Do you have a source on that? I thought airbusts took out unhardened civillian electronics. Sheilded, hardened gallium circuitry (basically expensive military crap) should survive this, or so I have been lead to beleive.
Nuclear weapons FAQ. Upper-atmospheric bursts create EMP's that are far more powerful than ground-level airbursts for any given yield. They also create far wider-ranged thermal effects.
You have to remeber the defender has nukes also. If he can lay enough out so that the entire attack area is saturated ... you may well see none of the fighters making it through to deliver their payload.
If we're still talking about planets, this is a brain-damaged idea. Huge numbers of atmospheric nuclear airbursts would kill countless people on the surface. The attackers' objective would be accomplished by the defenders' own weapons. Moreover, you can kill large numbers of people with the thermal radiation from upper-atmospheric bursts as well, which cannot be realistically intercepted by ground-launched missiles.
You are thinking strictly in terms of ground-burst nuclear explosions; they are completely unnecessary if your only goal is widespread destruction. If you are planning to use WMD against a planet, your goal is obviously to render its cities and industries useless. The EMPs and mass casualties caused by high-yield upper-atmospheric bursts would accomplish this for miniscule cost and minimal risk. Your mass-drivers would be far more difficult to use, and with far less effectiveness.
[SHIT SHIT SHIT!!! I meant to hit the "quote" button, and I accidentally hit the "edit" button instead! This post looks like it was written by Tharkun, but it was actually written by me (DW) answering Tharkun! Fuck!!!!!!]
Nuclear weapons FAQ. Upper-atmospheric bursts create EMP's that are far more powerful than ground-level airbursts for any given yield. They also create far wider-ranged thermal effects.
Umm quoting the FAQ, by Carey Sublette:
"Military equipment is generally designed to be resistant to EMP, but realistic tests are very difficult to perform and EMP protection rests on attention to detail. Minor changes in design, incorrect maintenance procedures, poorly fitting parts, loose debris, moisture, and ordinary dirt can all cause elaborate EMP protections to be totally circumvented."
Is there something I'm missing here? Nowhere does it state that military equipment, designed to be EMP resistant, is vunerable to high altitude airbursts if properly maintained.
In any event if the enemy can get anything into the upper atmosphere ... you are already screwed. I was thinking more of making your stand further out in the atmosphere, where air density is insufficient to create the uber EMPs.
If we're still talking about planets, this is a brain-damaged idea. Huge numbers of atmospheric nuclear airbursts would kill countless people on the surface. The attackers' objective would be accomplished by the defenders' own weapons. Moreover, you can kill large numbers of people with the thermal radiation from upper-atmospheric bursts as well, which cannot be realistically intercepted by ground-launched missiles.
Depends on the defender's firepower. If they can hit your fighters out above the atmopshere (at least where the surface EMP isn't particularly nasty) and disable missiles throughout the entire area of approach ... then swarming is pointless. It's running infantry grunts into artillery.
If the defender has the range and firepower to take out your entire swarm with area effect shots before they can deliver their payload ... then nukes may not be the best answer. Swarming only works against point weapons or area affect weapons well below saturation limits. Nobody sends infantry to run across an open meadow to attack machine gun nests and artillerly for a reason. No sane grunt attacks through artillerly fire that is saturating the entire approach. The same thing applies with missiles and fighter swarms.
The EMPs and mass casualties caused by high-yield upper-atmospheric bursts would accomplish this for miniscule cost and minimal risk. Your mass-drivers would be far more difficult to use, and with far less effectiveness.
It depends on enemy defenses. If they can maintain saturated area effect defense ... then you may well see NOTHING make it through. Attacking into those conditions is SUICIDE. If large numbers of the swarm are going to be killed by area effect weapons (and the rest can be stopped by point weapons) ... your swarm is not going to make it through.
