Deep Space Bombardment Force
Bruce Lewis
the stealthy missile-carrying submarine, the
USAF had developed a concept (Dyson, et. al)
for a Deep Space Bombardment Force
consisting of many deep-space vessels
armed with nuclear bombs for purposes
of deterrence. The idea was that the DSBF
would serve as a counterforce weapon to
prop up MAD.
The idea was discared with the success
of the Polaris program. However, recent
advances in ocean survellance technology
are casting doubt on the future of stealthy
submarine forces. If a submerged missile
boat could be accurately located by a blue-
green laser radar or an advanced synthetic
aperture radar mounted on a satellite, it
might be worthwhile to consider reviving
the concept of the Deep Space Bombardment
Force.
I assume that the United States will in the
future continue to consider a nuclear-armed
"weapon of last resort" as a necessary thing.
If so, and if surveillance techniques finally
gain the measure of ballistic missile submarines,
a deep-space strike force might be considered
desirable. The question for the reader: is such
a system practical given the situation above?
We know it is possible. The planning for the DSBF
was quite detailed and was considered workable
back in the late 1950s. I see a possible DSBF as
being a deep-space analog of the current missile
boat scenario: a stealthy force of ships capable of
conducting a devastating nuclear counterstrike
on command from an unpredictable position.=20
Instead of deep water, however, the ships of the
DSBF would rely on "deep space" to protect them
from detection by an enemy power. A DSBF "boomer"
might consist of an Orion-type nuclear pulse
vehicle with long-duration nuclear-electric "cruise"
engines added. The "boomer" would depart orbit
with a high velocity using the nuclear pulse system,
assuming an orbit in "deep" space, i.e. a cislunar
or Earth-tracking solar orbit, switching then to
the ion drive system to modify its orbit further.
The drive plume of the pulse system would, of course,
make the "boomer" visible to enemy observers
while in use, but once the ion drive was switched
on and used to modify the ship's orbit unpredictably,
the ability of an enemy to predict its trajectory in
space would be close to nil. The ship would for
all practical purposes "disappear" once the ion
drive systems came into play. As is well-known, the
inverse-square law would prevent all but the largest
search radars from being able to track the ships
one they were in flight; with every second after the
ion drive is employed, the spherical area of space
where the ship could possibly be would increase.
A radar capable of searching the entire volume
of cislunar space to find such ships would have to
be located on the moon or on orbit=8Band would, of
course, be the first target for an attack in the
event of war.
The ships themselves would be large, with fractional
mass-ratios possible due to the high delta v and IsP
of the nuclear pulse drive system. Such huge ships
could carry amenities equal to or surpassing those
on modern-day subs, vital for the maintenace of
crew functionality on long, deep space missions.
Problems of resupply might be alleviated by special
"freighter" versions of the basic "boomer" design; in
addition, the ships would probably be large enough to
be spun up axially, producing a moderate inertial
acceleration perpindicular to the hull of the vessel
and allowing the crew enough "gravity" to raise
enough crops to provide much of the ship's needed
oxygen and food, further reducing the need for
supply. This would also prevent calcium loss and
other problems of long-duration zero-gee exposure
for the crew. The high mass-ratio of these ships
would allow them to be constructed from ordinary
materials like heavy steel, easily obtained at the
fleet's "Luna Pearl Harbor" home base; these dense
hulls would provide the shielding from solar proton
and most galactic cosmic radiation the crew would
require. Storing the ship's water supply in bunkers
between the outer hull and the inner pressure hull
would further reduce ambient radiation within the
ship.
The ships might be "homeported" at Luna Pearl Harbor;
aluminum towers 60-100 miles tall could be built up
from the lunar surface to act as "piers" for ships in
dock, allowing for easy and efficiient rapid transit of
crews and cargoes from the base to the ships in port.
One big advantage of such deep-space bombardment
forces is communication. Current missile subs must
rise to periscope deth to receive firing orders from
their home countries or rely on innefficient super-longwave
radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
be in constant communicaton with national command
authorities by means of laser communications. These
beams could be invisibly directed at the ships while "at sea"
from a central facility at Luna Pearl Harbor.
Such a program would have a wealth of beneficial side
effects. To avoid radioactive contamination of Earth's
surface, the ships themselves would be assembled from
lunar materials at the "pier", with the construction materials
being raised into lunar orbit using the "pier" towers.
The lunar and orbital infrastructure needed to maintain the
DSBF program would provide thousands of "ordinary guy"
jobs like welding, electronics, and shipfitting for people
on Earth, who would in turn require housing, provisioning,
and recreational facilities in lunar situ, thus creating more
jobs. There would have to regular "airline" service to
space stations from Earth's surface, and regular service
from there to Luna Pearl Harbor as well=8Bmore jobs.
Finally, some of the "boomers" could be constructed as freighters
and deep-space exploration ships, providing even more
value. How about a thirty-day round-trip to Pluto with
a crew of 100? Ships like the ones described above would be
capable of such trips.=20
Since life aboard such ships would
resemble greatly life aboard modern-day submarines, it
might be wise to commission the ships as naval vessels
and crew them with retrained Navy "nuke" crews.
The DSBF program would do more
than insure the US an unassailable nuclear retailatory
force; it would open up the Solar System for colonization, much
as the sailing ships of old fulfilled both a military and exploratory
function. I think I've considered most of the major
issues of such a force above; now, let's discuss it
in detail.
Thanks,
Bruce Lewis "The Freshmaker!"
Studio Go! Multimedia, LA =20
bc...@deltanet.com =20
My opinion=8Bit ain't necessarily Go!'s=20
=20
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Proud producers of STAR BLAZERS:
THE MAGAZINE OF SPACE BATTLESHIP
YAMATO=8Bone of the world's best-
selling independent comics magazines.
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SFD Lyons
too much Star Trek??? Don't worry, I do to!
The Idea is rather sound, but as for a propulsion system based on Orion, I
am not sure. The idea was abandoned a few years ago (or was that one of
the other in the multitude?) At any rate, that would be a definate step
ahead for the US Navy, as I would hate to see the USAF control such a
force. Is it fesiable? With a space program and military funding being
cut by our current (vomit) administration, I doubt it financially. Once
we have built a space station, and returned to the moon to set up such a
facility as your Lunar Pearl Harbor, it is a idea that deserves serious
investigation. It is unfortunate that the NASA focus has been on
near-Earth studies (with exceptions of Galileo and Mars Orbiter etc...)
We need to get back to the moon, and who better to have a fake flag flying
alongside the US flag than the USN??????
Where would these ships be built and serviced? Earth? Luna? Orbit?
Also, where are the materials, and most importantly funding coming from?
Carry on.....
Rob
Fleet Admiral Robert F. Lyons, SFD
157 Stacey Lane, Suite 3
Anderson, Indiana 46016-5848 U. S. A.
"To boldly go where none have gone before!"
Star Fleet Division
Department Of The Star Fleet
United Federation Of Planets
Thomas Kalbfus
attacking Alien space ships, it is more likely that the DSBF
will attack the Earth itself in the event of war. People living
on the Earth and somehow surviving the nuclear holocaust would
probably view it as an attack from outer space. It is
regrettable that people often need a military reason to
motivate them to do something worth while. I can picture it now
huge armadas in space, the Chinese, The Americans, the
Russians, and perhaps some Islamic Block all targeting
different cities on Earth, but when war comes they'll look like
they are a single force seeking to destroy it to an outside
observer. You see the enemy doesn't live on another planet, he
lives on our own.
Dwayne Allen Day
: Back in the 1960s, before the advent of
: the stealthy missile-carrying submarine, the
: USAF had developed a concept (Dyson, et. al)
: for a Deep Space Bombardment Force
I'm not familiar with this proposal. All I've seen is the USAF Air
Research and Development Command April 1960 lunar base study. Got a cite?
: might be worthwhile to consider reviving
: the concept of the Deep Space Bombardment
: Force.
This is ludicrous (and the rumors of the submarine's imminent demise are
greatly exaggerated).
: I assume that the United States will in the
: future continue to consider a nuclear-armed
: "weapon of last resort" as a necessary thing.
Wrong right there. The US does not consider the submarines to be a
"weapon of last resort." They consider them a survivable leg of the
deterrent triad.
: If so, and if surveillance techniques finally
: gain the measure of ballistic missile submarines,
Baloney. ICBMs have been vulnerable for 20 years now. We still have
them, don't we?
: back in the late 1950s. I see a possible DSBF as
: being a deep-space analog of the current missile
: boat scenario: a stealthy force of ships capable of
: conducting a devastating nuclear counterstrike
: on command from an unpredictable position.=20
Against whom? Earth to reader: the Cold War is over. Nobody else on
the planet has the ability to effectively target all of our nuclear
forces.
: One big advantage of such deep-space bombardment
: forces is communication. Current missile subs must
: rise to periscope deth to receive firing orders from
: their home countries or rely on innefficient super-longwave
: radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate. And they can receive ELF
and VLF signals at pretty hefty depths. These messages don't have to be
longg to begin with--"Dust Moscow" is sufficient if you're already on a
war footing.
: The DSBF program would do more
: than insure the US an unassailable nuclear retailatory
: force; it would open up the Solar System for colonization, much
: as the sailing ships of old fulfilled both a military and exploratory
: function. I think I've considered most of the major
No. This is all pure, total, absolute baloney. It's garbage. It is all
based upon a highly unlikely speculation. It is like saying "First,
let's assume that all pigs suddenly grow wings" and then trying to
extrapolate how this will affect the market for bacon.
Here's the simple reply: We live with vulnerable ICBMs. If SLBMs become
_more_ vulnerable (they will never become completely vulnerable), then we
find something to make them LESS vulnerable. Maybe we make them more
stealthy. Maybe we make them dive deeper. Maybe we hide them in
underwater caves or something.
Or maybe we switch to something else entirely, like stealthy bombers that
stay over the United States on airborne alert.
You are presuming an enemy with capabilities far beyond anything that the
Soviet Union ever had--NOT ONLY PERFECT INTELLIGENCE AND SURVEILLANCE
CAPABILITIES, BUT A PERFECT ABILITY TO ENACT A TOTALLY DEVASTATING FIRST
STRIKE. This is impossible. And there's no reason to come up with some
sci-fi fantasy to deal with an impossibility.
