linkxsc

My first suggestion to you wihtout this info though, you say you might build it like an RC plane. Perhaps you might dump about 150-200 dollars (or whatever it would cost) for a cheap 4channel RC plane. There's lots of great ones out there, most are rather weak to breezes though. As far as building the engine itself...

You do have a point, a polar orbit gives you a bit more to work with than a regular... planar orbit I guess? Could maybe hit Eve with a polar retrograde assist, and do a burn while right on the opposite side of eve from kerbol.

Fixed your post On the note of only preindustrial tech (lit pre1800s, actually i dont even think a lot of people realise how advanced we were between 1600 and 1800, which ill admit is dwarfed by 1800-1900, which again is dwarfed by almost every decade of the 1900s). Preindustrial isnt even really that bad, sailing ships, muskets, fertilizer, the beginnings of advanced steels. Heck the simple knowledge of the Chinese wheeled cart over the western wheelbarrow would put me miles ahead of many. And still, even if blasted back in tech, theres no way to remove the shreds of modern tech that would be left over.

Couple things. 1 like above a gravity assisted slowdown is doable. Its actually what the apollo program used between earth and moon, often known as a "free return trajectory" great for early game flybys of the mun and minmus. As far as gerting a retrograde kerbol orbit... ive done it before, if you do slowdown passes of eve it can be done with less fuel, but i personally find it to be kinda useless past just seeing if it can be done.

It's detonator might not fire due to the cold, but it'd probably still fire just fine

It would strike several times, probably with no spark, as your hands quickly start to chill. Then you freeze to death.

Don't need major changes in orbit, But its pretty safe to assume that your main engine has a higher TWR and efficiency then your RCS or translation thrusters. Also, say you do translate yourself at say, 50m/s perpendicular to the missile, whats to stop it from making that same translation and still hitting you? Odds are that a missile would close to you at 300-500m/s (thats ~700-1100mph or all the non-metric people) and keep another 500-1000m/s of fuel left to chase you with. Only reason why we dodge missiles by turning tightly IRL is that the missile is using a solid rocket motor, even long range missiles trying to make a sharp turn after flying a long way run out of fuel trying to turn around and come back, and even then missiles are generally too accurate for that now, the best defense is to shoot first and drive them away or not get shot at. So... where do we draw the line then? Imagination? Or projects that never happened? This entire thread is nothing but speculation and wild ideas, some ground in science, others not so much. Its certainly possible to assume a realistic spacecraft capable of war, even built from current technology, and then pit it against the arguments of others here on the forums. Heck if my laptop was capable of firing up blender and not blending itself, I'd model mine up for everyone for a better perspective of my arguments, but well my laptop sucks. I'd build the thing in KSP and screenshot it, but I can't even play that. So all I can do is argue. Because we haven't really done anything to give anyone accurate points of how it would turn out.

You completely skimmed over the, "keeping yourself ready to burn evasion" part. I highly doubt these warships would be able to flip themselves to the side with their RCS in a second or 2, they'd probably be only able to rotate in the tens of degrees a second (and remember it would have to accelerate to that turn and decelerate that turn too, this wouldn't be immediate performance). Also just because your ship is built for combat, if doesn't mean you're completely ignoring the fuel gauge, because that is literally your lifeline. High ISP, thermal engines or other technologies might make that fuel gauge go down slower, but still pretty fast. Most fights would probably be while ships are shifting orbits across eachother and they pass within enough range of eachother to fire though, then after 1-2 minutes of engagement, and several more of evading the missiles that are still floating around, then their "retreat" would just be drifting along their orbit away, out of range. Most fights that happen would probably fight and maneuver until all their fuel was burned to a "quick orbit back to base +match orbit when we get there" ideal of what we now call bingo fuel on fightercraft. Also just because any of the real world concepts that you have found, doesn't mean thats how it would turn out. Quick glance though google nets me several goofy hand drawn sketches that showed up in magazines in the 60s, most of them not being more than a dozen meters long, and on the scale of a possible spacewar would be like the merrimack and monitor compared to a ticonderoga (I make that specific comparison due to the Ticonderoga's basis as a missile cruiser, not a gunboat.) Also many of them don't seem to include any ideas of proper armor design. At least for a craft that should be taking fire, the front would be brought into a point or a chisel, so your armor would be pre-angled to oncoming fire, Weapon barrels could be built inside of the angled part perhaps with a little armored cover that moves out of the way when you go to shoot.

