Hey everyone!

I'm writing a science fiction novel set in the far, far, future and I was wondering about some of the things I came up with- specifically some ship-borne weapons. The vessel around which the story takes place is the ICV (imperial combat vessel) Winter, a ~550 meter long corvette built by the evil-ish empire but requisitioned by a very high level intelligence organization to track down and destroy a terrorist group scouring ancient space battle sites, looking for space-time destabilization bombs. I know those are way out of conventional science, but I am actually here because I would like your opinion on some of the 'common' armaments I plan to put into the novel.

The Empire has major enemies, including an insurrection turned empire, and so major space battles are still common, usually over populated planets. Since there is only a limited amount of planets suitable for habitation, teraformed or underground, in in the various galaxies, neither side really wants to annihilate planets, even though they are easily capable of doing this. Planets are usually not heavily bombarded, so the weapons in question are mostly reserved to space battles.

The battles happen in three stages: At distances of about 7.5 billion kilometers, close to the distance between habitable planets and the outer edges of a solar system, ships are arranged in a very loose formation (out of visual range of one another) and bombard the enemy with extremely destructive weapons. The ships are equipped with extremely effective countermeasures, capable of jamming almost all incoming missiles and given the proper distance, diverting solid projectiles. They are also equipped with shields powerful enough to allow them to fly through the outer layers of a Sun like star. The weapons imperial ships mount include 500 tera-ton nuclear missiles and EMACs (ElectroMagnetic Accelerator Cannons). The smallest EMACs fire 30x10 meter cylindrical projectiles of solid depleted Uranium at just over the speed of light, resulting in about 8 x 10^27 joules kinetic energy (if I did my physics right). The idea of an EMAC on a corvette capable of negating the recoil shooting up to light speed seemed reasonable until I ran that through a calculator. Though the cannon can only fire about every hour due to the time necessary to recharge the capacitors and to cool down the coils (it is a coilgun based system) this still seems unreasonably powerful for a corvette to have. This thing makes the 500 teraton nuclear missiles (capable of easily rendering a planet uninhabitable) seem like childs play: it generates nearly 2 million teratons... probably enough to turn a planet into a fine mist of magma spread evenly throughout a solar system.

Anyways, this is the sort of weapon, were I doing a nations roleplay, I would categorically forbid anybody from using. I am definitely rethinking and redesigning the power of this weapon, and I need your input. What do you think is reasonable for an ultra futuristic empire which spans several galaxies to put as the main armament on corvettes? Are even the 500 teraton bombs still over powered?

I'm treading lightly, based on how the last space-combat-realism thread turned out. Essentially, the weapon in space is kinetic energy -- not nuclear, not chemical, not beam (yet, though there's potential there obviously). All you need is mass and velocity -- if there's a chemical/nuclear role to be played, it's in mass acceleration. So if it was me, building an interstellar fleet to impose my empire, I'd be using asteroids as the offensive weaponry -- use drones to capture them and affix rockets, then drag them along with the fleet. When necessary, you give the command and they fly themselves to the target ship at ludicrous speed and obliterate it. Seems safer and more efficient than toting around giant bombs -- although you have to imagine you'd carry a few of those, too, in case you needed to do any atmospheric work.

So, is a 500 terraton bomb overpowered? I think so. I mean the dinosaurs went extinct from a giant rock. Still, blowing something like that up in the middle of an enemy formation is sorta like pushing that button from Last Starfighter, that kills everything in a galaxy radius or whatever. I mean you think frag grenades hurt here on earth, imagine if the projectiles never slowed down, if they just kept going forever until they hit something with the entire force of the explosion? That's what you get from a spacebomb.... it's a little chaotic for my tastes, and so primitive. I'll smash my enemies with rocks like a civilized gentleman, thank you very much.

resulting in about 8 x 10^27 joules kinetic energy

Not actually accurate. That is a severe underestimation.

