Anarchist military: just read "New Model Army" by Adam Roberts. We are using a lot of concepts from it in my group, like the battlespace wikis. Warships: I think cloud combat is the rule of the day in space. Lots of sensors, submunitions, decoys and other gadgets flying or drifting in vast clouds after they have been launched by the main ships. Battles are fast, run at digital speeds, and involves a lot of desperate dodging, burned out sensors and tricks to fool the opponent into misallocating their devices. Rather slim opportunities from heroic fighter pilots, and capital ships might be rated more for their bandwidth than tonnage. Still, a big ship has an engine which is essentially a giant particle beam gun - you can melt through a habitat with it. As I see it, the jovians have a tech disadvantage in their loathing of AI and uploads, but they compensate by spending more, using more energy, and simply having lots of professionals. The biggest disadvantage is probably for the sides that do not have sophisticated QE comms: they really boost your tactical effectiveness. EDIT: the space battle scenes in Scott Westerfeldt's "The Killing of Worlds" are a big inspiration for me.

Size does have a quality all its own. Take a ship 100x the tonnage of a small ship. If two small ships are lethal to each other at a range of "1" with their lasers, if I put out 100x your wattage, in general I'm lethal to you at 10x the range. In addition, my armor might be 10x as thick, and I can maybe push the "danger zone" to me from a small ship's laser to 1/3.33 of a range unit. Same with big sensors. 10x the detection distance from the more powerful active sensor, and 10x the sensitivity from my bigger passive receivers and telescopes. And then the ship gets tagged with a hand-held sized can full of antimatter space mine, and is destroyed, costing the defense purse at least 100x as much as a small ships' destruction :) Anyway, a big ass ship supported by a picket fleet of escort ships screening it can be a very very effective proposition, if expensive and risky. In my EP universe I tend to think of the Jovian fleet as remnants of Earth's super impressive near orbit industry that is now long gone, and that the Jovians cannot realistically afford to build new super capital sized ships, and that most of their resources go to upgrading and refurbishing the pre-fall ships they have.

Gravity violates the KISS principle, so I would imagine it would be dumped on warships.

Yeah, I botched some of that. Will rewrite it when I get a chance.

Arenamontanus wrote:

It has a huge advantage in that it can carry the small crafts and gadgets efficiently: you don't want every of them to have a huge engine, and at least for antimatter there are economies of scale and a minimum size.

A thought came to mind reading this: how efficient would a fleet of ships be if they could attach to one another to form a larger ship rather than being contained in a larger ship in and of themselves? The back of said gestalt vessel could essentially just be a massive engine that attaches to the greater whole as a module. This would mean that every ship of said fleet can be designed at a smaller scale, and propulsion of the entire fleet can be handled by one non-combat vessel (which in theory could double as a projectile, when you think about it). Would this be an effective combat fleet?

Decivre wrote:

how efficient would a fleet of ships be if they could attach to one another to form a larger ship rather than being contained in a larger ship in and of themselves? The back of said gestalt vessel could essentially just be a massive engine that attaches to the greater whole as a module. This would mean that every ship of said fleet can be designed at a smaller scale, and propulsion of the entire fleet can be handled by one non-combat vessel (which in theory could double as a projectile, when you think about it).

It would have a single point of failure, of course. From a celestial mechanics perspective, delta v changes are going to be determined by the Isp, which favours a really efficient engine, and the total amount of fuel to payload (more is better, but levels out quickly). Acceleration on the other hand benefits from light ships with little excess fuel. So I think this favours dedicated carriers, but probably a few separate carrier engines that can link together just in case a few are lost or the fleet needs to split.

In our Pre-Fall game we play the infomorph crew of a big warship. It has a delta v of 500km/s and an acceleration of about 0.009 Gs. Last session we were on a brachistochrone trajectory to the belt from earth and it took us about 50-60 days of constant acceleration and deceleration. We will be able to fly back the same way and will still have some reserves. The Captain was only on board for the second half of the trip, he spent the first month with his wife and kids back on earth.

This: http://www.transhuman.talktalk.net/ts/TSTravTime.htm gives me 171d for 20 AU and two years for 100 AU, which I estimated for the smallest and biggest distance. In the campaign we started talking (or trying to talk) to all the faction leaders of our traget asteroid group as soon as we started from earth, as well as long range infiltration of their public networks with monitoring AIs. Not being detected isn't possible in our view of the whole space navy thing.

