Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Intercosmos is doing really well, the Americans are burning money on SDI while we're hauling two thirds of the planet into space and moving historical milestones up by a decade or more and getting paid for the privilege. Space going really well, the steel sector going much less well with the sanctions. Hopefully we can create enough domestic steel demand to avoid a hard crash with sufficient expansions of infrastructure and manufacturing. Now, to take a big sip of coffee and check out how the machine-building industries that we need to support a large increase in manufacturing intensity are doing...
[X]Keep with Ryzhkov
What do you mean by "if by whiskey"?
And... Space based nuclear weapons aren't SDI. They are a different kind of stupid.
For a start, leaving them in orbit is a significantly worsening of MAD, since it cuts down the decision time from about half an hour to about 5 minutes, making accidental nuclear war far more likely, as people don't have the time to check false positives before they have to authorize a "retaliation" strike.
So putting up orbital nukes is an act of war, no ifs or buts, since the only reason to put them in orbit is in preparation for a strike.
To make it worse, orbital nukes:
a) stand out like a sore thumb against the coldness of space
b) carry limited fuel, so can't dodge for shit
c) can be intercepted and destroyed by vastly less expensive munitions (it's easy to get something high, the hard part about orbiting the Earth is getting enough speed to miss the ground as you fall - an interceptor doesn't care about the ground)
Orbital nukes are vastly more expensive, more vulnerable and less capable than submarine launched missiles.
By good I mean "remotely worth building".
Orbit is a terrible place for weapons. There's no-where to hide, there's nothing to dump waste heat into and its expensive to reach.
Also, for SDI to have coverage over Soviet siloes every minute of the day and for enough defenses to be over the USSR to attack a theoretical Soviet strike as it was leaving its siloes, an absolutely ungodly amount of crap needs to be shoved into orbit. Astronomers in such a world would envy our world's astronomers and their problems with Starlink satellites getting in the way of their telescopes.
To make all that worse, to have fast response times and to deal with issues like laser dispersion, the SDI platforms need to be in fairly low orbits.
And there is a serious ammo/consumables problem. Practically speaking, any defense platform is a single-use system. Either you need an energetic chemical reaction to get the high peak power output for things like lasers or particle beam weapons (meaning enormous masses of fuel for even single-use death rays, let alone multi-use death rays), nuclear explosions (for the bomb-pumped x-ray lasers), even one of which being lit off starfish primes the near-Earth environment or racks of expensive guided missiles.
Then there's the problem of hitting an enemy warhead. The easiest thing to do would be to hit the warhead from the ground as the now hypersonic warhead falls towards its target - but it is fairly easy to overwhelm and boosting to intercept a hypersonic target requires tracking and acceleration that is, while so far as I know feasible, unavoidably expensive. In a full WW3 scenario, the best this could do is ensure that some missile silo could survive long enough to execute a second strike, achieving the same results as an SSBN but costing far more resources. Next easiest is to hit the warhead at its apogee in space, which is a short window and is troubled by the fact that even if you can destroy the warhead, you are doing so by expending vastly more resources than the attacker has expended in attacking you, since you need to have space based systems competent enough that they aren't foiled simply by the warheads having a coat of shiny paint, and as we are learning with drone warfare in the modern day, countermeasures that cost more than the thing they counter aren't all that useful. Hardest is to damage the missile boosting the warhead close to the ground, since you have to punch through the atmosphere to hit the missile there, you require quick interception, high power, optics and tracking that the laws of physics frankly don't allow, at least not in combination. Better just to do a saturation bombardment of the silo field as soon as you see the covers start to pop, but that brings us back to the hideous expense of putting a butt load of crud into orbit, all to do a job that a SSBN hanging out in the Arctic ocean could manage at a fraction of the price by launching a nuclear strike on the siloes.
So theoretically, one could just brute force the problem, much as one could theoretically stop every bullet being fired in a battlefield with a big enough anti-bullet machine gun. But the cost of such an area saturation system would be so absurd that any army that attempted to build it would bankrupt themselves long before they reached the battlefield.
Similarly, SDI is not remotely feasible.
Also, please note that I am being extremely charitable and assuming a bunch of problems that real world engineers haven't been able to crack in more than 40 years of work can be solved. I'm not sure that these engineering problems will ever be solved though.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
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- Bottom of the pot
What's the general non-military implication of their SDI effort? Like are they pumping money into more STEM education? Less discrimination in higher ed? More R&D for basic research? Are they paying money to recruit foreign expert? Are we (CMEA) experiencing brain drain?
That is what I have been thinking as well, even though the SDI is very unlikely to work out the technical developments it brings about might be useful down the line.
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- Location
- Russian Federation, Kirov
The only way I see to counter such a first strike strategy is to learn from the OTL experience of the USSR.
The PERIMETER system or the Western nickname "Dead Hand". An automated system of nuclear vengeance in case of complete destruction of the top commanders. Without receiving an override code from a live operator, it will automatically launch the entire nuclear arsenal of the USSR.
The US will think twice about attempting a first attack, given that even if the USSR dies, it can drag them to the grave with it.
