Orbital weapons

[ARS]

In your opinion, what's the feasibility of orbital weapon platforms? (Satellite based). Considering that:

it's limited in firing range (only around on it's orbit (unless it has maneuvering thrusters or there's multiple satellite but then, it makes the satellite waste time to reposition itself or making the system enormously expensive)) 

Limited power (most of what the orbital weapon do can also be performed with conventional means(with cheaper and reasonable cost))

Limited usability (resupplying is not feasible, especially considering that it's basically launching a resupply craft in times of war (unless the satellite uses energy weapon, but even that it's doubtful to cause any significant damage))

Limited positioning (you can only use it when it's directly on top your enemy, otherwise, you must wait for the satellite to pass (and even then, it's predictable for enemy, so they can hide/evacuate before the satellite passes))

Fragility (you can guard your nuke silo like a fortress, but you have a very limited option to guard your rods from god satellite from A-sat weapon (which is much cheaper than an orbital weapon))

A beacon for attention (considering how we are basically unable to (theoretically) launching something to space undetected, any country possessing a satellite weapon (and their satellite), without doubt will be always watched 24/7 by other countries)

What do you think about this? What's the feasibility of having a weapon in orbit?

 

Write your opinions, replies are highly appreciated

[kerbiloid]

To shoot an aircraft carrier or a rocket submarine whose position is unpredictable, with a missile being guided from orbit.

To make a limited strike against a few most important targets.

Flight time of an ICBM to a SILO is 30..40 minutes.
Flight time of an antisat to a sat is up to several hours. So, when SILOs are already killed by a sudden strike, sats have some time to release a back strike.
(According to biopic, Orion (that, true Orion, from 1960s), was being designed also according to this idea.)

Earlier (in 1960s-70s) also: to compensate low accuracy of ICBM with predictable trajectory of satellite platform.)

Edited April 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Nibb31]

36 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

To shoot an aircraft carrier or a rocket submarine whose position is unpredictable, with a missile being guided from orbit.

A missile being guided from orbit needs to be fired at a specific point in a 90 minute orbit, takes 15 minutes to reach the ground, must be fired at the proper inclination, and would be rather easy to detect and shoot down. It could take days to align it properly. It would be a poor weapon for any useful military purpose and would be extremely expensive.

 

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

A missile being guided from orbit needs to be fired at a specific point in a 90 minute orbit, takes 15 minutes to reach the ground, must be fired at the proper inclination, and would be rather easy to detect and shoot down. It could take days to align it properly. It would be a poor weapon for any useful military purpose and would be extremely expensive.

Unless it's a maneuvering warhead beloved by Chelomei and Yangel/Utkin.

Also one doesn't need to kill the aircraft carrier at once. First it can be stopped and blinded, then killed with a second strike.

Edited April 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[shynung]

A stationary orbital attack station would be as visible as an ordinary spy satellite, and just as vulnerable. In a war situation, these will be the first objects to be targeted, destroyed, and rendered useless. Also, having them is equivalent to having a nuclear arsenal; every other nation-state would keep a close watch on its owners.

A truly effective orbital weapon would not be an Earth-orbit-based station, but a swarm of SEP tugs around the asteroid belt. When ordered to attack, they'd find a nearby rock of the appropriate size, and nudge them to a collision course towards Earth, ideally towards the enemy nation-state. It'll take a long time to commence such an attack, and it can be spotted well before it hits, but there are almost no effective countermeasures against them that doesn't have a significant collateral damage (spaceborne nuke explosion while in the vicinity of Earth's magnetic field generates EMP, which can fry satellites).

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, shynung said:

In a war situation, these will be the first objects to be targeted

Yes

9 minutes ago, shynung said:

destroyed

After the ground-based ones. Those on a high orbit - only several hours later.

9 minutes ago, shynung said:

rendered useless

As any SILO in first 30 minutes.

9 minutes ago, shynung said:

When ordered to attack, they'd find a nearby rock of the appropriate size, and nudge them to a collision course towards Earth, ideally towards the enemy nation-state

When the party already had ended.

Also, in 1950s-1960s they were hoping to build a lunar base with SILOs on a back side of the Moon, to hide the launch from an opponent and to prevent their fast killing.

P.S.
Several dozens of R-36-O irl were not too much expensive, btw. And MOL, Dyna Soar, Spiral and original Almaz were designed in assumption of one-two turns flight and could guide a missile.
(Yes, MOL and Almaz could fly several weeks. But they were to be launched with full crew to make them work in several minutes after coming to orbit.
All of them were to be launched with a hyperholic ICBM ready to use for years,)

Edited April 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[shynung]

2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

When the party already had ended.

On this, I agree. Asteroid tugs are less of a first-strike weapon and more like a retaliatory weapon, much like the Soviet Dead Hand system.

