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Crashing ships as weapons

Adam Dray

SOC-13
Baronet
Marquis
What's the usual answer for the problem of ships accelerating to near-C speeds and smashing into cities on planets?

If you have meson weapons, great. If not? Is it really that easy to obliterate an entire civilization by ramming a reasonably small starship into a planet at 0.9C?
 
What's the usual answer for the problem of ships accelerating to near-C speeds and smashing into cities on planets?

If you have meson weapons, great. If not? Is it really that easy to obliterate an entire civilization by ramming a reasonably small starship into a planet at 0.9C?

Kinetic Energy:
Ek = moc2 * {(1 / sqrt [1 - R2]) - 1}, where are R = v/c.

If I assume that 1.0 dton = ~ 10.0 metric tons:
A 100 dton ship masses ~ 1000 mt = 1 * 106 kg​

Therefore:

Ek = (1*106)*(3*108)2 * {(1 / sqrt [1 - (0.9)2) - 1} ==>
Ek = 1.165*1023 J​

Since 1.0 ton of TNT = 4.184 GJ:
Ek = ~ 27.8 Teratons for a 1000 mt mass moving at 0.9c.​

IIRC, the Gigaton range is sufficient to crack a planetary crust and/or alter a planet's orbit in a noticeable way.
 
Yeah, what do planets do about that, canonically?

At those speeds, you barely get enough time to even react to it.
 
Yeah, what do planets do about that, canonically?

At those speeds, you barely get enough time to even react to it.

Canonically, that is the elephant in the room that nobody talks about, because no one that I am aware of has a plausible solution.
 
I've started thinking on a Traveller setting that takes all the Traveller assumptions and turns them on their head. So I get to this one, and I want it not to be the undiscussed elephant in the room.

I think, in my ATU, this will be a thing. People -- terrorists mostly -- do occasionally try to crash ships into planets at relativistic speeds.

Governments don't do it that often, because of mutually-assured destruction pacts, nobility / fiefdom repercussions, and so on.

But it happens. To prevent it, you need a defense network light-minutes away from your planet. You need beam weapons that can obliterate (and, ideally, redirect) any mass with a threatening vector. You need a pretty harsh policy about ships that are even starting to look threatening: this suggests that if you want to land on a planet, you follow strict protocols to avoid even the appearance of threatening acceleration, or you wake up the mesons.

My ATU is a sundiver / sungate (wormhole) universe with no true FTL, but high-G M-drives are a thing. However, incoming ships will be coming from the star, not coming from the outer planets. Doesn't mean there aren't ships out in the far bands for mining and stuff, and those are carefully watched.

I suspect the nobles also will carefully control who gets a starship. It's essentially a planet buster, so not you can't just let everyone have one.
 
I've started thinking on a Traveller setting that takes all the Traveller assumptions and turns them on their head. So I get to this one, and I want it not to be the undiscussed elephant in the room.

I think, in my ATU, this will be a thing. People -- terrorists mostly -- do occasionally try to crash ships into planets at relativistic speeds.

Governments don't do it that often, because of mutually-assured destruction pacts, nobility / fiefdom repercussions, and so on.

But it happens. To prevent it, you need a defense network light-minutes away from your planet. You need beam weapons that can obliterate (and, ideally, redirect) any mass with a threatening vector. You need a pretty harsh policy about ships that are even starting to look threatening: this suggests that if you want to land on a planet, you follow strict protocols to avoid even the appearance of threatening acceleration, or you wake up the mesons.

My ATU is a sundiver / sungate (wormhole) universe with no true FTL, but high-G M-drives are a thing. However, incoming ships will be coming from the star, not coming from the outer planets. Doesn't mean there aren't ships out in the far bands for mining and stuff, and those are carefully watched.

I suspect the nobles also will carefully control who gets a starship. It's essentially a planet buster, so not you can't just let everyone have one.

IIRC your ATU is described in this thread. If so, as you decribed it, ships travel by hack drive at about 0.1 (or 0.01, as you fixed latter) speed, not by acceleration. So, unles you changed this (after all it's YTU), this would not be a problem.

This aside, and still keeping IYTU, the fact the sungates are always in the sun (or close to it) makes a good defense against that. Planetary ship must only patrol the sun-planet straight line, as it wil lbe the only one travelled by intesrtellar ships (and I guess interplanetary ones are monitored by the local government), and any ship straying from this route without a good reason will be seen as hostile. Similarly, if using acceleration, any ship not turning at midpoint for deceleration will also be seen as hostile.

