nukes
- Thread starter Juzza
- Start date
I think Hiff nailed it - these are multi-megaton plot devices.
Nukes, shmukes - nukes to do what? Missile warheads? Standard Hyperions don't launch missiles. Bombardment weapons? To bombard whom or what, exactly? Mines? Well, that's the way they were used, but we don't see explosive mines at any other time in the series, AFAIK.
Any why would there be orders not to use them? No towns or cities to be covered in fallout in space, no real estate to be quarentined for years. No nuclear winters in a vacuum.
The most obvious way to deliver them, to my mind, would be to carry them on Starfuries as external ordinance. Fit them with time fuzes (proximity fuzes may get fooled by Minbo stealth) fly towards the enemy, fighters release and breakaway, nukes free-fall into the enemy fleet which then faces a thermonuclear shotgun blast.
Sort of DIY Emines.
Do I want to see this in the game, as an EA player? Absolutely not.
('Course, once you start talking about how you'd actually go about doing stuff, you have to ask *why* we'd still be putting human pilots in fighters in the 23rd century when IRL air combat's likely to all be done UAVs by the 2050's, but that way rationality lies...and where's the fun in that?)
Oh, and my apologies to Mongoose Steele over that misattribution.
Nukes, shmukes - nukes to do what? Missile warheads? Standard Hyperions don't launch missiles. Bombardment weapons? To bombard whom or what, exactly? Mines? Well, that's the way they were used, but we don't see explosive mines at any other time in the series, AFAIK.
Any why would there be orders not to use them? No towns or cities to be covered in fallout in space, no real estate to be quarentined for years. No nuclear winters in a vacuum.
The most obvious way to deliver them, to my mind, would be to carry them on Starfuries as external ordinance. Fit them with time fuzes (proximity fuzes may get fooled by Minbo stealth) fly towards the enemy, fighters release and breakaway, nukes free-fall into the enemy fleet which then faces a thermonuclear shotgun blast.
Sort of DIY Emines.
Do I want to see this in the game, as an EA player? Absolutely not.
('Course, once you start talking about how you'd actually go about doing stuff, you have to ask *why* we'd still be putting human pilots in fighters in the 23rd century when IRL air combat's likely to all be done UAVs by the 2050's, but that way rationality lies...and where's the fun in that?)
Oh, and my apologies to Mongoose Steele over that misattribution.
Nomad said:
Umm, no. We're always going to have human pilots operating the majority of our aircraft and humans doing the vast majority of our fighting in wars. Precisely because of the potential for push-button warfare to be too easy. Remember Lee's comment on growing too fond of war...
Shadow Queen
Mongoose
What would the stats for a Space born EMP will be
Also, unmanned warfare makes one very vulnerable to electronic warfare. This is because in order to have unmanned craft you either 1) need to build in an AI or 2) need to control it remotely. Both are susceptible to difference kinds of EW, what amounts to hacking. At which point, the bigger threat isn't the enemy destroying your craft but rather hacking it and turning it against you.
I live in the CA Bay Area and they have a regional mass transit system called BART that can be completely automated. Literally the trains can be run from central nodes. Yet they still put conductors on the trains. This is partially a PR thing so riders don't freak out, but also so that there's a guy to literally hit the manual brakes should everything fail.
Lord David the Denied
Mongoose
Actually, a proximty soft kill from a nuke wouldn't happen outside a few KM. It's all to do with the vaccuum and radiation, but I don't fully understand the physics. You'd really need direct hits or something very close for a nuke to do much damage to a ship in space.
ShopKeepJon
Mongoose
It was always my understanding that Sheridan was able to destroy the Minbari cruiser by luring it in very close to the nuke. It seemed to me that nukes were standard weapons in the EA fleet. They just couldn't get them close enough (due to Minbari stealth) to cause any real harm...
