NationStates Jolt Archive

First of all let me say that I like to RP aquiering new technology, and that I want to start a space warfare program. Now since google was unhelpful I thought this was the best place to ask. I want this to be done right so when its finalliy done there will be no questions about it. I also realize that there are several threads pertaining to this floating around at the moment (which I have tagged) but there are some questions I have and there seem to be varying opinions on the matter.

1. What would be a good timeframe from first man in space to launch of stations etc.

2. What would be a good annual budget for a space program.

3. How many weapons platforms/satelites would be required to effectively protect my nation in geosynchronous orbit from ballistic missles.

4. Information on space based rail guns (god rods).

5. Space based lasers (think the SOL satelite from Akira).

And please remember I have a strong desire to rp this right and realistically. If you have something bad or disparaging to say please keep it civil. I want differing opinions on the pros and cons on various types of space based weapons platforms.

First of all let me say that I like to RP aquiering new technology, and that I want to start a space warfare program. Now since google was unhelpful I thought this was the best place to ask. I want this to be done right so when its finalliy done there will be no questions about it. I also realize that there are several threads pertaining to this floating around at the moment (which I have tagged) but there are some questions I have and there seem to be varying opinions on the matter.

1. What would be a good timeframe from first man in space to launch of stations etc.

2. What would be a good annual budget for a space program.

3. How many weapons platforms/satelites would be required to effectively protect my nation in geosynchronous orbit from ballistic missles.

4. Information on space based rail guns (god rods).

5. Space based lasers (think the SOL satelite from Akira).

And please remember I have a strong desire to rp this right and realistically. If you have something bad or disparaging to say please keep it civil. I want differing opinions on the pros and cons on various types of space based weapons platforms.

1. Depends on what type of stuff you are wanting to do.

2. Pretty expensive. If you are just starting out, I recommend asking other nations for assistance. This will greatly reduce the cost to you, if they agree to help you.

3. The more sats in your system the better. You will need not only the sats to launch missiles or lasers, but you will also need weather sats and intelligence gathering sats and a couple of other types of sats.

4. I recommend the scientific american website. They did an article on them awhile back.

5. Depends on the type of laser. But it is possible.

First space launch: October 4, 1957
First sub-orbital flight(manned): February 20, 1962
First orbital launch(manned): March 23, 1965
Man on Moon: July 20, 1969
Mir launch February: 19,, 1986
Occupied: 4,594 days
In Orbit: 5,511 days
Hubble telescope cost: $2 billion
Shuttle launch cost: $500 million/launch, maintence and repairs included
Hope this helps.

Well, looking at the NASA budget of the the 1960's might be a good way to guesstimate the cost of a robust space program actually putting stuff up there, frequently, repeatedly, and developing new launch vehicles to make it further economical to lift larger payloads more efficiently.

This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget) oughta give you a good idea of the budgets. Even at it's peak NASA's yearly budget was around 26 billion dollars (after accounting for inflation in the intervening years, to bring it to the value of more contemporary dollars to us). This shouldn't really be that much of an expenditure for a decently developed NationStates nation, at least not looking at most of the calculators.

The martian probes on wikipedia show it takes at least 6 months to get from earth to Mars.

The martian probes on wikipedia show it takes at least 6 months to get from earth to Mars.

This is for weapons not science. (a space telescope or something may develop as part of this) And besides, I have no desire to go to the moon or mars.

HANE (high-altitude nuclear explosive)
pros: quckly destroys unsheilded systems over a wide area, clears out low orbit satilites
cons: completely nonselective, may violate WMD usage treaties, residual radiation takes years to dissipate.

"god rods"
pros: simple, few moving parts.
cons: very high launch cost.

giant parabolic mirror.
pros: the quintessential "mad scientist" orbital weapon
cons: impossible to hide, difficult to control, targets limited by focal distance.

Well, looking at the NASA budget of the the 1960's might be a good way to guesstimate the cost of a robust space program actually putting stuff up there, frequently, repeatedly, and developing new launch vehicles to make it further economical to lift larger payloads more efficiently.

