The Role of Ground Forces in Interstellar Warfare

[JagerIV]

Those are very small payloads. With expensive miniaturization of electronics and nuclear warheads, it can work, but it leaves precious little room for things like penetration aids, alternate sensors, and multirole capabilities.

Also, a lot of predictions about costs, for top of the line guidance/countermeasure discrimination, you still will probably need top of the line electronics, because that's what the enemy will be using for their defenses, and that screams expensive.

Eh, a lot of that is going to be offloaded on battery targeting radar anyways: the assumption is, more or less, on missile is final intercept sensors. Larger ones (50kg package) were designed with the assumption that Coke cans of death were viable weapon systems, so each 50 kg payload comes with 20-30 2 kg ish submunition.

It strikes me as a bit optimistic, and I'm not sure if its actually the optimal deployment (its more or less optimized as a way to be difficult to destroy with laser fire), but we are making lots of advancements in such things, so its not implausible.

I do tend to assume a higher minimum viable weapon threshold.

For bombers to make sense at all as more than another missile stage, more exotic options like nuclear are more likely.

Yes by bomber I do mostly mean another missile stage, maybe with its own in built tracking radar. You have your reusable starship, so you can get your 10 ton methalox missiles into orbit with an insulator available, and that full 10-15km/s delta v of the heavy missile can be used for target engagement, rather than reaching orbit. Similar role to what air launch cruise missiles have, which seems to be one of the main bomber tasks these days.

Hypersonic glide vehicle. Fast like a ballistic missile, but with full, cruise missile like maneuvering ability.

Huh. Sounds counterproductive in this situation, but okay.

That is completely backwards in light of what we in fact do know about maintenance needs and complexity of various equipment. More complex and high performance devices generally need more and more maintenance. Fighter jets require orders of magnitude the maintenance trucks do, and the intervals are orders of magnitude shorter.
Ballistic missiles merely kept in readiness also last for months or few years at most without any more intense exercises.
If literal rocket technology gets so perfected to a point where it's not a maintenance hog, their trucks will be resembling something from BT or 40k.

Because the missile is generally not doing anything, while the truck is. Even if the fuel is corrosive, with terrible 60s tech that seems to be a weeks and months, maybe years, problem, not a couple of days problem. Most other missiles won't even be problems on that scale. Maybe you run a diagnostic daily or so to make sure the truck didn't bump something loose.

This is me saying I am now convinced the fuel issue is, well, a complete non-issue. It is such a non-issue that the truck with its constant need to refuel and likely use in heavy vehicles over rough terrain, is probably more of an issue.

How do you know how many and what kind of missiles a bomber carries?
How do you know it's even possible to intercept, as it may be merely putting missiles on an odd orbit while staying far away from the planet?
There is a lot that can be done in terms of harassing tactics in that vein.

Sure. Fighter tactics exist. Liquid fuel has zero to do over who's fighter maintaince schedule will keep their fighters and other recon/defense assets more active for longer. Missiles are probably a rounding error in comparison to the fighters and spaceships in maintaince needs.

In some scenarios, yes. We are talking readiness, it's not a binary question, it's a matter of proportion of time it takes to take something out of the line, and what time it takes to put it in readiness again. Your average car is absolutely great in that regard - it's ready to do its job most of the time, and once every few months or years it may need a few days in a workshop.
But the expensive military toys aren't like that.
For example, in the B-2 fleet on average for each operational bomber 1 or 2 are undergoing maintenance at the same time, readiness given being around 40%.
If your car had to spend 60% of time being worked on by a mechanic, you would have a bit different outlook on that.

Great, so if a B-2 is valuable with a readiness of 40%, missiles with a likely higher readiness are good.

Again, we are talking about readiness. The question is not if something needs maintenance, the question is how much and how often.

Here's a mystery for you... Why can a destroyer operate without going somewhere for maintenance for far longer than a fighter jet can?

Because an aircraft is more tightly designed craft on the limit of its material capacity doing more punishing activities? Also a ship is bigger and can be worked on in the field while a plane generally can't be? Fortunately then, a missile is most of the time not doing anything crazy, and a lot of the maintaince on it can be done in the field.

Again, basic logistics and common sense defeating theoretical math. If it takes 5 minutes for a dude to change a car battery, that doesn't mean 50 dudes can do it in 6 seconds. Attempting that would probably cause a lot of confusion, wasted labor and little improvement in the timing. Equipment, transport and procedures needed tend to be the main limits in such cases.

More like "missile A is super well designed to exacting specs, so it only takes 10 hours of maintaince check ups per month to stay operational. It also costs $100 million. Missile B is not so exactingly designed to minimize labor and doesn't use the highest quality material, so it takes 100 hours of maintaince time per month to stay operational. It also costs $5 million". If your on a space warship with tight crew requirements, that super expensive missile that means your hundred missiles only require 6-7 dedicated missile tender might make sense. Meanwhile, on the surface battery where personnel are not the limiting factor, buying a hundred $5 million dollar missiles for the cost of 5 expensive missiles even if it requires a ground crew of 60 might still make sense."

You can throw capital and automation at a problem, or you can throw manpower at a problem. The proper comparison in you example is not one guy does a car battery in 5 minutes, but one guy changes the battery of 50 cars in 250 minutes, and 50 guys can change 50 batteries in 5 minutes. Though even in your example with training breaking down the battery change between 2-5 different people can probably save a bit of time where such things matter, such as an assembly line.

There is little point for defensive missiles to aim for interceptions further away than this, if possible at all on account of reaction times, detection tracking etc, it would have additional requirements for no extra benefit even if doable. If you are intercepting something coming at you, well, it has to become a very close encounter at some point if it ever wants to hit in the first place.

Secondly, new solid fuel technologies are constantly worked on, and due to the sheer complexity of the subject involving things like manufacturing technologies and grain shapes, a lot of stuff can happen there, involving, say, the potentially higher densities of solid fuel.

Sure, we can theorize solid fuel that is better. I'm not sure its really possible for it to be better than cryo liquid rockets, but science fiction we can theorize nearly theoretically impossible things. Still doesn't make your arguments against liquid any more true.

The reasons for intercepting further out are so self evident I'm not sure to take you seriously there. Earlier interception is always an advantage if you can.

 

[Atarlost]

That's actually a super neat way of looking at things. Plus you can think of campaigns like Rabaul, Okinawa and Iwo Jima and Peleliu or Tarawa etc where almost the entirety of the terrain was able to be targeted by naval gunfire (plus obviously air operations). The US Navy could literally pound every square foot of Tarawa or Iwo Jima with high explosives but the vast majority of the troops would still survive and could survive for weeks or months off of their stored supplies. So you still had to send in troops to root it out.

