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Longinus00 posted:Orbit to surface vs surface to orbit is so lopsided it's not even funny. Just go cozy up to a nice asteroid and apply some delta V. Have fun shooting all of those down. Maybe, maybe not. The planet has the advantage that it's a planet. If it's a military target worth fortifying against orbital attacks it has: 1. More armor than you- seriously, like mountains and poo poo 2. More missiles than you- because surface to orbit missile installations are way cheaper to make than a warship's missile launchers + the warship 3. More point defense than you (see above) 4. More aerospace fighters than you (see above) I think the idea is that very few worlds are economically/militarily important enough to warrant that sort of fortification and/or the giant gently caress you anti-orbital bunkers are lostech. But if you wanted to start a fight with Earth you'd need a fleet, not a warship.
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Oct 25, 2011 20:06
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In the canon, has there been ANY instances of people actually dropping asteroids on a planet??? Especially since nukes, biological weapons, etc. would have the same effect?
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Oct 25, 2011 20:12
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"Just add a little delta v" is easy to say, but really hard to do. Anything that's going to make an impression after going through atmosphere is loving massive, and nowhere near a planet. You have to drag it from a "nearby" (in solar system terms) asteroid field or bring it with you, and then you have to get it to hit the right spot. You could just bring some iridium rods with you or something, but KE weapons are not the magic bullet for killing things on the ground.
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Oct 25, 2011 20:18
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Rick_Hunter posted:In the canon, has there been ANY instances of people actually dropping asteroids on a planet??? Especially since nukes, biological weapons, etc. would have the same effect? I'm fairly certain this is what the WOB did to Taurus. The Taurian Concordat took this about the way you'd expect (they ignored any and all evidence of who was responsible and attacked the FedSuns).
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Oct 25, 2011 20:21
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Or mount a engine-unit on the rear end end of the asteroid, point at planet and have it accelerate itself to near light-speed  (I take all my strategic decisions from Yang Wenli)
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Oct 25, 2011 20:25
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Pimpmust posted:Or mount a engine-unit on the rear end end of the asteroid, point at planet and have it accelerate itself to near light-speed How weird, I posted the exact same clip in this thread four months ago. I think we had this dscussion already.
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Oct 25, 2011 20:40
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Tarquinn posted:How weird, I posted the exact same clip in this thread four months ago. I think we had this dscussion already. Really, it also depends on how big the guns on the planet are.
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Oct 25, 2011 20:43
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wiegieman posted:"Just add a little delta v" is easy to say, but really hard to do. Anything that's going to make an impression after going through atmosphere is loving massive, and nowhere near a planet. You have to drag it from a "nearby" (in solar system terms) asteroid field or bring it with you, and then you have to get it to hit the right spot. Fun fact, the asteroid that created thisBarringer crater weighs (assuming it is a perfectly spherical 50m in diameter and nickle-iron 7.9kg/cm^3 and bt tons = metric tons) about 1/4 of a McKenna warship or about 10 mammoth dropships, a dropship that can actually escape a planets gravity well no less. Tunguska events require meteors/comets in the 10+ kiloton range only (20m diameter asteroids), lighter than many dropships. Adding delta v is no problem in battletech land. VVV Yea but mass drivers only do something like 8 hex diameter worth of damage. What if you want to wipe out mapsheets at a time? Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Oct 25, 2011 |
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Oct 25, 2011 21:20
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^^^^^ Then you could always just strap a dropship engine to an asteriod and let it go like you said. You don't need an asteriod when you can simply load a 90 ton ball of rock and shoot it at something. Welcome to something that has also been posted before but still awesome: Mass Drivers Axe-man fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Oct 25, 2011 |
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Oct 25, 2011 21:21
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Longinus00 posted:Fun fact, the asteroid that created thisBarringer crater weighs (assuming it is a perfectly spherical 50m in diameter and nickle-iron 7.9kg/cm^3 and bt tons = metric tons) about 1/4 of a McKenna warship or about 10 mammoth dropships, a dropship that can actually escape a planets gravity well no less. Tunguska events require meteors/comets in the 10+ kiloton range only (20m diameter asteroids), lighter than many dropships. Adding delta v is no problem in battletech land. You're imagining future weapons without imagining future countermeasures. BTech world also could detect an asteroid weapon long before modern earth can. BTech world also has an orbital defense system which, by it's nature, is intended to intercept objects around a planet, something modern earth conspicuously lacks. So a big rear end asteroid is a bad thing for modern earth because we'd get maybe one shot with one nuke. That just makes the asteroid mad. But with enough explosive force, you can make even giant objects fracture into fragments tiny enough to be burned away in the atmosphere. So the way I see it, that's a problem that's solved with more dakka. Specifically, more nuclear dakka.
