Real Life vs

[adam_grif]

I recall reading a "what scifi nation would be taken by real life easily?" thread not too long ago. The general consensus seems to be that SciFi ground forces are nearly universally pathetic, but that their ortillery is generally enough to slag a world or at least destroy all real life militaries before they got to land the redshirts.

So to make it a little less one sided, Earth knows who's coming, knows their capabilities (having watched the shows), and has a 5 year head start to militarize and develop weapons that may be more effective at combating the enemy of your choosing. Since pretty well any space empire can win just through attrition, try to determine how long we'd be able to hold out, whether it's indefinitely or "barely take out one ship". For physics, everything operates how it does in their home universe, however when developing counters for their tech, you're stuck with real-world stuff.

The universe is as it is in real life except for their arrival, if the Goa'uld are attacking, you can't call the Asgard for help, for instance. Likewise, you won't have the wanktastic 3 week turn-around times for reverse engineering alien technology to exploit their Achilles heel that we see on the show.


I'll start off with The Covenant (because I hate Halo), but it can be any SciFi nation of your choosing.

The Covenant

Ground forces: Laughable. Can probably be trashed by WW2 military.

Tank equivelant can be killed in 2 hits from a 90mm HVAP projectile, is shown to be quite vulnerable to 102mm HEAT rockets (~on par with RPG-7), moves at a blistering pace of "slow as fuck" and fires in an easy to predict, slow moving parabolic arc. Munitions they fire are unguided, and they don't appear to have any kind of fire control systems, so moving vehicles will be impossible for them to hit at any thing but very close range. Given that KE munitions are quite capable of taking them out, contemporary APFSDS rounds should work well. Any contemporary MBT will be effective at dealing with them, as would any Attack Helicopter.

Infantry are generally weak. Although shielded opponents can take a lot of punishment, they can't stand up to any kind of armor. 14.5mm Soviet ammunition (fired from sniper rifle) is shown to be highly effective at dealing with their infantry (usually in 2 shots to the chest for shielded opponents), indicating that existing KPV heavy machine-guns firing this round will be highly effective at dealing with all Covenant foot soldiers. Conventional 5.56mm ammunition will be fine for dealing with Grunts and Jackals, but not for shielded opponents. Any current MBT will be highly effective at dealing with them. Bradley IFV should do exceptionally well in this role.

"Close air support" consists of small, low flying, heinously slow Banshees, inside which pilots are vulnerable to small arms fire from infantry. Its armament is only effective at extremely close ranges. Non-combat helicopters with conventional MGs for protection are adequate for dealing with them if necessary, although ideally some kind of SAM would be used.

Air superiority vehicles are non-existent, although their Space-fighter can be used to fight in atmosphere (although are noted as being particularly sluggish in atmosphere). Armament is useless for killing other aircraft with the exception of a single pulsed laser in the kilowatt range. Although to my knowledge we've never seen them perform in combat against aircraft, this probably means they can take modern stuff if they get a chance to fire at them. With no defensive shielding of any kind, presumably these can be downed with conventional anti-air weaponry. In-universe, they can be downed with high explosive missiles of unknown size, so it's definitely technically feasible to build countermeasures to them.


Space forces

This is where it gets hairy. The only really notable abilities the Covenant have over modern day Earth is FTL and the ability to devastate large patches of the ground with their stupidly powerful (by real life, not SciFi standards) energy weapons. Fortunately, the ranges on them are not immense, and the Modus Operandi seems to be to come into lower-atmosphere to fire them.

The literature explicitly mentions that EMPs disable covenant shielding for a time, and additionally that plasma is exceedingly effective at penetrating them. For this reason, an arsenal of medium-range ballistic missiles, with Cassabla Howitzer warheads should be able to easily down the small cap-ships, given that they are essentially dumping 85% of a nuclear weapon's energy into a streak of red hot plasma death. The defensive capabilities of larger ships are far more formidable, so the use of Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generators (to generate EMPs without having to detonate nuclear weapons in high atmosphere) would be used to disable shielding, followed by a swarm of conventional explosive tipped (or just high velocity) missiles to destroy the craft itself.