The analogy breaks down in an important way here. The planetary equivalents of those islands don't matter. If you need intermediate bases for your fleet you don't want them at the bottom of gravity wells. If you want to deny your enemy bases you have to contest not just the planetary surface or orbitals but the entire star system. And depending on how your universe's FTL works maybe interstellar space as well.

Now imagine defending something like Hong Kong if it were built on a lonely atoll instead of a coastal island. When either the government fears orbital bombardment more than occupation or the civilians hate the government keeping them in the war more than they fear its enforcers you have failed to defend the planet. After that it's surrender with or without a revolution and it's a police job not an army job.

 

[Crom's Black Blade]

Hm, I think history suggests this is not actually the case: people say things are 3 days from anarchy, but that's actually not the case: USSR, China, and India have had massive famines which didn't seriously threaten the state, or even particularly its operation overmuch.

In the case of an EMP, as you suggest it may cause a great deal of disruption to the civilian economy, but not to the military. Which if anything is likely to make the civilians more obedient to the military: if your in a town, and the only source of communication and organization is the military, most people are likely to just fall in line with what the military is saying: after all, they're the only one who have comms and functioning supply: being in the good grace of the military is the optimal way to feed yourself if there is a food shortage. If your in the great leap forward, the path to surviving is probably to signal that your more loyal than everyone else to the Red Army, not to rebel.

The times when starving people actually charge machine guns seems historically rare, and it makes sense in a game theory logic: if the soldiers will shoot you, then you risk a high chance of death. But, if you have the strength to attack machine gun nets, there's likely 10-20 other strategies you could pursue that have some chance of success, and certainly have less chance of immediate death.

And all of this is in situations of people who are not living particularly high above subsistence! Richer areas, well, have more wealth. As overweight Americans, we have extensive fat stores so simple caloric starvation takes a while. We have some beans and rice. In case of cold we have gas, which I don't think has any part that's dependent on electronics, but even if that goes we have a lot of trees around because we previously had gas, and thus almost no one has needed to chop down trees for fuel. Many have wood grills, basically just for fun that can now be used to cook.

Food in general to not starve is not a huge amount of material: rationed food can be about 1 kg a day, so 300 million people on rations is roughly 300,000 tons of food per day. The American Airforce C-17 fleet of 230 has a combined payload of 18,000 tons, the 370 c-130s collectively can carry about 7,000 tons, and the 50 C-5 Galaxy's can carry another 6,000, for a total of about 30,000 tons of airlift capacity. So, short hops of 2 hours with 10 trips a day, you can just barely move enough food to keep everyone from starving with Airforce strategic airlift alone.

Obviously you wouldn't need to do so: other civilian infrastructure could be brought to operation, and if you needed to just use military transport capacity, you'd probably lean on the 100k+ trucks the army has, with something like 1 million tons transport capacity.

Or, for a look at the civilian side: The US ships roughly 12.5 billion tons of good. If even rounding up you need 1 million tons of goods shipped per day so people don't starve, so about 365 million per year, you need to destroy 97% of civilian shipping capacity, long term. If you only destroyed 90% of it, that leaves 1.2 billion tons of shipping left, which you only need, lets round up again to 400 million tons so people don't starve, leaving 800 million tons of capacity to sustain military operations and carry out rebuilding back up to the billions of tons of transport natively available.

There is just so much surplus available that unless you are destroying 80-99% of everything, your still likely leaving a surplus which can be re-invested into fairly quickly rebuilding and getting everything back online.

Well I think you're overly fixating one one small facet, whether or not people will charge machine guns, and missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

Specifically that riots hardly have to be against machine gun nests or even have the overthrow of the government in mind. When they could just as likely be directed against storefronts for food or just to loot in general taking advantage of crippled law enforcement.

Just like airlifting or otherwise tying up military assets to ferry food and supplies ties up desperately needed military resources away from fighting me.

 

[Marduk]

Eh, a lot of that is going to be offloaded on battery targeting radar anyways: the assumption is, more or less, on missile is final intercept sensors. Larger ones (50kg package) were designed with the assumption that Coke cans of death were viable weapon systems, so each 50 kg payload comes with 20-30 2 kg ish submunition.

It strikes me as a bit optimistic, and I'm not sure if its actually the optimal deployment (its more or less optimized as a way to be difficult to destroy with laser fire), but we are making lots of advancements in such things, so its not implausible.

I do tend to assume a higher minimum viable weapon threshold.

That assumes a setting so near-future that spaceships come with pretty much not even minimal armor. Or in other words, you have invasion fleets of ships so delicate that they can Kessler syndrome themselves with orbital trash they produce destroying enemy orbital defenses.

Yes by bomber I do mostly mean another missile stage, maybe with its own in built tracking radar. You have your reusable starship, so you can get your 10 ton methalox missiles into orbit with an insulator available, and that full 10-15km/s delta v of the heavy missile can be used for target engagement, rather than reaching orbit. Similar role to what air launch cruise missiles have, which seems to be one of the main bomber tasks these days.

Not really, if it was that, new bombers would be cheaper, B-52 replacement style ones, not B-21. The issue here is, if the task of the "bomber" is so simple, and it still uses ordinary chemical rockets, it may not even be worth recovering, saving a nice chunk of the performance gained by using a more expensive delivery system. For Falcon 9 the difference is about 1/3 of the payload, and considering the situation and system in question, it's hard to say if the launcher will still exist anyway by the time the "bomber" returns.
If the "bomber" uses something else, like nuclear, or whatever else the invasion ships are using, in which the engine is so much more valuable and provides performance gains significantly exceeding the impact of choice of specific fuels for chemical rockets, now that makes bombers and interceptors far more tempting options.

Huh. Sounds counterproductive in this situation, but okay.

How is being a much harder target for interception counterproductive?

Because the missile is generally not doing anything, while the truck is. Even if the fuel is corrosive, with terrible 60s tech that seems to be a weeks and months, maybe years, problem, not a couple of days problem. Most other missiles won't even be problems on that scale. Maybe you run a diagnostic daily or so to make sure the truck didn't bump something loose.

This is me saying I am now convinced the fuel issue is, well, a complete non-issue. It is such a non-issue that the truck with its constant need to refuel and likely use in heavy vehicles over rough terrain, is probably more of an issue.

