Designing Armor for Star Wars like warships

[Sea Skimmer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beiD1IpR ... re=related
This is the round in question being employed

[Darth Tedious]

In general, the best argument fo rthe Death Star's existence that one can devise is basically "because we can".

I always felt the Death Star served a good purpose in ruling through fear. If a planet gets out of line, it suddenly gets a new moon (That's no moon, it's a space station! ). You'd certainly want to align your planet with the Empire if you had that thing hanging in the sky overhead (though this is probably more true of DS2, being larger and more visible).

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, but it can only be in one place at a time. The Death Star can't even come close to being omnipresent; it has to exercise more power by deterrence than anything else.

If we accept the premise that its superlaser is being used to crack shielded worlds (with sufficient overpenetration that no conceivable shield can stand against it, possibly, which would explain why it's so turbocharged), it's probably intended to work with the regular Imperial Navy, which is responsible for all the planets not covered by ISD-proof defensive shields.

[Sea Skimmer]

One slightly rational idea I just had for why the super laser might be so overpowered, is the Emperor wanted to be able to blow up a planet with extensive orbital shipyards, and have all the ship yards and vessels in orbit destroyed by the debris. However even then, a fleet of large battleships attacking ought to work just as well and would be able to chase down all the rebel or whatever ships fleeing. Course heavily built up and heavily fortified shipyards would also be one of the few places you'd expect might muster enough firepower to challenge the Death Star to a conventional battle.

Also given that the Death Star is merely the largest superlaser ever, not the only one, the damn thing seems really vulnerable to someone building something like Eclipse, and destroying it with a single shot in return. 10 very large battleships, all identical would provide the Emperor will a lot more security because no one would easily know which one he was one at any given time. Deception like that is par the course for modern VIP protection.

[Simon_Jester]

In principle, but the Death Star is in large part a weapon for internal policing.

There are a very limited number of places in the galaxy with the potential to build an Eclipse-equivalent, and Palpatine is probably confident of his ability to keep an eye on them all and prevent one from being built.

So I doubt he worries much about people being able to kill an operational Death Star that way, any more than the security protections for modern leaders worry much about the idea that someone might smuggle in a battery of mortars and just bombard their heavily protected residence/motorcade/whatever into submission. While they may have a plan for that, it's not exactly a common occurence.

[Sea Skimmer]

In principle, but the Death Star is in large part a weapon for internal policing.

There are a very limited number of places in the galaxy with the potential to build an Eclipse-equivalent, and Palpatine is probably confident of his ability to keep an eye on them all and prevent one from being built.

The problem is someone doesn't really need a true Eclipse equivalent, just the sufficiently massive superlaser assembly with engines on the rear with sufficent bracing and they can hide it 50,000 light years outside the galaxy when not in use. Like building a railroad gun vs. the whole battleship. I'm sure this is very hard to build; but its pretty clear Star Wars doesn't rely on scaling machine tools to the job like we do today. They have the ability to make stuff we'd have to cast and machine out of many specific pieces, bonding it all together with equal strength. I am at least pretty sure they don't cast ISD reactors in 500 meter wide sand molds. If you can just keep putting small pieces together to make giant things you then this fits with the idea of the Trade Federation simply being able to rape worlds for materials and convert them directly into warships and weapons and thus challenge the massively developed core sectors.

So I doubt he worries much about people being able to kill an operational Death Star that way, any more than the security protections for modern leaders worry much about the idea that someone might smuggle in a battery of mortars and just bombard their heavily protected residence/motorcade/whatever into submission. While they may have a plan for that, it's not exactly a common occurence.

The US President is certainly prepared for that situation, and always travels in a convoy with decoy limos. Dictatorship of an entire galaxy of 50 million worlds and the ability to travel across the galaxy in a day... umm thats enough to generate a pretty broad spectrum of threats. Its like if anyone from anywhere on earth could arrive outside the limits of the District of Columbia without warning. All the more so when you are already undergoing a civil war. The Death Star had to eat fuel like crazy and everyone in the Galaxy would naturally dislike it, its just not a wise strategy compared to deception. But hell the Emperor was setup to loose anyway. The Death Star isn't the worst survival strategy ever, but for how much it cost to build in secret vs. 100 decoy battleships of the highest speed and range its a bad investment.

The Emperor was however at least smart enough to travel in a shuttle craft which looks exactly like all the others by the time of ROTJ, I give him credit on that.

[Simon_Jester]

True.

Then again, who said the Death Star was meant purely as a heavily armed throne room? It can serve that purpose- even if the enemy has weapons that can kill it it's mobile enough to be hard to destroy. Sure, you send your dedicated superlaser carrier to its location- only where is it? Someone decisive enough may be able to outmaneuver you that way, just by keeping the Death Star moving.

