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Post by sage on Feb 27, 2021 2:38:19 GMT
This game only allows us to simulate space ship to ship warfare. And does not allow us to simulate the effectiveness of orbital bombardment. So I propose to you a question.
How do we find out if our ships are capable of orbital bombardment?
As well as its effectiveness?
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Post by redlaughingman on Mar 20, 2021 8:25:33 GMT
That's a very complicated question. For kinetic weapons (railguns, cannons, coil guns, missiles) if the body has an atmosphere the projectile will start to burn up during atmospheric re-entry. If the projectile is small enough, it may fully burn up before it hits the ground, making it worthless. All that depends on the mass, composition, shape and speed of the projectile, as well as how thick the atmosphere is. Accuracy is also going to be different than in space - in COADE there's no issue with firing - "dinner plates" out of guns, where the projectile has a wider diameter than length. In atmosphere this will lead to significant amounts of drag and exacerbate any deflection the round suffers, hampering accuracy. Point being, a whole different set of equations are needed. Laser intensity will be affected by diffraction due to atmosphere, so the intensity at distance X will be lower than when firing through atmosphere. I suspect the calculations are easier than they would be for kinetics, but COADE still isn't equipped to handle them. Then of course, you have the question of orbital bombardment of which body in the solar system? Atmosphere differs significantly between say, Earth and Mars. For some potentially habitable bodies (I believe Ceres is portrayed as habitable in COADE) there's no atmosphere to worry about. COADE should be at to accurately tell you how much force everything strikes with. However, any life on Ceres may be underground, rather than in the surface, in which case you need a whole new set of assumptions about how much force and penetrating power your weapon needs to do something when it hits. Point is its a complicated question, varies depending on what you're bombarding, and would probably take another game to simulate. Hopefully it'll be in COADE-2  (sarcasm) |
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Post by dragon on May 10, 2021 9:15:31 GMT
Orbital bombardment is actually surprisingly hard. Your best bet are missiles, followed by high mass, low velocity guns. Lasers can work, but will be attenuated by atmosphere. If we had particle beams, they'd have the same problems. Atmosphere is a massive problem, and that's why all that talk about gravity gauge is bollocks. Anything you gain from gravity you will lose to drag and ablation, and if you're not firing high-mass projectiles, it'll likely eat your shots outright. All while the planet returns fire with ground-based lasers running at several GW, skyscraper-sized coilguns (no problems with cooling or reactor mass there) and surface-to-orbit missiles (no problems with bulky storage there). Fighting an atmospheric planet is like a rock-throwing fight with a guy at the bottom of a well - the guy at the bottom can duck underwater and laugh off whatever you're trying to throw at him, all while having a practically infinite supply of rocks at his feet.
Missiles are the most straightforward to figure out. You just need a nosecone of some heat-resistant material to make them survive reentry. Railguns and coilguns, generally, wouldn't work unless designed for the task. I've made a 2km/s railgun firing 20kg projectiles, inspired by the USN design, and that one would work, though the round would likely shed some mass. However, kinetic energy on that thing wouldn't be very high, it would hit about as hard as a regular 130mm shell. Which is still pretty hard, and at one round per second you've got one heck of an artillery barrage. However, it sucks against spaceborne targets due to short range, even if it does a lot of damage when it does hit. You could do the same thing with most terrestrial artillery pieces, I suspect. For orbital bombardment, they'd work just as well as shooting them from the ground, and for space combat, they'd be of limited utility. Sandblasters and anything firing smallish rounds would be completely useless, with rounds burning up as soon as they hit the atmosphere.
As for bodies without atmosphere, it'd be similar to space combat, only with several meters of "armor" made up of whatever the asteroid/moon is made of. You can actually make that, just make a stationary, box-shaped station with very thick ceramic armor radiators at the back and just enough attitude control to orient it face-on towards you, and fire away. Same types of weapons as for space combat could work there, though effectiveness against such a large, thick mass could be poor. Anything on the surface would be toast, though. Of course, an asteroid or moon colony can use the same weapons you do, and probably a lot more of them, and everything about having unlimited space and heatsink capacity applies there, as well.