We are all familiar with K=1/2 MV^2, however that is only an extremely accurate approximation at low speed. The actual equation is K=(mc^2/(1-(V^2/c^2))^0.5)-mc^2. The first term calculates the total energy and the second calculates rest mass. Subtract rest mass from total energy, you get the energy of motion.

Firing at the speed of light would require infinite energy, and firing over is similarly impossible.

So Boerd said
Firing at the speed of light would require infinite energy, and firing over is similarly impossible.

Exactly, the railgun weapon is completely impossible (unless you equip every projectile with an FTL drive). Honestly, in a far future setting where corvette class ships have the power to violate the laws of physics simply using the "MOAR POWAH" philosophy, we would see nuclear bombs as primitive devices. Antimatter weapons would rule the battlefield, a single bomb taking out an entire continent. There would be railguns that fire projectiles that contain antimatter within them, taking out starships with a single hit. To take out the shields though? Just good old railguns (provided the shields are at least somewhat similar to literally every other sci-fi energy shield). Just a thought here, what if the shields took the mass of physical attacks and the energy of, well, energy attacks and used that to power the system? There wouldn't be any "Shields at 20%!" the shield core would simply short out after a sufficient number of attacks were thrown at it. You could even take it a step further and have the attacks used to power the entire ship, so when the shield goes down, the entire vessel is disabled or destroyed, depending on how dramatic you want it to be. Going with that would give you an excuse to use projectile weapons over energy weapons, as mass converts to absolutely ludicrous amounts of energy. That's why we won't get teleporters for millions of years, converting a human body into energy would probably blow up the entire planet.

Also, it would be nice if you would keep me updated, I am most certainly interested in this!

So Boerd said Firing at the speed of light would require infinite energy, and firing over is similarly impossible.

And this is why practical space battles in space are impossible, and why balkanization would take effect on any colony we would start.

There are ways to go, mostly depending on the technology level and ways of progress to it that your civilization would have taken:

No matter in which age you are a FTL civilization would be heavily dependent on computers and cybernetic warfare, artificial intelligence and network protection would be a significant part of every major conflict.

The earlier you are the less advanced your weapons will get and on the low tech levels will be faced with two major choices - use massive barrages of missiles and hope some hit or go in close with railguns, cannons and other weapons. Naturally space crafts would be also used to provide a long-reach alternative to missiles. Fusion or fission reactors would provide power for ships.

As time progresses you would probably develop lasers enough powerful to damage ships, shielding systems and plasma cannons. The much quicker lasers would slowly replace railguns as anti-craft turrets. Antimatter warheads might start to appear in larger missiles (history has shown that it is easier to use potent energy reactions as weapons then as a power source). Power would probably come from advanced fusion reactors.

With the invention of a practical anti-matter reactor you would see that near-light speed plasma weapons are used for long-range attacks, together with powerful lasers, railguns returning as medium to near combat weapons and firing at high speeds, advanced strike craft run on miniaturized fusion reactors equipped with shields and missiles equipped with pin-point accuracy used together with lasers to provide anti-craft firepower.

Nanotechonology (nanotech), quantum computers, genetic engineering, improvements in ion thruster technology, high-temperature superconductors are just some of the technologies we cloud see in the next 25-50 years which would lead to development of the basics of space warfare.

Oh and nukes would still have some use - but not in stupidly powerful builds but rather in high electro-magnetic emission bombs for EMP and as cobalt bombs for punishments or terror attacks due to them turning wide areas inhabitable for centuries (now imagine a star ship threatening to bomb the largest cities on planet with them).

But it all depends on how realistic you want to be - I am usually am somewhere around half the way on the realism scale with most things being based upon technologies being already developed or that are scientifically plausible. Less realistic you get the more firepower your ships will probably have - more realistic you get, well at some point even FTL would be need to disappear.

If we're looking at truly realistic space combat, let me start by saying that ANY battle would be dictated by orbital mechanics. This would make it extremely difficult and complex for several reasons, and I'll try to illustrate those in my next few paragraphs.