it probably would have some issues with the pressure, but at the same time it might not given it was slowly brough up to pressure, its bigger problem would likely be our different atmospheres

Hmmmm, I'm sure we'd still have turrets, yes you can point the whole ship at the target, but that takes time and RCS fuel. Also you might not want to point yourself directly at the target in the case that you wanted to use your main engines to burn and avoid fire. Also while burnign in a different direction, turrets give you the ability to fire. CIWS would also definitely need turrets because missiles could be programed to arc around and attack your ship from the sides rather than the front. Although having good forward firepower is never a bad thing, mount it up such that all the recoil would act along the COM axis. Well remember, your missiles might burn to get a couple 100m/s of closure, then upon getting within a range they burn to speed their approach, and might end up coming close with 1000-2000m/s of deltaV, are you gonna burn all that fuel to outrun the missile? Flares and chaff are probably a fraction the weight of the fuel needed to avoid the missile in that way, and perhaps combined with a much smaller burn, you could do your evasion with a fraction the weight spent. Also usually when avoiding SAMs, they either burn away and run the missile out of fuel (which since SAMs also need match altitude, is doable if they were kinda far away from the launcher. Otherwise they turn hard hoping to get outside of the missiles detection angle/pop chaffs/flares. Usually missiles are flying significantly faster then the target aircraft so they do have a lot of ability to overshoot, but they also don't have the ability to throttle their motors, all of them being solid rocket motors. A missile in space would probably have a throttleable motor/vectoring engine, and probably its own RCS packed into a tiny package, and likely cost several times what an atmospheric missile would (another part of the whole, we might not just sling salvos of hundreds of missiles back and forth, probably more dumbfire rockets to fool/waste CIWS mixed in with actual attacking missiles)

Cantennas are nice and easy to make, just punch a hole in a pringles can (although coffee cans seemed to work better in my testing), put a wifi dongle sticking though, and run a wire down to your computer. We were able to pick up known routers from ~1/4th - 1/2 mi with that. But my friend and I managed an 8mi wifi link using a pair of "WokFi" antennas and attaching them to the roofs of our houses. Getting the angle right was annoying though, using a wok and an omni router we've also pulled of a 2mi uplink with only needing to direct 1 antenna. Actually with a goofy network of antennas we've built, most of my local friends can all connect to the same wifi even though we're all spread across a 6-7 mi area. Early on, we didn't have good cable internet up in our area (and still kinda don't, but dialup wasn't gonna do it for lanning starcraft/warcraft) so when we wanted to LAN, we had to get creative.

Oh well in that case... isn't this basically what we're doign with phased scanning arrays? They electrically steer the sending beam for their radars, also they can similarly do it to send things like communications signals, VOR beacons work like this to an extent too. However this isn't even really a new technology. We've had highly directional, tight beam antennas for years. As a matter of fact in the early stages of WW2, the Germans used this to their advantage when directing bombers to targets in England. Initially there were 2 tight beams, 1 that the bombers would travel along, and a second that when met, they would drop their bombs. This worked pretty well for a while actually, just set up the 2 beams so that they cross over the factory or w/e you want to bomb and go. Later though the English started picking up those signals with their own systems and would have fighters waiting at areas they thought the bombers would hit, or they'd evacuate. So the Germans instead added a 3rd beam. Like before they would fly along beam 1, but when they hit beam 2 it would start a timer counting up, when they hit the 3rd beam the timer would stop and start counting back down to 0, and when it hit 0 that would be their target and they'd drop. After that some stuff started where a radio station in England figured out the frequency they were using and would start/stop the timers prematurely so that their drops would be far off course. And that was in the 40's

great mod for use with KSPI, some of the ships you make over there can get pretty heavy, this thing will launch them all, twice

