Wait. Is that on the Kerbal side or the Firefly side, I may be confused here. Again, the Kerbals are still using remotely realistic spacecraft designs; 20-30mm rounds (possibly armor piercing) can still penetrate pretty reliably, unless we're talking about spacecraft that mass in the range of tens of thousands of tons and have foot-thick walls just to handle the structural loading. And a ship like that... well, if the Kerbals could build those, Jeb Kerman wouldn't be complaining about how hard it is to build an Orion drive pusher plate.Zaune wrote:Well, it's pretty much exactly what I'd envisioned them as, albeit with a larger main gun; some of the ships they have to board for an inspection could shrug off 20mm cannon rounds just by sheer mass.Simon_Jester wrote:I haven't actually read it yet, but seriously, good on you.
Anyway, is my depiction of the "space patrol" craft reasonable to you?
As to the missiles, the thing to remember is that the Kerbal space effort doesn't really justify having a 'space combat doctrine' in the sense of having a well defined plan for systematic wars fought in space. The missiles are there for the same reason that a Coast Guard cutter has a cannon (or autocannon): it needs an "or else" when telling someone to "do this or else."
If they were seriously worried about spacegoing attack, mind, they are quite capable of building armed spacecraft- but their pre-existing situation wouldn't justify it.
OK, that's different. Even so, though, you'd be looking at at most a few dozen armed patrol craft (which would actually be doing search and rescue mostly), with something like 25-50% of them actually flying at any one time, maybe lessSomewhere in between the two, actually. They've got a decent-sized colony on Duna that's almost met their prearranged criteria for a plebiscite on independence, with a fair amount of trade and passengers going between it and Kerbin, an assortment of orbital factories and industrial facilities with a proper O'Neill cylinder on the way and a few scattered scientific outposts on the other planets and moons. Laythe is soon to be the site of the first 100% privately funded extraplanetary colony, and there's a couple of hundred asteroid mining ships in service.
The main thing likely to cause inflation of the numbers is that there are multiple national 'space forces' present in the scenario, even if the deep space exploration part has been globalized.
Can you give me an actual population estimate for the Kerbal space population? On an order of magnitude? 1000? 10000? 100000?
No hard feelings; just scale it down by about a factor of two. It's happened to me any number of times.Oh, and sorry about that damn picture. It looked fine everywhere else I posted the story to, when I posted it last night I was on my netbook; I thought it was just my screen.