But ultimately, even if it's not a heavily armed throne room, it still serves a very useful purpose as a military weapon- a planet-cracker large enough that only unusual weapons of types seldom seen in the galaxy could threaten it credibly. It serves as a mobile base, as a way to punch out the enemy's strongest strategic points and intervene decisively in fleet actions... it's useful in that regard.

[Connor MacLeod]

I'd guess that the Death Star's got two main advatnages from Palpy's perspective:

1.) the way it is designed it is massively more powerful and tougher than anything else in the galaxy, and thus nothing is powerful enough (or no force numerous enough, at least on any practical scale) to threaten it. While I am sure such ships (or fleets) could be built given time, Palpy could no doubt act in some measure to prevent such. After all, the Empire proper probably commands more wealth and resources than any individual member (or even groups of members.)

2.) the insane logistical requirements behind the weapon make it easy to control. Regardless of whether it needs onboard fuel or needs the power/fuel transmitted to it (different theories of operation), the Emperor basically controls the supply lines, and can cut it off when he wants. Hell, its quite likely that only the Empire itself could probably command the resources to maintain any number of Death Stars.

Also, given its uniqueness (or depending on the source, the limited numbers of DS he intended to build as regional commands) it would be realtively easy for him to sabotage or destroy it via his agents. WE already know Palpy is prone to building in hard-wired backdoors and controls into ships (like the Chimera in Dark Force Rising), as well as emplacing agents (visible and hidden) who are dedicated to carrying out self destructs and such. A small number of weapons, whilst individually more powerful, are thus more easily controlled.

But otherwise from the POV of practicality, the Galaxy Gun setup makes far more sense (although you dont even need a gun. Any sufficiently large hyperspace platform could be designed to blow up a planet).

[Connor MacLeod]

Four or five meter lethal fragmentation radius, the shaped charge will defeat a 70mm RHA plate at 0 degrees. It can start fires by M42/46 grenades don’t have a dedicated incendiary effect as far as I’m aware, some cluster bombs have zirconium ring for that. Blast effects are minimal; this is 30 grams of explosives.

A much newer submunition of the same size could potentially defeat 75-100% more armor and the case could be fragmenting reactive metal explosive. The fragmentation radius won’t go up because you just don’t have that much metal to spray out. Note that 88 grenades at 5 meter lethal radius covers closer to a 7,000 square meter area then the 4,000 square meters I credited each shell with, so we have significant overlap in lethal fragmentation frag radiuses built in.

So the primary kill mechanism is lots and lots of shrapnel. What if you reliedon just on HE blast? Or what about say, a FAE?

Also before you mentioned bunker busters... what sort of bunker busters were you envisioning?

In real life DPICM can hit as high as 50% dud rates under optimally shitty conditions and bad production lots. However I theorize that a future DPICM subprojectile could have a fundamentally different, all electronic arming and fusing system that would simply cease to be hazardous once the battery drained. An insensitive munition explosive could also be used as well. Right now that would just be too complicated to mass produce. Even in real life these things get produced in the 100 million+ range. Comp B explosive is toxic, almost all explosives are toxic in reasonably large quantities but a one time mass use isn’t likely to have more then transient effects if any. So after a heavy rainfall the area would be more or less usable given hypothetically safe bomblets.

It did occur to me that you're also chucking billions of tons of jagged metal fragments all over the planet. That can't be safe. And once you pureed every living thing on the planet you'd have to also clean up the bodies n stuff.. no idea ho whard that would be (decay and disease would be an issue, I imagine.) I suppose if you have droids like SW does, that may not be much of an issue though.

Sure but no one ever tries to explain how a theatre shield would work even in sci fi terms. We have big guns and big rocks for that anyway.

Heh. Some people try to figure out how shields work. I've known quite a few actually. That said, it might still be as simple as EM or magnetic fields of sufficient strength, or some sort of tractor/repulsor beam. CAn you make grenades out of non-ferrous materials? Or have they done so?

Both. Nukes leave radioactivity, and using more nukes together makes the fallout worse then the sum of its parts as far as we can tell. Nuclear blasts do not scale up well in terms of inflicting mass damage, so your talking about tens of thousands of the things to carpet the earth if not far more. You are also simply dumping a tremendous amount of energy in the environment and destroying plant life far more extensively. DPICM would start a lot of wide fires, and tear up trees and bushes but it wouldn’t be flash scorching everything in sight and killing all the grass leading to planet wide dustbowl. This makes it much more realistic to move in loyalist colonial types to takeover the planet and mobilize its resources for the WAR EFFORT. Clone loyal colonists if you have too…

I'm aware of the energy issues and things like nuclear fallout influencing the enviroment rather nastily even with sub-gigaton levels.

