On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

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Rabid
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

Powerful, yeah, maybe, but I think that they would be really short ranged ; it's to say that to effectively use them as a weapon again another ship you'd have to be so close to it (a hundred of kilometers or so) that its point defense mass-drivers alone could tear you to shred anyway.
As of the effect against a ground target, those ships don't have artificial gravity, can't go into an atmosphere, and if you where to "fire" your "torch" 150 kilometers above ground (which is already extremely dangerously low), the "torch" wouldn't even reach the ground, and the heat it would generate would be easily absorbed by the atmosphere without any meaningful impact ; or for it to have an impact, you would have to run your torch for several days - this would be A LOT of fuel to burn for what would be a glorified air-warmer.

So, I don't see how in this setting you could teach the Kzinti Lesson in a meaningful way given the distances of engagement involved.

Still, the idea is there, and between other things it's another incentive not to be too close to another starship (this also mean that fleets would tend to operate in a very loose pattern to avoid "friendly fire")
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

Rabid wrote: As of the effect against a ground target, those ships don't have artificial gravity, can't go into an atmosphere, and if you where to "fire" your "torch" 150 kilometers above ground (which is already extremely dangerously low), the "torch" wouldn't even reach the ground, and the heat it would generate would be easily absorbed by the atmosphere without any meaningful impact ; or for it to have an impact, you would have to run your torch for several days - this would be A LOT of fuel to burn for what would be a glorified air-warmer.

You don't need AG to have a fusion rocket, which is what your space ships are, lower itself into a planetary atmosphere. As long as the ship remains upright, it can hover at pretty much any altitude over an area as long as it''s fuel holds. You could conceivably do a vertical landing with such a ship, though I would not recommend that. All that this requires is the ship engines to be gimbaled like they are on a real life rocket. This is probably not the most practical use, but it would likely have value as a terror weapon. The most notable example of someone using of fusion dives against planets that I've read comes from reading "A Mote in God's Eye" where the Empire of Man would put rebellious world to the (fusion) torch.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Number Theoretic »

On ranges of a couple of hundreds of kilometers i'd agree on the idea that the engine is effectively a weapon in itself. But on longer ranges, say several ten thousand or up to 200 000 kilometers, not so much. Because engines are optimized to yield maximum thrust and therefore don't need any beam focusing or aiming precision, which becomes important at longer ranges. Several thousand or ten thousand kilometers out, the engine plume simply disperses, while an x-ray or gamma ray laser can be focused at such ranges to deliver maximum energy punch and also doesn't suffer from the inverse square law.

Speaking of lasers, how about some single-use, bomb pumped lasers? Using the whole energy of one shaped charge 1 Megaton fusion bomb, you could pump a really powerful laser. Granted, it's just one shot, but if you aim correcly, you just need one shot.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by The Romulan Republic »

I am so very disappointed to see people once again jumping to massive orbital bombardment as the answer. Do you people never consider the possibility that the arguments against casual use of strategic weapons will still exist in the future? Ie Mutually Assured Destruction, political/diplomatic backlash, and the issue of obliterating anything on the surface you might actually want to capture intact?

In my opinion, occupying a major planet using any level of technology that is plausible any time soon is impossible, as you simply won't be able to transport enough troops and equipment for the job. However, the issues with strategic weapons still stand. So frankly, I would say you have two options:

1) get a local proxy and provide support in the form of intelligence (from orbital observation), orbital bombardment, and communications support, with perhaps limited special forces involvement.

2. just take out any orbital assets and surface to space weaponry and then blockade the fucking planet. Ie, sit a couple cruisers in orbit and blow up anything trying to leave the atmosphere. Sure, that doesn't really help you take control of the surface, but it does neutralize the planet and keep it out of the war and a relatively low cost. If you need a small-scale objective accomplished on the surface you can do a raid with special forces backed up by orbital support.

Of course, you can always fall back on strategic weapons as an absolute last resort once the first two options fail.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Forgothrax »

I'd imagine that someone might try for an Honorverse-style bomb-pumped laser-head missile. Expensive as all hell but the shock value of nailing an enemy at outside their point-defense range would be a great incentive for developing such technologies.

Something else I wonder-- if there was a past war that involved a great deal of planetary bombardment, wouldn't securing an orbital and saying "disarm or be bombarded from orbit via asteroids" be sufficient to make a government surrender? I can see laws of war being formulated that accept that, once someone secures orbitals, surrender from the planet is expected. It's just too easy to slaughter people from orbit with impunity, and the ships doing the bombardment can stay far enough out from the planet to avoid planetary-based defenses.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Guardsman Bass »

Would this setting realistically have torch drives? For most of their space travel, they wouldn't be necessary. Anything beyond a few tens of thousands of kilometers would be handled by FTL jumps, and travel within that amount of distance could be done mostly with chemical-powered rockets.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

Guardsman Bass wrote:Would this setting realistically have torch drives? For most of their space travel, they wouldn't be necessary. Anything beyond a few tens of thousands of kilometers would be handled by FTL jumps, and travel within that amount of distance could be done mostly with chemical-powered rockets.
I think that a fusion torch is the LEAST that the OP needs, given the scale of the ships he seems to be talking about. Also, it's likely that his FTL drive is going to require a fusion reactor to power it, so why not have that reactor pull double duty as the sublight drive as well?
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Guardsman Bass »

VarrusTheEthical wrote:
Guardsman Bass wrote:Would this setting realistically have torch drives? For most of their space travel, they wouldn't be necessary. Anything beyond a few tens of thousands of kilometers would be handled by FTL jumps, and travel within that amount of distance could be done mostly with chemical-powered rockets.
I think that a fusion torch is the LEAST that the OP needs, given the scale of the ships he seems to be talking about. Also, it's likely that his FTL drive is going to require a fusion reactor to power it, so why not have that reactor pull double duty as the sublight drive as well?
I suppose so.

