*raises eyebrow* I read the entire thread, mate, as the rating bombing probably tipped some people off to before I even posted. I seem to have missed that. I mean, sure, we know it becomes vulnerable when it vibrates, but I never got the impression the vibrations themselves were enough to take a ship down. Most of the memorable kills came when we crossed behind the buggers, and fired up their...ahem, rears. Doesn't take much to wonder if the two aren't linked.
Possibly. On the other hand, being on the enemy's six o'clock is also the best time to unload a heavy barrage of weapons fire into them, maximizing the possibility of landing enough hits in a short period of time to disable them by pure vibration.
If we killed the fighters because we got a lucky shot inside the craft through the exhaust, and the exhaust ports seal when the craft isn't vibrating, that's not gonna be obvious on an "autopsy" of a fallen craft...unless we get a look inside. Also, Mobius and Baker explicitly blew holes in the bastard's asses last fight. Like, they got a look inside. How would you explain that one?
They were firing at an entirely different class of target- the very large "shield ships." It's quite possible that the shield ships aren't armored all around with five inch thick alien supermaterial.
Also, Mobius One in particular is flying a CFA-44 armed with the ADMM cluster missile, which lays down a barrage of twelve
micro-nukes miniaturized burst missile warheads. He was not
only firing
normal weapons, to put it mildly. And sustained machine gun fire seems to have caused the plates to
fall away, but there isn't any sign of them being riddled with holes. It's entirely plausible that the impacts of hundreds of cannon rounds set them to shaking so hard that big hull plates popped right off their mounting brackets.
Suffice to say that your theory is not implausible, but we have no visual evidence of cracks opening up in the aliens' hulls that are large enough to admit a 20mm exploding shell, and cracks that large
should be visible.
Evidence we'd expect to be there, isn't... obviously there. I strongly suggest that you may be over-interpreting some evidence at the expense of others, and that we table this idea until more evidence becomes available.
My bet is on enemy aces being living aliens, the rest being either Sectoid brains in jars (there is canonical precident on that one), or drone AI. FGU are probably either Sectoid Commanders, or straight-up Ethereals.
I can buy it.
I am aware of this. On the other hand, such systems have been abused before, too. I did read the lore stuff hYGP posted. Hell, I even read the wiki a bit. And I do have a talent, if I do say so myself, of figuring stuff out based mostly on contextual clues. I already had an idea of what the history of this world had to be like, given all the destroyed superweapons being brought up in the country descriptions, and the ridiculous achievements of our Aces people would bring up, before hGYP's lore posts (which I was still grateful for, btw). At least 7 games, all about separate conflicts, many of which involved variations on the Death Star run? Oh yeah, that's gonna be weird.
Yes.
But what I'm getting at is, the solution "construct terrifying space-based superweapons to counter an imminent global threat" is not unprecedented on Strangereal. Historically, the main failure mode of this strategy has been that bad-actor nations (usually Belka) seize control of the superweapon and use it as part of a deranged plot for continental conquest. X-COM was created
explicitly to break this pattern by placing terrifying orbital superweapons under international control.
This is well within our mandate, any inhabitant of Strangereal aware of their own history would fully expect us to do this, and so I don't expect
major negative ramifications from doing it. Obviously it increases the scale of our scariness for people who are worried about us becoming an enemy, but it's not
abnormal for Strangereal, any more than an international peacekeeping organization being issued top-flight exotic experimental weapons and getting to gallivant across multiple continents to kick alien butt without so much as a by-your-leave.
Surely microdebris was already an issue that had to be dealt with, though? Massive fuck-off lasers aren't necessarily going to get everything, and micrometeors in LOE are already a thing, I think. My quick Google searches seem to agree. We just need to reduce it.
Look up "Kessler Syndrome." It's a scenario where destruction of several satellites sets off a chain reaction whereby bits of destroyed satellites hit other satellites, shattering them and creating more and more debris.
There are
hundreds of tons, at least, of low orbital debris up there, ranging from kilograms to grams to milligrams in mass. Everything from paint chips with the kinetic energy of a .22 caliber bullet up through big solid chunks of metal with the kinetic energy of a locomotive, probably. This is NOT an environment we can safely send manned spacecraft up into for laborious collection, "bagging and tagging" of each individual tiny bit of wreckage.
I'm honestly amazed the Lighthouse hasn't been disabled by debris strikes already, and I strongly suspect the reason it hasn't is because of some kind of automatic, reflex-mode use of its beamed-power systems to fry debris likely to become a threat. That, or it's built
hellaciously tough out of some kind of material I wish we could get our hands on- not as sexy as alien alloy, but pretty impressive.
