Ender wrote:Not just population. Incumbent with having a population that size is the infrastructure to support them, and the energy to power it. Particularly since this civilization can also launch starships – that implies a certain level of energy available to them in order for it to be economical. This civilization will be able to call upon more energy and resources then the entire Federation is able to. It’s the point that has been raised with the debate against Star Wars before – even if we went with the sheer stupidity of people like RSA the sheer scale of the industry means that they can bury the Federation, even if only by building things faster then the Federation can destroy them.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the Federation basically has unlimited time to develop a way to defeat this civilization, and the enemy has no remotely practical way of striking back.
Cooling the reflector isn't a big deal - I could use a phased array, which makes the cooling problem easier by reducing the heat load at a given point. Or stick an Excalibur type warhead on a drone. I don't need much power – Battle Lines and Survivors both had 40 MW phasers and “anti-proton beam”s as threats. Who Watches the Watchers had 4.2 GW be enough for a phaser bank, and even on the high end Survivors had a 400 GW beam kick the ass of a battleship. The first 3 examples are all well within the range of solar power stations that were designed in the 70's
That does not refute my point. Yes, it doesn't take enormous power to take out a warship. So what? How the fuck are you going to hit ships which can appear at any arbitrary place anywhere in your home system without any warning, fire, and then disappear
before you can even get a single radar reflection? Have you even vaguely tried to think this out?
Like I said, I don't need much. Hell, a 2.1 MJ disruptor was enough to shake the E-D in Conundrum. Though combining a charged particle beam with a magnetic sail to get a better starwisp may be a more efficient use.
See above.
Why must the drones have limited delta V?
Ummm, the laws of physics?
I could just as easily use beamed power propulsion. I can cut that by making them variations on the starwisp, or replace the mass of the engine with more fuel send the energy remotely. And even if I make them carry all their fuel, so what? They get the bonus from the relative motion of their launch platform.
Bullshit. That launch platform can only achieve those high velocities of yours on a fixed axis, which makes its forward velocity totally useless for launching torpedoes at anything which does not conveniently sit on that axis.
FTL is not as big an advantage here – firstly the Picard Maneuver in its brilliance of “get close to the guy and shoot him” is regarded as something rare, wonderful, and incredibly clever, not a standard tactic.
It is easily done, and would become a standard tactic against any enemy which is incapable of responding to it. You're just trying to handwave away anything that you have no answer for.
Secondly, even if they do that, at any reasonable clip the starship will be out of range for the Trek ship before they get their shot off. The Federation may see no need to not use FTL to pick the time and place of the engagement, but by the same token the hard sci-fi group has no reason to come to a dead stop relative to the Federation ship, line up, and fire like some kind of Napoleon era army in a vacuum.
More bullshit. They don't need to hit the enemy's starships. They can fuck up his planets and fixed installations.
As for the idea that the space infrastructure would be defenseless, I very strongly disagree with that idea.
Too bad.
Earth's orbit is 1 AU. Mars' orbit is ~1.5 AU. At 300 km/s, it would take three days for a projectile to reach Mars' orbit. Meanwhile, your average soft sci-fi ship makes that trip in minutes, and it's a full-functioning ship, not a missile. If we ignore the fact that it's not really possible and just look at tactical balance, soft sci-fi kicks the shit out of hard sci-fi. Accept it.
No answer to this?
PS. You can't be serious about simply "aiming" a 50,000km long payload accelerator at a moving target with attitude control jets.
I was thinking more about using it against a ship supporting troops.
And that somehow makes the idea practical?
Voyager is capable of landing on the surface, so I always figured it could do double duty as a troop transport. A ship in a stationary orbit is a sitting duck, and the loss of it will hurt the invading troops severely in terms of fire support, coordination, logistics, and moral (“Well, there goes our ride home guys”).
Oh yeah, as if the Feddie starship couldn't simply change its course slightly every now and then. Just how fast do you think this 50,000km long accelerator would re-orient itself, and what kind of settling time, rise time, and positional accuracy would you seriously expect for this operation?