First, let's just say, for instance, that the speed required to maintain a perfectly circular orbit (zero eccentricity) around a planet at 1000 kilometers in altitude is 5 kilometers per second. From here, there are a few things that need to be taken into account. Any ship at that same elevation will have the same orbital velocity, but if their inclination is different (say ship A is orbiting above the equator and ship B is orbiting with an inclination of 2 degrees), then there will be exactly two points where the ships could possibly intercept one another, and that is the ascending and descending nodes (the points at which their orbits intersect). Now, since both ships have the same altitude and with zero eccentricity, the only thing to take into account is their position along their orbital trajectories, and oh shit, ship B is on the other side of the planet.

Now if ship A wants to intercept ship B (let's just say ship B is either adrift or unaware of ship A's presence), ship A is going to have to go into a higher orbit in order to attain a lower orbital velocity by burning away from the center of the planet (the same can be applied in the opposite direction to speed it into ship B's orbit, but would be less efficient as it would have to use more thrust to counteract the stronger gravitational force). This will raise the altitude of their orbit, but also curve it into a parabolic orbit, so another burn will have to be executed once the ship reaches it's intended altitude to compensate for it's new orbital eccentricity. By the end of this, ship A is at 1200 kilometers. Now it's moving quite a bit (in lieu of an actual calculation) slower than ship B and will eventually reach a point where it can drop in on top of ship B.

But wait, it's still at a different inclination from ship B, so how do we correct that? Remember when I mentioned ascending and descending nodes? Ship A can correct for the inclination at either of these points by either making a burn tangential to the surface of the planet towards the South pole at the descending node, or doing the same thing towards the North pole at the ascending node. So, once this burn is made, ship A will be on the same orbital plane as ship B, so now all ship A has to do is get into a lower orbit once ship B is below it using the same method I described earlier.

Now there are two ways you could avoid this. You could have battles take place in very high orbits so that the orbital velocity is always fairly low, though that would also make escape velocity really low, meaning that ships at this altitude would have to watch their speed to avoid going into an escape trajectory, and they would probably also have to use a pre-defined velocity as a sort of "zeroed" reference point for their own velocity. Either that, or you could just implement a technology that negates the force of gravity at certain altitudes to make space battle somewhat more feasible.

This isn't even going into the sort of weaponry you'd use. Depending on what types of weapons your ships are using, you'd have to take their orbital velocity into account as well. It wouldn't exactly do you much good if you shot a massive ball of tungsten carbide out of a railgun if it makes said projectile's orbital velocity zero. Without the centripetal force that orbital velocity provides, that ball is now plummeting towards the planet below, which could result in collateral damage, not to mention it will completely miss your target (unless you're going for an ad-hoc orbital bombardment). To compensate for this, make sure all of your guns use high-velocity rounds, projectiles reaching into the hundreds of kilometers per second range. That only really goes for kinetic types of guns, so you could use shit like particle projection cannons, lasers, quantum destabilization fields, or whatever the fuck else you can come up with to make up for it. Also missiles, missiles will work.

The convenient thing about the physics involving your weaponry is that you can avoid explaining it by just saying that it's all calculated by your targeting computers into a firing solution, or something like that.

tl;dr: If you want a truly realistic space battle, you're going to have to take orbital mechanics into account, and orbital mechanics is a bitch.

Keyguyperson said
Exactly, the railgun weapon is completely impossible (unless you equip every projectile with an FTL drive). Honestly, in a far future setting where corvette class ships have the power to violate the laws of physics simply using the "MOAR POWAH" philosophy, we would see nuclear bombs as primitive devices. Antimatter weapons would rule the battlefield, a single bomb taking out an entire continent. There would be railguns that fire projectiles that contain antimatter within them, taking out starships with a single hit. To take out the shields though? Just good old railguns (provided the shields are at least somewhat similar to literally every other sci-fi energy shield). Just a thought here, what if the shields took the mass of physical attacks and the energy of, well, energy attacks and used that to power the system? There wouldn't be any "Shields at 20%!" the shield core would simply short out after a sufficient number of attacks were thrown at it. You could even take it a step further and have the attacks used to power the entire ship, so when the shield goes down, the entire vessel is disabled or destroyed, depending on how dramatic you want it to be. Going with that would give you an excuse to use projectile weapons over energy weapons, as mass converts to absolutely ludicrous amounts of energy. That's why we won't get teleporters for millions of years, converting a human body into energy would probably blow up the entire planet.Also, it would be nice if you would keep me updated, I am most certainly interested in this!