Targeting all the little bits of debris is a job for big ground-based radars (yes, you can track a bolt in orbit) and eliminating them is a job for something that doesn't consume delta-V or match orbits or have to physically retrieve the debris. The most unambitious form of this system, a
laser broom, has been seriously proposed.
I mean, I was assuming it wasn't available either. Ended up in Belka too, or is just too scarce ro use. Plus, reactors are a pain on aircraft. Though we could possibly use Alien Alloy shielding to make them more viable. I dunno. The issue is usually more that you're either irradiating the air around you, or trying to use some coolant to carry the reactor's heat into something like a jet engine, rather than the weight of shielding, though that is also a concern. First is bad for readily apparent reasons, second tends to f*ck up your weight-to-thrust ratio.
For vaguely normal aircraft, yes. On the other hand, occasionally a nation on Strangereal decides to build a giant flying command cruiser/battleship/aircraft carrier
thing with a wingspan measured in hundreds of meters, at which point nuclear power starts to look a bit more appealing. It may have been tried.
Why not just seed the orbits with little orbs made of Alien Alloys, with a power source on the inside, and have them collect up all the magnetic debris with their superconducting BS? It won't get everything, but it's a start. Heck, if they collect enough shred, they'll start collecting the nonmagentic stuff, too, just by gravitational pull.
Uh... that won't work for several math-physics reasons. I can explain in detail if you want, but suffice to say it won't work very well.
That's my second idea, BTW. My first one was basically Alien Alloy snowplows with ion drives on the back. The mental image was too amusing not to share.
This is actually probably a better idea. The big problem there is that you'd need the snowplow to
catch debris and not just have it bounce off at awkward angles.
I might want in on that. Easiest explanation? The Rutherford expy in Strangereal didn't put his foot in his mouth and tick off the Léo Szilárd equivalent, delaying the development of the concept of the nuclear chain reaction. Either that, or not!Léo got hit by a bus when he stepped off the curb.
(For those who don't know, Rutherford said, with absolute no evidence, that there was no way to ever get more energy out of nuclear fission than was put in, which ticked off Léo enough for him to start brooding on how it might be done, just to prove Rutherford wrong and show him the folly of making such statements with no science to back you up. After trying for a while, he went on a walk, which, as walks are wont to do, involved crossing a street. The story goes that Léo had an idea as he stepped off the curb, and had refined it by the time he crossed the street. That idea was the basis for the nuclear chain reaction.)
Hm. Works.
IMO, that is just the perquisite of being one of the people willing to put together a plan of action, take the time to listen to other people to get their input to refine it, convince others to back them, and try to keep all the logistics and crap in their skulls. It's a job of work to do right. There's nothing wrong with not making a vote, either. Contributing to vote refinement or the discussion of a vote is still completely worthwhile.
As an example of this,
@kilopi505 has been a determined advocate for drone warfare, in keeping with the advances made in that field which played such a big role in the plot of
Ace Combat 7.
Even if not all his specific suggestions seem viable to me, it is far more likely that we will integrate drone swarms into our future plans, either as part of our base defense or in other ways, thanks to his actions and advocacy.
I think this is putting the orbital cart ahead of the orbital horse a little.
Now that I think about it, the debris belt in LEO/GEO may actually be good for us. It's a debris field that's roughly randomly distributed -- but we can just model it as increasing the mean time to failure of any given satellite. And, if that debris cloud represents a navigational hazard to the ayy -- which I suspect it might -- we will want to get good at hiding satellites in the debris.
That said, it doesn't take much in the way of radar to track every piece of space junk -- NORAD already does it, we almost certainly can.
The big problem is that the mean time to failure of our satellites will be
so short that we're having to replace them constantly, as a steady drain on our resources, and one that will only thicken the Kessler Syndrome debris cloud in orbit over time.
Plus, you can't really "hide" the satellites in the debris cloud, because the debris orbits are so numerous. You have to dodge bits of debris constantly, tapping the orbit a little bit here or there to sidestep threats all the time. Realistic satellites only have so much delta-V budget in orbit and can only dodge so many times, plus of course the risk of getting hit by something you missed or couldn't track quite precisely enough.
It's not entirely out of the question that we could do as you describe, but it's going to be a
huge industrial investment, and probably with a lot of people on the ground tracking orbits and nudging the satellites around to keep them safe and extend their lifespan. This would be a major diversion of resources that I'd hesitate to make at this time.
I'd do something more like
--[] Project for Shen: Consult with Bradford and Snow on what is the most militarily useful satellite we can field immediately, with 10,000 IC budget (pulling funds away from industrial development as necessary.) Field it.
