Practise Bits: Defense
October 15, 2011 in Articles
Over the last three centuries, I’ve guarded Wren’s Home, a system which at one time had been the farthest frontier, but was now a Sector Capital.
“I can’t Paul.” She trembled as I held her hands, and willed my eyes to speak volumes for me. “I have to know.” We stood in the shadow of the Deepcrosser, an inter-galactic arm exploration ship.
“Know? Know that I love you, Wren. I’ve walked a dozen universes, and never cared for anyone like this.” And it was true, my darling Wren was joy and courage, laughter and beauty all wrapped up in one very appealing package.
She cried a little, and I really tried to figure her out, but even though I was two hundred years older than her, I still could not understand the ways of a woman, especially this one.
“I will be back.” She promised me fiercely. And then disdaining kiss or hug, or longer good-bye, she broke from my numbed fingers, and broken heart, and ran to the entrance portal to the Deepcrosser. I’m afraid I stood there and cried until men with gentle hands and soft drugs took me a way for a while.
Five years later, I was busy in the Material Fab shop, when I heard troubling news on the radio. Skinitr pirates were sweeping through the area.
A month later, I heard that the DeepCrosser had gotten to the edge of the Perseus Arm by a series of long hyperjumps, and was ready for the Big Jump from Perseus outward to Norma which would then let them establish a new colonial center from which further expansion could be planned. The hope was to eventually colonize the outermost area, the Monoceros Ring which had been incorrectly thought to be torn from other galaxies in the days of the materialist superstition.
Even for an immortal verser such as myself, this was an awestriking ambition that would in best cases take a millenia to fulfill. I was proud of the courage and vision of the splintered sub-species of the Collegia that had begun on Old Earth. Dolphin, Ape, Tiger, Kraken, and Whale had joined Man in his near-dozen variants to colonize thousands of stars, going ever outward in what was called the Neverending Frontier.
A year later, and I was still in therapy, dealing with my feelings of loss, and newly promoted to supervisior of the MatFab, when local destroyers tried to stop a Skinitr raid on the Long Run from the hyperlimit inward. But with the aid of asteroids and the gravity well, the raider managed to smash Navy Docks at QP-31 as it was then known.
I stayed home for two weeks, and was generating significant concern from my therapists who kept calling, when I showed up to check myself out of the program.
“Paul, I think we’ve done good work with your feelings of grief and abandonment.” My chief therapist objected in his warm and welcoming office as I tried to check out.
“You have, doc, but I realize I need to do something.”
“I…applaud this new sense of purpose. We always felt you were underutilized, but…”
“If I want to see Wren again, I have to do something.”
“Oh Paul, you’ll never see her. She’s in the Dark now, and won’t be back…”
I told him I was a verser, which got him alarmed at my mental state. Then I proved it about a half-dozen times until he realized Something Important had happened. Shortly thereafter, I proved it to the Navy, what there was left of it.
Two months later, the Skinitr came to accept our surrender was their plan. We met them with system edge lasers. A starship inside the hyperlimit, falling inward at 10% of c is very predictable. Leading it for a shot is child’s play. All you needed was a laser of sufficient power, and focus to hit the edge of the system from your home planet.
I had the plans for such in my PDA.
The Skinitr came, and we slaughtered them. I doubt they figured out what had happened before they were all dead. Beams of extremely high energy came out of the darkness at luminal velocity, and exploded their ships, for a ship exposed to that high of an energy gradient does not melt.
This opened the Era of Free Systems. Each solar system was an impregnable fortress. Before this, the starship had the decisive advantage, being able to drop rocks down a gravity well. Now, the starship was a mere target, and its ‘rocks’ were easily blasted so that they fell into a useful orbit for later mining.
On the plus side, systems were safe from pirates, but on the down side, any sort of empire such as the one that had planted us here, grew extremely notional. We never left the League of Expansion, but we tended to ignore what they said whenever convenient.
For the first hundred years, it was an age of economic expansion, and Wren’s Nest acquired its name. I was given a title, the Duke Defender, and a small estate, and stayed out of politics.
