Hyperspace without hyperlimits

[SMJB]

[quote=""Building A Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle, as quoted by Atomic Rockets"]If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, then there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Empire because belonging to the empire wouldn't protect you. Instead there might be populations of planet-bound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of of space pirates. Upward mobility would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate.[/quote]I disagree. I think this analysis comes from the time when it was assumed that someone on Earth attacking an opponent in orbit would be like someone at the bottom of a well throwing stones at someone at the top of it.

A ship in space cannot hide. On a planet, it's relatively easy. If you're after conquest rather than genocide, you're not going to be using nukes or relativistic weapons (and in a universe where such weapons are common and/or people live on a lot of worlds with hostile environments, there's going to be precautions taken, like building your cities underground), whereas the defenders have no such disadvantage. Assuming all relevant industries are present on-world, the supply line will be at worst measured in kilometers, not lightyears. Assuming there's no such thing as a hyper limit, even what little advantage the planet's gravity well gave you is negated. (Presumably ships/missiles can see each other in hyper.)

What we would see in such a situation is that there would be a lot of planetary militias. "Pirates" will never have the resources be able to take a planet, and anyone with a planetary home base can presumably be traced back to their home base (through spies, interrogations, etcetera) and have that base attacked. You would see at best loose confederations of planets, and planets who declare themselves independent would largely be let go without a fight. A federation simply doesn't have the power to enforce its will on unwilling worlds without resorting to choke-their-rivers-with-our-dead-style drastic measures.

Which still means the Empire could not exist, just for an entirely different reason.

[Zwinmar]

I would beg to differ. Empires could still exist because it may prove beneficial for provinces to coalesce around a government. While it may not be hyper-centralized it is not unprecedented for a nation/country/political entity to answer to a higher authority while they are relatively autonomous, all that is required is that the citizens feel like they are part of something greater.

[Batman]

Wouldn't that go both ways? Sure, you have no protection against pirate raids, but neither do the pirates have protection against the Navy seriously ruining their day on zero notice once they figure out where you're staging from.

[Boeing 757]

An empire being grounded on such a hyperdrive could still provide enough adequate protection in order to convince independent worlds that its hegemony could be worthwhile for them, should they gain membership. The fear of reprisal and threat of retaliation alone of a strong government can provide a very powerful disincentive against its member-worlds being attacked in the first place. Even if this universe's hyperdrive has no hyperlimits, an empire could still supply member-states with enough ammunition and defenses so that it could thwart any would-be attackers that may come unannounced out of hyperspace.

[Purple]

Wouldn't that go both ways? Sure, you have no protection against pirate raids, but neither do the pirates have protection against the Navy seriously ruining their day on zero notice once they figure out where you're staging from.

I would not count on that. Pirates as a rule are not going to be one monolithic block. And thus they won't need large stationary staging grounds like planets. It is far more likely that they will simply operate entirely from their ships, with the larger factions maybe having some star stations and the like. All of which can be easily dispersed and moved out of the way of an attacking fleet. This is especially true in a setting where the government can arrive at any time without notice.

[SMJB]

I do imagine confederations of a sort existing, but the simple fact is that it would be pretty difficult for any central authority to assert itself in any meaningful way if member worlds can up and quit the union whenever they feel like. Remember that all of these planets, of necessity, have their own individual militaries. Remember also that the primary military benefit of such multi-planet unions are offensive in nature.

I imagine taking a planet from space or hyperspace is extremely difficult. This assumption affects the--er, I guess the word is "predictions"--I'm making.

[Simon_Jester]

The "successive hordes of space pirates" referenced are intended to evoke things like the nomadic cultures of Central Asia in the pre-gunpowder era. Basically, armies/fleets/whatever that arrive out of nowhere and hold you hostage. Sure, you can shoot back, but they are already in position to hurt you badly. Paying them tribute will tend to be more appealing than fighting.

Calling these people "pirates" is like calling the Huns or the Mongol hordes "raiders." It's technically accurate, but we have to remember that what the term evokes for us (small groups staging smash-and-grabs) is not exactly the reality behind our use of the word.

The way you counter them is by having defenses and institutions that buy time and allow an organized force to use 'collective defense' strategies. If you can delay an attacker until the massed force of twenty planets' Federal Navy arrives to blow away the raiding horde, then that attacker will soon cease to be a problem, and no sane people will act as attackers in the future.

But there's no incentive to do that if 'raider' groups can literally appear out of nowhere with no warning, and depart just as easily. Because in that case, it's much harder to make collective defense an effective deterrent.

On the one hand, the collective deterrent force cannot be used directly to block the attack, it can only go running around looking for where the attack came from to take revenge. Since that is inherently an uncertain process, it gives a would-be raider more grounds for optimism about his chances of getting away with it.

On the other hand, the very possibility of "raiders from nowhere" means that you can't afford to concentrate all the forces of your twenty worlds in a single deterrent fleet. If you scatter your fleets looking for the raiders' unknown base, and neglect the defenses of each of your worlds, the same group of raiders might well be able to hit several of your worlds in turn. So the vast majority of your forces must be kept at home to defend their own bases, and the total fraction of your forces that can be used for counterattack decreases.