This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget) oughta give you a good idea of the budgets. Even at it's peak NASA's yearly budget was around 26 billion dollars (after accounting for inflation in the intervening years, to bring it to the value of more contemporary dollars to us). This shouldn't really be that much of an expenditure for a decently developed NationStates nation, at least not looking at most of the calculators.

Let's see... VAA budget.... 3.785 trillion per year base, plus secondary income, totalling 4.324 trillion yearly.

Not really a problem putting Tudrussel into orbit and building onto it like lego, considering we also use better fuel then NASA. Cheaper too.

3. How many weapons platforms/satelites would be required to effectively protect my nation in geosynchronous orbit from ballistic missles.'Lots'. Lesse, for NS purposes... You will have to deal with opponents being able to throw in a couple thousand missiles in a full strike. The *minimum* would be one missile for every million citizens, although ten missiles/ mio citizens shouldn't be impossible (I would consider it to be the max, though).

Given NS nation sizes... You will have to deal with somewhere between 1000- 50000 missiles.

Second, it depends on the kind of weapon platforms you use.

The options being

1. Kinetic Projectiles (Advantage being immense destructive capacities. Disadvantage being The nasty time-on-target thing. You will need seconds, up to minutes, to hit a target. This can be too late). Incidentally, railguns in orbit suffer problems (Recoil), so it would be easier to just release debris from a satellite inside the path the missile takes. Not to mention vastly cheaper. (The debris will automatically have a velocity of several km/s, so will the missile, and this allows for sufficient KE to destroy the MT target with casual ease).

2. Particle Beams. Those are 1. a bitch to construct and target and 2. an even greater bitch to carry into orbit. Finally, they are a horrendous bitch to power.

Still, for soft kills over 'short' (Relatively speaking, for space) distances against a limited amount of targets, they are an option.

Basically, a stream of neutral particles (I.e. hydrogen) accelerated to 0.999~ c. It has the nice advantage of achiving damage by way of penetrating deeply into the target (One centimeter and more, compared to the fraction of a millimeter a laser manages), vaporising holes into it, with the more deeply penetrating particles eventually taking out internal electronics.

I have a formula for its energy density decrease over distance, somewhere, but can't find it right now :/ But it should be sufficient for orbital distances.

Incidentally, this works for a high orbit. For a low orbit (Below, say, 200km of altitude), you use charged particles, I.e. Electrons or Protons, as neutral ones would be scattered by the atmosphere (In an environment lacking an atmosphere, the charged ones would repel themselves, though. Hence: Ion cannons don't work).

Mind, recharge times and maintenance would be a serious pain in the ass.

3. EM radiation weapons (I.e. Laser). For soft kills (Fry the electronics, prevent the bomb from blowing up, and deal with the KE impact by losing a building or so), reusable platforms might work, if the distance isn't too excessive, which it shouldn't be for a normal ballistic missile (Again, I have a formula for the range, somehwhere, but... Well, later, perhaps).

But then again, it only works for small amounts of targets, as I refuse to acknowledge a few thousand reusable laser platforms in space as being anything even remotely feasible for MT capacities.

The alternative would be Edward Teller's X Ray Laser bombs. Nuclear weapons produce, well, Gamma Radiation. This radiation vaporises the bomb, and by wy of that, is turned into X Ray Radiation. This X Rays are focused into coherent beams, comparable to a visible light laser, and target $Target (The pulselength is, naturally, about comparable to the time it takes the bomb to vaporise, about one millionth of a second).

Advantage: Comparatively cheap & hard kill capacities (I.e. The missile actually explodes). Disadvantage: The things can only be used once (But then, every bomb should be able to power quite a few beams).

Now... Given energy requirements, differing orbits and the likes, any kind of reusable platform based on MT wll fail to take out more than, uh... One missile before the target is gone, blowing up one of your cities. And this does not take into account that you might miss a target, for which case you would need, say, twice that.