Like other guys said, this results in whats known as a recoilless rifle (and yes, dumbfire cannons in space would probably still be rifled for the gyro-stabilization of the projectile, don't want it to turn off center and smack into the target on the non-armor-piercing side now do we?) They'd be great for space, perhaps on smaller craft where the turrets sticking out of the side wouldn't be hindered much by the hull of the craft. But you would have some problems. First and probably the most annoying, would be limited firing arc. See rotating the thing and firing tangent to the hull of your craft would be fine, the turret could almost account for all of its roll effects too. If you were trying to shoot at something above the turret though... that backblast would be going straight into your hull. Might not be too big of a deal for a 2-3in gun. But any larger than this and you might start damaging yourself by doing this. Also you'd have limited arcs wherever the back blast (or forward firing) might hit another turret, or other parts of your ship (might not be able to fire straight ahead for example because behind the turret would be your radar arrays or w/e) Though they would be great, also due to their lack of needing large recoil systems, they cut down on the crafts empty weight a lot. Less stress on the hull also. The ammo may weigh more than a regular shot due to the extra propellent needed to get the same velocities though so another drawback, But considering the weight that some guns can get IRL... Would be great for putting larger caliber weapons on smaller craft

Math works out with my napkin. However there are a couple things that have come to my thoughts. 1 It itsn't clear which L4 we are talking about, Sun-Earth, or Earth-Moon, so lets do some figuring with both situations Sun-Earth. Your 1m^2 warhead would be sitting ~1AU from earth itself (merhaps moer perhaps less, unless my figuring is wrong, but I believe it should be roughly the distance from earth to sun At that range, before considering temps or anything your target from earth or a near earth satellite would be roughly, 2 sin-1[c/(2r)] c being the length of a chord, or in this case the diameter of our object. And r being the radius of a circle, or basically our range to the target. Now if you already know you're supposed to be looking at L4 to track this thing, yeah you might be able to pick it up with an expensive accurate thermal telescope. But thats with it being in there amongst all the other debris that may be filling up L4 in the future. And thats a pretty dang narrow beam of detection, just sweeping across the whole of the angles that teh L4 region takes up would take days or weeks, maybe even years to pick up something that small. And if theres other debris around, good luck. Would be better off trying to pick up targets within 1million km from earth before working on the 150million range. Although, you could always just have a scanning array built in L4, sicne in this space future you might need sats there to keep in communications with bases on mars and such (unless those got destroyed, and now there's more debris absorbing heat to try and sift through. More realistic would be the craft sitting in Earth-Moon L4. This is only ~384,400km and our 1m^2 target would be 2.18*10^-6 wide from our perspective. I think we could do a pretty good job of picking that up, its over a million times larger in a scope compared to before, and we already have a few satellites out there, or if we don't already, they would be great aides to communicating with bases on the far side of the moon (being relays for sats sitting at E/M L2) This however also could have a chance to hide because thered probably be more stuff floating around there. maybe some space colonies, maybe a station or 2, ofcourse those stations and colonies could pick it up, but well, who are we at war with, they may be the ones holding those colonies or stations. But again, assuming your craft is the 1 above with several meters of radiator/solar panel to keep itself powered and cool, you'd be easily spottable from the lunar surface, sats/stations in L1,2,3,4, and 5. With some angling, and redesign though you might hide yourself from earth, moon L1,2,4,5 but still be noticeable from L3. Therefore if you want to be stealthy your best hiding spots would actually be L3, farthest from all the other points, and all the points are within ~60degrees infront of you, so the craft could be designed... maybe with a cone shaped "cloaking" array, to have a better chance of hiding. Although, thats still assuming there aren't a bunch of sats/stations/colonies sitting out around L3 which could easily be hidden around becuase they would be vastly higher thermal sources. Stealth as I see it in space is much less not being detected through technology, its not being detectible relative to the other junk floating around. Also a ship could always carry its own thermal/radar decoys to draw attention of scanners away, they could be launched by hydraulic piston away from the ship, after drifting a few hundred KM, they fire up and do their job (make burns different to what you're making your burn and such) heck could get all tactical with ships in 1 area launching decoys to draw the attention of scanners to a different part of the sky, so that ships elsewhere can have their time to make a burn. Makes me wish I had a team of developers where we could go make a sim game that you have to deal with and work with all the problems of range and detection and such. It'd be like "Silent Hunter" only ~30x as hardcore