D-Day
--
"Buttered bread always falls with the buttered side down. Cats always
fall and land right side up. Therefore, if you strap a piece of buttered
toast to the back of a cat and drop it, the cat-toast combination will
not reach the ground, but will hover above it, spinning wildly."
Wayne Johnson
>The DSBF program would do more
>than insure the US an unassailable nuclear retailatory
>force; it would open up the Solar System for colonization, much
>as the sailing ships of old fulfilled both a military and exploratory
>function. I think I've considered most of the major
>issues of such a force above; now, let's discuss it
>in detail.
Lord have mercy
No thanks.
Wayne "not with April 15th coming" Johnson
cia...@ix.netcom.com
James Corley
writes:
>Back in the 1960s, before the advent of
>the stealthy missile-carrying submarine, the
>USAF had developed a concept (Dyson, et. al)
>for a Deep Space Bombardment Force
>consisting of many deep-space vessels
>armed with nuclear bombs for purposes
>of deterrence. The idea was that the DSBF
>would serve as a counterforce weapon to
>prop up MAD.
>The ships might be "homeported" at Luna Pearl Harbor;
>To avoid radioactive contamination of Earth's
>surface, the ships themselves would be assembled from
>lunar materials at the "pier", with the construction materials
>being raised into lunar orbit using the "pier" towers.
Much Sci-Fi stuff has been deleted.
It would be much cheaper to:
A. Built these 'ships' in orbit an just put them in GEO
B. Just build and/or base ICBMs on the moon. This too was studied in
the late 50s. Why build a trillion dollar base to build billion
dollar ships.
The only real advantage to the "Lunar Pearl Harbor" would be as an
advanced base station for further planetary exploration. The building
of the space elevators would be technological nightmares (for about the
next 100 years, IMO) and very expensive, but could save lots of money
in the long run (About 200 years, IMO)
Christopher Weeks
What are your references for this?
This is either an extremely interesting bit of history, or a
completely lunatic idea. Or both.
-Chris Weeks
Ed Turner
> This is either an extremely interesting bit of history, or a
>completely lunatic idea. Or both.
Both for sure! The think tanks came up with a lot of scifi type ideas
(at taxpayer expense!) for the future of the space program in the 1950's
and 60's. It is not too hard to make all sorts of "conceptual designs"
sound plausible as the original post in this thread illustrated, but 40
years of history should by now have taught us a some what more modest
vision (in light of practical technical and financial constraints).
As an aside, it may have made sense at the time the DSBF was conceived,
but it is very hard to imagine that one would want to used large *manned*
vessels as launching platforms with current or future technology.
Did you ever hear the one about blasting mountains into space with a drive
powered by small nuclear explosives? It was seriously proposed and studied
too!
MichaelYeager
Ever wonder why 'dense pack' was of such interest to the ICBM crowd?
Ever question why fractracide was counted on to protect ICBM silos? Ever
wonder why the silos would *need* to count on fractracide to protect
their contents when they should be empty?
What ever became of 'Brilliant Eyes' anyway?
Henry Spencer
>...If a submerged missile
>boat could be accurately located by a blue-
>green laser radar or an advanced synthetic
>aperture radar mounted on a satellite, it
>might be worthwhile to consider reviving
>the concept of the Deep Space Bombardment
>Force.
Disregarding the policy issues -- the lack of sophisticated opponents to
justify major new nuclear forces, and the treaty violations involved --
there are several technical difficulties here.
>Instead of deep water, however, the ships of the
>DSBF would rely on "deep space" to protect them
>from detection by an enemy power...
Unfortunately, space-surveillance technology has improved quite a bit
since the 1950s. As Bruce noted, radar is pretty hopeless because of its
inverse-fourth-power range law (the inverse-square law gets you both
coming and going). However, passive detection techniques such as optical
and infrared telescopes suffer much less from this. The vessels Bruce is
proposing would be large, and should be relatively easy to detect --
particularly in the thermal infrared -- even if attempts are made to
render them stealthy.
Remember, you don't *have* to do a complete sky search. It suffices to
track each ship continuously, starting when it leaves port. With passive
tracking, this can be done without alerting the ship.
>A DSBF "boomer"
>might consist of an Orion-type nuclear pulse
>vehicle with long-duration nuclear-electric "cruise"
>engines added. The "boomer" would depart orbit
>with a high velocity using the nuclear pulse system...
Here we have another problem: use of nuclear-pulse engines anywhere in
Earth's vicinity will be devastating to current satellite populations,
which are not hardened against the effects. Even limiting nuclear-pulse
operations to very high orbit, outside the magnetosphere, is not a
complete fix, because the X-rays from the bombs will kick up energetic
electrons from (and within) any solid surface they hit.
As a practical note, also, nuclear-pulse engines are extremely expensive
to run. (The Orion people assumed that fission-free bombs would become
available in the 1960s, but they didn't.)
>...but once the ion drive was switched
>on and used to modify the ship's orbit unpredictably,
>the ability of an enemy to predict its trajectory in
>space would be close to nil...
The basic idea is sound -- using a low-thrust drive to make unpredictable
orbit modifications -- but note that large nuclear-powered ion drives are
not going to be inconspicuous objects. The reactor itself is a copious
source of gamma rays, and conversion of its heat to electric power is an
inefficient process, producing large amounts of waste heat which have to
be radiated away.
The instruments on the Solar Max satellite -- which wasn't even designed
for gamma-ray astronomy! -- detected the USSR's Topaz experimental
satellite reactors quite well at quite substantial distances. In fact,
the Topaz tests interfered quite noticeably with Solar Max's observations
of the Sun.
These particular problems can be circumvented somewhat by operating the
ion drive only intermittently, and by trying to point the emissions in
harmless directions.
>A radar capable of searching the entire volume
>of cislunar space to find such ships would have to
>be located on the moon or on orbit=8Band would, of
>course, be the first target for an attack in the
>event of war.
Surely the same criticism can be levelled at satellite systems capable of
finding missile submarines. If space-based tracking systems are not a
threat to the DSBF, they are not a threat to the missile subs either.
Actually, I think the argument is fundamentally flawed, simultaneously in
opposite directions. :-) First, I don't think even large space-based
radars are going to be able to fight the inverse-fourth-power law well
enough to be useful. However, second, the most important point of
tracking DSBF ships is not to be able to find and destroy them during a
protracted war, but to be able to track them during peacetime, so that
attack forces can be positioned quietly and secretly to destroy them at
the very start of the war. It's not necessary that such attack forces
be large vessels or that they trail the DSBF ships around, because the
bad guys don't need to be able to destroy the DSBF ships on a moment's
notice -- it suffices to be able to destroy them at a pre-planned time.
"Gosh, what a shame, all your DSBF ships were destroyed simultaneously
by meteorite impacts. What an amazing coincidence that this happened
just as we invaded West Germany. Of course, we had nothing to do with
it, and there's no cause to get hasty with your other nukes. You'll
notice that *we* haven't used any nuclear weapons."
In any case, this is all a bit silly. The same effect as DSBF can be had,
at vastly lower cost, with well-hidden missile bases on the Moon. The
Moon is too large to search effectively, it provides ample background
clutter to hide low-powered bases, and lunar bases can be hardened against
attack much more easily.
(Of course, it's still a very expensive project that violates assorted
treaties and is impossible to justify since peace has broken out.)
Frankly, I would suspect any 1950s/1960s DSBF schemes of having been
attempts to justify military manned spaceflight, and possibly to justify
Orion in particular. This strikes me as a clear case of starting with a
solution and working backwards to find a problem for it to solve, without
considering whether there are better ways to solve that problem.
--
Americans proved to be more bureaucratic | Henry Spencer
than I ever thought. --Valery Ryumin, RKK Energia | he...@zoo.toronto.edu
Bruce Lewis
>I'm not familiar with this proposal. All I've seen is the USAF Air
>Research and Development Command April 1960 lunar base study. Got a cite?
Dr. Dyson went on about about it at some length in
INFINITE IN ALL DIRCTIONS. I got the impression
that the docs he was working from were not available,
but they may be now. This was more a gedanken-post
than an argument-post...
>
>: I assume that the United States will in the
>: future continue to consider a nuclear-armed
>: "weapon of last resort" as a necessary thing.
>
>Wrong right there. The US does not consider the submarines to be a
>"weapon of last resort." They consider them a survivable leg of the
>deterrent triad.
Okay then, a "survivable leg" it is.
>: back in the late 1950s. I see a possible DSBF as
>: being a deep-space analog of the current missile
>: boat scenario: a stealthy force of ships capable of
>: conducting a devastating nuclear counterstrike
>: on command from an unpredictable position.=20
>
>Against whom? Earth to reader: the Cold War is over. Nobody else on
>the planet has the ability to effectively target all of our nuclear
>forces.
No one TODAY... [ominous music]...
>: One big advantage of such deep-space bombardment
>: forces is communication. Current missile subs must
>: rise to periscope deth to receive firing orders from
>: their home countries or rely on innefficient super-longwave
>: radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
>
>No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate.
Carrier squid? Wire-guided message-in-a-bottle? Last I heard
we were still using radio, UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT IS
COVERING UP SOME BETTER BUT FAR MORE SINISTER
METHOD DERIVED FROM ZETA RETICULAN [TM, Pat. Pending]
TECHNOLOGY!!!!!!!
(Oops! Slipped into HoagieMode there Sorry.)
>And they can receive ELF
>and VLF signals at pretty hefty depths.
Recent tests conducted by the AIAA showed conculsively
that signals from elves do not penetrate seawater more than
ten meters. Once they get HAARP going up there, who knows?
>These messages don't have to be
>longg to begin with--"Dust Moscow" is sufficient if you're already on a
>war footing.
Especially if you're calling collect.
>: The DSBF program would do more
>: than insure the US an unassailable nuclear retailatory
>: force; it would open up the Solar System for colonization, much
>: as the sailing ships of old fulfilled both a military and exploratory
>: function. I think I've considered most of the major
>
>No. This is all pure, total, absolute baloney. It's garbage.
Down, DAD, down! It's only a silly Usenet post from a guy
who draws comic books for a living. Consider decaf...
>It is all
>based upon a highly unlikely speculation.
