Moderator: Vympel
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source)
- PeZook
Well said! Many worlds might have defenses as old as the Republic that can be demothballed in case of emergency.Shroom Man 777 wrote:A centuries old Defense Archipelago that was mostly unused, lifeforms and corals and shit growing on the platforms' base. Then war comes and energy has to be dispersed to the area and entire coral reefs and fish havens and bird sanctuaries and whale hives melt. As the turbophasers and the shields just bleed out energies.
To a certain size that would work, and actually project mass back into higher orbits. Past a point though gravity is a thing, and you planet could face being drown in a thick layer of dust if nothing else. If it settled on top of your shield it could block out the sun!Simon_Jester wrote:Shooting it repeatedly with 'merely ordinary' heavy antiship weapons might do the job- you'd cause so much shattering that you might well knock the thing back into a stable orbit, and would tend to reduce the problem to one of large numbers of individually smaller fragments you could take on the planetary shields.
Yeah but on the other hand nobody ever built walls that would repel the entire planet attacking, and in Star Wars a single city being attacked by the whole world is the kind of force mismatch you would precisely expect. Anyway even if you worry about your fleet sailing away to other duties orbital platforms still start to make far more sense then surface guns after a point. All the more so if the metal to make this stuff is already imported. Old SW worlds probably have the crust long mined out.Or on not wanting to gamble on their eternal superiority. It's like building walls for your city in an ancient or medieval context. You hope your field army can keep them at bay, but it's so much better to have walls and not need them than to need walls and not have them!
Yeah well that's what I was saying, put more budget into shield more then anything else.
Plus, hyperspace interdiction technology and the like is a thing in Star Wars, at least in the old EU and maybe in the new. It's not impossible to imagine a situation where some enemy could show up above your planet and somehow trap or prevent reinforcements from reaching you in time to prevent the planet from taking damage. Good planetary shields are the minimum needed to prevent that, and having some meaningful anticapital weapons for shooting back into space would be really helpful.
You'd certainly have to do stuff like that if you had to place these systems near urban areas, and the richer the planet the more that's a problem. I dunno what you do about the open oceans though, that's part of why I think mobile is going to be the way to go, stuff gonna have to float or fly or something.
Now I'm imagining designated island bases and stuff where the heavy weapons are installed, with an extra layer of shields that forms underground so that the entire island fortress can explode and burst up through the shield like a blowout panel if something goes wrong.
Shallow angles? I want usable depression on these guns. Remember just by employing any anti capital weapon were are accepting some kind of probability that 1-10 mile scale exploding starships fall out of the sky onto our world because that's how gravity works. Were not going to limit the firing arcs on our guns out of fear. Not if its more then a token defense anyway.Yeah, but you saw me do the math. No matter how tall your flak towers are, you don't really want to have to fire parallel to the horizon or at extremely shallow angles. So you do wind up needing at least 6-8 sites to cover the whole planet properly, and more would be highly desirable.
Yeah but you'd site that so those blind spots are over oceans, while you have gun coverage over your cities. Of course a lot depends on how many shield generator sites are needed, and if they each sector scan or actually project a uniform field.Agreed. The catch is that if you only have a single-digit number of installations spread across the entire planet providing surface-to-space firepower, the blind spots in your firing arcs are hundreds of kilometers high. That stretches the definition of "low altitude" pretty far.
They have flying cars in this universe! Seriously, this whole universe is predicated on ultra high mobility for everyone, everywhere and up to the scale of a galaxy. Physical defenses don't solve the riot mob problem, that's a problem of the willingness of the people defending them to keep them out of the hands of the mob. The advantage of mobile platforms is you can remove them from the disturbed area, hopefully before you have a problem, and put them under the control of your elite regime protection mooks at a safe spot. Can't do this with giant fixed buildings.Like having mounting the fortifications on islands hundreds of miles offshore or on top of remote mountains whose sides have been artificially steepened into 200-meter cliffs. Rioters aren't going to be able to get close unless they're flying. At which point you have light surface beam mounts to ionize and tractor anything that flies too close without a transponder code.
That's why it doesn't make sense to invest in more then minimal defenses. Like I said before, the enemy will just decline to grant you a battle that will make it pay off. The offensive value of a fortress is in providing a fixed pivot for maneuver, not in blowing up attackers. It's always been this way, the long walls of Athens for example mattered because they secured the Athenian Navy.In that context the mobile platforms are very much useful, though the fixed platforms also remain useful by doing exactly what they did at Hoth: deterring the enemy from sending heavy starships in over the areas still under your control to provide direct orbital fire support, and preventing the attacker from establishing a close blockade. At that point, they are back to being deterrent weapons instead of trading fire with the attacking fleet, though.