In other words, if travel is fast and enemies can appear out of nowhere, then the enemy only has to be strong in one place to threaten you, while you must be strong in all places to deter a threat. This gives a strategic advantage to the smaller polity.

[jollyreaper]

I don't think there is any universal answer. It depends on the setting. For example, in the age of sail the saying went a ship's a fool to fight a fort. A ballistic missile submarine can level a country. Then again, a carrier would still be vulnerable against mobile cruise missile vehicles deployed on land.

If planets have incredible offenses, mere fleets would have trouble making raids. If planets are weak, they are easy takings. If you can warp a ship in on top of a planet, even into a planet, you have a tremendous WMD. That might ruin certain kinds of space opera so the writer forbids it. If you have transporters that operate across interstellar distances, you have no need for starships.

I think you can justify what you want as long as you take the time and it has the feel of authenticity.

[Formless]

Wouldn't that go both ways? Sure, you have no protection against pirate raids, but neither do the pirates have protection against the Navy seriously ruining their day on zero notice once they figure out where you're staging from.

I would not count on that. Pirates as a rule are not going to be one monolithic block. And thus they won't need large stationary staging grounds like planets. It is far more likely that they will simply operate entirely from their ships, with the larger factions maybe having some star stations and the like. All of which can be easily dispersed and moved out of the way of an attacking fleet. This is especially true in a setting where the government can arrive at any time without notice.

Then you effectively have a random assortment of criminals, and can deal with them the same way governments always have.

Basically, the problem with Niven and Pournell's reasoning is that the whole existence of the drive makes everyone in the universe "closer", in the same way trains, cars, and airplanes did. Faster travel times allows for more expansive governments and empires, a trend towards "globalization" (or whatever you would call it here). Where are these "pirates" supposed to come from anyway? The faster you can travel, the faster the "frontier" goes away, meaning that outlaws have no place to hide anymore. Plus, people don't simply form coalitions and organizations based on mutual defense, but also on ideology, culture, economic advantage, and many other things. Even if the pirate situation happened, pretty soon things would stabilize into coalitions of former pirates now running larger scale communities. The Franks were once considered a barbarian tribe by Rome. Now we just call them the French.

[jollyreaper]

The Seafort Saga expressly had FTL with long transit times to justify the return of the dictator captain from the age of sail. No FTL coms, huge delegated authority. The author also saw the UN resurrecting strict monotheism as a way of enforcing temporal law far beyond means of effective coercion. You mess with the captain, you mess with god.

Many people had quibbles with the proposed historical convolutions leading up to this situation but the story was done well enough that you could overlook the hand waves. The story he wanted to tell required an age of sail dynamic. An admiralty board decision is years away from a round trip. There's no micromanaging from back on earth. The author knew what he was trying to accomplish with the story and crafted the world to support it.

[Simon_Jester]

Side note: in the CoDominium universe, messages travel at the speed of ship- thus, there is no way to summon reinforcements to a planet under attack easily and reliably, even if those reinforcements can travel at infinite speed.

I don't think there is any universal answer. It depends on the setting. For example, in the age of sail the saying went a ship's a fool to fight a fort. A ballistic missile submarine can level a country. Then again, a carrier would still be vulnerable against mobile cruise missile vehicles deployed on land.

True- although the ballistic missile sub would have a very different experience trying to penetrate the defenses of a continent-sized opponent that's made serious investments into ballistic missile defense. Which doesn't invalidate your core point.

Even if, as is the case in the CoDominium setting, ships are too precious to be expended as kamikaze weapons or hyperspace missiles, they're still very dangerous when they can literally teleport out of nowhere and just drop nuclear bombs on things. So your core point is very valid indeed.

Then you effectively have a random assortment of criminals, and can deal with them the same way governments always have.

Governments' survivability depends in part on the fact that criminals can't randomly pop out of nowhere and bomb their (permanent, fixed, publicly known) headquarters. Or if they can, they cannot easily do so in an organized fashion, the way a national military could. A military can do that, but a military is too big to approach without tripping alarms, so you can at least see them coming and respond in kind.

If raiders or criminals could easily neutralize the facilities of the law enforcers meant to stop them, it would be very hard to fight them at all. Also, bear in mind that "pirates" are not necessarily random freebooters. They can just as easily be, say, the armed forces of a single ferocious polity that wants to reduce some of the neighboring territories to a state of tributary subjection.

If their forces can jump around freely, and if their own home position is not well known to everyone involved (say, because they took precautions to create deniability until such time as they'd sabotaged their opponents fatally)... they could do a lot of damage. "It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation," as Kipling put it.

Basically, the problem with Niven and Pournell's reasoning is that the whole existence of the drive makes everyone in the universe "closer", in the same way trains, cars, and airplanes did. Faster travel times allows for more expansive governments and empires, a trend towards "globalization" (or whatever you would call it here). Where are these "pirates" supposed to come from anyway? The faster you can travel, the faster the "frontier" goes away, meaning that outlaws have no place to hide anymore.