As for stopping them, their own speed is the best weapon against them. Just throw some rocks on their way, and they will be obliterated (though, as you say, this must be done far from the target). See that if the ship is going at 0.5 C, throwing some rocks (let's say, a shotgun like spraying rocks group of 1 kg rocks); and those rocks will be hiting it at 0.5 C (relative) speed. You can run the numbers if you want, but just let's say no ship will survive that, and if its speed or agle is affected (even very slightly) it is likely to miss the planet (the farther you can intercept it, the more likely it will be to miss if its vector is afected).

Strategically, and not entering in detail (as it would be Pit matter) most terrorist groups have a political claim behind them, and their goal is to gain supporters, as much as creating fear. Such a move will make them quite unpopular even among their sympathyzers (unless blind fanatics), and probably backfire politically.
 
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I'm surprised you remember Nova Roma stuff. What I am working on now is a new setting (working title: Main Sequence) with standard M-drives, sungate interstellar travel, and way less black-globe stuff (it causes too many problems). STL travel is by nuclear fusion or something.

Throwing rocks in the way doesn't work for relativistic speeds. There's not enough time unless you detect it very early. You also need to deflect the target, not just obliterate it. Getting hit by a million 1kg rocks is just as bad as getting hit by a single 1 mT rock. Or whatever (math is hard).

More later.
 
Yeah, what do planets do about that, canonically?

At those speeds, you barely get enough time to even react to it.

This kind of leads us back to the sensors question. At how many light-second or light minutes out is the inbound detected?

To avoid someone building vector in one system then jumping in to the 100 d limit in another may very well be the reason some versions of trav require jump from a zero vector location (not moving prior to jump). This also makes the g-turns of fuel idea from TNE useful. If you only have 20 g-turns of fuel and a 2 g drive the max magnitude of your vector is 2(drive rating)*9.8(definition of gravity)*20(minutes in a space-turn)*20(max # of turns)*60 = 470,400 m/s ~ 470 km/sec [someone double check my arithmetic]

Edit TNE has a type S having 114 g turns of fuel when you include jump fuel. 2(drive rating)*9.8(definition of gravity)*20(minutes in a space-turn)*114(max # of turns)*60 = 2, 681,280 m/s ~ 2,682 km/sec [someone double check my arithmetic]

470 km/sec is nowhere near speed of light (~300,000 km/sec). Nor is ~2700 km/sec

Supposing you could get a ship to .0.9C. At one light minute the planet has one minute to vaporize you or make you space junk small enough to most burn up in atmo. Anybody remember what the rating is of a planetary meson gun? And how many auto crits that will get on a 100 dton ship?

Now most places aren't gonna have a deep meson site, but a fist full of lasers and missiles from SDBs would break it up enough. And for those systems without SDBs or deep mesons, well they aren't important enough a target to use a planet buster on, now are they?
 
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I'm surprised you remember Nova Roma stuff.

Why shouldn't I?

I guess the number of posts of mine in the linked thread shows that I found it interesting enough to remember it...

What I am working on now is a new setting (working title: Main Sequence) with standard M-drives, sungate interstellar travel, and way less black-globe stuff (it causes too many problems). STL travel is by nuclear fusion or something.

Looking forward to see more deails on it. Just let me point you that (at least at first thought) unless some black globe like system ships cannot et close enough to a star for the sundives to work...

Throwing rocks in the way doesn't work for relativistic speeds. There's not enough time unless you detect it very early. You also need to deflect the target, not just obliterate it. Getting hit by a million 1kg rocks is just as bad as getting hit by a single 1 mT rock. Or whatever (math is hard).

As you point, the key for that is early detection and far interception. If you can achieve this (and IYTU, with sundiving and limited routes, that's quite easy, not so in OTU), I guess the rock cloud would work, probably converting the incoming ship into a plasma bolt and altering its vector, hopely enough for it to miss.

As for avoiding it in OTU, with jump ships appearing anything outside the 100 D Shell of the planet, and assuming any so accelerating ship going through normal space would be dected quite soon (and so, quite far away), it depends on many factors:
  • is the arrival point relative to the star system at large or to the target planet?
  • is jump time accuracy enough to allow to vector against the planet at such speeds (and so, nearly unable to maneuver)?
  • can a so accelerated ship jump and keep the vector against the planet?
  • etc...

In any case, I guess the main defenses are to establish a speed limit near (in astronomic terms) inhabitated planets and political consequences of any such action.
 
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There is not a single version of the Traveller rules that requires you to be zero vector. It is common practice, but not required. It does solve the problem though.

CT 77 edition gave a ship a maximum number of burns, 288 10 minute burns or 48 hours in total with a fully fueled power plant.