I'll give you that one. Let us imagine it is 1918. The
"Evil Empire" lies in ruins. Our fleet of reciprocating-
engine battleships will soon be replaced by advanced
oil-burning turbine ships, far superior to anything conceived
anywhere in the world. Our former enemy is reduced
to paying for things with lumps of coal due to
hyperinflation, and our army can whup anybody
else's in jig time. The Millineum is at hand! We are
invulnerable thanks to our strategic triad of bayonets,
machine guns, and poison gas. Oh, sure, those aeroplane
thingies are neat, but stack one of those flimsies up
against a REAL weapon like an 88 or a "landship" (tank)
and watch the feathers fly! Long range bombardment?
From an AIRPLANE? Pure, total, absolute baloney!
Garbage! Was fur Quatsch ist das! Etc., etc.
>Here's the simple reply: We live with vulnerable ICBMs. If SLBMs become
>_more_ vulnerable (they will never become completely vulnerable), then we
>find something to make them LESS vulnerable. Maybe we make them >more stealthy. Maybe we make them dive deeper. Maybe we hide t=
hem in
>underwater caves or something.
Or in big, honking space cruisers...
>Or maybe we switch to something else entirely, like stealthy bombers that
>stay over the United States on airborne alert.
How about one hundred thousand Cessna 150s, each carrying
a German teenager, an Esso road map, and a one-KT pony
bomb. We KNOW that delivery system works...
>You are presuming an enemy with capabilities far beyond anything that >theSoviet Union ever had--NOT ONLY PERFECT INTELLIGENCE AND =
>SURVEILLANCE CAPABILITIES, BUT A PERFECT ABILITY TO >ENACT A TOTALLY DEVASTATING FIRST STRIKE. This is impossible.
Tora, tora, tora, Dwayne. Nothing is impossible.
>And there's no reason to come up with some
>sci-fi fantasy to deal with an impossibility.
Well, I guess you told me! Sorry I brought it
up, sir! I'll just slink back to my desk and get to
work on the exciting new IRS Tax Explorer satellite
that NASA's planning as part of its bold, new
policy towards space exploration! (^_^)
The above attempt at humor aside, thanks for
the reply. All responses welcome!
Bruce LewiscPop Culture Guru
Studio Go! Multimedia
Manhattan Projects Multimedia
*****************************************
Producers of STAR BLAZERS MAGAZINE
and other quality entertainment products.
*****************************************
R. Paul Martin
............big snip.......................
Well, Bruce, I was going to just comment that you had a rich fantasy
life, and then I saw the end of your post, the part about producing
comic books.
Stated as a comic book idea, this is just fine. Otherwise, well, you
seem to enjoy stating things as fact that are not even well thought
out in terms of reality. But if it's just make-belive, fine.
BTW, nukes in space is a violation of some treaties at this time.
You'll need to fantasize a way around that as well.
>value. How about a thirty-day round-trip to Pluto with
>a crew of 100? Ships like the ones described above would be
>capable of such trips.=20
Well, this isn't good sf, Bruce. Your 30 days to Pluto has you going
at an average speed of about 1,041 miles per SECOND, if Pluto is at
perihelion. Pluto is recently past perihelion, so you'll need to wait
about 260 years or so for that to reoccur. So the numbers below are
best case scenarios, which you're unlikely to get.
This is for a straight line 2.7 billion mile run, which is not what
you're going to be able to do. But even so, the
acceleration/deceleration, 15 days each, would require a personnel
debilitating acceleration of about 8.49gs!! I seriously doubt that
humans can live with that acceleration for that long.
Now realize that even this is not a straight line run perpendicular to
gravity. You are trying to climb out of a gravity well. Hell of a
lot of energy required for that.
You have to run the numbers for this stuff, Bruce, otherwise the
brighter children in your audiance are going to not be able to
maintain their suspension of disbelief.
Andy Dingley
>>No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate.
>
>Carrier squid? Wire-guided message-in-a-bottle?
Take a look here and find out:
Dwayne Allen Day
: In article <4jm8mr$s...@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu> we...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Christopher Weeks) writes:
: > This is either an extremely interesting bit of history, or a
: >completely lunatic idea. Or both.
: Both for sure! The think tanks came up with a lot of scifi type ideas
: (at taxpayer expense!) for the future of the space program in the 1950's
: and 60's.
The idea of basing missiles on the moon did not come out of a think
tank. It came out of the Air Force's Air Research and Development
Command. Report was produced in April 1960 (although the idea predates
this). All that's been released is the executive summary of this
report. I have a copy on my desk which we're incorporating into a book
for the Government Printing Office.
At the time the Air Force had its sights set on a lot of the Navy's
strategic nuclear mission. This one was just bizarre.
D-Day
--
"If a tree falls on a mime, does it make any noise?"
Dwayne Allen Day
: not going to be inconspicuous objects. The reactor itself is a copious
: source of gamma rays, and conversion of its heat to electric power is an
: inefficient process, producing large amounts of waste heat which have to
: be radiated away.
: The instruments on the Solar Max satellite -- which wasn't even designed
: for gamma-ray astronomy! -- detected the USSR's Topaz experimental
: satellite reactors quite well at quite substantial distances. In fact,
: the Topaz tests interfered quite noticeably with Solar Max's observations
: of the Sun.
I believe that Solar Max's detection of the Topaz's had nothing to do
with detecting the reactor itself, but with detecting the charged
particles trapped in the earth's magnetic field. SM flew through it and
this caused its equipment to go haywire. So to detect a reactor in deep
space would require a different method.
D-Day
Dwayne Allen Day
: >I'm not familiar with this proposal. All I've seen is the USAF Air
: >Research and Development Command April 1960 lunar base study. Got a cite?
: Dr. Dyson went on about about it at some length in
: INFINITE IN ALL DIRCTIONS. I got the impression
: that the docs he was working from were not available,
: but they may be now. This was more a gedanken-post
: than an argument-post...
I'll check the cite. But the ARDC study was real. I have a copy sitting
in front of me right now. "Military Lunar Base Program or SR 183 Lunar
Observatory Study." Vol. 1, Study Summary and Program Plan. This does
not include the technical sections of the report, which I think are still
classified. It mentions SR 192, Strategic Lunar Systems, which a
colleague is currently searching for in the bowels of some Air Force
safe. I doubt that anything based upon Orion ever made it to the study
stage.
: Okay then, a "survivable leg" it is.
If you want a "weapon of last resort," then try a 100 Megaton cobalt-salted
doomsday device. Much easier to build.
: >Against whom? Earth to reader: the Cold War is over. Nobody else on
: >the planet has the ability to effectively target all of our nuclear
: >forces.
: No one TODAY... [ominous music]...
Maybe in some bizarro universe. But even the evil commies in their
heyday didn't have the ability to threaten our subs. Who can come close
to that in terms of deployed intelligence and strategic forces?
: >: their home countries or rely on innefficient super-longwave
: >: radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
: >
: >No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate.
: Carrier squid? Wire-guided message-in-a-bottle? Last I heard
: we were still using radio, UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT IS
What's wrong with radio? And, if you think that blue-green lasers will
work at detecting subs (they won't, not beyond a certain depth), then
they will also work in the other direction for communications purposes.
: >And they can receive ELF
: >and VLF signals at pretty hefty depths.
: >These messages don't have to be
: >longg to begin with--"Dust Moscow" is sufficient if you're already on a
: >war footing.
: Especially if you're calling collect.
You wanted to know the flaws in your plan, right? Well, you assumed that
the communications mode of a submarine would make it vulnerable. But all
a sub needs to do in a wartime situation is receive fairly simple
messages. And there are a lot of ways to do this that haven't even been
explored (how about putting transmitters on the ocean floor?). The
options for submarine communications have expanded dramatically since the
early days of SLBMs.
: >: as the sailing ships of old fulfilled both a military and exploratory
: >: function. I think I've considered most of the major
: >
: >No. This is all pure, total, absolute baloney. It's garbage.
: Down, DAD, down! It's only a silly Usenet post from a guy
: who draws comic books for a living. Consider decaf...
I don't touch the black stuff. Hyped to the gills on Chivas and sugar.
It's still baloney.
: else's in jig time. The Millineum is at hand! We are
: invulnerable thanks to our strategic triad of bayonets,
: machine guns, and poison gas. Oh, sure, those aeroplane
: thingies are neat, but stack one of those flimsies up
: against a REAL weapon like an 88 or a "landship" (tank)
: and watch the feathers fly! Long range bombardment?
: From an AIRPLANE? Pure, total, absolute baloney!
: Garbage! Was fur Quatsch ist das! Etc., etc.
You should realize the dangers of projecting future events based upon
past events. We don't travel around in atomic airplanes today, do we?
: >Here's the simple reply: We live with vulnerable ICBMs. If SLBMs become
: >_more_ vulnerable (they will never become completely vulnerable), then we
: >find something to make them LESS vulnerable. Maybe we make them >more
stealthy. Maybe we make them dive deeper. Maybe we hide them in
: >underwater caves or something.
: Or in big, honking space cruisers...
: >And there's no reason to come up with some
: >sci-fi fantasy to deal with an impossibility.
: Well, I guess you told me! Sorry I brought it
: up, sir! I'll just slink back to my desk and get to
: work on the exciting new IRS Tax Explorer satellite
: that NASA's planning as part of its bold, new
: policy towards space exploration! (^_^)
You wanted to know what the practical flaws were in your proposal? The
basic flaw is that it's lunatic.
Skot Fred
>
> wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Dwayne Allen Day) wrote:
>
> >: One big advantage of such deep-space bombardment
> >: forces is communication. Current missile subs must
> >: rise to periscope deth to receive firing orders from
> >: their home countries or rely on innefficient super-longwave
> >: radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
> >
> >No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate.
>
> >And they can receive ELF
> >and VLF signals at pretty hefty depths.
>
> Recent tests conducted by the AIAA showed conculsively
> that signals from elves do not penetrate seawater more than
> ten meters. Once they get HAARP going up there, who knows?
subs receive signals at depths MUCH deeper than 10m! Just consider the
fact that the standard ELF antenna currently in use is a 2000foot long
floating wire!
Nuff Said!!!
--
Dean "Scott" Fredrickson , ,
a.k.a. Skot Fred ("\''/").___..--''"`-._
`9_ 9 ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`)
skot...@sprynet.com (_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-'
fred...@dpg.devry.edu _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .'