The theory would probably be that the sheer size of outer space means that "bad guys" have more places to hide, can operate from a base so remote that even with the ability to teleport it takes too long to work out where it is. Think Hoth in Star Wars.

Plus, people don't simply form coalitions and organizations based on mutual defense, but also on ideology, culture, economic advantage, and many other things. Even if the pirate situation happened, pretty soon things would stabilize into coalitions of former pirates now running larger scale communities. The Franks were once considered a barbarian tribe by Rome. Now we just call them the French.

This is true, but it happens on a timescale of decades or centuries. And the structural point here is that the ability to achieve automatic surprise with hyperspace jumps tends to favor small polities over large ones, when it comes to a conflict.

That doesn't go away over time, unless you invent some other means of making planets and facilities resistant to attack by surprise raiders-from-hyperspace. So you might well see an endless cycle of 'barbarians'* emerging from various recesses of space, dismantling the complacent and slower-reacting forces of 'empires'**, taking advantage of the huge tactical edge they get from being on the strategic offensive in a universe where every attack achieves complete surprise.

Basically, ibn Khaldun's Asabiyyah cycles, only IN SPAAAACE! Which is a concept you can make great stories about***, but they weren't the stories Niven and Pournelle wanted to tell, so they did things another way.

*(i.e. tough, militarized, agile polities, relatively resistant to counterattack because of where they live, how they live, or how little they have to lose)
**(i.e. less militarized, less agile polities, relatively vulnerable to attack because their territory and forces are spread out over a wide area, and they have a lot to lose)
***(Junghalli, this is your cue! Although seriously, half of Golden Age SF touches on this theme in one way or another; see The Only Thing We Learn, by Cyril Kornbluth).

[Formless]

Governments' survivability depends in part on the fact that criminals can't randomly pop out of nowhere and bomb their (permanent, fixed, publicly known) headquarters. Or if they can, they cannot easily do so in an organized fashion, the way a national military could. A military can do that, but a military is too big to approach without tripping alarms, so you can at least see them coming and respond in kind. Governments' survivability depends in part on the fact that criminals can't randomly pop out of nowhere and bomb their (permanent, fixed, publicly known) headquarters. Or if they can, they cannot easily do so in an organized fashion, the way a national military could. A military can do that, but a military is too big to approach without tripping alarms, so you can at least see them coming and respond in kind.

And why are you assuming that random pirates can do that without tripping the same alarms? Size matters not, what matters is the sensitivity and effectiveness of early detection systems, much like how my ability to hijack an airplane is effected by my ability to slip a weapon past airport security.

If nothing else works, don't let civilians have access to hyperdrives without a license. Problem solved. No barbarians, no unauthorized or undocumented vessels allowed access to the frontier where they could hide and create weapons. Empires expand extremely fast if they are given the territory. Think of how fast China's population exploded. Now put a limit on where they can go and what they can take with them. Think like a tyrannical empire for a moment. Good. Goood. Channel your knowledge of Thomas Hobbes. Channel your knowledge of 1984. Let the hate flow through you.

[jollyreaper]

There's also a question of the industrial base required for starships in the first place. I always liked it in Civilization when I encountered a barbarian submarine or battleship.

With age or sail technology, it was possible for pirates to operate and be a threat to merchantmen. But if you move to the 20th century, you don't see the equivalent of corvettes flying the Jolly Roger. The closest thing you get to privateers are commerce-raiders who are actually destroying goods instead of stealing them. U-boats, pocket battleships, and uniformed sailors as part of a country's regular navy. Given Germany's behavior, you could say that crude barbarians have to become a proper empire to have the industrial base to support all the nice toys.

The military lesson I do think would apply regardless of setting and technology is that a planet's means to project power can be neutralized more easily than it can be conquered, or more specifically, turned into a revenue-producing asset. The Japanese were swept from the sea by 1945 and yet it still would have cost a million casualties to actually invade them. The atom bombs and subsequent diplomacy brought Japan into the western sphere in a productive fashion.

In both Iraq wars, the conventional military was destroyed with speed. Iraq could not project power. But doing anything useful in an occupation was a different matter. Could we have dropped atom bombs and killed everyone? Not with the world looking on. We killed tons of locals. They could not stand up to our firepower directly. We had favorable kill ratios. But we were bleeding money and never turned a profit.

So I would tend to think it is one thing to destroy a planet's fleets, it's means of projecting power, containing it, another thing to glass the surface and destroy all life and quite another to conquer it, for varying definitions of conquest which I'll define in part as turning a profit. Glassing the planet would only be about denying it to the enemy. If there's any contest for control of a planet, one presumes much of the value is tied up in the people who live there and the infrastructure in place. Lands without peasants don't do a lord much good. Unless the people don't matter, of course, some extractive industry like mining or oil drilling. But for most usual, non-mcguffinite resources, you can get those from asteroids and such. Mars doesn't need Earth's water. So I will amend my statement to say conquest is hard if you need some level of cooperation from the locals to meet your goal.

[Purple]

On the other hand we have the mongol solution. Put your ships in orbit of the enemy planet and issue an ultimatum. If the planet does not surrender it gets glassed. After a few planets go down like this they will start surrendering. Now the difference is that here since you can do this so can anyone else. So there is no point in trying to hold it. Just pick the world clean of what ever you can carry and run off before the next bully arrives for his share.

