The Idea of A Space Fortress

[Imperial528]

I've been lurking this thread for the past few days, and it got me thinking. Obviously, as far as cheapness and resilience goes, mined-out asteroids are the way to make a space fortress.

But, if you can't move an asteroid (either practically or economically) and there aren't any in the orbit you need a fortress at, you're stuck with artificial ones, which are much more frail.

The idea just occurred to me that you could make a hybrid base/satellite system, you can have the center of the fortress, consisting of whatever habitation systems needed, which ideally are few long term and several short term modules, then a sensor and major computing modules, and finally a manufacturing facility.
Then you have a swarm of offensive and defensive satellites in the same orbit controlled by the center station and manufactured by it. It's not as vulnerable as a single station to long-range attack, and it's much more robust in both offensive and defensive capabilities, since its weapons platforms are decentralized and you can't knock them out in one hit. Admittedly this idea is much more suited to solar orbits rather than planetary ones.

[Formless]

Uh Formless you are doing it wrong. Ground based solar is all we got so don't dismiss them so casually. Nobody has a realistic proposal for manufacturing solar power satellites yet.

Earth to Sarovok: I'm not dismissing them, I'm saying that they are not revolutionary like SI thinks they are. Also, you obviously haven't heard about the Japanese project to do just this. So in fact, it is he who is dismissing an idea casually without justification.

[Skgoa]

Pezook pointed it out on the last page, but since no one adressed it yet and I had meant to post this before...

In order to make a space fortress viable, you went to such extremes that its pretty unrealistic the threat model it was meant to defeat would stay the way you imagine it. (Even if we ignore for a second that whatever the space fortress can do can be achieved at a much smaller cost by more conventional means.)
Or to put it differently: my global fleet of laser-armed nuclear submarines numbering in the millions just vaporized your petty asteroid base. Your move.

The idea just occurred to me that you could make a hybrid base/satellite system, you can have the center of the fortress, consisting of whatever habitation systems needed, which ideally are few long term and several short term modules, then a sensor and major computing modules, and finally a manufacturing facility.
Then you have a swarm of offensive and defensive satellites in the same orbit controlled by the center station and manufactured by it. It's not as vulnerable as a single station to long-range attack, and it's much more robust in both offensive and defensive capabilities, since its weapons platforms are decentralized and you can't knock them out in one hit. Admittedly this idea is much more suited to solar orbits rather than planetary ones.

And then a bag of ball bearings rips your whole fortress to shreds...

[Simon_Jester]

Please, elaborate, what breakthroughs and technology do you consider sufficiently convincing?

First of all, only one of those had to do with energy storage, and the article was from 2008. Where is this so called green energy revolution promised three years ago? What you don't understand is that cutting edge technology rarely pans out.

Formless, real technology can't be put into production over the weekend.

The first integrated circuit was invented around 1960. If someone had predicted then that integrated circuits would revolutionize everything from communications to automobile efficiency to how we look things up in the dictionary, what would you say? Would you turn around in 1963 and say:

"Where's my super-efficient car, my pocket radiophone, my automatic dictionary? This technology is lame, it's just a fad."

Thing is, every one of the predictions would come true- eventually. They did come true. But in 1963, the role of integrated circuits was limited to stuff like missile guidance computers. These things take time to permeate the market.

I've heard a lot of things from pop-science rags promising this that and the other with regards to solar, wind, nuclear, and other technologies green and otherwise futuristic, and how many of them pan out? Precious few.

A lot of things pan out; they just take longer than your attention span to pan out.

And you don't notice them when they're in operation, because who goes sniffing around new-build power plants to see whether they make use of technology patented within the last decade?

Pop-science publications tend to repeat the same promises every time they do a piece on a given subject. Every time solar power is mentioned, they talk about how great it would be to have near-perfect solar cells. Every time someone makes an incremental advance in fuel cell technology, they talk about how great fuel cells are. And so on.

That doesn't mean you have a right to expect a massive technological revolution every time Popular Mechanics publishes an article, or to feel cheated when the revolution doesn't come within six months. Or however long it takes you to decide that some bleeding-edge prototype "didn't pan out" because it's not in mass production yet.

Hence, any discussion has to be about technologies we know work or will work, not technologies that are still in beta at best. While there are certainly issues to be resolved with power stations in space, they are not nearly as reliant on stuff that still needs work in the lab. Hence, the only thing really in the way is the logistics, and so far you haven't actually shown why that should sway our hands.

And you are comparing this to ground-based solar, which as zero unsolved problems that still need work in the lab (since it's already in use) and zero unsolved logistics problems (since it's already in use)?