They are very helpful.

My question is, what do the Jovians DO with all these ships? How come they haven't tried to take over more of the system? They have to understand that the longer time goes the less of an advantage they'll have so why not capitalize on it now?

For the same reason the US doesn't go Curb-stomping the rest of the world just because our Navy is bigger than everyone else's put together. It's ALREADY obsolete. Space warfare gives a tremendous advantage to the defender. You cannot sneak up on anyone in space. The Attacker has to carry enough Delta-V to get to the fight, while the defender can devote that extra mass to armor, weapons, thrust, or having more delta-V for maneuvering during the fight. To overcome this, the attacker will have to devote significantly more industrial capacity to the war than the defender in order to gain and keep a numerical advantage. Those Jovian Warships aren't really good for invasion. Nothing is. They're much better on defense. The entire Jovian setup is made for defense. The hollowed-out asteroids? All their habitats have massive layers of cheap armor, and a huge mass to dump heat in (very important for firing weaponry.) They're bunkers, able to outlast a major assault for a good long time. Those warships are there to respond to assaults on habitats. They'll have all those defender advantages then, huge delta-V reserves, more armor and weapons. The whole setup is there to defend against a possible TITAN attack. Unless the Titans show up with cloaking devices, shields, FTL Warp drives, and some way to violate thermodynamics to deal with the heat buildup, It's a pretty good defense. And if the rest of the system fears a Jovian Invasion because of that huge fleet? Then maybe they'll build up their own militaries, and design their habitats with defense in mind. Which is exactly what the Jovian Military WANTS: Decently armed allies when the TITANS return. It's like a cold war in reverse: pressuring the other economies into greater military spending for their own good.

I've been reading some of the other posts on space combat and it seems that most of the designs for radiators aren't well suited to the intense maneuvering that even the large warships would have to engage in. The solution I came up with was a drone swarm of fighter-like craft stripped down to the bare essentials and equipped with extra radiators and a coolant transfer port. The idea is to have a number of specialized docking spars to which the drones dock, pick up hot coolant while off loading cold coolant then eject to a certain distance to radiate the heat away. Since a small drone would be far more maneuverable ,it could evade the main ship even during combat jinking to avoid missile debris and railgun rounds ( assuming point defense is doing its job!) perhaps even to the point of docking during such evasive actions! Right now I see the drones as a sphere,similar to a rover morph, with a disc of radiator panels about 10 m square, at the "poles" of the sphere are the coolant ports ringed by metallic hydrogen RCS . The panels could fold slightly such that the drones stack like cups when not in use and the pass through coolant ports would enable the outer drones to launch first or a whole stack to be charged and launched simultaneously. When active the swarm would resemble a cloud of embers swirling from the docking spars. Not at all stealthy, but stealth is already a lost cause at that point anyway. If one were clever and had sufficient extra drones on hand, you could have them form decoy shapes or fog an enemy's sensors by switching from edgewise to full disc much like how bird flocks or fish schools move . In terms of quantity, you'd need a lot of drones( hundreds or thousands) to keep up a decent cooling cycle,this could mean more surface area than with conventional radiators and there would still be fuel costs involved with operations. But as a solution for heat management in combat it could be worth the cost

Things you wouldn't see that are staples of TV/movie space battles (yeah, this is basic stuff, but I'm responding to the original poster): - brick shithouse vessels like BSG's Battlestars - fighters with human pilots - that thing that happens in George Lucas movies and EVO where the entire viewscreen is packed with ships from opposing sides - opposing sides being in visual range before they kill each other - human gunners - chemical rockets - exchanges of beam weapon fire between capital ships - combat hacking of enemy vessels things you would see: - missiles, fueled and armed with either antimatter or metallic hydrogen (the latter not on a good day) - drones. holy crap, so many drones. (sensors, decoys, hull-holers, etc.) - armor, but more as radiation shielding than to withstand kinetic damage things you might see: - mines, but only if they're worth one side's expenditure of munitions - railguns & beam weapons designed for close-in defense The idea of using the exhaust spike on an antimatter vessel as a weapon is kind of funny (in that "mass destruction is really funny" kind of way), but in practice, I can't imagine it'd come up all that often. You'd probably have to have already subdued your target to get in close enough to use it.