[kerbiloid]

Just now, shynung said:

Soviet Dead Hand system

Not a weapon itself, just a signal rocket.

[shynung]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

Not a weapon itself, just a signal rocket

Which would trigger all of Soviet's nuclear arsenal to immediately launch all available warheads.

The idea is, should anyone destroys the owner nation, their weapons will immediately attack the agressor nation. It's supposed to work as a deterrent rather than an offensive weapon.

[Shpaget]

15 minutes ago, shynung said:

A truly effective orbital weapon would not be an Earth-orbit-based station, but a swarm of SEP tugs around the asteroid belt. When ordered to attack, they'd find a nearby rock of the appropriate size, and nudge them to a collision course towards Earth, ideally towards the enemy nation-state. It'll take a long time to commence such an attack, and it can be spotted well before it hits, but there are almost no effective countermeasures against them that doesn't have a significant collateral damage (spaceborne nuke explosion while in the vicinity of Earth's magnetic field generates EMP, which can fry satellites).

If nation A has the capability to turn an asteroid into a weapon, then nation B certainly has the capability to nudge it off course, potentially towards the nation A. After all, the dv to redirect an asteroid from its natural orbit into a collision with Earth is surely orders of magnitude larger than a nudge needed for a nearmiss, or just a target change.

[shynung]

1 minute ago, Shpaget said:

If nation A has the capability to turn an asteroid into a weapon, then nation B certainly has the capability to nudge it off course, potentially towards the nation A. After all, the dv to redirect an asteroid from its natural orbit into a collision with Earth is surely orders of magnitude larger than a nudge needed for a nearmiss, or just a target change.

Depends. If both nations have asteroid tugs, and they both are aware of this fact, they may arm the tugs themselves, to ensure the asteroid gets to their target. Whenever a war breaks out, there may be space tug battles to gain control of individual rocks. There would probably also rock vs rock impacts, if the impacting rock trajectories are well known.

[peadar1987]

May be useful to start an arms race and bankrupt your rivals?! Other than that, orbital weapons platforms don't give any particular advantage*

*Unless we start developing unprecedentedly powerful and efficient laser weaponry, in which case the huge, unobstructed field of view from an orbital platform would be of some benefit.

[kerbiloid]

6 minutes ago, peadar1987 said:

unprecedentedly powerful and efficient laser weaponry

, which in turn are required to take down an orbital platform faster than an antisat rocket can. 
(Also don't forget that antisat rockets aren't spred around all the Earth surface. They have to wait up to hour while sat crawls closer)

P.S.
Also is the OP about orbital weapons at all (including early times) or about only modern/near future world.

Edited April 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Hypercosmic]

How about 1 GW laser o' doom that can snipe ships from 100,000 km away

Wait a minute, is this thread all about surface-to-orbit/orbit-to-surface and low Earth orbit warfare?

Edited April 28, 2017 by Hypercosmic

[p1t1o]

There is actually quite a lot of literature that is available. During the cold war there was a lot of interest and a surprisingly large amount of well funded research into the feasibility of orbital weapons. Much of it is declassified today. Sadly, the news is not great for orbital weaponry with todays technology, and for many of the reasons, an increase in technological capability might not make them any more feasible.

Firstly, if the intention is to strike the ground from space:

You have put a huge slab of armour in between you and the target, namely the atmosphere. It is quite thick and substantial, so any weapon must penetrate this first, this is non-trivial whether you are talking physical warheads or directed energy weapons.

You have put a decent bit of distance between the weapon and the target, at least 100miles, probably more. This complicates targeting, yes there are ways to do it, but accuracy will certainly suffer compared to other platforms. Your platform is also moving rapidly, it may not seem like aiming a weapon at the ground from a satellite would be hard, but hitting small targets (ie: smaller than a football stadium)  would be non-trivial.

Many platforms required for global coverage, if you dont want there to be a chance that you will have to wait days for a platform to be in the right place. IE: extremal expense.

***

Other issues:

Lasers - dont get too excited (HA! PUN!) by these, physical constraints mean that to have any decent range, they must be very large and power hungry. And even with ranges of thousands of kilometres, against space targets, you still need a large number of them, and against ground targets you still have to penetrate the atmosphere. Even well-transmitted frequencies will have a hard time with cloud cover. Hypothetical high performance technologies only reduce these disadvantages by an increment.

Kinetic weaponry - against space targets actually pretty effective, the only complication is targeting and identification. Against ground targets, sure, viable, but you'd get better results with conventional weapons. The atmosphere is a significant obstacle here.

Nuclear weapons - already banned in space, see below:

Politically destabilising - countries - friendly and enemy alike - dont like having flying battlestations hovering over their territory. Their presence can destabilise arms races and negatively affect any peace negotiations. There is a non-zero risk of accident causing international incident. This is especially an issue if you are considering nuclear weapons, as this system would closely resemble a "FOBS" or "Fractional Orbital Bombardement System", once fielded by the Soviets, they have been soundly banned across the board for a host of obvious reasons. Due to the nature of the weapon system in question, this may be the most significant obstacle.

