NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[NeuPolska]

The average grunt using an M2HB probably doesn't realize the similarities between it and the Humvee diesel engine that his gun share, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know how to use it.

How does knowing what a recoilless rifle is or how it operates help an intelligence analyst do his job?

You can easily divorce the method of operation from the effects and capabilities of a weapon. It's done all the time.

It helps when a friendly convoy is coming through the area and the guy says the only threat is small arms

[Gallia-]

If he can't distinguish between "AK74" and "SPG-9" then he is bad at his job.

Doesn't really require knowing what a recoilless rifle is beyond "shoots explosions".

[NeuPolska]

If he can't distinguish between "AK74" and "SPG-9" then he is bad at his job.

Doesn't really require knowing what a recoilless rifle is beyond "shoots explosions".

I’m not saying he didn’t know the specific operation of the recoilless rifle

Just that he didn’t know what a recoilless rifle was to begin with

So he assumed small arms until I noticed his reporting looked vastly different from mine

[Gallia-]

It's not really explaining unless it's opening with a 20 hour lecture about venturis.

[Iltica]

Assuming a country was independent of both the USSR and NATO countries at the start of the cold war, what sort of things might influence which ammo sizes to adopt? Is it just ideological or do other things factor into it?

[The Akasha Colony]

Assuming a country was independent of both the USSR and NATO countries at the start of the cold war, what sort of things might influence which ammo sizes to adopt?

Historically there really wasn't any nation that was truly independent of both blocs at the start of the Cold War. While the newly-free ex-colonies might have asserted their political independence, their choice of weapons was hugely influenced by their history. Most former colonies started out with WWII British, French, or American surplus that had been left behind, although depending on the level of hostility toward their former masters they might swing toward Eastern bloc exports as a means of reducing their dependence on imports from Europe or the USA. Some switched back and forth depending on the politics of the moment (Egypt) and some continued to just buy both (India, Finland).

Many of these nations were so poor and poorly organized that things like the intentional adoption of a standard caliber was an afterthought at best. They got stuck with what they had and what they could get cheaply, which was often a hodgepodge of different calibers dumped on them by the competing blocs.

Is it just ideological or do other things factor into it?

Cost and availability. If you're in Eurasia or Africa you can get AKs for dirt cheap even if you're not outright aligned with the USSR or China. If you're in Latin America you can either get AKs or hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam (M14s/M16s) or the old colonial powers (FALs). The bigger powers will generally be happy to shower third parties in order to keep their domestic firearms factories busy and in the hopes of influencing "neutral" states. In fact, they may be so eager to export their weapons they'll sell them to your anti-government insurgents if the government won't buy them directly.

[United States of PA]

Probably by whatever nation wants to throw guns at you, as often happened in real life

[Vidor]

Assuming a country was independent of both the USSR and NATO countries at the start of the cold war, what sort of things might influence which ammo sizes to adopt? Is it just ideological or do other things factor into it?

I think It's mostly to do with location on that part, NATO Sphere of influence, eg Ireland, Sweden, Austria. or Pact sphere of influence, like Finland. And these depend on how close they are to said countries.
If neither it's ultimately what's on the export market and that's usually NATO standard sizes due to limited export to non-communist countries from USSR and other Pact countries.

[Iltica]

Cost and availability. If you're in Eurasia or Africa you can get AKs for dirt cheap even if you're not outright aligned with the USSR or China. If you're in Latin America you can either get AKs or hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam (M14s/M16s) or the old colonial powers (FALs). The bigger powers will generally be happy to shower third parties in order to keep their domestic firearms factories busy and in the hopes of influencing "neutral" states. In fact, they may be so eager to export their weapons they'll sell them to your anti-government insurgents if the government won't buy them directly.

I'm not talking about buying rounds but adopting an industry standard. The hypothetical nation could make its own rounds it's just a question of what determines which standard they would follow.

[Spirit of Hope]

Cost and availability. If you're in Eurasia or Africa you can get AKs for dirt cheap even if you're not outright aligned with the USSR or China. If you're in Latin America you can either get AKs or hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam (M14s/M16s) or the old colonial powers (FALs). The bigger powers will generally be happy to shower third parties in order to keep their domestic firearms factories busy and in the hopes of influencing "neutral" states. In fact, they may be so eager to export their weapons they'll sell them to your anti-government insurgents if the government won't buy them directly.

I'm not talking about buying rounds but adopting an industry standard. The hypothetical nation could make its own rounds it's just a question of what determines which standard they would follow.

Then why follow either NATO or Warsaw pack models? Just make your own stuff how you want it.

Neutral countries generally just took whatever was easier/cheaper to get.

[The Akasha Colony]

I'm not talking about buying rounds but adopting an industry standard. The hypothetical nation could make its own rounds it's just a question of what determines which standard they would follow.

If they are unaligned and are capable of manufacturing their own rounds, then why does it matter?

The point of standardization is to allow interoperability between allied military forces. If the nation in question is not allied to a particular bloc then this is irrelevant.

The number of nations that were in this position historically however is very small. Any nation with enough industry to manufacture its own ammunition at a rate sufficient to supply an industrialized military would have been immediately pressed into one camp or the other. Any nation without such capability was generally not worth bothering with and would have been at the mercy of whatever was on the market.

The Swiss are perhaps the only noteworthy example of a nation in this position and they maintained the use of their own unique domestic cartridge throughout the Cold War until finally adopting 5.56 NATO in the late 1980s. This is hardly surprising given that Switzerland was essentially surrounded by NATO nations throughout the Cold War and nowadays most of Switzerland's defense industry is owned by Germany.

[New Vihenia]

Using excel i tried to make a "range-height coverage" diagram for an AEW aircraft. with following result :



It's in Indonesian but i guess not too hard to make heads and tails for anything there X3 but basically :

X axis- range
Y axis- altitude
---
The legends from top to bottom.

-Cakupan KJ-2000 berdasar cakrawala= Radar Coverage of KJ-2000 based on horizon
-Detection range for target with 0.4 sqm (X-band)/3.177 sqm in L-band. Detected at 811 km.
-Upper limit of coverage
-Lower limit of coverage
-AEW Patrol altitude (11000 m)
-Estimated detection range against KF/IF-X
-Estimated detection range against JSF
-Estimated detection range against F-22

The diagram also include "cone of silence" of the coverage and taking account of RCS dependence to wavelength. The detection probability is 90% with swerling 1/2 target model.