[Simon_Jester]

The model of conquest and raiding described here does not revolve around glassing, as Purple notes. It revolves around the credible threat to glass. Just as the Mongols conquered not by razing cities, but by razing one city, then threatening to do the same to the next if they didn't surrender. Thus, they permanently weakened future opposition (by removing one city entirely), and secured the immediate submission of the rest of their targets.

Also, we have to ask, what are the goals of the raiders here? It isn't necessarily as simple as "argh we be freebooters, let's steal some booty." The use of the word "pirates" should not mislead you. You could just as easily be looking at a provincial armed force trying to secure independence for a small holding, by aggressively threatening the core worlds of the empire. We don't think of that as "a horde of pirates," but it certainly means the death of the empire if it's allowed to happen a dozen times in a row.

Also, because of the absolute advantage of surprise, in the long run power will tend to gravitate into the hands of people who are decisive and aggressive about using it, and who have an offensive focus rather than a defensive one. That makes it easier to tear apart a large, extended political system than it is to create one.

And why are you assuming that random pirates can do that without tripping the same alarms? Size matters not, what matters is the sensitivity and effectiveness of early detection systems, much like how my ability to hijack an airplane is effected by my ability to slip a weapon past airport security.

I was thinking of intelligence, not detection systems.

For example, the real warning we'd get if World War III broke out is not the radar and satellite images of missiles coming over the north pole. It's the news, over a period of weeks, of rising tensions and diplomatic attempts breaking down. That's what tips you off to the hostility of a large military in a realistic environment- whoever is acting as that military's patron has to get angry before they'll consider a military solution. Thus, you can anticipate the actions of a military if you are intelligent.

There are exceptions- Stalin being blindsided by Hitler, for instance. But those represent failures of the intelligence of the government, and no government will prosper if it is stupid.

[Pearl Harbor is another example, but there the Japanese achieved only operational surprise, not strategic. The US was expecting the Japanese to make a move somewhere; they just weren't expecting the daring and risky move of a direct attack on Hawaii.]

If nothing else works, don't let civilians have access to hyperdrives without a license. Problem solved. No barbarians, no unauthorized or undocumented vessels allowed access to the frontier where they could hide and create weapons.

This only works if you already own everything in human space, which is not a foregone conclusion. If you don't, then you will have to dedicate the imperial military to combing the frontiers looking for unauthorized ships and settlements. Two problems:

1) That risks provoking the very 'war of dismantlement' you're hoping to avoid, because the colonists will shoot back.

2) That disperses your armed forces so that they may not be able to respond effectively to things like a rebellion by a provincial fleet commander that strikes abruptly for the capital, which is also a failure mode for empires. You aren't just worried about the Goths and Huns crossing the Rhine, you're worried about Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

[jollyreaper]

On the other hand we have the mongol solution. Put your ships in orbit of the enemy planet and issue an ultimatum. If the planet does not surrender it gets glassed. After a few planets go down like this they will start surrendering. Now the difference is that here since you can do this so can anyone else. So there is no point in trying to hold it. Just pick the world clean of what ever you can carry and run off before the next bully arrives for his share.

But can this scale? The idea of a rogue pirate sloop works and had a historical antecedent. A rogue pirate battleship? The primary argument against that is the scale of industrial base required to support it. Although strictly speaking, the golden age of piracy sloop was still utterly dependent upon its prey for essential supplies. I believe there were some proper pirate states possessing full manufacturing capabilities in the east but, as far as the Caribbean goes, ships and rope and canvas all came from capture. Any ship resembling a 20th century warship is tied to a sophisticated industrial infrastructure.

With the Mongols, they were the threat in your backyard. You had no idea where they came from. There was no means of striking back. Someone tries this in the 20th or 21st century, ICBM's can be there quicker than a delivery pizza.

So, what would it take for space mongols to work?
1) Other powers can't easily threaten mongol homeworlds. As you said, if they can send a fleet to you, you can send a fleet to them. So if they're willing to threaten you where you live, they would have made it difficult for you to find where they live. So our mongols would have to be space nomads. Anything that isn't mobile would have to be not on or in orbit around a planet or known star but hidden, like in some planetoid adrift in interstellar space where waste heat could be dumped into the cold interior.
2) Ships are assumed to be technological constructs. Ponies grow on steppes. You're moving into biowank or strong AI territory if the ships are self-replicating or self-maintaining. So if human brainpower is doing most of the work of running society...
3) Space mongols would need a sophisticated, technological society. A sophisticated society that can be self-contained within the horde fleet that can keep on the move to avoid counterattack.
4) Help must be sufficiently far away. Otherwise the fleet risks destruction.

There's probably a few other details I'm missing.

[Siege]

If you can sneak up on planets, i.e. there's nothing stopping you from going into hyperspace anywhere you want, would the majority of your ships really look like traditional sci-fi spaceships? Why would they? Would you really need deep-space moving-about nonsense when you can just shift from departure point A on the surface of planet X into hyper and straight onto arrival point B on the surface of planet Y? And if that's the case, why bother going anywhere near orbit in the first place? That's like fitting jump jets to a freight lorry, it's insane over-engineering if the worst you'll encounter is a traffic jam.

