Grid power is useful for peacetime operations, but it’s nothing to count on for combat. Grid power is highly vulnerable to disruption over a large area, as shown by the mass blackouts the US has suffered. The space lasers and HPM weapons can easily knock out a power grid by disabling just a few key high tension wires and substations. The sudden overload will force a cascading failure of substations as they shutdown to protect themselves. If the casade stops, the space laser can just cut a few more wires to help it along. This would be much quicker and easier then bombing power plants or other more conventional anti power tactics. This wont cripple the grid forever of course, but it will take hours or days to restart it all.adam_grif wrote:Fixed ground laser positions have a few advantages; they can be hooked up to the power grid or have large reactors, they can store significant portions of themselves underground (protection from counter-fire), and have the availability of air-cooling and arbitrarily large heat-sinks.
I don’t see a need for a reactor. You won’t be using the laser 99.99% of the time, so why have such an expensive sustained power source? Also reactors have fairly low thermal so the need for hardened cooling gear would go up. Normally that cooling gear for bunkers is based on surface evaporative water sprays, though since the pipe work would be exposed to laser attack you might need to use the much more expensive option of an underground heat sink. If you put the sprays under cover, then you'd loose out on protection against atomic blast which I figure still matters since you would also want the laser fort as an ABM system.
A few diesels in a bunker will work better. They only run when needed, and thermal efficiency can be close to 50% vs. 25-35% for a nuclear plant. No need to get more exotic then the mission requires. Diesel bunkers are how the highly demanding Safeguard radar systems were powered for example.
Those ICBM trucks are not very mobile in reality, I mean just look how fucking huge they are, the Russians ones sit in garrisons in peacetime for a reason. If the enemy has to use such a large distinctive transporter I’d already call that mission accomplished. However something smaller should be possible, if you split the generator plant and the cooling plant onto separate trucks. The cooling plant needs a lot of volume besides weight, which makes it troublesome. But anyway take a look at the THAAD radar for how large a system like this could become.
If you can build one the size of one of those big ICBM launcher trucks, it may well be powerful enough to kill a sat in orbit while being able to reposition itself to hide from detection.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... fig4-1.gif
That ‘prime power unit’ is generating 1.3 megawatts for the radar, the little generate for the command post is IIRC 50kw. Still this is enough to need a whole semi trailer for cooling. Cooling requirements might be less if you removed the requirement to operate in hot weather, risky move in most countries. Even Moscow hit 98.5 degrees F the other day.
A railroad system is possible, but it would not be very mobile because it will either massively disrupt commercial traffic by suddenly taking over the tracks, huge problem with those ICBM trains, or be locked into limit areas by downed bridges, wrecks, disabled trains on electrical streches and other crap like that. Barges, warships and submarines are options too, and aircraft and just about anything else really, but mobility and the ability to sustain the system while mobile will push up costs a lot and you aren’t going any ground strike capability out of it which is annoying.
If it isn't, you can try doing railway-gun style lasers. Less concealable, but still mobile and can be quite large. As far as mobility goes, you don't need to be able to shoot-and-scoot to have some advantages, just the enemy not knowing where they are at all times to make your deployment unpredictable is useful. Even with a couple of support trucks, it can change it's position with some manner of frequency, and potentially deploy camo nets and the like when stationary to fire.
I certainly expect it to be a threat, but that’s why we’d also field an improved space radar over today’s toned down program. It would vastly improve the ability of the space laser to rapidly counter pop up threats. The laser doesn't have to be totally without its own defenses either, it could have a dust screen generator or even a moving panel of armor to protect the laser unit, while the solar panels are protected by redundancy.
As I do believe I said before, wars against equal first class opponents are going to go nuclear, one way or another. However a space laser would be an incredible defense against any kind of nuclear missile/bomber attack should it occur, and already being in space it would have a much easier time of killing satellites which live in orbits as high as 30,000 miles.
As far as nuclear strategy goes, killing enemy satellites is basically a prelude to nuclear war anyway. Lacking any sort of early warning and with greatly disrupted communications, it's really playing with fire there. If the enemy can kill your ICBM's or a good portion of them, then the first and most obvious target is the satellites that will be doing such things. Which you can kill with your own satellites, ground based installations, kinetic kill satellites, or whatever.
But while it can accomplish high end tasks like this it can also intervene in any manner of small war, without forward basing, and with incredible precision firepower ensuring that it’s not a one trick pony. Being able to burn communications antennas off the roof of a dictator’s bunker instead of bombing it and damaging the disabled children’s orphanage across the street is a real nice capability. Sure you could do it with an aircraft too, but strategic air power the way the US wields it is preposterously expensive anyway
Predators and crap might like cheep for supporting ground forces in low intensity wars, but the costs really add up when you count forward deploying that stuff and operating it in the theater. A space laser constellation would be on all call all the time for whatever was needed. They might get worn out more quickly being used like that, but otherwise the operating costs don’t really change.
In addition in the future many nations will exist which can field a credible ASAT capability but either don’t have nuclear weapons, or have so few they are highly unlikely to use them except to stop a ground offensive that was going to overrun them. People like this might feel rather free to target US space assets, so we have to be able to defend those assets. Even someone like Iraq could have fielded a very basic ASAT capability using SCUD C and a modified Tall King Radar. You don’t even need guidance, just shotgun shrapnel into space. If you are not a space power yourself you’ve got no reason to care about filling space with debris.
Funny thing, the end result of that Russian Dead Hand system is supposed to be that emergency communications rockets launch, apparently ones which actually enter orbit to become satellites. Space based laser could blow those away as they launch….
Given orbital speeds, it's pretty scary to think how things might be able to spiral out of control - when it takes 15 mins to send an ICBM to Moscow you at least have some time to think it over, when your entire defenses and early warning could be offline within 2 minutes it may be even worse. Automatic retaliation systems to be installed perhaps?
However that would assume that a massive nuclear attack has already crippled the normal channels of communications and command. The small scale of current strategic nuclear arsenals (I consider 1,550 launchers damn small, if acceptably so) really doesn’t make massive counter force attacks very practical, and heightened ABM deployment would make decapitating strikes near impossible.
I would however expect that the constant US shift to strategic communications based purely on satellites would be reversed, little is know about what Russia is really doing, and more troposcatter and ground wave systems would be kept around or restored. Of course the fiber optic lines around the world already provide a pretty robust and redundant communication system in its own right.
Also we might finally build the proposed Sanguine ELF system. It was going to use 100 hard bunkers as transmitters with the antenna wires buried at 6 foot depth. Got canceled because everyone bitched that the military was adding new nuclear targets, so instead we built a soft ELF system that is now retired for being rather shitty at its job due to lack of protection.