The way I see it, combat spacecraft are going to be cheap and nasty. Surprise is more or less impossible because everything in space sticks out like dogs balls. Surviving a direct hit is more or less impossible because it's very very easy to make insanely fast projectiles or insanely big explosions but very very hard to make a pressurised tin can in a vacuum that can survive either of them. So what you ideally want is something that accelerate harder than everything else (so you get to decide before the fight even begins whether you want to be part of it), something that's very maneuvrable and stuffed to the gills with countermeasures (because they're the only ways you'll survive an attack), and something that can hit as hard and often as possible from as far away as possible. Basically what you want is a stripped back piece of crap that consists almost entirely of a weapons platform bolted onto an engine, ideally with no living quarters because having crew on board sleeved in physical bodies (biological or otherwise) is just asking for it. Oh and I don't really see large "battleship" type ships being a popular idea. Any conventional ship is going to be toast if it suffers a direct hit from a badass military grade anti-ship weapon, no matter how big the ship is. So rather than wasting vast amounts of resources on an impressive looking white elephant, our hypothetical navy would be much better off by breaking up that space battleship's armament and mounting it on a flotilla of much more expendable vessels.

This of course requires some kind of sensor to have the exact position of the target, i. e. a small enough positional uncertainty to hit it. which reduces the range to that of the scouting asset, hwich is in turn subject to ECM. And everyone would know where that laser ist probably, due to the enormous activity the construction would require. You definitly need to be the main power in that volume of space, to an extent that other policies can't build up enough diplomatic pressure to stop you. So essentially nothing you can do when you have to share orbits with neighbours that don't trust you completely. In addition, everyone can plan for that superlaser and it would probably justify any kind of ruse to destroy it considering what it cost you. They do exist though and have some great military uses for defense, but I think they are far from unbeatable. In our pre Fall Royal Navy campaign ECM plays a major role, I think a superlaser would essentially be nothing more than a regular laser fighting alongside the sensor asset, albeit indestrucitble from a tactical point of view. I'll give it some more thought though.

Decimator wrote:

Also, scouting assets don't actually help in this sort of situation. The enemy unit will be targeted using its passive infrared emissions, and targeted that way. The limiting factor is lightspeed lag, which a forward probe will not help.

if your scouting asset is equipped with QE com it dose help. based on the maths earlier in the thread to calculate the volume of space a ship engaging in evasive maneuvers could occupy when your weapon arrives i would say it helps a lot.

Decimator wrote:

It doesn't need exact positioning. It has as much ammunition as the electricity its reactor can supply, so it can just keep firing until it scores a hit. A light-minute is an awful lot of space to cross when you're getting shot at. Also, scouting assets don't actually help in this sort of situation. The enemy unit will be targeted using its passive infrared emissions, and targeted that way. The limiting factor is lightspeed lag, which a forward probe will not help.

That is true I guess, you have a lot of time to hit something, I just wanted to add the caveat that although the theoretical range might be one lightminute, in practice in will be less and depend on forward sensors on the fringes. I don't use QE comms in my EP either btw.

Decimator wrote:

The existence and position of the craft would likely be known at all times, along with every other military spacecraft of every faction in the system.

Very true, my remark was aimed at the fact that you would know in advance where it will be, as it cannot maneuver.

Decimator wrote:

I never intended to imply that they are unbeatable. This type of craft is mostly a rebuttal to Rallan's idea of lots of small craft. The point is that certain very useful weapons are simply too physically large to fit on a small craft.

I did not think that you did, and I have not thought enough about this aspect of superlaser vs the swarm approach (which is my main way of thinking about combat in spaaace), yet, so I hope we can develop this further.

Decimator wrote:

There isn't any other weapon which has this kind of unanswerable range, and it can't be made any smaller without losing effectiveness. While a missile or projectile may technically have unlimited range, they can be deflected or destroyed. There is no such answer to a free-electron x-ray laser.