Have you looked up the maintenance costs for modern ballistic missiles? They are absolutely capable of generating serious maintenance costs even if sitting in a safe, climate controlled silo doing nothing, nevermind when taking bumps, vibrations and thermal cycles.
For example, US silo based missile plans - lifetime operation and support costs are expected to be higher than R&D and production of the missiles themselves, not even counting the warheads.
This is the main reason why it's only countries with more money than sense that build lots of non-nuclear long range ballistic missiles. They are not like some smaller missiles that come in isolated launch containers and can lie around in a warehouse for a decade or few before needing refurbishment.

Sure. Fighter tactics exist. Liquid fuel has zero to do over who's fighter maintaince schedule will keep their fighters and other recon/defense assets more active for longer. Missiles are probably a rounding error in comparison to the fighters and spaceships in maintaince needs.

The answer is more "depends on what missile and what fighter". Airbreather engines are a different animal than high performance rocketry.

Great, so if a B-2 is valuable with a readiness of 40%, missiles with a likely higher readiness are good.

It's also a strike weapon, not a scarce defense interceptor. For those, such a readiness rate is not acceptable.

Because an aircraft is more tightly designed craft on the limit of its material capacity doing more punishing activities? Also a ship is bigger and can be worked on in the field while a plane generally can't be? Fortunately then, a missile is most of the time not doing anything crazy, and a lot of the maintaince on it can be done in the field.

Exactly. And which of these descriptions does a missile resemble more?

More like "missile A is super well designed to exacting specs, so it only takes 10 hours of maintaince check ups per month to stay operational. It also costs $100 million. Missile B is not so exactingly designed to minimize labor and doesn't use the highest quality material, so it takes 100 hours of maintaince time per month to stay operational. It also costs $5 million". If your on a space warship with tight crew requirements, that super expensive missile that means your hundred missiles only require 6-7 dedicated missile tender might make sense. Meanwhile, on the surface battery where personnel are not the limiting factor, buying a hundred $5 million dollar missiles for the cost of 5 expensive missiles even if it requires a ground crew of 60 might still make sense."

What's more likely is that you design the ship based missile to have a longer maintenance overhaul time than the expected length of a patrol, without caring about what the maintenance requirements are afterwards. SSBNs and the like simply don't do missile maintenance onboard, only basic diagnostics, while the missiles are built to be as isolated from the environment as possible.
You are also implying that the same country has 2 separate "states of art" for missile engineering and one has much better resilience than the other, which is... very unlikely.
If such improvements are possible at a given state of technology at all, chances are they will proliferate and differences become very small with time.

You can throw capital and automation at a problem, or you can throw manpower at a problem. The proper comparison in you example is not one guy does a car battery in 5 minutes, but one guy changes the battery of 50 cars in 250 minutes, and 50 guys can change 50 batteries in 5 minutes. Though even in your example with training breaking down the battery change between 2-5 different people can probably save a bit of time where such things matter, such as an assembly line.

The difference here is that a high end missile is not a truck, and the maintenance cannot be done on a concrete lot, with cheap tools, and the main cost being the guy's salary. The facility and machinery needed plus their operation are the main costs. If the whole procedure for a single missile has to take 5 days of careful handling, you can't make the procedure faster than that, you can build more missile depots to overhaul a good chunk of the fleet in close to 5 days if needed, involving things like depressurizations, pressurizations, electronic tests, inspections, calibrations etc, all in standarized conditions, but beyond that there is little room for improvement.
Or in other words, no, that's not the kind of technology in which you can just get much done with replacing capital and time with extra manpower, and talking about interstellar warfare, that's even less likely to be applicable at this sort of tech levels.

Sure, we can theorize solid fuel that is better. I'm not sure its really possible for it to be better than cryo liquid rockets, but science fiction we can theorize nearly theoretically impossible things. Still doesn't make your arguments against liquid any more true.

The reasons for intercepting further out are so self evident I'm not sure to take you seriously there. Earlier interception is always an advantage if you can.

How? If a missile fails its mission by not surviving until getting to the target, interception successful. Making it happen further away has exponentially greater requirements for the "if you can" part with no additional benefits. It's not self evident, it's a luxury.

Why the fuck are you acting like they'd bother invading current earth like this when there are cheaper and faster ways to take over a planet of our tech level?

Idunno, because we are talking about chemical rockets and their fuels, which automatically implies very much a "near future sci fi" tech level?

 

[Vyor]

Idunno, because we are talking about chemical rockets and their fuels, which automatically implies very much a "near future sci fi" tech level?

So we don't even have spaceships capable of orbital bombardment and instead space stations and moon instalations.

Which massively changes the game and... makes them a lot easier to take out.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Why are we spending so much time on things not involving ground forces?

 

[Crom's Black Blade]

Why are we spending so much time on things not involving ground forces?

I think mostly because the two broad schools of thought being discussed consist of 1.) Orbital superiority is a massive trump card and advantage rendering ground forces either irrelevant or more niche, "brown water navy" type role or 2.) Ground superiority is so massive a trump rendering orbital control irrelevant or a niche role with an attacker desiring to quickly secure a ground theater to gain this "ground advantage" over the defending forces. Each side making assumptions about what technology works and to what effect.

 

[Marduk]

Why are we spending so much time on things not involving ground forces?

Ground to orbit defenses are ground forces, much like SAM systems are not airforce.

So we don't even have spaceships capable of orbital bombardment and instead space stations and moon instalations.

Which massively changes the game and... makes them a lot easier to take out.

Depending on the other options chemical rockets may well be the cheap option in lower sci-fi.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

1.) Orbital superiority is a massive trump card and advantage rendering ground forces either irrelevant or more niche, "brown water navy" type role

Orbital Superiority is certainly a necessary thing to take a hostile planet from the 'natives'. However, unless you're willing to glass sections of the planet that you want for yourself then you're going have to send something in to dig out your enemy.

I'm assuming that the ground based forces will have at least some form of AA available to resist landings if they happen within LOS of where they are.

It's likely going to be a case of grinding attrition.

2.) Ground superiority is so massive a trump rendering orbital control irrelevant or a niche role with an attacker desiring to quickly secure a ground theater to gain this "ground advantage" over the defending forces.

Ground superiority is wonderful...IF you are able to keep things from falling on your head. Ground forces are extremely vulnerable if they aren't well protected (shield tech and active defenses or buried deep enough). If the ground forces are located in an area that the attackers don't care about, they are likely to have high speed kinetics ruin their day. It's really hard to stop a rock/high density warhead at c-fractional velocities.

