Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
Well if fanfics have thought me anything, Seven would be willing to risk one of those things. xD
The Role of Ground Forces in Interstellar Warfare
- Thread starter Zyobot
- Start date
The "And Screw Janeway" thing seems like the largest impediment to technological progress in this field of highly credible science.
This is clearly not part of the Great Plan(tm).
This is clearly not part of the Great Plan(tm).
That's not the official Warp Chart. The warp scale used in the TNG/DS9/VOY era doesn't go past 10 which is infinite speed (also if you reach warp 10 you transform into a giant salamander and screw Janeway, with that kind of danger who would be mad enough to go to Warp 20?).
If we want to use the actual official script writer's guidebook (I do not know if it's considered canon) you can find an archived digital copy here:
Star Trek Voyager Technical Guide Version 1.0 : Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Star Trek Voyager Technical Guide V1.0 is a writer aid / bible sent to people that submitted scripts for the show. This particular version is the first season...archive.org
It has a warp chart on page 13, Warp 9.0 is 1,516C, Warp 9.975 is 3,053C and Warp 9.99 is 7,912C. Warp 10 is infinity,
However the actual showrunners did not always stick with these numbers and as I said, I'm not 100% sure the showrunner's guide is canon anyway.
Oh, good catch there.
I mistook it for another one, from the VOY writer's guide.
For that reason UV based long range recon may be a thing. Sensor fusion images based off different wavelengths cleared up by AI are also absolutely an option.
AA system looking for targets may be visible on radar emissions.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only .bmp.
More realistically, we a have single satellite with almost modern tech getting few terabytes of data back from friggin Mars every year.
Based on Google Earth, terabytes to low petabytes of data for full planetary mapping, fairly easily handled by modern industrial grade technology.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - NASA Science
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is the second longest-lived spacecraft to orbit Mars, after 2001 Mars Odyssey.solarsystem.nasa.gov
Frames per second? We are going for useful intel here, not the cinematic experience.
How big is the Google Earth database? - Google Earth Blog
This is the fourth and final in a series of posts about the size of the data in Google Earth. We already looked at: How much data 3D imagery requires How much data different types of 2D imagery requires How much historical imagery exists Today we are putting it all together and trying to come […]www.gearthblog.com
Part of that has to deal with the obvious downsides of having to get signals through atmosphere, sat to ship comms will have no such disruption. Also the ping is less important if they aren't using the data for critically real time operations, which they shouldn't need to if it's that far away.
That's ridiculous for mere orbital intel photos. The whole world's combined spy sats are nowhere near as numerous. They aren't trying to get high speed internet to every corner of the planet, they are trying to invade the planet.
If we are talking disposable spy sats to spam on low orbit, we aren't talking tons, we're talking no larger than this:
The Pentagon Is Building a Fleet of Tiny Spy Satellites
The goal is the ability to deploy small fleets of inexpensive satellites to support the U.S. military.www.popularmechanics.com
Mandrake 1
Mandrake 1, also known by the manufacturers designation Corvus-BC 5, is a technology demonstration mission conducted under DARPA's Blackjack progra...space.skyrocket.de
The worlds combined spy sats also aren't actually trying to monitor everything. Observing Afghanistan involved spy satellites, and I believe at peak hundreds of helicopters, planes, and drones, and several hundred thousand personnel for an area of a half million square km. If your insistence is that 12 satellites was everything need to observe things, and all those planes and drones was just because the miliary liked spending money? Are just being really stupid in Ukraine pointlessly risking drones when the existing satellite system provides all the intelligence we actually need?
I am somewhat unconvinced that a simple thing being relatively simple means a complex thing is also relatively simple. Or, that 1x gives 1y, so 1x can also give 1 million y, the rough scale of increase in difficulty were talking about.
The whole point is to highlight what an orbital only control likely requires. I'm not sure how much smaller, more advanced satellites change things. The small sats are extremely vague on what they actually do, so I'm not sure how well they can actually replace a big one, especially on these tasks. And if the tech is equal between the two, the planet is still in the innately more advantageous position. So manpad missiles are also more viable, because the minimum viable sensor package is also smaller.
And if your fighting a network centric war with space and ground forces in close cooperation, you probably do want planetary high speed internet. Though I thought I was being pretty clear the point was to maintain observation primarily.