As you rightly point out the TNE HEPlaR drive limits the number of burns to manageable levels - removing the threat of near c ships was one of the intents behind the change according to interviews with the folks at GDW.

The magic reactionless maneuver drive is the problem. We can handwave requiring massive amounts of front armour to withstand impacts with dust as you approach 0.9c, that sort of thing.
 
My 'station shields' are a rock sphere with a constantly changing 'gate' and altered rock positions, probably with a cable mesh between.

Won't stop catastrophic hits, but should stop vaporization.

Planets are another matter.

Oh, and don't forget, doesn't have to be frac-C, sufficient mass at low speeds will do.

http://gundam.wikia.com/wiki/Space_Colony#Colony_drops

The following movie is the second in the Clear Skies trilogy, featuring a ship ramming a station.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRJgxkK-t8
 
There is not a single version of the Traveller rules that requires you to be zero vector. It is common practice, but not required. It does solve the problem though.

I'm not familiar with the term "zero vector," except possibly as a mathematical construct. What do you mean here?


CT 77 edition gave a ship a maximum number of burns, 288 10 minute burns or 48 hours in total with a fully fueled power plant.

As you rightly point out the TNE HEPlaR drive limits the number of burns to manageable levels - removing the threat of near c ships was one of the intents behind the change according to interviews with the folks at GDW.

I don't think I pointed that out at all, but I follow your meaning. If there's a (much lower than c) limit to relative speed due to shielding requirements, that could solve a lot of problems.

However, in my setting, sundiving basically requires pretty good shields, at least fore.

The magic reactionless maneuver drive is the problem. We can handwave requiring massive amounts of front armour to withstand impacts with dust as you approach 0.9c, that sort of thing.

I've gotten rid of my stutterwarp drive from previous settings, but I might be using a reactionless drive, because I can't imagine that a fusion drive would really work well enough. I have to do a little research to understand thrust capabilities, maintenance cycles, and so on. If it works, I'll go with a fusion drive. If it doesn't, I'll go with some kind of future-tech EmDrive (RF resonant cavity thruster) capable of producing at least a constant 1G or 2G acceleration.
 
I agree about the magic reactionless drive - it's not one of the highlights of the OTU canon. In another system, I did the following approach.

M-drives used a certain amount of reaction mass per 1,000 tons of thrust, and a ship could accelerate at whatever Gs you had when you divided thrust by the mass of the ship. Round to the nearest G and adjust fuel consumption if you want to do starship combat on hex grids.

Dividing the fuel capacity assigned to reaction mass by the mass used per round and multiplying by the G factor gave you a unit of reaction mass used per G-turn. Doing the maths is a little crunchy but no worse than game systems published by GDW.

e.g. Say you have a 1,000 ton ship with 3,000 tons of thrust for 3G. The M-drive uses 30 tons of reaction mass per turn flat out. If you have 180 tons of fuel dedicated to reaction mass you get 6 turns of 3G acceleration, or 18 units in total. You can spend it in burns any way you want.

I have fiddled with retrofitting a similar rule to high guard, although for balance you have to frig the amount of jump fuel per hex if you want to make manouevre drives use a significant amount of fuel.
 
My 'station shields' are a rock sphere with a constantly changing 'gate' and altered rock positions, probably with a cable mesh between.

Won't stop catastrophic hits, but should stop vaporization.

I might just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. My new ATU has a dark cast to it anyway.

Maybe planet hits are a regular occurrence in this setting. Life is cheap and spread all over. Only the nobles really have the power to do anything about it.

Planets enfeoff themselves to the noble hierarchy so they can get meson defenses and keep a rogue captain from obliterating their capital.
 
Zero Vector==> Standing still. IIRC reading it was required in one of the versions, maybe Mongoose? Not worth digging up the version though.
 
"Standing still" isn't a thing, but I get your meaning. Zero vector in relation to the planet? How is that ever a requirement for anything? Obviously, ships need to move, or they'd be space stations, not ships, and even then...

So while I understand the mathematical concept of zero-vector, I do not understand what Michael is trying to convey.
 
Strategically, and not entering in detail (as it would be Pit matter) most terrorist groups have a political claim behind them, and their goal is to gain supporters, as much as creating fear. Such a move will make them quite unpopular even among their sympathyzers (unless blind fanatics), and probably backfire politically.

So, what you're saying is that the planet needs a really big sandcaster ...
 
That can throw that sand at relativistic speeds...

(Which would probably turn the sand into plasma, which wouldn't be all that bad, either.)
 
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