Speed is not so important if the response is guaranteed anyway.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Of course, the problem with any such system is that it needs to be, as engineers put it, "fail-deadly" rather than "fail safe." That is, the system is designed to send launch commands unless something else happens, and there is always some danger, however slight, of this situation arising in peacetime and the 'something else' not happening or failing to be registered.
It obviously wouldn't be as simple as "some Kremlin bureaucrat enters the wrong keycode, the Perimeter system sees that the Kremlin has missed a check-in, Perimeter takes this as proof Moscow has been destroyed, and launches the missiles," but the idea that such a thing could imaginably happen helps point us in the direction of the kind of thing we'd be looking at. Situations where some equivalent to Stanislav Petrov or Vasily Arkhipov might have been able to intervene to stop a situationally incorrect launch, but would not be able to stop Perimeter.
In short, the escalating level of nuclear threat from the US would create a situation in which nuclear war is more imminent because fear of an immediate first strike has led to a system where the USSR is forced to sacrifice some of its margin of safety against accidentally launching in case of a false alarm.
It obviously wouldn't be as simple as "some Kremlin bureaucrat enters the wrong keycode, the Perimeter system sees that the Kremlin has missed a check-in, Perimeter takes this as proof Moscow has been destroyed, and launches the missiles," but the idea that such a thing could imaginably happen helps point us in the direction of the kind of thing we'd be looking at. Situations where some equivalent to Stanislav Petrov or Vasily Arkhipov might have been able to intervene to stop a situationally incorrect launch, but would not be able to stop Perimeter.
In short, the escalating level of nuclear threat from the US would create a situation in which nuclear war is more imminent because fear of an immediate first strike has led to a system where the USSR is forced to sacrifice some of its margin of safety against accidentally launching in case of a false alarm.
- Location
- Russian Federation, Kirov
It's not as simple there as just a daily occurring code that has to be filled out to keep the nuclear arsenal from launching....
Most of the time, the system just sleeps. But as soon as there are seismic tremors, radiation levels rise and other parameters of a nuclear explosion are obtained. Then the system asks the command staff if a nuclear war has broken out.... If it doesn't get an answer, it will go down the chain of command, asking if it should launch a nuclear arsenal.... If no one answers, then it will think that the war has started and will launch command missiles that will send a signal and automatically wake up the entire nuclear arsenal of the USSR.
Edit: Link to Wikipedia if anyone is interested - [ Dead Hand - Wikipedia ]
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- Location
- Philippines
Can we work on improving our ship building now? The containerization seems to only extend to trucks. Personally id like it universal with all transport. Getting new yards and container ships would also benefit from the standard being set.
We've already begun building one shipyard and the plans are to complete both of them next turn.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Yes, that's why I literally said, in so many words, "it obviously wouldn't be as simple as."
What I'm saying is that as a practical consequence, the existence of a system like Perimeter does increase the risk of accidental nuclear wars starting. It is better for the safety of the world if such systems are not built, and therefore it is better if such systems are not necessary, and this is why aggressively pursuing rapid nuclear first strike capability is a bad thing, and this is why the US investing in an "SDI" system that works by bringing Soviet silos under immediate attack as soon as there is a sign of them opening would be a bad thing.
Because as you say, it would force the Soviets to build something more like Perimeter. Or a thing that is more sensitive and likely to launch than Perimeter. And that would be bad.
Yes. My practical observation, of course, is that this is a machine that when working as designed receives an input stimulus, then goes through a series of steps, and then if none of those steps comes back with a "stop" command, it fires all the missiles.
There are coherent, understandable reasons why one might build such a system. The downside of such a system is that any such machine is also a machine that, if it breaks or malfunctions, could conceivably fire all or some of the missiles when it shouldn't. If there was an error or oversight in the design, if something goes wrong in an unexpected way, and so on. Thus, the risk of accidental nuclear launches becomes higher.
Nuclear second strike capability is, by nature, always a trade-off. You can buy more certainty that your second strike will be launched quickly, before the enemy can cripple it. But you trade off by having more danger that your second strike will be launched quickly by mistake, before your own command structure can stop it.
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- It/Its
These bloody private enterprise just keep expanding. They must be annihilated or whatever the geopolitical situation, all will be lost
Considering the current state of the USSR in quest if we nationalize everything the CEO of the a iron corporation will simply become the Party Manager of the exact same factories on account of going to the same school with like the same delegates who signed said legislation
Shhhhh, capitalism always wins in the end. /jk
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- He/Him
[X] Keep with Ryzhkov
- Location
- The great frozen north
That is a good point. OK, I am ready to Ryzz the SimpSov!
[X]Keep with Ryzhkov
Podgorny has a solid base, and the man himself talks of the need to remove the structural incentives that encouraged such corruption before Klimenko. This is something, I hope, includes mechanisms to reign in the enterprises because the the members of our political patronage networks being de facto capitalists is a frustrating issue.
Well in general I agree with your point of view, though I do have a small caveat that I think that with say 2030s tech you might be able to make something that would work reasonably well against a vastly inferior opponent, like say North Korea.
