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Post by gyratron on Mar 15, 2019 2:02:43 GMT
Orbital combat favours sandblasters in CDE, but I don't think that holds for the real world where barrel life and finite mechanical tolerances exist and make it much harder to get enough grains to impact in the same spot to defeat Whipple armor. It's true that orbital bombardment missiles and re-entry bombs are not much use against spacecraft and effectively dead weight in orbital combat, but that also applies to your hypersonic guided cannon rounds which will be a marvel if they are any use in space even for short range point defense. Deorbiting from LEO takes a tiny amount of delta-v so even if you use a rocket motor and not a cannon to deorbit your re-entry bombs it's not really going to affect the payload mass that much.
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Post by dragon on Mar 15, 2019 17:32:16 GMT
For space combat, you don't use guided cannon rounds. You use a normal, unguided slug, and set up a close, high speed intercept. In space, this fighter effectively becomes a large, uparmored Stinger drone. Which is just fine for orbital combat, even a regular Stinger is, in groups of 10 or 20, a veritable death machine. With a pointy nose and armor designed to withstand atmospheric heating, it'd do well enough against most starship weapons, and high dV required for ascent would give it respectable orbital maneuverability.
Sandblasters are actually very likely to be useful in the real world, as well. COADE does simulate both barrel erosion and finite manufacturing tolerances. While the most extreme examples would probably be waylaid by proper turret armor (since COADE turrets are ridiculously fragile, and can't be fitted with anything but monolithic armor), you still want to maximize speed and ROF. Space to space weapons and space to surface weapons have vastly different requirements.
The problem with carrying separate orbital bombs is that they each need a separate heatshield, and that time to target is atrocious. You're not hitting anything mobile with those bombs, which is essential for troop support. If troop support is not the point (just destroying stuff), then your best bet is a heat-resistant nuclear missile, which has an added bonus of being good for space, too (since anti-laser protection and reentry protection have similar requirements). But that's not the point.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 15, 2019 19:48:45 GMT
There plainly isn't any simulation of barrel erosion except perhaps as a check to exclude very extreme cases, because there is no indication of barrel life in the editor at all. The real GAU-8 has a barrel life of 20,000 rounds, but my seven gun in-game approximation with equivalent specs can fire a million rounds in a single continuous burst without sustaining any damage or loss of performance. I don't know much about railguns but considering the much higher muzzle velocities and requirement of the armature to remain in physical contact with the rails they seem like they should be much worse, and I still haven't heard of any real railgun ever tested that could fire >50 rounds at >2000m/s before the rails needed to be replaced.
Stock 60mm cannon's spread of 0.000007 degrees also seems quite amazing in a rapid firing weapon. With 5m of diamond barrel armor you can bring the spread down to 0.0000000000001 so I am wondering exactly where these manufacturing tolerances are going to come into play. In short I am really not convinced that sandblasters are the way to go for orbital combat except maybe as point defense or extremely close range drone mounted weapons. This doesn't change the utility of a stinger-like drone though, if anything I guess it probably improves it.
If the heatshield is not the ablative kind then it's effectively just part of the warhead for kinetics, not a big deal. For nukes I suppose it might be a factor, but their use is likely restricted by political or environmental concerns anyway.
Hitting a mobile target is easily achieved with modern guided bombs, you just have to hope whatever it is can still be spotted by your recon drones about half an hour later. Time to target is a concern though. If you were to use hypersonic fighters (or hypersonic drones) and you wanted continuous support it might be best to have a flight of 10+ units and arrange to have them fly by the target area in turn so there is always one about to fly past and ready to respond. Seems very wasteful compared to the much smaller number of conventional spaceplanes you could use for the same coverage but I guess a simulation would be needed for a proper comparison.
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Post by bigbombr on Mar 15, 2019 19:50:50 GMT
You're trying not to get hit anyway. SR-71's problem was that it was a twin engine aircraft with a rather quirky inlet design. Also, that failure wasn't in level flight (IIRC, it could generally survive an inlet unstart), but in a sharp turn. Shuttle heatshield, meanwhile, wasn't the best design, anyway. RCC is rather delicate, and on the Shuttle it was really thin, too, to save weight. In a space-capable aircraft, mass will always be at a premium.If you have a nuclear engine you can probably afford to mount something rather tougher. Say, for example, tungsten alloy armor (like Shuttle was supposed to have at some point), or perhaps our good old friend amorphous carbon. Isn't tungsten despite it's strength pretty brittle? Tungsten would also be pretty heavy. And amorphous carbon (or any carbon allotrope) is likely to need pretty frequent replacement, if only because of erosion/corrosion of colliding with superheated oxygen atoms.