The projectiles lack any kind of subspace tech or presence, so the Federation is going to have a really fucking hard time seeing it coming.
So? Even if this ridiculous scheme actually works once, it is trivial to develop a countermeasure for it. As for the whole idea of landing ground troops, the Federation sucks on the ground. This is well-known. But if we're talking about a "total war" situation and one group is looking to completely defeat the other, the option of simply trashing his planets and fixed installations is available. I don't see why there would be any ground actions at all.
Your objections to the Valkryie's use as a warship are irrelevant. I cited that as a counter to your statement that “.92c” and “hard Sci-fi” do not belong in the same post, not holding it as an example of the good warship.
Fine, I bow to the overwhelming power of your nitpickery. Perhaps you could have been even
more of a pedantic fucktard and pointed out that we can accelerate subatomic particles to .99c today, thus further disproving your nitpicky interpretation of my statement.
The First Law of Thermodynamics in no way forbids lighthuggers like you claimed.
We're talking about sci-fi WAR, fucktard. If you're talking about sci-fi WAR, it is not enough to say that we might hypothetically find ways to slingshot an object at near-relativistic speeds. It's no more relevant than the particle accelerator example. You need to find
tactically useful ways of achieving those speeds for warships, otherwise you're just engaging in pure red-herring bullshit.
Solar energy is more then enough to launch vast numbers of relativistic starships, no matter how it is packaged for the trip.
It is enough to theoretically launch starships which would
eventually reach relativistic velocities after an extremely long time, and only on a fixed axis. Thoroughly irrelevant to anything we're talking about here, and not even remotely comparable to what a typical soft sci-fi civilization can do.
Your bullshit is breathtaking; you have even taken tactics which they have used before (and quite easily so, having improvised them on the spot and then taught them at the Academy) and then declaring that they wouldn't use them here even though the enemy would have no way of responding to them. Are you so hostile to Trek that you wish to knock it down even in situations where it has a logical overwhelming advantage?
If nothing else, I could build a 300 AU long accelerator and throw the starships up to relativistic speeds, using magnetic sails to slow at their destination. Only our lack of imagination is the limiting factor. It is an engineering problem, not a physical one.
Except that you are talking about the wrong problem. What part of this do you not understand?
Even drag from the cosmic microwave background is insignificant. Even at a gamma of 100, the pressure of the blueshifted microwave photons is only about 1 micronewton per square meter. While it could conceivably establish a maximum possible velocity, I'd be hard pressed to think of a scenario when you would need to get that close to c.
Only two things could preclude a lighthugger: One is the interstellar space medium (ISM), and that doesn't appear likely. We don't know enough about dark matter to know how it would interact, though assuming it is just poorly lit normal matter would be the most conservative route. At the very least it is premature to say that the ISM make relativistic space travel impossible. Particularly since simply streamlining the craft will do much to help, not to mention the possibilities of magnetically shunting the ions aside or shooting down dust. The other is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Time dilation on the starship should effect the effectiveness of the radiators, though how much I'm not sure. This may only limit the acceleration the ship can pull.
Thank you, Professor Google. Is there any other material which is completely irrelevant to this discussion which you can dredge up in order to bolster your perceived credibility without addressing the actual subject of discussion?
I think one of the problems here is that we have not defined the opposition. Stating that they must be a “Had Sci-fi” group is incredibly broad – as was pointed out, that ranges from something like Charles Stross' Halting States, where the setting is a mere ten years from now, there is no space presence, and the highest technology mentioned in it are quantum computers that cost a few million British pounds; to something like Alistar Reynold's Revelation Space saga, where humanity has carved out a volume of space 10,000 LY in diameter and inhabits everything in there, with lighthuggers, Dyson swarms, atomic level computers, and molecular technology. And that makes all the difference'
No, it only extends the time it would take to defeat them. The Federation can concentrate forces at any desired point in a matter of months. This civilization would take thousands of years to accomplish the same. This is the mother of all force multipliers.
