It does generate a brief pause.

"I don't care how high tech you are, a BFG is a BFG" -some unsc commander probably

"The Last Argument of Kings"

and since they can't dodge, you just lob projectiles at it from teh edge of the solar system and destroy it.

Or bigger then there home planet 😂

UNSC super MACs are the best.

So long as they ask for permission, first.

That is what Marines are for.

@@patrickkenyon2326 The thing I love about Halo: While spartans were awesome, it was the UNSC marines that put the boot to alien necks for 20 years while the navy folded like tissue paper.

@@iainballas Marines are tough as nails. Ask the Japanese. Or Iraqis.

Something that will stop a banana

the problem is they can't dodge long range projectiles. their orbital condition makes them extremely easy to destroy.

Well that would look awful, we got to think about resale.

@@SoloRenegade It's not long range projectiles you need to worry about, it's keeping X-wings away from the equatorial trench.

@@RCAvhstape It's absolutely about long range projectiles. I defeated the X-wings by removing the trench.

Except those ports become obsolete shortly after. Arguably because US and Japanese rarely fight those in the past, they adopt to more modern solutions faster.

@@TheRezro Yes, that solution being to bypass the fortress completely in most cases. Something you can not do if you are attacking a planet, as you must deal with the fortresses in order to approach the planet at all.

The rest of the RN (who had mastered the art of shore bombardment, and built classes of dedicated ships for the purpose) chuckle politely.

@@Dang_Near_Fed_Up bypassing a fortress in space is in fact a LOT easier than when limited to the 2D limitations of sea-faring vessels.

Doesn't rly work in space since you have the low ground and it is much easier to get around

When I played Sins of a Solar Empire with my friends years back in school, I would always choose the Advent as species because of their laser weapons and the research tree in laser power and range extensions. Then I would place my orbital defense networks in overlapping patterns around my planets, to the point where I could not employ any other orbital infrastructure. And after maxing out the laser research, those platforms could target ~80% of the entire stellar system. My friends stopped attacking after everyone's PCs would start lagging to compute the particle effects. At one point it was so bad, a maxed out capital ship entered my system, was engulfed in an enormous ball of glowing plasma and after the orbital platforms went through their firing sequence - space debris. All over the course of what should have been ~3s, but took almost half a minute to compute.

kaymish6178 _That_ is a *_hilarious_* deterrent, like _what?_ 💀

@@midnight8341 Hey I remember playing Sins too! Although I preferred the Vasari for defense simply cos their orbital fortress was actually mobile, unlike the other two. :D

The more Isaac Arthur I watch, the more annoyed with Stellaris's game balance I get. XD

Rail guns bigger than most ships? No

Yup. That sound reasonably.

But arguably spending that cash on interceptor fleets nay be better investment.

​@@TheRezro Not really. Anything meant to be deployed away from home has to have much better propulsion and internal supply storage. In a defense platform, more that mass can become weapon mass.

@@TheRezro You are thinking about a single purpose defense platform, I would posit that those would not exist. I would think that those platforms would instead be multipurpose platforms. For instance a 0 or near 0 G manufacturing platform, think of how many special materials could be produced without the disruption of gravity, or even atmosphere, on the manufacturing process. Or just the opposite an ultra high G, immense pressure, or specialized atmosphere manufacturing plant that produces materials with densities that make diamonds look like tissue paper. Orbital refineries for raw materials harvested from asteroids are also a possibility. The materials shipped to the refinery as a mass packet, requiring no transport ship to get to the platform I might add. Orbital solar collectors could send power down to the planet below, making the planet completely solar powered. Think of the advantages of free power for an entire planet. Orbital shades could also protect the planet and allow for planetary climate control or even terraforming. Then any or all of those manufacturing platforms are also the base from which the defenses for the planet are incorporated into. This not only makes the system cost effective, it should in theory turn a profit as well as providing special materials and resources otherwise unavailable to the planet as well as providing protection / defense.

@@icecold9511 This is especially important because, since at _SFIA_ FTL is considered impossible unless stated otherwise, a 'mobile' fleet is centuries away from any other star... and you've probably got decades to react to an incoming fleet.