7206...@compuserve.com (il).-'' ((i).' ((!.-'
Thomas Kalbfus
>
>BTW, nukes in space is a violation of some treaties at this time.
>You'll need to fantasize a way around that as well.
A treaty is a flimsy protection against the threat of nukes in
space. How would you verify that such a treaty is adhered to
Solar System wide. There are many places in the Solar System
where one can find fissionable Uranium and produce Plutonium
from it. Once Humanity colonizes space some other doctrine will
be required other than mutually assured distruction. Incoming
ballistic missiles will only be detected once they near their
target. After a number of orbital course corrections its going
to be very difficult to determine from where the missiles
originated. The only thing the defender can do would be to
destroy the missiles in flight and that would violate the ABM
treaty, and we all know that they would rather die than violate
the ABM treaty. (Just a little humor) The distances in space
are vast. Not every corner of the Solar system can be monitored
at once. A space colony could also be protected from a nuclear
attack by simply hollowing out an asteroid and placing the
community inside. The bigger the asteroid the more protection
against nuclear attack. Those cities stuck on the surface of
planets are another story, their only option is to violate the
ABM treaty for protection.
>
>
>Well, this isn't good sf, Bruce. Your 30 days to Pluto has you going
>at an average speed of about 1,041 miles per SECOND, if Pluto is at
>perihelion. Pluto is recently past perihelion, so you'll need to wait
>about 260 years or so for that to reoccur. So the numbers below are
>best case scenarios, which you're unlikely to get.
This illustrates how vast the Solar System is. Exactly of what
military significance there is in going to Pluto I don't know,
I'm sure there's no plutonium there.
Kelly St
defense force, but it would be interesting. I imagine any near future
space cruisers will probably keep close to earth, be stealthy, and be
using shifts to make them harder to find and able to attack various ground
or space targets. Sending them WAY out there probably wouldn't make them
that much safer, but make them a lot harder to service and get back on
target quickly. Sort of like sending the navies to hide in antarctic
waters.
In high earth orbit they could use SDI type satelights to defend them, and
still stay in close for quick responce.
A laser pulse fusion system with isotopes that don't release radiation
(He3, Li6, p + B11, etc..) would eliminate much of the problems with
radiation and anti nuke treaties and public sentament. It would also
perform better, given the smother ride and lower shielding problems.
Your port in Earth orbit would be a lot simpler and more practical than
one on the moon, and could leverage itself into a major facility, and
leverage space launch into a far more affordable industry.
I wouldn't expect any of this to be constructed anytime soon, but I
thought you might be interested in an alternate senarion.
Dwayne Allen Day
: > Recent tests conducted by the AIAA showed conculsively
: > that signals from elves do not penetrate seawater more than
: > ten meters. Once they get HAARP going up there, who knows?
: As a former submarine radioman, and ELF/VLF technician, I must add
: subs receive signals at depths MUCH deeper than 10m! Just consider the
: fact that the standard ELF antenna currently in use is a 2000foot long
: floating wire!
I think he was being tongue-in-cheek there. The recent report caused a
lot of chuckles because it proved something impossible that clearly
wasn't. I'm not sure of the specifics, or even where the report
appeared, but it got some mention here awhile ago.
Pat
Bruce Lewis <bc...@deltanet.com> wrote:
>>: radio at shallow depths. By contrast, the DSBF could
>>
>>No. Subs have plenty of ways to communicate.
>
>Carrier squid? Wire-guided message-in-a-bottle? Last I heard
>we were still using radio, UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT IS
>COVERING UP SOME BETTER BUT FAR MORE SINISTER
>METHOD DERIVED FROM ZETA RETICULAN [TM, Pat. Pending]
>TECHNOLOGY!!!!!!!
Let's not forget the Radio bouy deployed on long wire too.
the sub stays nice and deep and the Bouy is almost undetectable.
Also, given the massive sonar propogation, it should be technically
feasible yto send morse code messages that way.
>>It is all
>>based upon a highly unlikely speculation.
>
>I'll give you that one. Let us imagine it is 1918. The
>"Evil Empire" lies in ruins. Our fleet of reciprocating-
>engine battleships will soon be replaced by advanced
>oil-burning turbine ships, far superior to anything conceived
>anywhere in the world. Our former enemy is reduced
>to paying for things with lumps of coal due to
>hyperinflation, and our army can whup anybody
>else's in jig time. The Millineum is at hand! We are
>invulnerable thanks to our strategic triad of bayonets,
>machine guns, and poison gas. Oh, sure, those aeroplane
>thingies are neat, but stack one of those flimsies up
>against a REAL weapon like an 88 or a "landship" (tank)
>and watch the feathers fly! Long range bombardment?
>From an AIRPLANE? Pure, total, absolute baloney!
>Garbage! Was fur Quatsch ist das! Etc., etc.
Sure, and aircraft R&D was being conducted by the americans,
french, british germans and japanese. While the Japanese and
Germans had an early lead in concepts, they were never decisively
ahead of any of the western powers. in fact, the axis powers
made no serious efforts in heavy bombers a fact they began to regret
after 1943.
Even the jet engine was being worked simultaneously by the british
and germans, the germans just went operational sooner.
>>SURVEILLANCE CAPABILITIES, BUT A PERFECT ABILITY TO >ENACT A TOTALLY DEVASTATING FIRST STRIKE. This is impossible.
>
>Tora, tora, tora, Dwayne. Nothing is impossible.
Pearl harbor while embarassing was not a strategic victory for japan.
the japanese needed to conduct two more bombing runs, catch the carrier
force also, and then conduct attacks on seattle and san francisco.
I notice they didn't.
and people wonder why i keep bchan in my killfile.
--
One mans desperate mundane existence is anothers technicolor - Tik
Bruce Lewis
>The idea of basing missiles on the moon did not come out of a think=20
>tank. It came out of the Air Force's Air Research and Development=20
>Command. Report was produced in April 1960 (although the idea predates=20
>this). All that's been released is the executive summary of this=20
>report. I have a copy on my desk which we're incorporating into a book=20
>for the Government Printing Office.
Any clue as to where an Interested Layman [TM] could get a copy?
Bruce Lewis=8BPop Culture Guru
Bruce Lewis
=20
You've done great service to mankind.
wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Dwayne Allen Day) wrote:
>If you want a "weapon of last resort," then try a 100 Megaton cobalt-sal=
ted=20
>doomsday device. Much easier to build.
But a lot less fun to come home to. Remember, we only want the
Bad Guys to die.
>Maybe in some bizarro universe. But even the evil commies in their=20
>heyday didn't have the ability to threaten our subs. Who can come close=
=20
>to that in terms of deployed intelligence and strategic forces?
No one extant, but that may not always be the case. We are not the
God-ordained invulnerable rulers of Earth a lot of people think
we are.
>I don't touch the black stuff. Hyped to the gills on Chivas and sugar.
>It's still baloney.
Well, no wonder you're always so grouchy when you reply
to my posts! (~_=AD) You don't drink coffee? Hey, intelligence types=8B
better check old DAD out! Only card-carrying commies don't
enjoy the great taste of coffee!
>You should realize the dangers of projecting future events based upon=20
>past events. We don't travel around in atomic airplanes today, do we?
More's the pity! But this reeks of famous last words.=20
"What history teaches us is that mean have never learned anything
from it."=8BGeorg Wilhelm Hegel.
>You wanted to know what the practical flaws were in your proposal? The=20
>basic flaw is that it's lunatic.
Lunatic=8Bmaybe. Impossible=8Bnot proved.=20
Thanks for the scathing but thorough critique anyway!
Bruce Lewis=8BPop Culture Guru
Bruce Lewis
>A treaty is a flimsy protection against the threat of nukes in=20
>space. How would you verify that such a treaty is adhered to=20
>Solar System wide. There are many places in the Solar System=20
>where one can find fissionable Uranium and produce Plutonium=20
>from it. Once Humanity colonizes space some other doctrine will=20
>be required other than mutually assured distruction. Incoming=20
>ballistic missiles will only be detected once they near their=20
>target. After a number of orbital course corrections its going=20
>to be very difficult to determine from where the missiles=20
>originated.=20
This is the principle behind the DSBF. Missiles based on a
stealthy, high delta-v ship of constantly changing vector would
be invulnerable to ANY planet-based attack. No less an authority
than DAD himself states that tracking a DSBF boomer based on
its radioactivity would be nigh-impossible, and the inverse-
square law makes radar detection of a deep-space craft a
practical impossible. Once out of lunar radar range and manuever-
ing randomly on nuclear-electric power, a DSBF ship becomes
for all practical purposes invisible. If showtime ever comes around,
the captain simply lights off the 1g nuclear pulse drive and
points that sucker towards earth; it'll be there and dusting
targets in a matter of hours. The warheads themselves could
be made stealthy, and launched at high-gee accelerations to
make them damn near impossible to shoot down, terminal approach
ABM radar or not.
One thing I didn't mention about the DSBF ships is their
ruggedness. Since they've got delta-v to burn, I see them as
being welded together from naval-quality steel and other
heavy materials. Onboard electronics could be backed up
by a large crew to pull levers and turn knobs should a near-miss
from an enemy nuclear missile fry the electronics. The ships
would doubtless be equipped with their own terminal defense
systems (maybe Phalanx or a similiar kinetic or beam weapon)
in case sombody did draw a bead on them.
The purpose of this thread was not to debate whether or
not the idea of a Deep Space Bombardment Force is practical
or necessary given current national security projections. The
purpose of this thread was to discuss whether the idea of
a DSBF was physically possible given the highly-unlikely but
entirely possible future scenario painted in the first post.
Although many of you have raised serious doubts as to the
above, I have yet to see any evidence to support the contention
that such a system cannot exist. I must therefore conclude that
a DSBF is something that could, given the proper conditions,
exist.
Thanks again to all who contributed ideas and comments to
this discussion.
Dwayne Allen Day
: wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Dwayne Allen Day) wrote:
: >The idea of basing missiles on the moon did not come out of a think
: >tank. It came out of the Air Force's Air Research and Development
: >Command. Report was produced in April 1960 (although the idea predates
: >this). All that's been released is the executive summary of this
: >report. I have a copy on my desk which we're incorporating into a book
: >for the Government Printing Office.
: Any clue as to where an Interested Layman [TM] could get a copy?