As it happens, the properties you need to resist lasers and nukes are also the same you need to resist reentry heat. Only as long as you're talking about pulsed lasers. On top of that, each hit from a laser decreases your ability to survive reentry. And uneven ablation resulting in bowls or cratering seem dangerous.
AC is rather hard to beat in either regard, and is light and fairly robust physically, as well. IRL it's probably also expensive and a pain to make large tiles out of. And hits will still compromise it's protective properties against reentry heat.Also, it's not stealthy, but it's got one thing going for it: horizon. If it's zipping around at low enough altitude, any ground-based installation will have a very limited window of opportunity to fire at it. This is the reason their is so much interest in hypersonic boost-glide vehicles. But this shouldn't be overstated though.A laser will either be too weak to burn though the heatshield, or will need a mirror so large that it won't be able to traverse fast enough to track it. I very much doubt this. You need to only weaken the heat shield in a single spot and reentry heating will do the rest. And mirrors of 2-4 m aren't excessively large, and could probably be aimed at several degrees per second if needed. Phased arrays don't even have this issue at all. Heat shields don't necessarily make for great laser armor the same way Orion drive pusher plates don't make for great armor.An orbiting spacecraft, while also affected by this, is incredibly predictable in its orbit, because any orbit change costs dV, not to mention its altitude makes it move much more slowly across the sky (that said, I don't think that a ground-based laser of a reasonable size will do much against spacecraft, either). Hypersonic boost glide vehicles can maneuver, somewhat. But their general trajectory is still somewhat predictable, especially their timing. And I'm not sure low-orbiting spacecraft would move much slower across the sky.The same can't be said of an atmospheric fighter, which can change direction effectively for free thanks to its using air as propellant, and thus can fly a rather complex flightpath at low altitudes. Yeah, but hypersonic vehicles somewhat straddle the line between spacecraft and aircraft. Your turning radius is so large that while your hypersonic vehicle can fly complex flightpaths, it's mostly academic.Yes, this means my fighter can replace a pair of spacecraft. Each of which would have to be carrying vastly bigger weapons to punch through the atmosphere and still pack enough punch to do damage on the ground. Not really. Infrared to cyan lasers aren't bothered as much by atmosphere as you might think. The densest air is at low altitude, so hypersonic vehicles equipped with lasers wouldn't really have an advantage. And bombs/missiles can just use gravity and drag. They don't need all that much propulsion, and can be mostly payload.Well, the rounds actually reach the target, for one, and retain most of their mass while at it. Orbital bombardment is surprisingly troublesome to implement, and weapons capable of doing it are dead mass in orbital combat, unless you have a gigantic reactor to power either gigantic laser arrays or multi-kg class rail/coilguns that still fire at high speed. Orbital combat favors sandblasters due to advantages of short round flight time, but they're completely worthless when firing at anything with an atmosphere. As I've stated before, lasers can IMO be pretty much assumed due to their shear versatility, and they're excellent against all 'soft' ground targets (everything that isn't a bunker). Missiles are excellent for cracking open those hardened bunkers. Their flight time is less of an issue against stationary targets. While loading space-to-surface missiles means you can't load those VLS cells with space-to-space mssiles or drones, they're less dead mass and dead volume than carrying a hypersonic space-capable bomber.
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Post by bigbombr on Mar 15, 2019 20:06:07 GMT
For space combat, you don't use guided cannon rounds. You use a normal, unguided slug, and set up a close, high speed intercept. I very much get the impression this isn't all that viable as a tactic. Even more so in a more realistic setting.In space, this fighter effectively becomes a large, uparmored Stinger drone. With the additional mass, cost and ethical cost of a crew. The one advantage of gun drones is their expendability.
Which is just fine for orbital combat, even a regular Stinger is, in groups of 10 or 20, a veritable death machine. With a pointy nose and armor designed to withstand atmospheric heating, it'd do well enough against most starship weapons, and high dV required for ascent would give it respectable orbital maneuverability. How many dozens of missiles could you pack for that mass with similar delta-v, I wonder.