The radar's estimated technical spec also included. This based on my measurement on KJ-2000's radome. It's done in Blender tho (i actually made a 3D model of KJ-2000 rotodome and fit antenna inside). These specifications are in Indonesian but it's quite easy to understand i think.



There are gaps here and there but i guess 1250 Mhz should be reasonable operating frequency. During the estimates however i made mistake on the Chinese TRM power output at L-band. During the making of KJ-2000 Chinese have 200 Watt capable TRM (1996). My estimate of 300 Watt output power was based on later paper in 2000's. Nonetheless using the "right" value does not affect the range. More pronounced effect are for conventional target. Nonetheless still in 500-800 km range.

I think the diagram would be of better use compared to simple table as it include altitude coverage. but what do you guys think ?

[United Earthlings]

I haven’t forgotten or abandon our conversation Purp, it just took a little longer than expected to type up a proofread reply and a response that if it expands anymore is soon going to need its own thread. FTR this one was 21 pages and 8,831 words.

That's part of it. A more significant factor is that small craft can't afford the speed (small engines, little fuel) or armor required to keep up with capital ships. My combat environment revolves primarily around these behemoths lobbing broadsides of gigaton grade atomic shaped charges at one another, with the occasional atomic pumped scatter laser as point defense against the same. Something like an X-Wing would not survive long in that environment.

Assumption on my part, but I didn’t envision large fleet interstellar battles occurring at velocities at C or higher, but more within the range of sub-light speeds of half of C at the most if not even slower. So, in that regard, as I said most of my larger capital ships are hybrids like seen in a lot of other Sci-Fi shows where they are equipped with weapons that can do what your behemoths do, but also carry an fighter/bomber wing. At slower sub-light speeds, a small {smaller} fusion reactor should provide plenty of power for engines, weapons and armor {some type of energy shield in this case} and specific to my civilization a stealth cloaking field for the fighter/bombers.

Not to harp on Star Wars or its fans, but unless you were a Jedi with a God like droid like R2D2 in the rear cockpit or Poe Dameron with the same {cough R2D2 replacement cough) then even in the Star Wars universe itself X-wings tend not to survive that long in any environment. So, probably a bad analogy there.

Thinking about acceleration and mass is important, true. But ultimately I went with the other path because larger ships can carry larger and better engines and more fuel (which is likely to be hydrogen!), they can survive better in a war, carry more supplies for their crew, more ammo, better self repair facilities etc. And those things are huge. And all that makes it superior to mass produce those and plop them everywhere I need them to be in small distributed fleets that gather up for when there is a war.

Plus it's not like resources are a real problem. Trained crews are. But resources aren't really. Break open a couple asteroids or strip a moon down and you can build up millions upon millions of ships. And in an empire with hundreds of systems that isn't a big loss.

I assumed hydrogen would be a good and obvious starting point, but I took it even further than that. As Stars slowly fuse their hydrogen supply over their lifecycle they create heavier and heavier elements before the Star in the majority of the time goes Nova or Supernova spreading all those elements on the periodic table {minus the 24 synthetic elements we’ve created ourselves} across the universe. Depending on how far along even your Type II civilization is, if you’ve master creating Fusion and can even harvest/siphon off elements and energy from a star itself, I see no reason one’s civilization couldn’t recreate what a typical star does during its typical lifecycle on a smaller scale. So, forget hydrogen, think bigger-all the isotopes that exist of hydrogen, need air for your crew-manufacture oxygen, nitrogen and any of their myriad of isotopes. Need to 3D print repair parts-manufacture some carbon, iron, titanium or any of their many variables of isotopes that exist now or would exist in the future, etc. If your civilization has even begun to approach mastery of the energy conversion ratio of Fusion, they won’t need massive vessels approaching kilometer long lengths or longer, never mind what their width or draft would be. If your civilization has master Fusion, the next step becomes about minimization and maximizing energy density.

As you haven’t stated the amount of crew your behemoths take, but I’m guessing since trained crews might be a problem your vessels might be a bit overmanned by a large extent. Since, my civilization is currently limited to only 17 claimed star systems {it’s actually 18, but I made one a separate odd ball} spread across a spherical radius of 60 light years {which is nothing I think you would agree compared to the size of a large spiral galaxy}. Millions upon millions of vessels would be a little beyond my civilization’s resource capacity I believe or should be limited for RP reasons, so I settled for thousands upon thousands and since I borrowed from modern naval warfare, I created different vessel types of different sizes to perform specific missions and functions. I also, factored into that like in real life modern warfare, technology is automating ever more systems where less people {AKA: claimed intelligent biological organisms} are required. My largest vessel only requires a crew of 654 crew, thanks to centuries of automation.

Taking the impact of automation even further down that path, borrowing from another Sci-Fi universe, this time Star Wars, specifically the clone wars era where like modern warfare you have the proliferation of autonomous vehicles even automatons with basic AI functions. If developed these robotic automatons could operate mining outposts and therefore automate resource gathering operations allowing you to devote your organic crew to more specified functions like manning all those Kships.

In addition, I gave some more thought about what you said earlier on your massive space cities and this I think you’ll like. It also, addresses the supplies requirement for space vessels as well and why probably you wouldn’t need such massive vessels to begin with. Replicators [With access to the potential energy output of a large scale Fusion reactor, you could easily convert organic matter to synthesize everything from proteins to meat] starting with GMOs in large scale climate controlled hydroponics bays to synthetic meat.

And depending on the economic system of your Interstellar civilization, the desire for your citizens to have real meat or whatever classification they would call it verses synthetic meat would drive the economic incentive to settle Earth-like planets [M-Class or whatever else your civilization would call them] to have a planet wide industrial scale agricultural farms devoted to satisfying the demand for real meat, this leading to the desire to create interstellar trade routes, which I elaborate further on, later on.