Well, we have orbital satellites so that's a good starting assumption to model what a purely space based operation would need.
Parking in space is also extremely expensive. Even helicopters have hovering endurance problems in our atmosphere. A powered hover is very difficult to maintain in space for long, outside Clark tech like anti gravity. Which has a bunch of other knock on effects, like possibly aerospace super Harriers.
Also on your earlier point, I'm not sure in most situations you actually do get any sort of widespread rioting. Rioting generally takes a perfect storm of issues to happen. The way's an EMP would lead to that perfect storm seems generally limited.
US sat coverage obviously wasn't designed for observing Afghanistan, it was designed for handling the Soviet Union, which is famous for being pretty big, and in its late years, not very safe to fly planes over.
Most drones by number are for tactical battle support, kinda superfluous until you have forces on the ground having tactical battles. Likewise, that and COIN has both different options and requirements for the kind of data and timing of its acquisition and analysis they need, with COIN under restrictive rules being particularly interested in seeing tiny details about individual people. Those are very interested in, say, few dudes going into a building in some small village and whether they had rifles or not, strategic recon hardly cares about anything smaller than trucks that may be carrying big missiles, so there is also no reason to dramatically inflate the required capabilities on the spy sats.
Guidance packages are already a tiny part of any missile's mass anyway. Without dramatic improvements in propulsion technology which will have similar implications for all other spacecraft and anti-spacecraft weapons, impossible.
Do you? On the planet? Before the orbit is even safe enough for even small spammable sats to live long enough to be worth the mass budget, nevermind park invasion transports and warships nearby?
You are basically trying to set up things necessary, or even just nice to have mid invasion or in late occupation/COIN phase, before the orbital defenses are even destroyed or suppressed enough to allow the ground forces to land without crippling losses, which is a pointless challenge. You either deal with the defenses first, and if you can't, why even bother with step 2.
@Crom's Black Blade I guess thinking on it my skepticism of the EMP caused riots and orbital bombardment both stem from a shared assumption on the resiliency of the civilian economy/civilization.
Lets go back to my earlier number of 12 billion tons shipped per year in the US at face value. So, for 300 million people, that suggests roughly 40 tons moved per person, which seems roughly in line with annual per capita of 24 tons per capita. So, say you had a 1 Billion man developed planet. Maybe 4x as rich as the US with 100 tons per capita consumption. Canada gets to roughly 60 tons, I assume for winter, so a planet involved in global extraction with a tenth of our population and engaged in large scale space flight.
So, roughly 100 billion tons produced/consumed, maybe a transport capacity of roughly 200-300 billion tons of transport capacity? Assuming US vehicle per capita numbers, multiplied by 4 for the higher wealth, you have the following numbers for the economy:
All numbers are absolutely dominated by road vehicles, though I'm surprised how many boats there actually are in the US.
So, an advanced world is going to have something on the order of 1-3 billion vehicles in the civilian economy. Even if you only had per vehicle cargo capacity in line with civilian vehicles of roughly 400 kg, and it only carried that much cargo per day, that's still collectively 400 billion tons carryable.
People starving is still likely in the 1 kg/day roughly 400 kg per year, so keeping everyone alive is still only 0.4 billion tons, or 0.1% of lowballed transport capacity.
Military at 1% mobilization would be an army of roughly 10 million, and even if per capita military consumption is 1,000 tons, 10x higher than average, military consumption is still only 10 billion tons, or 2.5% of transport capacity.
So, your back to needing to destroy 90-95% of the civilian economy to achieve short term crippling limits to basic survival or military operations.
Civilian economies of rich nations are likely extremely resilient to orbital bombardment type destruction, at least sub general nuking (and even those you can get pretty resilient with a bit of prep). The less completely out of blue the attack, the resilience likely increases exponentially.
Crippling the million or so military vehicles (depending on native logistics may make the military even more short term independent of the civilian economy) by chewing through the civilian economy, which may include destroying/disabling 900 million civilian vehicles, seems likely to be expensive and generally counterproductive.
Lets go back to my earlier number of 12 billion tons shipped per year in the US at face value. So, for 300 million people, that suggests roughly 40 tons moved per person, which seems roughly in line with annual per capita of 24 tons per capita. So, say you had a 1 Billion man developed planet. Maybe 4x as rich as the US with 100 tons per capita consumption. Canada gets to roughly 60 tons, I assume for winter, so a planet involved in global extraction with a tenth of our population and engaged in large scale space flight.