 

[JagerIV]

Orbital Superiority is certainly a necessary thing to take a hostile planet from the 'natives'. However, unless you're willing to glass sections of the planet that you want for yourself then you're going have to send something in to dig out your enemy.

I'm assuming that the ground based forces will have at least some form of AA available to resist landings if they happen within LOS of where they are.

It's likely going to be a case of grinding attrition.

Ground superiority is wonderful...IF you are able to keep things from falling on your head. Ground forces are extremely vulnerable if they aren't well protected (shield tech and active defenses or buried deep enough). If the ground forces are located in an area that the attackers don't care about, they are likely to have high speed kinetics ruin their day. It's really hard to stop a rock/high density warhead at c-fractional velocities.

Well, that is part of the question: how vulnerable are they? If technology is such that every truck can have anti-orbital weaponry (the anti-orbit MANPAD is a reality, which is theoretically possible, but I think pushing some extreme engineering and handling) and you need low orbit to do effective counter ground fire, that suggests your combat looks more like Ukraine: Anti-air is strong enough and dangerous enough that while aircraft aren't a non-issue, its prevented from being the decisive issue, and decisive action leans more on ground forces.

That's also where some questions off effectiveness, especially cost effectiveness, come in: If a trillion dollars (maybe merely billions) worth of Airforce struggles to keep Serbia or the Taliban down, that is suggestive winning on airpower alone requires grossly disproportionate force: a space force might be able to bully a one town planet, but but amassing enough space assets to bully a one America planet might be grossly disproporate.

For example, how expensive is a fractional c projectile? Lets say its 1 kg at 10% c, or 30,000 km/s. By basic, non relativity math, that's about 450 TJ. About 112 KT equivalent. Which if I'm doing my math correctly is equivalent to 125 million KWh, which at commercial electricity prices is about $25 million dollars worth of electricity. Assuming in the future a 2 order of magnitude decrease in electricity price, about $250,000 of electricity. Maybe a $1 million with inefficiencies. Which is suggestive of a cost per shot roughly in the $10-$100 million dollar range. I could easily see it being a 1-10 million dollars per shot with the right assumptions.

Which is conveniently something affordable to shoot by a plausible spacefaring species, but maybe not at 12 random rebels in a basement, especially if you don't actually know for sure which basement they're in, just "somewhere in that town". It also might not be fireable at forces under an atmosphere anyways, not just because of collateral damage concerns, but simple practicality concerns: I believe an object that fast interacts with the atmosphere as though a solid object, so it should mostly have exploded in the upper atmosphere: thus its counter surface impact might be negligible, as devastating as its anti orbital might be, depending on accuracy.

 

[JagerIV]

Which might justify reiterating why such a close parking orbit may be necessary. Big one for me is optics.

Physical laws give rough limits to the resolution of telescopes, their angular resolution. Hubble for example is close to the theoretically possible of 0.04 arc seconds in the visible spectrum for a telescope its size. Possibly being able to identify a human sized object I think takes a 10 cm/pixel resolution, and even there it would be very vague. A 2.4 m mirror like Hubble can pick that up at a distance of about 500 km up, under theoretical ideal circumstances.

Here's a good quick look at spy satellites and the amount of detail provided by various resolutions.

How powerful are the cameras on modern spy satellites?

Answer (1 of 47): One Trump's tweet probably confirmed that the resolution of American KH-11 spy satellite’s cameras can let American intelligences read license plate number through a spy satellite photo. On 30 Aug 2019, President Trump posted a spy satellite photo in his tweet, mocking Iran's m...

www.quora.com

But, 500 km is pretty low as far as orbits are concerned: by 5,000 km your down to a theoretical 1 meter resolution, where recognizing plane sized objects get difficult. Distinguishing between real and fake objects is much more difficult. And this is visual spectrum, where basic camouflage can be quite powerful. IR is longer wavelength, and thus worse.

David Webb as an infrared telescope only has a resolution of 0.1 arc seconds, despite being a larger telescope. A David Webb telescope can only see human scale resolution about 200 km out, under ideal circumstances. If an IR sensor could read much of anything through an atmosphere, which I'm not sure the extent of. So if the visual camouflage is good, I'm not sure you can get around that with Satellite IR readings. And as far as I'm aware an idling tank/truck/AA system/bunker generator is not giving off a lot of radio waves.

There are also field of view limits (I believe these are physical limits of optics that impose trade offs between field of view and detail), and raw data limits.

1 square km of terrain at 10 cm^2 resolution is 100 million pixels, which at a low color depth black and white picture is about 2bits per pixel, full color is 24. An image of about 25-300 Megabytes. Total observation of an area the size of Ohio, roughly 100,000 square km, which is not all that huge compared to a planet, you are talking about 2.5-30 Terabytes of data per second, assuming 1 frame per second recording speeds. At 24 frames per second your talking about 60-720 Terabytes per second of data. We are getting better at data processing, storage, and transmitting, but those all have limits, and they get more difficult the more distance and latency you have in the system. Your recon satellites might be able to collectively record 100,000 terabytes of data, but your intelligence ship might "only" be able to receive 100 TB of data, and truly only process 1 TB per second.

I'm not sure what the physical limits of these are, but it seems clear more satellites closer are preferred vs fewer farther away, as SpaceX 10,000 low earth satellites is much better than older geostationary communications satellites that have relatively large receiving area, but very low data throughput. If all data has to be processed by high orbit intelligence ships, that seems likely to be somewhat overwhelming to the system.

So, Actually tracking what's going on on an earth sized world seems to me to require a large number of fairly close in observation satellites, and likely a fairly substantial communication network in support too. Even with AI dispersal of commuting power over many relatively small sensors who can then process them into relatively lightweight communication reports to hand up the chain seems superior. I just blindly copy the Starlink plan of needing roughly 10,000 satellites. If each of these are Hubble scale combined observation/communication satellites, say 20 tons each, that's about 200,000 tons of satellites.

Which is not a huge amount of material overall on the scale of a planetary invasion. However, to me this suggests very low capacity satellites. A Starlink or Hubble sized satellite is likely not going to have particularly great self defense. And if anti sat capacity is cheap and widespread, that kind of satellite doesn't have a great lifespan, which doesn't help that in order to be useful it takes some time: one 10 minute pass over an area isn't likely to give you much info, especially if the enemy is aware: just leave the missiles in their bunkers/under bridges. Its likely takes time to have a satellite overhead to catch when the opponent is forced to move under satellite observance, or otherwise makes a mistake, or just to collect enough information to confirm information: is that a school converted to serve as a military barracks, or is it still just a school in operation? Confirming that by satellite alone may take a bit.

