mdk

Various Scifi Weaponry and Destructive Potential

Asuras said
Fair enough. Agreed. :PIn the end I believe interplanetary weaponry will be the only method of "space war". Weapons capable of firing or transporting projectiles or explosives to their destination far too fast or instantly for anything to intercept it; i.e. "warping" them. A planet is the biggest spaceship out there, if you think about it, capable of handling far more weapons on it than any fleet even of similar size.A wormhole at the end of the barrel, essentially.

It's gravity that becomes your weakness, and atmosphere. If you could find a small planetoid with ludicrously high rotation speeds, you could use it as a cannon to slingshot items or weapons into space, but even that's harder than simply dropping a rock out of the sky and guiding it towards the ground.

Various Scifi Weaponry and Destructive Potential

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.

ACA supreme court ruling, re Religious Exception

Brovo said
You're right. It isn't as extreme as telling someone they cannot use certain birth control methods because it might piss off the Aztec Sun God. It should be up to the individual employee to decide. Not the company.

It is. The only thing at question was, does the individual get to tell the government to force other individuals to pay for their decision. That's been ruled unconstitutional. You can still take whatever you want, and according to this decision, you can still tell the government to pay for it; the only thing that's been overruled is the (federal) government's power to make someone pay for something that violates their beliefs. Or to keep the aztec sun god comparison alive,they can't make you participate in the human sacrifice. If you choose to sacrifice humans for whatever reason, that's still fine according to this ruling, but no one can make you do it.

Various Scifi Weaponry and Destructive Potential

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.

Drawing Spam Members as Cats

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2014 World Cup thread

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2014 World Cup thread

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2014 World Cup thread

Giant said
The Swiss can go with pride.

I really thought their keeper was gonna nail that bicycle kick for the win. Holy shit. Can you imagine?

Also, Di Maria looks like a living incarnation of a soccer motivational poster.

Drawing Spam Members as Cats

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