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Hypothetical Venusian War


Souper

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How would war be carried out on / around Venus?

I know, you're probably wondering why they'd be fighting over Venus in the first place.

Here are the conditions:

The year is 2200. All the hypothetical scientific advancements and construction projects, economic expansion etc. predicted for 2200 are fully available.

The backstory is as follows: Two factions (the Red and the Blue) were once at peace and had focused the last 200 years terraforming and colonizing Mars. Their plan was to use the newly-terraformed Mars as a gateway to the colonization of the remaining solar system... until they found Venerium, a very valuable resource. They then declared war and now fought over it.

Red and Blue have exact same 2200 tech. Advances in 3D printing tech allows complex electronic, metal, plastic, glass, essentially all elements in the periodic table to be made in a matter of several minutes provided they have the resources to do so. For the most part, their machines are unmanned. Due to the 3D printer's limited size, in order to build larger structures, it prints out various modules and uses the help of a crane to assemble the full building. It can build more of itself in a deployable form to make it small enough to fit inside its fully deployed version.

TL;DR self-replicating machines in the future fight for Venus over Venerium.

 

Our scenario begins at the beginning of the war. Red is based on Earth, while Blue is on a terraformed Mars.

Red prefers more powerful weapons and armor, but slower building and slower / sluggish movement. Red is more specialized and organized.

Blue is the opposite, high building speed and high speed / maneuverability, but less powerful weapons and armor. Blue is more adaptable and creative.

Edited by Souper
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7 minutes ago, Souper said:

How would war be carried out on / around Venus?

I know, you're probably wondering why they'd be fighting over Venus in the first place.

Here are the conditions:

The year is 2200. All the hypothetical scientific advancements and construction projects, economic expansion etc. predicted for 2200 are fully available.

The backstory is as follows: Two factions (The Red and the Blue) were once at peace. However, they exhausted the resources of every planet in the solar system except Venus. The minerals buried deep within Venus and the gasses in it's atmosphere were left virtually untouched due to the difficulty of obtaining them until recent mining techniques and technological advancements. Once the resources of the other planets were exhausted, (Read: stripped virtually bare), and with Venus the only place where resources could be found, the Red declared war on the Blue for those resources.

Red and Blue have exact same 2200 tech. Advances in 3D printing tech allows complex electronic, metal, plastic, glass, essentially all elements in the periodic table to be made in a matter of several minutes provided they have the resources to do so. For the most part, their machines are unmanned. Due to the 3D printer's limited size, in order to build larger structures, it prints out various modules and uses the help of a crane to assemble the full building. It can build more of itself in a deployable form to make it small enough to fit inside its fully deployed version.

TL;DR self-replicating machines in the future fight for Venus in a war of extermination.

 

Our scenario begins at the beginning of the war, with almost all of either side's population / infrastructure having fled to two perfectly opposing sides of Venus (Red = venusian north pole; Blue = venusian south pole.) where they established a war complex from scratch. Both are the exact same size at beginning. How would the war play out?

Red prefers more powerful weapons and armor, but slower building and slower / sluggish movement. Red is more specialized and organized.

Blue is the opposite, high building speed and high speed / maneuverability, but less powerful weapons and armor. Blue is more adaptable and creative.

why? What would be the need for war around Venus?

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17 minutes ago, Souper said:

Snippy

I find it highly unlikely we will have exhausted all resources in the solar system in less than 200 years, and even if we did do that, if we're that advanced, why don't we have mining colonies around other solar systems?

You might need another reason for this happening :)

Edited by Spaceception
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17 minutes ago, Souper said:

Both sides expanded too (Extremely) fast and depleted them early. It wasn't until after they were gone until they looked towards Venus.

Looks like their war will be a reproductive competition... If even on Venus...

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This makes a great backstory for, say, a video game.  But I'd seriously have trouble believing it as ever happening IRL.

The available resources in the solar system that are easier-to-get-to-than-Venus are staggeringly vast.  You could pretty much completely hollow out Ceres before it would be worth looking at Venus as a source of anything.  We're talking millions of cubic kilometers of stuff.

So,

#1, it ain't gonna happen that it "runs out."  There's just too much out there that's easier than Venus.

#2, even if somehow it did "run out" ... the amount of tech needed to be able to "run out" of everything in the solar system that's more easily accessible than Venus (i.e. "everything") would be so insanely advanced that at that point, you might as well just pack up and go interstellar.

