Crime book!!

God I can't wait for X-Risks, I want to see exactly how horrifying these writers can be for exsurgents. And hell maybe I can finally get a decent grip on that Ozma campaign that's been rattling around in my head for a while now.

So they haven't decided on a title for the Crime book or Space Combat. What do you suppose they will be ? I'll start... Crime book - Darkcast It's a setting unique term for an illegal activity, seems pretty straightfoward. Space Combat- ummm... 3Jane's Warships of the Solar System ? :) Okay, this one is tougher as there are a lot of directions you could take with a title. It would probably have something to do with Direct Action or Gorgon Defense Systems ( particularly Gorgon - as extropians they deal with Inner and Outer system interests) .

There's part of me that hopes against hope that the space combat book will be written entirely from the perspective of members of the Jovian Navy.

Kojak wrote:

There's part of me that hopes against hope that the space combat book will be written entirely from the perspective of members of the Jovian Navy.

Kudos to the writers if it's written from the perspective of characters that aren't blatant caricatures, and instead professionals who actually know what they're talking about, ie Michael Ironside's character in Starship Troopers.

AdamJury wrote:

I misread this as 3Jane's Whaleships of the Solar System and had a hearty laugh.

Hunting the great white surya?

The Paradox of the Spacy: Why Build Military Ships when you can accelerate space junk?

Ah, but accelerating space junk is immeasurably cheaper then the means to defend against space junk. There is more space junk then there is things to defend from it. You dont need big rocks to do big damage. Force is mass times acceleration. Just accelerate lots of 50lbs rocks, and they'll all become kinetic kill weapons.

Lazarus wrote:

You can defend against a 50 lb rock with another 50 lb rock, so no, it isn't more expensive. What's more, accelerating space junk is really only effective against targets that can't move. Since the question is 'what is the purpose of warships in such an environment' I would posit that one of their functions is to shoot people accelerating 50 lb rocks. :)

No you can't use another rock to kill rocks, or more precisely, you shouldn't. The idea of accelerating space junk to ubersuperspeeds to destroy targets is somewhat good if the target is enough stationary(planetlike stationary, a simple RCS fart in your space station will protect you against such tactics) or doesn't have defenses to destroy it while coming to you. But such defenses should be lasers, why? Everytime you throw a missile or a kinetic projectile into the direction of the enemy you are creating space garbage, and whats worse, every space station or ship destroyed contributes to the kessel syndrome that can render any kind of orbit around a space object useless and therefore making such entity unacessible to others. In the space faring world of EP a Kessel syndrome would be more of an annoyance than anything else since all the space garbage can be ultimately disintegrated with lasers. BUT, it can be a valid tactic if you want to: -Clean an orbit of low deltaV targets Like spacestations and satellites, if they have defenses then is a question of how much projectiles did you let invade the orbit and how much can their lasers shoot before getting too hot or being simply unable to deal with all the tiny objects going their way, in the end it would be more like a natural selection of the most protected and rich stations(althought you risk destroying them though) leaving any orbital security with much less places to hide inside their own infraestructure. There is no need to mention that the more objects destroyed the more they contribute to this tactic. -Deny anyone from entering or exiting the planet Keeping track of the space debris is easy, predict its constant change is not, and since you're using it to attack a certain enemy position cleaning the garbage will be hard. First you can't use anykind of missile or satellite since it would only be fighting fire with fire, if you use lasers you would be giving their; position, size, type and power to the enemy making them vulnerable to a counterattack(even if they're mobile the enemy intelligence can try to track them). So you can't clean your own orbit and your defenses are kind of useless in this situation, the only one who can actually use the orbit is the enemy by employing their own lasers but it will only mean that they get to say which orbit is safe so forget about escaping by using a polar orbit and you can bet that they will surround the planet on 360º to have a complete control on what comes in or out in their own orbits. Now, this is the usual thing with a lot of moder warfare. The fact that you can convert the enemy into dust with an artillery barrage doesn't mean you should, some strategic targets are valuable for their infrastructure, meaning that the orbital industry of a certain planet is valuable enough to make this tactic counterproductive, and if the enemy objective is a planet without atmosfere it means that you would subject the surface to a kinetic bombardment that can have a similar effect that it does on orbit making your own objectives useless. And of course there are defenses against this like having specialized kill-sats for these low-mass/high speed/swarm targets, or adding armor to your orbital thingies. But since this is a provoked Kessel effect what we are looking for is to overcome those defenses with quantity, so this warfare is more related to economy than actual warfare(as usual?), so it might actually be kinda more expensive than just "spacejunk". Also you can use this for other purposes like terrorism(no big powers involved just wanting to do some damage), or a form of sanction since taking out all the space debris would be a time consuming task that you would be forced to do instead of other thing and that without taking into account all the colateral damage that would happen anyway. Space garbage is really serious business I would say, just like a spaceship at 14% the speed of light can crack a moon a lot of small pieces of metal can block a planet spaceport for days or months.