We went from a tiny frontier outpost to a nation, and we turned our planet green, and filled the night sky with the blinking lights of our orbital factories. There was a series of holo shows where some much more handsome guy than me would show up as a deus ex machina at the end of a show, and solve everyone’s problems. In a quiet way, I enjoyed life.
But then the pirates figured out a way to intercept hyperdrive ships while in transit. It required a scanner, and then a ‘grav burp’ which let them track down the oncoming ship, and then knock it out of hyper. After that, they fell on it like cannibals with long knives. It was not pretty.
This led to a severe economic contraction, and I would have intervened, but the ruling class at that moment were dumber than a box of rocks. They told me to shut up. It took a Velvet Revolution to rid ourselves of these machine politicians who it turned out were in league with the pirates. They had thought to use the emergency in the infamous ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ sense to put themselves into absolute power, to turn the largely honorary nobility into the real thing.
Funny thing was, in the midst of their reaction against the Velvet Revolution, all their office comps crashed at the same time. What? You’re looking at me? Moving on…
I showed them how to build convoys, and frigate patrols. It was less economic boom times with all that money spent on the Navy, but over the next fifty years, we did all right. In this time, we went from a nation to a league of planets and asteroids with most of our system settled. We broke a hundred billion humans during this time.
The outer planets were a bit tiffed at the inner, for good reasons actually. But with the system edge lasers, it was hard for anyone to fight back. So the OP built their own lasers, and thus began the Staring War, with both sides having sufficient long range lasers to destroy the other in less than a half hour.
Researchers turned to the grav burp and its implications, and the hyperlimit problem went away. Now a ship on the inner or outer planets could get into orbit, and then Jump. It was thought to benefit the Inner the most as they could now jump straight out, but in actuality, it helped the Outer the most as they were ready and flexible in their culture.
We frankly spent so much time making sure everyone agreed, and filling out paperwork that we measure production cycles in decades. The Outer just went to work building Orbital Docks, and so began the Great Boom as the Outer took the lead over the Inner.
And then pirates struck and hard. The riches of the Outer System were there in docks in orbit, and raiders popped out of hyper with ease and sacked and looted and ransomed (‘that is a surely pretty orbital forge you got there, worth oh, five trillion creds….be a shame if a quantum torp got shot into it….’)
With that money, the pirates built more ships, and came after the Inner. But we’d had another change of governance just in time. And so we were able to build gigantic scanners, and lay in minefields of burpers. And thus began the First Nest War as pirates took over the Outers before they could get ready, and then tried to loot the Inner.
It was trench warfare on a scale unimaginable to those not there. We had seven trillion, with a T, burper mines. We had a hundred thousand drone carriers. You could read on most nights by the light of the explosions and drive flames in the sky.
I was on board fully, trying to come up with some clue from my files as to how to proceed when I stumbled over the idea of tanks. And so we began to build small ships, with one heavy railgun and a lot of armor. They were sub-light so they ignored burpers.
And the enemy responded by putting in line after line of system edge lasers. I was responsible for feeding a million men into the Battle of Some, a small planetoid, which had been defended by tens of thousands of SE lasers. Something had to be better, so I tried for a negotiated peace.
To my relief, the pirates had become ‘civilized’. The outer planets had culturally swallowed them. The new pirates were not that eager to die for their glory, so much as to live to enjoy being a noble with lots of bucks.
This left a problematic situation for the Outer, who were ruled by a class of men who were vain-glorious, thought honesty an amusing joke, and did not hesitate to murder political opponents. But it was better than Total War, and the typical outie responded by keeping his head down, forming up into guilds to offer protection en masse from his new overlords, and watching with amusement as those self-same overlords blew, stabbed, and poisoned each other with merry abandon.
With this came the Age of Imperial Politics, or perhaps Complexities. It was a glorious time to be a young woman who wished to dance with dashing young men at embassy balls, or for the young fellow eager for cloak and dagger.
The force we had gathered, and the new ability to project force inside a system had put us up above some other systems. So we moved in, and took over parts of other systems. And other advanced systems in our situation would also move in.