Sandblasters are actually very likely to be useful in the real world, as well. COADE does simulate both barrel erosion (only erosion by a single shot, not by multiple rounds, especially not sustained firing where heating might weaken the barrel) and finite manufacturing tolerances (on this CoaDE is a little inconsistent). While the most extreme examples would probably be waylaid by proper turret armor (since COADE turrets are ridiculously fragile, and can't be fitted with anything but monolithic armor) (I think turrets would still be pretty vulnerable, even with composite armor, as the internal componenets could get damaged before penetration occurs), you still want to maximize speed and ROF. Space to space weapons and space to surface weapons have vastly different requirements. Agreed, which is why lasers and VLS are awesome. Lasers are versatile and at least somewhat effective against most targets, and VLS cells can be packed with whatever munitions the mission requires.The problem with carrying separate orbital bombs is that they each need a separate heatshield (not much of an issue, as all the separate reentry vehicles carried by a MIRV indicate), and that time to target is atrocious. Which is why you use guided munitions capable of course-correction. their time to target is better than a strike mission from a hypersonic vehicle that needs to be deployed from orbit though. Against the really time-sensitive targets, use lasers. Unless you invent FTL, they are the fastest weapon possible.You're not hitting anything mobile with those bombs, which is essential for troop support. Aircraft dropped guided bombs routinely hit moving targets.If troop support is not the point (just destroying stuff), then your best bet is a heat-resistant nuclear missile, which has an added bonus of being good for space, too (since anti-laser protection and reentry protection have similar requirements). But that's not the point.
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Post by dragon on Mar 15, 2019 23:33:44 GMT
Sure, modern guided bombs can hit moving targets. They, however, do have to be aimed in the general direction of the target. They fly for, give or take, 20 seconds, so that's fine. If they flew for 30 minutes, though... You're not going to hit anything moving with orbital bombs, period, because by the time they deorbit, the target is going to be nowhere near the aiming point. You can cover a larger area if you can correct your course on reentry, but not that much larger. Modern ground warfare is highly mobile, and it's likely that any orbital invasion force would be so, as well. There's a reason ICBMs are generally used against things that don't move, like cities. Of course, there's a technology that could change that, namely... hypersonic glide vehicles. As for AC, if you're using it on ships, you can use it on spaceplanes. I think a lot would change in COADE meta if you put manufacturing limitations on it. This is a somewhat troublesome material to make, but it really is as good as COADE portrays it. Tungsten would also be good, though. Brittle, yes, but not "crush it with your fingers" brittle, like Shuttle tiles were. IIRC, it already sees some use in tank armor, since it's also dense and doesn't have the environmental problems of depleted uranium. Regarding lasers, you're forgetting the biggest stress on the heatshield is on descent. Small irregularities in the shield are not going to bring the fighter down if they're made afterwards. During hypersonic flight and subsequent ascent, stresses would be much lower, though still considerable. In case I wasn't clear on this, I certainly did not intend them to be able to perform orbital combat and atmospheric flight in a single mission. They would need to be returned to the mothership, rearmed and the heatshield patched up, if needed. Also, when talking time to target I'm assuming the fighter is already deployed and loitering. You obviously need to do that in advance of the actual landing (in fact, you can probably have them accompany the landing craft during entry). The Stinger is expandable, but a drone doesn't need to be. In fact, on a stategic level, you probably want drones to be recoverable. In fact, this is one reason to use them over missiles. That COADE drones act and are used like a glorified missile is not a good thing, a realistic design would put more stock in survivability, if you want disposable stick with missiles (you can even stick a gun on a missile if that's what you're after, not that COADE's AI will take it well). The same applies to fighters. Hitting a mobile target is easily achieved with modern guided bombs, you just have to hope whatever it is can still be spotted by your recon drones about half an hour later. Time to target is a concern though. If you were to use hypersonic fighters (or hypersonic drones) and you wanted continuous support it might be best to have a flight of 10+ units and arrange to have them fly by the target area in turn so there is always one about to fly past and ready to respond. Seems very wasteful compared to the much smaller number of conventional spaceplanes you could use for the same coverage but I guess a simulation would be needed for a proper comparison. As I said about, it can't, at least not where you can have hope of hitting it with a bomb you dropped 30 minutes ago. The timescale difference on orbit versus ground combat is vast, and part of the reason orbital bombardment is hard to make work well. The problem with "conventional spaceplanes" is that they're pretty much nuclear Skylons. Large, heavy and only useful in atmospheric combat. If you want that kind of approach, it's better to use VTOLs taking off from landing craft. In fact, you'd probably want both those and hypersonics, because they fill completely different tactical niches. And yes, staggering multiple hypersonic craft (10-20, maybe more, depending on the scale of the invasion) is the general idea.
