OTU Only: Preventing terrorism or war sabotage

[Frankymole]

What prevents an enemy agent or terrorist from using a starship fusion power plant as a weapon - i.e. when parked in a starport, ready for lift off, simply running up the PP, overriding the safeties, and causing a thermonuclear blast? Did this sort of thing occur in any of the Frontier Wars?

 

[mike wightman]

Because fusion power plants do not explode like fusion bombs.

 

[Condottiere]

The rockets could be used as a very short range fusion gun.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

The rockets could be used as a very short range fusion gun.

you mean the Kzinti lesson?

 

[simonh]

Because fusion power plants do not explode like fusion bombs.

Perfectly true, but I thoughtbid expand on that.

Making a atom if weapon, either fision or fusion, explode is actualy extremely hard. As soon as as fast nuclear reaction starts, it naturally tends to force the nuclear material apart, damping the reaction.

That's why fision nuclear cores do not explode, they melt down. They contain enough concentrated nuclear fuel to generate a continuouss reaction, moderated by neutron absorbers to prevent the reaction going out of control. If that fails, the heat causes the nuclear material and the mechanisms around it to melt. If the nuclear material did burn fast enough to explode, the explosion would blast apart the nuclear core and separate the nuclear material a very long time before more than a small fraction of it had released its energy.

The explosions you do get associated with fission reactors are steam explosions in the heat exchange mechanisms. That's what blasted a hole in the Chernobyl containment vessel. Fission bombs actualy have a spherical she'll of high explosive around the nuclear core. This she'll detonates as the nuclear reaction starts and its the spherical compression wave created by this explosive, blasting inwards, that forces the nuclear material to hold together long enough for the fission reaction to complete Sioux tearing itself apart prematurely and 'fizzling'.

Fusion reactors have a very different design to fusion reactors. In a fision reactor you have. Lot of nuclear fuel in the core at the same time for an extended period of time. But in a fusion reactor you feed in a slow trickle of fuel into a magnetic containment field. If your were to feed in too much fuel, the magnetic containment field would fail a long time before the energy release was sufficient too cause an explosion. To design a reactor in such a way that the magnetic containment was powerful enough to generate an explosion, you would have to massively over engineer it from design time, and even then it may not be physically possible for more than a fairly modest explosion. In other words even a specially designed reactor intended to explode would be very hard to build and wouldn't work very well anyway.

Actual fusion bombs work on a completely different engineering principle. They put the fusion fuel at the focus of a shaped charge fission bomb. So they actualy use a fission bomb as an igniter for the fusion bomb. That's the only way we know so far to generate enough energy in one go to trigger a large scale fusion reaction without it fizzling.

Simon Hibbs

 

[mike wightman]

The rockets could be used as a very short range fusion gun.

Traveller ships do not use rockets - they use a magic gravity based handwave drive.

Although in CT 77 up to HG1 drives were fusion rockets - and then in TNE the paradigm went back to plasma rockets - the majority of Traveller iterations (and the two latest incarnations MgT and T5) have the magic gravity handwave drive.

 

[mike wightman]

you mean the Kzinti lesson?

Which is how it worked in HG1 - but only HG1

 

[creativehum]

Traveller ships do not use rockets - they use a magic gravity based handwave drive.

Although in CT 77 up to HG1 drives were fusion rockets - and then in TNE the paradigm went back to plasma rockets - the majority of Traveller iterations (and the two latest incarnations MgT and T5) have the magic gravity handwave drive.

You know, the more I read here about all the internal contradictions between editions, the retcons on the retcons, the way so many elements of setting, rules, later setting, always seem to crater so many other setting elements, the more amazed I am at how certain so many people are the is a Third Imperium that can be teased out as some sort of bedrock solid setting and get frustrated people aren't getting it "right."

 

[McPerth]

Although in CT 77 up to HG1 drives were fusion rockets - and then in TNE the paradigm went back to plasma rockets - the majority of Traveller iterations (and the two latest incarnations MgT and T5) have the magic gravity handwave drive.

MT also uses plasma/fusion rockets (in HT), but they have no backblast problem described...