So, 2000- 100000 platforms. Neither of which is even remotely feasible.

For the Suicide bomb solution, well... Technically, ever platform should be able to target several missiles, but one can imagine that it gets *quite* complicated, seeing as the missiles will have to be targetted simultaneously.

And of course, those can miss, too.

But they are somewhat cheaper (You don't need a friggin nuclear reactor to power them), so it works out a little better, and I would say that the industrial capacities to have about as many of them as one can have ballistic missiles (Of course, you can't have both at the same time... Well, half of both works) should be a given, so, a couple thousand are manageable.

So, a reasonably effective defence (Killing off a strike that involves about half the missiles the opponent has, in total) would require some 1000- 50000 platforms, a few of which would probably be (Insanely huge and expensive) reusable platforms, with the vast majority being the bomb-pumped thingies.

5. Space based lasers (think the SOL satelite from Akira).Unfeasible in the extreme. The energy requirements for such a thing are... Insane.

Oh, and edit: THIS (http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/Nielsen-EDEW.pdf) might be an interesting read.

-snip-
On railguns:


Wouldnt the Earths Gravity cancel this out? (for firing against ground targets) These would be used against Sea going vessels, bunkers, buildings, ICBM sites, etc.
What would be a way to counteract the recoil for anti ICBM strikes?


On Energy Weapons:


What are some options for power?


On SOL type weapons: I read a report (trying to find it) that the Soviet Union was quite close to getting one of these operational when the Cold War ended. Supposedly it used a nuclear reactor for power, etc etc. Still, im very interested in building one of these.

And whats your ICQ number? (you can tg it to me)

Well... No. Earth' gravity results in the thing actually orbiting. Every bit of energy you add pushes it into a slightly higher orbit.

Of course, one can counteract (Or rather, adjust) by adding chemical propulsion, but that just rises costs, again, which kind of defeats the point.

Oh, and to hit targets on the ground, you need seriously big projectiles. For the targets you listed... Singledigit ton projectiles with excessive densities (13.565g/cm^3, 50% tungsten, 50% Iron, not exactly cheap) would be necessary, I guess, especially to prevent them from burning up (Or breaking up, but such would be less of a problem, so long as it still hits) in the atmosphere.

And the energy required to accelerate them... IIRC, v0 for a railgun is Inductivity (Modernish it would be about one microhenry) times Current squared times time of current pulse divided by (Mass times 2), so you would need a... Biggish nuclear reactor to accelerate the projectile to sufficient velocities.

More to the point, launch costs in a MT scenario would be worse than the damage you could achive with it.

As for energy weapons... Forget Solar Power. Insufficient.

The same goes for Chemical Energy, as well as for Radioisotopes (The nifty stuff they use in the long range probes to Jupiter etc..). The only option you have is fission, I.e. a standard nuclear reactor.

Which isn't completely unfeasible. launchcosts would be high, but... It works out. The question is, again, if it is worth said launchcosts.

As for SOL: I doubt. At least the Akiraesque way. Akina looked like, well, the thinghad the poweroutput of a small nuke. What would such do to a satellite (Especially considering the ludicrously low energy efficientcy of EM radiation weapons)? It would destroy it.

I can imagine a laser to reach the ground, sure. It should be able to do *some* damage (I'm thinking multiple hundreds of megawatts and a beam no larger than, uh... Multiple hundred squarecentimetres). But it would never have the Akiraesque capacities. It wouldn't destroy buildings, heck, it would fail to kill tanks.

And while it could certainly do serious damage (Read: kill) to Infantry, the thing would be so cost inefficient, it's a nightmare.

PS: As for ICQ, there *Is* this thing right under my name in the box to the left...

Mind, I'm never on, there.

PS: As for ICQ, there *Is* this thing right under my name in the box to the left...


The messenger icons dont work.

*Tests* True. Well, hrm, didn't know that. And neither does the public profile... My apologies.

168662140.

Of course, I'm still not particularly active, there...

if you want effective space weapons, you probably should go FT.