Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[El_Phil]

You will never see infantry in space, not even super shiny mechanised space marines 'o' doom. Planets are very easy to slag with just kinetic weapons making invasions a waste of everyones time. You'd have to kill every weapon system capable of shooting down a shuttle/drop pod/etc before a landing. Once you've done that why not just take out the land forces from orbit? Or just say 'Give in or we kill you.'

Ship boarding is equally pointless, by the time you've supressed the enemy ship enough to board it, you can just threaten it into giving up. Plus it's probably a flaming (as the internal oxygen burns up) wreck from end to end and so not worth boarding and easier just to analyse the wreckage.

Kinetic energy weapons, although not dramatic and so on, are the way forward. 1/2 mass x velocity2 produces ridiculous energy very quickly thanks to that squared. Rail Guns are the way forward!

[Starhawk]

LOL El-Phil that sounds like the theory people used when we first got the A bomb and some goons in the senate wanted to disolve the army and navy because "Hey we can always just nuke em"

If you think about it you will always need a ground pounder because yeah you can just destroy the colony outright but then what was the point of even fighting for it? Land, population and money would be against the whole "Just glass it and recolonize it" theory.

[Renegade 13]

Isn't there currently an international treaty forbidding the militarization of space?

In either case, you can bet that wouldn't stop any nation that wanted to do it!

[Slick]

Hunpecked said:
Slick writes: "At 1g, you could accelerate for 353.8 days and still not reach the speed of light (barely)."

In a Newtonian universe, yes. In our relativistic universe, however, the ship's speed can asymptotically approach c, the speed of light, but never reach it. Meanwhile the ship's mass increases, its length decreases, and time slows down for the ship and its crew. For an entertaining look at relativistic space travel I recommend Poul Anderson's 1970 novel "Tau Zero".

Yes, I learned the same equations in college decades ago. I never mentioned that it would be practical, just that it would be possible - and speed is not the only relativistic limit approached at c. I just posted that as an interesting tidbit because when I calculated it, I found it a little astonishing that you could accelerate for almost a year at 1g and not exceed the speed of light. Therefore it would work in a Newtonian or relativistic universe, but be practical in neither.


As far as "entertaining" space travel, I like the "infinite improbability drive" in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[El_Phil]

Starhawk said:
LOL El-Phil that sounds like the theory people used when we first got the A bomb and some goons in the senate wanted to disolve the army and navy because "Hey we can always just nuke em"

If you think about it you will always need a ground pounder because yeah you can just destroy the colony outright but then what was the point of even fighting for it? Land, population and money would be against the whole "Just glass it and recolonize it" theory.

Not glassing, just slagging any millitary unit from orbit. If you control space you will control the airspace, then just scale up any air superiority doctrine. Now crowd control and whatever you will need, but that is a police job, not a millitary job.

I seriously can't see any role for a ground force in space. They wont be fighting any organised millitary force, that can easily be taken out from space/air. Hell we've seen what modern air power can do, now imagine that but massively scaled up. Any organised land force is just a selection of targets to space based weapons.

So your not fighting enemy forces on the planet, what do these troops do? Put down any opposition on the planet perhaps. No. Against irregular forces your best weapons are political, getting the planet not to oppose you in the first place. If the majority of a population want you out you will lose, no millitary force can change that without getting very bloody hands and doing some unpleasent things. Even then that just gets the population to fear and hate you. Yes they stop, but only until they can build up strength to hit you again.

Besides such things are so far in the future with such totally different tech and physics it's impossible to predict. Hell its worse than that, there's a whole extra dimension. Space and orbiting weapons change things more than airpower and we've barely scratched the surface of possibilities. Try getting Henry V to predict how the Gulf War would be fought is probably a good parallel.

[Renegade 13]

Ah, but what do you do when the regular military forces are stationed in the cities with millions of civilians? Doesn't sound like you could take them out from orbit without frying a few hundred thousand civilians at the same time...which would cause the already mentioned political unrest and turn all the population against you. Which, as you pointed out, would mean you've lost the planet.

[El_Phil]

So they're hiding among civilians. What are ground troops going to be able to do about that? Other than wade in and take horrendous casualites and hit lots of civilians as well.

If you can't identify what is a civy target and what's millitary using sensors, satellites and UAVs what magic device do men on the ground have? And don't say eyeballs, just have a man watching the output of your sats and UAVs for the same effect, but at a fraction of the tonnage.

[Arkcon]

Regarding spinning to generate gravity, a group of engineers have written a website over {here}. They pretty much rip on bad physics in general, and the link above is to the movie Armageddon, where they spin-up Mir to make Bruce Willis feel more at home.

[Renegade 13]

Hey, I love Armageddon! I didn't want to know it's physics were totally screwed! Even though it was obvious...

[Starhawk]

Armageddon sucked something serious man and yeah the phyisics were obviously totally screwed not to mention the question of how they got two shuttles designed specifically to take out a meteor they only discovered what a week prior? As far as I recall the current rather unsophisticated shuttles we have today (in comparison to those ones) took months to build lol.

Oh and to El-Phil as far as urban warfare goes if modern US and British level forces are any indication a decently trained army would do rather well without taking all that many losses in comparison to those they inflict on their enemies. And air power HELPS win wars it doesn't win them all by it's self as Clinton proved by randomly attacking various countries during his administration with missiles and fighters lol...now assuming that a soldier of the future will have even more advanced body armor then what we have to day odds are it would be a rather interesting ground battle lol