Yeah this should all be solvable. However the cost of solving it much seriously reduce the different in cost between a shore battery, an orbital platform and an actual if slow battleship. Very little might exist in fact, and a surface weapon has to be at least sort of sane (by the 1920s shore guns had gotten so powerful you could not have them near cities, they shattered all windows, LA found this out the win way) in manners that wouldn't apply to space anything.
One trick that occurs to me is to mount the shield generator on top of a scaled-up tractor beam that exerts force on very large zones of rock (and mantle) underneath it. Set it up right, and when you shoot the generator the impact is transferred elastically to half a million cubic kilometers of molten rock. It'll cause earthquakes, but no localized catastrophe.
Planets should have more ability to absorb momentum transfer and waste heat than ships, not less. Presumably this problem has a solution, unless ships routinely wind up scooting across the sky at comically high accelerations with par-broiled crews when they take hits.
I'm sure any reasonably prosperous Star Wars planet abolished glaciers by the time the old Republic was founded.Shroom Man 777 wrote:Imagine the enormous neutrino heatsink radiators being used such a facility - flower petals around a very dangerous teraton-powered central STIGMA (yes that is what the protruding fertilizing-parts of the flowers are called!).
Do they use ocean water - or ice cap glaciers - as heatdumps, coolants?
True, but an industrial civilization that can build life support or generate electrical power on the scale of Star Wars might be able to deal with having the sun blocked out, or other kinds of Chicxulub-level planetary disasters. It wouldn't be good, but it could very well be possible given skill, determination, and planning.Sea Skimmer wrote:To a certain size that would work, and actually project mass back into higher orbits. Past a point though gravity is a thing, and you planet could face being drown in a thick layer of dust if nothing else. If it settled on top of your shield it could block out the sun!Simon_Jester wrote:Shooting it repeatedly with 'merely ordinary' heavy antiship weapons might do the job- you'd cause so much shattering that you might well knock the thing back into a stable orbit, and would tend to reduce the problem to one of large numbers of individually smaller fragments you could take on the planetary shields.
Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either. Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:Yeah but on the other hand nobody ever built walls that would repel the entire planet attacking, and in Star Wars a single city being attacked by the whole world is the kind of force mismatch you would precisely expect.Or on not wanting to gamble on their eternal superiority. It's like building walls for your city in an ancient or medieval context. You hope your field army can keep them at bay, but it's so much better to have walls and not need them than to need walls and not have them!
I'm reminded of the Golan platform series, though those appear to have been entirely immobile and not generally well integrated into planetary shields.Notionally such platforms could be in clusters protected by a collective shield overlaid on top of a planet wide shield, forming a series of space based strongpoints, or even by shields projected from the planetary surface if that someone provides an energy generation advantage. Such platforms though must have some engine, or the enemy could just shove them out of orbit. But then that would also mean they could cluster and disperse too. In peacetime they might be in much higher orbits too, because that's better for securing local space.
Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.Shallow angles? I want usable depression on these guns. Remember just by employing any anti capital weapon were are accepting some kind of probability that 1-10 mile scale exploding starships fall out of the sky onto our world because that's how gravity works. Were not going to limit the firing arcs on our guns out of fear. Not if its more then a token defense anyway.Yeah, but you saw me do the math. No matter how tall your flak towers are, you don't really want to have to fire parallel to the horizon or at extremely shallow angles. So you do wind up needing at least 6-8 sites to cover the whole planet properly, and more would be highly desirable.
That would help, although it also means that your gun emplacements are closer to places you don't want wrecked either by sidescatter or by enemy fire.Yeah but you'd site that so those blind spots are over oceans, while you have gun coverage over your cities. Of course a lot depends on how many shield generator sites are needed, and if they each sector scan or actually project a uniform field.Agreed. The catch is that if you only have a single-digit number of installations spread across the entire planet providing surface-to-space firepower, the blind spots in your firing arcs are hundreds of kilometers high. That stretches the definition of "low altitude" pretty far.
Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.They have flying cars in this universe! Seriously, this whole universe is predicated on ultra high mobility for everyone, everywhere and up to the scale of a galaxy. Physical defenses don't solve the riot mob problem, that's a problem of the willingness of the people defending them to keep them out of the hands of the mob. The advantage of mobile platforms is you can remove them from the disturbed area, hopefully before you have a problem, and put them under the control of your elite regime protection mooks at a safe spot. Can't do this with giant fixed buildings.Like having mounting the fortifications on islands hundreds of miles offshore or on top of remote mountains whose sides have been artificially steepened into 200-meter cliffs. Rioters aren't going to be able to get close unless they're flying. At which point you have light surface beam mounts to ionize and tractor anything that flies too close without a transponder code.