It all depends on your energy levels.Gamma rays after all are nothing special. We have them on earth too. And protection from them can be as little as a thin sheet of lead.
A gamma ray burst in cosmic sense is simply an idiotically huge discharge of them produced by an idiotically powerful cosmic phenomenon. So unless your energy weapons are producing energy on the scale of actual supernova I should be perfectly fine. And if they are, I would kindly ask why you aren't using that insane power generation technology to just crack my stars open with a death ray from your homeworld avoiding all the fighting. Or indeed why you aren't using that energy to make your self a perfect post scarcity utopia with infinite resources for everything through sheer brute force m = E / C² energy to mass conversion.

Or why you are even bothering with me at all. Because clearly my man, you have mastered the energy of galaxies and have advanced well into K3 status. Where as in my setting all civs are essentially hovering around K2 just distributed around many stars. So any conflict between us is like the modern US military deciding to take grave offense at a local anthill.

I wouldn’t classify my civilization as well into K3 status, but more middle of the road K2 on its way toward K3 status. Some of my civilization’s technology I base on what they would have developed and/or learned if they had been studying various types of stellar phenomenon not just for years or decades, but centuries. One specific example I devised, a more recent example to emerge in my civilization’s timeline, would be the ability to create Quantum singularities {AKA: miniature black holes}. From a balance RP POV, a boring unfair story and just fairness, while yes my civilization in theory could send a single ship to your homeworld system, launch a weapon that creates an unstable singularity {black hole} inside the heart of your star causing it to Supernova thereby destroying for all practical purposes the heart of your empire killing good lord knows how many, potentially billions and all in a single powerful stroke like you said. And while, my civilization probably wouldn’t be above this mass genocide of your species, it does smack of poor story telling, hence why’ve I’ve imposed various types of limitations on the more advanced technology I believe my civilization would in theory have access too.

I view it this way, our civilization doesn’t know how powerful it is compared to its intergalactic neighbors, so fear of this unknown drives it inward.

As for the Gamma ray burst weapon itself, I figured it would be like sitting directly inline within 1 AU of an active Pulsar. Probably not good for your vessels or its crew, as such to strike a good balance in all areas, I consider that weapon to be more along what we today would consider WMDs and as such it’s not a standalone conventional weapon…

Though slightly off topic rant that does beg the question, will conventional weapons as we understand them today even exist in a futurist Sci-Fi setting?

Anyway, given the vast amounts of power I figured would be needed to power such a weapon, I use it as a single stand alone modified attachment fitted only to my Civilization’s largest vessel class which probably by sheer volume are as large as one of your Kships. Of course I also threw in a few other weaknesses in using it for good measure to be fair.

[*]Jamming is an active emission technique. Therefore jamming someones sensors is a very good way to tell them you are there so that he can start looking for you. And that's half the battle lost because even if you aren't found you have lost all advantage of surprise. Your enemy is on guard now, he knows you are out there. And he knows your approximate numbers and location by looking at where the jamming signal is coming from and how strong it is.

If you want to use Jamming I would suggest constraining it to the overt portion of your fleet and keeping the hidden portion hidden so that they can strike at an opportune moment.

As for the rest you have to remember the scale and scope of my battles. In my game, 100 Kships facing off against another 100 Kships was considered a border skirmish. And my largest ever battle featured over 1 Mships per side. At that scale formation fighting (even if the battle line is stretched across an Earth to Moon scale distance) meant that fleets could combine their point defenses and jamming to great effect. And the only way to get through those was to have your fleet coordinate their fire so that all the hundreds of missiles fired from each ship come in at once in hopes of overwhelming the enemy defenses. And even than you'd get like 1-10% of actual shots going through until you got real close and the formations got mixed up.

So a single ship firing single projectiles is hard to pick out, but it's not a threat either. The threat is that flotilla of 100 Kships hiding inside the upper atmosphere of the local Jupiter equivalent (true story) waiting to come out and fire a volley of a million missiles into your flank.

I thought I stated it before, but just in case I didn’t, the active jamming {thereby announcing our presence} wouldn’t start until the main battle started when surprise has already been lost thanks to both sides rapid exchange of weapons fire. Furthermore, as the battle developed between the two sides as I image it, some of my vessels would remain cloaked even while firing their weapons and others would be uncloaked as to devote additional power to propulsion, weapons and defense systems {namely shields in this case}. Not all vessels would be actively emitting jamming signals and given the constant movement of the two fleets, I don’t believe even approximate numbers and locations would be as easily determined as you think.

Here’s how I image the first hypothetical border skirmish would go and you can adjust it on how you would react and/or adapt to the various tactics and strategies during the evolving battle.

Prologue: As the borders of our civilization would at first be unmarked and unknown, over the previous weeks or months you’ve lost contact with numerous vessels in this uncharted area of space. As a response, you’ve probably figured out by now some entity or power is destroying your vessels, you have no idea who or what, but you want it to stop. If your civilization leans that way, you’ve tried sending various diplomatic signals to that area, but so far no response has been forth coming, if not then the next option happens first. So now, you’ve chosen the more aggressive militarist approach and begun to assemble a small fleet, let’s say 100 Kships, to investigate and if need be deal with the problem towards bringing about a more permanent solution.

Your Fleet of 100 Kships enters an outlaying border Star System of my civilization near to where you believe your lost ships were last located: For the first few hours, nothing happens, all your fleet is detecting is your standard background cosmic goings on when suddenly your sensors and defensive warning systems light up indicating unknown energy readings incoming at a velocity of Half the speed of light directly ahead [12 o’clock] within 1 AU distance, time to impact 4 minutes. Within less than a minute you’ve determined they are six distinct separate unknown energy readings and by extrapolating the data from where the strange energy readings first appeared you’ve plotted a general location from where the energy signatures originated. As such, you’ve focused your sensors onto that general area of space, but surprising your detecting nothing there to lock target on-no strange energy readings of any kind, no ship, no station, nothing, but empty space and that just doesn’t add up. Still, dealing with these unknown incoming energy readings takes priority and as such you order the fleet into a tighter defense formation and concentrate all defensive fire on the incoming energy signatures. With the combined defensive fire of your fleet all six energy readings are neutralized, but it took a little longer than expected because the darn bastards apparently had some kind of energy shield protecting them.