The hyperlimit as a staple of science fiction isn't just there to allow planets to defend themselves from ships, it's a requirement for having ships-as-we-know-them to begin with. Without it the need to go far away from planets into deep space simply disappears, unless you come up with either some sort of targeting trouble (we can aim well enough to jump across light years into orbit around a planet in another solar system but the last few thousand kilometers are somehow an insurmountable hurdle -- this I suspect will start to feel really artifical really fast), or you must find some other pressing reason for people to spend a lot of time in empty vacuum.

Also I'd like to inject that if this go-anywhere system is a thing the pirates from Morgan's Quadrant don't actually need ships to terrorize you: they can simply threaten to hypershift a nuke straight into your city.

[Formless]

The model of conquest and raiding described here does not revolve around glassing, as Purple notes. It revolves around the credible threat to glass. Just as the Mongols conquered not by razing cities, but by razing one city, then threatening to do the same to the next if they didn't surrender. Thus, they permanently weakened future opposition (by removing one city entirely), and secured the immediate submission of the rest of their targets.

You know that threat becomes less and less credible as the amount of orbital infrastructure increases. Try these threats against a Dyson swarm or against Ringworld (one of Niven's own works). See how far it gets you. That's right, nowhere. They are too big to threaten by some punk ass fleet of raiders or barbarians or whatever the fuck you want to call them. Point is that they will always be outnumbered in any reasonable scenario, so the damage they can do is too limited to matter. At best, it will drive civilization towards tyranny, not anarchy.

Also, because of the absolute advantage of surprise, in the long run power will tend to gravitate into the hands of people who are decisive and aggressive about using it, and who have an offensive focus rather than a defensive one. That makes it easier to tear apart a large, extended political system than it is to create one.

"Absolute advantage of surprise"? Seriously, enough of this BS. It is not a given that there will be an element of surprise. The only thing known about the hyperdrive is that it has infinite speed. It does not necessarily mean that the process is instantanious or undetectable. Activating it may take a while, and create something detectable in the meanwhile, such as a portal of some sort on each size. Then you have to wait for it to grow large enough, and that is enough warning for the other side that surprising them is not a given. The accuracy of navigation may not be accurate enough to safely put you inside of a star system, so in practice everyone still must check in at the periphery of the system before either making the final jump or just getting into the system the old fashioned way. Speed isn't the only limitation, but its the only one Pournell and Niven talk about. You are already forgetting jollyreaper's point, even though you agreed with it.

Also, again, not everyone necessarily can have access to it, whether because of economics or because the government has the foresight to anticipate this very problem.

This only works if you already own everything in human space, which is not a foregone conclusion.

Question. How did colonies outside the Sol system come to be in all of your hypotheticals?

The hyperlimit as a staple of science fiction isn't just there to allow planets to defend themselves from ships, it's a requirement for having ships-as-we-know-them to begin with. Without it the need to go far away from planets into deep space simply disappears, unless you come up with either some sort of targeting trouble (we can aim well enough to jump across light years into orbit around a planet in another solar system but the last few thousand kilometers are somehow an insurmountable hurdle -- this I suspect will start to feel really artifical really fast), or you must find some other pressing reason for people to spend a lot of time in empty vacuum./quote]
That's a much better argument, although not foolproof. As I said, navigation could be a problem to teh point where you could just teleport from planet to planet or space colony to space colony. Or you could end up telefragging yourself by teleporting into solid rock.

But in my mind, the really cool thing about infinite speed is that it lets you escape the observable universe-- like if you could escape the event horizon of a black hole. What exists beyond beyond? Does spacetime even follow the same rules out at that distance? Now that's my kind of sci-fi! Screw space opera. I want to explore the sixth dimension.

[Purple]

But can this scale? The idea of a rogue pirate sloop works and had a historical antecedent. A rogue pirate battleship?

Why not? In a situation like this it would be trivially easy for a fleet officer, be he a captain or an admiral to decide he can get a better deal by turning pirate. And there is little the rest of the army can do to stop him.

The primary argument against that is the scale of industrial base required to support it. Although strictly speaking, the golden age of piracy sloop was still utterly dependent upon its prey for essential supplies. I believe there were some proper pirate states possessing full manufacturing capabilities in the east but, as far as the Caribbean goes, ships and rope and canvas all came from capture. Any ship resembling a 20th century warship is tied to a sophisticated industrial infrastructure.

It all depends on how the ships are designed. If they have a high degree of automation or just have a modular design you could easily pull over anywhere in deep space for repairs. You don't really need dry docks or complex machinery when there are no elements to protect from and your work crews can maneuver in 3D freely without having to worry about gravity. All you need is spare parts. So as long as you can capture those by raiding planets you can support your self out in space indefinitely.

This is especially true given that the likely goal is NOT to get into fights in the first place. Pull over next to a planet and transmit your warning. If they shoot back, glass them and run. If it has a fleet protecting it than jump in, glass and run without even a warning.

