HMS Sophia wrote:That's the Germans. The threat of strategic bombing diverted 88's into defending cities and industrial areas instead of them being shipped to the front lines where they could be used as anti-tank guns.
Oh, the Germans did it on a vastly larger scale. But arguably, even having AA gun defenses anywhere except maybe the west coast was a complete waste of time for the US. I could have sworn some were mounted.
Also, the Germans faced a real strategic bombing threat that could have crippled them if they hadn't been able to use (among other things) the flak threat to force bombers to fly high and bomb inaccurately, even by the standards of WWII bombing technique.
Fair point, they would have been. Though can you calculate the morale boost given by a visible military presence in and around cities to show that the US was taking the war super seriously? I imagine that's non-negligible...
And yes, the German's were, which I did try to reference above. I was trying to make the point that they did it for a viable military reason, not for shits and giggles.
"Seriously though, every time I see something like this I think 'Ooo, I'm living in the future'. Unfortunately it increasingly looks like it's going to be a cyberpunkish dystopia, where the poor eat recycled shit and the rich eat the poor." Evilsoup, on the future
Simon_Jester wrote:The alternative is to post early warning networks and make sure the neighbors know you have a deterrent force in place that will definitely annihilate their planets and very probably annihilate their space habitats and so on too. And that you will probably be able to stop their counterattack without even being wiped out by the attack so that trying for a preemptive strike is utterly stupid and pointless beyond all possible belief.
I am just going to ask one thing. How are they going to pay for all that hardware?
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
If they're too poor to afford it, odds are they're too poor to actually tip the balance and trigger mass interstellar warfare, unless of course everyone was so close to the brink of such war that they'd have already fought it long ago.
My point was that the absolutely idiotically huge amount of hardware required would bankrupt anything short of the Empire.
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
The amount of hardware required is not orders of magnitude compared to the minimum necessary to launch a single system-wrecking attack that could credibly destroy an 'enemy' civilization's ability to make war. The only hard part is establishing early warning posts in deep space, and there are ways to partially mitigate this with FTL drive if you are tolerant enough of wide spacing between early warning outposts.
Simon_Jester wrote:The amount of hardware required is not orders of magnitude compared to the minimum necessary to launch a single system-wrecking attack that could credibly destroy an 'enemy' civilization's ability to make war. The only hard part is establishing early warning posts in deep space, and there are ways to partially mitigate this with FTL drive if you are tolerant enough of wide spacing between early warning outposts.
I like the idea, though the early warning systems wouldn't be set all that near any systems, just launched STL from the nearest gravaty well powerful enough to pop a warp bubble.
The reason that the FTL civilization would ally is the same reason that any other conquer would. They needed help. In theory, they might have been able to take out all of the STL civilization, and escape unharmed to rule over the ashes, but the risks where too high for rewards too small. Honestly, why bother with conquest when every formally habitable plante you take is a dead rock by the time you take possession of it? It's easier to terraform an Earthlike planet to Earth normal, tweaking the environment, instead of building it up from an ordinary dead rock.
The second reason, is that they needed either friends, or useful enemies to controll all the terratory they gained, providing more targets for irate gripes armed with Bussard Ramscops, AM drives, or STL warp drives. Also, they needed friendly enemies, civilizations who they might fight with often, or even just be in compation with, but who, isn't the end, wouldn't commit xeneocide on, if only to keep the status quo.
It's still a very high risk strategy for everyone involved, though, with high risks and low rewards.
Plus, given that earlier you were saying "politics motivates this," that "we need friendly enemies" crack sounds more like some ideological nutjob's idea of good policy. Not like something an actual public would normally be on board with. If you've already committed to wiping out virtually all life in the galaxy, for your own protection, how is it sane to leave alive precisely those civilizations which already have the most advanced technology?
Especially on grounds like "we need enemies to fight... but not genocidal because they wouldn't do that... because... um, something!"
I mean come on you have to realize how absurd that sounds.
But an alternative idea a bit closer to real life might be some highly relativistic neutron beam (obviously it'll have to be fast enough to not decay before it gets to the planet). You won't be able to see it because it's electrically neutral, that will help it to interact less with EM fields and photons on the way, but when it gets to the enemy planet, it deposits all its energy with the strong force.
That would involve... a... improbably big particle accelerator, plus the nontrivial problem of even accelerating neutrons in a coherent beam in the first place at all.
Again, you're talking about civilizations on the brink of warp-bubble technology. They'll need a particle accelerator larger than that for that purpose. The only idea of how to do it with a reasonable level of energy (i.e. not the mass-energy of Jupiter) is to somehow bend space so the inside is bigger than the outside and then move the outside bit around. If you do that, with a more reasonable level of energy such as, say, the gravitational binding energy of mercury, you'll need to fit that energy into an area of about 9 barns. For that you need a particle accelerator, and of rather large proportions.
Also, you don't need a coherent neutron beam, just a neutron beam.
Well, I don't think we can really treat this setting as hard-SF in that respect and assume "if warp drives then high end Kardashev Type 2.5 power outputs." Meanwhile, the idea of a star system-sized megastructural particle gun designed as an interstellar weapon is intellectually interesting, but it runs into serious problems
For example, with a neutron beam that's designed to not start decaying until it reaches the target star system, you need to accelerate the particle beam to a relativistic length contraction on the order of, oh... fifty thousand or more per light year of time of flight. The barrel length of the weapon scales more or less linearly with its intended range. You also have major problems with beam dispersion, with aiming, and with the vast majority of the energy you expend accelerating the beam being wasted on neutrons that pass harmlessly through the target system without hitting anything, or whose decay products don't hit anything.
Well, in terms of aiming, these will be comparable to a civilization that can launch warp bubbles at gas giants to a very high level of certainty. I dunno how much harder that aiming will be compared to aiming a neutron bean at a planet, but it's something worth thinking about.
Something else I've thought of: if you just want your beam to be undetectable (and ignore the whole problem of unpredictable deflections mid-flight), you could do that with charged particles if you make them fast enough. Imagine you have a beam of protons each with the energy of the Oh My God particle. That will have a relativistic gamma factor of 3.3e13 or a speed of 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 9951c, meaning over 4 light years, the light will be ~60 attoseconds in front of the beam. Due to relativistic beaming, this radiation will be concentrated into a beam of angle ~2/γ, so we are looking at a light beam of maximum width 4e-29 light-seconds, or 10 zeptometres wide. So unless you have your mini-wormholes, entangled particles or other FTL sensors are within that area, you're not going to detect it until it hits you.