2 to 3 minutes since first contact with the strange energy readings: Thirty seconds after you’ve managed to neutralize the incoming unknown energy signatures you again detect the same energy signatures and after a few seconds, again six distinct signatures incoming at half of C. Clearly you’ve gathered some intelligent entity is testing or playing with you, still even after again tracking the point of origin back to its source location your sensors are still telling you there’s nothing there to target beside the incoming energy signatures. Thirty seconds later your sensors again detect more of the same energy signatures, but this time something doesn’t quite add up as the energy signatures just as rapidly vanish and before you’ve had time to think or say what the hell was that, one of your forward deployed Kships just took all along its length 6 almost simultaneous 150 MT Fusion warhead blasts. Thankfully, you’ve built your ships to take just such a punishment, but large chucks of your armor is gone followed by micro fractures and small hull breaches all along the hull and the ship itself has lost most of its sensors and some weapon and defensive systems are critically damaged rendering them non-functional at the moment.

6 seconds after the detonation: 12 more incoming energy signatures have been detected at three and nine o’clock…

Thirty-six seconds after first detonation: 18 more incoming energy signatures have been detected at three, nine and twelve o’clock…but like before the energy signatures rapidly vanish and seconds later three more of your Kships each suffer 6 simultaneous 150 MT Fusion warhead blasts. Furthermore, in all the confusion that’s followed you’ve now detected multiple wide band transmissions all around you that seem to be jamming and disrupting your sensors and communications.

Six seconds after second detonations: Suddenly, massive amounts of energy signatures the same as those already detected and something new, which in time you figured out are very powerful directed energy weapons, are incoming from behind your fleet at the five to seven o’clock position both on the X axis and the Y axis. They appear to be targeting your vessels sub-light engines and maneuvering thrusters first.

Two minutes later: Your entire fleet is surrounded, massive amounts of energy signatures are incoming from every direction imaginable including from the brief sensor readings you’ve been able to gather from small craft within the middle of your fleet formation, your losses in ships and personnel is slowly mounting because even they were not designated to take such a beating.

After less than ten minutes of battle, your fleet commander has had enough {if he/she survived, but I’ll be kind and say they did} and order those ships able to, to engage their FTL engines and plot a course back to friendlier space. Out of 100 Kships dispatched, only ten make it back {my civilization would prefer all were destroyed, but I’ll be kind} to their operating area from whence they departed not that long ago. You’ve learned much from the engagement, probably more than your new enemy wanted you to, you’ve learned their weapons technology is similar in power to yours, but that in some areas they’ve clearly advanced beyond your current understanding with technology that gives them a clear tactical and strategic advantage when deciding how, where or even if they will engage your forces. This knowledge though has come at a great cost and this victory can only be described as a Pyrrhic one. Still, this is one potential adversary you know you shouldn’t or won’t underestimate in the future.

Finally, just out curiosity in regards to better understanding and comparison sake, aesthetically, what do your Kships look like. I’ve pictured something along the lines of a Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer or Super Star Destroyer.

The real threat of being detected isn't being shot at. It's having the entire local defense force alerted and shoved down your throat like a hive of very angry bees. And the further away you are spotted the more time you give your enemy to mobilize and assemble that fleet to intercept you. And in a setting that emulates WW1 era naval combat and its speeds the difference between being spotted at someones border vs a the edge of his star systems could easily be days worth of preparation. Weeks if you tried a poke deeper than the border worlds.

So my defensive installations were basically giant sensor hubs with accommodations for patrol ships to restock, repair and have leave for their crews rather than combat installations. Although they did have some self defense capability. But I newer expected them to last against an enemy fleet, just survive long enough to scream for help.

Fair enough and this is where we seem to part on our preferred gameplay style. You prefer to emulate WW1 era naval combat and that’s fine, but I prefer the more modern approach since going with that analogy you can use more sophisticated Carrier Air Wings and Nuclear Propelled Submarines, both weapon types that did exist during World War I, but only really reached their zenith in the modern Atomic Era and beyond.

Also, this just doesn’t apply to modern warfare, but send some vessels out on patrols to better observe and spot potential intruders thereby giving you more time to decide what type of response you want to mount. Furthermore, this only applies to me since I made myself a smaller galactic interstellar civilization compared to others, but when you can go over a 1,000 times faster than light, you can cross according to my source, 20 light years in 7 days. That’s a third of my civilizations claimed space and since I use claimed star systems as the designated borders of my civilization, the interior lines of supply and communication of my civilization are to use a game concept, pretty turtlish. Also, I don’t know how fast you’ve personally decided to allow your space vessels to travel at sub-light speeds, but mine can reach velocities up to Half of C which if you do the math allows you to cover the distance of 1 AU in 16 minutes and 34 seconds or 30.33 AU [That’s all the way out to Neptune FTR] in approx. 8 hours and 40 minutes. So, you are looking at a response time of hours not days even when arriving in on the edge of one of the star systems claimed by our civilization. Furthermore, the deeper into our civilization’s space you go, the worst it would be as to be blunt, we cheat, IE. Our civilization solved and created what is termed the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, quite a few bridges in fact as that’s how our civilization first achieved its FTL capability. Lastly, the vast emptiness of the interstellar medium really has no significant value worth defending to our civilization.

By the way, I can drop you a link if you are interested. Or you could just look up the CivFanatics forum if you haven't already. The home of the best mods.

Don’t tempt me, I barely have time to play the mods that came preinstalled with the game and those are some damn good mods. I love me some Gold Editions…

Good call on that. It was meant to be a matter of fact statement to the effect of: "The scale of nations and their resources and thus accomplishments you are working with is very, very, very different than the one I am using to the point of narrative incompatibility. I shall now explain why I feel that way by presenting my view of the subject of scale."

Also I am sorry if it ever came off as rude. That's one part of English I am yet to properly master because where I am from "you are wrong and here is why" is an appropriate and regular idiom for a polite disagreement without any implication of talking down to someone where as in English it seems to be considered far more aggressive and negative and I keep forgetting that. I have similar issues with several other things that I've not yet identified but that get me called out as aggressive in discussions such as this and I have no idea why.

Also, if in the future I come off as aggressive or rude that is not the intention. I am having fun with this conversation, is all. And I rarely run into a fellow enthusiast like you. And some things just don't cross the language gap well. Especially not when I am writing posts with thousands of words in them.