Sure, me. You're going to be disappointed, though. The only part that's
releasable is the executive summary. Like I said, we're currently
working on getting the rest of it declassified (which shouldn't be too
hard, but will take time). The Strategic Lunar Study mentioned in the
report hasn't been located yet.
Dwayne Allen Day
: >If you want a "weapon of last resort," then try a 100 Megaton cobalt-salted
: >doomsday device. Much easier to build.
: But a lot less fun to come home to. Remember, we only want the
: Bad Guys to die.
No. You wanted a foolproof deterrent. The Doomsday device fits the bill.
: No one extant, but that may not always be the case. We are not the
: God-ordained invulnerable rulers of Earth a lot of people think
: we are.
I believe the American Century has a few more decades left in it.
: >I don't touch the black stuff. Hyped to the gills on Chivas and sugar.
: >It's still baloney.
: Well, no wonder you're always so grouchy when you reply
: to my posts! You don't drink coffee? Hey, intelligence types
: better check old DAD out! Only card-carrying commies don't
: enjoy the great taste of coffee!
Noriega drank coffee. Fidel drinks coffee. In fact, where do you
think the phrase "cuppa Joe" came from? That's right--Joe Stalin was
a major coffee drinker. I don't drink coffee because I don't want it to
sap and impurify all of my precious bodily fluids.
Besides, all my liberal friends think I'm Genghis Kahn because I actually
support Mr. Newt and have a picture of Maggie Thatcher in my office.
Dwayne Allen Day
: stealthy, high delta-v ship of constantly changing vector would
: be invulnerable to ANY planet-based attack. No less an authority
: than DAD himself states that tracking a DSBF boomer based on
: its radioactivity would be nigh-impossible, and the inverse-
I said no such thing. I'm not qualified to comment on long-range
detection of nuclear power sources. I said that the detection of the
in-orbit Topaz reactors was due (I think) to them being in orbit, not due
to their simply being turned on.
: square law makes radar detection of a deep-space craft a
: practical impossible. Once out of lunar radar range and manuever-
: ing randomly on nuclear-electric power, a DSBF ship becomes
: for all practical purposes invisible.
A big fat IR net in Earth orbit would be a great way to look for it. You
cannot bring it down to absolute zero.
: above, I have yet to see any evidence to support the contention
: that such a system cannot exist. I must therefore conclude that
: a DSBF is something that could, given the proper conditions,
: exist.
No, you were highly selective in your "proper conditions." For instance,
you assumed that subs would become absolutely vulnerable and would be
unnable to benefit from new technology or a change in tactics. You also
assumed political conditions that were highly unlikely to start with.
Maybe good enough for a comic book, but not good enough for serious
storytelling.
Filip De Vos
: This is the principle behind the DSBF. Missiles based on a
: stealthy, high delta-v ship of constantly changing vector would
: be invulnerable to ANY planet-based attack. No less an authority
The next subject in this thread becomes, of course, the hunter/killer sub
or other anti boomer weapon system. The stealth/delta-v that makes a
space-boomer invulnerable from earth based weapons, can be applied
1)by the enemy to his own boomers = MAD all over again
2)by the enemy to an anti-boomer vessel
The anti-DSBF vessel could deploy a large amounts of sensors to sweep a
volume of space for the boomers ( the enemy will be able to guesstimate
where the boomers patrol).
Given that electronics rapidly get cheaper, deploying a cloud of sensors,
perhaps with solar electric propulsion to track the nuke-electric (in
cruise) boomers would be relatively cheap, espacially if you can mass
produce them somewhere in space, or launch them in bulk on a boomer
derived transportation vehicle.
When , or if the command to activate the nuclear arsenal comes, the
boomer ceases being covert, and cazn be targeted. Once the nukes are
away, we are back to Reagan's Star Wars....
: than DAD himself states that tracking a DSBF boomer based on
: its radioactivity would be nigh-impossible, and the inverse-
: square law makes radar detection of a deep-space craft a
: practical impossible. Once out of lunar radar range and manuever-
Only from earth. See above. Optical/IR is also possible.
: ing randomly on nuclear-electric power, a DSBF ship becomes
: for all practical purposes invisible. If showtime ever comes around,
: the captain simply lights off the 1g nuclear pulse drive and
: points that sucker towards earth; it'll be there and dusting
: targets in a matter of hours. The warheads themselves could
: be made stealthy, and launched at high-gee accelerations to
... though stealthy warheads complicate things mightily.
One thing that cannot be made stealthy, is the re-^H^H^Hentry.
START-type very fast accelerating intercepters, colliding with the
nukes while they are still in re-entry, will definitely nock them out.
Nothing can survive multi-tens of kilometer/second collisions.
Drawback: the incoming nukes arrive at very fast speeds, while your ASM
(Anti Space Missiles) start on the ground and have to fight their way up
against gravity. If you have to use nuke-pulse jets like the boomers
have, then the cure is worse than the disease.
: make them damn near impossible to shoot down, terminal approach
: ABM radar or not.
Right
: One thing I didn't mention about the DSBF ships is their
: ruggedness. Since they've got delta-v to burn, I see them as
: being welded together from naval-quality steel and other
: heavy materials. Onboard electronics could be backed up
: by a large crew to pull levers and turn knobs should a near-miss
Maintenace could also be done at remote locations, like with the vessels
the US navy uses to service subs in remote ports. These vessels could be
based on the same propulsion units, but with weapon systems removed and
servicing workshops, spares warehouses etc added.
: from an enemy nuclear missile fry the electronics. The ships
And the crew? How about a water-jacketed command-center/survival bunker?
: would doubtless be equipped with their own terminal defense
: systems (maybe Phalanx or a similiar kinetic or beam weapon)
: in case sombody did draw a bead on them.
Filip De Vos "Manned exploration initiatives will be
difficult to afford when transporting a
fid...@eduserv.rug.ac.be single meal to the US space station will
cost $15.000"
Lt Col John R. London III
Walter Daniels
Bruce Lewis <bc...@deltanet.com> wrote:
>Back in the 1960s, before the advent of
>the stealthy missile-carrying submarine, the
>USAF had developed a concept (Dyson, et. al)
>boat could be accurately located by a blue-green laser radar or an advanced
>consider reviving the concept of the Deep Space Bombardment Force.
>
>a system practical given the situation above?
>
>I see a possible DSBF as being a deep-space analog of the current missile
>>boat scenario: a stealthy force of ships capable of conducting a devastating
>"cruise" engines added. The "boomer" would depart orbit with a high velocity
>cislunar or Earth-tracking solar orbit, switching then to the ion drive
>system to modify its orbit further.
I had to snip large parts this post to be able to respond but some very good
suggestion.
One of the problems is that the Inverse-Square law is not as big a problem
as he seeem to think. Yes, Cis-Lunar space is relatively large, but not that
hard to search. Radar technology in the 1960's was good enough to pick up
objects the size of the Lunar expeditions. I am certain they could find _much_
smaller ones now. Yes, they could use stealth technology, but the problem is
not to find them, it is to _protect_ them. If you know what the delivery
technology is capable of doing, you know where they _have_ to be. If I know,
where the DSB "boomer" is likely to be, all I need is a couple of kilos of
lead shot (Bird in fact) in it's probable path. At a couple of Miles per Sec,
a piece of bird shot (pun _not_ intended) is as good as a bomb.
Another problem is thinking that random orbit changes will protect them.
Every time the motor lights up to change, it says "HERE I AM." Duration of
firing and direction of plume tells the new course. This is not good for going
undetected and long term survival.
Much better solution is to put them _behind_ the moon in a geo-lunar
synchronous orbit. By _wobbling_ the orbit about the back side point, you
preserve location uncertainty, and the usefulness of the deterrent. Another
alternative is to put several at the Lagrange points but randomly shift them
around to preserve the shell game idea. If there are 16
"ships/forts/whatevers" and only three are real, but continually shifting on a
true random pattern in relation to each other, it becomes harder. A sub
survives because it can be inaywhere in several thousand _cubic_ miles of
ocean. To kill it requires a small bomb right next to it, or a large one
_next_ _door_ (a mile or two). A spaceship has no such defenses. A high
velocity object hitting is better than a bomb, because it acts like one.
>Studio Go! Multimedia, LA =20
>bc...@deltanet.com =20
>My opinion=8Bit ain't necessarily Go!'s=20
> =20
>******************************
>Proud producers of STAR BLAZERS: THE MAGAZINE OF SPACE BATTLESHIP
>YAMATO=8Bone of the world's best-selling independent comics magazines.
>******************************
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Walter Daniels FBN Graphics - The place where your mug says what YOU want!
Custom orders cheerfully done on quality coffee mugs, with no minimum order.
You can order quantites of 1 to 100 for use by individuals, club, etc.
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Henry Spencer
>: The instruments on the Solar Max satellite -- which wasn't even designed
>: for gamma-ray astronomy! -- detected the USSR's Topaz experimental
>
>I believe that Solar Max's detection of the Topaz's had nothing to do
>with detecting the reactor itself, but with detecting the charged
Both, actually. See the papers published in Science a few years ago.
(I can probably dig up a precise reference if necessary -- I saved the
papers, I just can't remember *where* at the moment... :-)) The really
long-range detection was by particles trapped in the magnetosphere; at
shorter ranges, the gamma rays themselves were detectable.
>So to detect a reactor in deep space would require a different method.
There are magnetic fields in deep space, too, in the solar wind. This
isn't quite as good as the LEO situation, but it can still be useful --
it turns a 3D search into a 2D search.
As for the gamma rays themselves... I don't know, offhand, the range at
which major purpose-built gamma-ray instruments like those on Compton
could see a Topaz. I do know that it's going to be a lot longer than the
effective range of the Solar Max instruments.
Henry Spencer
>...How would you verify that such a treaty is adhered to
Name three places off Earth where reasonably-exploitable uranium ores are
known to exist.
Actually, I expect Thomas is right, but this is far from established fact.
In any case, clandestine uranium mining and plutonium cooking are a lesser
problem. The more fundamental problem is likely to be the need for nuclear
propulsion to really open up the solar system. That is going to require
industrial handling of fairly substantial amounts of high-grade fissionable
materials, unless pure-fusion or antimatter systems can be perfected first.
Dwayne Allen Day
: > I'm not familiar with this proposal. All I've seen is the USAF Air
: > Research and Development Command April 1960 lunar base study. Got a cite?