Computer technology. It is routinely noted that our present computer security and programming is superior to Trek technology. Given current trends in computing and this information I think it is a reasonable conclusion that an advanced hard sci-fi civilization will have them beat in this area. And that they will exploit it. From the prefix code in The Wrath of Kahn to the destruction of the Yamato to the times that Holodeck simulations threatened the ship we know that access to the main computer is a major threat. I have more trouble believing that any future society won't run roughshod over the Federation via their own computers then the opposite.
Do you honestly not understand that the timeframes of this war are so long that the Federation could deploy virtually every Trekkie wank scenario they've ever concocted? They really
could re-develop the Genesis Device, mass-deploy it, and then launch swarms of them. They really
could develop trilithium nova bombs, load them into long-range warp torpedoes, and scatter-shot them through the enemy's territory. They really
could deploy cloaking devices on every ship. All of this wanky bullshit which is totally ridiculous and irrelevant to a SW vs ST discussion becomes completely probable and realistic given the kind of timeframe the Federation has available to it in this scenario. Do you honestly not understand this?
Time. The point has been brought up that it will take millennia for anything launched from the hard group to reach the Federation. This is obviously true if the opposition replaced the Klingons or Romulans. Yet as the placement has never been defined, this cannot be assumed to be true. If the moons were swapped like I proposed above, then the Federation is going to have Mike dropping dumpsters on their heads long before they can recall a ship to Earth to try and dig the Loonies out. But what we do know is that Trek will take a considerable amount of time to go after the opposition. Consider: even with the incredible speed of Warp drive, it would still take years to bring ships in from across the Federation. This is time that the opposition can use to prepare themselves. They are likely to be screwed for offense (though it isn't a given) but they can play defense well enough to give the Federation a thumping.
Surely you know enough military history to know that if you can't take out the enemy's ability to wage war and he can, then you will eventually lose. Even the most spectacular tactical victories would only delay the inevitable.
Population. Once they do get there, what is the Federation going to do? I'm hard pressed to think of a hard sci-fi series that has a significant space presence and doesn't have more people in a single system then the Federation has in 10 systems. Most of them have single systems that outnumber the entire Federation by orders of magnitude. How will they subdue them, threaten to commit genocide on an entity larger then their entire civilization?
If your only argument is that the Federation would
refuse to commit itself to do what is necessary to defeat this civilization despite the apparent "total war" scenario implied by the OP, fine. But if they're going balls-out, their victory is inevitable.
I rather doubt threatening to shoot down space installations will be effective. One can reasonably expect humans will keep fighting wars in the future and good fences will still make good neighbors, so they would likely already have defenses installed.
And the Federation can probe and test those defenses at their leisure. Hell, the Federation
could set up bases all throughout enemy territory which the enemy would not detect for years if at all.
If not they would certainly do so as soon as they went to war. Phasers would have limited effectiveness against planet, moons, comets and asteroids due to their relatively low power, and space stations would have to defend against weapons of similar levels already.
And how would they do this? Shields? Energy-shields are nonsense-physics already.
As for torpedoes, first I would expect that they would already mount extensive point defense in space and missile defense for planets. And even if they can fire at them, it won't be very effective against the largest population centers. Wow, you bombed the fuck out of the lunar colony. Too bad it is built completely underground to take advantage of shielding. You didn't do a damn thing. The end result of this means that the Federation will have to bring in ground troops and go door by door fighting across a star system. That is not a winnable situation, particularly when you think about the time and travel bottleneck. How are they going to hold what they take?
See earlier point about the Federation having time to deploy every Trekkie wanktech idea they ever came up with.
Sensors. One recurring theme with Star Trek is that the target is using subspace technology, and that is what lets their own subspace sensors spot them. But the opposition doesn't use any subspace. So Trek would be damn near blind, at least until the recalibrate the positronic flux suppressor by 1.21 jiggawatts and discover the telescope. This is a major advantage. It is very hard to fly to a battle and fight when you can't see where it is or what is shooting at you. This is closely tied in with the population point – given that one can expect structures in the Oort cloud, the Federation has to find them. Find them and eliminate them before they can spawn daughter colonies.