Antimatter weapons require reliable containment methods to keep them from killing whatever it is that is carrying them. If these containment methods fail (either from an error in their design or by the malicious strike of a foe's accurate laser fire), which will probably be an electromagnetic field, then the antimatter reacts with matter, explodes and probably causes a chain reaction to occur within the vessel that is carrying them. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want a single weapon like that on-board my multi-billion dollar war vessel, let alone 30 of them.

Fusion or fission munitions, specifically shaped charges (lhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) provide longer range as well as a safer alternative, since a fusion or fission missile isn't going to violently explode if a random projectile comes to say hello. They're also cheaper, and thus could be spammed more. Not saying AM weaponry is useless, but they're far from the god-tier weapons sci-fi likes to portray them as.

For space engagements, I'd ditch the railguns. While useful at close range (and in other roles), they're badly gimped by space's sheer vastness. I'd go with an x-ray laser or gamma ray laser, or a charged/neutral particle accelerator weapon, for long-range engagements.

Lasers? You know how terrible those would be in space as weapons? The law of conservation of energy would utterly render them useless at anything beyond "knife fight" range in space. Because every second it travelled, it would lose significant chunks of power to dissipation. Yes, it moves at the speed of light. No, that still isn't fast enough in space.

If you were to engage in space, it would only be against planets, because planets are the only things that can't really dodge whatever you fire at them. Even then, a planet probably has vastly more defences to wage against an incoming fleet than the fleet could muster against it.

Space battles in space, if we are talking hard sci-fi, just would not happen.

Soft sci-fi, it could go in any direction, though.

Although, as a quick protip, in space, the more inconspicuous the object, the more effective it will be. Trade ships carrying suicide tsar bomb payloads, a few hundree asteroids with thrusters on them built by self replicating drones hurled at a planet (as you only need one to hit to "win" as it were and it would be obscenely cheap to pull off.) Space wars would be more espionage and hitting the enemy so hard the first time they would be incapable of a retalitory strike. Otherwise, anything blatant and obvious like a space fleet of war ships is easily seen and countered long before it can reach you.

Deepstrike101 said The battles happen in three stages: At distances of about 7.5 billion kilometers, close to the distance between habitable planets and the outer edges of a solar system, ships are arranged in a very loose formation (out of visual range of one another) and bombard the enemy with extremely destructive weapons.

At that range the enemy can annihilate anything you fire at will LONG before it gets near them.

The ships are equipped with extremely effective countermeasures, capable of jamming almost all incoming missiles and given the proper distance, diverting solid projectiles. They are also equipped with shields powerful enough to allow them to fly through the outer layers of a Sun like star. The weapons imperial ships mount include 500 tera-ton nuclear missiles and EMACs (ElectroMagnetic Accelerator Cannons).

500 Teraton Nuclear Missiles?

You do know how way over-the top it is right?

It makes the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs look like someone shooting a BB gun at the planet.

The smallest EMACs fire 30x10 meter cylindrical projectiles of solid depleted Uranium at just over the speed of light, resulting in about 8 x 10^27 joules kinetic energy (if I did my physics right).

You definitely did not do your physics right if you're firing a solid depleted uranium round at "just over the speed of light" in fact, at even 60% the speed of light it literally wouldn't matter if your projectiles were made out of spit and dirt or tungsten, when it hits it'll release its weight in antimatter as far as destructive potential goes.

Anyways, this is the sort of weapon, were I doing a nations roleplay, I would categorically forbid anybody from using. I am definitely rethinking and redesigning the power of this weapon, and I need your input. What do you think is reasonable for an ultra futuristic empire which spans several galaxies to put as the main armament on corvettes? Are even the 500 teraton bombs still over powered?