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Post by sage on Jul 30, 2021 2:04:41 GMT
Orbital bombardment is actually surprisingly hard. Your best bet are missiles, followed by high mass, low velocity guns. Lasers can work, but will be attenuated by atmosphere. If we had particle beams, they'd have the same problems. Atmosphere is a massive problem, and that's why all that talk about gravity gauge is bollocks. Anything you gain from gravity you will lose to drag and ablation, and if you're not firing high-mass projectiles, it'll likely eat your shots outright. All while the planet returns fire with ground-based lasers running at several GW, skyscraper-sized coilguns (no problems with cooling or reactor mass there) and surface-to-orbit missiles (no problems with bulky storage there). Fighting an atmospheric planet is like a rock-throwing fight with a guy at the bottom of a well - the guy at the bottom can duck underwater and laugh off whatever you're trying to throw at him, all while having a practically infinite supply of rocks at his feet. Missiles are the most straightforward to figure out. You just need a nosecone of some heat-resistant material to make them survive reentry. Railguns and coilguns, generally, wouldn't work unless designed for the task. I've made a 2km/s railgun firing 20kg projectiles, inspired by the USN design, and that one would work, though the round would likely shed some mass. However, kinetic energy on that thing wouldn't be very high, it would hit about as hard as a regular 130mm shell. Which is still pretty hard, and at one round per second you've got one heck of an artillery barrage. However, it sucks against spaceborne targets due to short range, even if it does a lot of damage when it does hit. You could do the same thing with most terrestrial artillery pieces, I suspect. For orbital bombardment, they'd work just as well as shooting them from the ground, and for space combat, they'd be of limited utility. Sandblasters and anything firing smallish rounds would be completely useless, with rounds burning up as soon as they hit the atmosphere. As for bodies without atmosphere, it'd be similar to space combat, only with several meters of "armor" made up of whatever the asteroid/moon is made of. You can actually make that, just make a stationary, box-shaped station with very thick ceramic armor radiators at the back and just enough attitude control to orient it face-on towards you, and fire away. Same types of weapons as for space combat could work there, though effectiveness against such a large, thick mass could be poor. Anything on the surface would be toast, though. Of course, an asteroid or moon colony can use the same weapons you do, and probably a lot more of them, and everything about having unlimited space and heatsink capacity applies there, as well. You make some good point there and I would like to know more. First of how do we know that our heat-resistant material is heat-resistant enough? Like how thick does it need to be to get thought atmosphere, for which materials. Do you know how much energy we lose when firing a laser thought atmosphere? |
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Post by dragon on Jul 30, 2021 8:43:51 GMT
For missiles, just look at unclassified info about ICBM warheads. Basically, that's how you want your space missile warhead to look like. It might be a good idea to jettison the body in such situations, to avoid having to shield it. In practice, there's little difference between a small ICBM and an orbit to ground missile. Same principles apply. Lasers are harder to calculate, but check this out: www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/planetaryattack.php#id--Orbital_Bombardment--Laser_BombardmentNote that not everything on this page is correct, but the section I linked to is. |
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Post by sage on Oct 16, 2021 22:38:33 GMT
The info is from wiki Altitude and orbital inclination
Sightings from Earth ISSThis would mean that if a ship was stationed at the same height as the international Space Station () it would be over a target for 10 minutes. The ISS is at min 370km and at max 460 km away from the earth. We can test our weapons range by asking what it can hit from 370km to 460km away. The ISS make 15.49 orbits per day. Meaning that about 310 minutes in two day can be used to fire on a target on the ground. Or you can fire at a target for 10 minutes, and then wait about 82 minutes to fire again for other 10 minutes cycle. |
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Post by thiccengine on Oct 25, 2021 5:10:34 GMT
Another interesting note is orbital bombardment as an anti-air weapon: really looking at spacecraft as aerospace assets. Earth's surface orbital velocity is about 7900 m/s I think. So if you have missiles that can either survive reentry, or slow themselves enough to, you could effectively deny enormous airspaces along your orbital path. I'm having a lot of fun imagining my space battleships as anti-air platforms, raining down volleys of air-burst missiles on hostile fighters and bombers below. In a real war in 50 or so years that may actually be a viable tactic. It fits what you hear from people in/around the military who get paid to think: it's always a struggle to get the higher ground whether it's air dominance, and well.. this just extends that struggle up into orbit. Of course, logistics becomes everything in space, even more so than usual... So you can imagine states pre-staging