I think youre overreacting a bit, i fairly well understood his statement as a light spectrometer, similar to the ones we use now to guesstimate the chemical makeup of stars.

I remember watching a documentary a while ago talking about how the f-22 and f-35 only had particularly small radar cross-sections from the front and sides by other aircraft at about the same alt, and were easily detectable from the rear top or bottom. Well then in a head to head fight, or maneuvering around they have an advantage over other fighters but in a dogfight theyd rely on speed and thrust vectoring. The f-117 was made for ground attack and hence was built to be less detectable to radars on the ground physically below it (however we later found it had issues with getting tracked by radars operating at frequencies above spec). This is why for example the exhaust from the engines was run over the top of the wing so it would have some time to cool and be less receptive to thermal sams.

Ethanol is fairly easy to make if you have some yeast already. A still is just some piping, a burner, and a couple of barrels. Yeah early on you wouldnt be able to make much but you could expand. Now you have disenfectant, fuel for lamps and gasoline engines and to help star fires in wet wood, also from there you can make vinegar for pickling/preserving food.

Nope. But we dug it with steam powered shovels in the past, and we could do it again in the future

Wood and coal, pretty much everywhere, and with a bit of work useful for steam. Also hydrogen gas is fairly easy to make if you have a sustainable electrical source (water wheel driving a generator, and compressors for the h2 and o2) On the steam engine thing... dunno why either, but it could be done and given some circumstances, might be a good way to do it.

A full auto with a small caliber at close range maybe. A deer at 200-300 yards shooting .308, the recoil will throw off the shots. But im in the woods, the foliage is more of a problem than the deers speed Ofcourse. But i said that to impress the fact that even with guns, lots of people will be wasting ammo all over the place because they have no idea what theyre doing. You can practice, but that takes up your limited ammo. Literally my friends and i when we were little would go out with blankets and sticks catch turkeys for fun (no videogames for us). Really not too hard, especially if you have something to feed them. Guneafowl probably arent too much harder. And we caught pheasents lije this before too. Countless ways of catching game. Hell bears are regularly attracted to my bird feeders. On the note to Seret. It might not be efficient, but doable with the replacement of the cam driver (turn it into a 1:1 rather than the 2:1, though gears might not be forthcoming.