 

[Quint]

Aside from the already good answers, I just always figured that the big risk on this level was from terrorists using a high thrust ship or boat as a rock and ramming it into planet. That was actually a plot point in one of my campaigns, and the group had to figure out what/how happened with the Imperial authorities essentially went apesh*t over the failure of multiple systems each with multiple redundancies and locked the system down.

D.

 

[Blue Ghost]

What prevents an enemy agent or terrorist from using a starship fusion power plant as a weapon - i.e. when parked in a starport, ready for lift off, simply running up the PP, overriding the safeties, and causing a thermonuclear blast? Did this sort of thing occur in any of the Frontier Wars?

The way an atomic or nuclear weapon works is that the material that releases that energy is forced under compression by an explosion of traditional conventional explosives equidistant from your weaponized heavy element, which is suspended in the middle. When that conventional explosive is triggered, it compresses the heavy element to critical mass where is has no choice but to release the energy contained with in the nucleus of its atoms.

A fusion power plant works by lazing a specific point to a mini critical mass state, but it's exceptionally small. In essence a weapon requires lots of special material and specific engineering to make it go "boom", whereas a powerplant creates a steady stream of energy due to exciting a specific point by way of focusing energy.

Simply put the engineering it totally different, and there's no way to make a fusion power plant go boom, or least not beyond the reaction chamber. You might induce an electrical feedback back or something, and get a small explosion like when you see socket short out (albeit a few times larger, but not by much). But the critical "fusion area", where fusion is taking place, is too small, uses steady power from another source, and just isn't capable of delivering a bang. It's a different design.

The only thing a weapon and a powerplant have in common is the pure science of fusion, and nothing more.

(sorry if this was explained in the previous comments......I'm too lazy to read the entire thread)

 

[BlackBat242]

Aside from the already good answers, I just always figured that the big risk on this level was from terrorists using a high thrust ship or boat as a rock and ramming it into planet.

D.

That would do far, far more damage than even the nuke warheads in anti-ship missiles would - if you started from far enough out, so you got to a very high speed.

 

[Blue Ghost]

It would have to be exceptionally massive and moving at a very high rate of speed, particularly for a planet with a dense atmosphere.

It would also seem unlikely in the higher populated region where patrol craft would intercept such an effort, and traffic regulations and other legislation would probably define how close you could move a big piece of rock to a world, and how fast.

Still, you don't need a dino-killer sized asteroid to create havoc. Something a fraction of that size, moving at mach 25+, would be enough to obliterate New York. I imagine cities in Traveller are larger. Something like the Los Angeles metroplex, but with gravity suspended buildings.

 

[Timerover51]

Take a 100 ton nickel-iron meteoroid, attach to a Scout. Select planet target, accelerate at 1G for 82 minutes. Release rock, which is now traveling at 30 miles per second/48.28 kilometers per second, on a course to intersect selected spot on planet. Watch fireworks on impact. Energy yield is equal to roughly 50 kilotons, but as about half the yield of a nuclear weapon is in the form of heat and radiation, more like 100 kilotons of TNT.

Scout changes course, accelerates and decelerates at 2G for about 180 minutes and then jumps out-system.

 

[rancke]

Take a 100 ton nickel-iron meteoroid, attach to a Scout. Select planet target, accelerate at 1G for 82 minutes. Release rock, which is now traveling at 30 miles per second/48.28 kilometers per second, on a course to intersect selected spot on planet. Watch fireworks on impact. Energy yield is equal to roughly 50 kilotons, but as about half the yield of a nuclear weapon is in the form of heat and radiation, more like 100 kilotons of TNT.

Scout changes course, accelerates and decelerates at 2G for about 180 minutes and then jumps out-system.

And great fun is had by everyone.

IMTU the Law of Narrative Causality ensures that either no one tries to do that sort of thing or the PCs manage to avert it.


Hans

 

[BlackBat242]

Its that orbital battery of starship fusion bay weapons that vaporizes all such attempts.

 

[Quint]

And great fun is had by everyone.

IMTU the Law of Narrative Causality ensures that either no one tries to do that sort of thing or the PCs manage to avert it.


Hans

In one of the semi-recent threads there was some discussion of "how things worked" at the various starport types and tech levels as related to Imperial Law and customs, and local law, etc.