On a side-note, I wonder if "Abundant Fusion Power" is itself a standard convention of "hard" sci-fi that really should be examined more. Fusion Power in real life is still struggling along after fifty years of very difficult, incremental research - and we're still decades away from commercial fusion power, at best. What if it's never commercially viable to use fusion power, or never compact enough to fit inside a reasonably sized spaceship?
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Baffalo »

Destructionator XIII wrote:I certainly don't think it's necessary nor that it is diamond hard. But then again, you could argue my tech assumptions are so conservative as to be unrealistically stagnant!

Though, even when doing hard sf, trying for 100% accuracy in tech details or especially future history is going to bog you down. Sure, we all love talking about it, but at the end of the day, I'd just shoot for "good enough for me".
Hard sci fi tends to get needlessly complicated when trying to explain certain conventions. At some point, you just need to shrug your shoulders and say, "Ok whatever, on with the story." At least, that's the way it's always seemed to me. I'm sure someone will take offense to this but the hard sci fi books I've read tend to grind on and on and on without any real substance other than proving the author knows a thing or two about science. It's quite boring.
Guardsman Bass wrote:On a side-note, I wonder if "Abundant Fusion Power" is itself a standard convention of "hard" sci-fi that really should be examined more. Fusion Power in real life is still struggling along after fifty years of very difficult, incremental research - and we're still decades away from commercial fusion power, at best. What if it's never commercially viable to use fusion power, or never compact enough to fit inside a reasonably sized spaceship?
Remember though that those fifty years also include advances in computers, materials, understanding of quantum theory and numerous other advancements. Lots of people think we can just line up a target and research straight to it, but without other inventions along the way, we'd never make it. Without computers that can run simulations at billions of computations a second, we'd never be able to model many of the calculations needed to keep a sustained fusion reaction going for any amount of time. So many things change in mere fractions of a second that doing it by hand would be literally impossible. A discovery in some remote field might not mean much now, but if it later turns out to have just the characteristics needed for an advancement later, we'll be glad someone was doing the research. That's why organizations that fund the sciences tend to let scientists study a variety of things in the hopes that something will eventually pan out. They don't know for sure, so they go for more of a shotgun approach. Don't give up hope just yet.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Simon_Jester »

Alerik the Fortunate wrote:Varrus is right: I had intended to mention it, but in a realistic setting, your torch drives are by far the most powerful weapons you have; that should really be taken into account.
They're energetic, but not good as weapons because they don't produce a precisely aimed burst of energy, and because you can't use them without making your course predictable to any other enemy platform. If you're busy melting one of my ships to slag at point blank with a burst of torch-drive, I know exactly where to expect you to be a minute from now when my spread of railgun rounds comes whistling through.
The Romulan Republic wrote:I am so very disappointed to see people once again jumping to massive orbital bombardment as the answer. Do you people never consider the possibility that the arguments against casual use of strategic weapons will still exist in the future? Ie Mutually Assured Destruction, political/diplomatic backlash, and the issue of obliterating anything on the surface you might actually want to capture intact?
My idea is that you'd want relatively restrained bombardment capability just to enforce control, assuming you can establish control at all. It's that or occupation troops, which are even more difficult to manage under the circumstances.

Of course, the answer may just be "it's impossible."
Forgothrax wrote:I'd imagine that someone might try for an Honorverse-style bomb-pumped laser-head missile. Expensive as all hell but the shock value of nailing an enemy at outside their point-defense range would be a great incentive for developing such technologies.
Those don't really work well in real life. Weber had to violate a couple of laws of physics to make his "laser heads" perform as advertised. So far as I know, the closest you get is shaped nuclear charges, which are dangerous but not dangerous enough to fry enemy ships from thousands of kilometers away, unless they're... well, I'd call something that can be destroyed like that pretty fragile.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

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Baffalo wrote:Remember though that those fifty years also include advances in computers, materials, understanding of quantum theory and numerous other advancements. Lots of people think we can just line up a target and research straight to it, but without other inventions along the way, we'd never make it. Without computers that can run simulations at billions of computations a second, we'd never be able to model many of the calculations needed to keep a sustained fusion reaction going for any amount of time. So many things change in mere fractions of a second that doing it by hand would be literally impossible. A discovery in some remote field might not mean much now, but if it later turns out to have just the characteristics needed for an advancement later, we'll be glad someone was doing the research. That's why organizations that fund the sciences tend to let scientists study a variety of things in the hopes that something will eventually pan out. They don't know for sure, so they go for more of a shotgun approach. Don't give up hope just yet.
I haven't. But it would be interesting to do a hard SF story where fusion is in the condition I described above. Hell, a softer SF story (one with a "low-energy" FTL trick) might be interesting along that line. Most SF stories that mention fusion (including a lot of hard SF) tend to take its utilization for granted.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Connor MacLeod »

I suspect that from the outset the move towards 'hard' sci fi was more of an effort towards internal consistency, at least with regards to how the tech was used. Injecting greater doses of realism forces you to think things through and plan. And, if you are knoweldgable enough about the matters, it can simplify things so long as you aren't required to get bogged down in doing math every five pages or so.

