A little doomsday weapon, perhaps ?
- Thread starter rust
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Subzero001
Banded Mongoose
So what would happen if a jump assisted planet killer asteroid going close to the speed of light since it doesn't really need to the slow down procedure of the jump drive exited into atmosphere? if you wanted to take out the planet. :evil: or you could do the same to the stars core making an instant blackhole taking out that system and effecting / threatening nearby systems with extinction. :twisted: A primitive version of the "Nova bomb" used in Andromeda series. :idea:
I wasn't saying the technology would never be used as a weapon, I am just saying just because you can use it as a weapon doesn't mean that you will.
Look at nuclear weapons. We have "used" them for over 65 years now as a "deterrent". We don't want to actually use them. Why? Because they are not a "controlled" enough weapon. Look at our love for precision bombing. The powers that be like to only kill and destroy what needs to be. Its more "cost effective" that way in many, many ways and on many levels, both material and psychological.
So this singularity weapon would not be used for many of the same reasons.
Then we have the Neutron bomb, who among you know why it isn't mass produced and in every silo around the world?
Look at nuclear weapons. We have "used" them for over 65 years now as a "deterrent". We don't want to actually use them. Why? Because they are not a "controlled" enough weapon. Look at our love for precision bombing. The powers that be like to only kill and destroy what needs to be. Its more "cost effective" that way in many, many ways and on many levels, both material and psychological.
So this singularity weapon would not be used for many of the same reasons.
Then we have the Neutron bomb, who among you know why it isn't mass produced and in every silo around the world?
I agree about 99.99 %.Treebore said:
However, there is always the chance of a leader insane enough to do
what we consider unimaginable. There are even one or two in our real
world who may crack and use nuclear weapons.
In a Third Imperium with 11,000 worlds, in a galaxy with species who
do not necessarily share our concepts of ethics, the probability that such
weapons would be used somewhere, somewhen almost becomes a sta-
tistical certainty.
Of course, they would be outlawed after the first desaster. But we have
also outlawed the use of nuclear weapons, and this does not convince me
that they really will never be used.
rust said:
I did mention insanity in my first post in this thread, so we do agree.
The Neutron bomb plays into that as well, because it largely cuts out the destruction of material goods and only kills life forms. Again, for the most part. Plus its half life is much shorter than what we refer to as "conventional" nuclear weapons. So it is an atomic weapon that is even easier for sane people to convince themselves to use, let alone more unstable people.
Its been a long time since I last read up on the data, but I think Neutron bombed areas would become clean enough to re inhabit in less than 50 years. It may have been less, and I am pretty sure it was not above 100 years.
This does assume no effort is made to "bury" the radioactivity, etc...
Mongoose Pete
Mongoose
Unless you come up with a valid workaround for how it emerges so close, I'd imagine the c-fractional asteroid would precipitate out of jump at the 100 diameter limit - most likely missing the world entirely if the timing was out by more than three and a half minutes either way from a perfect jump. Since arrival time variance is 6d6 hours, the likelihood of intersecting the planet with such an attack is tiny.Subzero001 said:
Now if you can bypass the 100d precipitation limit, say via TL17 Darrian hypermaths for example, then of course you might be able to theoretically jump into or out of something like a star, with potentially catastrophic effects... :twisted:
As for gravitational attacks on spaceships, are there not spinal mount Jump Projectors at TL21? I thought they did indeed kick vessels into jump space.
At the end of the day, it is the mass of a black hole that makes it dangerous, not the event horizon (by the time you get that close to a star of the same mass, you're cinders). A singularity with the mass of a moon would be no easier to move around than a moon of the same mass. Normal Traveller tech levels just aren't up there - it's Ancient stuff. You MIGHT find such a doomsday weapon as an artifact, I guess, but its the ability to manipulate planetary masses that's the weapon, not the ability to create black holes.
Re the black globe asteroid idea... detecting such a beast against the entire sky just by picking up occlusions would be a mammoth undertaking. Stars get occluded by normal asteroids and solar junk all the time, and there's no inherent way of detecting the occluding object's size, distance and orbital track without prolonged observations.
Yeah... I'd be scared of that one, as I would of suicide ships. Don't forget that these things aren't turning around at midpoint - they continue to accelerate all the way down to the ground, and thus the standard 100D chart is misleading in how much time you have to destroy them. Deep sited Meson guns won't help much if they have M-screens, and thick enough armour takes care of the rest.
A dedicated suicide "ship" designed to be carried into the system and released would only need:
* Robot crew
* Sufficient thrust to provide acceleration from 100D to impact (cheap rockets instead of M-Drive are likely to work best. No crew to protect from high Gs, so impact time should be possible in about 30 mintues or so, by which time it has too high a vector to intercept anyway).