This part of the Vs matchup is less certain, because we don't have examples of this in-Universe. As far as I know, there haven't been any quantification of Cap ship defensive shield strength, although if it's true that "EMP = shields down" (it's stated that it is, but it's wise not to fall into the no-limits silver bullet trap). They do have point defense systems of unknown effectiveness, so it will probably have to be some kind of missile swarm to kill the larger ships which can defend themselves like that.


Conclusion:

- We can fight a ground war against them and win every time if they land anything.
- Fighting off ships in orbit will be difficult.
- Destroying intra-atmosphere capital ships will be possible with our tech base, but will be limited by how effectively we can overcome point defense systems and how well nuclear shaped charges go against them.

[Shroom Man 777]

The humans in Halo routinely use nuclear weapons and relativistic railguns against Covenant space forces. The humans still lose horribly.

What is this Cassabla Howitzer?

[Sarevok]

According to the Halo manual the plasma rifle has a 100 to 150 kilowatt power output. An elite can take over a dozen plasma bolts without shields failing. Said shield can also recharge to full strength in under fifteen seconds. How much energy does a modern rifle bullet carry ? It may not be as simple as pointing a machinegun at them.

[Shroom Man 777]

Yet somehow, Elites can be felled by the standard-issue firearms the Marines and the Spartans carry. Is the "dozen shots before falling" thing from literature, or from gameplay? How many plasma bolts can a regular human ODST soldier take to the face before he dies?

[adam_grif]

What is this Cassabla Howitzer?

Nuclear shaped charge. I just noticed that I'd spelled it wrong, it's only 1 s. It was part of the Project Orion stuff. The Orion drive pumped 85% of a nuke's energy into a 30 degree cone, turning parts of the case into plasma and accelerating them in the forward direction at extremely high speeds. Casabala Howitzer is the same principle, but the 30 degree cone is shrunk to a far, far narrower angle, resulting in far, far higher speeds. It basically turns it into a bomb pumped, single use directed energy weapon.



Given that shields are notoriously vulnerable to plasma weaponry, and that this is basically super-high velocity plasma spear, it stands to reason that they'd be effective weapons against smallish capital ships, given sufficient yeild (high double digit KTs at a guess, but guessing is all I can do without any kind of shield strength quantification or physical principles that they run on to work with).

The humans in Halo routinely use nuclear weapons and relativistic railguns against Covenant space forces. The humans still lose horribly.

Yes, and the nukes only fail because the shields can apparently absorb or deflect copious amounts of radiation. With shields down, they are vulnerable to conventional weaponry / nuclear weapons as you'd expect them to be. Apparently their nuclear missiles create EMPs in space (which is how we know that EMPs = shields go down for a period of time), which doesn't make sense unless their shields are some kind of strong magnetic field (in which case we can presumably swarm them with KE penetrators made of non-magnetic materials...).

Given that we can create EMPs without nukes quite handily with EPFCGs in real life, that the UNSC doesn't fire these followed by low yield nuclear tipped missile swarms represents a failing of imagination on the part of the world builders (presumably if they'd thought of it, they'd have patched the holes).

According to the Halo manual the plasma rifle has a 100 to 150 kilowatt power output. An elite can take over a dozen plasma bolts without shields failing. Said shield can also recharge to full strength in under fifteen seconds. How much energy does a modern rifle bullet carry ? It may not be as simple as pointing a machinegun at them.

But it is that simple.

The assault rifle fires 7.62 x 51 Nato rounds, in the 26th century. The sniper rifle fires 14.5x114mm Soviet rounds. In the 26th century. Regardless, regular, unaugmented soldiers are shown firing these weapons just fine with recoil you'd expect from real life, so the energy can't be much higher than the real world rounds. A single sniper rifle round downs shields, another kills the enemy (depending on difficulty, of course). Machine-guns firing these rounds will therefore decimate formations of elite and brutes.