So, yeah, a great story and all, and if you'd like to speculate based on the "story" aspect, great!  :) But the math doesn't work, so let's be clear:  this is a Hollywood-sci-fi, let's-tell-an-interesting-story exercise, not an actual examination of any kind of realistic extrapolation.

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24 minutes ago, Snark said:

This makes a great backstory for, say, a video game.  But I'd seriously have trouble believing it as ever happening IRL.

The available resources in the solar system that are easier-to-get-to-than-Venus are staggeringly vast.  You could pretty much completely hollow out Ceres before it would be worth looking at Venus as a source of anything.  We're talking millions of cubic kilometers of stuff.

So,

#1, it ain't gonna happen that it "runs out."  There's just too much out there that's easier than Venus.

#2, even if somehow it did "run out" ... the amount of tech needed to be able to "run out" of everything in the solar system that's more easily accessible than Venus (i.e. "everything") would be so insanely advanced that at that point, you might as well just pack up and go interstellar.

So, yeah, a great story and all, and if you'd like to speculate based on the "story" aspect, great!  :) But the math doesn't work, so let's be clear:  this is a Hollywood-sci-fi, let's-tell-an-interesting-story exercise, not an actual examination of any kind of realistic extrapolation.

They couldn't mine deep enough on the other planets, and setting up mines capable of mining deep enough would take so long that the mine would be bombed by the other side.

 

P.S the sides declared war on eatchother shortly after they could no longer dig deep enough. Venus is only feasible simply because nobody looked at it yet.

Also, the universe in which the story takes place is set in a universe where our estimations of the mineral deposit position on and in Venus are wrong, with resources being readily found near the top. only reason they weren't mined were the extreme environment.

TL;DR I use my magic wand to force a Venusian conflict to occur. Now gimme them tactics and strategies for Venus >:(

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Well, I would think that the simplest solution would would just be "hit the other guy with as many nuclear weapons as possible, first, before he does the same to you."  Effective, but not super interesting.

Since I assume that your goal here is to have an interesting story that's longer than "so they nuked each other, the end", you'll need some sort of plot element so that that's not the answer. Got any suggestions?

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1 minute ago, Snark said:

Well, I would think that the simplest solution would would just be "hit the other guy with as many nuclear weapons as possible, first, before he does the same to you."  Effective, but not super interesting.

Since I assume that your goal here is to have an interesting story that's longer than "so they nuked each other, the end", you'll need some sort of plot element so that that's not the answer. Got any suggestions?

Nukes overheat and explode before leaving Venus's atmosphere.

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26 minutes ago, Souper said:

Nukes overheat and explode before leaving Venus's atmosphere.

Not to worry, human flesh is more vulnerable than nuclear missles. 

 

Btw i'm burnt orange in your war, examining the warring factions i moved to the oort belt, built myself an interstellar space craft, before i left i sent out a singlal alerting all sentients in the vicinity that several predatory creatures might be expanding soon, that they were preparing for war on 2nd planet. Alas as i reached my destination i watched venus being destroyed by a vogon constructor fleet. 

Easy venus solution, build a super sunscreen park it on venusian L1-sun, block all radiation from hitting venus,mthe atmosphere collapses abd recombines withbthe rocks. Any ship that tries to leave i blast it. War over. 

Starting conflicts in space is not nearly as productive as cooperating with others in space. 

How many space stations does china have? 

 

Edited by PB666
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27 minutes ago, Souper said:

Nukes overheat and explode before leaving Venus's atmosphere.

How so? You're postulating that they've got all kinds of machinery happily operating continuously long-term on the Venusian surface. They're almost certainly nuclear-powered (no other power source would be practical). A nuclear bomb is considerably less complex than a reactor.

If they have the technology to run all sorts of equipment (including nuclear reactors) for days / weeks /years on the surface, then it should be no trouble at all for a bomb to last a few minutes.

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16 minutes ago, Snark said:

How so? You're postulating that they've got all kinds of machinery happily operating continuously long-term on the Venusian surface. They're almost certainly nuclear-powered (no other power source would be practical). A nuclear bomb is considerably less complex than a reactor.

If they have the technology to run all sorts of equipment (including nuclear reactors) for days / weeks /years on the surface, then it should be no trouble at all for a bomb to last a few minutes.

Hmm..... Uranium is prohibitively rare on Venus. most power is supplied via solar, wind or thermo solutions.

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11 minutes ago, Souper said:

Hmm..... Uranium is prohibitively rare on Venus. most power is supplied via solar, wind or thermo solutions.