munitions in orbit, denying or obfuscating evidence, international treaties trying to limit what's there and then the loopholes... oof. And then there's the ruining of everyone's day when the ships/satellites in low orbit take damage and create rings of debris. So State-A can force-project or even implicitly threaten by adjusting orbit to fly over State-B, but State-B can't preemptively attack without world wide sanctions. I wonder if that'd be a good reason for electronic warfare in low orbit to disable/disrupt combined with attempting to board and take a ship. Ground-bombardment wise, sounds to me like a gold-plated B2 bomber -- some real high-value air/space/sky strikes given how limited ordnance will be. But, especially if able to defend itself against anti-satellite missiles... a real replacement for aircraft carriers as an armed forces prestige weapon. I think that's a realistic angle we don't hear a lot of in sci-fi. My main thematic criticism of CDE is the "Earth died" trope (which plenty of scifi is guilty of too), and it's pretty heartening to see newer titles like Terra Invicta attempt to deal w/ the complexity of the world being a thing. Here's an interesting video I found on orbital bombardment physics: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo6VSRRT5Ew |
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Post by dragon on Oct 31, 2021 23:26:17 GMT
Shooting at aircraft from orbit has more or less the same problems as shooting at ground targets, since the velocities are simply that much greater. It's hard to go much faster than mach 5 in deep atmosphere, due to heating, and practical speeds for sustained flying are even lower. This translates to 1700m/s at SL, slight higher up high, so it's a huge difference to correct for. It's very hard, even for a missile, to make sharp turns at high speeds, so a hypersonic missile would likely fall for the classic "SAM break" defensive turn, although it'd have to be quite precisely executed (it'd be easy to see coming, though, so it's not like that's a problem). There might be ways around this problem, but either way it's going to be a situational weapon at best.
In general, in supersonic regime, faster means less maneuverable. Orbit is very high and very fast, but it's so difficult to make significant maneuvers up there that its tactical options are severely limited. Aircraft could easily time their sorties to avoid the spaceborne warship altogether. Of course, this wouldn't apply to any attempts to attack the ship itself.
What you could do is to drop nuclear-powered hypersonic ramjet drones from the ship (or even manned fighters, if you don't have a way to ensure a good connection to the drones), have them slow down to supersonic speeds to fight, and then accelerate using the ramjet and get back to the ship. They'd be capable of similar tactics to regular fighers and, with some patience, could be dropped anywhere in the world. They would not be very maneuverable unless you sink a lot of mass into some sort of variable geometry wing, but they'd be able to loiter, at least.
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Post by sage on Nov 24, 2021 7:27:32 GMT
Another interesting note is orbital bombardment as an anti-air weapon: really looking at spacecraft as aerospace assets. Earth's surface orbital velocity is about 7900 m/s I think. So if you have missiles that can either survive reentry, or slow themselves enough to, you could effectively deny enormous airspaces along your orbital path. I'm having a lot of fun imagining my space battleships as anti-air platforms, raining down volleys of air-burst missiles on hostile fighters and bombers below. In a real war in 50 or so years that may actually be a viable tactic. It fits what you hear from people in/around the military who get paid to think: it's always a struggle to get the higher ground whether it's air dominance, and well.. this just extends that struggle up into orbit. Of course, logistics becomes everything in space, even more so than usual... So you can imagine states pre-staging munitions in orbit, denying or obfuscating evidence, international treaties trying to limit what's there and then the loopholes... oof. And then there's the ruining of everyone's day when the ships/satellites in low orbit take damage and create rings of debris. So State-A can force-project or even implicitly threaten by adjusting orbit to fly over State-B, but State-B can't preemptively attack without world wide sanctions. I wonder if that'd be a good reason for electronic warfare in low orbit to disable/disrupt combined with attempting to board and take a ship. Ground-bombardment wise, sounds to me like a gold-plated B2 bomber -- some real high-value air/space/sky strikes given how limited ordnance will be. But, especially if able to defend itself against anti-satellite missiles... a real replacement for aircraft carriers as an armed forces prestige weapon. I think that's a realistic angle we don't hear a lot of in sci-fi. My main thematic criticism of CDE is the "Earth died" trope (which plenty of scifi is guilty of too), and it's pretty heartening to see newer titles like Terra Invicta attempt to deal w/ the complexity of the world being a thing. Here's an interesting video I found on orbital bombardment physics: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo6VSRRT5EwThe ASM-135 ASAT was a F-15 air-launched anti-satellite multistage missile. So there would be a need for that ability. |
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