Overpowered, certainly, but most importantly. RIDICULOUSLY inefficient.

It would be cheaper, and much more destructively efficient, to use 500'000 1 Gigaton Missiles than 1 500 Teraton missile.

Brovo said
Lasers? You know how terrible those would be in space as weapons? The law of conservation of energy would utterly render them useless at anything beyond "knife fight" range in space. Because every second it travelled, it would lose significant chunks of power to dissipation. Yes, it moves at the speed of light. No, that still isn't fast enough in space. you were to engage in space, it would only be against planets, because planets are the only things that can't really dodge whatever you fire at them. Even then, a planet probably has vastly more defences to wage against an incoming fleet than the fleet could muster against it.Space battles in space, if we are talking hard sci-fi, just would not happen.Soft sci-fi, it could go in any direction, though.

They wouldn't be terrible in space, since hard sci-fi military ships wouldn't be the lumbering armor-clad WWII-knock off vessels most sci-fi portrays them as. They'd be light, so as to conserve delta-v during maneuvers---and to make it easier to accelerate, decelerate and alter their trajectory--- which means they'd have less mass for a laser to burn through. A sufficiently-powerful laser would easily burn through a ship's hull, compromising it and potentially dooming the crew inside. As for the speed, the thought of effortlessly dodging laser fire with a slow-than-light vessel (that obeys the laws of physics) is pretty much inherent to soft sci-fi where antimatter weapons, warp drives and phasers are the norm, as any ship packing laser weapons is going to have them mounted in fully-traversable turrets. While a space warship may be able to dodge one laser, the other 30 that are taking shots at it create an absurdly-large arch of inter-locking fire that simply cannot be avoided.

And not only that, but as space lacks an atmosphere, lasers become even more dangerous, as there is nothing in their immediate path (or surroundings) to degrade or scatter their beams.

Or you know. Equal and opposite reaction. Whatever material you make the laser gun out of that can sustain that heat at its most potent and concentrated (the gun barrel) you just... Coat your ships in. And now enemy lasers are useless. And that is completely ignoring conservation of energy.

Also, to explain the formula in layman's terms: The further the laser travels, the more enegy will dissipate into surrounding space, since it is a weapon of pure energy, this means it has a restrictive maximum range.

Oh, and this is ignoring the fact that if you can build up that much energy, contain it, and fire it, you are equally capable of simply deflecting it. :p

Brovo said
Or you know. Equal and opposite reaction. Whatever material you make the laser gun out of that can sustain that heat at its most potent and concentrated (the gun barrel) you just... Coat your ships in. And now enemy lasers are useless. And that is completely ignoring conservation of energy. Also, to explain the formula in layman's terms: The further the laser travels, the more enegy will dissipate into surrounding space, since it is a weapon of pure energy, this means it has a restrictive maximum range. Oh, and this is ignoring the fact that if you can build up that much energy, contain it, and fire it, you are equally capable of simply deflecting it. :p

Idunno, based on current technology, it almost seems like a waste NOT to outfit your fleet with solar/stellar/whatever capacitors and laser weapons. Even if only as defensive units.

Ultimately the choice in weaponry boils down to what's easy to build, and we don't know what that would be. Uranium is hard to find on earth -- maybe we find an asteroid or two full of fission materials, and then you'd almost be stupid NOT to make tons of bombs. Space combat is inherently attack-oriented (or at least I'm treating it that way, because that's how air power works, and how the energy equations play out). Sooner or later someone builds an Ironclad warship and changes the whole philosophy; same thing could happen in space strategy I guess. The take-away is, it's much easier to destroy things in space than it is to build them -- there's just so much energy at play. The 'unstoppable force' in space is much more 'unstoppable,' and the 'immovable objects' aren't 'immovable' enough. It seems to all add up to a very aggressive kind of warfare, and it seems (to me) like the kind of environment that only really supports one top-dog. Less like WW2-era dogfighting, more like modern BVR.

mdk said I'll smash my enemies with rocks like a civilized gentleman, thank you very much.

