Maya Rkell
   |
Posted - 2004.06.06 13:32:00 -
[1]
He's making some hillariously bad assumptions in there, mind you.
A decoy does not need to look much like a starship. A decoy only needs the same emissions epectra as a starship, which is fairly easy to do. Sure, at closer ranges you'll be able to detect the differences. As for things like radar, ships will be designed for minimal radar signature. Making a decoy have the same profile to radar isn't really a major issue.
Decoys will have a PLACE.
A place in what will be a VERY ECM-hostile environment.
Nukes - Even low levels of radiation will damage current electronics. Ships will be relying at least partially on decoys and jammers to decieve the enemy as to their exact location, and nukes will be able to (at least for a time) sweep this away. And as he says, neutron bombs have a nasty lethal range in space.
Lasers are WHY the environment will be ECM hostile, to a large extent. A spaceship with any reasonable acceleraton will not be able to evade computer-aimed laser beams for any lenght of time once it's true position is known. So you create uncertancy as to your position and hence radically reduce the chance of a hit.
Particle beams are more likely to be used for shorter range point defence than for offensive purposes, given the fact that lasers will be reiably hitting beyond the point at which a particle beam is truly effective with modern technology.
Kinetic kill weapons as described have the worse features of a missile and a laser. They are unguided, like a laser, but like a missile are not lightspeed weapons.
Far more likely will be some missiles have warheads which are effecrively huge canisters of minature kinetic kill vessels. As they approach a target (perhaps once tripped of stealth by a nuclear burst or two), they seperate into submunitions, making them a lot harder to detect and depriving the enemy point defence of an easy kll against a single missile body.
As for cold plasmas, I think he badly underestimates them. You can hold them outside your ship in a magnetic field. And you can absorb ANY electromagnetic wavelenght, although efficiently is FAR better when the plasma is "tuned" to a specific wavelenght.
"As far as I can tell, It doesn't matter who you are, If you can believe there's something worth fighting for " - Garbage, "Parade" |