Well what other answers, of a different kind, will be there? ;) Like I said, you know where the thing is all the time, so the owner needs to be extra careful with the sphere of radius R = "typical range of a small standard weapon" around her big laser. That practically excludes a good volume around it, which might make it really difficult to find a good spot. Do you assume an asteroid as a heat sink? Or rather a free floating station? My knowledge about free electron lasers: A big ring of relativistic electrons, spraying X-rays all over the place at every bending magnet. You take the beam and let it fly through an undulator shooting lots of X-rays where the beam and the undulator was pointed. I think the Laser will have same blind spots, won't it? If it is on an asteroid it will at most be covering one half space, but you can just put two on each side. Otherwise it has a gigantic two dimensional radiator array somewhere, which might be difficult to maneuver out of the way when someone approaches from there. This approach might be even more difficult to pull off though. But most of these superlasers will be close to a planet right? So there might be windows of opportunity if you have come close already to get even closer, but still you're pretty far away, so might be useless. Can you aim your laser in any other way than moving the (massive? how massive?) undulator(s)? Does anyone have an idea how to calculate how many shots you would need given some numbers about the precision of the various aspects (where you point your laser, where you think the target is, etc.) How do you fire the beam into directions not in the plane of your accelerator ring? Is it possible to change the area in which the energy is concentrated to scorch lots of small targets and knock them out of their way instead of vaporizing them? How much of the construction can be armored to an extent that it is pretty much invulnerable to kinetic attack (i.e. buried under many meters of asteroid rock)? What about other superlaser-concepts? Phased array lasers are the main weapon on ships or asset in my EP so far. 1000nm is the usual wavelength.

Decimator wrote:

How did you do ECM? The only thing I was able to come up with was a bunch of laser dazzlers of various wavelengths pointed at every local sensor the opponent controls, and I'm not sure that's workable.

Basically every asset of the swarm traveling in front of the main ship in a combat situation and every inflated decoy are surounded by a swarm of wide frequency (esspecially lots of energy in IR) jammers that are focused in the general direction of the enemy, something on the order of a few degrees. The few hunderd K asset is somwhere between them, hopefully with a positional uncertainty so that the first shot misses, but unveils the attacking asset, which gets shot at in turn. Arenamontanus paper: S/N = Ft / (Ft + Bnpt + Btnp + Dnpt + R2np) where F is the average photon fux from the source (photons per second per square meter), t is the time interval of the measurement, B is the flux per pixel per second from the sky background, Bt is the flux per pixel from the telescope itself, D is the dark current flux (due to the CCD array itself), R is the readout noise per pixel and np is the number of pixels. Typically useful observations begin to be possible at S=N > 5, although guessing that something might be there is possible at S=N = 2 or 3 (but estimates of energy and other properties will have 50% errors). It is very difficult to see something that is close to the sun, maybe you can put something in front of the sun. But I don't think that concept works when jammer and the object are only fractions of arcminutes away from each other.

