in the future.
C) Even a 4.2 GW laser would deliver 3.6 kilotons per hour, 86.4 kilotons per day, 2.592 megatons per month, and 31.536 megatons per year to ground targets. In other words, it would be more destructive than all the militaries that fought in World War 2.
D) Any fleet of nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft could level a planetary civilization from orbit with DEWs, so there is really no need for nukes.
E) If we go big with spacecraft sizes and reach the terawatt level, then you can drill through the planet's crust and create your own volcanoes; so underground bunkers would not even help defenders.
F) Underwater bunkers are probably the safest place to hide.
G) Once a fleet has established orbital superiority, you are pretty much left at the mercy of the attackers.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 21, 2019 18:40:22 GMT
A) No one is going to go around nuking planets unless you are fighting aliens, in which case you are talking about interstellar spaceships with ludicrous power levels. B) It is mostly pointless as DEWs from nuclear powered spacecraft are destructive enough. C) Every spaceship will carry the space equivalent of helicopters. Spaceships will not land, but will have a need to ferry supplies and personnel from ship to planet/station/moon/base/whatever, and to do inspections of civilian craft or boarding operations. This means that they will all have some capacity to land ground troops. If you arm these helicopter equivalent shuttles then you have dropships of scifi-lore. D) You are not going to land ground troops until after planetary defenses have been suppressed unless you hate your ground troops and don't care about unnecessary loses. E) The main battle for a planet or whatever will happen in orbit. Ground troops are for mop up operations and securing positive control over anything that you don't want to vaporize. F) Orbital bombardment of the drop zone to clear away any hidden defenders will precede any deployment of ground troops. G) You will land away from population centers to create a beachhead that you can expand. A) The term megameter is so annoying. Does anyone know anyone that actually uses that term in real life? B) Nukes in space are prohibited by international law and I don't see that changing in the future. C) Even a 4.2 GW laser would deliver 3.6 kilotons per hour, 86.4 kilotons per day, 2.592 megatons per month, and 31.536 megatons per year to ground targets. In other words, it would be more destructive than all the militaries that fought in World War 2. D) Any fleet of nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft could level a planetary civilization from orbit with DEWs, so there is really no need for nukes. E) If we go big with spacecraft sizes and reach the terawatt level, then you can drill through the planet's crust and create your own volcanoes; so underground bunkers would not even help defenders. F) Underwater bunkers are probably the safest place to hide. G) Once a fleet has established orbital superiority, you are pretty much left at the mercy of the attackers. A1: I pretty much agree. B1: True, and DEWs have a shorter time to hit. C1: For this, I personally envision laser thermal rockets with air breathing capability. Meshes well with your warships carrying large lasers around. D1: True. F1: Makes sense. G1: Makes sense. Urban combat is a pain. Doing so to secure your base perimeter would be insanity. A2: No, I don't. CoaDE does though. B2: I partially agree. It's not likely to change soon but eternity is a long time. C2: While I agree that orbital DEWs would be highly effective, their effect also shouldn't be overstated. Energy spread out over large periods of time is less damaging than energy deposited in a short amount of time. Though the ability to keep firing as long as your reactors can keep pumping out juice is an often overlooked advantage of lasers. D2: You could most assuredly disassemble their civilization, but I'm not so sure how effective lasers would be against underground bunkers. E2: /doubt. F2: Probably. Have you seen MatterBeams blog posts on laser submarines? G2: I largely agree, but I recommend Matterbeam's blog post on laser submarines.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 21, 2019 19:07:26 GMT
Nukes and megameter ranged lasers in orbit are most likely what you would use to enforce blockades and foreign policy in a general sense,
A) The term megameter is so annoying. Does anyone know anyone that actually uses that term in real life? B) Nukes in space are prohibited by international law and I don't see that changing in the future.
C) Even a 4.2 GW laser would deliver 3.6 kilotons per hour, 86.4 kilotons per day, 2.592 megatons per month, and 31.536 megatons per year to ground targets. In other words, it would be more destructive than all the militaries that fought in World War 2.
D) Any fleet of nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft could level a planetary civilization from orbit with DEWs, so there is really no need for nukes.
E) If we go big with spacecraft sizes and reach the terawatt level, then you can drill through the planet's crust and create your own volcanoes; so underground bunkers would not even help defenders.
F) Underwater bunkers are probably the safest place to hide.
G) Once a fleet has established orbital superiority, you are pretty much left at the mercy of the attackers.
