War in orbit???

All this assumes that Earth, full of extremely warlike people with milleniaof military experience, just sits there and takes it. Just a guess,but a 8,000 mile diameter planet is probably a wee bit tougher than youraverage few-kilometer sized colony. There are many ways to destroya space colony. A few thousand steel balls in retrograde orbit woulddo just fine. Even if the habitat was hardened, the solar arraysand thermal radiators would be destroyed. Keeping up the attack fora few days would doom any colony -- no power and no thermal radiation. Besides being wasteful and stupid, war between space colonies and Earthwould ruin your whole day.
Darren Brown wrote:
Bill,
Time for a deep breath, wipe the sweat off your hands and change your
grip on reality. First let me say that you don't get milk froma cow
by threatening to shoot it, you certainly don't by actually shooting
it. North Korea maintains an official policy of self-sufficiency,it
doesn't work now and has never worked in the past and let's face it,
things aren't really all that great over there at the moment, are
they? A large habitat may just be able to do better, they wouldhave
a lot more to work with and I hope intellect to use it but I think
that, at lest in the beginning, habitats will want to have
information exchange, trade and a flow of people, either as tourists
or as immigrants with the Earth. This will be a little hard ifyou
are at war, which I hope will always be the absolute last resort, I'd
rather fight in court than in battle. Now having said that youhave
a few problems with the way you want to go about it.
BT:
You want a war from space.
First you take out the full satellite network. No exceptions. That
will ground pretty much all military and commercial airtrafiic. A 10m
concave mirror and a good telescope could do this.
DB:
Yes, a good mirror, a telescope and a few hours will certainly kill
the comsats and all the others. Of course this does raise a small
problem, are you going to kill all the sats or just the ones
belonging to the nation you are at war with and what about commercial
units that belong to a neutral third party that your foe can buy time
on? Killing every satellite in orbit is just going to add tothe
list of people who want you sunk or are you going to compensate them
for the loss, if so I hope you have very deep pockets. By theway,
no exceptions, does that include weather satellites? A lot ofships
and aircraft are dependent on them and GPS as well.
Perhaps I can offer you a better option. The satellites are notyour
problem, the information they transmit is, so you stop the
information from getting out. Given that you are already in orbit,
this shouldn't be a big problem. Consider, a small plastic (little
or no radar signature) rocket or even a manned craft, you launch it
and it matches orbit and pull a big, conductive bag over the thing.
No signal in or out. If it is an optical spy sat, how about painton
the lens or not, those are strictly military so killing them is a
legitimate action. The bagged targets could be let out at theend of
the conflict. Don't like the idea of big plastic bags, how abouta
cloud of copper needles around each, the cloud would disperse aftera
few weeks/months.
BT:
Then you start lobbing rocks at the major cities. Take out 20-30% of
the population straight away. Next target industrial area using the
same method. Take out 2/3 of the economy.
DB:
Lobbing rocks, sigh, I thought I'd been through this already. Is it
possible to drop big rocks on people from a high place? Yes itis.
Is it easy? No, it isn't! If the rock is small, then it mightnot
get to the ground and all you would do is give them a really nice
light show. Granted, you could put a heat shield on the rockand
that would let it get to the ground but now you have another
problem. Go and read some accounts of people who have seen areal
meteorite fall, they report that the rock didn't , repeat, didn't
blow a huge hole in the ground and that it wasn't, repeat, wasn't hot
to touch when they picked it up, warm but not hot. This is aresult
of a thing called terminal velocity, something every skydiver finds
out about quickly. A small, the exact size depends on composition,
rock will slow to a low speed and it with a modest impact. Ofcourse
the impact energy will depend on the initial velocity and mass of the
object but if you are directing it then I will have to assume it will
not be huge. You could get around this problem by increasingeither
or both, the speed and mass of your projectile. Here you willsoon
discover that in order to generate a reasonable impact energy you
will need a large/fast rock. What size exactly, well I must confess,
I've never sat and worked out the numbers but I can offer a rough
estimate, that means that nobody should take them as anything other
than a guess. The Apollo missions showed us that the lunar surface
is covered in craters on every scale down to as small as the eye
could make out, our atmosphere acts as a kind of bar, and allows no
crater below a set limit, what is it? Your guess is as good asmine
but I don't know of any crater on Earth less than a kilometre or two
wide, so that is as good a line as any. With that as the cutoff
point, you are going to need a lump of nickel iron massing a few
tonnes at lest. So what you are have an army where the smallest
weapon you have is the equal of a tactical nuc. Not bad but notvery
discriminating. Of course you did say that you were going totake
out 20-30% of the population and the major industries. So you
believe in total war? By the way, how do you stop the effectsfrom
crossing the national borders?
BT:
If they haven't asked for surrendered at this point start targeting
their strategic allies with the same. Make the rest of the world
pressure them into surrender.
DB:
I see, if the first cow doesn't give milk, you shoot her and then the
rest of herd, just to be certain. If you have no intention ofever
having anything to do with the rest of the human race, it would be
simpler to just move your habitat out of the solar system and forget
everything you leave behind. What you are saying here is, ifthe US
refused to acknowledge your ownership of a space rock, you would kill
off about 90 million people, destroy its industrial base (startinga
world wide depression at the same time), disrupt world weather
pattens, blanket Canada and Mexico in dust and then you would start
bombing us here in Australia and half of Europe. Then when itwas
all over, if it ever was, you would expect us to forget what you have
just done and open normal trade with you! Really? Tellme, if your
neighbour has dispute with you do you shoot his dog, burn down his
house and then do the same to everybody else in the street, until
they make him agree with you?
BT:
You see you only need troops on the ground if you plan to conquer and
stay. If you plan to annihialate without regard to ever taking overa
country their is no reason to keep ground troops.
DB:
Or if you want to stop him from building something to hit back at you
with and of course you have now given him reason to really want to
and to hell with the consequences. I recall a conversation years
ago, when the possibility of a neutron bomb was first raised and how
it shared a common trait with bio weapons. Nobody really wantedto
ever face an enemy that knows it is going to die in the next few
days/weeks because they have nothing to lose. You have something
like that with the country you bomb back to the stone age, they would
have nothing to lose. If you didn't keep a very close eye onthings
you may just find some kind of suicide attack. What would ittake to
send an infected tourist into you habitat?
BT:
This of course assumes a fair bit of independance in space.
DB:
Well, this is the biggie isn't it? At the moment there are ahandful
of nations that can place things into orbit, given time move will
have the ability and then there is what ever methods you are using.
You can't launch a few thousand fist sized rocks at a ground target
because they will never reach the ground before burning up. However
there is nothing to stop one orbital habitat from launching thousands
or millions of small, marble to fist sized projectiles at your
habitat. How many holes can you patch at once? How easywould it be
to attach a small nuc to the outside of your shell? It wouldbe much
better to be a polite neighbour. Cheaper to fight in court.
Darren Brown
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
I think we should:
1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failurerate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels willneed to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.
2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroidare
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand spacecolonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.
3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need theircolony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearbystars.
Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.