SuperBigD60

stripes for the flag

I meant to watch a particular launch from IVA, but instead of IVA, I hit EVA, and my poor kerbal never made it into space, even though his rocket did. That may have been fatal, but considering I've had kerbals land from interplanetary trajectories and survive, I just followed the ship and assumed he'd survive. I didn't care enough to make sure, though. It was super funny to watch, and I actually think I recorded it. I'll have to find that.

Nice, man. So basically, we'd be well on our way to being a tier 3 civilization by the time we've got access to this sort of cash as a society. We might visit another galaxy before that.

So, you'd see the thing being fired, but might not see much more, although, I'd believe the computer could extrapolate the projectile's course based on the limited measurements it could take. I guess it could just be a matter of calculation, then. Happy to help,

I was more speaking along the lines of this. Surviving g-forces are one thing, but surviving the core of a star? And as far as scanning the object, I was legitimately asking whether or not it would be physically possible to see (scan, detect, whatever) the object due to relativity without magic. Don't mistake my nitpicking for criticism, though. I've definitely watched/read far less realistic stuff and enjoyed it a lot. I was just giving you questions to ask yourself as you go forward, considering you stated you want realism. I feel like my ksp career has followed this piece of advice for a while, actually.

What about that lonely island just above the south pole on the right side? If you're playing risk, that could be your australia.

It's kind of a game of economics to make sure the bullet you shoot at your target is actually cheaper than the target. That's why the navy is funding this stuff, so that the cost to destroy a target isn't more than the target is worth in the first place.

Also, to put this into perspective, I seem to remember some Japanese company a couple years ago planning a space elevator for some remote future date. They seem to treat speculative, future engineering proposals as genuine business plans, or at least they talk about them as seriously as US businesses talk about what they're going to do for the next fiscal year.

I don't know that this is possible as long as humans retain their logical fallacies. I suspect we'll be, at least in some way, very competitive for a long time to come. And, I suspect that if we find some other form of life, especially another civilization, out there, I'd be very surprised if we ever stopped competing with them. Also, it could be argued that our competitive drive is what has produced much of the innovation that has brought society to where it is. If we are going to change the way we think, would we want to remove such a useful (if dangerous) trait? I do think, though, that we will always find competition among the stars, and hopefully we will try and rise to the challenge.

I think we need to start by getting some sort of manufacturing plant going on the moon. If we can build and launch our stuff from the moon (which takes less dV than Kerbin, mind you) we could start to make some headway on this and other orbital construction projects. Of course, setting up a space program from the moon is kind of another can of worms I don't want to get into.

This sounds kind of like some old red cross book I read about drowning from the 50s. Lots of conjecture, and even some valid points based on data, but considering I had 60 years on whoever came up with that book (and a ridiculous amount of studies have been done since then, especially recently), so I knew very precisely what happens when you drown and the book almost seemed laughable. I say that to point out that we just don't know how exactly our bodies will react to space, because it doesn't happen often enough to gather any meaningful data points or track someone's condition as it progresses. And we don't really have a line forming of volunteers to test this. As far as drowning goes, sometimes people go in the water and come out dead, sometimes dive teams pull kids out of the lake after 30 minutes and they get revived. There's just so many variables as far as the human body is concerned that trying to predict exactly how long it'll take someone to die, and exactly how they'll die, is statistically impossible, and in fact the only reason we even have a general idea as to what goes on during the drowning process is due to decades of research studying however many drowning cases there are per year. Now, move to space, where we only have a handful of people at any given time, and they are all trained in ways to avoid the effects of depressurization, anyway. I don't know, but off the top of my head I'd say the number of people who died due to exposure to space is 0. So we have no idea what will actually happen, because it's never happened. (Or I'm wrong and its happened a few times, but my point still stands). We can come up with good guesses as to what might happen, and who knows, maybe we could even be right. But I think that, because both space and the human body are such complex, chaotic systems, we could predict until we're blue in the face and not be right. I think that, in general, the human body tends to be more durable than we predict rather than less, so I'd probably agree more with people saying it's survivable for longer vs shorter periods of time. But that's just me.

I like it. Sounds like a good prologue Although, with a collision of such high energy, would 30 seconds be enough to escape the blast radius? And, would you be able to accurately scan something in real time moving towards you at .7c? Also, I hope that AI pulls a HAL and tries to murder everyone.

Jeb usually seems quite happy no matter who's flying the ship, as long as something crazy is going on. As for that video, my goodness, that's incredibly dark.