Hrm... This topic prompted me to think and ramble. Take my ramblings for what they are: just ramblings by me, as I read the setting... In a proper, knock-down, drag-out space war between the polities, the advantage is going to go to whomever has the most efficient ships. Obviously that doesn't equate to automatic victory... But quite frankly, there's literally no need to put a single morph aboard your vessels. Biomorphs require living space, they require food and oxygen and waste handling facillities, etcetera, etcetera. They require mass and volume, two things which will only hinder you in a fight. The Fenrir synthmorph is the perfect example which dedicated warships should wish to follow. You can fit an entire main battle tank's worth of crew and armaments into a morph about a quarter to a half of the size of the main battle tank simply by excising, completely, all of the space and mass used to support that crew. You can either use this savings to build your ships smaller and lighter, or the same size and more heavily armed/armored. Even using synths exclusively would be a lot of a savings, but not nearly as much as an all-infomorph crew, unless they're all swamanoids or something. (Though really, even an all-infomorph crew will probably want swarmanoids and other microbots around to sleeve into for maintenance and repair work. The footprint of swarmanoids would be negligible, however.) Plus, of course, there is acceleration to consider. A ship whose crew isn't rattling around like shot in a shoebox can quite happily perform maneuvers that would reduce a squishy biomorph crew to pulp on the bulkheads and even a synthetic crew to piles of parts. This is particularly important in the case of fighters, but is still important for larger ships. Ultimately, though, nobody has the stones to do that. The Jovians are extra-screwed: even their spies sleeve into flats, which is pretty much the very first thing that anyone suspecting Jovian shennanigannery is going to look at, so there's no reason to suspect their spaceship crews don't do the same. Not only do their ships have to carry enough radiation shielding to protect computerized systems, but they have to carry enough to protect the crew. This isn't something that can be jettisoned, either, at least not if you ever plan to come home, which means a Jovian warfleet has to carry a smegload of radiation shielding into battle, spending delta-v to accelerate and decelerate it. Between the radiation, the flats, and the fact that they're falling behind in the tech curve, ultimately the Jovians are space North Korea: Loud and dangerous on their home turf, but essentially incapable of projecting any real power anywhere else. Their ships are going to be antiquated and obsolete, and while they might have an advantage in their ships being too [i]dumb[/i] for returning TITANS to hack, that won't mean much since in thirty years' time any attacking power will simply rend their fleets into confetti. The Titanians, ironically, are in a similar situation: though they have the technology to be the highest-powered fleet in the system and good morale, ultimately their fear of TITAN hacking has led them to install copper-wire, analog-switchboard archaeotech redundant communications aboard their ships, which indicates that not only are their systems largely manually operated (or at least have mechanical failsafe interlocks that let a biomorph flip a switch and disable all the interconnectivity,) but also that their ships are crewed by biomorphs. They'll have the advantage over the Jovians in terms of technology, but they won't be able to wage a successful war on the Junta's home turf without building an entirely new fleet specifically to fight in the Jovian system and even then they'd more or less have to resort to a wave of battleships riding in behind an absolutely enormous cloud of missiles. And even then, if they can't get over their hang-ups about TITAN hack-attack preparedness, they probably won't win, because the Jovians will still have a huge military-industrial base and the home-ground advantage. The Martians are a wildcard. If they played very smart, they could make themselves the uncontested military might of the system. Judging by two colossally failed attacks on Locus, however, they aren't playing very smart at all. Even if they get over the TITAN preparedness thing, though, I wouldn't put it past them to try and crew an all-informorph ship with a mostly-indenture crew, which is just begging for mutinies to happen at the worst possible time. Basically, dominance is going to go to the first party who gets over their biomorph and human-sized synthmorph hang-ups, and their "we need to be ready if the TITANS come back!" hangups first and makes a fleet of tight, compact, dense warship full of informorphs and swarmanoids that can outmaneuver and out-gun everybody else by virtue of being capable of running their ships hotter and accelerating harder than any biomorph crew can tolerate. The Jovians are screwed, because while the other factions might be able to adapt to the new military paradigm, they won't be able to, and like the original North Korea, they'll be left with an alarmingly huge military consisting of increasingly-antiquated and obsolete weapon systems, vehicles, personnel, and modes of thinking; still dangerous if you attack them in a conventional war on their home front, but if you really want to, you can simply wipe them off the face of the solar system and they can't do jack to stop you. Ultimates? Other than a few habitats and a small moon, they aren't really holding much terrain in their own name, and they haven't got much of a navy to speak of. The only danger from them to the main groups is a surprise attack invasion through the Pandora gates. Since they too have biomorph hangups, that won't last long when they emerge from the gates to find that literally everyone else (except the Jovians, of course, who will simply resort to overwhelming numerical advantage,) has their gates guarded by Fenrir-style morph tanks and hardened defensive turrets, and that they're invading through an obvious choke-point down which the other guy has likely sited a capital-scale railgun or laser or an absolutely ridiculous array of automatic railguns, and if they should somehow manage to overcome the beachhead defenses, the other guy [i]probably[/i] has a bottle of antimatter sitting next to the gate waiting to blow it and the entire gate facility clear off the planetoid. They're only dangerous situationally, inasmuch as they can operate with virtual impunity in the outer rim because nobody's reinforcements can get anywhere any time soon, and isolated habs of autonomists are easy to pick off without provoking anybody with enough military potential to decide to retaliate and turn Xiphos into space junk into doing just that. (I imagine that the Titanians [i]could[/i], but they won't commit their navy to demolishing Xiphos for fear the Jovians or Martians would take it as an invitation to attack them or other inner-rim autonomists with whom they have defensive obligations while they're off indulging in a spot of military adventurism.) They might be useful mercenaries if you wanted to hire them to put their own biormorphs on the line in a conventional invasion (If I wanted to invade