Human muzzle sci fi11/22/2023 ![]() ![]() it is easier for you to drop heavily armoured things into a gravity well than it is for them to fly them out, after all. ![]() If you've got big lasers, they might be a cleaner way of doing the same thing, but really you want space around the enemy world to be extremely hostile to anything coming off the surface. Use some suitable nuclear engines to boost the rocks into a fast intercept trajectory you've presumably got decent nuke engineering skills, so orion drives may be entirely practical here.įinish off everything softer by throwing a load of debris into orbit on inconvenient trajectories, smashing up everything in near-planet space and triggering an ablation cascade. If they've got big lasers in hardened platforms (say, a small moon or asteroid) you should swat them with a long train of big rocks sufficient to overpower any defenses. If you've got big lasers, zap everything that looks military from a long way away, if possible. Probably should should start by softening up the planetary defenses. Such a nuke is probably excessive, though. It might even be possible for us to build a gigatonne nuke today, not that it would be a very useful thing to do. ![]() ![]() Thermonuclear warheads on the other hand, even with the original Teller-Ulam design, can be scaled up to more-or-less arbitrary sizes. It requires absolutely mindboggling amounts of power, to the point where if you're present in the same solar system as your enemy you'd probably be better off using that power in a large number of much slower weapons. Obviously building a gun with a barrel this long is impractical, regardless of technology. The most realistic of your two choices is the 10-gigatonne nuke.Īccelerating a projectile to the speed of light is an exceptionally difficult task, and is best done over scales of millions or billions of kilometres, or even more. As would a 'shotgun' spread of multiple small 'dumb' weights depending on the size/nature of the target. Applying the KISS principal one or more metallic 'darts' perhaps equipped with a passive targeting system and simple gas maneuvering retros to maintain target alignment will do the trick. Any mass that can be detached from a ship traveling at a significant % of the speed of light will do the trick. Result? Multi-megaton death by kitty litter!ĮDIT So if the ship is traveling fast enough the choice of a weapon is pretty much irrelevant. Separate to the ship the kitty litter just keeps on keeping on! Solution? Just dump a couple of kilos of used kitty litter out the airlock and then maneuver the ship off at a tangent to its original course to avoid a collision between the ship itself and the planet. The ship is on an intercept course with a planet occupied by an evil genius or similar (well evil from the cats perspective anyway). Mr Chung uses the amusing example of a space ship traveling at a significant % of light speed who counts among its crew the ships cat - and, as a bi-product of the aforementioned feline, a supply of used kitty litter. The key takeaway message from both however is that at high C velocities your ship is the weapon!Īny vessel accelerated to high velocities accumulates kinetic energy, as do ALL the objects on that vessel. You should check out Wichell Chung's Atomic Rockets and 'Matter Beam's Tough SF Websites for realistic details on warfare and weapons in space. Finally, it is also less complex than atom bombs, depending on how far the railgun is developed. It is all potential energy waiting to be released from there towards the planet. Having enough payloads on board is basically the only requirement for senseless devestation. Potentially you just fire them from outside the solar system and can even get gravity assisted speed boosts from planets and the star before landing on the target. Extrapolating this to your space combat, you can just put any (partly)magnetic material in a gauss cannon, fire it and watch the devestation. Simply their speed from falling to the Earth is enough for incredible devestation, while being near impossible to stop. There are idea's to just drop tungsten rods from sattelites. Any energy imparted on the shell will increase velocity, allowing you to put a lot of energy in the projectile.Īlthough it will be difficult to accelerate to C, it's not needed. The shell can be suspended and launched by magnetic forces, reducing damage to the gun part of the ship. It can be done without shielding, as you can operate in space and thus a vacuum. That being said, something often conflated with Railguns is your best bet. Firing things lose to C is also particularly difficult. You're more likely to fire multiple nukes instead of a 10.000 megaton one. ![]()
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