Formless, you're being silly.

You are a fucking broken record. I don't care how much energy hits the earth, what matters is how much of it actually can be converted into usable energy in a consistent manner. If cloud cover can shut off the power grid right during peak hours, people will still rely on good old fashioned coal fired plants and the green revolution is doomed. (At least, assuming nuclear never gets back its old prestige, which I do doubt it ever will)

Ability to store power does a lot for this. So does having backup plants that only run when the solar panels aren't working. This is not an amazing revelation: the idea that you can have a coal-fired plant that only generates electricity when other plants aren't doing the job is not all that difficult.

And this obvious solution greatly reduces the number of kilowatt-hours of energy produced by burning coal, because whenever the sun is shining in Nevada, and whenever the capacitor banks charged by the solar farms in Nevada still hold charge, you can use those to power things with green energy- reserving coal for stopgap purposes.

You don't even need to use coal for this. A really obvious choice to complement solar power is hydroelectric, because it's highly storable. Let the reservoir fill during the day, then run the turbines at night when the solar cells aren't gathering power.

There's no reason for anyone (you or Singular Intellect) to be super-enthusiastic about unproven Grand Engineering Projects when well-proven systems can do the same job well enough.

[Formless]

Okay, back to that ever arrogantly named persona Singular Intellect:

You think carrying payloads, delivering upgrades, simple maintenance and logistics in orbit has any kind of cost effectiveness or practicality compared to doing so on dry land and the ocean? What the fuck are you smoking?

And? Space doesn't have a whole lot of things that wear out machinary like the ground does. Are appeals to incredulity all you have to go by?

See above. Ballpark figures are our planet receives ten thousand times more energy than our entire civilization consumes, we need to only tap a tiny fraction of it to meet all our energy needs.

See my previous link on energy input from the sun hitting the surface of our planet. We have more than what we know what to do with.

Someone should name a logic fallacy after what you are doing. Simply having an abundant resource does not equate to having practical, reliable access to that resource.

They're not fantasy. They're being built as we speak, you ignorant simpleton.

Great, now address the problems with wide scale deployment of such schemes. Jeez, even the paper you quote names a few:

However, building such a facility involves a few restrictions. There has to be around 350 days a year of sunshine, and it needs to sit somewhere between the tropics, near the equator for optimal performance. In many respects, the coastal region of the UAE fits the bill, and this is why RAK is footing a large part of the development costs, contributing $5 million to the project. He added that "we began working on renewable energies with the emirate three years ago, indicating that the market with the biggest potential for solar energy and water technology".

Bolding is again mine. Most of the earth's population does not live where this scheme would be optimal, meaning that most of us will be restricted to using other power options like coal, nuclear, wind, and yes space based solar power.

Futhermore, it would be vastly easier to repair and maintain systems on dry land and the nearby ocean than in fucking orbit. Or do you think space based solar plants with necessarily large surface areas would be immune to significant problems like space debris?

And how much of a danger is space debris in comparison to the constant threat of bad weather? Again: simply throwing out talking points does not sway an argument ot your favor, Bubble Boy.

Yeah, too bad we haven't figured out how to make shit float yet.

There is a difference between floating a boat around that needs constant maintenance and has a crew always at hand to do said maintenance and floating a small island that needs to be constantly anchored in one spot 365 days a year to supply a poplation center. One is easy, the other is hard (and expensive). For one thing, the larger the object you want to float, the more of a problem ordinary waves become due to the fact that the island has to be able to bend with them. Size matters in the real world.

Yeah, beause our capability to implement infrastructure in space even remotely compares to doing so on land or the ocean, right?

Oh, yeah, that really answers the question doesn't it.

Once again: how do you propose mass deployment of these islands when it costs millions to billions of dollars to float just one oil rig in comparitively shallow seas? You can complain about the logistic of space based solar power all you want, but that does not excuse you from making proposals that are just as rediculous in their own ways.

Solar power is a decentralized energy source. You don't need to live near the ocean. Anywhere you see the sun will do just fine.

You guys don't get sunshine? That's news to me.

Seriously though, this is one of the stupidest fucking questions I've ever seen regarding solar power.

Except that in the winter the day gets as short as ~8 hours at this lattitude. Do you even think before throwing out your talking points? Because the evidence so far suggests that you don't.

Yeah, utterly insignificant portions of the ocean having artificial islands floating on it would be so disruptive! Especially since all they are doing is collecting that damn polluting sunlight!

I'm the dumbass, eh?

I was thinking of the pollution created by installing those rediculous things, Bubbles. What, oceangoing ships don't create pollution now?