This is the kind of target I'm mostly picturing the small 100s kg to 5 ton missiles are used against: recon satellites, communication satellites, and supply depots/transports of various kinds (fuel, cargo, munitions, whatever). If you have anti orbital lasers or railguns, especially small mobile ones, the long term lifespan of such low parking orbits gets more questionable.

More capable craft make it more survivable, but that also means spamming is much harder. Say you have your 20 tons of observation and communications equipment, attach them as 10% dry mass for a light craft of 200 tons, likely wet mass of 1,000 odd tons. Fairly standard patrol boat tonnage. But, if you still need 10,000 to properly occupy low orbit and maintain ground observation, your now committing 10 million tons of mass to the planet, a quite substantial investment. Reminder that the total bomb load committed to WWII strategic bombing was 2.7 million tons. And you still have small boats spread out across the whole planet and thus poorly supported, opening them up to defeat in detail.

Even more capable ships with stronger offensive and defensive abilities , or light craft formed up into self supporting squadrons, can help overwhelm local defense, but I don't think attrition would be on their side with anything but very overwhelming power: Imagine an F-35 predictably circling over a city in MANPAD range. Even with all its advanced tech, the F-35 is likely to run out of countermeasures and luck before the enemy runs out of cheap and terrible MANPADS. Or maybe even old fashion AA artillery.

Same if you park your big orbital battleship in orbit: all your advanced countermeasures mean any one particular attack has a low probability of success, but after a week of steady harassing attacks? Harassing attacks you have trouble countering because the recon and communication escorts/screens have been taken out first, so your overall awareness of what the enemy is doing outside engagement range is low? And resupply in such low orbit difficult and costly for much the same reason? That is a difficult position to maintain.

Occupying Low orbit is something you can do, but its costly against even moderately equipped and competent foes.

You'd much rather keep your big ships further out, where being attacked is more expensive on the defenders side. But, well, now your practically bind. A 30 meter diameter visual sensor still can only get to 0.1 cm resolution out to about 5,000 km, under theoretically ideal circumstances. At 30,000 km you might be sort of able to distinguish a car from a tank, maybe, and at moon distance you can sort of maybe tell a Boing 747 from a building. Under ideal physics limited systems in ideal circumstances. If the planet has, well, clouds your visual recon was going to be a bit limited even from low orbit. And how many 30 meter telescopes can your fleet maintain anyways? So even with perfect sensors, the eye of Sauron likely falls on a much smaller part of the planet, leaving much more room for the defenders to get up to mischief.

None of this suggests why a planetary landing might be preferable to a primarily orbital move, but it hopefully outlines

1) Why I think effective use of space weapons likely requires some presence in LEO (or lower, maybe some other post), and if relying just on LEO assets rather than surface assets, quite substantial low orbit presence, and

2) Maintaining such a presence in the face of even fairly moderate anti-orbital weapons is likely to be costly and difficult for the orbital faction.

And I'll sign off for now, this is long enough as is.

 

[Doomsought]

Also, you will probably want to get pretty close to a planet before launching your shuttle craft for an invasion. There are multiple reasons. Low orbit means it is that much quicker to re-use your shuttle for the next wave of troops. You also need less Delta-V in the shuttle, which may be very important if you can't scale down fusion torches or whatever highly fuel efficient engines you use on your capital space ships. Finally there is less flight time for your much more vulnerable smallcraft to be exposed to anti-air and anti-space attacks.

 

[Crom's Black Blade]

Its likely takes time to have a satellite overhead to catch when the opponent is forced to move under satellite observance, or otherwise makes a mistake, or just to collect enough information to confirm information: is that a school converted to serve as a military barracks, or is it still just a school in operation? Confirming that by satellite alone may take a bit.

Is there a reason you're assuming an interstellar navy is relying on purely orbital surveillance? I would think if you can so trivially move armies between worlds you could drop a spy buoy into place and just keep readjusting it position to stay perfectly still in relation to your target rather than "constantly falling" around the globe the way satellites do. Reducing the size of the network needed and the data that has to be processed at any one time.

It also has to be said that not all data will be of equal value. It's likely going to matter very little in the initial stages if the enemy has converted a school into a barracks compared to pinpointing bridges, power plants, fuel depots, roadways ect that I would want my initial strike to wipe out preventing my enemy from being able to function. Worrying about school-barracks is a mid-stage problem after I've secured Orbit and Air supremacy, at least over the target area.

If you have anti orbital lasers or railguns, especially small mobile ones, the long term lifespan of such low parking orbits gets more questionable.

More capable craft make it more survivable, but that also means spamming is much harder.

Honestly I would say a missile fired off the back of a truck, let alone a fixed emplacement, would be hideously static in comparison to the Invader forces which can move freely outside the planet's gravity well swarming and concentrating their force at a particular point.

 

[The Original Sixth]

Well obviously Fluff would take priority to game mechanics I would think.

40k fans have problems coming to grip with the limitations of the warp. In my experience, they consistently downplay the standard ftl time and push outliers to the front. Looking at the Rogue Trader RPG game pg 183-184:

The Passage of Time in Real Space
The subjective time experienced by those traveling through the warp is different from that that passes in the physical world. The amount by which time experienced within the warp and real space varies is not fixed, but if necessary to calculate how much time has passed in the real world whilst a ship was in the warp, use a ratio of one day of passage in the "open warp" to 12 days passing in real space on average. the Game Master should, however, feel free to vary this ratio as he sees fit and on the most stable warp routes this should be less (even in 1 to 1 parity in some places), and in turbulent areas potentially much worse. Factual accounts of ships arriving at their destination centuries late are thankfully extremely rare, but known (and should never "randomly" occur during the game). There have been accounts of ships that have actually arrived at their destination before they have left!

Table 7-2 (Passage Within the Warp) -- (Example Voyage)
1-day -- Short passage between two close systems by a well-traveled stable warp route.
5-10 days -- A journey between systems in the same sub-sector using accurate navigational information.
30-60 days -- A journey across the body of a full Imperial sector (such as Calixis) using accurate information and known warp routes.
100+ days -- A perilous journey across a Segmentum at best speed avoiding only the worst known hazards.
Several Years -- An odyssey across the galaxy.