You know, even if we were totally independent from fossil fuels for power generation/transport....wed still be fcked in half of the apocalyptic scenarios (esp the EMP, hell the Russians burned down a powerplant as I recall while testing a couple nukes... imagine that on the scale of the world. And now imagine that happening to a nuke plant itself? Yeah lots of them have millions of powerfailure modes... But how good are they at shutting themselves down when every computer connected to them is dead and all wires coming going into the thing are getting crazy varying voltage spikes?) Even then since the event happened all across teh world, its not like all the oil suddenly disappeared. Canada would still have most of its oil, there'd still be tons and tons of it sitting in the Gulf. I see you're from the UK, well you're kinda screwed on that. But even with all these debates, its not like all the machinery on say an oil platform would die off (only the computers... and last I checked, those weren't exactly the most integrated machines around, computer/electronic needs can be bypassed if given time to re-engineer) Also ships would still be floating. Yes their navigation systems might go down, but many of the older container and cargo ships engines could be brought online with some work, and navigation could be done again by the stars, the biggest factor in the age of sail was their lack of accurate timepieces, they could find out where they were north south, it was east/west that was the problem. Saudi Arabia is probably having some serious problems during this time of apocalypse too (its not exactly a country that can support its population well without imports, and if all their supply routes are cut off many of their people would be starving. Given a generation goes by, could probably haul right into the coast with a couple ships and men, get to an oil field and set up camp. The oil platforms would have likely been abandoned years ago because they're kinda worthless now. Or you could always trade with them for the oil. Refinery... well dunno about bringing old ones back on line myself but its not like they're particularly complex. They heat up the oil and give it time to separate, then they suction it off at different heights and thats the different types of fuel depending on height. Find a book and some plans that are likely at the plant, and now you're cookin. Also I dunno about your country, train tracks everywhere and we have lots of people who collect old steam engines, those things would be beasts during this intermediate time period at transporting goods and well son of a gun, they're depressingly simple machines aswell, and wood isn't lacking in supply. The only reason why fossil fuels really matter is because they give us unsurpassed power in material transport (and to an extent, materials gathering such as mining or harvesting) Forgoing the ability to move resources on a scale though, you'd never have the chance to bounce back. And don't forget. You could possibly use an existing engine, replace the cam shaft so that you don't have a compression/power stroke anymore, although you might just leave it, compressing and expanding your steam once would just lower your efficiency a bit. And pump some high pressure steam into the intake manifold. What would normally be the intake stroke, the high pressure steam forces itself in and pushes the piston down. Seems like an interesting project... need to find an old small 2 cylinder engine that noone minds never working right again. Well there goes next weekend.

