Realistic Flying Warships?

[Junghalli]

There's an old rumor that the US had an 800-foot flying wing that moved at 20-30 knots.
As a plane, it could, perhaps, be useful, as it no doubt could carry a lot of fuel, supplies, etc. If you're certain it's not going to get shot down.
If the USAF does possess such a thing I highly doubt its mission profile involves getting anywhere close to combat.

Well, there was the Atomic Bomber.

http://davidszondy.com/future/war/atomicbomber.htm

Not really. Any species who would find it feasible to carry military aggression to foreign starsystems would be so advanced that any armed response on our part would only prolong the agony and do nothing to delay, or change, the inevitable outcome.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If it was, say, an expedition sent by a civilization only 75-100 years more advanced than us, limited to relativistic travel with no possibility of reinforcement this side of 100 years, we might be able to beat them by sheer numbers, assuming they're actually interested in conquering the planet instead of just destroying it.

[Cao Cao]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If it was, say, an expedition sent by a civilization only 75-100 years more advanced than us, limited to relativistic travel with no possibility of reinforcement this side of 100 years, we might be able to beat them by sheer numbers, assuming they're actually interested in conquering the planet instead of just destroying it.

Would any society be stupid enough to pick fights with the natives with no hope of reinforcements coming in their lifetimes?
Yes, I'm assuming said civilisation is *not* led by the extra-terrestrial version of George W. Bush.

Moot point anyway; that no weapons in space treaty will hold about as much water as those deeds to land on the moon and Mars will.
After all if you're dealing with a nation advanced enough to place viable weapon platforms into space.. who's going to stop them?

[Balrog]

Ok, so realistic is out. Is there anything that would make such flying ships, I don't know, seem somewhat realistic? It's for a story I was going to start and I would rather not resort to "a wizard did it" excuses.

Hell, if realistic is out, all you can say is "a wizard did it." Sure, you might change the wizard's name to "countergrav" or "repulsor-lifts" or "antigrav/artificial gravity fields" or "a reverse-polarity graviton deflector field" but the end result is pretty much the same.

Bah, you're right. Oh well, guess I don't have to worry about anything else being realistic then

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Not really. Any species who would find it feasible to carry military aggression to foreign starsystems would be so advanced that any armed response on our part would only prolong the agony and do nothing to delay, or change, the inevitable outcome.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If it was, say, an expedition sent by a civilization only 75-100 years more advanced than us, limited to relativistic travel with no possibility of reinforcement this side of 100 years, we might be able to beat them by sheer numbers, assuming they're actually interested in conquering the planet instead of just destroying it.

A civilization that happens to only be a scant century ahead of our own is not likely to exist, given the vanishingly small odds that two civilizations will be so close together in development at the same time and within a reasonable sphere of space (had evolutionary circumstances been different, sapient life could've evolved on this planet as early as 65-75 million years ago, or some tens of millions of years into the future. Seriously, most sapient life you're liable to encounter will either be barely past the level of smashing rocks into each other to form tools, or so far advanced that we'll be like the barbarian rock-smashers to them.)

With that aside, a civilization only a century ahead of ours will just barely be starting to exploit their own solar system. The desire, level of cooperation, and resource extraction/processing capabilities required to pay for the expense of mounting a relativistic expedition to another starsystem will be hundreds or even thousands of years ahead of them. Furthermore, the energy expenditure involved in getting a ship up to relativistic velocities, and back down again is ridiculously high. To do it in reasonable timescales requires a civilization with technology capable of generating and dealing with stupefying levels of power. To put conquering foreign, pre-inhabited starsystems within shouting distance of economic feasibility requires a civilization that can easily construct ships that would handily defeat anything fieldable by a civilization barely capable of exploiting a sizeable fraction of their single planet.

If we ignore all that, and somehow magically transport a purpose-built invasion force by a civilization barely more advanced than our own into the solar system, then they can still force our complete capitulation without ever entering into range where we might concievably hurt them. If they want to do it cleanly, they land on Earth-crossing asteroids and construct mass-drivers. Then they conduct reasonable-precision mass-driver strikes. Given the current state of Earth's combined space programs, they could even do this from the Moon. We couldn't kludge together a launch vehicle capable of sending a nuclear weapon to the Moon in the time it'd take for them to identify and smash every last rocket-launching facility large enough to support a lunar rocket.

If they wanted to, they could concievably go on to destroy all our trappings of civilization. Power stations, airfields, factories, ports. Even large-scale farming operations. A decade or so of this, and Homo Sapiens is largely extinct except in swaths of the Third World where the infrastructure is too primitive for the invaders to see clearly or waste kinetic strikes on, and scattered survivors of the industrialized world too badly fragmented to mount more than a half-hearted guerilla war against the fresh, well-fed invading forces.

[Patrick Degan]

Not really. Any species who would find it feasible to carry military aggression to foreign starsystems would be so advanced that any armed response on our part would only prolong the agony and do nothing to delay, or change, the inevitable outcome.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If it was, say, an expedition sent by a civilization only 75-100 years more advanced than us, limited to relativistic travel with no possibility of reinforcement this side of 100 years, we might be able to beat them by sheer numbers, assuming they're actually interested in conquering the planet instead of just destroying it.

Those very limitations are the reason why any such scenario is unfeasible in any real world. This notwithstanding the improbability of finding a civilisation so close to ours in development within such close range to our star system.