a Jovian habitat, I'd sure rather the first waves were Ultimate mercs than my own marines, for instance,) but they're basically untrustworthy and should be treated as such. (If they're left alone for fifty years, though, that might all change, especially if they decide to backstab the go-nin and claim the gate for themselves in their own name, a move that would more or less be about as contested as when the go-nin hired them to blatantly and aggressively take it from the scientists who found it.) So, it's a little bit of a mess. My bet, though, is on the Martians. Ultimately, the Autonomists Alliance has completely failed to grok that war-fighting is a field in which statists absolutely dominate autonomists, and this has been true ever since the days of Roman legions and barbarian tribes. Unless and until they set up some kind of system whereby the AA is managing an actual, first-rate, front-line regular military, Titan and - ironically - the Junta (who also have a vested interest in deterring Martian military adventurism) are basically the only things standing between them and being rofflestomped habitat-by-habitat by the hypercorps. None of their habs, not even Locus, could stand up to a determined and well-executed effort to exterminate them by a Martian military apparatus that had gotten its act together and treated them as a real threat. If Titan failed to get over their TITAN attack preparedness hangups fast enough, they wouldn't be able to stand in the face of Martian military-industrial innovation and production scales. Eventually, assuming their act comes together and they manage to squish in-fighting, the hypercorps will out-tech the Jovians to an hilarious degree and out-industry Titan, and simply outgun the AA as a whole. The Unification War will be long and bloody and drawn out, but the hypercorps - or more likely, a single hypercorp that manages to cow all of the others with significant industrial base and bring them to heel - will emerge dominant. Most likely they'd simply resort to nuking habs rather than trying to conquer them, as history has shown that a determined defender with backups waiting offsite have few qualms about an atomic scorched-earth policy. If their act [i]doesnt[/i] come together, though, Titan and the Autonomist Alliance will carry the day. There's a non-insignificant chance of this, depending primarily on when the Martian Revolution goes down and how successful it is. The hypercorps won't hold without Mars, and if Mars is subjected to a Red Faction-style revolution and then largely goes Autonomist, the hypercorp agenda is boned. Even if they declare themselves an X-factor, neither hypercorp nor autonomist, that will still leave the AA and Titanians together the single dominant power in the system, though given their nature, they'll never be able to consolidate and prosecute a successful unification war to bring everybody together under their banner. If Mars decides to follow Titanian Technosocialist lines explicitly, though, that might be an interesting day. The Jovians defaulted themselves out of the long race by trying to bring a technoconservative human space navy to a transhuman space fight and can't win the short race for the same reason Mars can't - if they even try, Mars and the AA would gang up on them, and most likely Titan would start arming all those interplanetary missile silos with antimatter habitat-busters. The Ultimates aren't serious contenders and will be destroyed (quite possibly by an alliance of literally everybody else,) when and if they try to deploy their pandora gate back-alley trump card and probably get branded as exhumans for their trouble. Their best bet is probably to find an exoplanet to call a homeworld, move there en masse through their gate, and then like, fling the exoplanet-side gate into a sun. Failing that, they might manage to be a serious threat to the others in about a century, if they find and claim an exoplanet homeworld and start shipping raw resources back to the solar system en masse to be assembled into a huge fleet, if they build up very, very rapidly and the other powers completely disregard them and spend that century doing other things or fighting with each other. The real question is, does any of it matter? If the TITANS come back, transhumanity can't stand, they simply can't. The TITANs sure as hell didn't [i]flee in fear[/i] from what remained after they'd slaughtered the vast majority of the transhuman population of the solar system when they turned Earth into an unlivable hell-hole. They probably left because they had the means to do so and no more [i]need[/i] for those that remained; they almost certainly would have been able to finish the job if they had been so inclined. That says that whatever they're doing - probably running off to incorporate themselves into some massive alien hard singularity collective of seed AIs somewhere in the galaxy - they (a) don't give a rat's ass about the rest of transhumanity, and (b) could squish the rest of transhumanity like a grape if they were so inclined. So there's no point worrying about the TITANs - either they're coming back and there's literally nothing transhumanity can do to stop them other than turning themselves into a hard-takeoff singularity long before they arrive, or they don't give a damn about transhumanity and thus, aren't an x-risk. The stuff the TITANs left behind is not as dangerous to transhumanity as a whole - it can cause some proper Dead Space style carnage raging across ships and habs, and it's possible entire moons or even Mars might be lost, but if it gets too out-of-control for Firewall and the individual security agencies to handle, the navies will simply antimatter the problem until it goes away. (If the TITANs had had some kind of basilisk hack that could propagate by the mesh and turned everyone into a mindless slave or whatever, they would have used it during the Fall. They either didn't care enough to make one, or couldn't make one in the time they had before their evacuation.) Other x-risks remain, however. Of those, the most obvious, immediate, and dangerous is the Factors - anyone with tech that's smacking you in the face with Clark's Law can pretty much exterminate you whenever they feel like it. The second biggest x-risk is transhumanity itself: with antimatter aplenty and lots of hostilities, it's entirely possible for the inner system and inner rim to wipe each other out in an orgy of matter/antimatter conversion. If that happens, it's questionable that the autonomists and scum and etcetera will be able to survive for reasons of simple resource requirements, let alone whether they'll be able to survive the long night with exhumans and so forth crawling around out in the dark. It makes you wonder if Firewall is turning a blind eye towards transhuman-initiated traditional x-risks such as all-out war, or not. That's what I think, anyway. Take it for what you will. Victory in the long run goes to the Martians if they get their act together and go both unconquered/undestroyed and unrevolutioned long enough to get their shit together, to the Autonomists otherwise. It's Mars's race to win, but if they keep faffing about and not taking everyone else seriously, the runner-up will pass them and their own pit crew will shank them in the back.