Would fourth generation (I believe those are the pure fusion type) nukes be as much of an issue for radioactivity? What if you scale down the yields to below kilotons (I know those aren't as efficient as larger nukes, but I believe you can make some pretty compact ones still. antimatter would be even more compact.)

I think WW1 already showed you can fuck up the landscape big time with conventional and chemical weapons. Many chemical weapons kill plants and sustained high explosive bombardment will toxify the landscape on its own. Some new explosives aren’t so bad in that respect, but the TNT base stuff they used in WW1 outright killed many shell filling plant workers. Most artillery firing ranges are considered the same as toxic waste dumps.

huh, interesting.

The cost of a chartering or building a container ship to deliver the attack seems trivial in comparison to building the barracks you need just to house the workers to build the Death Star.

True, but just how trivial is it to something like an ISD? ISDs can bombard planets (they don't have to do the full out BDZ to render the place inhabitable after all), as well as carry out myraid other duties.

Maybe loading up a transport with the munitions for delivery would be cheaper still, but that still leaves the matter of having to ferry the resources to the planet (including time to load the ship) and then deploying them. For that matter, multiple smaller ships (to cover different angles) probably would be better than one big one (also less chance of losing the entire loadout if they are attacked or in case of an accident or sabotage or whatever.) Seems like it might be more efficient in some ways, but not neccesarily in others. And even then, blasting a planet with turbolasers may not only be more convenient (if less efficient) but also may leave more of a lasting impression. I suppose it owuld come down to whether they care about reclaiming the planet or not/

Yeah okay, but they also all act like idiots as persistently as they can, so one has to seriously wonder about how well a lot of stuff they do actually works. Look at Africa, completely inept idiots can fight each other a very long time as long as they are bad at killing. The Death Star may just have been a solution to the chronic retardation of Star Wars forces in general… its not a great basis to work from.

I won't disagree at all as far as the idiocy goes, and that includes the Death Stars. Most of the military stuff in the movies and series and even the books could be pretty foolish. But in the absence of any real large scale wars (at least ones that couldn't be managed ins ome fashion.. something like the Vong War), various forms of cultural stupidity and/or general human nature, and overall compacency, I don't really expect SW to consider efficiency of paramount importance in their military forces. It's almost as contrived in some ways as dune.. or more like play or sport sometimes than anything else. And the military tends to be used more as a political or economic tool rather than as a defense.

Punishing people brutally by removing an ocean makes vastly more sense as a deterrent then killing everyone, which quickly puts you into a spiral of needing to kill on bigger and bigger scales.

Depends on how you go about killing, I suppose.

[Sea Skimmer]

So the primary kill mechanism is lots and lots of shrapnel. What if you reliedon just on HE blast? Or what about say, a FAE?

The lethal blast radius of such tiny explosives would be trivial; an FAE would help but not a whole lot. It is not easy to kill people with blast. If we wanted to use small blast weapons we’d be looking at dropping groups of small bombs in the 20-100lb range, rather then cluster bombs. Such clustered small bombs were very common in the world wars and with French and Russian aircraft, though usually for fragmentation rather then blast effects.

Also before you mentioned bunker busters... what sort of bunker busters were you envisioning?

Depends on what bunkers the people I want to kill are using, a 155mm artillery shell set to delay action will take out someone in a backyard fallout shelter but much heavier stuff would be required for places buried 40ft or more down.

It did occur to me that you're also chucking billions of tons of jagged metal fragments all over the planet. That can't be safe. And once you pureed every living thing on the planet you'd have to also clean up the bodies n stuff.. no idea ho whard that would be (decay and disease would be an issue, I imagine.) I suppose if you have droids like SW does, that may not be much of an issue though.

One advantage of the DPICM method vs. nukes is that it would not totally wipe out, though it would heavily damage populations of birds and insects and various small which will eat the corpses. Rotting corpses will certainly be a problem for a while, but that’s life. In a year I can’t see it mattering much. Shrapnel on the ground is annoying but it will rust, and you are going to have millions of tons of broken glass and debris from blowing up cities any way about it. At least steel you could clean up with a magnet dragged across the ground, and the bits will rust away over time.

Heh. Some people try to figure out how shields work. I've known quite a few actually. That said, it might still be as simple as EM or magnetic fields of sufficient strength, or some sort of tractor/repulsor beam. CAn you make grenades out of non-ferrous materials? Or have they done so?

Submuntions, no, but they have made landmines including aerial scattered ones which are ferrous metal free. This would mean reducing fragmentation effectiveness.