Thanks, that is, but one example of why I have this life rule {one of them anyway} I try to teach others. Don’t make Assumptions. Apology accepted and I’m glad to have cleared up the misinterpretation because I’m too greatly enjoying this conversation.

Yeah, I don’t like English that much either and I’m a native speaker of it and even I get the idioms wrong sometimes given the vast cultural differences that exist even among the various states [USA] not including the idioms from other sub-sets of English that exist elsewhere in the world. To learn them in another language without directly living within or grown up among the culture can be beyond frustrating at times.

So, since I seem just be rambling now, I think I’ll end this part of the conversation fully agreeing with your sentence, “And some things just don't cross the language gap well.”

I am using the word planet in its original definition which only includes actual planets as defined by astronomers. If you are willing to extend that to mean "anything useful in space" than we are at an agreement. But I feel it is better to stick to the actual definition for the purposes of further discussion because it prevents such misunderstandings and because there are some very important distinctions between the two that will become crucial to my replies shortly.

Definition of planetary body I’m working from.

My view of this is as such: Resources locked up in planets (traditional definition) might be there and useful. But for the most part they exist in space in much larger quantities and ones much easier to access. The fundamental problem with planetary mining is that you always have a gravity well to contend with. This makes extracting the resources more costly. It makes building anything out of them more costly. And it makes shipping anything up into space more costly, in any form. So it makes very little sense to be producing things such as starships, orbital infrastructure or the goods and supplies needed to keep them sustained on a planet and than shipping them off into space.

And whilst planetside manufacturing will obviously remain a thing for local needs this does mean that an ever growing fraction of your production will be done off world for off world needs. Eventually resulting in an economy wholly or largely separate from planetary ones. And that this fraction will inevitably grow as your civilization moves ever more of its primary production needs (war machinery, transportation and trade infrastructure, tourism, heavy industry (to access vast resources) etc.) into space.

So I would personally be very surprised if anyone was building strip mines on non-terraform habitable planets if there is a moon or asteroids nearby to grab those materials from.

When the vast majority of your civilization’s population is concentrated on or in orbit of specific planetary bodies, planetary mining itself becomes more cost effective and efficient even with planets with large masses and large gravity wells, which given the massive amounts of energy one’s civilization can generate shouldn’t pose that much of a considerable problem of transferring items both small and large into orbital stations. Large Fusion powered Cargo transports the size of modern day Panamax, Neopanamax or even larger cargo ships and/or even some type of multiple massive space elevators connected to Star bases and shipyards in a geostationary or stationary orbit. Furthermore, as industry is concentrated within the Star System themselves and as I’d showed you earlier you could travel vast distances within the star system itself in hours and days the question then becomes why are you not making more large habitable or even semi-habitable planetary bodies the heart of your civilization.

A single star system similar to ours has enough resources for a K2 civilization to start to or have achieved a post-scarcity society. The question then becomes, once FTL travel has become easy to mass produced and widespread, which future star systems make the most since to claim, exploit, develop and finally colonize in one form or another.

So, to summarize from the above paragraph incorporating what you stated above and what I just stated, I think we’re both right and we’re both wrong. As a civilization moves from K1 status to K2 and beyond, some form of equilibrium would develop where a certain percentage of population and industry would be located on large planetary bodies like Earth or on world’s most likely terraformed like Venus or Mars with the other divided percentage inhabiting large space vessels or space stations somewhere within a star system or on the vast outskirts of one, but still close enough to capture and collect energy [Solar Winds come to mind] and resources [Asteroids and Comets located in a region of space similar to the Kuiper belt and Ort Cloud].

I have no idea what this percentage would actually or realistic be at one moment, so for the discussion at hand I believe it would fall down to personal preference in one how decides to structure their FT [Sci-fi] civilization.

I am not sure what to say to this other than to point out it's a cultural distinction rather than a biological one.

Modern technology already allows (given resources in quantities we just don't have) us to construct rotating space habitats which would simulate gravity and the other essential necessities of life to a nigh perfect degree. And it is quite reasonable to assume that we'll be building O'Neil cylinders and the like long before we start fighting FTL space wars with millions of warships. And you can actually make one of those large enough to have its own climate, ecosystem and everything so much so that it's internally indistinguishable from a planet. And as more and more industry moves off world you are likely to find more and more people living and even being born in such habitats.

So the question of preferring one over the other is going to be an entirely cultural one that's up to the writer rather than any objective fact.

I did a little bit too much projecting there, aren’t biases grand?

Your right, culture would have a huge impact and in ways I don’t think anyone would be able to foresee. Just as one example thinking off the top of my head, so your civilization has decided to build colonies in space either specifically O'Neil cylinders or some other large type of weird Space city that can generate its own artificial gravity [that doesn’t need to spin], energy [heat] and the other life giving requirements for biological organisms. What kind of cultural divided would form if any between those individuals born on the Homeworld/Planet of origin of the species and those born in the space cities, are we looking at a future civil war of some type? A Class or Caste system developing?

I hate to keep quoting you [I lied, I love quotes ], but what type of futurist K2 society would exist is anyone guess and there is no objective fact of what it would or wouldn’t be. As such, it’s whatever the creator decides it is.

Is your future civilization going to consider planets a haven of perfection and prestige or just vestiges of the old days before space? Are void borne people going to dream of a little house by the shore or are they going to consider those living there as primitives that need to get with the times? Those and all other options are all equally viable from a mechanical standpoint. And thus up to us to have fun with.

In my own setting the way I handled it was actually rather interesting. My people were humanoids distinguished primarily by having small canines AND by having their hair and eyes come in literally any color in the visible spectrum (also internal biology). Only said colors were not permanent but changed depending on the compositions of minerals and stuff you ingested from your environment and through food over years. So you could tell people who spend years in space vs those that mostly live on planets (and the exact planet) by sight.

Well in answer to those questions, I went with bipedal omnivore humanoids [Best frame of reference there currently is] that have an aggression problem they never really solved resulting in a Class system bound by honor through familial ties where habitable planets [AKA: the Core Worlds] are both a haven of prestige and vestiges from the bygone days before space travel was common. For the record, I stole quite a bit from the Klingon Culture of Star Trek lore and added in a few other traits just for good measure. As to the second question, neither as void people don’t exist for the most part within my Civilization and those that do would probably be or consider to be outcasts that brought shame and dishonor upon their familial house, these familial house structures a remnant when our civilization society was more feudalist in structure and that remnant carried on into the colonization of other worlds before the establishment of a more centralized interstellar government I termed the UCP or United Commonwealth of Planets because UFP was already trademarked you know.