[Formless]

Formless, real technology can't be put into production over the weekend.

You miss the point. The technology he is proposing isn't just a matter of improving engineering, its a matter of discovering completely new processes that we don't have yet. Also, it takes a long time to make improvements, but with regards to energy technology we do not have the time to wait for these inventions to be slowly improved. Integrated circuits were not a matter of civilizations rising or falling, whereas solar very well might. So as far as I am concerned, if we want to talk about the pros and cons of technology x vs y we have to talk about the technologies that are known, not unknown.

A lot of things pan out; they just take longer than your attention span to pan out.

This would be a lot more profound if the promises made weren't made in the short term. They want to capture people's attention, even when the future of that technology is in question. You read that article about the "decline effect" in science? Well, its effects are quite a bit more obvious when you look at engineering and futurism. Hence my skepticism with SI's wild claims that ground based solar power will revolutionize the world while space based schemes are apparantly devoid of all worth.

Its not that I dismiss anything that ends up in Popular Mechanics: indeed, space based solar power schemes are themselves the kind of futuristic thing those magazines are drawn to. Its just that I don't get my hopes up, nor dismiss proposals I don't like or find intuitive.

And you are comparing this to ground-based solar, which as zero unsolved problems that still need work in the lab (since it's already in use) and zero unsolved logistics problems (since it's already in use)?

Formless, you're being silly.

Simon, I'm talking about hydrogen fuel cells. Its related to the ground based solar power bit by the fact that the article SI linked to proposed storing energy in hydrogen fuel cells, an idea I've seen toted around for over a decade without panning out.

Ability to store power does a lot for this. So does having backup plants that only run when the solar panels aren't working. This is not an amazing revelation: the idea that you can have a coal-fired plant that only generates electricity when other plants aren't doing the job is not all that difficult.

And this obvious solution greatly reduces the number of kilowatt-hours of energy produced by burning coal, because whenever the sun is shining in Nevada, and whenever the capacitor banks charged by the solar farms in Nevada still hold charge, you can use those to power things with green energy- reserving coal for stopgap purposes.

You don't even need to use coal for this. A really obvious choice to complement solar power is hydroelectric, because it's highly storable. Let the reservoir fill during the day, then run the turbines at night when the solar cells aren't gathering power.

There's no reason for anyone (you or Singular Intellect) to be super-enthusiastic about unproven Grand Engineering Projects when well-proven systems can do the same job well enough.

This I do not disagree with. But then, see my reply to Sarevok: what irritates me is that the space based idea was rejected out of hand. I never said I thought it would be a magic pill, just that its not as bad an idea as he makes it out to be.

[eion]

A single asteroid-fortress would have to be attacked by dozens of warships to even the odds, for instance.

I'm curious. What's a "warship"?

That would depend entirely on how advanced the society is. It could be anything from a converted explorer with a couple missiles strapped to it to an armored laser-packed bruiser. The point is that the cooling capacity of a warship will always be lower than an asteroid fortress that can spend every non-combat moment cooling its massive heat-sink, also known as all the cubic kilometers of rock it's built into.

[Imperial528]

And then a bag of ball bearings rips your whole fortress to shreds...

I think that's simplifying things a bit... much, to understate. At the range which you could fire a few shots without having the swarm respond immediately, you'd have to use a missile to deliver the "ball bearings", which of course can simply be intercepted by the defensive satellites, even if they have to simply shift orbit to be in the way of it.

Closing in to get off a shot that can't be intercepted by anti-missile systems would surely bring you within the swarm's firing range.
Not to mention that the sheer amount of metal required to actually shred it would be so huge and so much would go to waste that it wouldn't be worth it. From what I can tell, you're thinking of shooting a large amount of micro-meteorite sized shrapnel at it. It'd definitely be a hindrance, and it'd be a pain to fix, but even a few hundred hits wouldn't be enough to kill it outright, and I doubt that you'd be accurate enough to even hit it with that many.

[Simon_Jester]

And? Space doesn't have a whole lot of things that wear out machinary like the ground does. Are appeals to incredulity all you have to go by?

In exchange, it picks up others: radiation damage, micrometeoroids... plus, anything that does fail is going to be enormously harder to replace, orders of magnitude harder. When something breaks on the ground, you send a guy out with a wrench. When something breaks in orbit, even if you have astronauts on hand to fix it, you need an extensively planned EVA operation where everything needs to be moved and stowed very carefully.

So I don't think this issue can be handwaved.