An IFV firing 20 or 25mm rounds will also be shredding them horribly. And these are the "elite" troops of their army, the regular ones don't get any shielding at all and their vehicles don't have shields either. I don't even want to think about what's going to happen if a Spooky or Spectre gunship opens up on them.

Yet somehow, Elites can be felled by the standard-issue firearms the Marines and the Spartans carry. Is the "dozen shots before falling" thing from literature, or from gameplay? How many plasma bolts can a regular human ODST soldier take to the face before he dies?

Plasma weapons are shown to be far more effective against shields than armor. Dozens of bolts is kind of misleading, since the plasma-rifle that fires them in rapid succession is basically like a sub-machinegun. It's true that they might take one dozen bolts, but that's only a few seconds of firing. Plasma rifles are NOT effective weapons, each bolt is less likely to down a human than a regular bullet is.

ODSTs won't be a good representative for real world soldiers because apparently the future human armor is somewhat resistant against their fire. ODSTs in game are functionally identical to SPARTANs or Elites, having "stamina" instead of rechargeable shields. Humans in the games are unreasonably tough to kill, but that's not canonical, that's just game-play tweaks to make it easier to play.

[Shroom Man 777]

Do you have more material on the Casabla/Casaba thing? It's a great concept, nuclear shaped charges, and I'd like more reading material from the internets.


Oh, note that those regularly-used USNC weapons, I think that Shiva-nuke was rated at a gigaton... or a teraton? I'm unsure. And what happens if the Covenant ships just dodge the Earth-launched nukes or intercept them with fighters or something? They fight space battles against enemies who use relativistic railguns as standard ship weapons. You've got to admit that against a reasonably-sized invasion force, humanity doesn't have a chance if it's just stuck with using modern day weapons, or using conceptual theoretical weapons based on not-even-experimental unrealized and nonexistent Orion designs.

[adam_grif]

Atomic Rockets has some stuff on it:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... apedcharge

Shiva nukes are Gigatonne according to some sources, but again, it's the shielding that appears to be nigh-indestructible, not the hull-construction. For the big-ships, it's the EMPs that are going to decide battles.

I'm not expecting Earth with 5 years prep time to be able to hold off more than maybe four medium sized capital ships, mainly because the missiles will be needing to swarm them (like they do in-universe) to get a hit. There's only so many missiles that exist currently that can be converted to reach high enough to get them in orbit, although as stated before, they're in low-atmosphere for the planet glassing, so if that's their objective then we should be able to reach out and hit more of them.

They have point defense, as I've said. They do shoot them down, as I've said. Swarm swarm swarm. 26th century Earth's military tech is not that far beyond ours except in Material science. We can't build relativistic railguns, but we don't need to in order to make some kills. Just lots and lots of missiles. In universe, the trouble isn't getting missiles to strike, it's getting them to kill the covenant ships.

[Shroom Man 777]

Atomic Rockets has some stuff on it:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... apedcharge

Incredible. So they planned to use x-ray opaque material, like lead or something, to block the radiation burst from just spreading omnidirectionally (which, upon exposure to other stuff, tends to cause that other stuff to kinda explode... which is why nuclear weapons explode, burninate the air, send blastwaves and generally ruin shit) and to direct it to a single opening where it gets, yeah, "shaped" and where the tungsten and beryllium becomes the "propellant" (i.e. the material that gets annihilated by the radiation, to cause the epic HUEG explosion of death... but this time directed towards someone's face!).

Wow. Goddamn, I love 1960s science. Our forefathers were infinitely more killy than us, and I salute them!

[adam_grif]

I, too, am in awe of their coolness.

[Commander 598]

You forgot something: Seraph Fighters. Banshees are basically the equivalent of a flying ATV/4 wheeler while Seraph are the real aerial threat.

[DrStrangelove]

Couple of mistakes here; 1) Destructionators physics is wrong, power = work(energy)/time thus your math is backwards.

2) Covenant energy weapons are rated at 100-150kV @ 2-3dA. Which when worked out places covenant plasma weapons at 20-45kW. Which at the stated rate of fire puts the per shot energy at around modern weapon levels.