So, roughly 100 billion tons produced/consumed, maybe a transport capacity of roughly 200-300 billion tons of transport capacity? Assuming US vehicle per capita numbers, multiplied by 4 for the higher wealth, you have the following numbers for the economy:
| Vehicle Type | US Number | US per Capita, 1 billion man planet (3x) | Theoretical 1 billion planet with 4x per Capita vehicles (12x) |
| Aircraft | 210 thousand | 600 thousand | 2.5 Million |
| Highway | 276 million | 800 million | 3.3 Billion |
| Transit | 138 thousand | 400 thousand | 1.6 million |
| Rail Cars | 277 thousand | 800 thousand | 3.3 million |
| Watercraft | 12 million | 40 million | 144 million |
| Total Vehicles: | 288 million | 840 million | 3.4 billion |
All numbers are absolutely dominated by road vehicles, though I'm surprised how many boats there actually are in the US.
So, an advanced world is going to have something on the order of 1-3 billion vehicles in the civilian economy. Even if you only had per vehicle cargo capacity in line with civilian vehicles of roughly 400 kg, and it only carried that much cargo per day, that's still collectively 400 billion tons carryable.
People starving is still likely in the 1 kg/day roughly 400 kg per year, so keeping everyone alive is still only 0.4 billion tons, or 0.1% of lowballed transport capacity.
Military at 1% mobilization would be an army of roughly 10 million, and even if per capita military consumption is 1,000 tons, 10x higher than average, military consumption is still only 10 billion tons, or 2.5% of transport capacity.
So, your back to needing to destroy 90-95% of the civilian economy to achieve short term crippling limits to basic survival or military operations.
Civilian economies of rich nations are likely extremely resilient to orbital bombardment type destruction, at least sub general nuking (and even those you can get pretty resilient with a bit of prep). The less completely out of blue the attack, the resilience likely increases exponentially.
Crippling the million or so military vehicles (depending on native logistics may make the military even more short term independent of the civilian economy) by chewing through the civilian economy, which may include destroying/disabling 900 million civilian vehicles, seems likely to be expensive and generally counterproductive.
I think your dramatically underestimating how difficult finding trucks from space would actually be. Skud trucks were hard to track with aircraft overflight. You might be able to manage smaller missiles than Skud. Lets say, using my Ohio example, 100k km^2, 10 million people, lots of forests. 100,000 soldiers total as garrison, 10,000 in AA rolls manning about a 100 batteries, each with 3 launchers, 3 radar, and 6 supply/refill trucks. So total roughly 300 launchers, Lets say a hundred high intercept Sud scale, roughly 6 tons and 12 meters long, 100 lower intercept Lance scale 6 meters and 2 tons, and 100 terminal maneuverable 300 kg/3 meter batteries.
Roughly 1,000 heavy missiles, 5,000 missiles light anti-orbit, and roughly 20,000 terminal defense.
What kind of observation do you think would be necessary to hunt a force like that down, even confined to such a relatively small area?
Admittedly, this is a question I would have to give some thought to too. I'll try to formulate an answer of my own later when I have more time.
I regarded many of this as necessary as part of the hunting enemy forces part. Which is basically attempting to do COIN with zero boots on the ground. How difficult I perceive achieving this is is part of why I lean much more its not worth it compared to boots on the ground.
Answer completely dependent on level of preparation on part of defenders (how do you even find the SCUD truck when it's in a tunnel underground with an exit in a garage or warehouse?), technological assumptions, and rules of engagement and so on.
Still, you don't need such detailed data, real time, to do strategic scale defense suppression. You need it for COIN, if you really care about not accidentally'ing civilians.
In practice, think something closer to Omaha or Okinawa landing, except with ordnance far meaner than battleship shells being used for landing zone preparation. Obviously they didn't have anything even close to that level of observation available, and inherently landing zone preparation *has* to happen before you have boots on the ground, it's an essential part of getting them there in the first place.
Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
I legitimately don't think you understand what an EMP weapon does. Or at least you have stubburnly refused to address it instead focusing on number of vehicles per person as if that would matter if the electrical is fried and gas pumps don't work.
Vyor
My influence grows!
Both of those would work. EMPs ain't hard to stop.
Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
Quite possibly but he hasn't addressed that in any shape. Instead his argument appears to be based around "advanced civilization s" are just too massive to damage rather than EMP to shield against.
Ie that in a worst case scenario the civilian number of cars/military could just pick up any slack with little or no trouble.
Are you so confident you know?
Not even knowing the details though, one would assume like most things in reality, there's some probabilities at play: x% of vehicles are damaged in a repairable state, y% are damaged in a non-repairable state. All my math there tells you is for EMPs to be crippling on their own, you need a 80-90% kill probability.
My initial googling of the their effect suggests they may have a damage range closer to 3%.
So, in order for your EMP to be as effective as you hope, it needs to disable something on the order of 80-90% of equipment. Against vehicles it seems to be roughly 3-5% producing a damaging pulse on an on vehicle, and no effect on an off vehicle. Most of the effect on on vehicles was forcing them to turn it off and on again.
EMPs from my understanding generally cause temporary problems to electronics, unless you have miles of wires to build up voltage in. Then you get a surge which just burns out/trips your fuse box if it worked properly and protects the rest of your house.
The grid broadly might be burned out (though even there likely not 100%, probability distribution and all that). But stuff not plugged into the grid likely has minimal, likely temporary damage, and thus anyone with batteries or a generator is going to likely still have power.
So, on the EMP question and the breakdown of society,
1) Even if it produced the massive effects you seemed to be theorizing, it would not break down.
2) It really does need a near 100% success rate to do enough damage to have the effects theorized, which are still unlikely.
3) An EMP is unlikely to have anywhere near the scale of effect theorized, making other concerns mute.
Edit: @Crom's Black Blade : yes, that is my argument: a wealthy society has so much slack, actually having society fall apart is quite unlikely, and even if people were literally starving, you still would not likely have much in the way of riots, what with starving people don't generally charge people with guns, nor generally do much looting if looters are presumed enemy collaborators and summarily executed.
People will be literally starving to death and not riot. And, further, people literally starving to death is quiet unlikely, because of how high the threshold of success is.
And since the damage done is actually likely fairly minor, the EMP is actually barely an inconvenience in the scheme of being nuked by invaders.
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Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
I know the two biggest issues to be discussed would be area of effect and the vulnerability. None of which you seemed interested in discussing. Instead going off with calculations that, without answering the above, were pretty meaningless.
Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
I assume by "expensive" you mean in terms of energy expended? I would think it couldn't be much more intensive than shuttling armies to and from orbit.
Even if not, in the lead-up before orbital bombardment, conventional or nuclear, I'd likely dump/swarm the necessary spy drones over the target area retrieving/replacing them as need to keep eyes in the skies. Fewer drones maximizing the surveillance of what I need at the moment for adjusting/calibrating firing patterns.
Focusing on eliminating defensive batteries first then moving onto logistical concerns, depots and other "big targets".
And I would argue it's the exact opposite. Advanced societies are dependent on numerous interlocking systems that even minor variances can produce rippling affects.
I also feel your analysis focuses too much on just the math portion without reflecting on the actual practicalities. All the vehicles in the world doesn't mean much if they aren't distributed where they're needed, can't travel because of destroyed roadways/bridges, aren't organized to do so, can't locate what they need to transport, etc.
Both presupposes that they're are enough people with guns. Which if things have gotten that bad you require them may not be the case.
For the record, my position never was that EMP was this super effective. Indeed my original post on the subject was an inquiry to their utility. My gripe was that saying you'd need to destroy 90+% of something, and therefore it's impervious, doesn't mean much unless we've established how easy/hard said something is to destroy.
I admire the participants of this thread giving more credence to numbers and scale then most popular SciFi authors.
Vyor
My influence grows!
Literally a metal box will stop an EMP. That's all that it would take. Fuck, houses would also stop them.
Doomsought
Well-known member
The problem with EMP is that you also need surge protection on all I/O lines. In particular for civilian infrastructure, power liens are also antennae.
Crom's Black Blade
Well-known member
And that's fine. I just don't see why he couldn't say that instead of his actual argument.
Vyor
My influence grows!
Sure, but that trips the breakers and blows up some transformers and... then does nothing. You might be out of power for like, 3 days max? Your car will still work, your phone will still work. Tractors and trucks will still work.
Doomsought
Well-known member
The power tranformers in the grid will all need repaired. This can take months.