Would fourth generation (I believe those are the pure fusion type) nukes be as much of an issue for radioactivity? What if you scale down the yields to below kilotons (I know those aren't as efficient as larger nukes, but I believe you can make some pretty compact ones still. antimatter would be even more compact.)

Radiation would matter a lot less from forth generation air bursts; ground bursts would still be dirty as fuck and without ground bursts humans can still survive in fairly basic shelters. 4ft of earth overhead cover is enough to reduction radiation exposure by a factor of about 100 which will turn a dose of radiation that should instantly drop you dead into one which might not even give you cancer 15 years later. The same cover BTW would be easily defeated by 155mm delay action.

In general the effects of nuclear weapons are easy to protect against given preparation time, except for the intensive 20+ psi blast close in, and the long term radioactive contamination of the food supply starving you all to death.

True, but just how trivial is it to something like an ISD? ISDs can bombard planets (they don't have to do the full out BDZ to render the place inhabitable after all), as well as carry out myraid other duties.

If Star Wars had the same commercial vs military tonnage cost ratios then a 10km long freighter would easily still be cheaper then a 1.6km Star Destroyer. Droid factories on uninhabitable worlds might theoretically make the cluster bombs ‘free’ once you paid off the initial investment. If no humans are required you don’t need salaries….

I suppose it owuld come down to whether they care about reclaiming the planet or not/

Of course the objective always matters.

[Simon_Jester]

...What exactly stops the planetary defense batteries from turning your big, slow, tubby, unarmed transport into a pile of scrap metal before it releases more than a small fraction (if any) of its cargo of artillery shells?

I mean, coming up with the most cost-effective way to win when the enemy doesn't shoot back is seldom the basis on which men plan to fight wars.

[SCVN 2812]

...What exactly stops the planetary defense batteries from turning your big, slow, tubby, unarmed transport into a pile of scrap metal before it releases more than a small fraction (if any) of its cargo of artillery shells?

I mean, coming up with the most cost-effective way to win when the enemy doesn't shoot back is seldom the basis on which men plan to fight wars.

Planets might as well be stationary targets since you always know where they're going to be at any given moment. Even a warship with myopic sensors and bad intel can at least hit the planet from light seconds away, if not further. With good intelligence or good sensors, a warship could hit cities or even individual weapon batteries. This is, of course, assuming ballistic weapons or energy weapons that wouldn't fade into indifference at such ranges.

The basic idea is that, depending on the rules of the universe, if weapon ranges are not limited by a drop off in firepower, then its no problem at all to sit back at ranges that give the warship a comfortable amount of time to change its position before any incoming fire arrives and bomb the planet. For energy weapons this will probably be a few light seconds or more depending on how much acceleration the ships have. For ballistic weapons, it depends on how fast the projectiles at. It could be under a light second or much further if they are relativistic.

[Beowulf]

...What exactly stops the planetary defense batteries from turning your big, slow, tubby, unarmed transport into a pile of scrap metal before it releases more than a small fraction (if any) of its cargo of artillery shells?

I mean, coming up with the most cost-effective way to win when the enemy doesn't shoot back is seldom the basis on which men plan to fight wars.

You don't necessarily have to have the transport drop the munitions. You can have it sit behind the nearest gas giant while the warships pick them up, and drop them. You don't need a warship capable of doing BDZs, but just one that can face off against a planetary defense battery and win.

[Connor MacLeod]

Depends on what bunkers the people I want to kill are using, a 155mm artillery shell set to delay action will take out someone in a backyard fallout shelter but much heavier stuff would be required for places buried 40ft or more down.

I was looking at the Massive Ordnance Penetrator as the upper limit, which looks like just on penetration alone you might get quite a bit of depth, nevermind explosive payload. Hell, made from sci fi materials and dropped from orbit you're going to probably get far more penetration than that.

I couldn't find anything authoritative on the terminal velocity of the MOP save "supersonic" and "hard" numbers between Mach .5 and Mach 1. It probably doesn't hit any faster than a tank round though, whilst a round dropped from orbit quite probably will be a hyper-velocity impact (just a quick look suggests its something on the order of Mach 25 or so for the shuttle) Maybe you'd have to be using fighters or attack drones to drop this, unless you had some way to bleed off all the extra velocity... hypervelocity impacts aren't very good for penetration (but very good for making big craters) as I remember. Unless we're planning some sort of controlled descent or guided munitions for your scenario.

Hell, maybe we should just forget the HE warhead at those speeds and just drop a solid slug for penetrator damage. I never considered that method for bombardment. Depending on the kind of world, subsurface bombardment could get intensive (Such as a planet whose population exists entirely below ground. Or a Coruscant-like city world - that has a fairly significant sub-surface component too.)