Me too. I'll get on that

All I'm thinking about is that, sure, maybe you can construct drones and train the pilots/drivers cheaper than training a marine, and it'd definitely be more expendable, but it won't be as functional. The physical human presence on the battlefield will inevitably scale back, but I can't imagine a sequence of events over the next 200-odd years that renders a human soldier completely obsolete in every possible manner. There's just too much people can do in a battlefield, and for us to come up with a machine for each thing, or even one machine that does everything is going to take a lot longer than the scope of this discussion.

I think it'd be easier to shield a ship that doesn't necessarily require outside communication to function vs shielding one that absolutely requires outside communication to function. I mean, don't we have ways already to protect sensitive electronic equipment against excessive radiation? On another vane: I think I've been going about this somewhat in the wrong way. I mean, I've been assuming that the space aspect of warfare would be the only one going on, and so I've been just thinking in terms of naval warfare, but I suspect that might be rather myopic. What about the guys on the ground? After all, infantry have been a part of our warfare since the dawn of civilization, and even though every other aspect of warfare has changed (well, maybe not every aspect, that was hyperbolic), I just get the feeling we'll still have ground forces involved in battle for the next couple centuries, at least as long as the scope of this discussion. And navies and air forces planet side won't just dissappear, I don't think. I mean, if we're still not united on earth, any armed force would still have a part to play terrestrially. So, that leaves the question as to what would orbital forces would do in these battles. To me, it seems like the role would develop progressively, much like the role of aircraft in battle has already. The first major conflict might see small, light craft designed primarily for recon missions, maybe with small armaments to defend or take out small, strategic targets (think of the first canvas planes in WWI; ships not really designed for combat, exactly, but the pilots still carried bombs they could drop on unsuspecting enemy troops below). Then we'd see more combat oriented craft in the next few conflicts, but still they are very balanced so thy can do a little bit of everything, but not very well. Perhaps they'll have more armaments, better dV budgets/life support, etc, but we still would be developing just what role orbital forces would play in any given battle. In the end, what comes to mind for me are orbital batteries used for taking pot shots at enemy strongholds without using nukes, and we'd have craft designed specifically for orbital superiority, meant specifically to take out other space-faring vessels. I imagine we'd see some sort of amalgamation of strategies from artillery tactics, submarine tactics, naval tactics, and air force tactics, depending on what was going on. Probably some new stuff we can't foresee thrown in there, as well. Just some thoughts

You're right, the analogy as I phrased it is misleading. But a similar relationship exists, I suspect. Your 10 ton hunter killer would not be fit for long distance travel, due to being stripped way down and being, in large part engine. You would need some sort of delivery method to bring this craft (and its friends) to the battlefield, and a capital ship would be one possible solution. the difference you get between the big and small ship here is the 10 ton ship is 90% engine, while the 100000 ton ship is 5% engine. You don't need to worry about getting significant thrust for something that is dealing with interplanetary transfer burns. Perhaps you just need to be more careful with your calculations so you know you can stop when you get to the target, but still, a ship that big has no business being 90% engine by mass.

I mean, that's not impossible, just ill-advised.

Some absolutely unintelligent individual I met in highschool simply said she didn't believe in space. Although I definitely think she was unintelligent enough to legitimately hold this belief, when I pressed her further, I got the distinct impression she was just being difficult, so this reason might need an asterisk.

Yes, that's precisely the reason. Here's basically something like ksp's SOIs, and your distance from the sun will make you SOI bigger. The idea of meta moons is something I've always been curious about. Clearly it must be rather rare with moons in our solar system, because we haven't found any. tidal forces might be too chaotic to sustain this sort of binary system for very long, so maybe it might not happen very often for the similar reasons Venus doesn't have any satellites.

I don't know if we'll be all that constrained by having to keep humans alive long enough for the trip (or allowing them to reproduce or perhaps cloning them or whatever). My inclination, and I'm no expert (but I have done a little bit of research into futurism), is that due to increases in technology, a human who survives to the end of this century will be able to live until the end of the millenium and beyond. I also suspect that as we progress, we will end up merged with our technology (not in a freaky borg way, or even a starwars way, more like a cool way in some of those halo books that led up to halo 4, or Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series). If we don't need any resource but electricity to survive, and if we can gain that electricity simply from our movements, we don't have much in the way of life support to worry about. As for a utopia, I don't think any sort of human utopia is tenable. Maybe once we are smarter (and therefore more logical and pragmatic) due to our technologcal merger, we might stop fighting because we realize cooperation is more beneficial. Perhaps we'll even end up as some sort ofinterdependent hive mind civilization (those come up quite a bit in scifi that I've read, actually--evidently fictional humans embrace that sort of thing), but then we run into the question of what makes us human, and is progress worth whatever steps we need to take to achieve it. Anyways, as we are now, there will always be war, stemming largely from our ability to dehumanize others who have what we want. As for aliens, I'm torn between whether or not we'll be more or less advanced as whatever other civilizations we'll inevitably encounter. On the one hand, there's been 13.7 billion years for another civilization to develop and progress, and there's a lot of space for them to have developed. On the other hand, It took nearly 4.5 billion years for our planet to develop to the point it had an intelligent civilization (and I'm assuming that should we develop to the point where we're interstellar, it will only take a few thousand years or so), which is a sizeable portion of the history of the known universe. It depends on how likely it is for life to develop on any given planet, but thanks to kepler, we can extrapolate that there are several millions of earths out in our galaxy, so its possible there is a lot of life out there. I suspect we'd need to go through a few generations of star formation and supernovae before we had the right materials for complex life (at least as we know it) to form, so, even accounting for the decreased lifespan of super-massive stars, we could be in only the second or third (maybe even first) generation of stars that can support complex life. All that to say, I believe that its very possible we could be the most advanced civilization we encounter in our galaxy, or at least top 5. As for extragalactic colonization, due to the exponential nature of population growth, I suspect that by the time we are expanding enough to even think about travelling to other galaxies, it will go much faster to colonize than the milky way.

