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Post by Pttg on Nov 28, 2018 19:57:04 GMT
Suppose you wanted to defend a position, but knew that the enemy would destroy your fleet with ease. Or maybe you don't even have a fleet, and want to deny the enemy access to your orbital domain.
One way to do so would be to launch super-chilled missiles that sit in space at background temperatures and await enemy detection. To launch them, build a nice hot missile bus that pushes the pre-chilled missiles off the deck in pairs. Rely on the bus being so hot and noisy that it's difficult to guess what the orbit and mass of the projectiles are.
Your missiles, in turn, just sit in space, orbiting your favorite rock and looking passively for heat sources. If a hot one gets too close to your rock and you aren't transmitting a "stand down" code, the missile automaticaly gives an enthusiastic hello to the visitor.
Yes, one space mine would be unlikely to survive, let alone harm the enemy. But 3000, coming from every orbital trajectory?
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Post by airc777 on Nov 28, 2018 21:08:49 GMT
If we're talking for defensive purposes wouldn't it be easier to build railgun or laser installations on the surface of or inside many asteroids and small moons? They won't exactly be stealth, or mobile, but you could have bunkers with dozens or hundreds of meters of armor. The railguns or lasers that you would need to do counter battery fire effectively would be comparatively very large if you had to also build a ship and fly them into range. Nukes wouldn't need to be amazingly large to defeat them but these are purpose built defensive installations, they are going to have point defenses.
If we're talking offensively then I suppose you could hypothetically build swarms of missiles or drones less then 100kg with RTG's and MPD's and dozens of km/s of delta V and attack from many different vectors from outside of a planets gravity well. But that's entirely reliant on the enemy just not having enough sensors or not having enough point defenses.
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Post by airc777 on Nov 29, 2018 15:09:09 GMT
Now that I'm awake and thinking clearly I'm going to have to do a retort of my own earlier point. Static defensive installations on asteroids and small moons would probably be significantly less useful then I made them out to be. Because the asteroid can not maneuver and has a known orbit and is relatively large it would be highly vulnerable to high mass kinetic kill vehicles from far outside their own effective range. You could just use a small rocket to put 10 kilograms of osmium on a high speed intercept with the defensive installation and that should be plenty to defeat most bunkers. Actively targeting the projectile with point defenses is at most just going to break the single large object on an intercept trajectory into many smaller objects on an intercept trajectory. Building defensive installations only really makes sense if the installation is more valuable to the enemy intact then destroyed, I.E. if you just added some point defenses to an existing mining infrastructure or a space elevator. Then what it does is just make the civilian infrastructure harder to occupy.
Really micro drone and missile swarms are just a question of how good is your targets ability to detect and track them and how good is their point defenses. Making a visual shield of vanta black and keeping it between the target and the payload and actively cooling it to background temperature while radiating heat directly away from the target may or may not be viable but it's entirely dependent on the target.
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Post by thorneel on Nov 29, 2018 22:43:32 GMT
(For reference : toughsf.blogspot.com/search?q=stealth ) Stealth ambushers are interesting as the bigger they are, the more autonomy they have. But if they get too big, they start being detectable through occlusion as longer and longer distance (limited by light diffraction, similarly to laser divergence). So we may have the space equivalent of modern submarines, both attack and ICBM-launching (well, IPBM-launching) ones. We may even have the equivalent of WWII Kriegsmarine submarine tenders, giant hidden stations for smaller units to refuel. Anti-ship stealth mines would be the attack submarine equivalents, and may have similar constraints: small ones with low autonomy for short-range work like defending a Hill sphere, equivalent to today's diesel-electric subs doing coastal defence. Bigger ones equivalent to long-range nuclear attack submarines, capable of patrolling the system. The main weapon would probably be long-range stealth torpedoes/cruise missiles: the command/carrier ship closes in on the target, takes the decision to fire, releases the torps and moves out. Short-range weapons may be installed for last-ditch defence, similar to anti-aircraft missiles on modern subs, but those would probably be a waste of mass: a detected stealth craft is a dead stealth craft anyway. Depending on details, they could also take on the anti-stealth craft patrol duty, like attack subs patrolling against missile-launching subs. The attack and detection duties would probably be separated, so this would actually be done by sensor platforms, or stealth sensor drones with stealth motherships, but depending on details, it could make sense to equip those with weapons as well if they are light enough - or even turn them into missiles. There could also be the same balance of terror, with ICBMs replaced with stealth IPBM and the same mutually assured destruction.
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Post by doctorsquared on Nov 30, 2018 2:56:35 GMT
Suppose you wanted to defend a position, but knew that the enemy would destroy your fleet with ease. Or maybe you don't even have a fleet, and want to deny the enemy access to your orbital domain.
One way to do so would be to launch super-chilled missiles that sit in space at background temperatures and await enemy detection. To launch them, build a nice hot missile bus that pushes the pre-chilled missiles off the deck in pairs. Rely on the bus being so hot and noisy that it's difficult to guess what the orbit and mass of the projectiles are.
Your missiles, in turn, just sit in space, orbiting your favorite rock and looking passively for heat sources. If a hot one gets too close to your rock and you aren't transmitting a "stand down" code, the missile automaticaly gives an enthusiastic hello to the visitor.
Yes, one space mine would be unlikely to survive, let alone harm the enemy. But 3000, coming from every orbital trajectory?
One other idea would be cold 'mines' (IE blast launchers with a trigger activated by a passive radio signal/laser pulse) that could be used to launch clouds of nice 20-25g polytetrafluroethylene-coated vanadium chromium steel ball bearings in alternating standard and retrograde orbits around where your position was at alternating intervals. It would work more in line with a classical minefield in that you're not trying to blow the enemy up, you're setting up a zone that the enemy has to go around in order to reach you if they don't have the ability to clear the field or fear an ambush if they do try to clear it. And the risk of running out of dV or consuming precious time before the opposing fleet could launch a defense or get reinforcements would be a major boon.
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Post by newageofpower on Nov 30, 2018 17:36:46 GMT
Or a literal radar stealthed, vantablack coated micromissile box/guided frag dispenser with transciever and a liquid hydrogen/helium resevoir cooling it to background temperatures. Basically the stealthy hydrogen/helium steamer concept, but in mine form.
Make them cheap and mass producible, and you'll have enemy ships forced to advance at a slow pace with constant X-Ray sweeps. If they come in at 100 kms pseudo-brachistrone burns with their MPDs they'd get obliterated by their own relative velocity.
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Post by lucubratory on Dec 10, 2018 0:15:49 GMT
You could use Casaba Howitzers as the mines, correct? To emplace them you could launch them into their orbit with a powerful mass driver, or if you wanted to avoid your enemy knowing the possible range of mine orbits in advance you could launch stealth busses (like the hydrogen/helium steamers) to give a decent amount of Dv in addition to what the mass launcher imparts. Could be a potent strategic weapon.
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