In Kengari, to give an example, the Inner planets had resisted the pirates, but less successfully, so we took over an irradiated wasteland near their sun. This led to others we took. Meanwhile, the Mord and the Trankil had each grabbed other bits of Kengari, while the successful asteroid republic of Visk had grabbed an underused part of our asteroid system in Wren’s Nest. And the pirate overlords had moved into the Mord’s outer planets, and….
It was very complicated. The Teyerdahl System which was the most complex had twenty-eight extra-solar system empires owning bits and pieces of it, while the various native forces in Teyerdahl owned chunks of a hundred fourteen other systems.
This made for a Codex on Legal War, and rule bound systems which was good as it limited the damage greatly. We had minor wars frequently, but nothing major flared for a very long time. But then a unified empire, based on a new religious system came at our borders, that is the borders of the Codex Civilization of several hundred stars, and once again, I sought a way to defend my people.
We had heavily armored ships which could brush aside some of the system edge lasers, and generate their own burper fields so hit and run attacks from hyperships did not work. They had long-range missile ships which had a warhead they said was armed with Creation’s Fire. It was true that once one of these hit a ship, the ship burned until it was no more. Even a glancing shot was enough to doom one of our ships.
We turned to space fighters and launching craft, and thus began the Long War. Over the next hundred years, we ducked in and out of space, hunted and were hunted in a raging furball that was tens of lightyears long.
And then I literally smacked myself on the forehead in wrath. Forcefields. It was so simple. And with that, the war turned. Deprived of physical contact with our ships, their terrifying missiles did little harm. We drove them back, and imposed the Peace of the Broken Stars on them.
Despite my advice, it was punitve, and designed to keep them from ever threatening us again. Perhaps they are right, those who counselled thus. We shall see.
But for now, I hear news from my estate on Wren’s Nest.
The Captain of the DeepCrosser Three believes that she has proven to herself that she could stand alongside the Legend of the Codex Civilization, and would be most honored if he would join her for dinner.
It had been centuries, but my Wren was back. And if now, she knew her heart, and was willing to bind herself to me for the millenia to come, why then I’d call this little interlude well worth it. Hurriedly, I called for my tailor, and my perfumer, and got in the shower, and then got out because I had forgotten to get out of my clothes…
Wren was finally coming home.
JTM said on October 15, 2011
Uh, countering lasers fired from a distance of light-hours is really easy. They’ve got no seeking capabilities, so you just have to not move in a perfectly predictable line. Actually, the underlying assumption of most hard-SF ranges is that beyond a few light seconds even simplistic evasive maneuvers will allow ships to avoid lasers.
M. J. Young said on October 16, 2011
I think there are two problems with the “avoiding lasers” concept.
The first is that a ship moving at 0.1c is not terribly maneuverable–you would have to have a lot of power to get a slight shift in direction.
The second is that if someone fires a laser at you, you are hit at the same moment you see them pull the trigger.
Now, if what you mean is that ships approaching on an attack run have to do so on an erratic course that cannot be predicted by the defender, it’s probably worth the extra energy to do that if you can actually create an unpredictable course at that velocity. If you’re twenty light-minutes away, it’s going to take twenty minutes for information concerning your position to reach the target and twenty minutes for the laser to hit its target point, so that gives you better than half an hour to change course, so maybe it would be plausible. That assumes there aren’t laser stations scattered in higher orbits to defend against such attacks, as they would be closer and have a faster turnaround time.
The second is tougher, unless you’re going to assume that the attacker can see where all the ground-based lasers are pointed before anyone fires them.