[NecronLord]

Unless these covenant are MEGA retards, they can win in space by simple dint of firing asteroids at us.

Also, Nukes do not, repeat, not, make EMP in space. You need special weapons, which we don't have made. Similarly, if they have decent accelleration, which I expect they do, they can just outmanouver our missiles (oh, BTW, ordinary ICBMs are not capable of intercepting a starship) with ease, even if, repeat if they can't shoot them down.

Don't these guys 'glass' planets? With that kind of firepower, our arsenal would barely scratch one of their ships. I'm told they also only bother with ground attack when the target has Forerunner artifacts or something like that. Total planetary extermination, no Covenant casualties.

[Sarevok]

The covenant never used asteroid bombardment. They also dont resort to direct orbital bombardment. Apparently there is only two modes covenant command thinks along. Either invade against a planet with defenders enjoying great numerical advantage or burn planet to cinder. There is not much use of orbital bombardment to support troops beyond a few cases. Sounds retarded but this is the same enemy that gave their best shielded elites swords to fight with.

[Black Admiral]

Unless these covenant are MEGA retards, they can win in space by simple dint of firing asteroids at us.

Well, honestly, they're pretty damn stupid. But that's more in the "religious fanaticism" sense, and as far as I'm aware their religion lacks any specific prohibitions against squashing the enemy with large rocks.

Don't these guys 'glass' planets?

Yeah, they do, and the result is described so;

The hologram of the planet Harvest changed. The lush fields and rolling hills transformed, morphing into a cratered, barren desert. Thin gray sunlight reflected off a glassy crust. Heat wavered from the surface. Isolated regions glowed red.
- The Fall of Reach, pg. 97

How long this took and the number of ships involved isn't mentioned, but it gives an idea what the end result is.

I'm told they also only bother with ground attack when the target has Forerunner artifacts or something like that.

When dealing with humans, yes; they're not known for deploying ground forces unless there's something on a given planet that they want - which means Forerunner artefacts, usually. The planet Charybdis IX, not having anything like that, was simply glassed from orbit without any deployment of ground troops.

EDIT - And as for use of capital ship weaponry in support of ground forces, they've done it before. Most notably during Operation PROMETHEUS, targetted against the Spartan-IIIs of Beta Company. However, most of the time, shipboard weapons are a sledgehammer where a scalpel's required.

[Ryan Thunder]

Unless these covenant are MEGA retards, they can win in space by simple dint of firing asteroids at us.

There are days when I wonder if there should be a moratorium on even mentioning this any more because its been run into the ground so goddamn many times that its pretty much assumed.

Almost any scenario like this is going to be "what would they do--besides that?", if not from the get go, then shortly after some Acting Captain Obvious brings it up for what must be the billionth time.

[adam_grif]

You forgot something: Seraph Fighters. Banshees are basically the equivalent of a flying ATV/4 wheeler while Seraph are the real aerial threat.

No I didn't. Seraphs are the space fighters w/ pulse lasers I was talking about.

Unless these covenant are MEGA retards, they can win in space by simple dint of firing asteroids at us.

You're in luck. The covenant are MEGA retards.

Also, Nukes do not, repeat, not, make EMP in space. You need special weapons, which we don't have made. Similarly, if they have decent accelleration, which I expect they do, they can just outmanouver our missiles (oh, BTW, ordinary ICBMs are not capable of intercepting a starship) with ease, even if, repeat if they can't shoot them down.

...

Are you even-

Gah.

Let me quote myself.

so the use of Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generators (to generate EMPs without having to detonate nuclear weapons in high atmosphere) would be used to disable shielding

...

Apparently their nuclear missiles create EMPs in space (which is how we know that EMPs = shields go down for a period of time), which doesn't make sense unless their shields are some kind of strong magnetic field (in which case we can presumably swarm them with KE penetrators made of non-magnetic materials...).