So, I started to do the math on Δv requirements to avoid getting hit, but realized I'm missing a very important detail: how often the laser can fire. In my research I stumbled across [url=http://www.technewsdaily.com/18420-table-top-particle-accelerator.html]this article[/url], and [url=http://www.zmescience.com/research/particle-accelerator-on-a-chip-demons... article[/url]. Between the two of these technologies, I wonder if an accelerator ring would be required at all. I may have just invalidated my own initial point.

Good god, I honestly can't expect to take all everyone says into consideration as a GM, right? This all blatantly falls into hard sci-fi which idk if I can handle :/

Yeah,this is all speculative until such time as the devs publish otherwise.Take it or leave it as you like. We're just having fun throwing out ideas on how things could work. Here's a for instance: the Jovian fleet Most posts have the Jovians being hopelessly outclassed and pretty much doomed. With a bit of work and the source material the Jovians could be a credible threat despite the bioconservativism and mistrust of advanced technologies. Ships: Those ships are going to be built to work in the most hostile open space in the Solar system so taking them on in their space puts you at a disadvantage when you're lugging way more shielding or the fancy tech stops working. Just moving around the gravity well will require more power ( I shudder to think how much energy gets blown on customs stop!) . Each ship must have a crew compartment for biomorphs. I usually envision this as a spherical section to enclose the most space in the least amount of shielding material. Depending on the frequency of combat there may be a room with an array of g- couches and mounted on rotating gimbals to better deal with combat maneuvers. They can use teleoperated drones for any number of purposes from maintenance to point defense , although the fighters may have to be controlled locally by a dedicated patrol craft! In the time since the Fall, I'd expect the newer ships to be better suited to the Jovian environment than the older free ranging vessels. Tactics: Having the largest fleet means never sending one ship to do anything ,send a task force instead. Since biomorphs are a must they can't rely on extreme maneuverability to keep the ship safe. Expect long ranged attacks of overwhelming firepower to be conducted in order maximize the time available for evasive actions at tolerable g-loads. Special procedures are likely in place for dealing with offensive nanotechnology. Cleaning crews with EMP or microwave sweepers are an unpopular duty for sure , or just orbiting through the radiation belts to cook off any "bugs"! Morphs: The Jovians have augmented morphs. I think they strive for a certain minimum of genetic tampering and that these are done to the users original body, not sleeving into a new custom morph. I sometimes wonder if *ahem* samples are preserved beforehand to keep citizens children biologically "pure". The most necessary augmentations would be radiation resistance and possibly high g tolerance to better narrow the gap against more heavily modified or even fully synthetic crews of the enemy. After those, you're looking at splicer level mods and cybernetics. Yeah, I see the Jovians being quite ok with taking a mechanical advantage as long as it doesn't involve active nanotech. As mesh implants are allowed ships and drones can be controlled by VR and jamming.

Actually, now I'm wondering if all of the images of Jovian destroyers aren't just like those replica car exterior kits you attach to your hyundai so it looks like a ferrari.