: I hope Bruce provides one. Sounds interesting. Might have been part
: of the Project Orion studies Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor, et al did for
: the USAF. (Do you suppose this material could be declassified yet?)
: If a bomb-powered spaceship was to be developed, there had to be a
: mission for it, so people were dreaming up justifications.
Orion stuff is easily declassified/declassifiable. A year or so ago one
of the NASA security people was declassifying some of the early nuclear
propulsion stuff. I don't know where those records are. I'm guessing at
Suitland, Maryland's Federal Records Facility.
I have the executive summary of the lunar base study. The rest is still
classified, but should not be. It references another strategic lunar
base study which is also probably declassifiable.
: It sounds like Bruce is using arguments from the early Sixties, at
: which time they sounded more plausible. First, it was not obvious
: that, if land-based ICBMs or submarines became vulnerable, the U.S.
: second-strike capability would still be credible. It was a scary
: time.
This prompted a change in strategy. Sub-launched missiles weren't very
accurate (sidenote: they were deliberately designed that way) and so the
subs targeted cities.
: Second, in 1960 people were putting bombs atop missiles of
: intercontinental range. And putting cameras into satellites.
: This would have seemed fantastic in 1950, when only a handful of
: die-hard techies believed in such things on such a timescale.
: 1960 was a time to be much more optimistic about such Buck Rogers
: development-- you can see this in textbooks and trade magazines of the
: time. What outrageous developments might occur by 1970?
The pre and post-Sputnik discussions of these things are startling. The
Air Force senior staff thought that space was goofy on October 3. On
October 4 they were clamoring for manned ICBMs and lunar bases.
But the ideas were still considered quite goofy. The ARDC lunar base
study came about at a time when the Air Force was losing all of its
battles for putting people in space. The issue was not technical, it was
political.
: I'm sure the enthusiasm for exotic weapons and vehicles was mirrored
: in internal reports and contractor studies.
Yeah. But the people who controlled the purse strings were never convinced.
: It's not baloney, if you presume that Bruce is posting from 1960, or
: reading a really old book. At least, there were plenty of people
: making arguments like these within the Pentagon of the time.
Air Force officers who wanted billions of dollars for every hair-brained
idea they could come up with. The civilian secretaries and the Secretary
of Defense didn't let them get away with it.
: Note that they didn't win these arguments-- the U.S. didn't build
: Orion, or an "aerospace plane" SSTO fighter, or a military lunar base,
: or orbiting bombs. And Dyna-Soar and MOL were canceled. So there
: must have been people with counter-arguments who won the debate.
My point exactly. Although Dyna-Soar and MOL are interesting cases.
Dyna-Soar, contrary to popular misconception, was NOT killed because it
was too technically challenging. It was killed because it had no mission
that justified the cost. MOL was created to placate the Air Force for
losing Dyna-Soar. But it was a dumb idea as well. The Air Force wanted
to fly people in space at any cost and looked for reasons to do so. MOL
was an amorphous technology demonstration program that puttered along for
four years before finding a more clearly-defined mission--reconnaissance,
which was ultimately determined to be better done by robots.
: These conclusions are a lot easier to reach with the hindsight of
: history. Perhaps an ancient book cast a spell that temporarily
: overcame Bruce's awareness of the Cold War's outcome.
Well, Bruce wasn't talking about 1960. He was talking about a possible
future program. For this, he assumed that submarines would become
vulnerable. But, as I pointed out, if a certain operating mode of a
submarine makes it vulnerable (such as communications), then it is more
likely that such a mode will be changed, than it is likely that the
submarine will be abandoned altogether. It would take an unbelievably
dramatic change of circumstances to force the outcome he posited. And,
as I said, even that might not change anything, witness the fact that
ICBMs have been vulnerable for years, yet we still keep them.
Jim Herring
snip
> The purpose of this thread was not to debate whether or
> not the idea of a Deep Space Bombardment Force is practical
> or necessary given current national security projections. The
> purpose of this thread was to discuss whether the idea of
> a DSBF was physically possible given the highly-unlikely but
> entirely possible future scenario painted in the first post.
> Although many of you have raised serious doubts as to the
> above, I have yet to see any evidence to support the contention
> that such a system cannot exist. I must therefore conclude that
> a DSBF is something that could, given the proper conditions,
> exist.
The US is having a hard enough time building a civilian space station in
low orbit. To build was is essentially a large mobile space platform with
a large crew would probably wreck the US economy. We could never keep
it's delevelopement secret or the launching of the fleet of shuttle (or
whatever) to build it. And then to keep secret the ferrying of supplies
and crews?
I don't believe its practical in any sense. Nor given available resources
is it possible.
Jim
Skot Fred
Dwayne Allen Day wrote:
>
> I think he was being tongue-in-cheek there. The recent report caused a
> lot of chuckles because it proved something impossible that clearly
> wasn't. I'm not sure of the specifics, or even where the report
> appeared, but it got some mention here awhile ago.
True... considering that all the message has to say is "COME SHALLOW FOR
FOLLOW ON TASKING" or something similiar, hell you can send that kind of
message if the sub is not "below the layer" and the CVBG has a general
clue on where the sub is at that time (considering that the morons in the
BG normally set PIM for the SSN, causing all sorts of trouble when the BG
changes course while the SSN is deep!).
Filip De Vos
: In article <4jeiit$e...@news03.deltanet.com>,
: Bruce Lewis <bc...@deltanet.com> wrote:
: >Back in the 1960s, before the advent of
: >the stealthy missile-carrying submarine, the
: >USAF had developed a concept (Dyson, et. al)
: >boat could be accurately located by a blue-green laser radar or an advanced
: >synthetic aperture radar mounted on a satellite, it might be worthwhile to
: >consider reviving the concept of the Deep Space Bombardment Force.
: hard to search. Radar technology in the 1960's was good enough to pick up
: objects the size of the Lunar expeditions. I am certain they could find _much_
: smaller ones now. Yes, they could use stealth technology, but the problem is
: not to find them, it is to _protect_ them. If you know what the delivery
: technology is capable of doing, you know where they _have_ to be. If I know,
The volume of space, where you know them to be can still be so large,
that you still do not know were the boomer is.
: where the DSB "boomer" is likely to be, all I need is a couple of kilos of
: lead shot (Bird in fact) in it's probable path. At a couple of Miles per Sec,
: a piece of bird shot (pun _not_ intended) is as good as a bomb.
And the boomer launches a cloud of dust before its passae, turning your
lead pellets to plasma. In fact, unless you know the position of the ship
very precisely, you need impossible amounts of leadshot. Shades pf the
WW2 transatlantic minefield.
: Another problem is thinking that random orbit changes will protect them.
: Every time the motor lights up to change, it says "HERE I AM." Duration of
Ion drives were proposed for the random changes.
: firing and direction of plume tells the new course. This is not good for going
: undetected and long term survival.
: Much better solution is to put them _behind_ the moon in a geo-lunar
: synchronous orbit. By _wobbling_ the orbit about the back side point, you
Huh? what is that? Do you mean a halo orbit around L2 ?
: preserve location uncertainty, and the usefulness of the deterrent. Another
: alternative is to put several at the Lagrange points but randomly shift them
The L4 and L5 regions are about 70000km long. They can easily be swept or
nuked. The largest Eareth-nuke tested yielded (I think) about 60
megatons. There is no reason to think that an even stronger ones could
not be made. They could be EMP-enhanced to fry the electronics of the
boomers.
The original idea was to put the boomers in _deep space.
: around to preserve the shell game idea. If there are 16
: "ships/forts/whatevers" and only three are real, but continually shifting on a
: true random pattern in relation to each other, it becomes harder. A sub
: survives because it can be inaywhere in several thousand _cubic_ miles of
: ocean. To kill it requires a small bomb right next to it, or a large one
: _next_ _door_ (a mile or two). A spaceship has no such defenses. A high
: velocity object hitting is better than a bomb, because it acts like one.
--
Henry Spencer
>: Well, no wonder you're always so grouchy when you reply
>: to my posts! You don't drink coffee? Hey, intelligence types
>: better check old DAD out! Only card-carrying commies don't
>: enjoy the great taste of coffee!
>
Besides, the wonders of modern science have exposed coffee for what it
really is: a prehistoric attempt to approximate Coca-Cola. Naturally,
given the limitations of the techniques used, it's not a very good
approximation, and the result is a foul-tasting mess that's barely
drinkable if served scalding hot or mixed heavily with cream and sugar.
>Besides, all my liberal friends think I'm Genghis Kahn because I actually
>support Mr. Newt and have a picture of Maggie Thatcher in my office.
Sounds like your friends still have some faith in you, Dwayne. Now, if
they thought you were Genghis Khan, that would be bad, but Genghis Kahn
is a nice old guy, even if he is a bit grouchy when one of his grandsons
forgets to wear a yarmulke.
:-) :-) :-)
Derek Lyons
Thomas Kalbfus <tkal...@westnet.com> wrote:
>at once. A space colony could also be protected from a nuclear
>attack by simply hollowing out an asteroid and placing the
>community inside. The bigger the asteroid the more protection
>against nuclear attack. Those cities stuck on the surface of
>planets are another story, their only option is to violate the
>ABM treaty for protection.
This is so ignorant of basic science and common sense as to be
unworthy of further rebuttal.
Henry Spencer
>...you assumed that subs would become absolutely vulnerable and would be
>assumed political conditions that were highly unlikely to start with.
>Maybe good enough for a comic book, but not good enough for serious
>storytelling.
Dept of Nitpicking: that should be "maybe good enough for a Marvel Comics
comic book" :-). The *best* current comics will stand comparison to most
"serious storytelling" -- they aren't "Moby Dick", but they're better than
most current prose fiction.
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
> Ed Turner (e...@Princeton.EDU) wrote:
> : Both for sure! The think tanks came up with a lot of scifi type ideas
> : (at taxpayer expense!) for the future of the space program in the 1950's
> : and 60's.
>
> tank. It came out of the Air Force's Air Research and Development
> Command. Report was produced in April 1960 (although the idea predates
> this). All that's been released is the executive summary of this
> report. I have a copy on my desk which we're incorporating into a book
> for the Government Printing Office.
I'm sure Dwayne doesn't mean to reply that the ARDC report was the first
place the idea appeared. It was "in the air" in the Fifties, because
lots of ardent space advocates were looking for a reason why the U.S.
government should support satellites and lunar exploration.