Though on a side note your laser stuff seems a bit off. For instance reflective paint really is pretty much ineffective against high power lasers as it burns off, and so far I know we already found ways to track high speed objects in the atmosphere with lasers.
Still even in our current age lasers are still lacking in power to be effective against incoming ballistic weapons and will probably remain so till at least the 2030s or 2040s. And in space the issues with deploying such systems only becomes vastly larger, so yeah. (And even lasers from that period would I believe have pretty limited ranges where they'd be effective.)
Thus why in our actual reality the only branch of SDI research that eventually remained was ground based interceptors of ballistic missiles. With the caveat that while SRBM intercept was eventually after decades of effort made to eventually work reasonably well, ICBM intercept ability seems relatively poor still and it's dubious how well it would work if there was substantial penetrator aids like a major power could design. And such intercept systems are extremely expensive as well, so maintaining a full coverage against a peer opponent seems unrealistic on budget grounds. Saturation attacks would probably overwhelm any such system.
PS, hiding in space is probably more doable then some arguments presuppose. Though it's hard to evaluate how well or not it works in practise as efforts from the USA in that area are classified. Though it's worth noting because local orbit is now becoming some what cluttered, there is more noise to hide in, so it's not like you need to be perfect.
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- Location
- Minnesota
[X]Keep with Ryzhkov
- Location
- Reno
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X]Talks with Vorotnikov
Yes, with a large enough economic gap, the calculation does change.
And tactical use of ground interceptors is a very different case than strategic use. Having a defense that buys time in a skirmish is far more useful than having a defense that just delays the inevitable at crippling cost once escalation has reached the highest level.
One of the important elements of why SDI is so dumb is the "S" part.
How powerful a laser, at what range and against a target moving in what ways?
Space is a really terrible environment for laser weapons, since lasers have an incredible amount of waste heat to be disposed of, this makes even a single-use laser weapon (which can explosively dis-assemble in the process of firing, radiating off its waste heat from the cloud of expanding hot gas and debris after it fires) quite heavy for its power output, especially when we're talking pre-2000 tech.
And the laws of physics set stark limits on the efficiency of lasers. Carbon dioxide lasers are considered very efficient, and they only turn 20% of their input power into the laser beam.
"More doable than some arguments presuppose" leaves alot of wriggle room, for sure. In this case, I am comparing a rather large satellite (100 tonnes minimum) with an orbit of 150-700 km from the surface to a submarine.
And in the case of a full network of satellites able to maintain coverage over Soviet launch sites every minute of the day (and note that if we build a new silo field, the Americans need to launch a few thousand tonnes more crud into orbit to service that field) most of the clutter these satellites would be hiding in would be other defense platforms and the sensor platforms that provide them their eyes. It would be a bit of a target rich environment.
Regards,
fasquardon
If I recall correctly from an article on the US navies work in the area, you'd need at least a few MW to intercept an SRBM-IRBM on time before it reached a target. There the defense would be from the ships, the aspect would presumably be towards the front where you'd have to get through the most material, and also presumably it would be moving at least moderately towards the laser for most of the approach. This is for a conventional round intercept scenarios though, something that obviously make the intercept time a bit more generous compared to a nuclear payload which could try stand off attacks. In any case practical field usable lasers of that level won't be available for quite awhile still, even if one was very optimistic on development timelines. And at that point you'd still only be hitting the minimum requirements for intercepting an IRBM, so they'd probably still fall short of what you need for an ICBM. Still, if the power upped up enough you could probably get a close in defense system with it eventually, but it's most a future prospect as such then anything usable for now.
Deploying such a thing in space would obviously have even more problems as naval vessels obviously have some advantages in cooling and powerplants.
Lasers can be created via diodes you know. Thus the very best lab laser diodes currently I believe can hit about 90%, that admittedly is a figure you only get in perfect lab conditions though.
If we're talking real world field deployable lasers, the fiber lasers are I think about the best you can currently get at around 40%.
Still, the theoretical max efficiency is thus really really high. This isn't really surprising though, as light emission can be achieved via EM manipulation, a process that theoretically can even allow for near 100% efficiencies. Though of course in practise getting that in the field might not be all that realistically attainable. Still physics is actually as such really generous on allowed efficiencies here, but a good deal more harsh in actually getting to such lofty efficiencies in realistic use cases.
That close in might be a problem, yeah. It works better if you can take a few thousand km distance at least as then between signal dissipation and stealth features to make one look smaller and fainter, you could hide better as just another piece of debris then.
In any case, I wouldn't particularly expect this as all that useful for intercept system and more for spy or other specialty system. After all, you need some level of misdirection to even fool the other side in not spotting them, which is basically impossible if you then deploy them by the thousands. Not noticing that many launches and deployments is pretty unrealistic. At most you'd probably make it more of a pain to keep track of all of them and I'm not sure what you'd exactly gain from that in a space based intercept system. You need to kind of equally spread it out anyway to not have gaps in the entire thing.
I was mostly as such noting this in a PS thus, because some times people can be a bit too dismissive on any kind of stealth in space being possible at all.