So, what would it take for space mongols to work?
1) Other powers can't easily threaten mongol homeworlds. As you said, if they can send a fleet to you, you can send a fleet to them. So if they're willing to threaten you where you live, they would have made it difficult for you to find where they live. So our mongols would have to be space nomads. Anything that isn't mobile would have to be not on or in orbit around a planet or known star but hidden, like in some planetoid adrift in interstellar space where waste heat could be dumped into the cold interior.

Not nesecerily. If FTL works quickly and without limits than you don't need to dump waste hear or hide or nothing. Space is big. In fact it's huge. So just run away to somewhere far enough away.

2) Ships are assumed to be technological constructs. Ponies grow on steppes. You're moving into biowank or strong AI territory if the ships are self-replicating or self-maintaining. So if human brainpower is doing most of the work of running society...

I do not even know where this came from.

3) Space mongols would need a sophisticated, technological society. A sophisticated society that can be self-contained within the horde fleet that can keep on the move to avoid counterattack.

You seem to be thinking huge scales where as I am thinking small. You envision a giant mongol horde of a million ships. I envision a million small pirate bands made out of breakaway outlaw fleet captains raiding left and right where ever they can, occasionally aligning to beat up a particularly pesky planet.

4) Help must be sufficiently far away. Otherwise the fleet risks destruction.

That's always a risk with any military operation.

[Sky Captain]

IIRC in Stargate it was also possible to jump out of hyperspace few km from planetary surface, only full WMD implications of that capability was never fully taken into account.

A setting with unlimited FTL would highly favor fully mobile nations that exist in some sort of mostly self sufficient worldships that spend most of the time in deep interstellar space never staying in one location too long and sending out smaller ships to raid some random star systems for resources. If everything is mobile then a successful counterattack would be hard to manage because attacker would have to know exactly where (maybe within few light second range) the worldship is.

[SMJB]

Firstly, in a universe where planet-glassing is a thing that happens, people are going to build their cities deep enough underground to ensure that being glassed doesn't hurt them. Hell, if we're not assuming a universe full of Earth-like planets, building underground is just practical. Eventually the planet raiders are going to come across a world that says "Go ahead and nuke us. What's it going to do, poison our non-existent atmosphere?"

As to Siege's suggestion, the problem here is that, well, hitting a planet from another star system takes ridiculous precision. Accuracy to within one part in a billion across ten lightyears means you're going to come out somewhere in a sphere a hundred thousand kilometers in radius centered on your target, for example.

[SMJB]

As for infinite speed, I don't know of any typical hyperdrive that does that, but anyway, it seems it would help unity. Individual worlds in the union would only need to hold off an invasion fleet long enough for them to call for help. I suspect a hyper-militarized universe in that scenario--no world is entirely safe, and only the fleet and the planetary militias keep them as safe as they are.

Tangentially, I know not being able to see into hyperspace is generally a big part of the trope, but it seems to me that logically speaking there must be a way to sense hyperspace from realspace, or else how was it discovered in the first place?

[Simon_Jester]

So, what would it take for space mongols to work?
1) Other powers can't easily threaten mongol homeworlds. As you said, if they can send a fleet to you, you can send a fleet to them. So if they're willing to threaten you where you live, they would have made it difficult for you to find where they live. So our mongols would have to be space nomads. Anything that isn't mobile would have to be not on or in orbit around a planet or known star but hidden, like in some planetoid adrift in interstellar space where waste heat could be dumped into the cold interior.

To be fair, all you really need is for the location of the settlements to be undocumented or deniable: i.e. you have a civilization that assembles its fleet in a remote star system and attacks without leaving evidence of where the attacks came from. That doesn't work so well if you're trying to extract tribute, but it does work if you're trying to devastate an Imperial border region so that your own polity can break away from the Empire.

2) Ships are assumed to be technological constructs. Ponies grow on steppes. You're moving into biowank or strong AI territory if the ships are self-replicating or self-maintaining. So if human brainpower is doing most of the work of running society...
3) Space mongols would need a sophisticated, technological society. A sophisticated society that can be self-contained within the horde fleet that can keep on the move to avoid counterattack.
4) Help must be sufficiently far away. Otherwise the fleet risks destruction.

In the CoDominium universe, the FTL drive is instantaneous-between-jump-points. In other settings condition (4) can be met.

Also, remember that if a planet can rapidly summon help to teleport in and save it, you become open to cases where the attacker uses feints to lure small relief forces into traps, or to lure large relief forces out of position so that a more critical target can be uncovered. As I observed earlier, in a setting where travel is instantaneous and provides no warning, the defender must be strong everywhere, while the attacker need only be strong in a few places at a time.

The hyperlimit as a staple of science fiction isn't just there to allow planets to defend themselves from ships, it's a requirement for having ships-as-we-know-them to begin with. Without it the need to go far away from planets into deep space simply disappears, unless you come up with either some sort of targeting trouble (we can aim well enough to jump across light years into orbit around a planet in another solar system but the last few thousand kilometers are somehow an insurmountable hurdle -- this I suspect will start to feel really artifical really fast),

Well, if your system is only precise to one part in a million, your jumping ships wind up scattered anywhere in a sphere millions of kilometers across. That imposes interesting constraints... to my way of thinking, it tends to favor single very large ships, because coordinating a rapid flow of smaller ships runs into navigational problems.