There are, no doubt, examples of space-based weapons somewhere in
Thirties science fiction or earlier, but I'll give you two examples
which helped circulate the missiles-on-the-Moon idea after World War II.
Exhibit A is from *Collier's* for October 23, 1948, page 24: "Rocket
Blitz from the Moon," by Robert S. Richardson. It's illustrated by
two Chesley Bonestell paintings. I'll reprint the captions to give
you the flavor:
"The rocket base on the moon as it might appear at the time of the
attack on New York City. The rocket in the foreground is just
starting its leap through space. Following the vertical take-off it
will be guided toward the target by an automatic pilot. Within our
stratosphere, controls operated on the earth will take over"
"The beginning of the end for New York. One rocket has exploded
between the Empire State Building and the Battery, another in Queens.
Others, lauched earllier, may have missed. The slightest error by
attackers on the moon would cause projectiles to land thousands of
miles from the big city-- or even miss the earth"
(It's interesting that this boogeymen-from-space article appeared
several years before the more famous pro-space *Collier's* series--
celebrated in *Across the Space Frontier*, *Blueprint for Space*, and
other books-- for which Bonestell was also the illustrator, and I
think Richardson one of the authors.)
Exhibit B is a science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein, "The Long
Watch," in *American Legion Magazine* for December, 1949. In it, a
coup of military officers attempts to seize control of lunar missiles.
A heroic lieutenant sabotages the nuclear warheads but fatally
contaminates himself in the process. This appeared about a year after
Heinlein's novel *Space Cadet*, which also features space-based
weapons enforcing a global peace, but the bombs are more central to
the later story.
So propagandists for spaceflight were putting the idea of Moon-based
weapons into mass-market outlets in the late Forties. Like other
speculative ideas, it gradually became accepted by more and more
individuals, until by the late Fifties the Pentagon could seriously
study it (though it remained, and still remains, rather far-fetched).
Maybe there's a thesis in charting the spread of this idea from SF
writers to DoD officials?
"We call for an immediate ban Bill Higgins
on all antimatter-related Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
research, especially as this Bitnet: HIG...@FNAL.BITNET
is fundamental to many third- SPAN/Hepnet: 43009::HIGGINS
generation nuclear weapon Internet: HIG...@FNAL.FNAL.GOV
systems." --A. Gsponer & J. Hurni,
*Nature* v.325 p.754 (26 Feb 1987)
Thomas Kalbfus
upscaled version of the Orion spaceship using thermonuclear
warheads to propel a giant starship to nearby stars. The most
efficient design could reach alpha centauri in 100 years. If
and Earthlike extrasolar plane is found, there could be a push
for building one of these in the next century. Compared to
other starship designs this one seems achievable in the next
100 years. Assuming no nuclear fusion breakthroughs a fission
reactor with plenty of fuel to last 100+ would have to be
included to power the starship for the duration of the crossing
Dwayne Allen Day
[sci.military.naval clipped so it doesn't piss off Mr. Tappan]
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey (hig...@fnalv.fnal.gov) wrote:
: I'm sure Dwayne doesn't mean to reply that the ARDC report was the first
: place the idea appeared. It was "in the air" in the Fifties, because
: lots of ardent space advocates were looking for a reason why the U.S.
: government should support satellites and lunar exploration.
You are correct.
: There are, no doubt, examples of space-based weapons somewhere in
: Thirties science fiction or earlier, but I'll give you two examples
: which helped circulate the missiles-on-the-Moon idea after World War II.
: Exhibit A is from *Collier's* for October 23, 1948, page 24: "Rocket
: Blitz from the Moon," by Robert S. Richardson. It's illustrated by
: Exhibit B is a science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein, "The Long
: Watch," in *American Legion Magazine* for December, 1949. In it, a
I've got an earlier cite--Louis Ridenour's "Pilot Lights of the
Apocalypse" in Fortune, January 1946 (reprinted in the excellent NASA
book Exploring the Unknown--available from the Govt. Printing Office).
It briefly mentions an orbital nuclear system. (note that this was
evaluated and found to be incredibly stupid--I have a CIA report which
evaluates the potential for a Soviet system and says that they just
aren't that dumb).
: Maybe there's a thesis in charting the spread of this idea from SF
: writers to DoD officials?
There's probably an excellent article in this. If you don't write it
maybe I will.
Matt Bacon
>
> Maybe there's a thesis in charting the spread of this idea from SF
> writers to DoD officials?
If there is I'd sure like to hear about it. Perhaps it also includes Messrs Niven
and Pournelle's invention of the whole SDI thing in Reagan's "State of the Union"
address. And yes, I _DO_ have hard evidence to back up that assertion....
Matt
--
Matt Bacon
Virgin.Net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Sofur thu svid thitt
Svartur i augum
Far i fulan pytt
Fullan af draugum
"Sleep, you black-eyed pig.
Fall into a deep pit of ghosts"
-- Icelandic lullaby
-----------------------------------------------------------------
--
Matt Bacon
Virgin.Net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Sofur thu svid thitt
Svartur i augum
Far i fulan pytt
Fullan af draugum
"Sleep, you black-eyed pig.
Fall into a deep pit of ghosts"
-- Icelandic lullaby
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Wing
: : square law makes radar detection of a deep-space craft a
: : practical impossible. Once out of lunar radar range and manuever-
: : for all practical purposes invisible.
: A big fat IR net in Earth orbit would be a great way to look for it. You
: cannot bring it down to absolute zero.
But like radar based detection systems, the IR net could be
jammed/spoofed. Any craft would have countermeasures, perhaps long burning
flares that would saturate the sensitive detectors.
--
Politics is not the art of persuasion, it's the science of selfishness.
"Speeding down the misinformation superhighway"
Big Brother is not watching you, you're watching Big Brother, all 181 channels
Andy Wing Temple U. Comp Svcs agw...@astro.ocis.temple.edu
Dwayne Allen Day
Matt Bacon (ma...@london.virgin.net) wrote:
: > Maybe there's a thesis in charting the spread of this idea from SF
: > writers to DoD officials?
: If there is I'd sure like to hear about it. Perhaps it also includes Messrs
Niven
: and Pournelle's invention of the whole SDI thing in Reagan's "State of the
Union"
: address. And yes, I _DO_ have hard evidence to back up that assertion....
If Mr. Pournelle is responsible for half the things he claims credit for
it would still be impressive.
Pat
Dept of Nit-Nitpicking : That should be Comic Book. The good stuff is
called a Graphic novel at least here in the lower 48.
Pat
Dwayne Allen Day <wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> wrote:
>Bruce Lewis (bc...@deltanet.com) wrote:
>: No one extant, but that may not always be the case. We are not the
>: God-ordained invulnerable rulers of Earth a lot of people think
>: we are.
>
>I believe the American Century has a few more decades left in it.
unless the chinese continue their current growth rate.
>Besides, all my liberal friends think I'm Genghis Kahn because I actually
^^^^^^^^^^^^
>support Mr. Newt and have a picture of Maggie Thatcher in my office.
>
>
>D-Day
Sorry dwayne, I'm Ghenghis Khan. ;-)
Robb McLeod
>Dwayne Allen Day (wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu) wrote:
>: : square law makes radar detection of a deep-space craft a
>: : practical impossible. Once out of lunar radar range and manuever-
>: : ing randomly on nuclear-electric power, a DSBF ship becomes
>: : for all practical purposes invisible.
>
>: A big fat IR net in Earth orbit would be a great way to look for it. You
>: cannot bring it down to absolute zero.
>
> But like radar based detection systems, the IR net could be
>jammed/spoofed. Any craft would have countermeasures, perhaps long burning
>flares that would saturate the sensitive detectors.
Optics: extremely high-quality telescopes can scan space using a computer
to spot objects.
IR: any sort of drive is going to put out a lot of IR energy, which is good
enough to launch a smart missile with a shaped nuclear warhead on it.
Neutrinos: if you're powering your ship through fission, fusion, anti-matter, or
any other powersource that uses strong nuclear forces, neutrinos will be
emitted by the power plant. Neutrinos cannot be shielded; a neutrino can
pass through the earth without hitting any particle because they're so small.
Active sensors, like radar, are unlikely to be used except in a close
range railgun-laser-particle beam duel, because of the square rule somewhat,
but more because of the fact that in space you do not have to observe
aerodynamics and using a stealthy shape with the radar return of a pinhead
wouldn't be difficult to acheive.
Robb McLeod
kirs...@islandnet.com
Eric E Tolle
(Silly idea for Deep Space Bombardment Force)
>: A big fat IR net in Earth orbit would be a great way to look for it. You
>: cannot bring it down to absolute zero.
> But like radar based detection systems, the IR net could be
>jammed/spoofed. Any craft would have countermeasures, perhaps long burning
>flares that would saturate the sensitive detectors.
But then again, the countermeasures would have to be _continuous. IR
emmission would not merely be during deployment, but continuous.
Based on the capabilities Mr. Baugh described, we are talking about a
_very_ large structure, at least on the order of Freedom station
size, if not larger.
One of the problems with the DSBF would be keeping other powers from
tracking the sucker from launch- and any manuvering could be
detected via Earthbound or orbital tracking stations. Likewise,
unless the crew of the DSBF platform is expected to live their entire
lives in orbit, there would have to be regular crew/supply
replenishment trips- which could likewise be tracked.
A final problem with the DSBF is that it would have to assume a
masssive tecnological lead on the deploying sides part. If the
resources existed to put a large platform in a high- or past lunar
orbit, there would be the resources to put facilities in Earth
orbit. Specifically, large tracking and interception platforms.
Thus, if the DSBF _does_ 'fire up it's engines' it could be
intercepted easily long before it gets close to earth.
As I said at the opening, a silly idea.
Eric Tolle unde...@mcl.ucsb.edu
"An' then Chi...@little.com, he come scramblin outta the terminal room
screaming "The system's crashing! The system's crashing!"
-Uncle RAMus, 'Tales for Cyberpsychotic Children'
Henry Spencer
>: A big fat IR net in Earth orbit would be a great way to look for it. You
>: cannot bring it down to absolute zero.
>
> But like radar based detection systems, the IR net could be
>jammed/spoofed. Any craft would have countermeasures, perhaps long burning
>flares that would saturate the sensitive detectors.