@@boobah5643 Even with FTL, the issue remains a defender advantage. A mobile fleet trades mission capability for versatility and offensive use.

look, some of us aspiring authors are working on it.

It somewhat depends on where you drop the small mass objects; further away means more of the RKM debris will be deflected enough to miss. And if you're shooting into/through a busy orbital space then that debris likely just became someone else's Very Bad Day. Which is why stories where it's against the rules to bombard planets are _very_ careful when it comes to orbital infrastructure; even if you're not worried about an accidental colony drop, an RKM (or fraction thereof) that misses an orbital station can do Bad Things to the planet it's orbiting.

Ah the old it is better to be hit by a shotgun slug then shotgun pellets debate. I never understood why tho, as a soft ish defence like kevlar cloth have better time with pellets, as do our atmosphere against small stuff that is left. And defenders could no doubt soften it up even further with man made obstacles at the least.

To be fair you should fire a few thousand RKMs to show them your serious. That would ignite the atmosphere…

@@user-ww5sj3ny2y yeah, the danger is probably not ONE RKM indeed. I dunno how the debries and energy released during intercepting them will affect both the defence or ofence. Defence sensors detecting them, and stuff getting left to possibly foul the following RKMs guidance, and possibly even collision with the debris. If the RkM are so spread out as to not affect one another, or be cowered by the same defence/debris cloud. They may lose some of the point of overwhelming a spot on the defence. Still, with good enough guidance and planning I can see a focused attack on one "point" of a defence grid always being best way to get past any defence. Space is huge, and a simple diverse angles would be way enough to both saturate and hopefully not make it more difficult for oneself. Timing and WHERE any defence, and how deep it is, is always a factor.

@@jerryandersson4873 well the coin WOULDNT release its full energy. Most of its energy will be turned to plasma. A big hunk of led can take that heat. Also the mass of the RKM is still very much headed your way. Some of it is not plasma. Some of it is fragments. Most of the RKMs are still on track. And I would think of them as more like a long ranged weapon system instead of a close in weapon system. Think 3000rpm And track an enemy ship about as well, but from insane distances. At those distances, it would be like a huge shotgun and you would shoot a whole area of space in hopes of a couple near hits. Like depth charges

Sure, but you're talking about lasers. You're basically turning the laser into a search light, one effectively closer than the platform firing it, then trying to hurt someone with it by shining it on them. So, you hit the target, and it heats up a bit... but space ships already deal with heat, and you've already spent most of your energy trying to heat up ships that aren't actually there; is it enough to do any damage before the ship radiates it away? Not saying it can't work, but there's very much a tradeoff here; split your output too many ways (multiple lasers, moving mirrors, whatever) and you've done little more than announce that you're firing your laser to your target.

Figures, one of the few books by him I haven't read yet :)

Which is funny because I finished the last book and looked up to this notification. Totally on topic

We got this. Keep pushing 🤙🏾

Or just the accuracy of kinetics just get that good keeping in mind that stations aren't that mobile in specially those that are connected to the planet that requires them to stay synchronize with the rotation of the planet it makes them fish in a berral if you can somehow out effective range them and hit them with something that they can't defend against like a bunch of targets to small and fast to shoot in space the speed and direction of projectiles stay the same so they will hit a full force at any range it just a matter of the targeting computer speed of projectiles and the distance and mobility of the target and size is what decides the effective range in in that aspect railgun that can shoot stuff at the fraction of the speed of light is king

Unless they've read an Honor Harrington book, since in that setting missiles (admittedly, gravitic propulsion there) with bomb-pumped laser warheads are the primary weapons for warships. And maybe a lot of people do miss this, but I'd thought it was a pretty well-known series.

Yes Xenons 🤪👍

Yeah its a bit of name, iirc it is from a novel called "the killing star"

Launching neighboring gas giants in to your sun to replenish the helium your mining from it.

Kill is short for Kinetic Kill, which means Kills by impact, as opposed to Kills by exploding.