[Molyneux]

If we ignore all that, and somehow magically transport a purpose-built invasion force by a civilization barely more advanced than our own into the solar system, then they can still force our complete capitulation without ever entering into range where we might concievably hurt them. If they want to do it cleanly, they land on Earth-crossing asteroids and construct mass-drivers. Then they conduct reasonable-precision mass-driver strikes. Given the current state of Earth's combined space programs, they could even do this from the Moon. We couldn't kludge together a launch vehicle capable of sending a nuclear weapon to the Moon in the time it'd take for them to identify and smash every last rocket-launching facility large enough to support a lunar rocket.

If they wanted to, they could concievably go on to destroy all our trappings of civilization. Power stations, airfields, factories, ports. Even large-scale farming operations. A decade or so of this, and Homo Sapiens is largely extinct except in swaths of the Third World where the infrastructure is too primitive for the invaders to see clearly or waste kinetic strikes on, and scattered survivors of the industrialized world too badly fragmented to mount more than a half-hearted guerilla war against the fresh, well-fed invading forces.

Wouldn't you say that that's a damn good reason to scrap the treaty and work on space-based defenses?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

If we ignore all that, and somehow magically transport a purpose-built invasion force by a civilization barely more advanced than our own into the solar system, then they can still force our complete capitulation without ever entering into range where we might concievably hurt them. If they want to do it cleanly, they land on Earth-crossing asteroids and construct mass-drivers. Then they conduct reasonable-precision mass-driver strikes. Given the current state of Earth's combined space programs, they could even do this from the Moon. We couldn't kludge together a launch vehicle capable of sending a nuclear weapon to the Moon in the time it'd take for them to identify and smash every last rocket-launching facility large enough to support a lunar rocket.

If they wanted to, they could concievably go on to destroy all our trappings of civilization. Power stations, airfields, factories, ports. Even large-scale farming operations. A decade or so of this, and Homo Sapiens is largely extinct except in swaths of the Third World where the infrastructure is too primitive for the invaders to see clearly or waste kinetic strikes on, and scattered survivors of the industrialized world too badly fragmented to mount more than a half-hearted guerilla war against the fresh, well-fed invading forces.

Wouldn't you say that that's a damn good reason to scrap the treaty and work on space-based defenses?

No. In the universe we live in, interstellar travel is enormously expensive and space is enormously vast. Invading and conquering a planet with pre-existing populations of sapients, or even pre-existing highly-evolved live, is such a losing proposition that a civilization would probably never, ever undertake it. If the idea of causing gigadeaths doesn't appeal to you: Invading and controlling a planet like ours would require between, say, 60 million to 600 million troops (enough troops to drop anywhere from a squad of ten soldiers, to a platoon of 100 soldiers on every small town of 1000 people on the planet.) Technology-using sapients are likely to be large and bulky, since you can only cram and inter-network so many neurons into a given volume of braincase and you need enough associated body to feed and care for that braincase. It costs an obscene amount of energy to transport just one kilogram of cargo from one star to another . . . let alone an entire starship's worth of kilograms. Those tens of millions of soldiers and military equipment will be so much deadweight when it comes time to make a living on your newly conquered planet. Especially since about the only thing you may be able to share with your subjugated subjects as an affinity for respirating oxygen.

You can reduce the number of essentially useless soldiers and equipment you need to take with you if you were willing to kill off most of the natives. Except that might take a while, and if you got hasty, you'd be hanging around waiting for the effects of numerous kinetic/nuclear strikes to settle before you can move in and reshape the planet to your needs. It would've been a vastly more simple prospect to conquer Earth half a billion years ago, when there was plenty of free oxygen, and the most taxing life-form you'd have to face are single-celled cyanobacteria. That way, you wouldn't have to waste cargo volume on soldiers and weapons, and you wouldn't have to waste time on a protracted occupation or extermination-terraformation campaign.

Of course, if we were to ignore how incredibly retarded the concept of invading a pre-occupied planet is (and, ironically, it's equally retarded for both a purely sublight universe, and one where you have FTL travel. In the former case, you'd pick systems you could colonize for a minimum of hassle, since it's not like you can go back home if you fuck up. In the latter case, you'd pick systems you could colonize for a minimum of hassle since, fuck it, you've got your choice of starsystems so why do the equivalent of beating your balls with a hammer if you don't have to?) Attempting to build space-defenses before we're even at the point where we can contemplate leaving Earth in any credible numbers, is also a dumb idea. This is because planets are essentially enormous space-going targets in any form of space-warfare. Their courses around their parent stars can be calculated by pre-industrial barbarians, and it's not like you can cause one to take evasive action. If I couldn't shoot at you from nearby, I'd simply retreat farther out and send my kinetic strikes from there. Sure they'd have to come in faster, and sure I'd have to wait even longer for all the dust to settle; but you've got just the resources of a fraction of a planet to draw on, and a laughable tech base and power generation capacity. You might be able to build orbital nuclear mines, or orbital nuclear missile launchers . . . but the difference between building one of those and building a space-warship that could get all the way out to . . . say Mars or the Asteroid Belt involves an order of magnitude or two of added complexity and cost.

You'd first have to control the resources of much more of the solar system before you could hope to fend off an interstellar invasion. Any talk of weaponizing space right now is just stupid.