Well, who knows, afterall lasers will have become a mainstay, so I'm sure at least some effort has been put into defending against them by this point. And even then, the lasers we've used IRL so far have been targeting relatively slow moving, unarmored drones that didn't try to maneuver. As the target shifts around and you lose focus on a single point, the weapons effectiveness drops off. Also light materials could make up the bulk of the craft with only tidbits of actual armor around the important bits. Missiles could also employ this manner of defense though. Also things to remember, IRL missiles deal damage using shrapnel against fighters yes they do, however aircraft are pitifully armored currently, relying more on mobility, tactics, and firing first, to avoid taking damage. Only the occasional GA craft like an A-10 has any remarkable armor. In space, a bit more armor could be put on craft because they wouldnt need to deal with staying aloft, and the shrapnel of missiles would become slightly less effective. Also if the missiles were desrtoyed any range away from the target their damage capability would fall to the woes of the "inverse square law" every unit farther from the target they go off, they deal that much less impact. Which since the target would be both shooting back and trying to maneuver to avoid the incoming missiles, could force missiles to have to get just as close as they do now to do any notable damage. Just a thought though, so its a weapons deployment box (Gundam 0083 comes to mind, amongst every other launcher in armored core). probably has enough fuel to make some orbital maneuvers... so does it have a radar system? Cause remember IRL we have ~3 major missile types: Thermal homing ie. Aim-9 Sidewinders. Simplest tracking system, also the easiest to beat with flares and infrared laser systems. Require LOS from launcher to target. Passive radar guided ie Aim-7 Sparrow. Requires something external to illuminate the target with a radar. Usually this is done IRL by the launching fighter, so the missile only requires a detector, and is thus much smaller and cheaper, and more deltaV. These would also require LOS of some sort from either a launching ship or perhaps you're launcher platform, or a fighter. These are currently used lots as fleet defense weapons due to the attacking missiles will always be in sight, and are easily illuminated by the powerful radars at close range to a ship. Odds are, this is what the missiles launched by your munitions box would fire. While the munitions box itself was guided to the target by the type below. Active radar guided ie. AIM-120 AMRAMM. These... well they take target data gathered from the launching aircraft (or another craft acting almost as a spotter to target) and fire, following an inertial path towards the target, occasionally updating with new info from the launching craft, spotter, or AWACS. Upon reaching a certain range to target, the missile switches on its own short range radar system and guides itself the rest of the way to the target under its own power... THESE would probably be the most likely system used in space combat... assuming that we don't have really good Ewar on both sides that can interfere with their guidance datalinks while approaching the target. There are also HARMs which seek out active radar sources (although they work quite the same as passive radar homing). Basically the farther down you go in that list, the more fuel will be needed to offset the weight of the guidance systems and such. Your munitions box is a great plan, and would probably work great, but its counter would be some jamming to its guidance as it approaches, or since its launched at extreme range, I could perhaps deploy a few rockets/expandible decoys to burn to slightly different orbits, and your launcher would probably have to pick 1 to follow. You could just launch more of the munitons boxes, but now we're in a stalemate as-to who runs out of equipment first. I still stand by that the best weapon would probably still be a cannon fired at close range, but well I play Gallante. But thanks for actually posing a good argument, I wanna see a follow up. How you fight my decoys that my ship launched? Remember, we're on other sides of the planet from eachother with some satellites that are spotting eachother... to an extent. I do wonder about the ability of a ship to fire through its own energy shields... I mean, if you had to bring them down for a split second to open fire, well that'd be the moment that they strike. Ofcourse shields might not even work so great against heavy kinetic rounds, or might shift their trajectory a bit, but now we're playing world of tanks in space with KV4s and armor angling. First I will state, I never attested that "fighters" were even effective, I just asked how much your missiles would cost compared to a fighter. Nor did I ever state that they would be manned craft. Any socalled fighters that exist would probably be drones controlled either by AI or direct link from a pilot sitting in a cockpit elsewhere (you know, like real drones are). Also its still a moot point, how big are our warships anyways? 1000ton, 10000ton? Hell by my figuring a "space fighter" compared to a "space battleship" would be like PTboats to battleships in WW2. Tiny and hard to spot, loaded with a few hard hitting weapons, and a few small turrets to defend themselves from like sized craft, or missiles. Also overwhelming defenses is something that only needs to be dealt with on missile type weapons. Thats it, we shoot lots of missiles at ships because lots of missiles will be shot down, and we need enough missiles to score a hit. My fighters would be small craft that sit on the outside of CIWS effective range, plinking away with cannon type weapons while burning periodically to shift their position relative to the target. I say fighters... but these could easily be the size of frigates relative to a socalled "battleship" Actually fighters would probably be borederline like bits or funnels from Gundam. Computer, RCS Thrusters, Gun, thats it. You can launch them and let them chill out on alternate orbits in amongst debris. Let em sit there for months, just give them a solar panel to keep them online. When you need them, online them and put fire on a target that wasn't expecting them to be there. Missiles, HA. Does your space society really have the resources to send hundreds of missiles in salvo after salvo at a target with a maybe chance of killing them. Or have some little drones that cost a bit more (actually they're basically a missile with a camera and a gun added to them, not much weight) can be left in space for ages until needed, and when they run out of fuel/ammo can be collected and relaunched without losing the materials used to build them. Remember in space you won't have all the materials in the world. The precious electronics for all these radar systems and guidance systems might not be so expendable as you think. Perhaps these "fighters" might not even have radars of their own, and instead rely on the eyes and communication of several pilots controlling them by camera and remote? I'll take a dozen space fighters armed with 30mm cannons, and a pair of .50cal mgs for missile interception with a deltaV budget around 5km/s over your salvos of missiles any day. Well, 3 missiles exploding spreading shrapnel around... taking out other missiles. Remember the target only needs a handful of good shots to take down a close formation of missiles. You need lots of missiles to overwhelm their defences. Me I like cannons meself, because with a wide enough spread of fire you'd never be able to evade. Again, no need for life support or controls. Hell even at that you could have a pilot in a space suit for all his life support, hes planning on getting back to base tonite anyways. But no, probably unmanned. And sensor suite... yeah 1 fighter needs the same sensors as every missile in a salvo (unless you're shooting off with thermal seekers or passive homers but still, radars be expensive. Think of it this way. 1 AMRAMM missile costs over 1.4mil for the most recent versions. An F-16 cost ~20mil in the late 90s, F-18s cost around 40mil now. Going by this your missiles cost ~1/15-1/25 a fighter. Missiles are single use, a fighter might live to fight another day) Even at that... how do you get your missiles into range without wasting too much of their fuel on the approach? vger came up with a decent 1, and armored box with teh missiles in it thats fired to approach the target, and then upon getting in range, or getting fired on to bad, deploys its weapons at the target. Whats your suggestion as to how to do this? Also said above, fighters would probably be loaded with a combo of their own missiles/cannons remember, a 20mm will blow holes the size of your fingers through the top and rear armor of tanks, a 30mm will blow them the size of your fist, god only knows what we're figuring for the armor on our warships here. Are they so weakly armored that regular old missiles work against them... cause well, I want a 30mm if thats the case. Aaah, well here we hit the speculation. See, a missile might have higher TWR and more propellent mass. But a fighter might be just large enough to be equipped with a fission/fusion reactor and is able to use a thermal rocket for extremely high ISPs (and perhaps TWRs) that a missile cannot within its small profile. Also, point defences wouldn't jsut be spray and pray. A ship probably wouldn't be taking potshots with its CIWS guns or interceptor missiles at a small craft over 150km away. A minor burn of 5m/s could provide more than enough to evade fire. And just keep burning back and forth every second or so... your fighters not taking shots. Laser point defenses change the game a bit, but now your missiles and fighters would both be heavier with armor now and the lighter missiles will probably suffer more from that than an already somewhat heavy fighter.