Also I'd like to inject that if this go-anywhere system is a thing the pirates from Morgan's Quadrant don't actually need ships to terrorize you: they can simply threaten to hypershift a nuke straight into your city.

True, though they might want something recognizable as a "ship" to, say, carry off hostages or plunder (i.e. machine tools)

You know that threat becomes less and less credible as the amount of orbital infrastructure increases. Try these threats against a Dyson swarm or against Ringworld (one of Niven's own works). See how far it gets you. That's right, nowhere. They are too big to threaten by some punk ass fleet of raiders or barbarians or whatever the fuck you want to call them. Point is that they will always be outnumbered in any reasonable scenario, so the damage they can do is too limited to matter. At best, it will drive civilization towards tyranny, not anarchy.

On the other hand, when we accept that megastructures bigger than worlds are the norm, we also recognize that the "raider" threat can easily take the form of a 'hegemonizing swarm' which has absorbed the resources of multiple star systems and can teleport out of nowhere with fleets of mass comparable to that of a ringworld.

Also, because of the absolute advantage of surprise, in the long run power will tend to gravitate into the hands of people who are decisive and aggressive about using it, and who have an offensive focus rather than a defensive one. That makes it easier to tear apart a large, extended political system than it is to create one.

"Absolute advantage of surprise"? Seriously, enough of this BS. It is not a given that there will be an element of surprise. The only thing known about the hyperdrive is that it has infinite speed. It does not necessarily mean that the process is instantanious or undetectable.

On the other hand it doesn't mean that it isn't.

Look, this thread started as a general observation about strategy and politics in settings where FTL drives let you appear very close to a planet. There are a lot of ways to imagine such a drive working. It could be instantaneous- or it could take weeks to travel from star to star. It could be detectable far in advance- or it could not.

The one unifying feature in this thread is NOT that the drive has infinite speed; it is that the drive can drop you into orbit above a planet without having to traverse interplanetary space within a given star system to get there. If it is detectable- and it might be, but we have no way of knowing, then the advantage of surprise is reduced. By how much it is reduced depends on how far out the enemy is detected, how long it will take them to arrive, and how quickly you can summon reinforcements.

If ships take days to travel between systems and incoming hyperspace travellers are spotted half an hour out, then all that detecting the enemy lets you do is prepare your own defenses and hopefully get a courier out so that a punitive expedition can come weeks later to find out if you're still alive.

If ships take minutes to travel between systems and incoming hyperspace travellers are spotted half an hour out, then you are correct that no one will be able to achieve surprise. But kindly do not berate me for not making the same assumption set you did, or for making a different and no less plausible assumption set.

The accuracy of navigation may not be accurate enough to safely put you inside of a star system, so in practice everyone still must check in at the periphery of the system before either making the final jump or just getting into the system the old fashioned way.

This assumption contradicts the Pournelle-Niven one, which you appear to have not understood- "if the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace..."

Speed isn't the only limitation, but its the only one Pournell and Niven talk about. You are already forgetting jollyreaper's point, even though you agreed with it.

So in short, you didn't even read the quote that inspired the OP, or suffered a total breakdown of reading comprehension while reading it.

Please stop, take a breath, and come back when you're not in chemical-imbalance mode, so that you can be your usual intelligent-commentator self again.

Also, again, not everyone necessarily can have access to it, whether because of economics or because the government has the foresight to anticipate this very problem.

If an interstellar civilization of any real scale exists, which is one of the starting premises of the discussion, since it was about interstellar warfare...

Then we still have the same problem. Even if only the imperial military has access to the drive, they are still vulnerable to rebels who suborn part of the military, to ambitious provincial satraps, or to random alien attackers who are not even part of the "airtight" political system erected by the imperial government.

You seem to be thinking huge scales where as I am thinking small. You envision a giant mongol horde of a million ships. I envision a million small pirate bands made out of breakaway outlaw fleet captains raiding left and right where ever they can, occasionally aligning to beat up a particularly pesky planet.

If the ships don't maintain themselves, raiders have to come from some kind of recognizable civilization. Individual renegades may exist and be a threat, but they are a short term problem which will be pretty easily taken down by the forces of order.

As for infinite speed, I don't know of any typical hyperdrive that does that, but anyway, it seems it would help unity.

Many jump drives are infinitely fast.

Asimov's hyperdrive is infinitely fast. The Stargates in, ah, Stargate are infinitely fast even if starship drives are not- you step into one end and out the other with no elapsed time as far as I can tell.

For that matter, the actual FTL Alderson Drive in the Niven-Pournelle CoDominium setting is infinitely fast- ships teleport from one Alderson point to the other along a given 'tramline' instantaneously. All the time consumed in interstellar travel is taken up by laboriously flying through normal space from one point to the next.