One advantage of the DPICM method vs. nukes is that it would not totally wipe out, though it would heavily damage populations of birds and insects and various small which will eat the corpses. Rotting corpses will certainly be a problem for a while, but that’s life. In a year I can’t see it mattering much. Shrapnel on the ground is annoying but it will rust, and you are going to have millions of tons of broken glass and debris from blowing up cities any way about it. At least steel you could clean up with a magnet dragged across the ground, and the bits will rust away over time.

Good point. I still think droids would be easier, though, at least in SW. We know droids can be made small and for cleaning purposes. Hell we know they can clean up a toxified planet too, so those same droids could take care of whatever toxic/poisonous after-effects of the bombardment too. Makes more sense than just letting it rust

This would be a good method if your goal is to wipe out the planet's inhabitants not render it uninhabitable (better than bioweapons even?). You could re-populate it at leisure. An added benefit is that it might cause economic or social disruption somewhere else (eg someone depends on agriculture on the planet ot support itself.) There are still cases where you may want to either render the planet uninhabitable or outright sterilize it (in 40K there are enemies that can infect or act on the microscopic/cellular level or lower or operate deeply below ground.)

Aren't FAEs supposed to be good in caverns and tunnels?

Submuntions, no, but they have made landmines including aerial scattered ones which are ferrous metal free. This would mean reducing fragmentation effectiveness.

You might use wide-beam energy weapons or proximity fused weapons to try to detonate incoming ordnance high up in orbit. Ion cannons (in SW) would be quite good at this. Along with tractor beams that might be as useful as shields. Of course that would be easily defeated by just mass-dumping the ordnance all at once (I'm pretty sure most SW defenses wouldn't be able to hit billions of targets simultaneously.)

Radiation would matter a lot less from forth generation air bursts; ground bursts would still be dirty as fuck and without ground bursts humans can still survive in fairly basic shelters. 4ft of earth overhead cover is enough to reduction radiation exposure by a factor of about 100 which will turn a dose of radiation that should instantly drop you dead into one which might not even give you cancer 15 years later. The same cover BTW would be easily defeated by 155mm delay action.

What is it about fourth generation nukes that still makes them "dirty"? I haven't found much info on the concept yet my impression was they were looking at lots of alternatives to triggering the fusion reactions other than use of fission (IIRc leftover fissile material and the contaminated casings are what contribute to existing nukes being so 'dirty')

In general the effects of nuclear weapons are easy to protect against given preparation time, except for the intensive 20+ psi blast close in, and the long term radioactive contamination of the food supply starving you all to death.

Nukes (or nuke like weapons) are probably best wiping out stuff aboveground with airbursts. Below ground you would probably want to use kinetic impactors from orbit or energy weapons.

If Star Wars had the same commercial vs military tonnage cost ratios then a 10km long freighter would easily still be cheaper then a 1.6km Star Destroyer. Droid factories on uninhabitable worlds might theoretically make the cluster bombs ‘free’ once you paid off the initial investment. If no humans are required you don’t need salaries….

Quite true. You could automate the entire thing. But I was thinking more along the lines of "how long would it take the craft to get there?" Yes we know SW hyperdrive can go quite fast (hours, say) but from what little I recall of other people like Ender doing their analysis, we're talking some pretty hefty energy costs (depending on distance covered, type of hyperdrive, etc.) Possibly approaching the levels of energy used in just bombarding a planet with energy weapons or nukes.

I wonder if you'd want some sort of large 10km carrier type vessel to be the delivery vehicle. Carriers probably would be military vessels and still carry military hyperdrive (and thus be fast), and if the thing is big enough it could carry lots of fighters to drop all the ordnance in a very short period of time (the more ordance you drop and the faster you drop it, the less time to respond or defend against it the enemy will have. Including raising planetary shields if they have them.) Lots of fighters also allows for a single vessel to cover the whole planet, intercept escaping ships, take out surface defenses, etc. There is still the "cost/energy expenditure" issue, but from a military POV that may be deemed irrelevant (such as if you want to wipe out everyone without rendering the planet uninhabitable.)

[Simon_Jester]

...What exactly stops the planetary defense batteries from turning your big, slow, tubby, unarmed transport into a pile of scrap metal before it releases more than a small fraction (if any) of its cargo of artillery shells?

I mean, coming up with the most cost-effective way to win when the enemy doesn't shoot back is seldom the basis on which men plan to fight wars.

Planets might as well be stationary targets...

Even so, this is still a lengthy operation that relies on a very large cargo hauler to dispense the munitions. It will work well against a poorly defended opponent, but not against planets capable of interfering with your operations to any meaningful degree- which, often as not, are the only ones worth bombing so heavily.