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Oct 25, 2011 21:42
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Every time people post about anything close to "realistic" space combat, I have a terrible urge to post this: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#boom Edit: Also, reading up on Sarna about the mass of the Naval Cannon's shells would suggest that if you really wanted to erase all life on the planet, you could just park your Dropships/Warships outside the planet's defenses and just fire off their entire magazine at it. A planet's not really that hard to hit unless orbital mechanics are Lostech. 
Z the IVth fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Oct 25, 2011 |
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Oct 25, 2011 21:44
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whowhatwhere posted:Wait, what? Leonard Kurita was a drunk who hated everyone. When he became Coordinator he celebrated by crossing the Combine in a six-month-long tornado of drinking and loving. One of his highlights as Coordinator was kidnapping an entire school full of children on a border world for DNA testing, because he believed the Terran Hegemony was hiding his heirs from him (incidentally, 20-some of those kids WERE his offspring). He famously said, "In the grand and everlasting debate on which is more essential for a man's survival, a well-built slut or a slug from a bottle, one thing must be said in the bottle's defense: it's always willing." So that should give you an idea of the kind of guy we're dealing with here. He once showed up to a Star League council meeting totally drunk off his rear end, and when the First Lord was like "Yo, get some coffee in you or something, dude," he got so angry he broke the bottle and threw it at the First Lord. A Sergeant on security duty by the name of Tanya Kerensky fired at him, though I'm not sure if it was intentional or a reflex from getting slashed with broken glass. Anyway, Kurita gets winged with a laser rifle shot, it makes him go out of control nuts and he pulls a knife, stabs her in the chest. Tanya Kerensky died, but the First Lord was so greatful it was her and not him that Leonard Kurita stabbed in the aorta that he named the Kerensky family "Protectors of the Realm," which gave them the right to, among other things, attend any military academy they wanted. Long story short, if it wasn't for that Kerensky probably would have stayed at Tharkad University, rather than transferring to the Nagelring, thus never would have joined the SLDF. No Kerensky leading the Exodus means no Nicholas Kerensky taking over the SLDF on his name alone, which means no Clans (nobody else is that hosed up in the head). So, inadvertently, by drunkenly stabbing Sergeant Tanya Kerensky as retaliation for shooting him in the shoulder, Leonard Kurita put in motion a chain of events that lead to the creation of the Clans.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:21
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It kind of makes me sad that fictional history can be narrowed down to such crux points of history.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:28
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It makes ME sad Leonard Kurita doesn't have character art in any of the Star League-era sourcebooks.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:30
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What an absolutely amazing story.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:34
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Defiance Industries posted:Leonard Kurita was a drunk who hated everyone. When he became Coordinator he celebrated by crossing the Combine in a six-month-long tornado of drinking and loving. One of his highlights as Coordinator was kidnapping an entire school full of children on a border world for DNA testing, because he believed the Terran Hegemony was hiding his heirs from him (incidentally, 20-some of those kids WERE his offspring). He famously said, "In the grand and everlasting debate on which is more essential for a man's survival, a well-built slut or a slug from a bottle, one thing must be said in the bottle's defense: it's always willing." So that should give you an idea of the kind of guy we're dealing with here. He sounds a lot like Tony Stark.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:38
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Arquinsiel posted:It kind of makes me sad that fictional history can be narrowed down to such crux points of history. I still think Victor Liao my favorite crazy successor lord ancestor.
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Oct 25, 2011 22:39
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Z the IVth posted:Every time people post about anything close to "realistic" space combat, I have a terrible urge to post this: Atomic Rockets is the best scifi writer's resource. The pro-est link. In response, there's actually a very good coverage of this exact problem by a closely associated blog here:http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/06/space-warfare-i-gravity-well.html You can of course always Yang Wenli the problem (I could hardly argue with that solution without discarding my avatar in disgrace!) but if you don't want to kill everything the surface combatant has the advantage. Of course, in Battletech most planets don't have defenses capable of holding off battlemechs at all. And against those that can the parties in Battletech capable of orbital bombardment (the Clans and WoB) also conduct their offensive campaigns with a massive advantage in military might sufficient to overcome the disparity and make orbital bombardment and orbital defenses irrelevant. Just, you know, if the Clans had ever tried to invade Earth (rather than glass it) they would have had the worst experience. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Oct 25, 2011 |
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Oct 25, 2011 22:48
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AtomikKrab posted:He sounds a lot like Tony Stark. Well, without the intellect or the charm or the "contributing to society through his efforts" thing. He's a drunk who was born in to money who is really self-destructive, though!