Things have changed a bit though... what used to be "hard" is now "soft" and the new "hard" is even more conservative. Hell it seems like it keeps sliding backwards each time the definitions change or something is decided as impossible.

Isn't fusion regarded as something more in the realm of "soft" sci fi nowadays?
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

I can't say that I'm any authority in judging the "hardness" of a science fiction setting. I suspect that the OP wants a "realistic" setting more for aesthetic reasons as opposed to trying to make a hard core piece of predictive fiction. I grant that you can't assume things like fusion rockets are going to happen, but in fiction, fusion rockets are convenient for allowing your ships to do cool things.

And to get back on the matter of a ground invasion of a planet, I think that it is plausible to conquer heavily populated and technologically advanced world without, as the cliche goes, blasting it into the stone-age. To summarize my opinion in my earlier post, a relatively few number of troops controlling vital strategic choke points, with heavy fire support coming form air and space, can effectively place said planet in a strangle hold.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

Thanks for all the inputs, I'll get to them in a later post. Now it's time for another bit of infodump (see in the later section).

Just as a general note, I don't plan on it to be “hard” sci-fi or whatever the term mean nowadays : I just want for this universe to be relatively low-powered (as far as a setting with FTL can be), consistent in its worldbuilding, while allowing for interesting space-combat. This I why I'm trying to work out an history and sociology for the setting explaining why things are as they are now.

Also, if there's to be a game, I plan it to be mostly human-centered, even if alien civilizations are known to exist and traded with. I may plan an alien appearance, but it would be used as an “outside context problem”, I think. You know, like a mid-game event that would totally change the course of the story and would force former enemies to ally in order to counter it : it may be an overused meme, but I think it's still effective if used well, and can lead to interesting moments of gameplay. What do you think about it ? (Note : “alien” doesn't necessarily mean acid-spitting tentacle monsters : it can also be a specter coming back from Mankind's past...)

------------------

Additional information :

A bit of history...

I don't have any clearly defined timeline or even “current date” for the story right now, but there has been several marking events in this setting for Mankind :

1) A Total-War has been fought before between two blocks of competing of human “space empires”, which has been really destructive at large and has led to a number of formerly habitable planets to be rendered totally uninhabitable, killing dozens, hundreds of billions in the process ; and that's not even counting the billions upon billions of people killed in the destruction of their space-habs throughout the conflict(s). This has been traumatic enough in Human History to lead to the establishment of several new Laws of Warfare that encourage limited warfare and restrain the use of planet-wrecking weaponry. As such, the role of Invasion Fleets nowadays is mostly limited to Space Superiority roles, the orbital bombardment weapons they mount being mostly there for dissuasive purpose – even if they are relatively often used in very limited, one-off show of force to ensure compliance (as an historical comparison, like nuking the Mt. Fuji to force Japan's surrender in WWII). It is a Gentleman Agreement that once control of the orbit is achieved, a planet has to surrender : it's the least bad option for everyone involved.

2) A few hundred years before the current date, Earth was still there. It was still an important world, industrious and populous, and as the oldest human settlement in the universe (so to speak), it was the most developed in term of industry and space-habs. Mars had also been settled, but it was only a peripheral world compared to the Earth-Moon system.
We don't know exactly how, or why it happened, but one of the asteroid-colony that had been put into orbit around Earth was de-orbited, and fell into the Pacific. The asteroid itself was large, being more than 100 kilometers long in its longest. The impact pierced the crust and shook the continents, the magmatic resurgence it caused at ground zero boiling an important part of the global ocean in the process, saturating the atmosphere with steam.
Nearly all complex life on the planet has been wiped in the event, and as of now, the world is a barren wasteland unsuitable to human life.
Needless to say, it deeply impacted human culture, and the event is still very fresh in human memory, between other things because a lot of people contemporary of the event are still alive now, and because the event itself was recorded by countless millions of the billions of people that lived and still live in the space-habs orbiting Earth, and by the swarm of automated monitoring equipment of the Earth-Moon system.
The event is known as the Earth Trauma., and one of its results is that the reluctance to use planet-wrecking weapons, which was already there after the Great War, has been greatly reinforced, each habitable planet being seen a something precious and worth preserving. It also birthed a lot of religious cults throughout human space...
Predictably, the practice of putting asteroids into orbit of habitable planets has been stopped ; and the size of individual space habitats orbiting planets has been limited, to limit as much as possible the damages that could result from a colony drop. A consequence of this is that space-habs being smaller, it forced them to increase exchanges between themselves, as autarky is far more difficult to achieve now that it could have been before.