"Iserlohn Fortress", IIIRC...a practical 'meta-planet as a mobile defense platform'... And they had several different types! Masterpiece Scifi anime!

Yep, we’re on every major podcast platform

I brought tea for the psykers arriving once other people started watching.

I brought a nice cup of joe

🍗 🍻 💻

How do you fry it cold?

@@MrSimonw58 liquid helium.

Stargate Atlantis used a single orbital defense weapon if I remember correctly? And I truly love that series to bits, but the logistics of that episode were also kinda bad in a the-script-needs-this-to-happen kind of way. That orbital cannon wasn't in planetary orbit, it was in stellar orbit around the outskirts of that solar system (it took them what 10h, 14h to go there by puddle jumper?) and the Wraith ships just left hyperspace right next to them? Why exactly? Because the Wraith knew it was there, just that it had been dead since 10000 years. And yes, hybris and all, but if I want to attack and eradicate someone, I'm going to do my darndest not to fall out of hyperspace next to the only, very obvious defense force left in the entire system (except the city itself). Now, just from a writing perspective, it would have been a great opener for the battle if they had moved the platform from its orbit (maybe it got de-orbited during the battle 10000 years ago and has been drifting through the solar system ever since) above Atlantis (you know, where the Wraith had to show up eventually) the ships were greated with an active defense platform upon falling out of hyperspace, immediatedly opening fire and destroying one of them with debris falling from the sky around the city during the battle. Then it could have been destroyed just as it was in the series. And yes, moving it would have probably been hard, but the Ancients had to do it and I doubt they would build anything without engines anyway, so if they hinted at the platform in an earlier episode and started that episode a few weeks earler to allow enough time for maneuvering with partly-damaged engines... that would have made more sense in my opinion.

The B5 one was ridiculously overpowered. Could wipe out the eastern seaboard of North America in one hit. Going to war with God?

True. As you know, the wraith are among those alien races too stupid to actually exist in reality for said reasons.

A planet is a moving target. Ask NASA.

Well, from a certain fidelity of simulation, yes. But facing definitepy does matter a lot, as ships are a lot more likely to be tapered cylindrical than spheroid, making armour significantly weaker, and target cross section greater from flanking shots. But there's also the fact you are largely limited to linear orbital paths. All on all its a very unique combat environment, best approximated perhaps by submarine combat, with information lightlag being replaced with sonar bearing uncertainty.

Of course! Got to make sure your personnel are well taken care of. Along with tourist if offered, inspection teams, and meeting top brass. That's the first rule of warfare.

I should probably add a shout out to Tyler Alexander Vernon for creating Troy.

@@rharris22222you have great taste

@@UpperDarbyDetailingThanks. I think it's more like I have been captured. I saw John Ringo on TV once, read "Live Free or Die," found David Weber through searching for more Ringo, started listening to HH on Audible, and absolutely could not stop listening to either author. I start sweating and shaking if I go too long without a fix of Ringo, Weber, or Kratman or one of the other "Hard science fiction" authors. I especially like how both authors seem to ask ahead of time "How little cheating of physics can I do and still tell the story?" And often they tell you exactly where the cheats are create a rational fiction to cover the new physics. HH in particular seems to have started by Weber asking himself how much cheating was required to transport Horatio Hornblower into space.

​@@rharris22222There is a Weber- White book series that is very similar to Honor Harrington. David Weber and Steve White. The first book is called " Crusade"

Hiding on the ground/ under the ocean also has the benefits of being able to mask your thermal signatures. Spaceship will stand out of the cold background of space, making stealth very difficult, a submarine has all the water surrounding it to cool itself. For aircraft it's also about energy efficiency. If they use chemical fuel, an atmospheric vehicle can use the planet atmosphere as part of the fuel or at least additional reaction mass, allowing them to have high thrust while still having high energy efficiency. Even if they use fusion power, an atmospheric vehicle can use the atmosphere as reaction mass, allowing it to accelerate/ decelerate as much as the engine allows since it can just suck more air in to push out. A spacecraft would have to conserve reaction mass because that would be more likely to run out before the fusion fuel.