ShopKeepJon
ShopKeepJon
Taran said:
That might come as a surprise to the RAF, who are looking at a UAV to replace the Tornado. http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/tanaris/
Sorry to be so unromantic, but combat UAVs have too many advantages - they're smaller, stealthier, more agile (you don't pull 30Gs in a manned aircraft twice - the airframe may stand it, the crew won't), and are nicely expendable - no bodybags coming back, or POWs in captivity. And potentially a lot cheaper, which given the over-inflation growth in defence costs is a major driver.
And I'm afraid a fear of 'push button warfare' is of a piece with poison gas, the locomotive torpedo and aerial bombardment, all of which were supposed to make war to horrible to contemplate.
Of course, nowadays, we think that about nuclear weapons...well, we'll just have to see how that works out as they become available to a wider cultural mix of governments and NGOs.
Which in theory is true of any remote guided weapon system. In practice it depends on the relative tech base of the opponents - in Vietnam, the US were able to reduce the hit rate of SAMs from about 20% to about 2% using EW; in return, EW didn't help the North Vietnamese against US RPVs at all.
In London we have the Docklands Light Railway which is fully automated - no driver aboard.
I'm new to the whole Babylon 5 thing, so forgive my ignorance. I started getting into the game before I watched the show.
When I watched 1 movie and saw that earth had nukes and seeing as game follows show I had a look to see if there were nukes in the game.
If earth had nukes on a hyperion space ship then where were the nukes being used to smash the minbari ships. So I watched the earth getting smashed and doing suicide missions and all, yet when a nuke was used they won a battle. Go figure! :roll:
Just a show, so i'll shutup
Nothing wrong with having nukes as the main weapon on a space ship its all got to be balanced anyhow like sap dd e-mine type of thing to replace the beam weapon on a hyperion.
When I watched 1 movie and saw that earth had nukes and seeing as game follows show I had a look to see if there were nukes in the game.
If earth had nukes on a hyperion space ship then where were the nukes being used to smash the minbari ships. So I watched the earth getting smashed and doing suicide missions and all, yet when a nuke was used they won a battle. Go figure! :roll:
Just a show, so i'll shutup
Nothing wrong with having nukes as the main weapon on a space ship its all got to be balanced anyhow like sap dd e-mine type of thing to replace the beam weapon on a hyperion.
dag'karlove
Mongoose
Nomad said:
This is an interesting site on the subject of plausable space ships.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html
I think you could describe the B5 nukes as powerful but clumsy to use.
Liken them to a WWII sub verus a modern warship. The sub will terminally spoil the day of even the most modern warship if manage to get a torp onto target but in all but most unusual circumstances that isn't going to happen.
If you take what was seen on screen, it relied on Minbari to blithly approach the crippled Earth ship from one direction only. So none too tactically flexible.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html
I think you could describe the B5 nukes as powerful but clumsy to use.
Liken them to a WWII sub verus a modern warship. The sub will terminally spoil the day of even the most modern warship if manage to get a torp onto target but in all but most unusual circumstances that isn't going to happen.
If you take what was seen on screen, it relied on Minbari to blithly approach the crippled Earth ship from one direction only. So none too tactically flexible.
dag'karlove
Mongoose
Nuke= EMINE
Nuff said
Nuff said
Lord David the Denied
Mongoose
dag'karlove said:
I fixed that for you. You seemed to be mistaken.
Derina. Space is filled with high levels of EM radiation anyway so the ships would be hardened to resist the affects. EM would also only affects electronic or magnetic based systems so many races would be immune.
A house rule (that was abandoned due to popularity) was admirals with a nuclear ordinance protocol who could give any missile or torpedo system a one-shot e-mine affect.
A house rule (that was abandoned due to popularity) was admirals with a nuclear ordinance protocol who could give any missile or torpedo system a one-shot e-mine affect.
Juzza said:
Just one problem: Nukes aren't that effective space weapons. Reason they are so destructive in planets do not exists in space. You need pretty much point blank hit which in space isn't that easy(what with distances being spoken in thousands of km's. Try to hit point blank there...Especially something you can only see visually...scanners useless...).
Black Star case was pretty special and likely after that Minbari were damn sure to avoid going into spots EA determined so nukes were as good as useless.