There is a difference between floating a boat around that needs constant maintenance and has a crew always at hand to do said maintenance and floating a small island that needs to be constantly anchored in one spot 365 days a year to supply a poplation center. One is easy, the other is hard (and expensive). For one thing, the larger the object you want to float, the more of a problem ordinary waves become due to the fact that the island has to be able to bend with them. Size matters in the real world.

This is true. On the other hand, it's also more of a solved problem than you would believe. Artificial islands aren't uncommon or new; nor are stationary platforms out in the deep ocean (like oil rigs).

Yeah, beause our capability to implement infrastructure in space even remotely compares to doing so on land or the ocean, right?

Oh, yeah, that really answers the question doesn't it.

Once again: how do you propose mass deployment of these islands when it costs millions to billions of dollars to float just one oil rig in comparitively shallow seas? You can complain about the logistic of space based solar power all you want, but that does not excuse you from making proposals that are just as rediculous in their own ways.

Formless, could you write out a comparison of costs per kilogram to orbit versus costs per kilogram to artificial island? Oil rigs weigh in the tens of thousands of tons; even positing dirt cheap space launch (say, 10$/kg), you get very large budgets to put something of comparable mass into orbit.

And you are comparing this to ground-based solar, which as zero unsolved problems that still need work in the lab (since it's already in use) and zero unsolved logistics problems (since it's already in use)?

In use for (much) less than 1% of energy generation in the United States.

Yes. However, it's scalable.

Once you have built one of something, building the second, the fifth, the tenth, and the twentieth becomes a lot easier. You can make rational estimates of how much it will cost. The size of the "unknown unknown" problems likely to crop up in construction shrink a lot. You can start turning the tricky finicky hardware that needs specialists to monitor into more user-friendly hardware that ordinary technicians can handle. And so on.

Solar power in the US on the ground is scalable; we could build more of it if we wanted to spend the money doing so. It would not be in any way impractical, and we can work out the costs in advance by taking the numbers from existing projects, adding minor corrections, and multiplying.

Solar power in orbit is not scalable, because there is nothing to scale it to. We have no prototypes to base our construction on. Nothing like it has ever been done, or even seriously considered.* All we have are projections of how much it is going to cost, projections which usually depend on assumptions that cannot be tested until we actually start cutting metal. This makes a huge difference if we're seriously interested in solving a problem any time in the next few decades, rather than just wanting to wave our hands and blather about how in the future we will have X and it will solve all our problems.

*If you aren't planning to pony up the money to do it in the near future, you aren't seriously planning something in engineering.

You miss the point. The technology he is proposing isn't just a matter of improving engineering, its a matter of discovering completely new processes that we don't have yet. Also, it takes a long time to make improvements, but with regards to energy technology we do not have the time to wait for these inventions to be slowly improved. Integrated circuits were not a matter of civilizations rising or falling, whereas solar very well might. So as far as I am concerned, if we want to talk about the pros and cons of technology x vs y we have to talk about the technologies that are known, not unknown.

Since space-based solar will make use of all the same technologies as ground-based solar and then some, I don't think it comes out very well in debates under those rules.

Remember, coming up with more efficient solar cells makes a huge difference to the feasibility of solar power satellites... as does reducing space launch costs. Any realistic estimate on the viability of SPS will depend very heavily on advances in solar power technology and the aerospace industry. You don't simplify your problem by putting the problem into orbit.

I'm not going to stick up for any "this will transform the world!" claims made by SI, since I have little reason to assume he knows what he's talking about. But I do think it's disingenuous to present untried solar power satellites as a "more realistic" alternative to equally untried ground-based solar power plants.

A lot of things pan out; they just take longer than your attention span to pan out.

This would be a lot more profound if the promises made weren't made in the short term. They want to capture people's attention, even when the future of that technology is in question. You read that article about the "decline effect" in science? Well, its effects are quite a bit more obvious when you look at engineering and futurism. Hence my skepticism with SI's wild claims that ground based solar power will revolutionize the world while space based schemes are apparantly devoid of all worth.

Look, Formless, what I want to get at is that the advantage of putting X tons of cells into space doesn't necessarily beat the advantage of putting 10X tons of cells on the ground at the same cost. Anything that improves solar power efficiency (or power storage) affects both systems more or less equivalently... and ground will still tend to win out over space on launch costs. If it's a choice between picking up eight times as much power per square kilometer of cells in space, while losing half of it in transmission, or building four times as many cheap cells for the same net price on the ground, space doesn't beat ground.

This I do not disagree with. But then, see my reply to Sarevok: what irritates me is that the space based idea was rejected out of hand. I never said I thought it would be a magic pill, just that its not as bad an idea as he makes it out to be.