An homage to life before civilization. How ironic. xD

If you're attaching rockets to an asteroid and then sending it off to the enemy, I feel as though they could easily and well in advance blow the asteroid up before it became a problem. It seems much more feasible to project a much smaller projectile at much faster speeds (aka space guns) than to fly big rocks at the enemy.

Not to mention the fact that using the asteroids as such seems like a big waste of good minerals.

ASTA said
They wouldn't be terrible in space, since hard sci-fi military ships wouldn't be the lumbering armor-clad WWII-knock off vessels most sci-fi portrays them as. They'd be light, so as to conserve delta-v during maneuvers---and to make it easier to accelerate, decelerate and alter their trajectory--- which means they'd have less mass for a laser to burn through. A sufficiently-powerful laser would easily burn through a ship's hull, compromising it and potentially dooming the crew inside. As for the speed, the thought of effortlessly dodging laser fire with a slow-than-light vessel (that obeys the laws of physics) is pretty much inherent to soft sci-fi where antimatter weapons, warp drives and phasers are the norm, as any ship packing laser weapons is going to have them mounted in fully-traversable turrets. While a space warship may be able to dodge one laser, the other 30 that are taking shots at it create an absurdly-large arch of inter-locking fire that simply cannot be avoided. And not only that, but as space lacks an atmosphere, lasers become even more dangerous, as there is nothing in their immediate path (or surroundings) to degrade or scatter their beams.

*Shakes head*

A: No, a ship mounting lasers for ANYTHING except point defence is NOT going to mount them in fully traversable turrets. It's going to mount it as a spinal weapon where they can get the most surface-area for the laser (Necessary, as your laser gets more powerful the size of the laser PROJECTOR increases with it.)

B: Your laser will be good, at MOST optimistic for a single light-second range. (299'792.458km) beyond that you're going to be less accurate than missiles (which in turn are terrible due to vulnerability at that range where any missile could be shot down so easily they literally aren't worth launching.) And as Brovo pointed out, the laser diffusing over range

The good ship Collateral Damage becomes aware of an incoming hostile missile. Collateral Damage has a laser cannon with a ten meter radius mirror operating on a mid-infrared wavelength of 2700 nanometers (0.0000027 meters). The divergence angle is (1.22 * 0.0000027) / 10 = 0.00000033 radians or 0.000019 degrees.

The laser cannon has an aperture power of 20 megawatts, and the missile is at a range of four megameters (4,000,000 meters). The beam brightness at the missile is 20 / (π * (4,000,000 * tan(0.000019/2))2) = 15 MW/m2 or 1.5 kW/cm2.

If the missile has a "hardness" of 10 kilojoules/cm2, the laser will have to dwell on the same spot on the missile for 10/1.5 = 6.6 seconds in order to kill it.

Figured another way, at four megameters the laser will have a spot size of 0.66 meters in radius, which has an area of 1.36 square meters. The missile's skin has a hardness of 10 kilojoules/cm2 so 13,600 kilojoules will be required to burn a hole of 0.66 meters radius. 20 megawatts for 6.9 seconds is 13,600 kilojoules. 6.9 seconds is close enough for government work to 6.6 seconds.

On THIS note...

And not only that, but as space lacks an atmosphere, lasers become even more dangerous, as there is nothing in their immediate path (or surroundings) to degrade or scatter their beams.

Go back to school and learn how lasers REALLY work.

mdk said Idunno, based on current technology, it almost seems like a waste NOT to outfit your fleet with solar/stellar/whatever capacitors and laser weapons. Even if only as defensive units.

Pretty much this. Lasers are an EXCELLENT choice for a secondary point defence. (Due to no ammo concerns, only power and head concerns.) And I say secondary because, just look at the equation above, point defence lasers will still be huge with 10 metre mirrors.

A more optimal "first response" point defence is either small-calibre railguns, or a railgun version of metalstorm.