Translation for Real-Time Passage:
12 days -- Short passage between two close systems by a well-traveled stable warp route. (4.4ly; 133c)
60-120 days -- A journey between systems in the same sub-sector using accurate navigational information.
360-720 days -- A journey across the body of a full Imperial sector (such as Calixis) using accurate information and known warp routes. (200 ly, ~101c to 202c)
1,200 days -- A perilous journey across a Segmentum at best speed avoiding only the worst known hazards.
36-60 years -- An odyssey across the galaxy. (75,000 ly, 1,250c to 2,083c)

Working off the closest nearby solar system to our own (ie, Alpha Centauri), an Imperium ship can travel that distance in about 12 days on average, so that's 133c (if my math isn't all fucked up--it's late and I just finished a paper an hour ago). The 360-720 days across a full Imperial sector comes out to 200 LY in that time range, which gives us an FTL of 101-202c. The 36-60 year journey is probably about 75,000 LY or about 1,250c to 2,083c.

That would put the IoM roughly on par with Star Trek ships in terms of long distance speed*. However, the closer you are to Earth, the faster and more reliable their FTL gets, with some areas 1 to 1 in parity. So in the IoM, traveling to Alpha Centauri probably would only take 1 day and hence be around 1,300c-ish. You can probably expect at the very least ever adjoining sector around Holy Terra is roughly the same, with FTL speeds being 1,216c to 2,433c.

For average FTL speeds, most ST ships move between Warp 5 and Warp 6. Or between 214c and 392c. So Imperium speeds can be up to over 6x faster in stable warp route areas close to Holy Tera...or further away they're actually slower, being between 1/2 to two-thirds slower than Warp 6 (roughly). Overall, there is an advantage to using the Warp (apart from...you know, demons and shit) as not only does it have a higher long-range speed, but logistics are easier because on average you're only using 1/12th the food for the crew.


*Sort of. Voyager's "75-year journey" was actually how long it would take if they jumped to Warp 9.75 and just left the ship on cruise. As the ship would basically melt long before it made it a week into that journey, it's actually much slower. I have a funny image in my mind of Janeway and Tuvok talking over presenting the most generous estimation for keeping crew morale up and it turns out it's based on the most generous, unrealistic estimation and the knowledge that her crew of Starfleet flunkouts can't do basic math.

 

[Marduk]

Which might justify reiterating why such a close parking orbit may be necessary. Big one for me is optics.

Physical laws give rough limits to the resolution of telescopes, their angular resolution. Hubble for example is close to the theoretically possible of 0.04 arc seconds in the visible spectrum for a telescope its size. Possibly being able to identify a human sized object I think takes a 10 cm/pixel resolution, and even there it would be very vague. A 2.4 m mirror like Hubble can pick that up at a distance of about 500 km up, under theoretical ideal circumstances.

Here's a good quick look at spy satellites and the amount of detail provided by various resolutions.

How powerful are the cameras on modern spy satellites?

Answer (1 of 47): One Trump's tweet probably confirmed that the resolution of American KH-11 spy satellite’s cameras can let American intelligences read license plate number through a spy satellite photo. On 30 Aug 2019, President Trump posted a spy satellite photo in his tweet, mocking Iran's m...

www.quora.com

But, 500 km is pretty low as far as orbits are concerned: by 5,000 km your down to a theoretical 1 meter resolution, where recognizing plane sized objects get difficult. Distinguishing between real and fake objects is much more difficult. And this is visual spectrum, where basic camouflage can be quite powerful. IR is longer wavelength, and thus worse.

David Webb as an infrared telescope only has a resolution of 0.1 arc seconds, despite being a larger telescope. A David Webb telescope can only see human scale resolution about 200 km out, under ideal circumstances. If an IR sensor could read much of anything through an atmosphere, which I'm not sure the extent of. So if the visual camouflage is good, I'm not sure you can get around that with Satellite IR readings. And as far as I'm aware an idling tank/truck/AA system/bunker generator is not giving off a lot of radio waves.

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.

1 square km of terrain at 10 cm^2 resolution is 100 million pixels, which at a low color depth black and white picture is about 2bits per pixel, full color is 24. An image of about 25-300 Megabytes. Total observation of an area the size of Ohio, roughly 100,000 square km, which is not all that huge compared to a planet, you are talking about 2.5-30 Terabytes of data per second, assuming 1 frame per second recording speeds. At 24 frames per second your talking about 60-720 Terabytes per second of data. We are getting better at data processing, storage, and transmitting, but those all have limits, and they get more difficult the more distance and latency you have in the system. Your recon satellites might be able to collectively record 100,000 terabytes of data, but your intelligence ship might "only" be able to receive 100 TB of data, and truly only process 1 TB per second.

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.

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

Based on Google Earth, terabytes to low petabytes of data for full planetary mapping, fairly easily handled by modern industrial grade technology.

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

Frames per second? We are going for useful intel here, not the cinematic experience.

I'm not sure what the physical limits of these are, but it seems clear more satellites closer are preferred vs fewer farther away, as SpaceX 10,000 low earth satellites is much better than older geostationary communications satellites that have relatively large receiving area, but very low data throughput. If all data has to be processed by high orbit intelligence ships, that seems likely to be somewhat overwhelming to the system.

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.

So, Actually tracking what's going on on an earth sized world seems to me to require a large number of fairly close in observation satellites, and likely a fairly substantial communication network in support too. Even with AI dispersal of commuting power over many relatively small sensors who can then process them into relatively lightweight communication reports to hand up the chain seems superior. I just blindly copy the Starlink plan of needing roughly 10,000 satellites. If each of these are Hubble scale combined observation/communication satellites, say 20 tons each, that's about 200,000 tons of satellites.

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.

Which is not a huge amount of material overall on the scale of a planetary invasion. However, to me this suggests very low capacity satellites. A Starlink or Hubble sized satellite is likely not going to have particularly great self defense. And if anti sat capacity is cheap and widespread, that kind of satellite doesn't have a great lifespan, which doesn't help that in order to be useful it takes some time: one 10 minute pass over an area isn't likely to give you much info, especially if the enemy is aware: just leave the missiles in their bunkers/under bridges. Its likely takes time to have a satellite overhead to catch when the opponent is forced to move under satellite observance, or otherwise makes a mistake, or just to collect enough information to confirm information: is that a school converted to serve as a military barracks, or is it still just a school in operation? Confirming that by satellite alone may take a bit.

This is the kind of target I'm mostly picturing the small 100s kg to 5 ton missiles are used against: recon satellites, communication satellites, and supply depots/transports of various kinds (fuel, cargo, munitions, whatever). If you have anti orbital lasers or railguns, especially small mobile ones, the long term lifespan of such low parking orbits gets more questionable.