Look swarming is a valid option if and only if enough of the swarm survive to actually deliver their payload. The defender cannot acheive saturation defense (or close thereto) otherwise swarming becomes pointblank suicide. Swarming is also not particularly good if the defender can easily disengage the swarm. If the defender is mobile with superior firepower range, they can dance at the optimum engagement range and wittle away the attacker. And of course the simplest of all ... the defender doesn't have enough point weapons to quickly down the swarm unit by unit.
It is not enough to just throw large quantities of units at a target. There are several occassions in which the defender can hold off a swarm until hell freezes over.
A mass driver is like the Death Star, it likely is not as effective as a swarm of smaller ships, but it can nail the enemy from safety and win in cases where a swarm would be turned back. It's usefulness is limited, but that does not render it worthless.
I'm puzzled as to how an electromagnetic accelerator could be more expensive and complicated than a very large number of nuclear weapons, which I didn't think were particularly easy to build in the first place, given the materials they require.
tharkûn wrote:Is there something I'm missing here? Nowhere does it state that military equipment, designed to be EMP resistant, is vunerable to high altitude airbursts if properly maintained.
It states that it can be made more resistant. It does not state that it is completely immune. And since the objective of the attack is to cause widespread destruction, the fact that certain hardened installations will survive is of little importance, since the widespread destruction will still occur.
In any event if the enemy can get anything into the upper atmosphere ... you are already screwed. I was thinking more of making your stand further out in the atmosphere, where air density is insufficient to create the uber EMPs.
Even low-orbital explosions will do the job. You would need to be quite far away from the planet, nowhere near the atmosphere at all. And when you do that, simple geometry makes your task extremely difficult.
Depends on the defender's firepower. If they can hit your fighters out above the atmopshere (at least where the surface EMP isn't particularly nasty) and disable missiles throughout the entire area of approach ... then swarming is pointless. It's running infantry grunts into artillery.
Hardly. Even above the atmosphere, the effect remains. And there are the kinematics of the situation; your missiles must accelerate against gravity out into space, while they can approach to within a hundred thousand kilometres, launch their missiles, and leave. A planet is a big target, and you would have to saturate BILLIONS of cubic kilometres to make yourself swarm-proof. Have you thought this through? I suggest you try the math!
It is not enough to just throw large quantities of units at a target. There are several occassions in which the defender can hold off a swarm until hell freezes over.
This isn't one of them.
A mass driver is like the Death Star, it likely is not as effective as a swarm of smaller ships, but it can nail the enemy from safety and win in cases where a swarm would be turned back. It's usefulness is limited, but that does not render it worthless.
Worthless, no. Vastly inferior to nuclear missiles, yes.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
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ClaysGhost wrote:I'm puzzled as to how an electromagnetic accelerator could be more expensive and complicated than a very large number of nuclear weapons, which I didn't think were particularly easy to build in the first place, given the materials they require.
The nuclear weapon's yield comes from the natural properties of those materials; it did not have to be provided by the technological apparatus of the weapon. A mass-driver would have to provide 100% of the energy itself. If it is to have megaton-yields, then its efficiencies must be near-100%, or waste heat will be a major threat to the safety of the launching platform. The recoil would be staggering. If the projectile is not moving fast enough or it isn't large enough, it will simply burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. We are completely incapable of building reactors which can quickly produce multi-megaton energy yields, while we can easily do it today with nuclear bombs. Etc.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Well, I think the problem is with the huge massdrivers used on B5. Smaller Railguns, on the other hand, would be great weapons, provided you can get decent speeds out of them.
Okay, second question: If they don't make good weapons(Unless you happen to be in the demolition business), how would a Massdriver fare as a launching platform?
Not an armored Jigglypuff
"I salute your genetic superiority, now Get off my planet!!" -- Adam Stiener, 1st Somerset Strikers
Even low-orbital explosions will do the job. You would need to be quite far away from the planet, nowhere near the atmosphere at all. And when you do that, simple geometry makes your task extremely difficult.