I think it gets rejected out of hand because it relies on too many technical advances: cheap space launch, solar cells that are lightweight and high efficiency, a mechanism for transmitting beamed power to the ground...

There are a lot of things there where someone's done a design study, but no one's ever actually cut metal on a working system to test cost-effectiveness. In that respect it's like fusion power: sure it might be the killer app of the 23rd century, but for now we don't know enough to know whether it'll work.

Hence the tendency to dismiss it in favor of just building ten times more copies of something we already have and know we can build.

[Purple]

I have a question. Does not anyone who can drag an asteroid into orbit also have the capacity to drag and drop a much smaller one from orbit? Does that not produce sufficient deterrence on it's own?

[Simon_Jester]

I have a question. Does not anyone who can drag an asteroid into orbit also have the capacity to drag and drop a much smaller one from orbit? Does that not produce sufficient deterrence on it's own?

It may not be practical to do this quickly, in which case its deterrent effect is limited.

EDIT: There are ways to neutralize a slow-acting deterrent. For example, suppose the nations of Simonia and Purplistan fight a nuclear war. During the war, you leave my population centers more or less alone. however, Purplistani forces destroy the ground-based nuclear arsenal of the Simonian military, or neutralize them by sabotage or by pulling a new superweapon out of a hat. All that remains is the Simonian space-based deterrent force.

Now, what happens if you, Purple, say the following to me (or my successor if I got nuked):

"Disarm your space-based deterrent force, or I will use my remaining nuclear arsenal to lay waste to your (still largely intact) population centers."

At that point, I'd be a damn fool not to disarm my space-based deterrent.

The only insurance I can have against this kind of trick is to be sure that my deterrent can strike you before you have the leisure time to work out a plan like this. I must be able to hit you before you reduce me to a state where I'm helpless enough to be vulnerable to such blackmail. Redirected asteroids that take weeks or months to move into position don't qualify.

Where is your transmission efficiency number coming from? The worst I've seen is 85% - no where near losing half.

Pulled out of a hat. Chosen not as a representative sample, but only because it's easier to say:

"Build one panel that generates 8X power at 50% transmission efficiency, or four panels that generate X power at 100%, and get 4X power either way"

Than it is to say:

"Build ten panels that generate 6X power at 85% transmission efficiency versus fifty panels that generate X power each at 100% efficiency, and get 50X power either way."

The arithmetic is the same; it's just easier to do in your head, and I'm trying to generate an illustrative example people can assimilate quickly here.

[Purple]

The only insurance I can have against this kind of trick is to be sure that my deterrent can strike you before you have the leisure time to work out a plan like this. I must be able to hit you before you reduce me to a state where I'm helpless enough to be vulnerable to such blackmail. Redirected asteroids that take weeks or months to move into position don't qualify.

I meant doing the same thing you do for a space fortress by bringing the asteroid into orbit early. Just instead of putting guns and missiles on it crashing the thing it self into the planet.

[Skgoa]

@Purple: Shhh! You are getting your filthy realism and logic all over this circlejerk!

And then a bag of ball bearings rips your whole fortress to shreds...

I think that's simplifying things a bit... much, to understate. At the range which you could fire a few shots without having the swarm respond immediately, you'd have to use a missile to deliver the "ball bearings",

"Vacuum", look it up. I can launch my cloud of kinetic impactors (felt silly writing "ball bearings" outside of the metaphore) as far away as I want to. And I want to launch them from as far away as possible. Since they are extremely small and dispersed quite a bit, reliably picking them up on radar is going to be a bitch.

which of course can simply be intercepted by the defensive satellites, even if they have to simply shift orbit to be in the way of it.

Which means I win, since that is exactly what I wanted to happen?

Closing in to get off a shot that can't be intercepted by anti-missile systems would surely bring you within the swarm's firing range.

The problem for your swarm is that its made up of (comparatively) very little satellites, thus they will not have strong weapons or sensors... Even if my space shotgun (tm) doesn't get them, how long do you think they will last against a capital ship's lasers? ()

Not to mention that the sheer amount of metal required to actually shred it would be so huge and so much would go to waste that it wouldn't be worth it.

Um, no. Not only would I need only a tiny fraction of mass of what your swarm needs, I also have the added advantage of using a low-tech solution, which is guaranteed to be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce.

From what I can tell, you're thinking of shooting a large amount of micro-meteorite sized shrapnel at it. It'd definitely be a hindrance, and it'd be a pain to fix, but even a few hundred hits wouldn't be enough to kill it outright,

So your swarm of killsats + modular redundand central facilities is armored, now? And its keeping so many radiators and solar panels on reserve that its only slightly inconvenienced?

and I doubt that you'd be accurate enough to even hit it with that many.

