Transport/liner types can carry espatiers, or for that matter the service techs needed to keep all sorts of space hardware in operating conditions.īut - here, finally, is the connection to the Golden Bear - survey ships are particularly well suited to wartime conversion. If cargo operations are modular, target seekers can ride on standard cargo clamps. But kinetics are the car bombs of space warfare, available by default.įor much the same reason, a wide variety of civil spacecraft can be pressed into war service. Laser-triggered fusion, or laser-boosted cargo propulsion, could make high powered lasers readily available, to be weaponized with an array of oscillating hands. Of course, if you really want lasers you can get around this. Multimegawatt laser installations combined with observatory-grade optics are less likely to be sitting around handy. They won't compare to the milspec'd version, but they don't have to: Their targets are also jury-rigged. The basic prerequisites of a target seeker: thrusters, sensors, and guidance package, are available from every space operations boneyard. If you can guide a spacecraft to a destination you have at least a fair shot at steering it on collision course into a target. Extensive space travel is pretty much a precondition here, and space travel is all about throwing weight around, fast and accurately. Kinetics, rather than beams, are probably (but not inevitably) the dominant weapon. But even without delving too deeply into the scenarios we can speculate about zero-generation space forces. See hints along these lines (and links to further hints) in an earlier post in this series. In these scenarios the trouble in space may well begin in space. Or if all else fails, the Fall of the Terran Empire could leave a welter of rising colonies, a few centuries later, to improvise their ships and military institutions. Or, on the other hand, there may be a world state, or demi-state international regime, with a blue-helmet constabulary but no force configured for major combat. Or the Earth of 2300 or 2500 may be so balkanized as to have no global Great Powers that would even daydream of space fleets. If Brazil and Nigeria are on such bad terms as to duke it out, the theater of operations is much more likely to be the South Atlantic than the asteroid belt. These might have more immediate concerns, namely each other. And when the apple of discord gets thrown it might not be contested for by terrestrial powers. The original international regime in space might be demilitarized, as (apart from ASATs) it is today. We can imagine Pentagon planners, or their counterparts, drawing up specifications for the spacecraft, while the service branches slug it out politically and bureaucratically to determine whether combat constellations have admirals, generals, or Space Marshals in overall command.īut what if space forces do not develop as simple outward projections of existing military establishments? A variety of scenarios might produce this result. Space forces then take form already fully developed, like Athena from Zeus's headache. If they are built by existing or future terrestrial Great Powers the origin question hardly arises. The question then becomes how these forces are developed in the first place. Not because of human moral improvement, but for the same reason Antarctica was untouched by the world wars and cold war: lack of strategic objectives.īut let us suppose it anyway. Let us suppose, for purposes of story, that some future era has space warfare, and space warcraft to do the fighting.įor the record, this is by no means an inevitable or even likely prospect, at least through the plausible midfuture, with the exception of mostly ground-based weapons intended to engage targets in Earth orbit. Her relevance to our topic comes from her oddly hybrid appearance: She looks like a not-quite-warship. The vessel is the training ship Golden Bear, originally built for the Navy as an oceanographic survey ship. (If you'll buy that, which bridge do you want to purchase? The pretty one to Marin, or the massive one to Oakland?) With sufficient stretching, I suppose you might justify it in a setting where ships have a magic drive, land on water, and their sea performance is the main design consideration. No, the configuration shown above is not proposed for any type of spacecraft.
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