*****
What caught my attention here is that I’ve seen science fiction universes populated by competing groups of humans (or one particular native creature), and I’ve seen science fiction universes populated by many cultures of which one is human and the others alien, but all rather monolithic. I don’t recall seeing any universe in which different races divided into different factions. That’s probably difficult to do, though, since at some level you have to make your various alien groups identifiably distinct from humanity by giving them specific characteristics, and then establish significant diversity within their group. But now that I’ve said that, it doesn’t seem so difficult. I’m reminded that C. S. Lewis commented somewhere that in every age the factions which to each other seemed irreconcilably opposed on every point actually shared common accepted fundamentals which in other times were completely rejected. So you would have to connect a specific alien species to specific core concepts, probably on some level related to biology, and then create diversified groups that oppose each other on other concepts. As an example, I’m reading a book right now in which the adult members of the alien species are all neuter, but three emerge as leaders, and in their efforts to achieve primacy over each other they become gendered, one becomes the ruling queen and the other two become her subordinate mates. Apart from the evolutionary inefficiency of this model on so many levels, I would expect that a biological system of this sort would have very marked impact on the way these creatures think and act–but it would not necessarily mean that they would not divide into factions which promoted democratic or socialist or oligarchical subcultures which had different views on how the triumvirate was selected and how the leadership and the subordinates relate to each other. Thus you could have a democracy, a socialism, an oligarchy, a feudalism, a variety of expressions of this, built around the biological aspect of the triumvirate. It would make alien/human alliances and wars much more interesting, because of course different factions of different alien groups would have some concepts in common with other aliens who were otherwise quite different.
Anyway, that’s probably way off topic, but the article pushed my exhausted brain in that direction and I’ll probably forget it by tomorrow.
–M. J. Young
JTM said on October 16, 2011
I expand on this in the comments to the next one, but unless you’re literally flying straight at the gun you can dodge simply by varying your acceleration unpredictably
Well, yes, but the laser hits some time after the trigger is pulled, so if you’re a full ship-length away from where you were expected to be when it was fired it’ll miss entirely. If your average acceleration over an hour can vary by 1g between hours, you have to get pretty close before that starts being difficult. So until you get to within a relatively short distance you can dodge just fine without knowing where they’ll be fired. Probably the best invasion strategy would be to send a heavy strikeforce zipping past the target planet at about a light-second and bombarding the laser stations, with a second wave consisting of more warships and transports hanging back a light-minute or so in order to still have some unpredictability in their courses until the defenses are reduced
Lasers in higher orbits wouldn’t be all that much better off, since a higher orbit gives them less than an extra second of turnaround time.
M. J. Young said on October 17, 2011
Sorry–I meant a higher stellar orbit. Planetary defense lasers for earth posted out in the orbital paths of Jupiter would be significantly closer to incoming ships. Admittedly, you would need a very large number of these to be effective, since they are by definition moving around the sun and thus not in any fixed location; and because they are orbiting at a higher (stellar) orbit their period is going to be lot longer and very much out of synch with the inner planet; but if we’re talking about a space defense system, putting lasers on semi-artificial planetoids in the outer reaches of the star system is not an unreasonable expense, and probably cheaper than sending interplanetary spaceship interceptors.
But your other points are well taken.
–M. J. Young
jtm said on October 19, 2011
I think you’re somewhat underestimating the scale here. Say the shell is a light-hour out: the radius is 1800 light-seconds, so the surface area is 4*pi*(1800)^2 light seconds. In order to have one platform for every 10 square light-seconds you’ll need roughly four million platforms. In order to be able to engage an incoming fleet with one platform within reliably effective range at any point. Or you could build four hundred ships with the same firepower and probably be more effective.
Now, if FTL physics dictate the points they can emerge from hyperspace at more precisely than “More than a light-hour from the sun”, you’d probably be best off stationing a lot of platforms around each of those points. See David Weber’s Starfire series for an example, complete with counter-tactics.
But ultimately static defenses will probably be best for protecting things instead of projecting power across a star system; if you’ve got a battery of heavy lasers drawing on the power grid of an entire planet no one will dare get close enough to be hit. But it will be like having a castle. Its main strategic value will be in that it cannot be taken and mobile forces within the envelope can launch raids from it unless the enemy commits forces to a siege, not that it will be able to destroy anything hostile in the system.
Not that building them is a bad idea, their mere existence essentially assures that a planet will never be assaulted. Hostile forces will simply avoid it until they can secure sufficiently overwhelming force to devastate the planetary biosphere, then demand a surrender. Major planets would simply be exempt from actual fighting, with even major wars consisting of efforts to cut them off from all hope of reinforcements and render their position untenable because they’re too powerful to storm and too valuable to destroy.