[Sea Skimmer]

Somehow I typed out a big reply to this and then it didn't get posted, or else I have stupidly put it in the wrong thread, here is a shortened version.

I couldn't find anything authoritative on the terminal velocity of the MOP save "supersonic" and "hard" numbers between Mach .5 and Mach 1. It probably doesn't hit any faster than a tank round though, whilst a round dropped from orbit quite probably will be a hyper-velocity impact (just a quick look suggests its something on the order of Mach 25 or so for the shuttle)

MOP will hit at way above mach 1 if you drop it from high enough, mach .5 is almost the minimal speed it might hit at considering that even a 500mph jet release is already faster.

Maybe you'd have to be using fighters or attack drones to drop this, unless you had some way to bleed off all the extra velocity... hypervelocity impacts aren't very good for penetration (but very good for making big craters) as I remember. Unless we're planning some sort of controlled descent or guided munitions for your scenario.

Guided is a given for attacking fortifications now, Star Wars looks to be at the point in which making every one of those DPICM cluster bombs guided might not be that expensive. Slowing down would be necessary if you want to deliver a high explosive payload inside the tunnels, if you dropped a 30,000lb slug and had it hit at mach 25 the shear earth shock of the impact would be effective against fairly deep tunnels. This can of course scale up, but the fact is while deep underground fortifications are very feasible even today they also risk turning into tombs. Providing protected entry and access for an entire population would not be easy and if the enemy seizes the surface he can use mine warfare against you. Of course the defender can also use countermines to explode the surface.

Good point. I still think droids would be easier, though, at least in SW. We know droids can be made small and for cleaning purposes. Hell we know they can clean up a toxified planet too, so those same droids could take care of whatever toxic/poisonous after-effects of the bombardment too. Makes more sense than just letting it rust

Depends on if you even care, a lot of the land isn’t going to be used for anything but resource extractions anyway.

This would be a good method if your goal is to wipe out the planet's inhabitants not render it uninhabitable (better than bioweapons even?). You could re-populate it at leisure. An added benefit is that it might cause economic or social disruption somewhere else (eg someone depends on agriculture on the planet ot support itself.) There are still cases where you may want to either render the planet uninhabitable or outright sterilize it (in 40K there are enemies that can infect or act on the microscopic/cellular level or lower or operate deeply below ground.)

Cellular level is hardly any different then biowarfare now is it? Biowarfare sucks for anything. You can never clean it up, and it wont kill people with any kind of protected shelter. Modern houses 30 years from now might have NBC warfare filters on the air conditioner, some modern buildings already do, and even the better grades of HEPA filter can stop most viruses. Combined that with a slight overpressure in a building and only clean air can leak out. This is far easier to accomplish then protection against DPICM barrages or almost any other kind of attack.

Considering how many diseases must exist in the Star Wars galaxy BTW, I think they must have very highly advanced medical science in ordered not to be ravaged by endless of plagues. Think about how many plague diseases the earth alone has, now multiply by 51 million. You would also simply need hundreds of thousands of tons of bioagent to realistically coat a planet, and even this might be conservative. The USSR was making anthrax in 50 ton batches for a reason.

Aren't FAEs supposed to be good in caverns and tunnels?

They are good for enclosed spaces because the lower impulse longer timeframe explosion can more easily flow around obstructions. However its hard to make an FAE of large size work in an enclosed space, so a more likely use of FAEs vs. tunnels is to explode them right outside the entrance. Then the blast is channeled down the tunnel.

The big problem is with hard rock tunnels and even some kinds of soil tunnels, just because a bomb hits the tunnel doesn’t mean it pierces it to explode inside, nor does it mean it explodes at all (damage assessment is hard). Even then a detonation in the tunnel may bring down a section of roof, but that may only be scabbing which is easily cleared away. Anyone entombed gets dug out, and most tunnels and rooms are not damaged. An FAE is seeking to just kill what is in the tunnel, rather then trying to collapse it. The US found 2000lb and 4500lb bombs can easily wreck a few rooms which may suffice for targets like an air defense sector operations bunker, but they will not bring about the complete destruction of large underground facilities. That’s one of the reasons for MOP, it not only can hit stuff 200ft deep in soft rock, it does so with over 6,000lb of bulk HE onboard to ensure target destruction, or at least a damn big chunk of it.

You might use wide-beam energy weapons or proximity fused weapons to try to detonate incoming ordnance high up in orbit. Ion cannons (in SW) would be quite good at this. Along with tractor beams that might be as useful as shields. Of course that would be easily defeated by just mass-dumping the ordnance all at once (I'm pretty sure most SW defenses wouldn't be able to hit billions of targets simultaneously.)