you generally need much more delta v to attack with a moon than defend against one. if you apply it early enough you only need to move it a few arc minutes and it will miss. so attack moon may want point defense. it dose give me an idea for those that are both genocidal and incredibly patient. start with an outbound comet, pick one with a low albedo so it will be hard to spot. put some engens on it and nudge its course so its return trip will intersect your target. do so fare enough from sol that inner system observers have difficulty getting precise data, they will observe the burn but assume that it is brinkers trying not to return. a couple of years latter it will be forgotten. as the comet is returning it looks exactly like a comet. the machinery buried in the ice is all completely inactive save a very small radio receiver. the comet will be able to get quite close before being identified as a threat only when the target sends people (probably not warships) to nudge the rogue asteroid you send a signal to wake up the hardware posably ego cast over and fight an unprepared enemy from surprisingly close. you could have big guns or just crash into a planet. of cause this is an attack that takes 50 years or more to send, and makes no allowances for improvements in technology of detection and war or for that matter just what your future diplomatic state with the target will be.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Nezumi, to change the orbit of any moon large enough to stand up to both the stresses of being used as an improvised warship and the antimatter missiles (among other weapons,) that the PC is going to throw in its way would require a mind-boggling amount of delta-v. Like, probably more delta-v than the entirety of transhuman civilization is capable of making. Not to mention that if you have that much delta-v to spare, and for some reason the PC doesn't have enough to counter it, you don't need to waste time making it into a ghetto warship, just chuck the whole space rock at Mars and flatten everything.

Not to mention that if you start shunting a heavily armed goddamn [i]moon[/i] around, people from halfway across the solar system will notice pretty much immediately, and they will completely lose their shit. And depending on your target they will have months or even years to come up with a plan to hijack the damn thing. Or failing that, they'll have months or even years to cobble together some sort of second-strike option so destructive that nobody will ever think of weaponising a heavenly body again.

thezombiekat wrote:

you generally need much more delta v to attack with a moon than defend against one. if you apply it early enough you only need to move it a few arc minutes and it will miss. so attack moon may want point defense.

In fairness, it's probably much harder to apply those few arc minutes on the defensive, though.

thezombiekat wrote:

it does give me an idea for those that are both genocidal and incredibly patient. start with an outbound comet, pick one with a low albedo so it will be hard to spot. put some engens on it and nudge its course so its return trip will intersect your target. do so fare enough from sol that inner system observers have difficulty getting precise data, they will observe the burn but assume that it is brinkers trying not to return. a couple of years latter it will be forgotten. as the comet is returning it looks exactly like a comet. the machinery buried in the ice is all completely inactive save a very small radio receiver. the comet will be able to get quite close before being identified as a threat only when the target sends people (probably not warships) to nudge the rogue asteroid you send a signal to wake up the hardware possibly ego cast over and fight an unprepared enemy from surprisingly close. you could have big guns or just crash into a planet. Of course this is an attack that takes 50 years or more to send, and makes no allowances for improvements in technology of detection and war or for that matter just what your future diplomatic state with the target will be.

Yeah, that conversation is almost always very awkward. "Hey, um... You remember how forty-nine years ago we were at each other's throats and ready to murder each other? Well, um... This is awkward, but see, we kind of... Launched a comet at you. We totally made a self-destruct system! (We filled it with nukes. Maxim 37, you know?) But, uh... It's not working and we can't figure out why. We would have told you sooner since we made peace twenty years ago, but we weren't sure it would last, and we figured we could blow it up remotely before it became an issue if the peace did last, but... Well, um... Yeah, sorry about that, guys."

Rallan wrote:

Not to mention that if you start shunting a heavily armed goddamn [i]moon[/i] around, people from halfway across the solar system will notice pretty much immediately, and they will completely lose their shit. And depending on your target they will have months or even years to come up with a plan to hijack the damn thing. Or failing that, they'll have months or even years to cobble together some sort of second-strike option so destructive that nobody will ever think of weaponising a heavenly body again.

I wanna find out what happens when you wrap a few kilos of antimatter in the strongest pressure vessel you can make, lash it to a Pandora gate and drop the mother into Jupiter. While a Pandora Gate can probably survive Jovian pressure/temperature/electromagnetism, the pressure vessel will eventually breach. When it does, the electromagnetic field suspending the antimatter will fail, the antimatter will go off, and that will definitely be enough to light off the Pandora Gate. (Not to mention being a pretty big boom in and of itself.) My personal bet is that that would be enough Boom (and possibly space-timey-wimey) to shock Jupiter into the stellar cycle and cook the entire Junta in their own septic vapors. Is that destructive enough for ya, or would you prefer deliberately building a few dozen Seed AIs and throwing them towards the guys who threw a moon at you? (Of course, I may be entirely wrong as regards the result of shocking Jupiter into the stellar cycle... Still, weaponizing a Pandora Gate seems fairly reasonable in response to someone weaponizing a moon.)