Personal preference talking here but that just feels a bit too Star Trek for my tastes. I like to consider planet sized systems to chaotic to actually control. Terraforming is fine and exists in my setting, although it does take many decades. But I draw the line at having a machine that lets the local weatherman summon rain on his neighbors wedding because the two are feuding. That sort of fine local control is just something I don't consider practical in a giant chaotic system like a planetary climate. It's perfectly fine on a small scale of course, like say inside a habitat just several kilometers side to side.

Plus, there are things I just would not allow at all like physically moving the planet to alter the length of day or year or massive megaprojects to saturate the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses to make it warmer and such. And you can do all those inside a habitat fairly easily because it's small and light comparatively.

Well, I did use Star trek tech for quite of bit of my civilization’s technology basis so that’s probably why. But, I did impose some limits so no weather control devices that lets you have a perfectly controlled rain shower just on your neighbors lawn. That stated manipulating large scale planetary weather events wouldn’t be beyond possible like dissipating a massive Tropical Storm like a Hurricane/Cyclone because all it is, is built up heat energy and convection and I see no reason why a K2 civilization wouldn’t have the energy or know-how to manipulate those properties, at least on some scale.

As to the second part, no physically moving or altering the orbit of a massive planet [Those of the size of the seven excluding Mercury that currently exist within our solar system], but massive megaprojects that take decades terraforming a world, yeah our civilization did that and not just adding or removing greenhouse gasses to make it warmer or cooler. I’m thinking Terraforming on a grandeur scale like what goes into planetary formation to begin with. Adding in Nitrogen, oxygen, H2O [Harvesting hundreds-thousands-potentially millions of Icy rocks and raining them down on the planet] and whatever else elements would be required to simulate the atmosphere like it is on the Homeworld.

If you’re an advanced K2 civilization and not doing things on a grand scale, you’re not being the right type of K2 civilization then in my opinion.

On the industry in space part, since I covered some of it already, let me put it another way. How would you propose the most cost effective and efficient way to extract resources from say the Moon or Mars or how about even Titan?

That depends. Are we talking about doing it today, starting from our earth with our meager resources and zero capability to launch lots of things into space? Or are we talking about a modest K1 civilization that has space elevators and other easy launch options, a decent orbital infrastructure and has already harvested enough resources from the moon to contemplate sending a Space Odyssey 2001 sized ship to the outer planets?

And that's a serious question because the answers are diametrically opposite.

Both, but since you covered the later more extensively, I will go with that one. For starters, I didn’t actually find your answers that diametrically opposed and quite captured the point I was trying to convey about the value large planetary bodies would hold.

In both scenarios, you started off by establishing a moon base, a base that is based on a pretty good sized planetary body, hence it has extreme value. Why wouldn’t it make sense to you to establish a similar sized base of operations on and in orbit of Mars to better facilitate that collection of resources from the nearby asteroid belt which is much closer to the orbit of Mars than Earth. If you already devoted the resources to construct massive orbital structures around Mars or on one or both of its two small moons, the question becomes why are you skipping the huge advantages that can be found by settling a mining colony at first on the surface of Mars, trust me watch any video of an astronaut working in space and/or talk about working in a weightless vacuum and they’ll tell you and you’ll see how an atmosphere of any kind and gravity similar to your Homeworld would vastly increase work efficiency. Then the question becomes once you start on the path towards K2 and beyond, why you haven’t started Terraforming Mars yet.

I tend to think you wouldn't colonize space without a plan. And I know this is presumptuous. But I feel that an investment on the scale of taking millions of people over many light years to a strange alien world would be a well thought out one. And such a plan would be something I think would unfold on a scale of not days or years but decades.

You'd start off with scouting the entire system looking for good resource patches that are easy to access (like our Near Earth Objects), examining space conditions (like how often the star blows out an eruption or if there is a Jupiter equivalent sucking up asteroids left and right) and eventually even looking for habitable worlds. The later being an optional nice to have but not a necessary component.

After all, Space Mining INC just needs things in space to mine. And the military can just as easily turn one lifeless rock in space into raw materials as another. And by the time we are discussing deep space colonization you should have a large population of people who, even if not preferring (cultural aspect) are at the very least used to living in space for extended periods of time. And if you have FTL a habitable planet, even in another star system, is just a short hop away.

Colonization would start in space by establishing the infrastructure you need to mine raw materials and exploit what ever resource you came there to exploit. Also military expansion probably. Once that's done you'd start building up orbital infrastructure around what ever planet you want to colonize to facilitate easy landing of many people.

Throughout this time you would be taking a decades long survey of the planets them self. Examining weather patterns and the climate, plate tectonics, the local ecology and microbiology and resources and just generally preparing for the eventual colonization. After all, the last thing you want is to plop down a prefab city right in the middle of tornado valley or in the shadow of an active volcano or have millions of colonists land only to discover the local microbes are deadly and you haven't taken the time to develop vaccines. And ideally you'll want your future industrial cities to actually be near the resources they will be consuming and your colony to fit into the local ecology (if any) as much as possible rather than wiping it out and starting from scratch because terraforming takes time and resources on a cosmic scale. And even if you have those to spare it's still just wasteful.

And this is all assuming you don't have to spend decades or centuries terraforming the planet to get the temperature down to something habitable, exterminate some particularly nasty form of wildlife or introducing vast changes to the ecosystem to facilitate (or as a result of) making the air breathable. Projects of the sort that will need large amounts of external supply which you obviously can't get from the planet you can't yet live on.

So by the time you have a strong planetary presence for hopeful colonists you should already have a strong space infrastructure and industry to support them. And actually colonizing THE planet in a system should be not the first thing on your task list in a new system but the crowning jewel of the project.

That's my view of it at least. And I feel it makes sense all things considered. After all, why would you expand into a system if there is nothing to gain from it? And if you are expanding into one and you have a planet to colonize why wouldn't you take it carefully to ensure you don't screw up? And why wouldn't you build up the resources you need on site so that you don't need to ship everything across the stars? It's just the path of least resistance and most efficiency.