More capable craft make it more survivable, but that also means spamming is much harder. Say you have your 20 tons of observation and communications equipment, attach them as 10% dry mass for a light craft of 200 tons, likely wet mass of 1,000 odd tons. Fairly standard patrol boat tonnage. But, if you still need 10,000 to properly occupy low orbit and maintain ground observation, your now committing 10 million tons of mass to the planet, a quite substantial investment. Reminder that the total bomb load committed to WWII strategic bombing was 2.7 million tons. And you still have small boats spread out across the whole planet and thus poorly supported, opening them up to defeat in detail.

Even more capable ships with stronger offensive and defensive abilities , or light craft formed up into self supporting squadrons, can help overwhelm local defense, but I don't think attrition would be on their side with anything but very overwhelming power: Imagine an F-35 predictably circling over a city in MANPAD range. Even with all its advanced tech, the F-35 is likely to run out of countermeasures and luck before the enemy runs out of cheap and terrible MANPADS. Or maybe even old fashion AA artillery.

Same if you park your big orbital battleship in orbit: all your advanced countermeasures mean any one particular attack has a low probability of success, but after a week of steady harassing attacks? Harassing attacks you have trouble countering because the recon and communication escorts/screens have been taken out first, so your overall awareness of what the enemy is doing outside engagement range is low? And resupply in such low orbit difficult and costly for much the same reason? That is a difficult position to maintain.

Occupying Low orbit is something you can do, but its costly against even moderately equipped and competent foes.

You'd much rather keep your big ships further out, where being attacked is more expensive on the defenders side. But, well, now your practically bind. A 30 meter diameter visual sensor still can only get to 0.1 cm resolution out to about 5,000 km, under theoretically ideal circumstances. At 30,000 km you might be sort of able to distinguish a car from a tank, maybe, and at moon distance you can sort of maybe tell a Boing 747 from a building. Under ideal physics limited systems in ideal circumstances. If the planet has, well, clouds your visual recon was going to be a bit limited even from low orbit. And how many 30 meter telescopes can your fleet maintain anyways? So even with perfect sensors, the eye of Sauron likely falls on a much smaller part of the planet, leaving much more room for the defenders to get up to mischief.

None of this suggests why a planetary landing might be preferable to a primarily orbital move, but it hopefully outlines

1) Why I think effective use of space weapons likely requires some presence in LEO (or lower, maybe some other post), and if relying just on LEO assets rather than surface assets, quite substantial low orbit presence, and

2) Maintaining such a presence in the face of even fairly moderate anti-orbital weapons is likely to be costly and difficult for the orbital faction.

And I'll sign off for now, this is long enough as is.

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

 

[Crom's Black Blade]

*Sort of. Voyager's "75-year journey" was actually how long it would take if they jumped to Warp 9.75 and just left the ship on cruise. As the ship would basically melt long before it made it a week into that journey, it's actually much slower. I have a funny image in my mind of Janeway and Tuvok talking over presenting the most generous estimation for keeping crew morale up and it turns out it's based on the most generous, unrealistic estimation and the knowledge that her crew of Starfleet flunkouts can't do basic math.

PARIS: Warp nine point nine. In your terms, that's about four billion miles a second.
-The 37's (Voy, Season 2)

Voyager is capable of far faster speeds than under 1000c. Logically "maximum speed" in this context is maximum speed that could be realistically maintain which is likely around warp 6 since that's the speed Voyager was maintaining when the Voth detected their ship in Distant Origins. (Season 3)

Working off the closest nearby solar system to our own (ie, Alpha Centauri), an Imperium ship can travel that distance in about 12 days on average, so that's 133c (if my math isn't all fucked up--it's late and I just finished a paper an hour ago). The 360-720 days across a full Imperial sector comes out to 200 LY in that time range, which gives us an FTL of 101-202c. The 36-60 year journey is probably about 75,000 LY or about 1,250c to 2,083c.

That would put the IoM roughly on par with Star Trek ships in terms of long distance speed

Unlikely. Archer's Enterprise, barely capable of Warp 5, can travel to Earth to Kronos in " Four days there, four days back". Which while its exact distance is never given would have to be as far as Alpha Centauri or farther.

In DS9 we learn a freighter ship can travel from one edge of the Federation to the other in just "eight weeks" and Star Trek: First Contact established the Federation is 8,000 lightyears on at least one axis.

In TNG the Enterprise, after being at Earth at the start of the season, visits a world "which is over two thousand light years" away.

In Voyager the titular ship, performing a warp transports of Chakotay from a sublight ship, is traveling " two billion kilometers per second" in relation to him.

While another episode establishes Voyager, searching for a system in a 3 light year radius, could reach it in "Less than two hours"

The original Enterprise can cross "over a thousand light years" and back in under forty-eight hours.

The Enterprise E can go from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth in time to rally the losing fleet.

Star Trek certainly has it's low-ball Warp speeds but even Voyager, the series most concerned with establishing >1000c maximum warp, is badly inconsistent with it at best.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Note that Voyager episodes were inconsistent as Tartarus when it came to how fast the Warp Drive was, like just about everything else Voyager.

In the episode Emanations they traveled 0.6 light years in 2-5 seconds at Warp 7, yielding a speed of 4,000,000-10,000,000C for that factor. In the episode Night they state it will take two years to travel 2,500 light-years at Warp 8.5, setting it at 1,251C. In the episode Parallax it takes them about 1 second at Warp 9.975 to travel 10 million kilometers, for a maximum speed of 33C.

And that's just the ones that happen to imply they somehow get slower at higher factors, every number in between is in there as well.

 

[The Original Sixth]

PARIS: Warp nine point nine. In your terms, that's about four billion miles a second.
-The 37's (Voy, Season 2)

Voyager is capable of far faster speeds than under 1000c. Logically "maximum speed" in this context is maximum speed that could be realistically maintain which is likely around warp 6 since that's the speed Voyager was maintaining when the Voth detected their ship in Distant Origins. (Season 3)

Yeah, we know that isn't true. And it isn't really fair that another group of enthusiasts for say 40k or SW adhere to more reasonable speeds while we ignore our own. This is the official warp chart:

It's what the writers were supposed to have used. The figure for 75 year journey back home was given in the writer's manual and it was specifically stated there that this was ASSUMING maximum warp, which would be impossible for Voyager to maintain for more than 12 hours.

Unlikely. Archer's Enterprise, barely capable of Warp 5, can travel to Earth to Kronos in " Four days there, four days back". Which while its exact distance is never given would have to be as far as Alpha Centauri or farther.

They're incorrect.