I suspect rail guns (which the US Navy is developing now, mind you), or something with linear induction motors might be more likely in terms of bulk weapons, for precisely the reason we're trying to develop them today. If a nuke costs $10 million, but a chunk of metal you fire out of a rail gun costs $1000, I suspect you'd go for the cheaper, easier to produce alternative. The reason behind railgun development today is because shooting down a $100,000 drone with a $1 million dollar missile is a little stupid. (I don't know the actual costs, but the missiles are sometimes/often more expensive than their targets.) I don't know if that would be the case. I think an important target would have large gun batteries/missile silos/whatever, and so any attacker would need to be armored against that. You could go for using small fighters to try and get between the big guns, but small, agile craft would be much more susceptible smaller machine gun/flak cannon fire, and I think those guns would be a necessity simply due to their relative cost compared to a railgun that could provide the same punch as a nuke (as in, they are cheap, and they defend against cheap-ish attackers, so they are important). Reading about some of how the navy operates, as far as I understand, aircraft carriers play a relatively central role in a fleet, so I'm starting to think some fighter (manned or unmanned) would be rather important to a space navy. These fighters would need a larger "aircraft carrier" like ship to service them and support them (keep them flying, refill their fuel/ammo, etc.). So I imagine some balance between armor and weight would have to be reached, because big ships are a strategic necessity

If a fighter isn't manned, its kind of just a missile with guns. It still would need to be rather heavy to have a useful dV. And the long lines of sight sort of combat is what I'd expect from a future spacial naval battle. I suspect much of maritime navy strategy would carry over into spacial warfare, hence the big ships. The sort of warfare would likely involve playing around on the outer edge of your enemy's effective radar/scanning/weapons range until either you or they make a mistake. The prevalence of aircraft carriers and the fact they work by using planes is the one thing that makes me think fighters might have some niche I just can't see.

You could protect the vulnerable parts against fighters, although that might not always be possible, or it would otherwise compromise that portion of the ship, I'll give you that. In order to evade that fire, though, the fighters sacrifice a lot in the way of life support supplies, and if it were to have any useful amount of dV, it could still be quite heavy anyway. As far as the guidance on a missile is concerned, I suspect AI will be loads more advanced than a human mind even just a few hundred years in the future. But, if its too expensive, your point would remain quite valid. I acknowledge there are drawbacks to massive ships, but clearly our engineers today have already solved most of those (with the exception of the asteroids and your nanobots) with modern naval vessels. As far as I'm aware, and I'm no expert, but most of the ships in a naval fleet are quite large, yet they have no issues building or navigating them. It would be harder to amass those resources in space, but if we're talking about war on an interplanetary scale, I suspect that at least two entities have access to the ridiculous resources required to construct and maintain such a fleet. Nukes aren't actually that big of a deal in space. You really would have to make contact, and even then it really just expends most of the explosion out into space. Asteroids, on the other hand, are probably easier for big ships to handle than fighter-class ships. micrometeorite strikes are inevitable, so a ship with more redundancy is going to fare better. Anything big enough that a fighter can dodge, a big ship could track and dodge just as easily. I'm not talking about "that's no moon" size, just like maybe an aircraft carrier.

What I went on to say was that, Since I think capital ships are necessary strategically, fighters would be made obsolete. That is, their sole purpose would be to help one capital ship destroy another (or perhaps hold a position or whatever). The only way this could possibly happen is if there's some magic death star trench which renders capital ships vulnerable to fighters. Basically, I meant capital ships of various sizes will be both too easily adapted to account for any unforeseen vulnerabilities to fighters and also too important not to exist for wasting time researching and designing a fighter-type craft.