You need defense suppression sure; I don’t see this as a major problem if the alternative is building the death star. The death star may have been ton for ton more gun for your money then an ISD, but it can only be in one place at a time and can’t do all the other jobs you need out of a military. Particularly a galaxy wide occupation force based on fear, which means killing people all the time and thus constantly creating new enemies.

What is it about fourth generation nukes that still makes them "dirty"? I haven't found much info on the concept yet my impression was they were looking at lots of alternatives to triggering the fusion reactions other than use of fission (IIRc leftover fissile material and the contaminated casings are what contribute to existing nukes being so 'dirty')

Normally long term fallout mostly comes from leftover fissile material attaching to debris. But short term fallout comes simply from debris being irradiated directly by the nuke blast. This can leave steel so radioactive it would kill you in 20 minutes… for several days. Now if you set off a shitload of nukes with ground bursts, and that’s creating a massive massively tonnage of those short term debris. The more fallout you have, the longer the decay period needed until the total radiation level is safe.

Nukes (or nuke like weapons) are probably best wiping out stuff aboveground with airbursts. Below ground you would probably want to use kinetic impactors from orbit or energy weapons.

Something like that. The ideal nuclear target is basically a warehouse made out of thin wood painted black, while the worst target is something like a main battle tank with a neutron liner dug into a hole.

Quite true. You could automate the entire thing. But I was thinking more along the lines of "how long would it take the craft to get there?" Yes we know SW hyperdrive can go quite fast (hours, say) but from what little I recall of other people like Ender doing their analysis, we're talking some pretty hefty energy costs (depending on distance covered, type of hyperdrive, etc.) Possibly approaching the levels of energy used in just bombarding a planet with energy weapons or nukes.

I cannot see energy costs being high in Star Wars if ships like the Death Star can be afforded and resupplied with reliability, and people make interstellar flights all the time. The Death Star may be proportionally more efficient at mounting raw firepower then smaller ships, I’d expect so, but its still got to have absurd supply needs. Something like the Executor cruising around has to guzzle fuel and it never seems to be a limitation. Anyway if economics matter, remember that after my bombardment any large objects are still largely intact. So you can steal whole 2km tall skyscrapers and scrap them for the war effort. The Death Star of a BDZ type attack would slag them at best, scatter them across a solar system at worst. The World Devastator is my preferred means of planetary destruction. Then all those massive nodes of raw materials that people like to call cities or ships or bridges can be converted right into more weapons for the war.

The modern earth has been making 700-800 millions tons of steel almost ever year from 1900 until now, and lots before that. So even accounting for losses billions upon billions of tons of material exist for easy harvesting even off a world no more developed then Earth. The city planets have so many buildings I think they would very significantly increase the planetary gravity!

I wonder if you'd want some sort of large 10km carrier type vessel to be the delivery vehicle.

Na, just use a container ship. If the defenses are weak the ship simply dumps all the containers into orbit to dump all the bomblets. If the defenses are strong then you take the containers and give some of them to each of your attacking ships to control/tow into action. Not much difference in principal then having your warships launch a fireship attack or using bomb ketches

[Simon_Jester]

Again, though, it's really only practical if there are no such things as planetary shields, or wide-area effect beam weapons. Star Wars is far from the only setting to have the former, and many settings have the latter.*

As a practical matter, this mode of attack is a lot like the Empire responding to defiant but weak planets by stealing its oceans or something: it works, and very effectively, but it's not something you can credibly use against an equal opponent. I mean, turn that mass-produced bombardment of cluster munitions around: what stops them from firing that same mass of projectiles at your own ships and blasting them into confetti?

It's not impractical but, again, only works if your margin of superiority is such that you could do this in other ways- albeit possibly more expensive ways.

*(SW may or may not be one of them, I neither remember nor much care right this moment).

[Sea Skimmer]

You think you can use the Death Star against an equal opponent? Doesn't look like it to me, anyone with remotely comparable strength would be able to counter it with a smaller superlaser in turn if nothing else.

Anyway I never intended this idea to be taken as literally as you are now. As I said all along it is an example of what weakness can still do. It has limitations, so does everything else, but it doesn't completely take the planet out of the war effort. That just never makes sense unless you are already loosing very badly. Maybe the Emperor already was; but in that case I still see few rational advantages over dozens of heavy ships that at least give the option of doing something else.

