WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

Wed, 2010-12-01 17:05

#2

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Firewall ;) my idea is : if it's so simple to have an atomic bomb it's probably equally simple to have a detector in the same time the Eclipse Phase setting have the same type of paranoïa that the real world have, every one knows that somewhere someone want to crash a plane in the pentagone but no one care really, they gave the stressful situation to someone else but can they manage this ?

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What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Wed, 2010-12-01 19:41

#3

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
In any case, does anyone have any suggestions for countermeasures against nuclear suicide-bombing?

Nukes are somewhat detectable: they have to be macroscopic, they involve heavy metals that block or interact with radiation in characteristic ways. Muon radiography might be a good method in EP: muons are blocked or deflected by nukes, and given EP technology muon scanners are likely doable. If your security cannot notice somebody crawling from a newly docked ship on your habitat outside, then you have bad security and deserve what you get.

Quote:
Nuclear arms aren't the only WMD, of course; there are pathogens and nanoplagues and even just plain hacking the habitat's life support and opening all airlocks with the safeties off. However, nukes are by far the flashiest and therefore the favourite to discuss.

Two words: anti matter. Still pretty detectable from gamma emissions etc. The thing to really fear is the subtle attacks - hacking will have a hard time overriding the safety of a habitat, but it is not that hard to make a slow incubation bioplague or molds that make nerve gas. But the general point stands: yes, it is easy to kill habitats. It likely happens a few times a year. I am reminded of the chilling line in Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbow's End'': "We have only lost three cities this year." Or as Charles Stross described it in 'Iron Sunrise', where the protagonist has to deal with yet another loon with WMDs:

Stross wrote:
Okay. So our target somehow scored twelve kilos of weapons-grade heavy metal and tested a subcritical assembly before anybody noticed. What then?" "The block management 'bot issued an automatic fourteen-day eviction notice for violation of the tenancy agreement. There's a strict zero-tolerance policy for weapons of mass destruction in this town." "Oh, sweet Jesus." Rachel rubbed her forehead. "It gets better," Inspector MacDougal added with morbid enthusiasm. "Our bampot messaged the management 'bot right back, demanding that they recognize him as President of Uganda, King of Scotland, Supreme Planetary Dictator, and Left Hand of the Eschaton. The 'bot told him to fuck right off, which probably wasnae good idea: that's when he threatened to nuke 'em."

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Wed, 2010-12-01 23:13

#4

Rhyx

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

What I wonder about the OP's question is: why even smuggle it inside! Even if you blow it up a couple of kilometers away, the Habitat is as good as gone. Why waste time even bothering with security inside the station. Just the radiation bombardment would be enough considering that there's no matter like air to get in the way. All that those radio active waves are going to be playing bowling with the first thing they meet, in this case the habitat's walls.

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Thu, 2010-12-02 04:41

#5

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Rhyx wrote:
What I wonder about the OP's question is: why even smuggle it inside! Even if you blow it up a couple of kilometres away, the Habitat is as good as gone. Why waste time even bothering with security inside the station. Just the radiation bombardment would be enough considering that there's no matter like air to get in the way. All that those radio active waves are going to be playing bowling with the first thing they meet, in this case the habitat's walls.

Well, nukes in space are surprisingly ineffective. In an atmosphere the gamma rays bump into air molecules and transfer their energy, creating a nasty shockwave and downconverting into infrared. In vacuum they just radiate away - the only damage is from the gammas you absorb directly, and there is not that much direct infra-red. You won't get an EMP since there is no air to ionize. In my analysis of space combat (which I *really* ought to finish, but have been distracted from) I calculated that the kinetic kill radius of nukes is a few meters per kiloton (!) The radiation kill radius (more complicated due to ship or station shielding) is measured in kilometres, but this is mainly a threat to biomorphs and sensitive nanomachines. Synthmorphs will survive fine. See http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunconvent.php for a further discussion of nukes in space.

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Thu, 2010-12-02 09:20

#6

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Learn something new. I didn't realize the EMP wave wouldn't come, which was always 'the big threat' with this sort of thing. Still, doesn't answer the question, since 'nuke' is interchangeable with any other sort of WMD. Why not detonate an antimatter bomb? Why not point your engines at it and just cook them with gamma rays? Of course large habitat swill have significant defenses, to pretty far out. They may require you completely power down and be towed in, for instance, or even leave the dock a hundred kliks out with customs there, and you finish your journey by farcasting or shuttle. But smaller habitats will never be able to afford all that, and will be like tiny soap bubbles in space. Their best defense is probably that they just aren't worth the trouble, and that someone who goes around torching habitats, even habitats of unpopular people, will be investigated and sought out. That sort of thing is just bad for business.