And why do you doubt it?

[Singular Intellect]

Maybe if Formless stopped staring into space for a few minutes, he'd notice that his 'land locked' Colorado state is well on it's way to estabishing at least one large solar power plant already. Apparently, at least some people in his state realize you don't need to go into space to collect very significant solar energy.

And to think Colorado actually has the temporary bragging rights for having the world's largest solar power plant to boot (at least according to the article). Maybe he should take the time to explain to the people building it that a much better solution would be to build it in orbit, because that wouldn't do anything like vastly increasing the costs and logistics of such a energy project, right?

Costs and logistics...the sole points I brought up in my first post on the subject. Hmmm.

[Imperial528]

"Vacuum", look it up. I can launch my cloud of kinetic impactors (felt silly writing "ball bearings" outside of the metaphore) as far away as I want to. And I want to launch them from as far away as possible. Since they are extremely small and dispersed quite a bit, reliably picking them up on radar is going to be a bitch.

Ha ha, really? Unless each one of the little things is being launched from its own little barrel your accuracy at range will be little better than 18th century blunderbusses, and that's only by virtue of possessing sensors beyond see and shoot.

Which means I win, since that is exactly what I wanted to happen?

Congrats, you took out a piece of metal with thrusters strapped to it, which the station can have hundreds if not thousands of depending on size.

The problem for your swarm is that its made up of (comparatively) very little satellites, thus they will not have strong weapons or sensors... Even if my space shotgun (tm) doesn't get them, how long do you think they will last against a capital ship's lasers? ()

Individually, they'll last seconds at best, but your capital ship will in turn have to face hundreds of laser pulses from the satellites and maybe even missiles or kinetic impactors from the main station.

Um, no. Not only would I need only a tiny fraction of mass of what your swarm needs, I also have the added advantage of using a low-tech solution, which is guaranteed to be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce.

It'd be magnitudes cheaper for you to just throw enough missiles at me than I can shoot down, rather than this shotgun silliness, which only grows exponentially more inefficient the further you try to shoot me from. At least a missile can be kinetically launched onto a general path before it even has to try to home in.

So your swarm of killsats + modular redundand central facilities is armored, now? And its keeping so many radiators and solar panels on reserve that its only slightly inconvenienced?

It's a bit less that it's armor (which armor against this kind of stuff exists on modern stations and satellites expected to be vulnerable to micrometeorites) and a bit more that your attack is going to be so spread out that it has little chance of hitting anything vulnerable, and if it does strike anything particularly important, like a main connection beam, there's little chance it will do nothing but put a few pock marks in it.

And why do you doubt it?

Because at the ranges required to leisurely fire off this weapon at me with no fear of counter attack most of your shot will disperse by the time any of it reaches the intended target unless you put the shot aboard a missile, which can be intercepted.

Even at close range, you'd need a large amount of projectiles to even hope to make a real dent.

Let's do a little math on the subject, shall we?

Your ship fires X weight in shot from Y range, so there is Z chance that a considerable amount of shot actually hits anything. The larger Y gets, the larger Z gets, so the larger X must get so that the amount of hits remain in the same number range.
Now, if you just fired a single shot of X weight at me, it'd potentially to much more damage, since depending on what angle you attacked me from it could very well penetrate through the entire station. Of course, I could also intercept the shot, but that's the price you pay for effectiveness.

[Formless]

Maybe if Formless stopped staring into space for a few minutes, he'd notice that his 'land locked' Colorado state is well on it's way to estabishing at least one large solar power plant already. Apparently, at least some people in his state realize you don't need to go into space to collect very significant solar energy.

That project is in the San Luis Valley, a desert and one of the southernmost places of this state, far away from Denver where everyone lives. Furthermore, I was mocking your idiotic presumption that solar farms in the ocean were comparable to solar power stations in space (which can supply anywhere on the planet that you can construct a receiver). You were saying?

[Singular Intellect]

That project is in the San Luis Valley, a desert and one of the southernmost places of this state, far away from Denver where everyone lives.

And? So? Therefore? It's a fuckload closer and practical to reach than orbit. I could make it there is less than a day's worth of driving time and a couple hundred dollars worth of gas all the way from Calgary.

Furthermore, I was mocking your idiotic presumption that solar farms in the ocean were comparable to solar power stations in space (which can supply anywhere on the planet that you can construct a receiver). You were saying?