Asuras said
An homage to life before civilization. How ironic. xDIf you're attaching rockets to an asteroid and then sending it off to the enemy, I feel as though they could easily and well in advance blow the asteroid up before it became a problem. It seems much more feasible to project a much smaller projectile at much faster speeds (aka space guns) than to fly big rocks at the enemy.Not to mention the fact that using the asteroids as such seems like a big waste of good minerals.

I'd be putting rockets on the sides for lateral maneuvering of the asteroid, but yeah, you could still shoot it down. The question becomes could you shoot down a hundred, or a thousand, or a million? Still yes, but it would require a lot of energy -- more than it would take to launch the rocks in the first place. Intercepting is harder than throwing -- that's why batters get three strikes. Energy-wise, you can build up a lot of power in deep space that defenders can't really match.

For instance, let's say I have a fleet and you have a fleet. I'm deciding to attack earth, and you move your fleet around Sol to stop me.

First thing I do is launch a bunch of rocks at earth. You can shoot them down from Earth -- but it takes tremendous (man-on-the-moon-ish) power to do so.

The thing to do would be to intercept my attack with your fleet -- lasers and defense missiles and railguns and whatever else you wanna use, human shields, whatever. So you do that, and maybe you stop *all* my rocks. Good job!

Now I bring in my fleet; you've already burned all that energy stopping my rocks, and I've got Deep Space kinetics at my back, plus totally un-spent weaponry and power and whatever. I mop you up in a heartbeat, and then move into bombardment mode and glass Planet Earth.

The attacker (almost) always wins, which then begs the question: if I can destroy an equal force at will, why would I ever let someone build up enough of a standing fleet to present a challenge? It's the same result that happened with the F-15 -- its combat record is a whopping 102 kills and zero losses. Fifty years later (an impossibly long time, for a war machine), nobody can fight it, and the politics follow the power. Space empire seems like the only logical conclusion to me.

Sure, a million space rocks would be difficult to stop. But to say you have the capability to fire all of them means you surely have the ability to make a lot more standard missiles. If you have a million space rocks (you'd need the rockets to propel them, likely many per space rock), then I'd have several times more explosive-carrying missiles. Stopping your space rocks would seem like much less of an issue, then.

In the scenario you described, you say you "bring in your fleet" as if it were some freebie. If someone had the power to stop a fleet much larger than your own of space rocks, then I'd have to assume they have the power to take on a fleet as well. The protection of Earth from space rocks could occur from the planet's surface itself (or other Sol system planets); no space fleet required. With your rocks gone, you only have your fleet to use, which is now at the mercy of the Earth-borne fleet given you've "brought them in" (plus whatever else Earth's surface has left in anti-spacerock weaponry).

Asuras said
Sure, a million space rocks would be difficult to stop. But to say you have the capability to fire all of them means you surely have the ability to make a lot more standard missiles. If you have a million space rocks (you'd need the rockets to propel them, likely many per space rock), then I'd have several times more explosive-carrying missiles. Stopping your space rocks would seem like much less of an issue, then.In the scenario you described, you say you "bring in your fleet" as if it were some freebie. If someone had the power to stop a fleet much larger than your own of space rocks, then I'd have to assume they have the power to take on a fleet as well. The protection of Earth from space rocks could occur from the planet's surface itself (or other Sol system planets); no space fleet required. With your rocks gone, you only have your fleet to use, which is now at the mercy of the Earth-borne fleet given you've "brought them in".

You have X number of Space Rocks. Each has 4 Rockets. (for simplicity) lets go with 1'000'000 Space Rocks. So you have 4'000'000 Rockets attached to your swarm of Space Rocks to conduct your bombardment.

Each Space Rock is 1km across at smallest. It would take the enemy their heaviest weapons to destroy your Space Rocks.

Person 2 just sends 4'000'000 missiles.

The Defender can destroy each missile with one shot from their point defence.

In the end it is infinitely more likely there would be big space rocks left over than missiles.

(OH, and the whole each rock has 4 Rockets is for maneuvering. As they ARE space rocks, you don't need more than a single rocket to get it moving. The others are only needed to adjust the course.)