 

The bottom line is - though an effective orbital bombardment system could be constructed, if you have the (very large amount of) cash required - for there to be any point to it at all, it must be better at its job than anything else we can already field.

 

Want an explosive payload on a target quick-smart? We've got various technologies from cruise missiles to aircraft carriers that can put a substantial amount of firepower down at very short notice. We may not currently be able to strike anywhere on the globe within hours, but we can do almost that. For an orbital system to match this, it would have to be very comprehensive and therefore expensive, to improve on it, even more so.

Want to nuke something? ICBMs are already pretty good at this and are far less controvertial/destabilising. Even with modern ABM systems, modern missiles and warheads still pose a very potent threat. And they already have the range to hit most targets in less than an hour.

Want to stop someone from nuking you? For this you need complete temporal coverage, or your opponents will simply fire through the gaps. This makes it, again, very expensive. For the same investment, other solutions would be as effective. Why pay a trillion dollars so that you have at least one or two interceptor platforms in position over your country, when you can instead, for a fraction of the price, build a complete ABM shield that will be in place constantly, have a similar probability of a kill, and have a larger number of available interceptors? And also not be vulnerable to ASATs.

Maybe you are interesting in orbital weapons for their sheer firepower? There is no laser or kinetic RV currently on the drawing board that can pierce the atmosphere from 150miles up and match the destructive energy of a 2000lb LGB dropped from a fighter jet or a Tomahawk cruise missile. And we can launch thousands of those.

Launching an ASAT is very, very, muchly less expensive than launching an orbital battlestation.

Taking warfare to space significantly increases the risk of closing off space for everybody due to the well known Kessler Syndrome. This would be bad for all sides, nobody wants this.

 

 

My position: with the current state of the art, orbital bombardment weapons are not a viable idea. Largely due to cost, politics and the fact that terrestrial weaponry is already very capable.

Edited April 28, 2017 by p1t1o

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

A missile being guided from orbit needs to be fired at a specific point in a 90 minute orbit, takes 15 minutes to reach the ground, must be fired at the proper inclination, and would be rather easy to detect and shoot down. It could take days to align it properly. It would be a poor weapon for any useful military purpose and would be extremely expensive.

 

Yes, an missile from an launcher in orbit would have to wait for obit to pass over target for doing an deorbit burn. 
Its not an fast response weapon unlike an balistic missile and the launcher would be pretty easy to hit unlike an submarine.

Now an space weapon for destroying others  space assets makes more sense, 
 

[Bill Phil]

Project Orion Battleship. Provided we throw out sanity...  It's maneuverable, heavily armed, and capable of devastating a continent. And it's very hard to shoot at, unless the enemy also has an Orion battleship...

It'd be heinously expensive though.

[Hypercosmic]

At my home game Children of a Dead Earth (realistic space warfare simulation game), it seems that lasers are the most OP weapons, with potential capability of destroying enemy missiles at more than 1,000 km away. In the game's forums, we have nuclear reactor design with output anywhere from a few watts to 25 GW, so energy usage is not the problem.

[sevenperforce]

If we're limiting ourselves to Kinetic Projectile Weapons delivered via re-entry, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using elliptical vs circular orbits? If you use a significantly elliptical orbit (e.g., Molniya), you can do plane changes and adjust your re-entry trajectory for very little dV, allowing you to hit a wide variety of targets. You also can have your platform's closest approach over friendly territory. But this significantly increases your lag from strike order to impact, making its military applications more limited.

[p1t1o]

22 minutes ago, Hypercosmic said:

At my home game Children of a Dead Earth (realistic space warfare simulation game), it seems that lasers are the most OP weapons, with potential capability of destroying enemy missiles at more than 1,000 km away. In the game's forums, we have nuclear reactor design with output anywhere from a few watts to 25 GW, so energy usage is not the problem.

Provided you can get your warships within 1000km of your target this is fine. CoaDE kinda of glosses over that part. For orbital bombardment, or space-to-space orbital applications, 1000km range still means you need a hundred-to-several-hundred stations for reliable coverage, depending on the required effects at-target. 1000km is not that far in space.

[Hypercosmic]

2 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Provided you can get your warships within 1000km of your target this is fine. CoaDE kinda of glosses over that part. For orbital bombardment, or space-to-space orbital applications, 1000km range still means you need a hundred-to-several-hundred stations for reliable coverage, depending on the required effects at-target. 1000km is not that far in space.

The range of the laserstar I posted above is about 100,000 km. 1,000 km is for small lasers on normal space warships.