I wasn't saying they were comparable, that was precisely my point. I was pointing out solar farms on the ocean would be vastly more practical and economical than your space based solar power fantasy. Obviously those islands are useless concepts in a land locked state like Colorado...which then builds another type of solar power plant anyhow.

Apparently you have no comprehension of the logistic difficulties of deploying and maintaining systems in fucking orbit as opposed to just a drive or boat run away.

Just how fucking stupid are you? Or are you being willfully ignorant?

[Formless]

That project is in the San Luis Valley, a desert and one of the southernmost places of this state, far away from Denver where everyone lives.

And? So? Therefore? It's a fuckload closer and practical to reach than orbit. I could make it there is less than a day's worth of driving time and a couple hundred dollars worth of gas all the way from Calgary.

The point being that most people in this state aren't going to see the benefits of that project, dumbass. New Mexico and Texas are.

I wasn't saying they were comparable, that was precisely my point. I was pointing out solar farms on the ocean would be vastly more practical and economical than your space based solar power fantasy. Obviously those islands are useless concepts in a land locked state like Colorado...which then builds another type of solar power plant anyhow.

Apparently you have no comprehension of the logistic difficulties of deploying and maintaining systems in fucking orbit as opposed to just a drive or boat run away.

Just how fucking stupid are you? Or are you being willfully ignorant?

Are you ever going to present any numbers on the costs of getting such a project off the ground? You can talk about how costly it is all you want, but if you don't actually show that it is all that costly compared to installing power stations all over the land with capacitors and so forth to make them useful at night, all this bluster is meaningless. Especially when at least one country (Japan) thinks this will be a worthwhile endeavor. Also, don't think I haven't noticed that you have yet to address my argument that encouraging space technology is a Good Thing. I'm still waiting for you to show that solar power stations would be an undue burden to other space projects.

[Singular Intellect]

Tell you what Formless,

I'll submit an example of ground based solar power costs here: 1 billion dollars for a 550 megawatt solar power plant built in three years.

I'm having trouble finding any actual space based solar projects underway or even proposed. I'll gladly accept your help in demostrating, not only the initiation of such projects, but how much cheaper they will be to build and maintain.

[Formless]

I'm having a hard time finding exact figures for the JAXA project I mentioned last page, but:

The total project cost would be enormous—perhaps in the tens of billions of dollars—but Suzuki and his colleagues say they are not considering the price tag. “We can’t know whether this is feasible or not if we don’t have the basic technology first,” he says. “We’re aiming to produce stable, cheap power and hydrogen at a target price of 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.” That would be in line with conventional power generation costs of today and might make it more economically attractive.

Also:

According to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), it has been announced that as much as 1 GW of solar energy will be produced from space by 2030. The futuristic project is expected to work at full capacity in 20 years from now.

...

The cost of electricity generated is estimated to be at a rate of $0.09 per kilowatt-hour or JPY8.

Both estimates are close to the price per kilowatt hour of conventional power technologies. Assuming that those estimates took into account launch costs (and I'll admit they may not), then it certainly can't be much worse overall.

[Singular Intellect]

Your sourced articles are blowing your position out of the water, Formless.

From Farming Solar Energy in Space:

-prototype completion in twenty years
-expecting to produce one gigawatt of energy by the year 2030
-"The basic science is only part of the challenge. Testing both the microwave and laser systems will require gargantuan structures in space: thin-film condenser mirrors, solar panels and a microwave transmitter stretching for kilometers and weighing 10,000 metric tons, as well as a 100-unit laser array of 5,000 metric tons that would be 10 kilometers long. The ground-based microwave antenna would have to be two kilometers long."
-"The total project cost would be enormous—perhaps in the tens of billions of dollars—"

From Japan going for Space Solar:

-in ten years they expect a whole 10MW of energy production
-"The total cost of the JAXA project will be $21 billion"
-"JAXA confirms that the technology will be harmless. Yet, the public fears that the beams which will be present in the air might burn or cut anything in its way such as burning birds or cutting aircraft passing under the beams."

So, what we have is massive costs in the tens of billions that could easily not be factoring in actual launch costs, a mere one gigawatt yield after twenty years which is equivalent to a single large nuclear power plant, zero mention of damage inflicted by space debris which is not a minor problem, public unease at the idea of being zapped (validity not withstanding)...could this project be any more insane?

Sure, it's all fine and dandy that your first article mentions "Shrugging off massive costs, Japan pursues space-based solar arrays", but not everyone else is going to share that mentality.

Meanwhile, the first example I gave you demostrated a solar project producing over half a gigawatt of power for around a billion dollars and a completion time of three years.