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Oct 25, 2011 23:31
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Defiance Industries posted:Well, without the intellect or the charm or the "contributing to society through his efforts" thing. He's a drunk who was born in to money who is really self-destructive, though!
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Oct 25, 2011 23:34
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She must have been a really lovely soldier for him to kill her with a knife when she has a gun in the first place. Guess it runs in the family.
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Oct 26, 2011 00:30
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Defiance Industries posted:Leonard Kurita was a drunk who hated everyone. Sounds like a dude who should've been stripped of all responsibilities except rokkin.'
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Oct 26, 2011 00:33
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UberJew posted:Atomic Rockets is the best scifi writer's resource. The pro-est link. To digress slightly. I feel the blog article is written with reference to space combat where both the attacker AND defender are based on the planet (i.e us in the near future). If we're talking about an attacker coming in from an interstellar civilization, once they have space superiority, they would be able to destroy defensive emplacements from high orbit (where the ships would be far more difficult to hit) before moving to close orbit to provide ground support. Hell, they could just threaten the planet with total destruction from high orbit if they didn't capitulate, and a single ship sitting up in orbit would be able to enforce that ultimatum without threat of MAD. You can't quite do that if your home's on the same planet. To digress even further, this is one reason why Avatar rankles me so. Why didn't they just drop a rock on blue-space-alien holy site from orbit? Would have been so much more effective than letting the natives get a chance to fight back.
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Oct 26, 2011 01:21
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You don't even have to be in high orbit. You can literally do this from dozens of AU out. The math is fairly straightforward, and you have fusion engine technology so thrust is basically free. The advantage of being closer is that it gives less time for the target to react, but the disadvantage is you have to have more direct impulse to achieve the same total kinetic energy on impact. But this all stems from the basic premise that air superiority is portrayed realistically, which doesn't apply in Battletech universe because that would take mechs off the pinnacle. Anything that would lessen the utility and primacy and focus of the battlemech is simply not applicable here, and that certainly includes using orbital assets to easily and cheaply neutralize ground-based ones, regardless of how realistic that would actually be.
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Oct 26, 2011 01:35
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Z the IVth posted:To digress even further, this is one reason why Avatar rankles me so. Why didn't they just drop a rock on blue-space-alien holy site from orbit? Would have been so much more effective than letting the natives get a chance to fight back.
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Oct 26, 2011 02:43
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Arquinsiel posted:I've seen rumours that this will be the plot of the sequel. That would be a very short movie.
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Oct 26, 2011 02:47
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Z the IVth posted:To digress slightly. I feel the blog article is written with reference to space combat where both the attacker AND defender are based on the planet (i.e us in the near future). If we're talking about an attacker coming in from an interstellar civilization, once they have space superiority, they would be able to destroy defensive emplacements from high orbit (where the ships would be far more difficult to hit) before moving to close orbit to provide ground support. Hell, they could just threaten the planet with total destruction from high orbit if they didn't capitulate, and a single ship sitting up in orbit would be able to enforce that ultimatum without threat of MAD. You can't quite do that if your home's on the same planet. Why would this be the case? Sure, if you're fighting annoying blue hippies that's fine, but if we have combatants of equivalent technological capability clearing low orbit is not a particularly hard thing. The article addresses attackers from deep space about half way down. If you have the technology to build a spacefaring warship, you also have the technology to put a warhead on a much smaller spacefaring craft. Missiles have ranges of controlled flight based on available fuel, and even assuming non fuel relevant drives, the longer a missile is in flight, the longer you have to shoot it down. This is important when you have the mass of an entire planet to launch countermeasures from. If anything, the planet can afford to pack bigger, longer ranged missiles because all they have to do is clear the gravity well. The attacker has to actually lug its ordnance in and then launch it from a platform where space and mass are comparatively very expensive.