Furthermore, the 5 year development + deployment cycle granted by the scenario is used to put craptonnes of interceptors in orbit, and develop as best they can software + hardware to intercept other orbits. I'm sure Chimerica will leap at the chance to get international backing behind their under-the-table ASAT developments. Since ICBM sized missiles that can reach orbit are expensive and time consuming to build, presumably we'd be retrofitting existing ones after the tech is there.

If we can get some orbital mines in place then that's just gravy. Perhaps some weaponized satellites too.

Don't these guys 'glass' planets? With that kind of firepower, our arsenal would barely scratch one of their ships. I'm told they also only bother with ground attack when the target has Forerunner artifacts or something like that. Total planetary extermination, no Covenant casualties.

I figured "they're invading us" was one of the assumptions we were making, but even if it's not they go into LEO to do "long range glassing", and whenever they want to do something more precise they fly into low atmosphere (as seen in games) to do it. In the human-covenant war, the humans had ~800 colonies. Seventy-six got glassed, for unknown reasons. I'm assuming that 724 didn't have valuable forerunner artifacts on them, I'd say they only glass as a last resort or when they're particularly angry.

[Samuel]

If we can get some orbital mines in place then that's just gravy. Perhaps some weaponized satellites too.

Space mines are a bad idea- the area to cover is too big, they can see them and shoot them first, etc.

In the human-covenant war, the humans had ~800 colonies. Seventy-six got glassed, for unknown reasons.

Source?

[adam_grif]

Space mines are a bad idea- the area to cover is too big, they can see them and shoot them first, etc.

I'm speaking of small kinetic kill satellites with nothing much but some maneuvering thrusters. Ideally made out of magnetically neutral things, or enclosed in a Faraday cage. If the shields are magnetic in nature, this will let them sail right on through at orbital velocities. Assuming they can hit at all.

Since we know that they do orbital flyovers of the glassing targets, and target population centers + military bases, then we can position them appropriately to be in range in one of their flyovers. Might need to have a booster on it to change orbital height of course.

Source?

It has been noted that the UNSC had over 800 planets colonized or under its control at the beginning of the Human-Covenant War, most of which presumably fell to the Covenant during the war. However, the Step of Silence, an area where a piece of glass from every glassed planet is placed, only has 76 shards of glass.

- Halo Wiki on Glassing.

They go on to speculate that "maybe it's only 76 planets that were fully glassed", but there isn't anything in universe that actually states this is the case. They get something from one of the novels that says that the covenant doesn't usually glass the whole surface of planet,s just population centers and military bases, but that doesn't really say anything about the number that have been glassed.

[Samuel]

I'm speaking of small kinetic kill satellites with nothing much but some maneuvering thrusters. Ideally made out of magnetically neutral things, or enclosed in a Faraday cage. If the shields are magnetic in nature, this will let them sail right on through at orbital velocities. Assuming they can hit at all.

I'm pretty sure they have point defenses that can deal with something that small- the covenant butcher clusters of UNSC lifeboats in one book with their weapons in a matter of moments.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

I don't have my books on hand to check, but I'm pretty sure they butcher missiles as well. I remember Capt. Keyes ordering the launch of something like a hundred and fifty archer missiles at a Covenent cruiser in the hopes that one of the three equiped with Shiva warheads would hit.

[adam_grif]

I'm speaking of small kinetic kill satellites with nothing much but some maneuvering thrusters. Ideally made out of magnetically neutral things, or enclosed in a Faraday cage. If the shields are magnetic in nature, this will let them sail right on through at orbital velocities. Assuming they can hit at all.

I'm pretty sure they have point defenses that can deal with something that small- the covenant butcher clusters of UNSC lifeboats in one book with their weapons in a matter of moments.

They have point defense, as I've said. They do shoot them down, as I've said. Swarm swarm swarm.

[Shroom Man 777]

The disadvantage is that you're not launching missiles from a space platform, like a spaceship that's also traveling pretty fast, but from a planet with a shitload of gravity for the slowass missiles to overcome. The Covenant might end up ruining the shit out of those missiles while they're still in boost phase, or might just outmaneuver the missiles, or they could just FTL right above Earth and start slagging away (depending on Covenant FTL capabilities).