I presume I don't need to do the math to show what yields one could expect from the ground based system over the same time frame and with the same budget projections for the space system.

[Formless]

*sigh* Why am I not surprised you didn't understand why I focused on the cost per kilowatt hour. The price of energy is partially a product of whether or not they expect the power plant to pay for itself in time, partially a product of market forces. If for example this is expected to last for as long as a nuclear power plant, then the initial launch costs are not necessarily the end of the line economically. In other words, what they say the energy will cost the consumer is a better way of figuring out whether or not this can pay out then the start up cost.

Granted, the dates are pretty far into the future, but once more I am not trying to argue that its a magic panacea. Merely that it is not as "insane" as you like to claim it is.

[Singular Intellect]

zero mention of damage inflicted by space debris which is not a minor problem

Prove it.

Here. Space debris is considered the biggest threat to the space shuttle in orbit.

Never mind orbiting solar power plants with much larger surface areas and much more fragile solar collector panels as the targets.

[Singular Intellect]

Most SSPS plans use geosynch orbit. (The JAXA plan appears to be going for low orbit for its prototypes, not sure if they are going to stick to that all the way through) Low orbit and geosynch orbit are worlds apart. Literally; you could fit two more Earths in there side by side between the two. It's a completely different situation.

Moreover, the threat to the space shuttle and to solar panels is completely different. Space debris hurts the shuttle by hitting the people or rendering it incapable of landing safely (damage the wings, the heat shields, etc. - your link goes into this, paragraph 3 under the heading "High Risk").

None of those affect solar power satellites, since they don't have to land. Debris would be more likely to sandblast the array, causing gradual degradation in it's ability. Bigger objects can be tracked and avoided from the ground, so the odds of a collision of big size are very low.

Which is my point. The system will be degraded by accumulating damage which will be very costly to maintain and repair, and you have to add additional systems like sensors and engines to permit the satellite to move out of the way if a particularily large impactor is spotted. That introduces other potential problems like alignment with the planetary based receiver during deviation from the expected position, possibly a need to return to an optimum position, fuel concerns for the engines, etc.

This would shorten it's lifespan, but is not likely to be catastrophic.

A shortened lifespan means increased overall costs for maintenance and energy payback, never mind the additional expenses of installing the capability to move itself, fuel and sensory packages to detect large incoming threats.

When it comes to engineering, the goal is to keep systems as simple and reliable as possible. If the goal is to collect solar power, we have a fuck ton of it on the surface we can utilize much more cheaply and much more easily.

btw, I love your supreme arrogance. A hundred Ph.D. types in Japan plan to build this thing, but obviously they're all stupid compared to your singular intellect. Engineers never consider things Internet people find obvious! Stupid fucking retards, I hope their array gets shattered ruining every satellite in orbit. Serves them right for not consulting us first!

I'm sorry, where is my user name used as an argument? Where did I declare myself smarter than anyone? Where did I claim they did not think of these problems? What the fuck does my user name have to do with my argument?

Oh yeah, that's right. Absolutely jack shit.

[PeZook]

These estimates are most definitely not factoring in launch costs. Getting 10 000 tonnes to geosynchronous orbit, even using a nonexistent 200 tonne to LEO superheavy booster, would require at least 90 flights. And that's for the construction materials alone, not counting the equipment and personnell needed to put the damn thing together. A superheavy vehicles like the Ares V would cost about 800 million or so per launch.

So just to physically move the basic building block to where you want them using rockets that do not exist, we're talking 72 billion dollars for a power plant generating 10 megawatts? Not counting R&D and the inevitable maintenance flights, and of course the cost of the ground receiver, and of course the emitters which, according to that study, would mass another 5000 tonnes

And, to add insult to injury, you are not going to get 100 tonnes of solar array to GEO because you have to launch it all in pieces, and thus accept inevitable mass losses to casings, unfolding systems, containers etc. which have to exist on every single flight. It's kind of like stuffing a 40 foot container with small 10kg boxes: the weight of the boxes themselves quickly eat into the total mass of the freight.

Now, even if the plant could generate a gigawatt, we can fucking get one gigawatt of power planetside for a mere two billion

The guys at JAXA even fucking said so, claiming it would only become viable with vast advacements in basic technology, since you can literally get 36 times more power (again, at the assumption the production plant will generate 100 times more power than the prototype) for the same price if we install the facilities planetside. Even more if we build nuclear plants instead.

Jesus. How can anyone read "Oh it would take arrays massing 10 000 tonnes in orbit" and go "Yeah that's totally better than what we have now"? For fuck's sake, people!