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Oct 26, 2011 02:51
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^^^^ You're thinking about this wrong. Imagine if instead of doing all kinds of diplomacy poo poo in Star Trek they just rigged up a helm on the outside of the ship and had Data hit the brakes while simultaneously letting go of a coffee mug when the Enterprise is aimed at the relevant planet. A space-to-ground attack missile would likely need less fuel than a ground-to-space defence missile as the incoming fire needs only make minor course corrections compared to the outgoing fire's need to clear the gravity well and intercept. Artificer posted:That would be a very short movie. It's approximately as retarded as the first film and thus plausible 
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Oct 26, 2011 02:58
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Z the IVth posted:To digress slightly. I feel the blog article is written with reference to space combat where both the attacker AND defender are based on the planet (i.e us in the near future). If we're talking about an attacker coming in from an interstellar civilization, once they have space superiority, they would be able to destroy defensive emplacements from high orbit (where the ships would be far more difficult to hit) before moving to close orbit to provide ground support. Hell, they could just threaten the planet with total destruction from high orbit if they didn't capitulate, and a single ship sitting up in orbit would be able to enforce that ultimatum without threat of MAD. You can't quite do that if your home's on the same planet. Like I said and the blog admits if you're willing to flatten the planet with comprehensive nuclear bombardment or enough relativistic rocks then it is not so much an issue. But if you're trying to conquer a planet then every building, mountain, forest or ocean can have missile launchers that you can't hide from but can't see until it fires. And that aside, I'm not actually sure any of the battletech factions could reasonably do either. Nuclear weapons are beyond rare and hitting a planet with big rocks would be a very expensive exercise even with battletech's torch drives. Dropship engines, much less anything bigger, are very expensive and very heavy and their engines do not ignore mass. Jump drives drop you off at specific locations, so they can't just warp drive over to sufficiently big rocks or warp them back, they'd need to fly to one with enough (expensive) engines to get the rock to sufficient speed over the course of flying it to the target. Which means either a waiting period of centuries flinging a rock from another star system or a whole fuckton of engine. That's not cheap. Arquinsiel posted:A space-to-ground attack missile would likely need less fuel than a ground-to-space defence missile as the incoming fire needs only make minor course corrections You should read the blog post I linked! edit: To summarize, the advantage of being able to conceal your launchers is way more important than the relatively simple task (and given battletech's pretty absurd engines almost effortless) of shooting something into orbit. Even battletech's magic heat sinks don't let them hide in space. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 26, 2011 |
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Oct 26, 2011 03:03
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UberJew posted:Like I said and the blog admits if you're willing to flatten the planet with comprehensive nuclear bombardment or enough relativistic rocks then it is not so much an issue. But if you're trying to conquer a planet then every building, mountain, forest or ocean can have missile launchers that you can't hide from but can't see until it fires. I think this is the key difference between you and the folks you're arguing with. If you don't care about the planet, or want to make an example of it to cow others into submission, I don't think there's a way that a bunch of stationary defenses can protect themselves from spacecraft accelerating objects to substantial fractions of C and slamming them into the planet. Sure, if the attackers want to keep the planet intact, or want to make surgical strikes against only the defensive emplacements, then the planet has an advantage. But otherwise....I don't think it's possible. That said, that's a decent handwave for no orbital bombardments in Battletech. Most planets aren't valuable because they're planets, rather they're valuable because they have Mech factories or large populations to produce income for overlords, or mines, etc etc. Thus glassing the place defeats the purpose of attacking, unless you're purely trying to deny those resources to your enemies rather than acquire them for yourself.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:23
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UberJew posted:You should read the blog post I linked! Also what Arcturas said.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:30
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Arcturas posted:That said, that's a decent handwave for no orbital bombardments in Battletech. Most planets aren't valuable because they're planets, rather they're valuable because they have Mech factories or large populations to produce income for overlords, or mines, etc etc. Thus glassing the place defeats the purpose of attacking, unless you're purely trying to deny those resources to your enemies rather than acquire them for yourself. That, and the time and expense of a 'safe' planetary bombardment with relativistic rocks is non-trivial. For everyone but the Clans Jumpships and Jumpship capacity are always at a premium and are mass-limited. Every ton of engine you want to put on a rock is one less ton of guns and lasers and K-F drives taking a week between jumps (with at best the ability to jump twice) puts a cap on how fast you can get material into a theater of operations. And the realities of politics make launching proper world busters from seperate star systems without realspace FTL impossible. The Clans could have opened their invasion with it, or the WoB fired them off from the hidden worlds, but those would be the only situations I could imagine. Arquinsiel posted:I did. Launch it from really far away and let it drift idle until any course corrections need be made, if any. The article makes assumptions about the defender's ability to detect incoming attacks and presumes that the attacker does not attempt to approach via any blind spots. There aren't any real blind spots in space, there's too much space! And even battletech keeps that, actually. Worse, you really, really can't hide in space if you are accelerating. This is a good link on the subject http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php edit: Let me quote the most relevant fragment quote:If the spacecraft are torchships [battletech engines are], their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Oct 26, 2011 |
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Oct 26, 2011 03:37
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Arquinsiel posted:Launch it from really far away and let it drift idle until any course corrections need be made, if any. Good thing Clan asteroids have twice the range and accuracy as their IS counterparts.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:42
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Soylent Pudding posted:Good thing Clan asteroids have twice the range and accuracy as their IS counterparts. Curiously though, since Clan asteroids are lighter than IS ones they actually do less damage.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:48
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landcollector posted:Curiously though, since Clan asteroids are lighter than IS ones they actually do less damage. I think we found this side-conversation's winning post right here. e: possessive apostrophes.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:52
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landcollector posted:Curiously though, since Clan asteroids are lighter than IS ones they actually do less damage. More problematic is that only one Clan asteroid can engage any given planet at a time without breaking Zell.