Okay this is where I have no clue what the hell you mean. How far is "quite far away"? As I understand EMP (which doesn't say much) a big explosion emits hig amounts of gamma rays. Gamm rays strike atoms, kick off electrons. Said electrons come off with enough energy to knock yet more electrons off of other atoms. As the density of air goes down, I thought the electron flux would also go down. I've tried to find an equation ... no luck. I had thought if you went far enough up the flux would be low enough you'd not have massive EMPs.
Even low-orbital explosions will do the job. You would need to be quite far away from the planet, nowhere near the atmosphere at all. And when you do that, simple geometry makes your task extremely difficult.
Do you have a ballpark radius for that? I haven't a clue what order of magnitude you are talking.
Hardly. Even above the atmosphere, the effect remains. And there are the kinematics of the situation; your missiles must accelerate against gravity out into space, while they can approach to within a hundred thousand kilometres, launch their missiles, and leave. A planet is a big target, and you would have to saturate BILLIONS of cubic kilometres to make yourself swarm-proof. Have you thought this through? I suggest you try the math
Okay again my knowledge is insufficient, how do you get the chain reaction of electrons knocking out larger numbers of electrons if you are above the atmosphere? Going by billions of cubic kilometres you are talking about a radius of ~620 - 6,200 km (using 1 trillion as the upper limit), right? Now saturation is a function of AREA not of volume. I need only a thin shell of blanket coverage to win (the thickness of the shell being determined by the quality of my weapons). So by my calcs that means I'd need to cover about 5 - 500 million square km with saturation if the planet is being swarmed from every direction.
However this dilutes the swarm and allows the planet to make better use of its point LOS weapons. You will likely get better results hitting from only half the planet, but that halves the area I have to defend.
Let's say you do drop your missiles at 100,000 km. That gives me about 1/3 of a second if they go near c. Let's stick a 1000 g thruster (I hope this is generous enough, this is already a decent way towards a KEM) on the back of your missile ... I get almost 2 minutes (142 seconds) before your missiles are on top of me. Of course at speeds of 14,000 km/s little bits of shrapnel are going to make life rather hard for you. In this case all I have to do is deploy DU fragments and let the missiles shread themselves on their own KE. Now you could put some heavy armor on your missiles so they don't tear themselves apart, of course this ups the mass of said missile and you start having to make a bigger engine or give me even more time to take counter measures. If your missiles are slow enough everything but my LOS weapons on the back half of the planet can be brought to bear.
You could come in at high v and dump the missiles and run, I could be wrong, but wouldn't that result in large amounts of strain on the ship?
As far as firing out of the well ... I was thinking of much closer engagement ranges than 100,000 km. When you engage at that range 1 g is going to be pretty pointless. It gives the attacker a 2 g advantage. So let's say that's 1% of total, your ToF is now getting up over 5 minutes, if I have equal engines we are looking at my first wave hitting you in about 3 minutes at about 41,000 km out give or take. Or about an order of magnitude greater than your previous range. If I have energy weapons with that type of range and refire rates ... forget it. If that 2 g is really important, I'll have hours to dick around on defense before your missile swarm can get into place. If its not important then we get pretty close to 50,000 km until reaction time and speed of light issues get important.
If you dump your missiles far away I have more area to cover, but I have more time to do it in. If you come in close I have far less area to cover, but I have much less time to get out multiple waves of shots, launch tracking point shots, etc.
Again its going to come down to the defender's weaponry compared to the attacker's defensive capabilities. If I can't acheive saturation coverage (or close enough my point weapons can make up the rest), then I'm screwed and the swarm wins, and is likely a better bet than a mass driver. On the other hand if I can acheive saturation coverage then you are likely better off with mass shots.
Okay, second question: If they don't make good weapons(Unless you happen to be in the demolition business), how would a Massdriver fare as a launching platform?
Launching platforms for what? For things like metal ore, sure, fine, great. For something like humans you don't want that high of acceleration.