* Armour
* Meson screen
Edit: Add heat and rad shielding to the above. To be useful, you can't have it burn up in the atmosphere (and for that reason they should also be streamlined)! The rad shielding is to help keep off nukes and particle beams. And a low tech version can be easily built if you have someone willing to pilot it (though that would limit the Gs). Banzai!
Re the black globe asteroid idea... detecting such a beast against the entire sky just by picking up occlusions would be a mammoth undertaking. Stars get occluded by normal asteroids and solar junk all the time, and there's no inherent way of detecting the occluding object's size, distance and orbital track without prolonged observations.
Yeah... I'd be scared of that one, as I would of suicide ships. Don't forget that these things aren't turning around at midpoint - they continue to accelerate all the way down to the ground, and thus the standard 100D chart is misleading in how much time you have to destroy them. Deep sited Meson guns won't help much if they have M-screens, and thick enough armour takes care of the rest.
A dedicated suicide "ship" designed to be carried into the system and released would only need:
* Robot crew
* Sufficient thrust to provide acceleration from 100D to impact (cheap rockets instead of M-Drive are likely to work best. No crew to protect from high Gs, so impact time should be possible in about 30 mintues or so, by which time it has too high a vector to intercept anyway).
* Armour
* Meson screen
Edit: Add heat and rad shielding to the above. To be useful, you can't have it burn up in the atmosphere (and for that reason they should also be streamlined)! The rad shielding is to help keep off nukes and particle beams. And a low tech version can be easily built if you have someone willing to pilot it (though that would limit the Gs). Banzai!
So what constitutes the ultimate weapon?
Is it a dyson sphere sized monstrosity designed to devour entire star systems to keep on functioning?
Is it a device designed to be placed at the very heart of the parallel realities of say one world whose detonation causes the collapse of all realities?
Or do we take heed the words of a popular science fiction character when he declares they're locked inside the largest repository of weapons in the house, its library?
I'd say whats more dangerous the weapon thats already been built or the one someone's going to imagine tomorrow or next weekend?
What would be the scariest weapon of all if its isn't some kind of repository of knowledge, something you can give words to because there is no way of declaring the ultimate weapon!
Is it a dyson sphere sized monstrosity designed to devour entire star systems to keep on functioning?
Is it a device designed to be placed at the very heart of the parallel realities of say one world whose detonation causes the collapse of all realities?
Or do we take heed the words of a popular science fiction character when he declares they're locked inside the largest repository of weapons in the house, its library?
I'd say whats more dangerous the weapon thats already been built or the one someone's going to imagine tomorrow or next weekend?
What would be the scariest weapon of all if its isn't some kind of repository of knowledge, something you can give words to because there is no way of declaring the ultimate weapon!
Charakan said:While the philosopher in me appreciates what you are saying Hopeless, the sarcastic bleeder in me says I don't think a scenario where the PCs have to stop a team of terrorists from using a library would go over that well with my players!.
But what if the terrorists don't know its the library they want?!
I think there was a Macgyver movie regarding the treasure of atlantis which turned out to be a mother lode of scrolls whilst the bad guys assumed was gold, platinum, etc.
I wonder how they would deal with a device designed to heal people on a planetary scale but altered ala doctor who?
Hopeless, sorry for being a little sarcastic last night, I was a little short on sleep and didn't mean to be rude (I'm still short on sleep I seem to be having chronic bouts of insomnia lately due to reasons I'm not going to go into on a public board).
I can actually relate to what your saying about knowledge being dangerous, I'm enough of an old lefty to seriously doubt the impact of runaway technological growth on a society withou in depth study of its social impact, but given the last the history of the last hundred years or so - the great war, the second world war and the cold war it was necessary to prevent extremes of totalitarianism gaining an unshakeable grip on the world, I'm not a fan of capitalist multi-party democracy, but the alternatives are far worse IMHO, they are systems that allow some sneaky personality disordered bastard to deceive and manipulate his or her way to the top and then inflict his or her warped vision on large swathes of the world, the same things happen in multi-party democracy, but hey at least you get the chance to vote them out and, my dislike is that the way the system works is that it makes it difficult to put long term beneficial goals into place without them being interfered with by party agendas.
Knowledge itself is not dangerous but the application of knowledge is, fusion power has the potential to solve global energy problems but also has the potential to lay the planet to waste.
I can think of at least one science fiction story where libraries and repositories are very dangerous, namely Niven and Pournelles The Mote in Gods Eye.