Achievable targets, clear goals, no micromanagement.
I can roll that into a plan, if needed.
OK, there are two reasons I don't support that.
1) I don't feel like we have 10,000 IC to spare right now. Lots of planes to buy, ground defenses to build, et cetera. I'm not prepared to hand him that budget
yet.
2) Given that we're operating on a slimmer budget for space launch right now (see (1)), I want to prioritize the one thing we
definitely want to have
right the fuck now.
Don't get me wrong. It'd be great to have a GPS constellation*, though committing to replacing the satellites however often we'd have to could get to be a real pain in the ass and would as noted get worse over time. But
aliens are literally on the ground in Belka, and Belka is presumably preparing for war against the world with alien support. At least one of the scenes in the original post "trailer" for the game alludes to this, with Excalibur opening fire on X-COM aircraft approaching a grounded alien unit.
I want,
very much, to know what Belka is up to. And with X-COM Osea in bad shape, I think that it's much better for us to specifically focus the resources we can spare on that one thing than to do something generic and worldwide that doesn't address any specific, pressing problem.
Again,
don't get me wrong. I will support expansion of our space capabilities soon. But it's going to become a very large IC drain on an ongoing basis, and one likely to get worse over time, if we
don't clear the orbital debris fields. Maybe you'd prefer that we not bother to do that... but if we do, we have to accept very limited access to our own orbital space.
...
Also, I approve
IN GENERAL of giving clear simple goals, but you have to think about things realistically. Just telling a weapons designer "make stuff better" without giving a clear definition of what you think 'better' is is a great way to get something poorly suited to your needs. Saying "just give us the most effective possible military satellite option" isn't going to give us what we
actually need, it's going to give us what a Shen-Bradford-Snow collective thinks we need. Which, well... we might well turn out to be right, but it's not the equivalent of wishing on a magical genie to give us what we need.
We've already seen some arguably bad choices out of our subordinates- for example, Shen and Vahlen
not being forthright and proactive about requesting equipment, and apparently having trouble getting their work done because they lacked equipment they hadn't asked for. We're not infallible, but neither are they, and we're remiss in
our job if we don't give them clear specifications for what we want to accomplish.
Good engineering is the art of taking the client's clear specifications about what they need, and turning it into a machine that meets or exceeds those explanations. In this case, we're the client, and it's our job to tell Shen specifically what we're trying to accomplish. Deciding what military intelligence we need isn't his job- you can argue that it should be delegated to someone not-us if you think I'm wrong about my priorities- but in any case it shouldn't be
his job to figure out what kind of satellite we need. That's why he has a commanding officer in the first place!
By contrast, I'd be a lot less micromanaging if I wanted to tell him to do something like "improve the damage output of our EML guns" or "repair Stonehenge." Those are simple objectives where the question "but what exactly do you
want" are already answered.
"Build military satellites" is not that simple a question; it comes with attached "but what do you want and what do you intend to do with it" questions that are outside the province of an engineer's duties.
___________________________________
*(Though if the aliens, or the Belkan-advised aliens, want to blow one up it won't be hard; GPS satellites are beacons that
radiate and by definition cannot be hidden).
It is debris field in constant motion. Even if we could track every piece of the debris field, even the smallest grain of sand sized pieces, not even mentioning he bigger ones, the satellite would still need to have microthrusters that would give it maneuverability to avoid all of the debris and someone to constantly course correct it, or it would quickly start falling apart due to being constantly bombarded by the debris, since we have no shield tech that isn't crazily power hungry.
Yeah.
To be fair, real satellites usually are designed with thrusters, especially spy satellites that need to slightly tweak their orbital track to overfly specific targets. And by monitoring radar, building the satellite with nice sturdy
Whipple shielding, making components redundant to resist tiny impacts that disable something, and generally doing everything in our power to steer and protect the satellite, we could potentially extend its life quite a bit. I don't know how dense the Keppler Syndrome debris fields are so I can't predict how long, but we
could.
The problem is that this would be hard work, constant work involving steady updating and monitoring of a
rapidly changing cloud of orbital debris, charting of maneuvering burns to sidestep the debris particles as they come close, and eventually running out of fuel for the satellite's thrusters, at which point it soon drifts into debris and becomes more debris. Over time, the job would just get harder and harder as our own efforts plus increasing numbers of debris-debris collisions create more and more individual bits of dangerous junk.
If we want to
keep infrastructure in space, we need some way of dealing with debris particles
en masse. Lasers are in fact a well known and widely accepted tool for doing this, which many people have seriously proposed as our solution if we need it.