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Oct 26, 2011 03:54
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Dammit that fantastic WH40K explanation of why rocks aren't free was just posted in a SotS thread and I can't find it. Sufficed to say, asteroids aren't free. They take quite a bit of assing around millions of miles away from your intended target, and then you have to sit and make sure they follow the trajectory you wanted, and in the end you might as well just fire off some nukes and forget the whole business. I guess the best-case scenario effort-wise is to find an asteroid at one of the legrange points and boost it into the interplanetary transport network. But then you have to wait like 3 years for impact.
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Oct 26, 2011 04:08
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Arglebargle III posted:Dammit that fantastic WH40K explanation of why rocks aren't free was just posted in a SotS thread and I can't find it. Sufficed to say, asteroids aren't free. They take quite a bit of assing around millions of miles away from your intended target, and then you have to sit and make sure they follow the trajectory you wanted, and in the end you might as well just fire off some nukes and forget the whole business. I've been looking around for that particular image as well. All I could think while reading the past page or so was "Rocks are not free, citizen!" Sure, it's from 40k, but it still might apply somewhat to the discussion at hand... EDIT: Nevermind, found it. 
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Oct 26, 2011 04:20
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^^^^ Sadly that joke, while hillarious, does not take into account the fact that Imperial ships have crews numbering in the high five- to low six-digit range (unless the unpublished Titan class has only got one torpedo tube, in which case it's not even a Destroyer....) . Also I get to play BFG with lego this weekend. Jus' sayin' UberJew posted:There aren't any real blind spots in space, there's too much space! And even battletech keeps that, actually. Worse, you really, really can't hide in space if you are accelerating. This is a good link on the subject http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php It also assumes a defensive net. Guess what else Battletech doesn't have? Seriously, normally the first warning a planet gets of inbound dropships is the courtesy radio message sent by the merchant jumpship captain getting the gently caress out of dodge once he's sure they aren't close enough to be able to board him before he can jump. Other than that you're relying on the recharge station or a friendly at the jump point radioing it in. Same old radio we use now. A relevant quote on super-long coasting: quote:Only if you can predict the strategic positions well enough to plan the tactical deployment of your forces during the attack months in advance. You get behind the star, slingshot weapons around in the known orbit (whichever way works fastest, my gut tells me there's a science reason that aiming counter to the planet's orbit won't work) and then wait. When the time to intercept is less than the relevant you pop out from behind the star and transmit "Hay guis! We gief missl! You have 20 minutes to signal unconditional surrender or your planet is gone". If they comply, detonate in space. If not..... Heck, by that guy's logic all you need is a payload and a passive sensor to receive the abort signal. I get where he's going with it, and in a universe where technology progresses as he describes then it's obviously going to work out that way. The way things are in reality it's not going to be that clear cut. We lose poo poo all the time on the ground after all.
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Oct 26, 2011 04:51
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Arquinsiel posted:^^^^ So we need to talk about FTL and its implications. Sure, you can drop out of FTL (with a battletech sort of 'extradimensional FTL' physics) and surprise a planet. But that's because you've been traveling faster than the speed of light in a way that your velocity is not actually faster than the speed of light. Any of the scenarios you're discussing all involve attacks inbound slower than the speed of light. Assuming you have methods of seeing around the glare from the sun (which even modern Earth has) you'd totally see the missiles being launched from the sun at however long light takes to travel to the planet later. You'd then have until the missiles arrived to blow them up. Similarly, a giant gently caress you asteroid, even if accelerated to a significant fraction of c, has to take a really goddamn long time to get there. Long enough to have years and years to plan your defense after light from the first moment you started accelerating it arrives at the planet.
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Oct 26, 2011 05:04
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