Thu, 2010-12-02 10:21

#7

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Antimatter detonations are like nuclear explosions. I wonder whether one could get an EMP if one detonated a nuke or AM charge inside a ship (plenty of atoms to strip electrons from), but I suspect it has to be a large ship and in a magnetic field (like the Jupiter or Saturn magnetosphere) to get the full effect.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:
Their best defense is probably that they just aren't worth the trouble, and that someone who goes around torching habitats, even habitats of unpopular people, will be investigated and sought out. That sort of thing is just bad for business.

Sounds like an idea for an adventure. The PCs are trying to catch a serial habitat killer. "Why I blow up habitats? Because that is where the people are!"

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Thu, 2010-12-02 12:02

#8

Rhyx

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Quote:
Well, nukes in space are surprisingly ineffective. In an atmosphere the gamma rays bump into air molecules and transfer their energy, creating a nasty shockwave and downconverting into infrared. In vacuum they just radiate away - the only damage is from the gammas you absorb directly, and there is not that much direct infra-red. You won't get an EMP since there is no air to ionize. In my analysis of space combat (which I *really* ought to finish, but have been distracted from) I calculated that the kinetic kill radius of nukes is a few meters per kiloton (!) The radiation kill radius (more complicated due to ship or station shielding) is measured in kilometres, but this is mainly a threat to biomorphs and sensitive nanomachines. Synthmorphs will survive fine.

Wow, is that right! I figured that it would carry more since there was nothing interfering. But that cuts both ways. And with the EMP, yeah, that part I should have figured on my own, it's the air that gets electrons knocked out of it, so the air atoms have to "steal" the electrons back from someplace. No air or other ionization of gas, no EMP. Same thing with the initial fireball of a nuke, if there's no air to turn into plasma and not enough matter for the initial chain reaction all you got is the uranium working. Space is empty, it only makes sense.

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Thu, 2010-12-02 13:50

#9

root

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

root@WMDs and Terrorism [hr] Almost every habitat is full of nanoclouds of varying densities. Anyone who has lived in one of these cannot guarantee that they have not been bugged, have not had their clothing co-opted by someone else's botnet, have not picked up a skin infection that constantly produces surveillance nanites, or have breathed in enough nanites that their liver and kidneys are getting blocked up. The mesh is likewise full of support software that makes use of these clouds, and there are likely billions of running processes dedicated to searching for this sort of thing, and most of them don't even have anyone to report back to now. Information will still be collected and stored, and another tier of processes will dig through this titanic pile of data looking for patterns and keeping track of all sources of WMD readings. Stack a few thousand more tiers of processing on top of that, and most information from the bottom will never see the light of day, but WMD data will get priority and be widely disseminated. Your terrorist is proper fucked before they even leave for their destination. And the simple answer of EMP blasting your morph to kill off all of those nasty buggers means you show up because you have no tracker bugs on you. Nothing draws attention like a hole in information, so you would light up ever security bot in the system.

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Thu, 2010-12-02 18:53

#10

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

The problem with any security system is that if it is sensitive enough to detect weak signals there will be plenty of false alarms. Do you investigate all of them with the same zeal? Adding AI will not really solve the problem because now you have just more complexity in the system that can be fooled or triggered into more false alarms. Consider how easy it is to disrupt airports today by doing or carrying something "suspicious" but completely legal. Now, what is the probability that even a mediocre hacker can produce signals or nanostructures that make these protective nanoclouds to light up in a big false alarm? The optimal security level for any habitat depends on a tradeoff between risk and costs of maintaining paranoid security. Enough security and you will be unable to do anything. No security and you will be vulnerable. And even at the optimum people will disagree on whether there is too much hassle or not enough scans.

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Thu, 2010-12-02 20:25

#11

root

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

root@WMDs and Terrorism [hr] Your argument sounds suspiciously like the tyranny of large numbers.