A) Would you prefer kilokilometer? Megameter is easy enough to interpret and a better economy of letters then one thousand kilometers. I'm not sorry. B) All wars start with someone violating a treaty. Gentlemans agreements might be maintained for morale purposes but tend to be thrown out the window as soon as it makes a difference in weather or not you are going to lose. C) Entirely fair point. D) Having multiple different means of delivering effect on target still has value in an of itself. Missiles are still a threat that can not be ignored, even if all they end up doing is giving the defenders an overwhelming number of targets that still means those weapon systems are tied up not attacking the enemy fleet. E) Entirely fair point in the context of once terawatt level literally 'fears nothing' dreadnoughts become the standard, before that not so much. Even then hidden ground emplacements may still have value in being just hidden if not actually 'fortified' relative to the attacking fleets weapon systems. F) Probably, but there are few places in our solar system where that's currently even an option, so this is very context dependent. Arguably just hiding things deep enough in a gas giants atmosphere would have largely the same effect, and at least in the context of our solar system you would have more real estate to work with. G) Completely agree, my post was more about speculating how they would go about doing that. You're probably going to want to enforce law at some point during your planetary occupation, especially so if you're wanting to use the workforce and infrastructure you have just invested so much in ceasing to continue your war effort in other theaters. One law breaker in a building or underground habitat housing thousands is probably not something you would target with a laser from orbit. Ground drones and tasers and gas and conventional guns and what not will probably still be employed.
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Post by bigbombr on Jan 21, 2019 19:45:46 GMT
A) Would you prefer kilokilometer? Megameter is easy enough to interpret and a better economy of letters then one thousand kilometers. I'm not sorry. B) All wars start with someone violating a treaty. Gentlemans agreements might be maintained for morale purposes but tend to be thrown out the window as soon as it makes a difference in weather or not you are going to lose. C) Entirely fair point. D) Having multiple different means of delivering effect on target still has value in an of itself. Missiles are still a threat that can not be ignored, even if all they end up doing is giving the defenders an overwhelming number of targets that still means those weapon systems are tied up not attacking the enemy fleet. E) Entirely fair point in the context of once terawatt level literally 'fears nothing' dreadnoughts become the standard, before that not so much. Even then hidden ground emplacements may still have value in being just hidden if not actually 'fortified' relative to the attacking fleets weapon systems. F) Probably, but there are few places in our solar system where that's currently even an option, so this is very context dependent. Arguably just hiding things deep enough in a gas giants atmosphere would have largely the same effect, and at least in the context of our solar system you would have more real estate to work with. G) Completely agree, my post was more about speculating how they would go about doing that. You're probably going to want to enforce law at some point during your planetary occupation, especially so if you're wanting to use the workforce and infrastructure you have just invested so much in ceasing to continue your war effort in other theaters. One law breaker in a building or underground habitat housing thousands is probably not something you would target with a laser from orbit. Ground drones and tasers and gas and conventional guns and what not will probably still be employed. I mostly agree with your points, but about D: True, but the main use of missiles in an orbit-to-surface application that I foresee would be to defeat hardened installations lasers might have trouble cracking and serving as bait for hidden ground side defensive systems that than can be targeted by the lasers.
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Post by airc777 on Jan 21, 2019 20:03:27 GMT
D) Having multiple different means of delivering effect on target still has value in an of itself. Missiles are still a threat that can not be ignored, even if all they end up doing is giving the defenders an overwhelming number of targets that still means those weapon systems are tied up not attacking the enemy fleet. I mostly agree with your points, but about D: True, but the main use of missiles in an orbit-to-surface application that I foresee would be to defeat hardened installations lasers might have trouble cracking and serving as bait for hidden ground side defensive systems that than can be targeted by the lasers. Completely agree. I proposed a deliberately worst case scenario in which it was expected that the missiles would not reach their target as a thought experiment to show how they would still have value in at least being a threat that can not be ignored. If they actually can reach their intended target that just adds more value in being a second weapon delivery system for applications in which lasers are not optimal, as you suggest.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Jan 26, 2019 9:28:56 GMT
Even then hidden ground emplacements may still have value in being just hidden if not actually 'fortified' relative to the attacking fleets weapon systems. That's why Russia has a lot of trucks that can just roam the wilderness and pop off a missile from a random location if it comes to fighting. I expect ground operations in the context of a space war to be extremely mobile, using a lot of 'fire and move' capable systems like the Archer. A) Would you prefer kilokilometer? Megameter is easy enough to interpret and a better economy of letters then one thousand kilometers. I'm not sorry. Money is sometimes specified in kk amounts, incidentally, so that could actually happen, lol.
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Post by cipherpunks on Jan 27, 2019 15:34:41 GMT
Money is sometimes specified in kk amounts, incidentally Please all, don't, just don't, because of momentarily impending dumbification that'll imminently follow. I repeat, no kk, ok? Gg, bb.
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