phong wrote:It's not EMP. His weapons will throw out a sleet of hard radiation which will destroy electronics within a certain radius + inject enormous amounts of high energy particle radiation will will last quite awhile - and probably collect in the Van Allen belts, closing off intersecting orbits for some time. Not sure of the range for the prompt radiation, though, probably have to look that up.
Here's the deal, I already read the papers. The altitude of Bean's sats means they are hardened against 30-40 KRADs if they are to function for a meaningful time (the launchers themselves are pretty fucking simple and should have little in the way of elements to be damaged by radiation) - as are his C&C satellites (which could be spread over various orbits, including GEO (in which case, good luck on trying to do ANYTHING to the targeting sats
).
What does that entail? Globalstar - a civilian, unhardened satellite constellation (at approximately the level most Bean's sats are), has "10-12%" affected in case of a high-altitude nuclear explosion (by viture of LOS x-rays).
DTRA baseline models (for the US military) predict that from a 20KT burst at 290km, Globalstar will fail after accumulating 60K rads (in case Bean hardened it to GEO Rad levels, it won't fail at all, merely have it's lifetime halved or so).
For an unprotected (30 Krad) satellite this would mean failure in
60 days.
60 days are two months - after that, replacement satellites will already have a lifetime of 2-3 months, and after 6 months the lifetime will restore to normal.
Saddamistan has not declared any heavy space boosters to lift anything more serious than small nuclear bombs into orbit.
I would also presume Bean would not tolerate Saddamistan launching multimegaton devices into orbit which would destroy the entire LEO constellations instantly - and with silent consent of the world, simply destroy Saddamistan's space launch complexes in a space strike, or whatnot.
GEO satellites will not be affected much AT ALL, and if Bean has "delayed revenge" systems in GEOstationary orbits - it would of course take hours for KVs to reach earth and "fall" on the head of Saddam, but that will still happen.
Plus I believe Bean hardened his COMSATs for the KV program. He'd be seriously foolish not to - the hardening costs percent of the satcost, but will be the last line of defense.
Remember that the over 1-megaton Starfish Prime took
monts to degrade several satellites' components, at a 400 km altitude. And those were not the hardened sats (now we can harden satellites to extreme levels, if we launch stuff into GEO for example the GPS, so that they have a lifespan of years
)
It's safe to say that a nuclear HEMP will not immediately destroy Bean's entier sat group. Maybe it will damage the LOS strongly enough, but revenge will still come, in the form of area denial bombing of cities.
Even a gigantic 20 Megaton explosion in orbit - will fry all LEO sats, but will only damage >1000km sats at natural civilian hardening (2x against natural radiation) in around 2 hours. More than enough for Bean to vape everyone. Line of sight sats might suffer immediate accumulation of failure doses, but it won't take long for Bean's constellation to rain more death on you.
No, the common "nuclear explosions good counter' is wrong here.
- PeZook
