Some of the Most Random Tech Questions Ever

[Mazon Del]

I've always thought that "Death Star" was only called that because the Rebels won.

I thought the Empire actually called it the Death Star. I'll have to rewatch and see if they do. I know they refer to it as "station", "facility", or "battlestation".

[K^2]

An unfortunate code name, perhaps, which I'm sure they've never meant to be made public.

[peadar1987]

An unfortunate code name, perhaps, which I'm sure they've never meant to be made public.

Fear can sometimes be a useful tool...

[Moar Boosters]

According to a star wars wiki I just looked at, the propaganda department call it the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor".

[Vallius]

Is the proposed carrier flying more like a zeppelin, a helicopter, or an airplane? The first is the most practical of the three, but it certainly wouldn't be the most maneuverable. The Second would require about 1/2 of it's mass to be in the propulsion system (Chemical-Engineering Fluid Mechanics course), and drag for the third design would make take off and landing of aircraft extremely difficult.

[Mazon Del]

According to a star wars wiki I just looked at, the propaganda department call it the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor".

Which would make sense given that for secrecy and deception reasons, the project was billed to the scientists and whatnot as being exactly that. The "intended" function was to be able to blast apart lifeless rocks to get at the ore. All the security was of course necessary. God forbid someone turn this peaceful device against an inhabited planet!

[Pds314]

Airborne aircraft carrier...

Steal the reactor from a NERVA. 5 GW of thermal power.

Get a lot of propellers.

Convert NERVA's reactor power to mechanical motion of the props.

Make giant blended-wing-body design with a cable to pull in aircraft, much like an aerial refuel cable.

Congrats on your ever-flying airborne carrier. If need be, store some extra Uranium in it. If you really don't like someone, fill it full of nukes and drop it on their face.

Also, cover it in laser turrets from the YAL-1. Nobody will dare fight it within visual range, and even AA missiles haven't got a chance.

[NERVAfan]

I got a cheaper solution: Launch few cubesats on highly elliptical orbit, and then pretend you lost contact with them while making an orbital maneuver. Carrier will have too much inertia to dodge them, and bang, in few seconds you won't have any usable carrier.

I don't think a cubesat would be nearly enough. Say 1 kg mass, relative velocity 10 km/s; that's "only" 50 Megajoules or the equivalent of about 12 kilograms of TNT. I'm pretty sure a well-designed armored giant orbital battlestation could stand up to that pretty trivially, especially if you designed the armor for space impacts (multiple layers with vacuum in between, like a Whipple shield) rather than like an ocean warship.

If it was sufficiently compartmentalized, it might actually be pretty hard to destroy, especially since it can't "sink".

[Sky_walker]

I don't think a cubesat would be nearly enough. Say 1 kg mass, relative velocity 10 km/s; that's "only" 50 Megajoules or the equivalent of about 12 kilograms of TNT. I'm pretty sure a well-designed armored giant orbital battlestation could stand up to that pretty trivially

I'm pretty sure noone was thinking about station armored enough to live through 50 MJ hit as if nothing would happen.

If it was sufficiently compartmentalized, it might actually be pretty hard to destroy, especially since it can't "sink".

There's absolutely no point in destroying it. It actually would be stupidly dangerous thing to do (space debris)

Just doing enough damage for the carrier owner to take months if not years to repair.

[peadar1987]

I'm pretty sure noone was thinking about station armored enough to live through 50 MJ hit as if nothing would happen.

There's absolutely no point in destroying it. It actually would be stupidly dangerous thing to do (space debris)

Just doing enough damage for the carrier owner to take months if not years to repair.

Of course, if you're fighting an enemy who can build an orbital carrier, filling LEO up with debris is a pretty effective way of stopping them building another one.

[Mazon Del]

Just doing enough damage for the carrier owner to take months if not years to repair.

The problem with this idea though, is that it doesn't actually help YOU the guy who did this damage. If the station was properly designed, compartmentalized, armored in current battleship methodologies (all or nothing style), etc, the only real way to actually make it combat ineffective and thus no longer a threat to you WOULD be to basically shatter it. The reason why is this. Right now if North Korea were to launch a single missile at a US carrier, and lets say it managed to hit but not sink the carrier. Let's even say nobody died or was even wounded despite the damage to the ship. The damage while visibly impressive in this particular example is also not enough to keep flight operations from occuring. While standard carrier doctrine WOULD be to head home for repairs, lets say the hit just happened to be the engines so this carrier is going nowhere. A battle station can't go somewhere for repairs, it is always going to be 'next to the target' because it is basically fixed in its orbital path, so this is roughly comparable. It is a safe bet that the resulting war would most certainly involve combat operations from this damaged carrier.