Assuming 6 ly, that would require 547.5c, but we know that they'd be using the TOS scale. It would require the Enterprise to travel 85.7 days. Even at Warp 4 it would have taken them 35.3 days to reach said system. At Warp 5, it would take 17.65 days. You need to start getting to a Constitution class ship at Warp 7 before you even get to about 6 days there and 6 days back.

And I get it, but we know that Star Trek makes lots and lots of mistakes when it comes to their warp speeds. This is simply just another example. That's why we look to official material, because we know most authors won't stop and do the calculations to see how fast warp actually is.

In DS9 we learn a freighter ship can travel from one edge of the Federation to the other in just "eight weeks" and Star Trek: First Contact established the Federation is 8,000 lightyears on at least one axis.

In TNG the Enterprise, after being at Earth at the start of the season, visits a world "which is over two thousand light years" away.

In Voyager the titular ship, performing a warp transports of Chakotay from a sublight ship, is traveling " two billion kilometers per second" in relation to him.

While another episode establishes Voyager, searching for a system in a 3 light year radius, could reach it in "Less than two hours"

The original Enterprise can cross "over a thousand light years" and back in under forty-eight hours.

The Enterprise E can go from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth in time to rally the losing fleet.

Star Trek certainly has it's low-ball Warp speeds but even Voyager, the series most concerned with establishing >1000c maximum warp, is badly inconsistent with it at best.

See, the problem is that time is not portrayed consistently in Star Trek, so a lot of this stuff can be easily dismissed as a time skip. That is not always the case, as where Archer gives out his 4 days there, 4 days back and the most likely distance is probably between 4-8 light years.

Now, there is an argument to be made that there are high-speed "warp corridors" that allow for ships to cross much farther distances on their own. That would allow the Enterprise 1701 to reach the center and the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy and allow the Federation to hold onto an outpost there. It would also allow for variations in speeds, as there are areas where warp is faster or slower, depending upon the subspace situation. There is some info to support that theory, I think it was a TM, but I can't think the source might be right now.

That would allow for a warp factor boost of about 5.55x. Interestingly enough, if you took that figure and added it to Warp 6 on the TNG scale, you would get 1,198c and that means you could probably cross 75,000 LY in about 70-75 years, since you need to include downtime and such. But that's still an absurdly optimistic figure for long-range travel. And it would only be in areas that we know that such currents exist, such as leading to the galactic core or the galactic rim, to a few star systems, and so forth.

 

[Crom's Black Blade]

Yeah, we know that isn't true. And it isn't really fair that another group of enthusiasts for say 40k or SW adhere to more reasonable speeds while we ignore our own. This is the official warp chart:

There's a difference between looking for the highest examples, say hypothetically only using TOS speed figures, and using actual examples from the show.

Oddly you seem almost uninterested in Trek as a show seemingly only caring about backstage or supplemental material. Now if you want to talk about tech manual Star Trek that's fine but it bears only a passing resemblance to the actual show.

They're incorrect.

No, it's an example which disagrees with a backstage source making said backstage source inaccurate in describing show Star Trek. To the extent that any source is wrong, obviously the actual show has higher priority since that's what we want to discuss.

That's why we look to official material, because we know most authors won't stop and do the calculations to see how fast warp actually is.

Except said authors define "reality", not the "official material".

See, the problem is that time is not portrayed consistently in Star Trek, so a lot of this stuff can be easily dismissed as a time skip.

No, out of the examples quoted only the Enterprise-E could remotely be dismissed as a time skip. And even that is heavily bracketed by the Borg engaging the fleet.

TNG , as was pretty much all following Trek, was quite consistent of 1 season equaling one year so we have a minimum of the Enterprise-D traveling 2000 lightyears in less than 365 days.

In the DS9,Voy and TOS examples we have an explicit statement on either speed or time elapsed/distance.

Now, there is an argument to be made that there are high-speed "warp corridors" that allow for ships to cross much farther distances on their own. That would allow the Enterprise 1701 to reach the center and the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy and allow the Federation to hold onto an outpost there. It would also allow for variations in speeds, as there are areas where warp is faster or slower, depending upon the subspace situation. There is some info to support that theory, I think it was a TM, but I can't think the source might be right now.

There is, to my knowledge, absolute no evidence from the show that support "warp corridors" at least as you describe here. There is evidence subspace can be damaged and warp can be inhibited or prevented entirely, such as with Omega particles, but the issue is achieving warp speed in the first place rather than getting more miles per milicochcranes as you suggest. When ever warp factors are presented they're simply treated as a velocity. Ie warp 7 is faster than warp 6 but slower than warp 8 rather than just a power output that could be faster or slower due to geography.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Yeah, we know that isn't true. And it isn't really fair that another group of enthusiasts for say 40k or SW adhere to more reasonable speeds while we ignore our own. This is the official warp chart:

It's what the writers were supposed to have used. The figure for 75 year journey back home was given in the writer's manual and it was specifically stated there that this was ASSUMING maximum warp, which would be impossible for Voyager to maintain for more than 12 hours.



They're incorrect.

Assuming 6 ly, that would require 547.5c, but we know that they'd be using the TOS scale. It would require the Enterprise to travel 85.7 days. Even at Warp 4 it would have taken them 35.3 days to reach said system. At Warp 5, it would take 17.65 days. You need to start getting to a Constitution class ship at Warp 7 before you even get to about 6 days there and 6 days back.

And I get it, but we know that Star Trek makes lots and lots of mistakes when it comes to their warp speeds. This is simply just another example. That's why we look to official material, because we know most authors won't stop and do the calculations to see how fast warp actually is.



See, the problem is that time is not portrayed consistently in Star Trek, so a lot of this stuff can be easily dismissed as a time skip. That is not always the case, as where Archer gives out his 4 days there, 4 days back and the most likely distance is probably between 4-8 light years.

Now, there is an argument to be made that there are high-speed "warp corridors" that allow for ships to cross much farther distances on their own. That would allow the Enterprise 1701 to reach the center and the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy and allow the Federation to hold onto an outpost there. It would also allow for variations in speeds, as there are areas where warp is faster or slower, depending upon the subspace situation. There is some info to support that theory, I think it was a TM, but I can't think the source might be right now.

That would allow for a warp factor boost of about 5.55x. Interestingly enough, if you took that figure and added it to Warp 6 on the TNG scale, you would get 1,198c and that means you could probably cross 75,000 LY in about 70-75 years, since you need to include downtime and such. But that's still an absurdly optimistic figure for long-range travel. And it would only be in areas that we know that such currents exist, such as leading to the galactic core or the galactic rim, to a few star systems, and so forth.

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.