I think we're in agreement on this, and the only question is what constitutes "minimal defenses" and how to design them. I figure a lot of planets that don't specifically fear attack might just establish a planetary shield and give up, aside from maybe some fighters in key areas just to stop random pirates from showing up in the equivalent of a Corellian corvette while your shields are down for maintenance.That's why it doesn't make sense to invest in more then minimal defenses. Like I said before, the enemy will just decline to grant you a battle that will make it pay off. The offensive value of a fortress is in providing a fixed pivot for maneuver, not in blowing up attackers. It's always been this way, the long walls of Athens for example mattered because they secured the Athenian Navy.In that context the mobile platforms are very much useful, though the fixed platforms also remain useful by doing exactly what they did at Hoth: deterring the enemy from sending heavy starships in over the areas still under your control to provide direct orbital fire support, and preventing the attacker from establishing a close blockade. At that point, they are back to being deterrent weapons instead of trading fire with the attacking fleet, though.
I was discussing close blockade in the context of after the enemy has a bridgehead on the planet, but while you're still trying to resist them getting to expand it. Basically, you don't want the enemy operating freely in low orbit over your part of the planet that they don't occupy yet. And if they try that, you want the option of either potting a few of their ships, or of being able to do something like the Rebels did at Hoth and run blockade runners out through the planetary shield under covering fire from your own defense guns.Avoiding close blockade seems relevant to a theater shield much more so then a whole planetary fortress. If you want to get serious about avoiding a blockade the only option I see is building in orbit, even adding moons if you could and fortifying those, until you have a protected roadstead and fleet base in orbit big enough for hyperjumps. But installations like this would be rare. Also this would protect all the civilian stuff your bound to have in orbit too.
True. On the other hand, I remember hearing arguments derived from the old calcs that a star destroyer actually needs something like 90 to 99% of its power output for the engines, and that even at maximum Base Delta Zero firepower the weapons are dramatically less energetic than the sublight drive. I could be misremembering, I suppose, but if true that would make static fortifications (planetary or orbital) a lot more economical than mobile vessels. Unless those mobile vessels were so slow compared to starships that they were functionally nailed to the floor in tactical terms.A big variable in this is just how much of the power generation on starwars ships is needed for firepower vs mobility. Hyperdrive can use the same power weapons do for example, because you never fire in hyperspace, while all sublight power, which is clearly linked to hyperspace power but not completely the same, needs to be usable while firing. It seems unlikely that an ISD for example can go full speed and use utter maximum firepower, but no reason exists why it could not. Its possible the power systems are totally non compatible, and that the ship actually has a large over design margin of power. We don't know.
Generally though the more and more power weapons-shields are going to eat, probably the less it matters if you have engines too as long as your ship isn't trying to be fast.The cost difference for ground based weapons may be very low. We have rather strong cost divisions in real life because in real life because we never pushed gun performance all that high.
Yeah, if you had a city planet you could resist that because you'd already need large scale weather control, though you could be a lot more vulnerable to being baked in fact. But for a planet like say earth now, we'd have a big problem with the planet freezing over. That's probably yet another strategic job for a really giant pile of coal.Simon_Jester wrote:True, but an industrial civilization that can build life support or generate electrical power on the scale of Star Wars might be able to deal with having the sun blocked out, or other kinds of Chicxulub-level planetary disasters. It wouldn't be good, but it could very well be possible given skill, determination, and planning.
Yeah, and the Death Star has to be linked to some kind of shielding resistance to make sense. But it's also a threat you'd need to counter with system wide defenses, which is what I'd advocate anyway. We really can't stop the Death Star from destroying one planet, but a couple of spaced out supercannon installations could destroy the death star without suffering more then one loss.... that's not a horrible trade if anyone actually had time to counter the death star.Blowing up my planet, by contrast, is the kind of thing I'm not going to get to rebuild from. Hence the Death Star superlaser.
No, but as faction size goes up the maximum plausible attack force goes up, while the 1 planet fortified zone remains just one place. So that makes it harder and harder to have any rational chance of withstanding it everywhere. With a fleet at least you have some chance of pulling off a victory.Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either.
Enemies simply interested in blockading you aren't a reason to spread your guns around, it would be a reason to try to make a completely defended zone in which you could destroy them, and then operate that as your supply point. The Hoth Ion cannon wasn't even that physically big. No reason not to make a 40m scale cannon mobile at that point, it clearly already was to some degree for it to have been emplaced quickly at an ice cut cave site.
Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:
Sci fi is plagued by the idea that space forts shall not even have weak engines. This is terrible idea if you have sci fi powr generation, which SW stupendously does. Even 1 g of thrust capacity would let you go anywhere in the solar system in a matter of months not considering speed boost from towing. Meanwhile it would mean you wont just fall out of orbit if enemy KE weapons fire hits you, and you can actually reposition in combat to clear arcs of fire blocked by say, other forts. That's the whole magic of being in space, it's not a big deal to move at all. It's only a matter of acceleration rates. Merely having say station keeping thrusters, it's a horrible limit on what otherwise must be a highly expensive installation. Attach a damn armored tugboat to the thing if you've got nothing else!I'm reminded of the Golan platform series, though those appear to have been entirely immobile and not generally well integrated into planetary shields.
It is only a matter of trunnion height, strength and will.Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.
The point was in fact, to blowup the ground. Like 10 degrees would do. All the more if you have a low power firing mode you might seriously need this to defend the site.
Assuming there's nothing sticking up above sea level to get in your line of fire, your maximum angle of depression is 7.16 degrees.
It's not actually a worse problem then tactical nuclear warfare already was. Just make a nicely drawn range card to show where you should probably not fire unless its literally to save freedom.
And any shot you fire at a significant angle of depression will skim the lower atmosphere for hundreds of kilometers. Now, assume for the sake of argument that we don't care about the energy releases on the planetary surface, even though said releases take place hundreds of kilometers from the flak tower's base, so that they could potentially cause major collateral damage per shot even if we built the tower in the middle of nowhere with a 200-km exclusion zone around the base or something.
Assadism suggests you should never believe dire predictions like that!Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.
Being able to blockade your own planet would be pretty damn important at that point, kind of was the point. The damn rebels will start selling topsoil for guns.Which is certainly a plausible threat, but if so then your real problem isn't your ability to defend the planet from a space attack. It's the ongoing civil war being fought ON your planet.
I would still favor grouping most of them together and then employing a proportion as mobile roving guns. Single gun fixed batteries are not tactically sounds since they will need maintenance, meaning regular planned zero defense periods and total failure if you have a fault in action. Everything has to be paired up. That's a big fiscal advantage of mobility at that point, if you think only 1 gun is enough firepower wise against a weak enemy then okay, but you could have say 8 mobile guns, but deployed at 6 locations. You've got two spares now, so an enemy has to lookout for suddenly being hit by three guns, and you still can maintain 100% defense coverage with up to two guns down for maintenance, dependent on mobility speed.Planets that anticipate attack being a realistic threat might well want anticapital guns, in which case the minimum required to consider yourself "defended" would be about, oh, ten plus or minus two installations- as few as four or six maybe, but that might be pushing it.
That's exactly where you want mobility, so you can move your guns to near the battlezone both before and after a breaching operation, rather then most of them being useless.I was discussing close blockade in the context of after the enemy has a bridgehead on the planet, but while you're still trying to resist them getting to expand it. Basically, you don't want the enemy operating freely in low orbit over your part of the planet that they don't occupy yet. And if they try that, you want the option of either potting a few of their ships, or of being able to do something like the Rebels did at Hoth and run blockade runners out through the planetary shield under covering fire from your own defense guns.
Yeah, but no evidence exists for the ship engines being as massively destructive as they would be if they were working on purely newtonian principles and actually outputting the kind of energy claimed. Count me skeptical, since you know, the universe is predicated on FTL which just negates energy calculations in the first place, and appears to involve the sublight drive directly.True. On the other hand, I remember hearing arguments derived from the old calcs that a star destroyer actually needs something like 90 to 99% of its power output for the engines, and that even at maximum Base Delta Zero firepower the weapons are dramatically less energetic than the sublight drive.
What I'm getting at is that defenses for a single planet would inevitably be scaled to what the government of that planet thinks it can fend off. They aren't going to seriously believe that they can stop the entire galaxy, but then unless you're one of a few very specific planets of extreme strategic importance, no galaxy-sized power would ever send its whole fleet to your doorstep.Sea Skimmer wrote:No, but as faction size goes up the maximum plausible attack force goes up, while the 1 planet fortified zone remains just one place. So that makes it harder and harder to have any rational chance of withstanding it everywhere. With a fleet at least you have some chance of pulling off a victory.Well, you can't build a mobile fleet to withstand the whole galaxy attacking either.