Uranium doesn't have to come from Venus. You only need a few kilograms of it for a bomb. You can ship it from anywhere.  Earth alone has already provided all the nuclear material needed for tens of thousands of warheads, using only 20th century technology, and is not even vaguely tapped out.  If they have the energy for a space faring, Venus-colonizing civilization, a few nukes are child's play.

Solar's going to be a pretty poor option on Venus. It's low-density even on Earth, and Venus has that hellaciously thick, cloudy atmosphere getting in the way.  I dunno if geothermal would be readily available on Venus, but even if it is, it'll be slow and expensive to set up, not available in every location, extremely vulnerable to hostile attack, and immobile.  You might be able to eke out some electrical power from wind, but again, it's low-density, immobile, and impractical to harden against attack.

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4 hours ago, Souper said:

They couldn't mine deep enough on the other planets, and setting up mines capable of mining deep enough would take so long that the mine would be bombed by the other side.

 

P.S the sides declared war on eatchother shortly after they could no longer dig deep enough. Venus is only feasible simply because nobody looked at it yet.

Also, the universe in which the story takes place is set in a universe where our estimations of the mineral deposit position on and in Venus are wrong, with resources being readily found near the top. only reason they weren't mined were the extreme environment.

TL;DR I use my magic wand to force a Venusian conflict to occur. Now gimme them tactics and strategies for Venus >:(

But there are more than just planets. Asteroids are literally everywhere, and the Trojans of the gas giants are significant. Particularly Neptune's. 

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Blah blah blah magic, blah blah blah nukes never invented, blah blah blah resources on other planets mysteriously cease to exist.

 

 

GIVE ME MY HYPOTHETICAL COMBAT FANTASY NAO

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4 minutes ago, Souper said:

Blah blah blah magic, blah blah blah nukes never invented, blah blah blah resources on other planets mysteriously cease to exist.

I see you are going for realism.

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Sorry OP - your story won't work in the shape you presented it to us. At least not here, not with people that know at least a bit how space looks and works. Of course, you can use an age old trick of the writers - plug your plot holes with the Applied Phlebotinum. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum

:D

Just invent a super rare, super valuable material that can be mined only on Venus - precisely because it forms only in those hellish conditions. That would be something people would go to Hell Venus to get and fight for.

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12 minutes ago, PB666 said:

I see you are going for realism.

no, i want a scenario where combat takes place on Venus. I want to see how it would be carried out.

 

Red and Blue want a magical element found only on Venus. The magical element does stuff unrelated to the war. Both seeds need the other exterminated to obtain it. How do they do so?

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Like most other space war scenarios, I predict short, not very exciting and carried out at extreme range. Who needs nukes when one shot delivered at sufficient velocity will vaporise pretty much any vaguely realistic spacecraft, and one dinosaur killer delivered from orbit will do much the same for any planet side military resource. We're also fighting over Venus of all places, so holding back on a total war scenario for minor reasons such as 'not completely fouling up the biosphere' also seems unlikely.

Space war is stupid, if nothing else because the effort involved in getting any sort of meaningful warfighting capability into space is vastly disproportionate to the ease of destroying it once it's in space. Even positing 23rd century technology, the rocket equation is still not your friend.

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1 hour ago, Souper said:

OK yeah, i'm abandoning this thread.

I'm sorry, Souper.  When I look back at the thread, I may have been a bit of a buzzkill, and I really didn't intend that.  Other folks also pointed out lots of flaws in the basic premise, and I can see how that could be off-putting.

For what it's worth:  I don't think you had a "dumb idea" or anything... I think it's more a matter of the basic "rules of the game".

I liked your basic idea ("propose a story line and see where people can go with it")-- the fundamental concept of such a thing can work, but only if it lends itself to the group dynamics of the situation.

For example:  My understanding of essentially what you were proposing was a type of "group storytelling" where there would be an agreed-upon set of rules and everybody could join in.

That's a great idea.  I could see how it could be a lot of fun.

But that can only work, in an open and free group discussion where you haven't hand-picked the participants, if there's a well-understood set of rules.  And you framed the problem in terms of "what would happen"-- the "would" here is implicitly postulating that the "rules of the game" are, basically, "reality"-- i.e. the laws of physics and engineering.

You can totally do that, but then you have to let people take it where they take it.  If you had simply said:  "Posit that there's a precious resource, available only on the surface of Venus, and there are two warring factions that both want it.  What would happen?" -- and then don't have any specific expectations of what solution has to be the answer -- you could get plenty of discussion.  Person A says "They'd use nukes!" and then Person B says "You could use such-and-such strategy to deal with a nuke-throwing opponent" and so on and so forth.  It could be great!  But then the story goes where it goes.  You don't get to pick a plot line.