Firing off flares is a wonderful way of advertising your presence. Such
tactics are for confusing a missile that's closing in for the kill; they
are highly counterproductive if your objective is to remain undetected.
Oh, and by the way, the usefulness of flares is coming to an end with the
rise of imaging sensors, especially multi-wavelength imaging sensors. (To
make the overall brightness of a small flare comparable to that of a large
spaceship, the flare must be much hotter, which shifts its emissions toward
the short end of the spectrum.)
JGrimes625
fold of the modern space program, but a bombardment force? Now? This is
the late 90s, not too far along in the whole of things, when it comes to
space. First, we need a space station, which we don't even HAVE yet. That
is the one and only way to get ANYWHERE in space, and we hardly have
anything. Then there needs to be a real station on the moon, as in various
scientific journals and articles. THEN we need to go to Mars, Venus,
Jovian moons, and by then, hopefully, the world will be at peace enough
with each other that by the time we are technically well enough and solar
system-ly well developed, we won't even NEED a DSBF.
Thank you.
Jake
Joseph Askew
>> But like radar based detection systems, the IR net could be
>>jammed/spoofed. Any craft would have countermeasures, perhaps long burning
>>flares that would saturate the sensitive detectors.
>There are various ways to detect a craft in deep space:
>IR: any sort of drive is going to put out a lot of IR energy, which is good
>enough to launch a smart missile with a shaped nuclear warhead on it.
Anyone have a shaped nuclear warhead? The previous poster mentioned
flares that would saturate the defenses. It isn't a matter of hiding
but of providing so many targets that it is not worth trying to fire
at them until you get closer.
>Neutrinos: if you're powering your ship through fission, fusion, anti-matter, or
>any other powersource that uses strong nuclear forces, neutrinos will be
>emitted by the power plant. Neutrinos cannot be shielded; a neutrino can
>pass through the earth without hitting any particle because they're so small.
The problem with neutrinos is that just as they cannot be shielded
they are a bugger to detect as well. Both systems rely on roughly
the same thing - a collision between the neutrino and either the
detector or the shielding. Hence the fact that a neutrino can pass
through the Earth with ease and hence any sort of protection also
means they can trivially pass through any detector without being
noticed. I don't see them being detected by anything smaller than
aircraft carrier and costing about the same with any directional
precision within my lifetime but I could be wrong.
>Active sensors, like radar, are unlikely to be used except in a close
>range railgun-laser-particle beam duel, because of the square rule somewhat,
>but more because of the fact that in space you do not have to observe
>aerodynamics and using a stealthy shape with the radar return of a pinhead
>wouldn't be difficult to acheive.
The square rule also applies here too but radar is still used by
planes and ships. Stealthy shapes would be a lot easier but all
they do is spread the return out or send it in another direction.
It is hard to absorb all the energy and so not send out a return.
Suppose your detectors were spread out, passive and cheap while
you had one large central sender. Sure the enemy would know where
the transmittor was but not if he had been detected or not. You
can also use short pulses and try to blend in with natural back
ground radiation. I don't think radar will be big but I think it
will be used.
Joseph
David M. Palmer
>In article <4k1q6m$3...@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu> wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Dwayne Allen Day) writes:
>>: The instruments on the Solar Max satellite -- which wasn't even designed
>>: for gamma-ray astronomy! -- detected the USSR's Topaz experimental
>>: satellite reactors quite well at quite substantial distances...
>>
>>I believe that Solar Max's detection of the Topaz's had nothing to do
>>with detecting the reactor itself, but with detecting the charged
>>particles trapped in the earth's magnetic field...
>Both, actually. See the papers published in Science a few years ago.
>(I can probably dig up a precise reference if necessary -- I saved the
>papers, I just can't remember *where* at the moment... :-)) The really
>long-range detection was by particles trapped in the magnetosphere; at
>shorter ranges, the gamma rays themselves were detectable.
A BFNPS (Big Nuclear Powered Spaceship) could not be hidden within the
Moon's orbit against specialized search equipment.
In 1988, at least two balloon-borne instruments: UC Riverside's Compton
Telescope, and Caltech's Gamma-Ray Imaging Payload (GRIP), each saw
gamma-rays from (presumably) Russian nuclear reactors in space at
different times on flights from Alice Springs Australia.
These were balloon-borne instruments in Earth's upper atmosphere (~35 km
high), and the reactors were probably on Radarsats, which like to
be low (inverse-fourth power really makes you want to get close
to the object you're pinging.) Presumably the minimum distance
to the satellite was a few hundred km.
I was working on GRIP. The light curve I have shows that the count rate
in our detector rose about 100 counts/second/645 cm^2. The spectrum
shows that these counts were concentrated at 511 keV (positron annihilation)
and 2.2 MeV (neutron capture on hydrogen to make deuterium), although
there was continuum flux at other energies (quite obvious even
at our upper energy limit of 6 MeV). Assuming that the reactor was
200 km away at its nearest, and that the flux in the 2.2 MeV line
was ~50% of the total, the total luminosity of the reactor at
these energies was 3E12 gammas/second, or about 1 Watt of 2.2 MeV
gammas.
The Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (GRO) Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) has
a ensitivity of about 1E-5 photons/cm^2/s for gamma-ray lines at these
energies, so it could detect the reactor from about 70 times as far
away, so call it 15,000 km.
Suppose a purpose-built instrument, designed only to look for
deep-space boomers, was two orders of magnitude more sensitive than
COMPTEL (throw a military budget, more advanced technology, and the
experience we have gathered with COMPTEL at the problem and this is not
all that unreasonable, I ran the numbers), and further suppose that the
boomer was 100 times as powerful, and no better shielded, than the
Radarsat. (It is, after all, the space-equivalent of a nuclear
submarine). That pushes the detection limit to 1.5 million
kilometers. It would have to be about four times as far away as the
Moon to escape detection.
Hiding strategies are shielding (heavy) not running the reactor
until needed (cold, dark, sitting duck) hiding behind the Moon (obvious)
or using a reactor which doesn't produce so much 2.2 MeV flux
(use materials without so much hydrogen). Shielding is probably the
best strategy.
But the whole idea just isn't practical for a number of reasons,
so lack of stealth isn't the worst problem.
--
David Palmer
dmpa...@clark.net
Chuck Buckley
>In article <DpnIML.4B1%spen...@zoo.toronto.edu>,
>Henry Spencer <he...@zoo.toronto.edu> wrote:
>>In article <4ka2sm$o...@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu> wayn...@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (Dwayne Allen Day) writes:
>>>...you assumed that subs would become absolutely vulnerable and would be
>>>unnable to benefit from new technology or a change in tactics. You also
>>>assumed political conditions that were highly unlikely to start with.
>>>Maybe good enough for a comic book, but not good enough for serious
>>>storytelling.
>>
>>Dept of Nitpicking: that should be "maybe good enough for a Marvel Comics
>>comic book" :-). The *best* current comics will stand comparison to most
>>"serious storytelling" -- they aren't "Moby Dick", but they're better than
>>most current prose fiction.
>>Americans proved to be more bureaucratic | Henry Spencer
>>than I ever thought. --Valery Ryumin, RKK Energia | he...@zoo.toronto.edu
>
>
>called a Graphic novel at least here in the lower 48.
>
>
Depends.. Some short comic series actually approach (and in some
cases surpass) graphic novels in texture, plot, etc, etc
Graphic novels is just another format. It is the story that makes the
difference.
Charles Buckley
Phil Alvarez
Hmmm Have you all been reading Silver Tower by Dale Brown?
____________________________________________________________
/Phil Alvarez - pa...@tcp.co.uk
\SIHE Systems Engineering T_501...@solent.co.uk
/WWW: http://www.tcp.co.uk/~palva
\Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
/ -DUKE OF WELLINGTON 1815
\__________________________________________________________
R. Paul Martin
Bruce Lewis <bc...@deltanet.com> wrote:
>This is the principle behind the DSBF. Missiles based on a
>stealthy, high delta-v ship of constantly changing vector would
>be invulnerable to ANY planet-based attack.
..big snip....
>One thing I didn't mention about the DSBF ships is their
>ruggedness. Since they've got delta-v to burn, I see them as
>being welded together from naval-quality steel and other
>heavy materials. Onboard electronics could be backed up
>by a large crew to pull levers and turn knobs should a near-miss
>from an enemy nuclear missile fry the electronics. The ships
>would doubtless be equipped with their own terminal defense
>systems (maybe Phalanx or a similiar kinetic or beam weapon)
>in case sombody did draw a bead on them.
Well, c'mon, either it's big and tough and capable of high
acceleration, or else it's stealthy. You're not getting both. That
propulsion system is going to make Comet Hyakutake look like a bottle
rocket.
You're still stating as fact things which are unsupportedly
speculative. Save that for the comics.
>The purpose of this thread was not to debate whether or
>not the idea of a Deep Space Bombardment Force is practical
>or necessary given current national security projections. The
>purpose of this thread was to discuss whether the idea of
>a DSBF was physically possible given the highly-unlikely but
>entirely possible future scenario painted in the first post.
>Although many of you have raised serious doubts as to the
>above, I have yet to see any evidence to support the contention
>that such a system cannot exist. I must therefore conclude that
>a DSBF is something that could, given the proper conditions,
>exist.
You obviously "concluded" that before you posted the original message.
You are, of course, free to do so, but why not just masturbate alone
rather than involving others?
BTW, you didn't mention whether ot not you "conclude" that your 30 day
rount trip to Pluto idea is feasible.
In that one I did make a mistake. I misread your post and made a
calculation for a 30 trip to Pluto. You in fact mentioned a 30 day
round trip. That would double the G forces to 16.98 Gs. While I
suppose that really well conditioned humans could stand this
acceleration for a little while, I bet that a couple of hours would be
intolerable, and of course they couldn't move an inch at any time. I
suppose the crew would either bleed to death from bursting blood
vessels, die of strokes or maybe the cerebro-spinal fluid would drain
into their spines and leave the frontal lobes in distress. If they
were genetic superpersons with none of the congenital defects the rest
of us have their hearts would poop out after a while.
>Thanks again to all who contributed ideas and comments to
>this discussion.
You're welcome, but I think you're not taking what others say
seriously.
>Bruce Lewis=8BPop Culture Guru
>Studio Go! Multimedia
>Manhattan Projects Multimedia
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