The idea of constructing a single "citadel region" of the planet with NO heavy surface to space weaponry elsewhere on the planet is interesting. The big problem with it is that the enemy has very little to lose from trying to breach your defensive planetary shield and start "rolling up" your defenses from the edges of the hole thus created. "Dump fifty zillion proton bombs on the unguarded side of the planetary shield" is a relatively cheap-and-nasty way to breach planetary defenses.Enemies simply interested in blockading you aren't a reason to spread your guns around, it would be a reason to try to make a completely defended zone in which you could destroy them, and then operate that as your supply point. The Hoth Ion cannon wasn't even that physically big. No reason not to make a 40m scale cannon mobile at that point, it clearly already was to some degree for it to have been emplaced quickly at an ice cut cave site.Remember that a lot of the incentive to build these defenses is against threats significantly smaller in scope than the Republic as a whole. As some hypotheticals:
Well, I was talking about the surface-to-space mission, which is the main purpose of the defense guns. In the surface-to-space mission, shots fired at grazing angles through the atmosphere are very likely to be ineffective, in addition to the collateral damage problem.It is only a matter of trunnion height, strength and will.Getting good depression on these guns is pretty much a non-starter.
If we're talking about the surface-to-space mission, my point is that a "reasonable minimum" of defense battery sites on the planet is enough that there are no large, exploitable blind arcs. One turret's blind spot is covered by the neighboring batteries. If you put yourself in a situation where the only viable way to target an enemy ship is by firing one battery along an atmosphere-grazing path, the odds are you will simply fail to stop that enemy ship.Remember the attacking enemy has much less reason to care about collateral damage if he attacks from high grazing angles then you do. You don't want to leave any kind of blind arc if you can help it. It just invites them to try it.
What I'm getting at is that if the people crewing the defenses are so politically unreliable and unwilling to even defend themselves, they're probably one bribe offer from going over to the rebels and turning the defenses on you in any event. And yes Assad is hanging on despite being in roughly that position- but he's hanging on in large part because of foreign help, and because the rebels against him are politically divided. Qaddafi, in a similar position, got his ass kicked because the rebels were better united and the foreigners backed the rebels, not him.Assadism suggests you should never believe dire predictions like that!Well, if the people manning planetary defense installations don't have the will to keep out rioters or strange YT-1300s, you're probably screwed anyway.
Yes, but you can't really do that with fixed defenses intended to stop an incoming fleet or to stop attacking ships from loitering above areas of the planet you hold. At that point you need your own mobile force- but the mobile forces most useful for stopping rebels on your own planet from trading freely with outsiders are NOT going to be effective at stopping an invasion fleet.Being able to blockade your own planet would be pretty damn important at that point, kind of was the point. The damn rebels will start selling topsoil for guns.Which is certainly a plausible threat, but if so then your real problem isn't your ability to defend the planet from a space attack. It's the ongoing civil war being fought ON your planet.
I can certainly get behind the idea of the weapons being redeployable. It's mostly a question of whether they can be redeployed on a timescale relevant in the event of an enemy attack.I would still favor grouping most of them together and then employing a proportion as mobile roving guns. Single gun fixed batteries are not tactically sounds since they will need maintenance, meaning regular planned zero defense periods and total failure if you have a fault in action. Everything has to be paired up. That's a big fiscal advantage of mobility at that point, if you think only 1 gun is enough firepower wise against a weak enemy then okay, but you could have say 8 mobile guns, but deployed at 6 locations. You've got two spares now, so an enemy has to lookout for suddenly being hit by three guns, and you still can maintain 100% defense coverage with up to two guns down for maintenance, dependent on mobility speed.
To reach the same reliability with fixed guns you need three gun batteries...so two can fail and 1 still works, meaning we go from 8 guns...to 6 x 3 = only 18 guns now. Even if the mobile guns break more then can cost much more each and still work out better.
Or maintained in active use for decades or even centuries while seeing all sorts of action rather than some lame fool's preposterous idea that the last ever action they saw was a thousand years ago and ALSO a Sith-involved conflict.Galvatron wrote:Well said! Many worlds might have defenses as old as the Republic that can be demothballed in case of emergency.Shroom Man 777 wrote:A centuries old Defense Archipelago that was mostly unused, lifeforms and corals and shit growing on the platforms' base. Then war comes and energy has to be dispersed to the area and entire coral reefs and fish havens and bird sanctuaries and whale hives melt. As the turbophasers and the shields just bleed out energies.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) - PeZook What action? The Jedi kept the peace for a thousand years, didn't they?Shroom Man 777 wrote:Or maintained in active use for decades or even centuries while seeing all sorts of action rather than some lame fool's preposterous idea that the last ever action they saw was a thousand years ago and ALSO a Sith-involved conflict.
I know, but you're being way too coherent. Please imbibe something before you post again.Shroom Man 777 wrote:I am mocking YOU by the way.