North Korea couldn't hit the broad side of a planet to save its life.

Actually, they've succeeded in hitting the Pacific Ocean with their ballistic missiles on multiple occasions. That's a start.

It's not so much the fact that everyone would be dead that is preventing whoever's in charge of the North Korean space program from blowing up the world--it's just North Korea isn't exactly a source of quality engineering and design.

Actually, they don't really need anything really high-tech to flatten their southern neighbor before the U.S. could respond; most sources agree that their artillery would turn Seoul into a giant crater within the hour or something.

From my reading, the south could do much the same with their opening volley, except they would rather use said guns to annihalate bridges and similar infastraucture, and thanks to their use of modern artillery plus a highly skilled army, are more likely to hit a target that isn't many kilometers across...
I only picked NK for the reason that they are a belligerent nation who continually chooses to 'flex their might' in order to try and show how all powerful they are.

The point is more about the idea of someone deciding to throw rocks because they obtained space superiority, because everyone talks of glassing planets, while forgetting the value of a habitable world, because terra-forming is horribly expensive.

Well, yeah. Except North Korea isn't going to gain air superiority any time soon.

I agree with you fully, don't mind me. I just like typing things.

Who doesn't like typing random things? And that is half the purpose of this thread.
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One of these days i am going to go into the discussion of what I was meaning regarding my post in the 'confused gender' thread... Actually maybe I should do it now... basically my comment was a stereotype, which of course means that most don't conform to it particularly well (which is of course the normal case for most normal people), because every stereotype started as a generalisation, trying to fit many people into one basket... however stereotypes have problems, specifically there are people who in their desire to 'Fit in' will do their best to CONFORM to the stereotype. This point is more scary than it initially appears, as the negative aspects of the stereotype are normally over-emphasised by those outside of it due to frustration, irritation or general ignorance... this leads to certain cases of individuals I have encountered who EMBODY those excessively over-emphasised negative characteristics, which I believe strange, and mostly due to peoples desire to conform.

It's a dangerous aspect of our modern society really.


The reason I felt the need to post this explanation is that most people were painting me to be some kind of hypocritical idiot, or sexist bigot... I admit I'm far from perfect, but given my goal was to paint a slightly OTT picture explaining some of the negative aspects of the discussion, it was taken VERY out of context to a point where it had lost it's original intent.
I never wanted to insult ANYONE, rather scare people with horrible mental images, and point out that with the good also comes the bad, negative things we would rather not find their way into our poor ignorant worlds.

Dropping stones from orbit is easy (if we don't care targeting) but how hard is to get them there?

Option 1. Take them from earth
Expensive as every kilo of material requires 10 kilo of fuel.

Option 2. Mine them from moon.
Build the launch facility on to moon, which cost a lot. After that, the transfer is much cheaper, but needs more targeting skills, so it will not miss the earth or bounce of from atmosphere.

Option 3. Harvest meteors.
Have we collected more materia than little bit of dust?

was more referring to planetary invasion, but local works too, just need a space based infrastructure first.... and who cares about accuracy, a little collateral damage is good for business, just pay a tribute in virgins(or whatever else is useful) every year or we drop rocks on you!

launch facility from the moon? bah build huge gun to launch missiles, from there it actually works.

although a dedicated facility in orbit would probably be better.

@discord: So instead of taking the stones from earth, moon or meteors, you just wish that they appear nowhere to your orbital launching center?

of course. thats how they do it in North Korea.

bunny: no, you move munitions to a place where you can actually aim it, aka a 'launch facility', you do not MAKE triton missiles in a nuclear sub.....even if RTS games do it that way quite often...

If i were to try to crush the earth, I would use the moon myself... however I wouldn't be relying on a base there to fire projectiles, and i certainly would not place it on the close side of the moon.
No I would use Ion engines, powered by the sun itself, and use the MOON as my projectile.

I wonder how much thrust 1m2 of solar panels can provide, and multiply that a few times to see how much per square kilometre :p

It would have about 14 days of impulse each month, every month, always towards the planet.

And the alternative (ground invasion) requires even more precision (so you don't waste your own troops with close in fire support), and even more supply (a large army that needs to constantly be fed/refurbished).

...

Maxium 20
"If you aren't willing to shell your own position,
You aren't willing to win."
(Schlock mercenary)

Speaking of which I suddenly realised what the Chinese would do in war... Close artillery support with no real emphasis on actual accuracy of that support.