This is the "Nightmare Scenario" that nobody wants, and which then in turn explains why there are such strict controls on approach vectors and general traffic control when approaching "civilized systems".

I rather imagine the Imperium keeps holocrystals around to show systems that are "less than cooperative" what can happen when you don't take precautions with who is travelling around your system.

"Yes, yes, smuggling is a bad thing, but, between you and me as civilized sophonts, *this* is what you really have to be worried about."

Suddenly Starport Authority coming in a taking care of interstellar traffic can seem like a real service instead of a heavy-handed attempt to control trade.

D.

 

[simonh]

Take a 100 ton nickel-iron meteoroid, attach to a Scout. Select planet target, accelerate at 1G for 82 minutes. Release rock, which is now traveling at 30 miles per second/48.28 kilometers per second, on a course to intersect selected spot on planet. Watch fireworks on impact. Energy yield is equal to roughly 50 kilotons, but as about half the yield of a nuclear weapon is in the form of heat and radiation, more like 100 kilotons of TNT.

The Chelyabinsk meteroite is estimated to have been equivalent to about 500 kt TNT and mass over 10,000 metric tons. If you arranged the trajectory to be vertical down throught eh atmosphere you could probably get more bang for your bucks, but I suspect most of the energy of a 50 kt scale event would be expended into the upper atmosphere. Also, at those kinds of velocities it would be picked up and intercepted by a planetry defence systm without too much trouble, after all it would be essentially indistinguishable from a pretty minor natural meteorite.

To defeat a planetary defence system you need to get up to a significant francion of the speed of light, not so much to increase the impact energy because you could get the same energy froma slower moving bigger object, but so they get the absolute minimum warning that the object is coming.

The problem is this takes quite a while. To get to 0.9C at 2G thrust would take about 160 days. That means if a tracking system picked up the projectile at 10 AU range (around the orbit of Saturn), it would reach earth in about 80 minutes, but the radio or laser comms signal carrying the warning would take 72 minutes to reach Earth, so they'd only have 8 minutes before the impact to do anything about it.

You wouldn't need to use a scout though. If you dropped off a 30 dton (say 10 metric ton) ship's boat, at 6G it would reach 0.9c in 53 days. The impact energy would be about 90,000 megatons. That's 450x Krakatoa, but only about 1,000th of the Chicxulub impact thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Simon Hibbs

 

[JimMarn]

Several documentaries I've seen on stopping comets from hitting Earth mention we don't currently have a means of spotting a comet coming from behind the sun until it could be too late.

 

[Timerover51]

The Chelyabinsk meteroite is estimated to have been equivalent to about 500 kt TNT and mass over 10,000 metric tons. If you arranged the trajectory to be vertical down throught eh atmosphere you could probably get more bang for your bucks, but I suspect most of the energy of a 50 kt scale event would be expended into the upper atmosphere. Also, at those kinds of velocities it would be picked up and intercepted by a planetry defence systm without too much trouble, after all it would be essentially indistinguishable from a pretty minor natural meteorite.

To defeat a planetary defence system you need to get up to a significant francion of the speed of light, not so much to increase the impact energy because you could get the same energy froma slower moving bigger object, but so they get the absolute minimum warning that the object is coming.

The problem is this takes quite a while. To get to 0.9C at 2G thrust would take about 160 days. That means if a tracking system picked up the projectile at 10 AU range (around the orbit of Saturn), it would reach earth in about 80 minutes, but the radio or laser comms signal carrying the warning would take 72 minutes to reach Earth, so they'd only have 8 minutes before the impact to do anything about it.

You wouldn't need to use a scout though. If you dropped off a 30 dton (say 10 metric ton) ship's boat, at 6G it would reach 0.9c in 53 days. The impact energy would be about 90,000 megatons. That's 450x Krakatoa, but only about 1,000th of the Chicxulub impact thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Simon Hibbs

You are assuming that all planets have planetary defense systems. Tech level 8 planets on down would not. Neither would planets with low populations.

As for reaching near light-speeds with a ship's boat, I strongly suggest you do some number crunching with respect to the energy required to reach that. E = M X C(squared) still applies in the Traveller universe, I think.