They have all the time they need to find their targets. Meanwhile, the other civilization will respond incredibly slowly. In fact, most of your hypothetical super-sized hard-SF civilization
would not even know that a war was going on until thousands of years had passed. You really don't seem to be grasping the enormity of the disadvantage here.
Economy. A civilization with sufficient space infrastructure to routinely launch starships and support the expected population it would have by that time has more economic muscle then we have seen from the Federation. It is the same as Coruscant shows that Star Wars could buy and sell the Federation several times over. Tied in with that, what is stopping the opposition from expanding as fast as they can during the war? Even if they are stuck within the star system, their combined industrial output means they should be able to produce more stations. In fact, I would not be surprised if a mature space civilization could spawn more daughter colonies faster then the Federation could conquer them.
Once again, scale is not the same thing as speed. When you compare SW to ST, you are comparing a civilization to one that has superior scale
and speed. In this case, that is most definitely not the case; the opposing force will be pathetically slow to respond to anything. So slow, in fact, that a two year long war (for example) could be started, fought, and then concluded against a member system
before the next star system is even aware that anything is going on. Did you consider that?
Culture. More people and better computers and interconnectivity means more interactions means more expressions of these interactions and viewpoints, which, after a suitable amount of time has passed since the creator of said expression or viewpoint has died, is known as art. Look at Web 2.0 and the way Internet culture has exploded as a result. The opposition can hunker down, throw out the occasional starship to do battle, fight the invading troops, and export their culture.
Fine, go ahead and completely ignore the effect of communication speed. Again.
Victory conditions. The scenario makes a conventional win damn near impossible. The opposition can't plausibly take out the entire federation. Depending on where they are placed they may be able to knock earth or other important signatories around the head enough to get a victory, but that isn't a good assumption. The fact that one cannot fight an interstellar war means they can't do much for offense. By the time the took out the Utopia Planetia shipyards, the ones they had destroyed first would have been rebuilt. Against smaller hard sci-fi groups the Federation may be able to bring in enough people to win, but there aren't many groups they can do that to. Even a group as poor as the survivors in The Outcasts From Heaven's Belt have the sheer numbers to bury the Federation.
Speed kills. Accept it.
And it is unlikely they would shift to mass murder without severe provocation.
So? It's also unlikely that they would start a war at all. Too bad for you that the scenario stipulates just such a war, fought until the complete destruction or capitulation of one side.
It is my belief that against most of the space operas regarded as Hard sci-fi the Federation would be curb stomped.
That's because most space operas "regarded as hard sci-fi" are not hard sci-fi at all.
But if we define the term hard sci-fi as only those within the limits of what is know instead of the usual fuzzy definition then it becomes mush more difficult. I think in that kind of situation you would see almost a kind of stalemate – Federation worlds and staging areas nearby (within a few light years) would periodically be hit by strafing raids and infowar attacks, while Federation attacks against the target system would be a cross between Operation Overlord and Stalingrad – attacking ships would deal with infowar and defensive fire to destroy or harry them back, while the invading troops would be doing a variation on city fighting where the terrain is much more hostile due to the nature of the environment and the fact that they are so heavily outnumbered. It would be massive resource sink. But in that time the superior economic and influence power of the opposition would come into play. Just as what happened when Sparta conquered Athens, even if the Federation wins the war they lose their civilization. Their culture, economy, ideas, and way of life would be buried by the sheer volume of competing values from the opposition. The free market of ideas would come into play, and the Federation as it once was would disappear. To me, that would be a win for the opposition. They already have enough people that a change in government would be largely unnoticed, but the Dominion War shows that the same is not true for the Federation.
Pure tripe. A civilization limited to lightspeed communications and travel would be utterly fucked against a civilization with FTL propulsion and communication technology. The very idea of launching attacks against the FTL civilization's planets requires many years of lead-time, not to mention some kind of quasi-magical ability to know where the enemy's attacks are coming from. And once more, you're totally ignoring the fact that every Trekkie wank-tech idea under the Sun might actually be plausible if you give them that kind of time to fuck around.