Individual worlds in the union would only need to hold off an invasion fleet long enough for them to call for help. I suspect a hyper-militarized universe in that scenario--no world is entirely safe, and only the fleet and the planetary militias keep them as safe as they are.

True- although in that case, any political division within the fleet very rapidly results in civil war and breakup of the state. And the resulting civil war could be very chaotic and destructive, seeing as how no place is actually safe from attack.

Tangentially, I know not being able to see into hyperspace is generally a big part of the trope, but it seems to me that logically speaking there must be a way to sense hyperspace from realspace, or else how was it discovered in the first place?

One might be able to deduce the existence of hyperspace without being able to detect the presence of objects moving in hyperspace.

[Formless]

This assumption contradicts the Pournelle-Niven one, which you appear to have not understood- "if the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace..."

[...]

So in short, you didn't even read the quote that inspired the OP, or suffered a total breakdown of reading comprehension while reading it.

I did read it. There is no place to hide. The setting is space, and there is no frontier in any sane setting with such FTL. There are always other limits, Simmo. Pournell and Niven assume that this is a possible scenario. I don't see that as a justifiable expectation, because in practice there are so many ways in which this can be thwarted by limitations outside the scope of the drive itself. If you can't navigate accurately enough to arrive on target within a million miles you lose the element of surprise. If you can't form a jump point instantaneously without it being seen, you lose the element of surprise. If the economics prevent you from making such a drive in secret, you lose the element of surprise because people will know you are coming before you even have a ship. You are making false assumptions, and that's why you (and yes, Niven and Pournell) fail. The point of the thread was to open the question up for debate, shithead. Questioning assumptions is part of that discussion. Learn to debate without acting like an infantile moron.

Also...

Please stop, take a breath, and come back when you're not in chemical-imbalance mode, so that you can be your usual intelligent-commentator self again.

You realize how low a blow this is to someone who has actual medical problems that need medicating, right? You know what the side effects of some of my stuff supposedly do? Look up Keppra and the side effects list. You are a real fucking shit, Simmo.

[krakonfour]

I did read it. There is no place to hide.

If the drive can take you anywhere at instantaneous speeds, then you can hide by simply being anwhere in the Universe after the attack is finished. Needle in a haystack strategy: you hide in the sheer number of planets and solar systems you have access to.

At the very least it forces your persuers to search every solar system within your reach.

The setting is space, and there is no frontier in any sane setting with such FTL.

There is a temporal frontier. How far can you travel given X time to escape? This provides an expanding sphere of possibilities that you are unlikely to be outside of. Also, the raiders will eventually have to return to civilization, and civilized planets (built up, able to repair their ships and accepting the stolen goods on the market) will have a physical limit to their numbers and location.

What I mean is that the Empire is unlikely to persue the raiders actively. Sure they will search for drive signatures in the first few days after the attack, but afterwards, the volume they have to search for rapidly approaches infinity. All they'd have to do then is sit and wait at the planets the raiders have to return to to sell their stolen goods.

A interesting consequence is that raiders will have to wait a very long time before selling their bounty, because the stolen goods are likely to have markers that would flag the seller to the authorities. Parallel black markets would suffer regularl crackdowns and searches by authorities if they allow planet-busting raiders to prosper.
In fact, we could have the Empire perform very forceful searches of the less regulated planets for raiders and their goods. It would amount to raiders existing on both sides, and stuff like actual raiders disguising themselves as contracted raiders doing policework for the Empire with false warrants, confiscating whatever they want and flying off with it...

because in practice there are so many ways in which this can be thwarted by limitations outside the scope of the drive itself.

Which are therefore entirely up to you to invent. Can't expect everyone to build the same world as you outside of the OP's restrictions.

If you can't navigate accurately enough to arrive on target within a million miles you lose the element of surprise.

Swords are for striking, guns are for shooting, lasers are for vaporizing the unprepared defenders the moment you drop out of hyperspace, with a megaton swarm of missiles arriving in the next few minutes.
'Surprise' is how long it takes for the defenders to get into position and start firing back. If you act within that time, the retaliation will be less than perfect. If it takes one hour for the enemy to orbit around the planet and lay their guns on you, then you just have to give less than one hour of advance warning, even if the sensors detect you milliseconds after you leave hyperspace.

Heck, the Blitzkreig took weeks and was still considered a 'surprise attack'.

If you can't form a jump point instantaneously without it being seen, you lose the element of surprise.

I'm sure the defenders will still be surprised as fuck if the jump points take 30 seconds to form.

If the economics prevent you from making such a drive in secret, you lose the element of surprise because people will know you are coming before you even have a ship.

I can buy a car, use it for years, parade in front of the embassy with it if I wanted to, then fit it with a bomb and drive it through the gate in one day.
A drive by itself isn't dangerous.

You are making false assumptions, and that's why you (and yes, Niven and Pournell) fail. The point of the thread was to open the question up for debate, shithead. Questioning assumptions is part of that discussion. Learn to debate without acting like an infantile moron.

Also...

You realize how low a blow this is to someone who has actual medical problems that need medicating, right? You know what the side effects of some of my stuff supposedly do? Look up Keppra and the side effects list. You are a real fucking shit, Simmo.

Formless strikes again!