3) As a general rule, all planets, habitats, etc... are more or less independent, with there own laws, traditions, and the like ; “space empires” emerging only when a number of planets and space-habs with close ties (be them commercial, cultural, etc...) form an alliance, or alliances, of interest. Conflict that would result in planetary siege in themselves don't happen that often, but at the scale of the Human Space, it happen relatively often.

4) After the Great War, an organization was created, tasked to maintain a relative peace throughout the Human Sphere. Basically, small scale conflict are fine by its standard (they can hardly be avoided), but if any conflict where to gain enough intensity as to menace the peace and stability of the rest of the Human Sphere, it is agreed that more or less everyone would band together to put down the disruptive elements ; and this organization would be there to coordinate their efforts. In period of “peace”, this organization is tasked to regulate “trade routes” and contain acts of “piracy” (rogue space-habs mounting pillaging operations against other space-habs ; attacking trade convoys ; and other things like that).
I think the game would put you in the role of a member of this organization, as it offer more possible variations in gameplay and choice of missions (from the point of view of the game-designer) that if it where centered on a given conflict between two competing “space empires”.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

Going on with my worldbuilding...

I'm posting in the hope of receiving some criticism, so don't hesitate.

-------------

Additional informations :

FTL Principles, Applications & Practical Consequences

How does FTL work in this setting ? Well, it's complicated (official excuse), so here is the dumbed down version :
FTL works by locally “warping” spacetime around the ship, such that if the ship itself stay immobile relatively to the bubble of space-time continuum it is in, the bubble itself will be going toward the set destination in a “straight line” (as straight as relativity allow) at a speed vastly higher than the speed of light in a vacuum.

[If you ask me how they are able to warp spacetime while not being able to go back in time or some other fancy stuffs, I'll just tell you that FTL is only the application of a very precise physics theorem discovered millenia ago ; and that it was only made possible by the use of some technobabble form of unified magnetism/gravity theory or something like that. It's just a story, sit back and enjoy the show dangit !]

This FTL drive is so potent that, theoretically, you could cross the whole galaxy (roughly 100.000 LY) in less than a week. However, in practice, as the drive is very easily disturbed by gravity wells, a travelling ship has to very regularly come out of “subspace”, let the FTL generators cool down, calculate its current position in the galaxy, compare it to its stellar maps, plot the new course, charge up the FTL drive and finally hit the GO switch.
In practice, this means that ships do not travel in a straight line in the galaxy, and have to constantly adjust their course in order to stay as far as possible of any star, keeping their courses as much as possible in Interstellar space.
The FTL speed in a straight-line is superior to 5.3 million time C. However, the drive require that navigation correction be made roughly every two lightyears on average, depending on factors like the distance between stars in the plotted course, their masses, and a whole academic study worth of other little details not worth mentioning here.
Given the complexity of the calculations necessary, Interstellar Navigation has long been delegated to the limited AI that run almost everything on modern ships (anecdote : including cooking in lots of military vessels).
Given the speed of the drive and the frequency with which corrections have to be made, most “subspace jumps” are less than thirty seconds long, most of the travel time being taken by the calculations made to judge of the ship's position toward the closest stars, toward the centre of the galaxy, and to calculate the angle of the ship toward a selection of other galaxies, this to judge of the ship's general position in the Milky Way.

A typical FTL journey is made of sequences of :
- Engage FTL for between 1 and 30 seconds, 5 to 15 being what's usual.
- Get out of FTL, calculate the ship's position for something between a few dozen minutes to several hours, 45 minutes being what's usual. Note that if the stellar sensors (a.k.a. Telescopes) onboard the ship have been damaged and are not repaired, this phase can take whole days, or even weeks, as the ship's AI will have to use mediocre data coming from the constellation of cameras monitoring the hull status, or even the optical sensors of the robots used to repair the hull. This has the consequence of making the ship's telescopes ones of its most precious and protected elements, right after the FTL drive itself and the ship's power generator.
- Orient and stabilize the ship in the right direction. This can take between 30 seconds to 10 minutes, depending on the size and manoeuvrability of the ship, if it's already close to the right angle, etc...
- Run a quick calculation to verify the good orientation of the ship. With functional stellar sensors, this takes generally less than ten minutes. Otherwise, that's easily another 3 hours of calculus.
- Charge the FTL drive and hit the GO switch. It takes generally between ten minutes and one hour to charge the FTL drive, depending on the ship's size, the power output of its generators and the design of its FTL drive.

All these steps are entirely automated and in the hand of the Navigation Computer.


A ship in FTL generate gravitational waves which act as a Mach Cone, which in turn can allow someone with the right equipment to detect a passing ship in FTL (even if he can't intercept it) in the same way you can detect a passing supersonic plane by hearing its sonic-bang.


As a consequences of how FTL works in this setting (theoretically extremely fast, but relatively slow in practice), the Human Sphere, after roughly four thousand years of existence, occupy nowadays only a tiny fraction of the Milky Way, a “sphere” between one and two thousand lightyears in diameter mostly centered around Old Earth. If human colonies are known to exist in almost all of the Milky Way, most of humanity live in the Human Sphere ; humans colonies living outside of it having little to no (regular) contact with those living inside of it ; this being due for one part to the impracticality of regular trade at such distances, and on another to the far greater day-to-day influence alien empires have on them.
Even if it is heavily dominated by Mankind's influence, whole Alien Empires exist inside the Human Sphere, while colonies of aliens coming from distant parts of the galaxy are known to exist inside of it, in the same way independent human colonies exist at the other end of the Galaxy.