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Fri, 2010-12-03 07:45

#12

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

BTW, this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3850 "SNIF: A Futuristic Neutrino Probe for Undeclared Nuclear Fission Reactors" has an interesting analysis of how to use neutrino detectors to find nuclear reactors. While intended for fission and on Earth, in EP neutrino detectors are far better (after all, they are used for farcasting) and fusion reactors emit on the same order of neutrinos as fission reactors. It still doesn't help detect a nuke when it is not detonating, but this kind of detector will be very good at detecting the presence of a stealthed spaceship with a running reactor.

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Mon, 2010-12-06 13:37

#13

valen

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
In any case, does anyone have any suggestions for countermeasures against nuclear suicide-bombing?

The same method I would suggest we use now days. Good Intelligence and non-proliferation. Even in EP and bet fissionable materials for an actual bomb or AntiMatter would be pretty difficult to come by.

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Mon, 2010-12-06 15:07

#14

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

valen wrote:
The same method I would suggest we use now days. Good Intelligence and non-proliferation. Even in EP and bet fissionable materials for an actual bomb or AntiMatter would be pretty difficult to come by.

Yes, but compared to today they are much easier to get. There are numerous old spaceships and wrecks with fission reactors, unguarded reactors and missile sites left from the Fall, not to mention plenty of legit antimatter fuel containers circulating among courier and military ships. Even worse, any ship with a decent isp like a fusion ship, is a WMD. Just point the business end at a habitat and fire the engine: the fusion torch is essentially a particle beam. If you add some heavy metal to it it becomes even more destructive, plus your ship will move away more slowly. And the antimatter ship can of course dump its fuel cannisters directly, equipped with timed explosives. And the ship doesn't have to be close. In space, nearly anything can be turned into a hypervelocity weapon. Remember, once something moves at 3 km/s (a fairly low speed in EP) the kinetic energy is larger than the energy of a corresponding mass of TNT. Throw a bundle of iron rods or rocks out of the airlock while accelerating towards a habitat, and they will strike like bombs. A ship with delta-v 400 km/s is a habitat-killer if it does a kamikaze attack, and even if it just dumps junk that junk will have 80 GJ/kg of energy - about 19 tons of TNT per kilogram of waste. It is hard to do non-proliferation of spaceships in Eclipse Phase. Especially when the scum got them.

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Mon, 2010-12-06 16:55

#15

valen

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Arenamontanus wrote:
valen wrote:
The same method I would suggest we use now days. Good Intelligence and non-proliferation. Even in EP and bet fissionable materials for an actual bomb or AntiMatter would be pretty difficult to come by.
Yes, but compared to today they are much easier to get. There are numerous old spaceships and wrecks with fission reactors, unguarded reactors and missile sites left from the Fall, not to mention plenty of legit antimatter fuel containers circulating among courier and military ships.

Yes, much more difficult then in the present day. That makes good intel even more valuable.

Quote:
Even worse, any ship with a decent isp like a fusion ship, is a WMD. Just point the business end at a habitat and fire the engine: the fusion torch is essentially a particle beam. If you add some heavy metal to it it becomes even more destructive, plus your ship will move away more slowly. And the antimatter ship can of course dump its fuel cannisters directly, equipped with timed explosives. And the ship doesn't have to be close. In space, nearly anything can be turned into a hypervelocity weapon. Remember, once something moves at 3 km/s (a fairly low speed in EP) the kinetic energy is larger than the energy of a corresponding mass of TNT. Throw a bundle of iron rods or rocks out of the airlock while accelerating towards a habitat, and they will strike like bombs. A ship with delta-v 400 km/s is a habitat-killer if it does a kamikaze attack, and even if it just dumps junk that junk will have 80 GJ/kg of energy - about 19 tons of TNT per kilogram of waste. It is hard to do non-proliferation of spaceships in Eclipse Phase. Especially when the scum got them.

This is much easier to prevent with traffic control. Establish a safe zone around the habitat. Anything unauthorized in the "safe zone" should be treated as hostile and destroyed. Anything leave a pre-established flight plan in the safe zone should be treated as hostile and destroyed. Anything approaching the safe zone should be challenged and authorized or warned away. Its not fool proof, but it should provide a measure of protection to the habitat.

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Mon, 2010-12-06 18:56

#16

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

valen wrote:
This is much easier to prevent with traffic control. Establish a safe zone around the habitat. Anything unauthorized in the "safe zone" should be treated as hostile and destroyed. Anything leave a pre-established flight plan in the safe zone should be treated as hostile and destroyed. Anything approaching the safe zone should be challenged and authorized or warned away. Its not fool proof, but it should provide a measure of protection to the habitat.