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Post by Lurker on Mar 16, 2019 6:39:19 GMT
If your attacking ground targets why not use big inert slugs? or use space rocks or debris, that will take out most anything.
And if you need to hit something with precision a missile or laser would do the job.
Also it's not like your going to move a whole lot in 30 mins only about 15 miles which you can account for. and thats on a good road with a truck moving 60 miles per hour, not tanks nor infantry which would move slower.
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Post by bigbombr on Mar 16, 2019 8:34:32 GMT
Sure, modern guided bombs can hit moving targets. They, however, do have to be aimed in the general direction of the target. They fly for, give or take, 20 seconds, so that's fine. If they flew for 30 minutes, though... You're not going to hit anything moving with orbital bombs, period, because by the time they deorbit, the target is going to be nowhere near the aiming point. You can cover a larger area if you can correct your course on reentry, but not that much larger. The steering capability is probably comparable to your hypersonic space-capable bomber. I wouldn't worry about it, the longer the time to target, the more you can alter your course. When the munition is closer to the target, it can correct it's course less (in absolute distance, in relative angle it improves) but this is needed less as the target has less time to maneuver at that point. Loitering munitions are definitely a possibility if needed though.Modern ground warfare is highly mobile, and it's likely that any orbital invasion force would be so, as well. There's a reason ICBMs are generally used against things that don't move, like cities. Of course, there's a technology that could change that, namely... hypersonic glide vehicles. Hypersonic glide vehicles are proposed as an alternative to purely ballistic missiles. Against moving targets they aren't much better. None is seriously developing anti ship hypersonic glide vehicles to my knowledge. And against most (if not all) mobile ground targets, orbital lasers would be more than sufficient.As for AC, if you're using it on ships, you can use it on spaceplanes. Spacecraft don't collide with high-temperature oxygen atoms. That AC layer will need very regular replacement.I think a lot would change in COADE meta if you put manufacturing limitations on it. This is a somewhat troublesome material to make, but it really is as good as COADE portrays it. Tungsten would also be good, though. Brittle, yes, but not "crush it with your fingers" brittle, like Shuttle tiles were. IIRC, it already sees some use in tank armor, since it's also dense and doesn't have the environmental problems of depleted uranium. I'm pretty sure most MBT armor uses NERA covered in and backed by steel. Possibly covered in additional ERA bricks.
Regarding lasers, you're forgetting the biggest stress on the heatshield is on descent. Small irregularities in the shield are not going to bring the fighter down if they're made afterwards. What, the enemy will politely hold fire during reentry, exactly when the fighter/bomber is most vulnerable? When it might be mistaken for a nuclear tipped reentry vehicle? During hypersonic flight and subsequent ascent, stresses would be much lower, though still considerable. In case I wasn't clear on this, I certainly did not intend them to be able to perform orbital combat and atmospheric flight in a single mission. So now you need ground bases. Wouldn't one way hypersonic missiles or more conventional aircraft launching missiles be more effective and cost-effective?They would need to be returned to the mothership, rearmed and the heatshield patched up, if needed. Also, when talking time to target I'm assuming the fighter is already deployed and loitering. You obviously need to do that in advance of the actual landing (in fact, you can probably have them accompany the landing craft during entry). S o would anti-air defenses be suppressed at this point or not? If not, you'll lose your aircraft. If they are, then why aren't you using more economical means to drop munitions?The Stinger is expandable, but a drone doesn't need to be. In fact, on a stategic level, you probably want drones to be recoverable. In space, with the tyranny of the rocket equation, and concerning close ranged gun drones I'd disagree. Long range laser or missile drones would probably be better of recovered however. It very much depends on what type of drone you're referring to: disposable gun drones (missiles with machine guns strapped to them), missile drones (booster stages essentially) or laser drones.