Edited April 28, 2017 by Hypercosmic

[YNM]

Actually, it's as feasible as what they were thinking about putting the first satellite : yes it's hard, but it's pretty easy given the massive fame (or fear, or submission for you, or anything) you get for it, so the only question is : what will people actually react to it ?

And that's why the US sort of slipped behind at first - it wasn't that clear (humanity is never meant to be clear, I supoose...). Once something's up however, it's useless to hide your worry. Get as much as you can !

(disclaimer : alright it was the 50s which is the precursor to 60s "gigantism" but i suppose it fits the whole thing. the only problem is that now human are soo regularly in orbit and they have one hell of a PR value in some ways it's simply too dangerous a move than it once was.)

EDIT : Regarding "what will it be", I say lots and lots of platforms of whatever they thought necessary. But I really hope we don't succumb to that...

Edited April 28, 2017 by YNM

[wumpus]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Yes
After the ground-based ones. Those on a high orbit - only several hours later.
As any SILO in first 30 minutes.
When the party already had ended.

For those wondering why ICBMs don't use kerolox and similar fuels, this is why.  They need[ed] to be ready to fire in only a few minutes, thus use hypergolics (soviet and early US missiles) and solid fuels (later US fuels).  There's no point in attacking a silo: either it already launched or the booster is a dud.  Perhaps you are playing that all-time favorite game: "Bounce the rubble: the nuclear third strike game*".

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Also, in 1950s-1960s they were hoping to build a lunar base with SILOs on a back side of the Moon, to hide the launch from an opponent and to prevent their fast killing.

Except they already worked out in the 1940s that trying to "win" nuclear war was a fool's game.  Building any system capable of "winning" only means your enemy has to launch before then.

 

48 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Project Orion Battleship. Provided we throw out sanity...  It's maneuverable, heavily armed, and capable of devastating a continent. And it's very hard to shoot at, unless the enemy also has an Orion battleship...

It'd be heinously expensive though.

Cost should be roughly similar to a battleship or carrier (plus a bunch of nukes).  And when it was being designed there were still people who knew how to build/weld battleships and all that armor plating, which is probably the main cost of an Orion.

Wasn't there a Salyut with some sort of gun on it?  Not just the Soviet "space gun" useful for fending off bears in Siberia, but a mounted space-to-space gun?  I don't think they fired it and it have no idea if they had a sufficient system to aim it, but I'm pretty sure it was in orbit.

* From "File 13: the Tom Wham game of making games".  Included in Dragon Magazine near the height of the cold war (Reagan's local maxima, anyway).

[p1t1o]

1 minute ago, YNM said:

Actually, it's as feasible as what they were thinking about putting the first satellite : yes it's hard, but it's pretty easy given the massive fame (or fear, or submission for you, or anything) you get for it, so the only question is : what will people actually react to it ?

And that's why the US sort of slipped behind at first - it wasn't that clear (humanity is never meant to be clear, I supoose...). Once something's up however, it's useless to hide your worry. Get as much as you can !

"Feasible" as in physically possible, yes, but can it outperform much much cheaper terrestrial options? Dollar-for-dollar, capability-for-capability, no IMO, by a decent margin.

 

5 minutes ago, Hypercosmic said:

The laserstar I posted above's range is about 100,000 km

That is...quite far...I wonder what sort of effect you will get spreading 1GW across the sort of spot-size you can expect at 100,000km.

I cant see the picture from here unfortunately, where is this laser from?

Using this calculator:

http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/laser.php

1GW at 50,000km vaporises 0.5mm per second of aluminium. Its not great.

At 1000km though, it vaporises 6.2metres of aluminium per second.

However, this laser requires a 10metre lens and will generate megawatts of waste heat. Along with a Gigawatt powerstation...

Further to that, the simple calculation ignores things like material blow-off which will significantly impact penetration.

These capabilities dont come cheap, which is the problem. Whilst "technically" "feasible", as weapons they may be worse than useless.

 

9 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Wasn't there a Salyut with some sort of gun on it?  Not just the Soviet "space gun" useful for fending off bears in Siberia, but a mounted space-to-space gun?  I don't think they fired it and it have no idea if they had a sufficient system to aim it, but I'm pretty sure it was in orbit.

Yes, Salyut 3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun

Also, google "POLYUS" which was a bona-fide orbital battlestation, albeit lightly armed. Unfortunately, when they launched it, it flipped over mid-ascent and failed to make orbit, in a most Kerbal manner XD

 

[YNM]

1 minute ago, p1t1o said:

"Feasible" as in physically possible, yes, but can it outperform much much cheaper terrestrial options? Dollar-for-dollar, capability-for-capability, no IMO, by a decent margin.

Your silos aren't really photograph-proof. Satellites however, are almost always photograph-proof - once up in orbit no one can really see what's up there in detail.