When I get the time to finish my analysis of space combat I hope to be able to specify safe zone distances etc, but I am not hopeful they will be that effective if you are a minor habitat. The Mars and Titan systems have enough sensors and firepower (in terms of array baseline, array area and cooling capacity) to deal with even big threats like a charging transport ship. But most habitats won't. Consider a metal rod launched at 100 km/s. It is two meters long and 10 cm across, weighing about 500 kg. You can easily stealth it against radar and the visual spectrum, and the temperature due to launch or solar radiation will be fairly low - it will show up if you look carefully enough, but it is tricky to see since there is so much sky. If it hits it will penetrate a few meters (no matter what you build your habitat from) and release 2.1 kiloton of energy, like a small nuclear weapon. The enemy can launch it from very far away, since stations move in predictable orbits. They can also do it when apparently turning somewhere else, making use of the curvature of orbits to bring the rod on target. From the station you need to hit the 10 cm target with enough energy to vaporize it completely (otherwise you will just be hit by a molten glob doing the same damage). That is about 3*10^9 J. For various reasons lasers are pretty useless beyond a light second, so if you are lucky you can spend all of the 3000 seconds it takes for the rod to approach lasing it, requiring just a megawatt of power. Except that that requires (for IR or visible light lasers) an array kilometres across to avoid too much diffraction losses. If you don't see the rod coming until later, then you need correspondingly high wattage. A missile or a railgun projectile might also be able to hit. They have a shorter range but if they hit far out enough they give the rod debris time to disperse before it hits the habitat. The rod can easily be followed by a second or third if the enemy wants to penetrate deeper. Or a whole simultaneous swarm, easily overloading the point defences. Now, the good news is that traffic control can be pretty long distance. Accelerating high delta-v spaceships are very visible (you cannot push the Destroyer up to marching speed without alerting the entire solar system - it is that bright). In fact, the trickiest part of space warfare is to accelerate in such a sneaky way that people lose track of you. The bad news is that most habitats regularly trade with ships that could do enormous damage just by turning the wrong way - the unseen rod-launcher is scary, but a suicide hacker taking control of a ship's engines and thrusters in near-space is equally deadly. It is a bit like how many nations go nuts over possible terrorists on airports but ignore what a terrorist in the refrigeration industry could do (please don't ask, I'm trying to be nice to the intelligence agencies before Christmas). There are plenty of dangerous stuff around if you know what to look for, and in EP there is much more of it. Thank heavens for off-planet backups.

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Mon, 2010-12-06 20:26

#17

valen

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Arenamontanus wrote:
When I get the time to finish my analysis of space combat I hope to be able to specify safe zone distances etc, but I am not hopeful they will be that effective if you are a minor habitat. The Mars and Titan systems have enough sensors and firepower (in terms of array baseline, array area and cooling capacity) to deal with even big threats like a charging transport ship. But most habitats won't.

I imagine the small habitats will have to band together in mutual defense. This is probably how Locus got started. I agree independent small habitats probably have to survive by hoping nobody wants to kill them rather then active defense.

Arenamontanus wrote:
Nasty stuff about kinetic munitions

EP level tech can probably get a handle on anything short of a true swarm. Their sensors are fantastic and near-AI can be programmed not only to watch continuously, but to also build up predictive algorithms for suspicious activity across the solar system and build pattern analysis for threat prediction . Rods from God are no longer something to be feared with the latest from Direct Action (TM) Habitat Defense Systems Division. Contact your nearest Direct Action representative for details.

Arenamontanus wrote:
hacker taking control of a ship's engines and thrusters in near-space is equally deadly.

This is probably the scenario that keeps HabSec people laying awake in bed at night.

Arenamontanus wrote:
It is a bit like how many nations go nuts over possible terrorists on airports but ignore what a terrorist in the refrigeration industry could do (please don't ask, I'm trying to be nice to the intelligence agencies before Christmas). There are plenty of dangerous stuff around if you know what to look for, and in EP there is much more of it. Thank heavens for off-planet backups.

In EP, paranoia is a way of life. Security theater probably is too...

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Tue, 2010-12-07 09:56

#18

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

valen wrote:
EP level tech can probably get a handle on anything short of a true swarm. Their sensors are fantastic and near-AI can be programmed not only to watch continuously, but to also build up predictive algorithms for suspicious activity across the solar system and build pattern analysis for threat prediction . Rods from God are no longer something to be feared with the latest from Direct Action (TM) Habitat Defense Systems Division. Contact your nearest Direct Action representative for details.