Earth is at an inherently disadvantageous position and, really, I don't think five years is enough to mobilize us in a Fortress World position when we still have to design, test, and mass produce these wundernapkinwaffen weapons to defend ourselves from an opponent who's got superior technology and superior ultimate high ground.

[adam_grif]

Ideally, the missiles will already BE in orbit. I hardly think they can distinguish between Sputnik and dormant rockets easily at a distance. If they start shooting down regular satellites, then that's just a whole lot of free (in the sense that they're already there) decoys for our missiles.

If the world literally depended on it, 5 years down the road we could probably have a far greater yearly heavy lift capacity. Even without developing new launch platforms, a few years down the road before they arrive we could certainly, with cold war style blank check budgets, have a metric fucktonne of gear in orbit.

[adam_grif]

Moving into more speculative ground, do you think that 5 years could have ground-based lasers capable of dealing significant damage to hulls in orbit? Or perhaps high altitude blimps with lasers on top. That means less blooming before it gets there, but also less power.

We're just scratching the surface with laser weaponry already. Perhaps a large scale (heinously expensive) array style laser (unsure of correct terminology, the ones where you have swarms of smaller lasers all combining).

Does anybody have any expertise on what the most powerful laser we could put in Earth orbit RIGHT NOW would be? Even if it meant assembling an ISS style laser canon in orbit.

Bomb pumped lasers ala Star Wars programme could be resurrected, but I'm very much doubting anything useful would come out of them within 5 years.

I can't find any sources describing the tech behind covenant shields. I have this feeling in the back of my head that they're described as magnetic fields deflecting plasma/slugs, but the halo wiki makes no mention of technology so I can't assume that's how they operate. The Nukes + cov ships = EMP is some evidence supporting it, but it's still not conclusive by any stretch of the definition.

If they are, then lasers will ignore shielding. If they aren't, then the EMP swarms should still render them vulnerable, although I'm certainly not confident in our ability to build laser weapons that can put a capital ship out of action. If we can, that's awesome though, because boosting photons out of atmosphere is far simpler than missiles.

[Shroom Man 777]

Ideally, the missiles will already BE in orbit. I hardly think they can distinguish between Sputnik and dormant rockets easily at a distance. If they start shooting down regular satellites, then that's just a whole lot of free (in the sense that they're already there) decoys for our missiles.

Those decoys will be in a ballistic or orbital or whatever trajectory. The instant those missile-mines start their rockets, they'll be targeted by point defense. The instant Covenant sensors detect the hiddden weapons, they'll be targeted by point defense. If the Covenant are stupid enough to enter this bigass orbital debris field without checking for weapons, and the sheer disparity between the handful of Covvie ships and the shitloads of nukes in orbit is huge, then yes, the Covenant could get trapped and killfucked.

If that happens, I can imagine the Covenant ships' bridge would have multicolored space gremlins going "SQUAWK! SQUAWK!" while their ship explodes or something.

If the world literally depended on it, 5 years down the road we could probably have a far greater yearly heavy lift capacity. Even without developing new launch platforms, a few years down the road before they arrive we could certainly, with cold war style blank check budgets, have a metric fucktonne of gear in orbit.

We would have to build the gigaton-yield nukes and space-missiles that are fast enough to defeat Covenant point-defense systems, of which our military intelligence would know nothing of (unless they started reading up on Bungie's shitworks to learn Covenant weapons specifications).


Their shields can withstand relativistic impacts from UNSC weapons. That means their shield generators, which absorb the recoil, are strong enough to withstand the kinetic energy of being violently pushed by the momentum of a relativistic weapon. That means the Covenant has some serious shit for its materials science, which means that even IF the shields are somehow defeated by the EMPs, their hulls most probably won't be made out of tissue paper or paper mache artistically sculpted by technicolored space gremlins that go "SQUAWK! SQUAWK!"

SQUAWK! SQUAWK!