As a result of the delay in communications induced by the necessity of using trade/courrier ships to communicate between systems, every system, every colony, is in fact independent from one another ; independent human settlements only being bound between themselves by things such as trade, culture, or defensive alliances.


The League

At the end of the Great War, the League was created as a mean of avoiding another destructive conflict. At its creation, it was only supposed to be the organization tasked to supervise the application of the “League's Agreement”. However, as years passed, it was used more and more by conflicting colonies as a mediator in order to resolve the conflicts opposing them.
As the “League's Agreement” demanded that each of its signatory party where to furnish it in peacetime at least one FTL capable starship and its crew each, it quickly became, in the scale of two decades, the most heavily armed individual organization of the post-Great War Human Sphere as the thousands upon thousands of human colonies of the Sphere met their obligations, often with more than one ship.
Isolated colonies, stranded after the fall of the Empires that formerly supported them, profited of the fact that the end of the Great War had left behind it an unbelievable amount of surplus weapons and starships. As they turned to piracy for survival, the League was called upon by its members in order to bring peace to a Sphere still trying to lick the wounds left by the War.
Ensued a century of struggle, where the League fought on many fronts. When it finally succeeded in pushing back Piracy toward the most isolated sectors of the Sphere and its periphery, it had become the most experienced armed force of the Sphere in matters of space warfare.

Today, the League can be considered the cement of the Human Sphere, as it run and monitor the most important trades routes of the Sphere, using the benefits received from this enterprise to build and arm its own fleet, independent from the donations made by the treaty's signatory.

Because of its central position in the Human Sphere, and because of its historical significance, the League's HQ is situated in the Solar System. Before the Earth Trauma, its HQ was situated on Earth. After it, the HQ was relocated to Mars, in the bustling Valles Marineris megalopolis.

Because of its central role in the life of the Human Sphere, the League had accumulated over its existence the most comprehensive history of the Sphere. However, with the destruction of Earth, a great part of this history has been lost, as no other of its archives on Luna, Mars or in the rest of its local agencies throughout the Sphere were as complete. For three hundreds years now the League has been trying to rebuild the missing links one by one, thousands and thousands of historian trying to make sense of more than two millennia worth of diplomatic missives, battle reports, trade bills, and other bureaucratic items forwarded by all its local agencies.
Historians, sadly, agree that it is likely that whole parts of the Sphere's history have been lost forever.

At this date, the League is monitoring a network of “pirate” colonies in [Sector X], which have particularly intensified their activities during the past year. It has sent a fleet to investigate the situation and judge what actions are to be taken. (This is the fleet the player/protagonist will begin the game/story with)
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

Edit :

Forgot to mention some things :

About the FTL

Given its nature, you can't in practice have a fleet of ships using their FTL together, because each FTL drive would perturb one another, and your course would become unpredictable. So, if you want to move a fleet in a coherent manner (not as individual ships only meeting at the end of the journey at a rendez-vous point), you have to use one or several carriers (depending on their capacity and the size of your ship), which will use their own FTL drive to move the fleet. Such carriers can be assembled together, like trains, standardization and synchronization allowing them to use their FTL drives in a coherent manner.
Such FTL-Trains can easily reach a size more than one kilometer in length (the size the biggest ships in the League's inventory and those of major Space Empires, necessitating the use of several carriers to carry only one of them), and some of them, during special fleet operations, have been known to be more than ten kilometers long.

Carriers have almost no defense of their own, relying on the strength of the fleet they carry to protect them if need be.
They are also heavily automated, much more so than other ships, and some of them have been known to make whole journeys without any human onboard ; their crew otherwise being ordinarily composed of less than ten people. Interestingly, if the crew is so large, when you compare it to what is standard with other ships, it is not due to any practical necessity, but to make sure that the crew itself, almost never on leave, become socially deprived. In fact, it happen relatively often for children to be birthed and to spend the first years of their existence in these carriers, their crew becoming one family.


About the League

Given its central position in the life of the sphere, and its responsibility toward Trade and Defense, one of the tasks of the League is to edit, update and diffuse the stellar maps used for navigation throughout the sphere ; without which travel time would be greatly increased, if not outright impossible.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Number Theoretic »

So far i rather have questions than any constructive criticism to offer. So, in no particular order:

Technology related:
- Do sentinent machines, "strong AI" or computers with consciousness and a distinct personality exist in your universe? If so, i'd assume they play a major role in any of the more advanced civilizations since you didn't mentioned any "machine wars" which served as a turning point after which a certain degree of machine intelligence would have been declared extremely verboten. Possible roles that spring to my mind are FTL carrier control, administrative and legal tasks in the government network of the League or any other role in the military, in economics or science. Or maybe they are needed to contain the byzantine physical processes required for FTL (if they are byzantine, which i assume because energy requirements seem moderate, compared to relativistic STL flight as you pointed out earlier).