Okay, you've detected this object at half an AU away. You yourself are about an AU from the nearest helpful anything. You anticipate collision in about 4 months. You call DA and they say 'hey, great hearing from you. Our nearest ship is 6 months away.' Then what?

Tue, 2010-12-07 10:17

#19

valen

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

nezumi.hebereke wrote:
Okay, you've detected this object at half an AU away. You yourself are about an AU from the nearest helpful anything. You anticipate collision in about 4 months. You call DA and they say 'hey, great hearing from you. Our nearest ship is 6 months away.' Then what?

My DA reference was a joke about how wealthy habitats will have better protection. How bout we use a network of small drones that intercept the incoming projectile, attach to it and alter its trajectory with remaining deltaV. Alternately we could launch a projectile from a railgun with a course calculated to deflect the incoming. What I'm saying really is that an object the size of a tire iron on a collusion course with a habitat, especially in earth orbit, is probably not all that uncommon an occurrence. Solutions have to have been found by now.

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Tue, 2010-12-07 10:49

#20

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

valen wrote:
How bout we use a network of small drones that intercept the incoming projectile, attach to it and alter its trajectory with remaining deltaV. Alternately we could launch a projectile from a railgun with a course calculated to deflect the incoming.

First, you need to detect the incoming object. Then the nearest drone needs to accelerate to intercept it. Considering my above example of a lightsecond detection radius, that means you have ~3000 seconds to move something to intercept (deflection is not really an option, when you hit the object it will blow up due to the hypervelocity difference). If one drone can accelerate at rate a, in time t it can travel 0.5at^2. So if you have a 500g acceleration missile, in 3000 seconds it can cover 22 million km, more than enough to intercept (but it would be *stupid* to waste delta-v and reaction mass like that by accelerating all the way - instead you would have more drones and shorter acceleration periods). Sounds good? But, what is the cost of interception drones versus decoy impactors? It is plausible that decoys are much cheaper, so the enemy can spam the interception system with lots of decoys and a few impactors. That way at the very least he depletes the more expensive drones, and likely can make hits without being efficiently stopped. Worse, once the first drone-impactor hits occur the volume becomes hard to scan - lots of hot gas and fragments. So seeing what is coming and exactly where it is will become very hard, reducing the ability of drones or railguns to protect.

Quote:
What I'm saying really is that an object the size of a tire iron on a collusion course with a habitat, especially in earth orbit, is probably not all that uncommon an occurrence. Solutions have to have been found by now.

EP ships and habitats clearly have defences against micrometeors (e.g. Whipple shields) and larger impactors such as debris (point defenses). But these are not intended to do maximal damage. Overall, my impression of EP space warfare is that it is a battle of signal processing. There is not much space for heroic captains or hotshot pilots, rather it is a matter of noise filtering, overload prevention, QE networks, sensor fusion, Bayesian strategy inference and spacetime game theory. A strategic position is a matter of information advantage rather than material advantage.

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Tue, 2010-12-07 12:23

#21

root

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

root@WMDs and Terrorism [hr]

Arenamontanus wrote:
Overall, my impression of EP space warfare is that it is a battle of signal processing. There is not much space for heroic captains or hotshot pilots, rather it is a matter of noise filtering, overload prevention, QE networks, sensor fusion, Bayesian strategy inference and spacetime game theory. A strategic position is a matter of information advantage rather than material advantage.

Yup. If you drop the QE networks and add in social network analysis, you've gone and described current SOTA.

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Tue, 2010-12-07 19:38

#22

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Society of Typographic Aficionados? Also, am I the only one who finds such statistical combat concepts as immensely disturbing? Combat taken to its ultimate pinacle; no longer any pretense of honour or heroism to disguise it from what it really is: Violence for the sake of resources. Cold, mathematical, precise, and without even having to see the other person's face. Calculate a firing solution, press a button, and wait to see if they die. More to the point, death is total. If your ship is hit, the destruction is likely inescapable. If your own engine systems don't go critical, and that's an immense if when things like antimatter come into the equation, your ship's going to lose power, life support will fail, and you face a slow death unless someone on your side rescues you, which is unlikely if your side loses. Worse, your enemy could find you... In short, it takes war back to that place where men lined up to die with muskets in arm, unflinchingly walking into place to roll the dice and risk ending up in a casket. That fills me with more discomforting dread than any other kind of conflict in history: War without pretense is staring a terrible monster in the face without even a mask to offer you comfort.