Distraction from the distraction thread--where is Arioch, anyway?

He tends to be fairly active on the forum, but I haven't seen him around in quite a while.

I'm starting to get concerned

I believe Arioch does have a RL job and the comic can sometimes take a back stage to his current work.

then, again, Outsider has gone for extended time without updates. Maybe it is quiet time for outsider ( or i hope arioch is doing a BIG 100 page celebration)

Guys, it's been a month and a half... there have been plenty of delays that long between pages. I wouldn't start standing on the corner and declaring the End Times yet...

Not so much the comic as the guy himself. He'll usually hop in to post even if there's no comic page inbound.

Didn't he post a few days ago in the Empire-RPG thread? I think there probably just isn't enough going on for him to post anything.

I'm here. Just not much to say on the current discussions.

smack to face ( of course). well looking forward to seeing the new designs

personally I thought the hanger would be bigger, oh well, its is a command cruiser. but now I see why Light interceptors are roughtly the same size as standard shuttles.

I foresee great utility in small designs in the fleet, yet a tendency to restrict the likely designs to perhaps three for various tasks for maintenance reasons (although fighters are likely to see semi-regular upgrade or replacement) I'd have a cargo shuttle with utility as a transport, the regular fighter for general point defence, and probably a cargo manipulator that is mostly clamps and engines for the purpose of pushing around and relocating medium to large lumps of cargo rather delicately into the parent ships of the fleet, as well as serving tasks such as allowing replacement of main guns and such while in dock, or perhaps literally removing an unstable weapon from the ship while far from home during combat deployments.

Casimir bring up any topic that you are interested in, for i am taking notes about what Arioch likes to reply to, because we like seeing him talk for it reminds us he hasn't gotten bored and forgotten about us :p
Some people have so little hope.
I've followed the comic since about page 38 (Ever get the feeling you're being herded into an airlock for disposal?), so I know and understand the waits.

Speaking of which, it appears that Arioch has to settle for a nice 3d design for the hanger bay (which seems the most likely appearance and setting for the comic to flow to) fortunately such a bay is large, and typically vastly empty space (to accommodate movement for travel, maintenance, loading/unloading and similar) and is a hazard as they have to be able to open into hard vacuum to allow fast deployment of things like fighters, so won't have many features like doors, and probably things like windows as well. The real question is, do Loroi leave reloading and re-arming, and maintenance in large units in the middle of the bay like they do on an Aircraft carrier (fixed to the floor of course, but by spreading out the maintenance equipment in this manner they can service many craft at once without having to walk to the side wall every time you want a different spanner, leaving the rest of the hanger for storage) or do they only haul out such equipment when actually doing such tasks?
Without such complexities, the hanger is a large clear space with one or two large access-ways to allow the moving of large cargo lumps out of the hanger quickly, to allow the departure of transports more quickly, probably only one primary doorway to help reduce the requirement for opening the big doors to allow small teams (say pilots) access to the hanger, and the hanger walls.
On the other hand, the Loroi might utilise a Air-dock for their hanger system, using say magnetic clamps and a airlock... fly to the clamps, it grabs you and drags you through the Air-dock into the hanger (which would automatically remove/collect the air as you move on through, if you make the dock equal to the hanger size, you lose only 50% of the air into the dock, evacuate the dock and you can recover more, while evacuating the hanger in the first place sounds good, it could well take too long if in combat, but maintaining fighters in hard vacuum is difficult at best, so you need some form of airlock system installed to help reduce the penalty of emergencies.), and exit with the clamps dragging you back out the same way you came in.
If they DID use an Air dock, then the Tempest would need it wide enough for two mag clamps to deploy the fighters quickly (both at once), and also have the ability to lift in and out the Highlander shuttle, because it is WIDE


The scary thing is, if we change the setting away from the hangerbay into the shuttle, Arioch will have to develop and design the layout within the shuttle AS WELL, and if we travel anywhere new, we can expect even more ship/station/building design previews.
These developments are either WOOT or *sad puppy face* depending on peoples desire for comic pages, or awesome racial design work with a greater insight into Loroi construction design.

so now cargo ships to bring supplies ? make sense with large fleet tender and supply ships ( and cargo haulers could speed up the process)



hehe, sorta remind me of the homeworld interior concept/cinematic art with various berts for various ships. the large opening hanger idea reminds of of the higarran mothership, captail launching doc ( although your idea of opening doors would be better idea, i keep seeing the enemy trying to knock the large door frame out of the way). but wouldn't that mean you would have to armour or reinforce the open bays against enemy attack?




station design, that would be fun to see but I'm interested on seeing if we see a few interior shots ( which give the level of detail of aroich work, might not be as many as the readers want). although I will WOOT with you Fotiadis for eihter offical and concept art ( at the artist inclination.