Can’t really fault your logic on any of what you stated, so I’m merely going to add adjuncts and adjust what I view as a few minor discrepancies in my opinion.

Starting off, I believe colonization of the closest star systems would evolve in a myriad of ways, some projects government sponsored, others by private corporations if private industry still exists among your civilization which it should, I think. The first few planets deemed acceptable for colonization would probably be colonized exactly as you said over many years and decades after they had been thoroughly studied for probably similar periods of time by both unmanned probes and later small manned expeditions.

However, I don’t believe you would take millions of individuals at once to colonize a star system, but it would occur more along the lines of how RL European immigration to the New World proceeded starting in the 1500s to the 1900s. So, in that regard it wouldn’t be millions at once, but thousands over decades and into centuries as the new colony developed into its own independent or semi-independent state. Furthermore, colonizing a large planet wouldn’t be the crowning jewel in my opinion, but occurring simultaneous with colonizing of other planetary bodies and industrial developments throughout the star system in question. In addition, multiple survey missions and expeditions to dozens if not more star systems would be happening at the same time, in my opinion, while the first round of interstellar colonization of a new star system was being undertaken. This would greatly speed up the process of future colonization plans to the point where it wouldn’t take decades, but years and then eventually only months as you would already have a large list of preselected potential colonization sites to choose from, by then all you would need to do is assemble the ships and people to go settle the system.

Finally, as to why an interstellar civilization would claim a region of space by all accounts worthless, that’s an easy answer. Intelligent beings don’t always do the thing that is most logical or rational that includes territorial expansion of their realms, kingdoms, empires, etc… To quote the quote, one’s person’s treasure is another’s person trash.

Personally I feel that it is unlikely all industry will go away into space. But I also feel all heavily polluting industry will. It makes no sense to import toaster ovens and microchips from off planet or to drink habitat grown milk if you have fertile soil and hydroponics at home. But it also makes very little sense to build giant open pit mines and heavily polluting refineries or dig deep into mountains if you have a space elevator that lets you import ready made blanks of steel from the moon where all this is done in zero gravity for no pollution and at fraction of the cost.

I also don't feel heavy specialization will exist in the long term. Short term yes, I can see asteroid X being a mining colony and planet Y being a shipyard. But over the long term each of those should build up its own constellation of satellite habitats and factories and various support infrastructure so that it becomes if not independent than at the very least mostly self sufficient. It's just the nature of human habitation that demand summons supply. Just look at your stereotypical old west mining town as a historical reference.

And with space habitats that can move (because they are starships after all) you can have the equivalent of an such a town springing up organically around a patch of resource rich asteroids or a moon much like they did historically around ore veins. And when said resource is exhausted move on to greener pastures. Becoming larger and more powerful economically with each move as the fleets wealth and size grows until eventually they get legal status like a planet or something.

That is why overall I liked to treat a star system as my minimal political unit. Anything bellow that level is just going to be vastly different from system to system depending on local conditions.

I believed I’ve already covered most of the points you raised above, so I’ll only add the following. It’s anyone guess how a futurist space colony settled by a K2 civilization would evolve over the centuries, but after reading all that you have stated, plus the imaged worlds of other science fiction writers and other countless sources including the very videos you asked me to check out.

So in that regard, my best guess is were both right and were both wrong as the various colonies whether planetary in nature or completely space bound would exhibit various degrees of specialization or even later potentially none throughout its history. Using your example, I see it this way eventually after oodles of time has passed. Planet X being a mining-shipyard-manufacturing all in one colony, planet Y being a shipyard and Asteroid Z being a mining colony all interconnected in some shape or form through a vast interstar system of trade which after more oodles of time has passed is eventually itself interconnected in some shape or form to the other colonized nearby star systems. Using a real life example from the current United States: You have a single state that produces a wide variety of goods that are widely distributed through the state’s intrastate transportation systems, but can’t or doesn’t produce everything it needs to not only sustain itself, but grow larger. So, to meet these needs and later wants of its citizens, the state interconnects its own vast intrastate transportation systems to other vast intrastate transportation systems which now form a vast interstate transportation system which in time later gets interconnected into a vast global transportation system. So, while in theory the single state could produce the basic necessities to sustain its population, the demand of ever expanding wants from its citizens drives the single state to specialize its industries thanks to its location and other incentives as its trades its accumulated wealth to acquire the goods necessary to satisfy its population demands.

Finally, to throw a wrench into the system just because you can, let’s say hypothetically your nomadic space colony arrives at a location and three-fourths of the inhabits having firmly establish roots now on the planetary colony don’t wish to again relocate even after the vein has run let’s say not yet dry, but unproductive. Now what happens?

I disagree. Whilst predicting anything with certain accuracy is indeed impossible we can provide decent extrapolations based on what we know about human nature as well as science and technology. And we can present those predictions with arguments and proof in the scientific sense as to why they are more or less likely than others.

Like for example we can say that it is vastly more likely that we will have a permanent base on our moon and industry there before we colonize the moons of Jupiter than the other way around and point to economics as the chief reason why. Or that if we lack FTL civilizations across multiple star systems will inevitably strive heavily toward localized government and point to communications and travel lag as reasons.

And I feel this is the approach we need to take in these discussions. Look at not just what can possibly be but what is likely to be based off how we know reality works. Because it is what ultimately determines plausibility. And more importantly because it leads us to some very plausible but highly unexpected conclusions that can be very inspirational and mind blowing at the same time. That is why historically the best SF has always been the stuff done by actual scientists.

It's just a rabbit hole I find very rewarding to crawl in.

I understand what you are saying and part of me is fighting against the part that’s rebelling against that agreement which makes perfect sense. However, the rebel part is screaming, but!, science is built around the premise that any theory is based on observable, testable, reproducible hypnosis. Human nature is also not always logically or rational therefore, our extrapolations, predictions and proofs are subject to fallacies. Furthermore, to advanced as a species to a Type II civilization would require thinking so far beyond what we can even image, that our current understanding of reality is so flawed or wrong that plausibility becomes meaningless.