In fact, this is one reason to use them over missiles. That COADE drones act and are used like a glorified missile is not a good thing, a realistic design would put more stock in survivability (cost-effectiveness and mass-effectiveness trump effectiveness of individual units), if you want disposable stick with missiles (you can even stick a gun on a missile if that's what you're after (this is the quintessential gun drone), not that COADE's AI will take it well). The same applies to fighters. Except fighters (if manned) also have all the issues (both in cost, performance, size and ethics) associated with manned spacecraft.As I said about, it can't, at least not where you can have hope of hitting it with a bomb you dropped 30 minutes ago. The timescale difference on orbit versus ground combat is vast, and part of the reason orbital bombardment is hard to make work well. The problem with "conventional spaceplanes" is that they're pretty much nuclear Skylons. Large, heavy and only useful in atmospheric combat. Not even that, IMO.If you want that kind of approach, it's better to use VTOLs taking off from landing craft. In fact, you'd probably want both those and hypersonics, because they fill completely different tactical niches. And yes, staggering multiple hypersonic craft (10-20, maybe more, depending on the scale of the invasion) is the general idea. At that point having multiple manned spacecraft deploy orbital laser drones, observation drones and mirror drones while readying orbit-to-surface missiles seems more economical. The hypersonics wouldn't add much to that, but the more conventional aircraft might. I'm not all that sure about that though, as their time on target might not be much better or even worse.
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Post by airc777 on Mar 16, 2019 10:57:30 GMT
I mean, this thread is cool and all but how many low yield nuclear devices in ablative reentry vehicles can you build for the mass of one manned tungsten skinned lifting body reentry cannon platform?
I'm not convinced this concept is worth the delta V budget it would take to put the craft into the required parking orbit around the target planet. Especially in the context of just having more nukes for the same delta V budget.
Possible exception I'm seeing in an air breathing NTR craft designed to operate in very, very, very high pressure atmospheres, but I have to ask what exactly are you targeting that you need prolonged close air support 300 km deep into Saturn? So again single use reentry warheads sounds more cost effective against a target of a research station manned by not more then a few hundred people.
I would however like to propose what to me sounds like a cost effective alternative to achieve largely the desired effect: Single use ablative reentry drone. Deploys a high altitude balloon with an air to surface missile system. Carrier spacecraft with hundreds of them.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 16, 2019 18:22:56 GMT
A few thoughts: Nukes, dropping asteroids and such don't really scale down well. You usually fight someone for a reason, and that reason is usually not just that you don't like them. If you want to capture and control something it usually makes sense not to escalate all the way up to 11. Yeah, I know that big booms are cool and stuff, but non-total conflict scenarios also make for more interesting fiction. Hypersonic re-orbiting vehicle has another downside to add to its long list - kinetics dropped all the way down from orbit have way more kinetic energy. Now regarding orbital bombardment lag: - Combat usually happens for control over places. Places don't really go anywhere so you can drop your munitions despite lag, and fine-tune in terminal phase to hit something worthwhile.
- A lot of targets worth hitting with heavy kinetics (or nukes) from orbit are going to be stationary laser installations using crust as armour and planet as their heatsink, and infrastructure. Those are also not going to dodge.
- Light, precision strikes can be performed with orbiting lasers.
- For everything else you can drop ground troops/drones or aerial craft/drones/cruise missiles that can loiter, adding re-orbit capability to the latter category only makes sense if it's effectively free.
- Non-recoverable drone is typically called "missile". Tyranny of rocket equation is lessened for gravitationally bound combat (see OP) and building drones for resilience is a viable alternative to microdrones (no large, vulnerable meatsack inside makes for easy resilience) which also makes them suitable for recovery and patching up. Been there, done that.
- Tungsten is awfully heavy. Use RCC or something.
- Reentry plasma is opaque to lasers and dissipates enough energy to make it hard to make any difference with lasers.
- High-velocity intercepts *might* be a thing, because in space it's harder to keep your distance, as combatants can move with velocities comparable to their projectiles.
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Post by airc777 on Mar 16, 2019 19:15:58 GMT
A few thoughts: Nukes, dropping asteroids and such don't really scale down well. You usually fight someone for a reason, and that reason is usually not just that you don't like them. If you want to capture and control something it usually makes sense not to escalate all the way up to 11. Yeah, I know that big booms are cool and stuff, but non-total conflict scenarios also make for more interesting fiction. Hypersonic re-orbiting vehicle has another downside to add to its long list - kinetics dropped all the way down from orbit have way more kinetic energy. Now regarding orbital bombardment lag: - Combat usually happens for control over places. Places don't really go anywhere so you can drop your munitions despite lag, and fine-tune in terminal phase to hit something worthwhile.