- Does humanity posses FTL communication capabilites? My impression was: not, but it isn't that important since FTL carriers could record and re-transmit communication data as well as physical cargo. So, this is just out of curiosity.

- What weapons are used in space combat? Even if FTL is very byzantine, it doesn't stretch my imagination too hard to think that perhaps some of the arcane physical principles used in FTL can be harnessed to create new weapons with terrifying capabilites. Where "terrifying" could also mean unseen-before range, speed or armor penetration capabilites. But on the other hand, we already had discussions featuring lasers and missiles as standard weaponry, which works fine. So, if these exotic weapons exist at all, it is most likely that the League possesses them. Only question that remains is, what is more prevalent? Kinetic weapons, missiles or lasers/particle beam weapons?

- How far is Habitat- or Para-terraforming technology developed? From your introductory fluff about a great longing all over Humanity for earth-like planets, fueled by the Earth Trauma, i deduce, that habitats and O'Neill colonies are typically only a few kilometres in diameter and length and Para-terraforming is only feasible for rich League members who happen to have the right calderas or craters on their planets or moons. Smaller habitats then resemble more giant, labyrintine space stations than O'Neill colonies, am i correct? It would be interesting to think about how this would impact human culture.

Politics-related:
- So far, it seems to me, that the League has a laisser-faire attitude, as long as its demands (like at least one FTL carrier per colony) are met. So, is it easy and no big deal for colonies to leave the League (for whatever reason)? Or should that colony better surrender to the inbound punishing fleet?

- Another question out of pure curiosity: Have there been cases where colony ships left the Human Sphere for good and set course to the other edge of the Milky way, to Andromeda or even further?

- Are there any big trade corporations, run by suitable insanely rich clans and dynasties or is all interstellar trade regulated by the League's military? And if there are big corporations: would small-scale interstellar trade, say a trading "start-up" with one tramp freighter be feasible or are trips on the FTL carriers simply too expensive?

- And finally, a boring number request: how much percent of all colonies in the Human Sphere are part of the League?
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

Answer time !
Number Theoretic wrote:- Do sentinent machines, "strong AI" or computers with consciousness and a distinct personality exist in your universe? If so, i'd assume they play a major role in any of the more advanced civilizations since you didn't mentioned any "machine wars" which served as a turning point after which a certain degree of machine intelligence would have been declared extremely verboten. Possible roles that spring to my mind are FTL carrier control, administrative and legal tasks in the government network of the League or any other role in the military, in economics or science. Or maybe they are needed to contain the byzantine physical processes required for FTL (if they are byzantine, which i assume because energy requirements seem moderate, compared to relativistic STL flight as you pointed out earlier).
[first, let me say that, from an aesthetical point of view, even if there will be a lot of transhuman elements involved, I want for humans to stay the focus of the story ; so I'm introducing limitations to what an AI can do]

Well, this is kind of a hard subject, here. So I'll break it in simple logical blocks.
Do AI exist ? Yes.
Are they sapient? Yes.
Do they think like us ? No. To be honest, to us humans their mind is totally foreign and quite beyond our capacity for empathy.
Is their intelligence superior to a human one ? It is superior in some domains, inferior in others ; incredibly good at all things mathematical or that can be reduced to pure logic, but abysmal at anything creative, or non-deterministic-but-not-quite-random (or at least the last part is the general consensus – I'm told some people like AI music...).

Indeed they play a major role in nearly every advanced civilizations of the Sphere. Humans and AI have, as the centuries passed, formed a symbiotic relationship, each one complementing the other.

I could try to give you a panorama of the Human-AI relationship, but it would be long and redundant, after what I'll say :
Even if some Luddites colonies exist (which otherwise still use some form of AIs to run their space-habs, as they are too poor to buy planets or acquire them by force), Humans and Machines live together.

As a special note, it is traditional in a number of cultures of the Sphere to offer to every young children a human-level AI (so to speak) at their seventh to tenth birthday (depending of the culture in question). The child will then grow and bond with the AI, the two growing together to finally form some sort of symbiotic relationship – the question being : who is the host and who is the symbiot ? The answer depend on who you ask...

[My Little AI : Friendship is Technologic ! - because honestly, sometime you want to dodge unnecessary grimdark and be a little optimistic]
Number Theoretic wrote:- Does humanity posses FTL communication capabilites? My impression was: not, but it isn't that important since FTL carriers could record and re-transmit communication data as well as physical cargo. So, this is just out of curiosity.
Nope. All data transfers have to be done by courier ship or by passing trade ship. There are several agreement toward the neutrality of these data-transfer in peace time and how it is really, really bad to read, or, god help you, intercept them. As such, it has often happened that a ship belonging to space empire A has transported an encrypted message from space empire B to space empire C, when A is experiencing tensions with B and C.

These communications protocols are automated on every ships that aren't military, following complex routing algorithm based on the declared destination of the ship and of the message, and taking into account the systems in which the ship is programmed to stop.

As a redundancy precaution, each message is carried by at least four different vector following four different routes.

Communication is centralized in each system by a “System Router”, tasked to route incoming and outgoing flows of data.

It is not unknown for the Sphere's military to run their own courier ships.