That stated, I share your sentiment about following that rabbit down the hole because one must remember what the dormouse said. However, there are times when it’s better just to shoot the damn rabbit and take it home for a nice rabbit stew content in your blissful ignorance.

And the channel I linked to is heavily involved with describing practical projects on a scale ranging from launch loops and O'Neil cylinders to turning stars into death lazors and how this can be achieved within the realm of modern physics and science.

You should definitively give the megastructures series on his channel a whirl. I'd suggest starting from Laser Highways.

Given the discussion at hand, why the sentiment is understandable and one I’m not opposed against, I still believe any actual Type II civilization would probably be well beyond any practical projects that could be achieved today within the realm of modern physics and science. As such, when trying to create a realistic {is that even possible to image let alone create?} Type II or even Type III civilization, one must take some creative liberties and move beyond what is practical and move their thinking not just outside the box, but to a box that probably doesn’t or wouldn’t exist as we would understand today and embrace a move from a practical reality to an unpractical reality.

Since you haven’t steered me wrong to date, I took a leap of faith in trusting you and watched quite of few of those videos. Couldn’t find a video titled Laser Highways though, the closest video(s) I found that match that description were this one and this one.

Interesting videos, though for the most part he’s not telling me anything new I haven’t heard or read before, though it was nice to discover another huge Stargate fan.

If you haven’t already seen the updated Cosmos or StarTalk, you should really check them out.

Any links?

Quick search on Youtube found this for the newer 2014 Cosmos and for Star Talk. Do note the youtube videos are from the podcasts and are of a different format from the TV show.

[United Earthlings]

(Image)
The Division High-Power Artillery Regiment. In the end I decided to even out all the weapons so each regiment has two dozen Koksan/Tyulpan/HIMARS respectively. Did not expect it to be so small even when accounting for supply vehicles in the manning.

Just me probably, but I don't like any of those regiments, especially that Artillery Regiment I quote above.

Would the height of the Vietnam War have been a good time for the USSR to launch an invasion of Europe?

The most opportune time for the Soviets/Warsaw Pact probably would have been sometime in 1975 while the United States was still reeling from all the political effects of the Vietnam War from the complete collapse of South Vietnam to the transition from a draft to a professional army was just getting underway. Also, the Soviets/Warsaw Pact were really at their peak parity with NATO at that time both in conventional arms and nuclear weapons, as more time passes and the 1980s roll in, the power was ever gradually shifting towards NATO having the advantages where it counted.

Iunno do you want to have pulverized glass in your eyeballs?

I won't because I don't live opposite a factory or military base. And there is no reason why anyone would drop a bomb within 10km of where I live. And for most people living in a modern city that is true.

If a nuclear war did start, I’m within ten kilometers of Centcom, so that’s probably going to be a very bad day for me.

Where I’m located just really isn’t idea to survive the start of any type of apocalypse, which is just as well I guess.

[Isilanka]

The question being, even in the 1970s, what would be the fucking point for the Warsaw pact to try and invade western europe ?

[Hrstrovokia]

Is there a specific thread for questions relating to navies? I can see Air Force and Ground vehicles but not one for navy.

I just wanted to ask is the Mistral Class capable of loading tanks onto LCAC's inside it's well? I've read they can carry 40 tanks and about 2 LCAC's. Could the LCAC's load Tanks and ferry them onto the shore, then return for more?

[Taihei Tengoku]

(Image)
The Division High-Power Artillery Regiment. In the end I decided to even out all the weapons so each regiment has two dozen Koksan/Tyulpan/HIMARS respectively. Did not expect it to be so small even when accounting for supply vehicles in the manning.

Just me probably, but I don't like any of those regiments, especially that Artillery Regiment I quote above.

This is a highly non-specific criticism.

[Purpelia]

The question being, even in the 1970s, what would be the fucking point for the Warsaw pact to try and invade western europe ?

There is none. There was newer one. The whole idea of Soviet Russia invading Europe in some sort of communist blitzkrieg was entirely a western fabrication from the get go. This is most trivially demonstrated by the fact that OTAN was founded before the Warsaw pact. Before.

The entire cold war was all about western powers, in particular america trying to ruin the soviet union by pushing it into an arms race and the soviets trying to grab as many minor nations as allies in hopes of creating buffer zones against that aggression.

[Gallia-]

It's like a tankie's version of NSC 68.

[The Akasha Colony]

Is there a specific thread for questions relating to navies? I can see Air Force and Ground vehicles but not one for navy.

It's here.

I just wanted to ask is the Mistral Class capable of loading tanks onto LCAC's inside it's well? I've read they can carry 40 tanks and about 2 LCAC's. Could the LCAC's load Tanks and ferry them onto the shore, then return for more?

That's sort of the whole point of the design?

[Austrasien]

The question being, even in the 1970s, what would be the fucking point for the Warsaw pact to try and invade western europe ?

The Cold War started because Stalin got PTSD from being taken for a ride on Ribbentrop's Ruse Cruise. Then it just sort of continued under inertia.

[Purpelia]

The question being, even in the 1970s, what would be the fucking point for the Warsaw pact to try and invade western europe ?

The Cold War started because Stalin got PTSD from being taken for a ride on Ribbentrop's Ruse Cruise. Then it just sort of continued under inertia.

He is hardly to blame. What reaction are you supposed to have when the first thing your allies do once the war is over is form a new alliance against you?

[Austrasien]

He is hardly to blame. What reaction are you supposed to have when the first thing your allies do once the war is over is form a new alliance against you?

NATO was literally founded the day after VE day.

[Purpelia]

He is hardly to blame. What reaction are you supposed to have when the first thing your allies do once the war is over is form a new alliance against you?

NATO was literally founded the day after VE day.

And by nations who had attempted to destroy Soviet Russia during the civil war AND happily supported Hitler as a bulwark against communism after that.

Honestly the real miracle of the 20th century is how the west managed to spin the whole cold war as a Soviet threat, so much so that even reputable historians and scientists were convinced given how obvious the evidence is for the exact contrary.

[Isilanka]

It's interesting how two of the great fears of the cold war (on the soviet side, the threat of germany rising again as a military power and invading eastern europe and on the western side, the red army attacking western europe) were both completely out of touch with the actual plans and intentions on both sides.