there is no 1 shot 1 kill rule in hunting that i know of, generally though at least when hunting in nh and maine forests though, if you dont hit them with the first shot, they bolt and often you wont get a second shot. Often even if you hit then they still bolt and you have to track them down. Yeah just go for getting them with the first shot. In the hills of the midwest though you might get second and third shots at them. Guns be everywhere man. Though i can vouch for the competent people. First time i ever went shooting my dad took myself and 4 of my friends along. A few of us were airsoft players so basic aiming had already been learned. But srsly, from 100yds (little less then 100m) away my friend wes couldnt hit a 36in(little less than 1m) target... or the plywood board it was attached to, the first or second day with a scoped .22lr rifle. Same gun all us others shot with, all the while he was being instructed. ty, though id try for the adults first before the eggs (might not be laying season anyways) also if any eggs are cracked and not gonna hatch, could boil them and use them for feed too. Catching bears... need a pretty solid net. Although definite point. A salt lick with a triggerable net trap (or perhaps a leg grabber type rig) could easily attract deer and moose in my area. If 1 could get their hands on some tranquilizer to subdue them while you move them to a pen, itd probably work great. But youd need high fences to hol them. Those things make it over our 5ft fence all the time. home actual comptuer, reformatted text to be... more correct.

Well forgoing the existence of shields or lasers... (or thin reflective armors) just how long of continuous fire does it take one of your ciws lasers to take down a fighter? Do the lasers have to take some time to cool down between shots? What kind of orbit are you in, did the fighters come from a differing orbit using the planet or a moon as cover from detection? Or did their mothership close in and launch them at relatively close range? After blowing up a few fighters can you still pick the living ones out from the high temp debris? Remember those blobs of metal will still be floating around, not like on earth where they fall down in the water after being shot down. Also, just how many missiles do you have, how fast can you fire them, what portion of your ships mass is missile compared to a carrier and its fighters? Seems to me the greatest asset in space combat of this type would be to overwhelm to interception defenses of your opponent, maybe your missiles are bright enough to leave their tubes and wait for others to launch before heading to the target enmasse. How good are the missiles at staying apart from eachother so that 1 getting shot at doesnt result in more getting taken down by shrapnel? Also on the argument of cost. Which is more expensive, a handful of fighters with sensors suite, or a bunch of missiles that also need advanced sensors and guidance systems to overcome orbital mechanics, enemy jamming, and ai smart enough to pick out their target among the amalgum of flares, chaffes, debris, and possible other ships? How capable are these missiles too. We talking thermal seekers, radar guided, maybe magnetomically guided (doubtful). What kind of deltav budget do they have unto themselves? What kind of twr we talking?