[Even if I have somehow managed to earn a diploma in Computer Science (more like Computer Janitor in actuality...), I'm terribad at routing theories and things like that, so please forgive me for not going into more depth on the subject. All you have to know is that data transfer is automated, out of your hands as long as you're not part of the military, and that you could transport a message supposed to harm you without ever knowing it – or having the right to know it]
Number Theoretic wrote:- What weapons are used in space combat? Even if FTL is very byzantine, it doesn't stretch my imagination too hard to think that perhaps some of the arcane physical principles used in FTL can be harnessed to create new weapons with terrifying capabilites. Where "terrifying" could also mean unseen-before range, speed or armor penetration capabilites. But on the other hand, we already had discussions featuring lasers and missiles as standard weaponry, which works fine. So, if these exotic weapons exist at all, it is most likely that the League possesses them. Only question that remains is, what is more prevalent? Kinetic weapons, missiles or lasers/particle beam weapons?
A legend from the Great War says that there once existed these weapons called “Planet Crackers”. The only thing that is known for sure about them is that they were supposed to be used when the defenses were so heavily entrenched on a planet that even dropping asteroids on the surface wouldn't have been sufficient. This weapon was supposed to be able to wreck a planet, to reduce it to dust. It may have been used once, even if the chronicles are unsure of “where” exactly.
Another legend mention a “Nova Bomb”, supposed to be able to, as the legend itself say “blow up a star”. If it has ever been used, or even if has really existed, is unknown.

Others FTL-Weapons have been famed to exist, but the stories about them are so egregious that very little credit is given to them.

In any case, “Planet Crackers” and “Nova Bomb”, given their intended effects, are definitively not produced or in the inventory of the League, or any other Space Empire – as far as the League know, at least...

Other than that, the nature of FTL makes it a bad weapon, at least because it would make your munitions mightily expensive, for effects that could be achieved by far more cost-effective means.

In short, if you want to shoot FTL bullets at another ship, these bullets would have to be FTL capable starships on their own rights – which could be conceivable if it was cost-effective ; but the thing is that as battles takes place inside of solar systems, and given the nature of FTL and its technical constraint, if firing against a ship-sized target far from the maximum conventional engagement distance (which would be the intended use of such a weapon), you would be, like, 99% sure to miss your target ; so FTL-Torpedoes are definitively NOT cost effective as anti-ship weapons.

Also : “Planet Crackers” are basically FTL-Torpedoes modified to give them a little more “oomph!” against planets.
“Nova Bombs” are something different altogether, and there exist a number of different theories on how exactly they are supposed to work, if they are even possible.

... Otherwise, kinetic weapons, missiles or lasers are all equally used, they just fit different roles :
Kinetic weapons for point defense and close range fighting, laser for long range fighting and missiles for medium range fighting.
Number Theoretic wrote:- So far, it seems to me, that the League has a laisser-faire attitude, as long as its demands (like at least one FTL carrier per colony) are met. So, is it easy and no big deal for colonies to leave the League (for whatever reason)? Or should that colony better surrender to the inbound punishing fleet?
You can leave the League alright. Just don't expect them to come at your rescue if you ever were to have problem that normally fall inside of their jurisdiction. Also, they won't assure trade routes toward you anymore ; you'll be on you own. Maybe they'll let you access their stellar maps, but it won't be free (which it would have been if you had stayed in the league, you idiot). Oh, and they may or may not revoke your access to the Sphere's Postal Service, depending on the particulars of your situation (the FTL-data-transfer-network thing I was talking about before).

No, it is generally agreed that quitting the League is a terrible idea ; not because of what they'll do to you, but what they'll don't do anymore for you.

Considering the only requirement is to provide an FTL capable ship and its crew to the league, which can be as simple as a trade ship (something that almost every colony, except the poorest ones, that are under the protection of the league anyway, can afford) ; a quick cost/benefit analysis show that you have nothing to gain and everything to lose from leaving the League.
Number Theoretic wrote:- Another question out of pure curiosity: Have there been cases where colony ships left the Human Sphere for good and set course to the other edge of the Milky way, to Andromeda or even further?
As I said before, human colonies are known to exist in the whole galaxy, even if the Sphere has almost no contact with them.
Some adventuring colonists may have tried to shoot for other galaxies, but it would be a very hazardous enterprise : you would have to have an FTL drive strong enough to run not for seconds, but for hours, days, or even weeks at a time ; and enough fuel to power your FTL-Drive,with the necessary security margin.
It is possible, but if it has been attempted, no one is known to have come back to tell the tall.
Number Theoretic wrote:- Are there any big trade corporations, run by suitable insanely rich clans and dynasties or is all interstellar trade regulated by the League's military? And if there are big corporations: would small-scale interstellar trade, say a trading "start-up" with one tramp freighter be feasible or are trips on the FTL carriers simply too expensive?
The League has no monopoly on Interstellar Trade. It's just that they assume a form of “public service” by running the biggest, most-vital-to-the-Sphere's-live trade lines (because it has enough resources to run on a deficit at times, even if it isn't in its habits).