Just a nitpick on something posted a while ago: ion engines are more of a pre-fusion era reality of regular space technology. Depending on the weapons an orbital combat vehicle would be threatened by I think whipple shields and ablative armor agianst projectiles and lasers are more likely than magnetic stuff.

Overall I think it would take quite a bit of insight into space systems design to have much of a clue about the mass ratios of such thingies.
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A new additional favourite author's trilogy of military sci fi novels have given me new angles to think about the whole space superiority assumption in planetary siege warfare. (Unfortunately the works of that author will not be available to the English speakers for the foreseeable future).

In the Outsiderverse type of situation, where for one planet based civilisation might be more of a relic than a requirement for prosperity and for two the worth of (presumably plentyful) habitable planets can be considered to be low enough for them to be found disposable on occasion, the assumption that a space force can overpower a planetary garnison by basically more or less scrapping the planet is quite reasonable.

However I'm thinking that if the planetside folk are numerous and have a long time to prepare (having decided that they need to defend themselves well enough), discarding the aspect of comparative infrastructure investment requirement, I think there are numerous advantages a planet based force has over a tactical space force siegin them. I mention tactical because a strategic scale siege could obviously try and deploy local system space based infrastructure to supply the siege effort.

The prerequisites for the planetary defence could very likely mean serious tunnelling and submarine type developments, but whatever the architecture of a large scale anti-space warfare infrastructure would be like, planet based weapons not being rockets can have significant advantages in "armor" and heat disposal possibilities and capabilities. Basically the fact that in orbital terms the firing ports of a planetary "fortress" are immobile, the sensors and guns firing from them themselves could be more powerful and numerous than the enemy's, which have to be either interplanetar or interstellar spacecraft cargoes.

The setting of the trilogy I mentioned in the introduction pretty much considers wrecking planetary ecosystems war crimes, and the use of higher level landscaping capable infantry AM warheads has to be authorized by higher command than the platoon/company level, I forget how that bit went. In fact using fallout-causing traditional thermonuclear warheads was one of the final cards the planetary defenders pulled on the invaders before some level of cease-fire was forced on the invaders who had to focus their efforts on cleaning up some of the cumulative damages the invasion was causing on the planet's ecosystem. This was pretty much giving the defenders more time to enforce their other planet in a nearby star system from a possible follow-up invasion against the same military fully devoted to the invasion of that single planet.

Overall of course such and advantage in the defender's part assumes that the offenders have a reason to fight for/agianst the planet in the first place, as always. The asteroiding* the nag from afar is always the possible altarnative strategic move, but here again we could argue that the planetary defenders might have means of mitigating attempts of such doomsday attacks, if not just making it more of an effort on the attacker's part. (Without space superiority delivering a massive warhead to fragment an asteroid at medium-range** on a collision course for subsequently re-targeting by smaller warheads would be quite difficult and with it at short range would be pretty sketchy, but I'm sure someone stuck on a big rock in such a perilthey would give it their best shot).

*The activity of using asteroids as kinetic weapons.
**Beyond the most effective range of planet based anti-space weaponry.
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I had a third topic in mind before I began typing.. but I have forgotten it by now.

EDIT: found an unfinished sentence left unattended in there; and omitting a whole point entirely, so an extra final paragraph was added.

i wonder how large a projectile you would need to survive entry into atmo, assuming flechete style metal/ceramic darts in a large shotgun style weapon...or simply fast fire rate....rain fire on'em...
sure it would be area denial weapon rather than a pinpoint accuracy hit a single person kind of thing...but it might get better precision compared to larger caliber ideas....

And old(er) article, but it gives you an estimate.
Check the "rods of god" section.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... 0oklkt.asp

geo: good article but i was not exactly aiming at blowing up fortified bunkers more like anti-vehicle/anti-material/anti-infantry sized stuff.