- A lot of targets worth hitting with heavy kinetics (or nukes) from orbit are going to be stationary laser installations using crust as armour and planet as their heatsink, and infrastructure. Those are also not going to dodge.
- Light, precision strikes can be performed with orbiting lasers.
- For everything else you can drop ground troops/drones or aerial craft/drones/cruise missiles that can loiter, adding re-orbit capability to the latter category only makes sense if it's effectively free.
- Non-recoverable drone is typically called "missile". Tyranny of rocket equation is lessened for gravitationally bound combat and building drones for resilience is a viable alternative to microdrones (no large, vulnerable meatsack inside makes for easy resilience) which also makes them suitable for recovery and patching up. Been there, done that.
- Tungsten is awfully heavy. Use RCC or something.
- Reentry plasma is opaque to lasers and dissipates enough energy to make it hard to make any difference with lasers.
Agree with this in it's entirety. I made some assumptions in my post:
The only reason for wanting a space plane fighter thing was to transport a weapon system a man or man sized drone on the ground couldn't while also staying over the target area for longer then an orbital ship. So something with the effect on target somewhere between very large shape charge and very, very small nuke, and that could stay in line of sight of the target area for hours if need be.
Hence my proposal of high altitude balloon drone air to surface missile system.
A balloon would lack a fighters speed defensive advantage, but I assumed weapon systems being brought to bear against high altitude balloons would be a problem solvable by either fleet in orbit or drone on the ground.
I also used reentry vehicle nukes in my post purely as a yardstick for mass budget cost effectiveness in terms of literal most bang for your buck.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 16, 2019 19:58:58 GMT
In this case "effectively free" means it costs less than throwing away the entire vehicle, or dropping an entire aircraft carrier to operate from complete with support crew. Also as noted earlier, the rocket equation actually helps a reorbit vehicle somewhat as mass can be minimised by dumping payload and excess fuel. Using heavy one-way bombardment to clear a perimeter and then deploying an airbase for ground-launched drones is probably a better doctrine for a full scale invasion, but for a small scale "intervention" reorbit vehicles could be useful.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 16, 2019 21:27:32 GMT
In this case "effectively free" means it costs less than throwing away the entire vehicle, or dropping an entire aircraft carrier to operate from complete with support crew. Also as noted earlier, the rocket equation actually helps a reorbit vehicle somewhat as mass can be minimised by dumping payload and excess fuel. Using heavy one-way bombardment to clear a perimeter and then deploying an airbase for ground-launched drones is probably a better doctrine for a full scale invasion, but for a small scale "intervention" reorbit vehicles could be useful. You are not throwing away the entire vehicle if you intend to invade and you can improve fighter's uptime without support by using air-breathing nuclear engine and relying on guns (or lasers, but that's a lost cause given what you're going to already have in orbit, although perhaps if you reduced aperture and cooled them intensively with air small atmospheric IR lasers might carve a niche for themselves) to reduce ammo consumption whenever possible.
Do note that nuclear airfighter does not even need any fuel tanks. Its fuel is in its reactor and its remass everywhere around.
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Post by Lurker on Mar 17, 2019 0:56:48 GMT
Regarding lasers, you're forgetting the biggest stress on the heatshield is on descent. Small irregularities in the shield are not going to bring the fighter down if they're made afterwards. What, the enemy will politely hold fire during reentry, exactly when the fighter/bomber is most vulnerable? When it might be mistaken for a nuclear tipped reentry vehicle?just going to point out if your performing a attack on a planet you probably have complete control over it's orbital space and therefor can reenter it basically anywhere. Such as over the poles as the defender probably can't cover everything. Also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment And you really can't move that far as to get out of the way of bombs or Kinetics (guided) in 30 minutes only about 15 miles which is really tiny if you think that we have artillery that can fire that far. Also thats moving 60mph on a highway, so in near perfect conditions. www.military.com/daily-news/2018/06/16/new-army-artillery-doubles-attack-range-outguns-russian-equivalent.html
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Post by airc777 on Mar 17, 2019 1:26:42 GMT
And you really can't move that far as to get out of the way of bombs or Kinetics (guided) in 30 minutes only about 15 miles which is really tiny if you think that we have artillery that can fire that far. Also thats moving 60mph on a highway, so in near perfect conditions. I generally agree with this premise, but I would be more worried about the man / drone on the ground that the fighter is providing fire support to during the long gaps in coverage between passes then I would be worried about the enemy ground target out ranging the sub orbital craft.
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