So if you think just dealing a bunch of costly, but ultimately superficial, damage to this orbital battlestation is going to keep it from being used against you now that you have opened up war-grade hostilities? Now one thing to point out that actually changes things a bit here. Peaceful naval doctrine is basically always dictated by the immediet threat. If we had a battleship roaming around the ocean and a North Korean ship attacked it, the battleship captain is fully within his orders to destroy the threat to his command. IE: Sinking the NK ship. But what is NOT within his orders is to then immedietly set sail for NK's shoreline and begin bombardment of military locations until ordered to do so by a higher authority. Can he open fire on sight of a new NK ship an hour later? It wouldn't be held against him, but he WOULD be held accountable for at least warning it off via radio. After all, things could have been a mistake, the captain could have acted alone against the US, etc. The point being, the immediet threat has passed and he is expected to prevent an escalation with the understanding though that he will do what he must to protect his ship. I can almost guarentee that the spirit of what I have described would apply to our orbital battle platforms. NK tries launching a satellite killer of some sort at it, the commander of the platform is well within his rights to take action against the incoming threat as well as the launch facilities in question which involves a direct bombardment against an enemy nation in no uncertain terms. Captains in this situation will be granted quite a bit of latitude in how they respond. Once they have committed to the bombardment if the Captain stops there, he risks his command the next time the station flies overhead if NK had other launch facilities. If he decides that the correct response is to expand his bombardment to involve every possible threat to his command in NK, the admiralty will almost certainly back him up. After all, NK wouldn't have gone against such a high profile target without expecting the feces to hit the fan if things went south. Don't think they wouldn't be given this authority. Remember, in the Cold War, boomer captains were basically expected to light off against the Soviet Union if their judgement decided it was time. Yes they were SUPPOSED to try and contact home first, but in the absesce of that information...best judgement.

[NERVAfan]

I'm pretty sure noone was thinking about station armored enough to live through 50 MJ hit as if nothing would happen.

It would be quite silly to build a giant orbital battlestation and not armor it to stand up against orbital-speed impacts.

Just doing enough damage for the carrier owner to take months if not years to repair.

If you had access to an Orion drive to launch (basically making mass into orbit irrelevant) -- which is about the kind of thing you'd use for this -- you could probably armor it to not take any significant damage (IE a hole in the armor, but not affecting any systems).

Of course, if you're fighting an enemy who can build an orbital carrier, filling LEO up with debris is a pretty effective way of stopping them building another one.

If you were going to build such a thing at all, it would be able to avoid big debris and ignore small debris.

[cicatrix]

At any rate - you'll need several such carriers in order to cover the whole planet surface. If I use any kind of sub-orbital weapon (like ICMB, for example), you cannot prevent the launch on the other side of the globe or destroy a missile on its ascent. When re-entry vehicles hit the atmosphere above you (in case the carrier is airborne) or warheads are inserted on your retrograde orbit (if the station is orbital) it will be too late.

And generally - if anyone is placed before the choice either to build such a station, thus, investing a two-figure percent of the annual GDP, millions of tons of raw materials, vast amounts of energy and human effort just to have a flying thing that launch other flying things... or to spend all that just to make ordinary small-scale weapon systems plus invest in their modernization and still have extra resources to spend / form active reserves, only an idiot would follow the first plan. The loss of such a station due to enemy attack/technical failure/bad weather or simply bad luck would be irrecoverable. From the other hand, having tons of expendable planes/drones/missiles which are too scattered and cannot be lost all at once would give me a tremendous advantage.

[peadar1987]

Nail on the head, cicatrix. At the end of the day, the question isn't "can it be done?", it's "what's the point?". In terms of effectiveness, nuclear submarines, ICBMs, drones and hypersonic cruise missiles are going to be far cheaper, and able to do just as much damage just as quickly, without pointlessly centralising your entire arsenal into one easily-attackable location.