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Tue, 2010-12-07 20:26

#23

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
Also, am I the only one who finds such statistical combat concepts as immensely disturbing? Combat taken to its ultimate pinacle; no longer any pretense of honour or heroism to disguise it from what it really is: Violence for the sake of resources. Cold, mathematical, precise, and without even having to see the other person's face. Calculate a firing solution, press a button, and wait to see if they die.

Or, in a ship-to-ship fight, whether you die. There is a reason ship combat is not suited for actual gameplay. Hmm, I might be numbed by my research (got some strange looks today when one graph I was plotting was marked in units of thousands dead) or maybe I'm possessed by the ghost of Herman Kahn, but I find this form of warfare more honest than the adrenaline and testosterone fuelled myth of the warrior. This is violence without any pretence or pride. It is ugly and worth nearly anything to prevent. The solution is not to return to chestpounding heroism but to make war impractical to do.

Quote:
More to the point, death is total. If your ship is hit, the destruction is likely inescapable. If your own engine systems don't go critical, and that's an immense if when things like antimatter come into the equation, your ship's going to lose power, life support will fail, and you face a slow death unless someone on your side rescues you, which is unlikely if your side loses. Worse, your enemy could find you...

Yup. But you can always take comfort in that you have a copy back at HQ. "Crew, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that we won the battle! The bad news is that the last radiation pulse has killed us." One outcome I found in my analysis is when a nuclear weapon detonates close enough to kill biomorphs but not the ship. The crew are up and walking, but will die within hours - time to decide who gets the remaining synthmorph and who ends up being cored and moved into the ship computer. Which might be slightly worse for wear due to the particle radiation. There is much to be said for mutual nonaggression treaties. Unfortunately it is hard to institute them between the major groups in EP - how do you even sign a treaty with anarchists?

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Wed, 2010-12-08 05:38

#24

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Arenamontanus wrote:
Hmm, I might be numbed by my research (got some strange looks today when one graph I was plotting was marked in units of thousands dead) or maybe I'm possessed by the ghost of Herman Kahn, but I find this form of warfare more honest than the adrenaline and testosterone fuelled myth of the warrior. This is violence without any pretence or pride. It is ugly and worth nearly anything to prevent. The solution is not to return to chestpounding heroism but to make war impractical to do.

I agree that war is something to be suppressed, but it is no less chilling to imagine it with all pretense evaporated. I can agree that, without a doubt, eliminating man's best qualities (bravery, sacrifice for others, mercy, etc.) from the equation is actually a good thing, as it bares what war really is and gives no idealist reason to push it except for valid reasons. Doesn't make this any less discomforting.

Arenamontanus wrote:
Yup. But you can always take comfort in that you have a copy back at HQ.

Cold comfort to a dying man... Personally, I've got some curious beliefs that are very difficult to test (darn p-zombies) that make this difficult for me to personally determine whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

Arenamontanus wrote:
"Crew, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that we won the battle! The bad news is that the last radiation pulse has killed us."

Another point for the horrors of war without pretense: Even if you win, you've lost.

Arenamontanus wrote:
One outcome I found in my analysis is when a nuclear weapon detonates close enough to kill biomorphs but not the ship. The crew are up and walking, but will die within hours - time to decide who gets the remaining synthmorph and who ends up being cored and moved into the ship computer. Which might be slightly worse for wear due to the particle radiation.

All the more reason to sleeve your crew into synthmorphs before they leave on their Tour of Duty (and bring spares). Much more resilient, less fuel and ship space spent on life support...

Arenamontanus wrote:
There is much to be said for mutual nonaggression treaties. Unfortunately it is hard to institute them between the major groups in EP - how do you even sign a treaty with anarchists?

You get representatives voted up by the majority to draw up a general contract of friendship. Anyone who abides by it will be treated with respect and dignity, while those that do not, will not. This can even include incentives for assisting in the capture of those that defy this contract. This gives anarchists something that requires no formal structure to abide by, but establishes a basis for interaction. The fact is, building a mass driver that can fire across the system will not go unnoticed, and not many autonomist habs like the idea of Jimmy drawing the attention of the PC in a way you'd call unfriendly; it tends to get you evaporated. Anarchists tend to police their own.