Again my apologies for my sarcasm, you were trying to promote a valid debate.
I can actually relate to what your saying about knowledge being dangerous, I'm enough of an old lefty to seriously doubt the impact of runaway technological growth on a society withou in depth study of its social impact, but given the last the history of the last hundred years or so - the great war, the second world war and the cold war it was necessary to prevent extremes of totalitarianism gaining an unshakeable grip on the world, I'm not a fan of capitalist multi-party democracy, but the alternatives are far worse IMHO, they are systems that allow some sneaky personality disordered bastard to deceive and manipulate his or her way to the top and then inflict his or her warped vision on large swathes of the world, the same things happen in multi-party democracy, but hey at least you get the chance to vote them out and, my dislike is that the way the system works is that it makes it difficult to put long term beneficial goals into place without them being interfered with by party agendas.
Knowledge itself is not dangerous but the application of knowledge is, fusion power has the potential to solve global energy problems but also has the potential to lay the planet to waste.
I can think of at least one science fiction story where libraries and repositories are very dangerous, namely Niven and Pournelles The Mote in Gods Eye.
Again my apologies for my sarcasm, you were trying to promote a valid debate.
Revisiting kinetic impactor weapons:
Assume a 1000 dTon "ship" equipped with 6G gravitic M-Drive. Designed to be launched at 1,000,000 km (roughly 100D from a size 8 planet). This would take about 1.6 hours to impact and would be travelling at about 346,000 metres per second. As discussed above, the object would be streamlined, heavily armoured, equipped with meson screens and a robotic crew (although in practical terms this would be an autopilot and a expert system to operate the M-screen).
Based on the masses of MegaTraveller and TNE ships, I will assume a mass of 10,000 kg per dTon, or 10,000,000 kg.
Plugging in the numbers, this results in a kinetic energy of 6x10^17 joules, which equates to 143 Megatons.
Delivery system would be a jump tender of some kind. You could use a normal tender designed for the same sized battle riders. Design the impactor to mimic a standard design and the defenders would not be able to distinguish a flight of them from a flight of raiders until it was clear they weren't decellerating (maybe not even then. A variation of this would be to have real ships equipped with ortillery or missiles designed to fly by the target and sligshot out for recovery).
Assume a 1000 dTon "ship" equipped with 6G gravitic M-Drive. Designed to be launched at 1,000,000 km (roughly 100D from a size 8 planet). This would take about 1.6 hours to impact and would be travelling at about 346,000 metres per second. As discussed above, the object would be streamlined, heavily armoured, equipped with meson screens and a robotic crew (although in practical terms this would be an autopilot and a expert system to operate the M-screen).
Based on the masses of MegaTraveller and TNE ships, I will assume a mass of 10,000 kg per dTon, or 10,000,000 kg.
Plugging in the numbers, this results in a kinetic energy of 6x10^17 joules, which equates to 143 Megatons.
Delivery system would be a jump tender of some kind. You could use a normal tender designed for the same sized battle riders. Design the impactor to mimic a standard design and the defenders would not be able to distinguish a flight of them from a flight of raiders until it was clear they weren't decellerating (maybe not even then. A variation of this would be to have real ships equipped with ortillery or missiles designed to fly by the target and sligshot out for recovery).
Mongoose Pete
Mongoose
Based on this excellent example (thanks Rinku), it suggests to me several things.rinku said:
1) The primary defence against the suicide ship would be a simple sandcaster loaded with barrels of gravel. Not only would the sand caster be able to provide a significant cloud of debris in the .5 hours left prior to impact (after realisation that its an attack), but it also only takes a single pebble to disintegrate the vessel enough so that the atmosphere will burn up the remaining fragments - assuming the world has one. Likewise several salvoes of missiles will do the job from the other tactical perspective, using guidance to hit rather than a shotgun minefield of micro meteors.
2) Whilst you can load a ship with big M-Screens, I imaging a world will always be able to mount larger M-guns. Since each screen reduces damage by x-dice, its not unreasonable to expect M-guns far in excess of spinal mounts. Although it might be more difficult to hit with a planetary defence M-gun than it would be for a scout ship armed with a sand caster.
3) At 143 Megatons, it is far, far, far more expensive an attack than simply smuggling down a cheap fusion warhead. Whilst N-Dampers do exist, would they actually be turned on all the time, and do they actually affect non-fission triggered fusion anyway? Even if they do, it still seems to be much easier to land a sabotage squad to take out an N-Damper transmitter(?) pole, than to build such a OTT vessel in the first place. :wink:
Just musing...
