Simon_Jester wrote:On the other hand, they also have fusion drives, enabling them to dodge better than most orbital targets. And they are way better armored than an ordinary satellite or aircraft, simply by virtue of their enormous size. Doing significant damage would require heavy aircraft bombs, sustained artillery fire, or a nuclear warhead.
Well; I've always understood that one way to hit something hard in orbit, is to launch your missile into the same orbit travelling the opposite direction. Blow it up before it reaches them and anything in that orbit get peppered with very fast chunks of metal; bits that if they don't hit the first time will continue orbiting and possibly hit the next time around as long as the target is in the same orbit.
That wouldn't stop them from dodging if they can of course; but you don't need a powerful warhead to do damage. Just the speed involved makes anything that can reach orbit dangerous.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
That would be a lovely idea, except that the RIM-161 isn't remotely orbit-capable. It can reach an altitude of hundreds of kilometers, but as far as I can tell it does so by flying straight up. It never gets close to orbital velocity. So while it can intercept a target in orbit by physically reaching a point in space where the target is going to be, it can't enter a stable or quasistable orbit, and neither can the shrapnel from its warhead. Therefore, we can't hit them with an impactor coming at them from the opposite direction except by using a larger rocket to put the missile warhead into a stable orbit.
There are not many facilities in the world capable of doing that, and you can bet they'd be the first things an alien invader would try to hit. Moreover, it takes them many minutes to get from ground to orbit, minutes in which the heavy rockets in question are vulnerable to interception.
While we could build an orbit-denial weapon of the sort you describe, we haven't done so, and I'm not sure whether we could do it on short notice if we were suddenly being invaded by the slavering hordes from Tau Ceti.
Simon_Jester wrote:While we could build an orbit-denial weapon of the sort you describe, we haven't done so, and I'm not sure whether we could do it on short notice if we were suddenly being invaded by the slavering hordes from Tau Ceti.
We do have vehicles that can reach orbit; that's all you need for this. All you are doing is releasing junk in orbit; you don't need the fancy targeting systems and whatnot of a dedicated military weapon. You could even just load a bomb on board a space shuttle, send it up unmanned and blow up the whole thing into a cloud of shrapnel.
Simon_Jester wrote:Moreover, it takes them many minutes to get from ground to orbit, minutes in which the heavy rockets in question are vulnerable to interception.
I think that's a serious problem, true. Perhaps if the aliens are all close to each other, you can launch while they are on the far side of the planet; if you can do that they also won't know that there is anything incoming they need to dodge. From what I've heard, the Race is unimaginative enough make that mistake.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Lord of the Abyss wrote:I think that's a serious problem, true. Perhaps if the aliens are all close to each other, you can launch while they are on the far side of the planet; if you can do that they also won't know that there is anything incoming they need to dodge. From what I've heard, the Race is unimaginative enough make that mistake.
They would certainly get hit by it once. Our use of Submarines would completely baffle them for a very long time, and adapting to such a navy-mobile strike force as we have today would no doubt make them gnaw their tails in frustration. This isn't to say it would be entirely onesided: their effect of blasting WWII Earth was diminished by the fact that they were first expecting Knights on Horseback and such, and secondly that when they saw we were more advanced, they tried to EMP us into the stone age--only to discover to their horror that we were still using a lot of vacuum tubes. If they hit us nowadays it would be basically not dissimilar from getting attacked by another terrestrial superpower that managed to get a lot of shit in orbit, so we could be looking at a lot of major cities being nuked. If we can soak the nukes or counter their attacks, we should have relatively little trouble dealing with their ground forces. Their stuff is good, but we have so much more of it. And plus, once we learn their weakness to certain Earth compounds we may be able to counterattack with a commanding biological weapons advantage that we have no ethical qualms against using.