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Wed, 2010-12-08 08:26

#25

valen

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Lets get off the space combat tangent and back to securing your habitat from WMDs

Arenamontanus wrote:
If one drone can accelerate at rate a, in time t it can travel 0.5at^2. So if you have a 500g acceleration missile, in 3000 seconds it can cover 22 million km, more than enough to intercept (but it would be *stupid* to waste delta-v and reaction mass like that by accelerating all the way - instead you would have more drones and shorter acceleration periods). Sounds good? But, what is the cost of interception drones versus decoy impactors? It is plausible that decoys are much cheaper, so the enemy can spam the interception system with lots of decoys and a few impactors. That way at the very least he depletes the more expensive drones, and likely can make hits without being efficiently stopped. Worse, once the first drone-impactor hits occur the volume becomes hard to scan - lots of hot gas and fragments. So seeing what is coming and exactly where it is will become very hard, reducing the ability of drones or railguns to protect.

For the record I am assuming detection within a time frame that allows corrective action is a given, at least for the sake of further conversation about how to stop a barrel of ball bearings dumped out the side of a space ship. Maybe the best answer is to not put the habitat on a predictable path? Maybe not dodging incoming objects once they have been detected, but what about varying the position of the habitat randomly. I.e. a zig-zagging instead of a straight line.

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Wed, 2010-12-08 09:38

#26

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

valen wrote:
Maybe the best answer is to not put the habitat on a predictable path? Maybe not dodging incoming objects once they have been detected, but what about varying the position of the habitat randomly. I.e. a zig-zagging instead of a straight line.

It is going to be very expensive fuel-wise for big habitats like Extropia in solar orbits, but it might work for smaller habitats in planetary orbits. Zigzagging is likely tough to do, but small changes in inclination or node are enough to make the habitat to be out of the way when a remote-launched bucket of nails arrives. It is likely a cheap safeguard, but messes up traffic planning.

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Wed, 2010-12-08 10:27

#27

nick012000 nick012000's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Arenamontanus wrote:
valen wrote:
Maybe the best answer is to not put the habitat on a predictable path? Maybe not dodging incoming objects once they have been detected, but what about varying the position of the habitat randomly. I.e. a zig-zagging instead of a straight line.
It is going to be very expensive fuel-wise for big habitats like Extropia in solar orbits, but it might work for smaller habitats in planetary orbits. Zigzagging is likely tough to do, but small changes in inclination or node are enough to make the habitat to be out of the way when a remote-launched bucket of nails arrives. It is likely a cheap safeguard, but messes up traffic planning.

In habitat swarms like Phelan's Recourse it might even happen naturally thanks to the dynamic instability of having that many objects in a relatively small area. Plotting the course of three objects is hard enough, but calculating that of thousands? It's probably nearly impossible, though you'd likely be able to target the swarm as a whole with KKV that fires off its impactors in a shotgun like fashion to spread the damage out amongst the target area.

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Wed, 2010-12-08 12:10

#28

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Phelan's is also a special case since it orbits through the rings, if I remember right. That means it has much more shielding than the average habitat swarm. Besides, there is the Free Enterprise... [In my game, there is a former US space cruiser in the swarm. It is run by Admiral Sorensen, who has been in charge of USSF Enterprise since before the Fall. He was on duty in the outer system when things went wrong, battled a few TITAN nasties near Saturn and picked up lots of refugees. When he was ordered to regroup to Jupiter to join the emerging Junta he refused, and instead joined the emerging PR. Since then the renamed ship has been providing impact defense and deterrent cpaacity for the swarm. At least that is the story. General Sorensen likes to embroider it a bit while sitting on the Star Trek-style bridge he built. Exactly what the capabilities of the Free Enterprise are is very uncertain, and the veracity of his stories is problematic. Some claim he actually stole it from the Space Force, or even that it is a remodelled civilian ship. Still, the Free Enterprise provides a reliable shuttle service with its launches and is a thriving space-military themed community (joining the space navy is a good way for Recourse youth to rebel against their parents... not that the navy is any less laid-back). ]

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Mon, 2010-12-13 19:18

#29

fafromnice fafromnice's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

you were searching a reponse to the question : How People lives with WMDs I think this documentary will help you to understand http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2864871032688882557# It was ban from Uk 20 years after his release and win the Oscar for best documentary film un 1967 this is not just a movie in the A-Bomb, it's a movie on the mass media desinformation 46 min you have, all, the time to watch it ;)

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What do you mean a butterfly cause this ? How a butterfly can cause an enviromental system overload on the other side of a 10 000 egos habitat ?