You can do it the other way around, too.  You could frame it as "Here's the story I've come up with.  I want to have two factions like yadda yadda, what would it take for something like this to happen?"  And then Person A would say "Hmm, IRL the straightforward thing would be to use nukes there, and we can't have that because that would spoil your plot.  So how could we avoid that?"  and then that's a challenge for people to come up with thoughtful ways that nukes aren't the answer somehow, and then that becomes the discussion.  But then you don't get to pick the rules, you have to let folks discover them.

I think what you basically ran into was that you were trying to have your cake and eat it too (pick the plot, and the rules), which is a lot harder to make work in an open forum like this, because it doesn't really leave any room open for people to provide their own creative input.  (Or maybe it's just in the wrong home-- posting it in "Science & Spaceflight" kinda implies that physical-realism is the rule.  Perhaps it would have fared better in The Lounge as a proposed work of fiction.)

Anyway, I'm sorry if the experience was a negative one for you, hope the next foray goes better.

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1 hour ago, Snark said:

I'm sorry, Souper.  When I look back at the thread, I may have been a bit of a buzzkill, and I really didn't intend that.  Other folks also pointed out lots of flaws in the basic premise, and I can see how that could be off-putting.

For what it's worth:  I don't think you had a "dumb idea" or anything... I think it's more a matter of the basic "rules of the game".

I liked your basic idea ("propose a story line and see where people can go with it")-- the fundamental concept of such a thing can work, but only if it lends itself to the group dynamics of the situation.

For example:  My understanding of essentially what you were proposing was a type of "group storytelling" where there would be an agreed-upon set of rules and everybody could join in.

That's a great idea.  I could see how it could be a lot of fun.

But that can only work, in an open and free group discussion where you haven't hand-picked the participants, if there's a well-understood set of rules.  And you framed the problem in terms of "what would happen"-- the "would" here is implicitly postulating that the "rules of the game" are, basically, "reality"-- i.e. the laws of physics and engineering.

You can totally do that, but then you have to let people take it where they take it.  If you had simply said:  "Posit that there's a precious resource, available only on the surface of Venus, and there are two warring factions that both want it.  What would happen?" -- and then don't have any specific expectations of what solution has to be the answer -- you could get plenty of discussion.  Person A says "They'd use nukes!" and then Person B says "You could use such-and-such strategy to deal with a nuke-throwing opponent" and so on and so forth.  It could be great!  But then the story goes where it goes.  You don't get to pick a plot line.

You can do it the other way around, too.  You could frame it as "Here's the story I've come up with.  I want to have two factions like yadda yadda, what would it take for something like this to happen?"  And then Person A would say "Hmm, IRL the straightforward thing would be to use nukes there, and we can't have that because that would spoil your plot.  So how could we avoid that?"  and then that's a challenge for people to come up with thoughtful ways that nukes aren't the answer somehow, and then that becomes the discussion.  But then you don't get to pick the rules, you have to let folks discover them.

I think what you basically ran into was that you were trying to have your cake and eat it too (pick the plot, and the rules), which is a lot harder to make work in an open forum like this, because it doesn't really leave any room open for people to provide their own creative input.  (Or maybe it's just in the wrong home-- posting it in "Science & Spaceflight" kinda implies that physical-realism is the rule.  Perhaps it would have fared better in The Lounge as a proposed work of fiction.)

Anyway, I'm sorry if the experience was a negative one for you, hope the next foray goes better.

There should be a space war and weapons  forum separate from a science forum.. i could not figure out why the OP thought a venusian war........meaning a war in a enviroment that is completely hostile to humans, was something that might be desirous.. Its sort of like asking how would you fight a war at the bottom of mariannas trench, answer, first evolve backwards and become a shrimp or squid, where that trench might be a useful resource. How to fight a battle on the top of mount everest? If you can manage these issues in a cogent manner you can ask the question of why fight a war on venus. 

To have a reason to fight a war you have to be hourding a resource in which two competing entities would like access. i pointed out in an old thread there is a redundancy of resources in our solar system. There is a much better availability of the rarest elements in the asteroid belt because true siderophilic elements have not undergone heat induced phase separation. Humans could not possibly deplete these. If we came to that point Venus would not be habitable unless you sheilded from the sun, in which case if you wanted to kill off a race just wait till they are facing the sun for several hundred days and remove the shield. 

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