As for your second question, some interstellar corporations exist, yes, and “private” freight companies run the bulk of the Sphere's trade outside of the League's routes.
Number Theoretic wrote:- And finally, a boring number request: how much percent of all colonies in the Human Sphere are part of the League?
Almost anyone of them (for the reasons explained above), at the exception of :
<> Pirate colonies
<> Isolationist colonies
<> Colonies with which the League is at war
<> And some oddballs that don't fit in any of the above categories


--------------------------

And now, for something different :

Additional information :

The Great War

I've said before that the Great War ended roughly two thousands years before the current date, with the creation of the League. But I haven't talked of the Great War itself yet. Let me correct this.
First, you have to understand the context of the time : It was the 5th millennium, and mankind had left the cradle of the Solar System less than a thousand year before. In this time Man had spread in an anarchic manner, taking up every space available it could reach, without any supervision. As always, tribalism quickly emerged, and Mankind's greed, envy and lust for conquest allied to create hundreds of competing Space Empires. Predictably, these empires came into conflict ; diplomatic, at first, but in a number of case the situation escalated to open armed conflict.
Five hundred years after Man had left the Solar System, the young Human Sphere was riddled with conflict and struggle. As a mean to survival in these troubled times, the space empires that composed the Sphere allied between themselves, slowly forming important power blocks. These blocks, in turn, merged, to form bigger and bigger blocks, in order to counter the other blocks that where themselves becoming bigger and bigger. This trend continued for three hundred years, in the same time as the Human Sphere continued to expand. At the end of this period, remained only two opposing power blocks, and a few independent powers standing in the middle, that the two Powers where trying to influence to their “cause”. This situation lasted for seventy years, a time during which the Powers invested themselves in a ruinous arm race. The weapons of this age truly were awe-inspiring, hulking space colossus reminiscent of the Battleships of old in their gigantism and raw firepower ; siege engines specialized in planetary bombardment ; whole Worldships dedicated to war... The martial heritage of this period is mostly lost to history, most of it in the flames of War, the rest seeing truth mostly indistinguishable from legend.

The chronic do not tell us who struck first, or why. It doesn't matter. The Human Sphere suddenly ignited in War, as eight hundred years of hidden tensions, petty grudges and bitter resentments came back to the surface.
Sides were switched, backs were stabbed, worlds were turned to ash as the conflict quickly escalated to cover the whole of the Human Sphere.

The detailed chronicle of this period would take whole libraries worth of books to cover, so let us only say that this period of generalized Total War lasted for a hundred year, which spiked with the Campaign of a Hundred Worlds (One-Hundred-and-Fifty-Seven, to be exact), and ended with the final dissolution of the two blocks, no one of their members still being able to trust their so-called “allies”. Followed another fifty years of warfare, as revenges were settled and “borders” were retraced in the blood of the innocent and not-so-innocent.

When the dust settled, the Human Sphere understood that it could never allow what happened in the last century-an-a-half to ever happen again. It is in this spirit of “Never Again” that the League was created. The signature of the League's Treaty in the ruins of Old Earth, which the war hadn't sparred, is seen as the official end of the Great War.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

Rabid wrote:Another legend mention a “Nova Bomb”, supposed to be able to, as the legend itself say “blow up a star”. If it has ever been used, or even if has really existed, is unknown.
Just on the issue of Nova bombs, if they in fact existed and were in fact used, then you would have supernova remnants detectable for many light years. Given that the Great War, which I assume is when such weapons would have been used, occurred two thousand years before the present date, means that any stars that got "nova'd" will be detectable to anyone within 2000 light years.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Dr Roberts »

VarrusTheEthical wrote:
Rabid wrote:Another legend mention a “Nova Bomb”, supposed to be able to, as the legend itself say “blow up a star”. If it has ever been used, or even if has really existed, is unknown.
Just on the issue of Nova bombs, if they in fact existed and were in fact used, then you would have supernova remnants detectable for many light years. Given that the Great War, which I assume is when such weapons would have been used, occurred two thousand years before the present date, means that any stars that got "nova'd" will be detectable to anyone within 2000 light years.
Yes but as they don't know for sure and it was only used once they could mistake it fir an ordinary supernova
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

Except that main sequence stars (A, F, G, K, and M) don't naturally supernova. The point that I am trying to make is that any astronomer studying recent supernovae would be able to determine, through measuring the mass of the material thrown out by the supenova, what kind of star the nova was originally. That would be seen as something usual, to say the least.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Rabid »

True. This is why there's a consensus between people versed on the subject that even if this legendary weapon ever existed, there's no definite material proofs of it having been used during the War.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Number Theoretic »

I see the point. It would be strategically wise to test it on a star that was prone to go nova anyway. The perfect opportunitiy to prove the weapon works as well as to conceal it. Nobody would ever know, and that is exactly the situation now, as i understand it.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by VarrusTheEthical »

Number Theoretic wrote:I see the point. It would be strategically wise to test it on a star that was prone to go nova anyway. The perfect opportunitiy to prove the weapon works as well as to conceal it. Nobody would ever know, and that is exactly the situation now, as i understand it.
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Re: On "realistic" space combat and planetary invasions

Post by Number Theoretic »

VarrusTheEthical wrote: Betelgeuse
For example. And if you were looking for other candidates, i would rather stay away from this star. If not, it's resulting hypernova could be seen from the entire Human Sphere.
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