[Connor MacLeod]

Guided is a given for attacking fortifications now, Star Wars looks to be at the point in which making every one of those DPICM cluster bombs guided might not be that expensive. Slowing down would be necessary if you want to deliver a high explosive payload inside the tunnels, if you dropped a 30,000lb slug and had it hit at mach 25 the shear earth shock of the impact would be effective against fairly deep tunnels. This can of course scale up, but the fact is while deep underground fortifications are very feasible even today they also risk turning into tombs. Providing protected entry and access for an entire population would not be easy and if the enemy seizes the surface he can use mine warfare against you. Of course the defender can also use countermines to explode the surface.

Point about underground tombs taken, though I can think of ways SW can reduce the risks (they have SIF like tech - one type is a component of particle shielding in fact. And tech exists to protect against shocks, blast, impact etc. I'd assume they'd be part of any underground engineering project. Hell, IIRC Coruscant extends kilometres below the surface, and yet the underground has neither collapsed in on itself nor was ever in danger. Not even when the Vong conquered and devastated the planet, IIRC.)

Also, can you clarify "mine warfare?"

Cellular level is hardly any different then biowarfare now is it? Biowarfare sucks for anything. You can never clean it up, and it wont kill people with any kind of protected shelter. Modern houses 30 years from now might have NBC warfare filters on the air conditioner, some modern buildings already do, and even the better grades of HEPA filter can stop most viruses. Combined that with a slight overpressure in a building and only clean air can leak out. This is far easier to accomplish then protection against DPICM barrages or almost any other kind of attack.

I think I should have clarified myself better, sorry. What I was trying to say is that some enemies are so pervasive in an enviroment that they can corrupt/infect at microscopic (or worse) levels. For example from 40K there are the Tyranids (Which can infest a planet down to the cellular level) and Chaos (one of the "gods" is master of pestilence and diseases of all kinds, and creates intelligent demon plague thingies on more than one occasion.) Ensuring you cleanse out a planet of that can require pretty intense levels of bombardment, especially if it must involve subsurface bombardment.

Considering how many diseases must exist in the Star Wars galaxy BTW, I think they must have very highly advanced medical science in ordered not to be ravaged by endless of plagues. Think about how many plague diseases the earth alone has, now multiply by 51 million. You would also simply need hundreds of thousands of tons of bioagent to realistically coat a planet, and even this might be conservative. The USSR was making anthrax in 50 ton batches for a reason.

True. Hell, that isnt even including the micro/nanotech wankery they have that can simulate diseases and such.

You need defense suppression sure; I don’t see this as a major problem if the alternative is building the death star. The death star may have been ton for ton more gun for your money then an ISD, but it can only be in one place at a time and can’t do all the other jobs you need out of a military. Particularly a galaxy wide occupation force based on fear, which means killing people all the time and thus constantly creating new enemies.

I doubt that even if you could build more DS's you would want large numbers floating around unless you had to have them - the potentail for one to get out of your control and go on a rampage would be too great a risk. I'd guess the greater the firepower, the fewer ships of that type you want floating around - at least until you need them.

I cannot see energy costs being high in Star Wars if ships like the Death Star can be afforded and resupplied with reliability, and people make interstellar flights all the time. The Death Star may be proportionally more efficient at mounting raw firepower then smaller ships, I’d expect so, but its still got to have absurd supply needs. Something like the Executor cruising around has to guzzle fuel and it never seems to be a limitation. Anyway if economics matter, remember that after my bombardment any large objects are still largely intact. So you can steal whole 2km tall skyscrapers and scrap them for the war effort. The Death Star of a BDZ type attack would slag them at best, scatter them across a solar system at worst. The World Devastator is my preferred means of planetary destruction. Then all those massive nodes of raw materials that people like to call cities or ships or bridges can be converted right into more weapons for the war.

The modern earth has been making 700-800 millions tons of steel almost ever year from 1900 until now, and lots before that. So even accounting for losses billions upon billions of tons of material exist for easy harvesting even off a world no more developed then Earth. The city planets have so many buildings I think they would very significantly increase the planetary gravity![

You were estimating what, billions of tons of ordnance or so to be moved? In terms of sheer mass to move, that's probably on the order of either a fully-loaded ISD (depending on your estimates, some make them lighter but in either case the bulk of the mass is fuel anyhow) or one of the larger multi mile cruisers. Sublight acceleration can be handwaved in various ways (emerging from hyperspace close the planet, using single gee or slower accelerations to manuver if neccessary, etc.) There is evidence suggestiong Hyperdrive and hyperwave are both implied to requiresstellar level outputs (or some fraction thereof, depending on interpretation.) It's not unresasonable to expect that teratons or petatons are expended to simply get all that mass there. Not a problem for SW of course, but if you're can expect to expend roughly the same level of energy overall to achieve the goal, efficiency probably more of a secondary concern compared to "how long do we want to wait to reclaim the planet" or some such.