Sat, 2010-12-18 13:46

#30

psiili

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

Considering this aspect, we should remember: 1. Near-extinction event 10 years ago. Everything is still in a constant flux, society has yet to recover or gain long-term stability. Also, The Fall would have been a significant selector, weeding out the less lucky, more conservative, change-aversive or antisocial. (it's hard to get a place on the raft by bullying / violence. That just tends to piss off everyone.) Since >90% of survivors are still kept on floppies, we can (reasonably) assume that only the luckiest / most well-of / intelligent / well-educated amongst all surviving people will be walking among us, since I doubt "they" (those in power) would start giving free bodies to unemployed on-the-dole or toilet cleaning assistants*, when highly educated, genehackers or nano-programmers would go without... And the better-off, well-educated and/or smart folks tend to be more reluctant to act out via inherent nihilism of humankind. 2. Capturing objects at orbital velocities is possible using TODAYs tech and I can't see EP not having significantly better solutions available for use. (see: probes capturing comet particles in aerogel) 3. Building costs in EP are near-zero. Just the material costs and some energy + excess time from thew fabber means that a paranoid habitat might keep it's mass stores in ready-to-use forms, such as hypervelocity railguns for kinetic kill interception, kinetic deflection defense plates and graphene aerogels / xerogels located in strategic points around the station. After all, a kilogram of intelligent self-guided homing projectile for hypervelocity railgun costs about as much as a kilo of raw fabber stock. Also, you don't have to deflect the incoming warhead, just smash it into fine powder so your micrometeoroid shielding will suffice. The incoming projectile provides a lot of the velocity needed for the kill by itself. Nukes in space don't scare me. What creeps me out, is the idea, that some hardcore nutcase would recover a sample of self-replicating TITAN nano horror, freeze it solid with liquid helium (so they become inert) and transport the sample to the target in a near-microscopic multi-walled dewar container inside his body. Then just break the container. * I'm allowed to say that. I've done it for a few years as a part-time job. 50% of us were college-students making ends meet... :P -psiili -- For the digital natives, not sharing files is like not breathing air. -WaggishWombat

Sat, 2010-12-18 14:40

#31

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorhttism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

psiili wrote:
Nukes in space don't scare me. What creeps me out, is the idea, that some hardcore nutcase would recover a sample of self-replicating TITAN nano horror, freeze it solid with liquid helium (so they become inert) and transport the sample to the target in a near-microscopic multi-walled dewar container inside his body.

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay3TwmchxWA]That's a familiar mental image...[/url]

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Sun, 2010-12-19 06:08

#32

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: WMDs and Terrorism (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying ...

psiili wrote:
And the better-off, well-educated and/or smart folks tend to be more reluctant to act out via inherent nihilism of humankind.

Nihilists are rarely problems. It is the nice people who really want to make a difference you should be afraid off. Remember that the average suicide bomber is above the average of education in their home society. And that people who think they are doing good are not going to give up as easily as people who think they are doing something morally iffy.

Quote:
2. Capturing objects at orbital velocities is possible using TODAYs tech and I can't see EP not having significantly better solutions available for use. (see: probes capturing comet particles in aerogel)

And this is why bullets are completely safe. After all, we capture them by shooting into water or sand. Hypervelocity impactors are *nasty*. Check out the NASA studies on how to protect space probes from micrometeorites (e.g. through Whipple shields). And these are dust-grain sized objects. When you move faster than 3 km/s the kinetic energy per mass is equivalent to TNT (and typical interplanetary speeds are ~10 times this, making the energy density ~100 times larger).

Quote:
3. Building costs in EP are near-zero. Just the material costs and some energy + excess time from thew fabber means that a paranoid habitat might keep it's mass stores in ready-to-use forms, such as hypervelocity railguns for kinetic kill interception, kinetic deflection defense plates and graphene aerogels / xerogels located in strategic points around the station.

And this also means the crazies, well-meaning extremists or concerned citizens who think your habitat houses horrific war-criminals also can build equally nasty things. Near-zero building costs means that people can have WMDs "just in case". In some situations "shields" are better than "spears". But space is not a good environment for shields, while hitting spears with spears is tricky. And if spears are cheap and spear vs spear defesenses are not perfect, then the enemy can simply throw a lot of spears and rely on that some will get through.

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