It would be rather unpleasantly hot on a submarine 3000km below sea level....

It is always layered defense. Classic onion. I skip detection, targeting, reaching etc. But you naturally would have fleets patrolling around. Long range sniper canons, but also point defense dealing with enemy munitions and also something like infiltration attempts. Like something popping from hangar of hijacked cargo freighter.

I think you had a typo, 3000km below sea level is very well within the earths mantle and getting any projectile out of there would be hard, antimatter or not. But also, you might have forgotten one important detail about those huge guns in any (gwell written) setting: those skyscraper-sized defense cannons are not build because they look cool and intimidating, but because it takes a truly insane amount of energy to not just simply make it into orbit, but then also still have enough momentum left to reliably intercept anything, let alone a moving spacecraft hundreds of thousands of kilometers out there. Just compare it with the infrastructure needed for SpinLaunch and how insane that project is for just going into orbit with small payloads. And how high their energy bill is. You're not going to have 10000 of these skipping around the planets surface and constantly connecting to ultrahigh-power outlets where ever they happen to plop down. Now, if you allow things like antimatter, then it's a bit of a different topic, but a) having any type of reactor being mobile is way harder than just the stationary one, b) people are not going to be happy that an antimatter-powered space defense platform just plopped down in the park across the road from their apartment building, severely limiting its use in the most densely populated areas and c) IF that thing gets hit, it's not gonna be a simple atomic or hydrogen bomb plopping off, that's gonna be an Armageddon device for everything in a radius of half a thousand kilometers or more, potentially killing multiple other platforms and starting an apokalyptic chain reaction. Or if they use antimatter-fueled missiles, the ecological damage these are going to do during deployment are already insane in space, but inside earths atmosphere...? I feel like this is gonna be a hard sell to the population of that planet.

@@logansmall5148 no, you see, he wrote -3000km under sea level. The negative number is the detail here. These submarines are in orbit, almost a hundreth of the way to the moon.

Goedel's incompleteness theorem covers that actually. No system can be simultaneously consistent (ie a statement can only be exactly true or exactly false and nothing else) and complete, (ie every conjecture can be proven or disproven from a finite base of axioms). That is my understanding at least In essence, while every theorem can be used to prove more theorems generally, there are times when no matter what you do you just go in circles. The famous example is the 5th postulate. Mathematicians had toiled for so many centuries to either prove it or disprove it, but it turned out that it could not be done. The base of axioms (axioms are the statements you accept to be true in order to build your first theorems) of math at the time simply did not cover it. So, axioms must be completely _independent_ statements, and the fact that there's already examples of many only obviates the trickery of Goedel's theorem. It was just silly to assume that the bunch of axioms we'd identified already would somehow be special and the only ones in existence, and, ultimately, _not_ as infinite as the primes

@@luigivercotti6410So if there is potential for an infinitude of axioms, there is a lot for mathematicians to do. Unless many results are all trivially similar when you choose some different axioms.

@@topdog5252Yes, you could say there is "a lot", I guess infinity counts as "a lot". As for what happens, taking different axioms can lead you to _wild_ places if you go far enough. Some of the craziest mathematical constructs we've had so far, like Non-Euclidean space, and the Banach-Tarski theorem all stem from taking an alternative position on key axioms, namely the 5th postulate and axiom of choice respectively. I'm sure there'll be things that don't change all that much or at all if you flip one axiom off or another on, stuff that's either completely or mostly covered by other axioms in your base, but if you push it, eventually, it's gonna go bananas somewhere. It has to, it's like if two identical ships started off from the same point with just the slightest misalignment in direction, eventually they'll find themselves in opposite ends of the world. The real question for me is the motive. Like I always said, math is just logic, they're one and the same, and all logic, ultimately, is just an advanced form of tautology. Yes, some people can always go forth and keep deriving seas of theorems across a whole galaxy of axiomatic worlds, just for the fun of it, and to see what might lie next; But that sort of wanderlust can't fuel an entire civilisation with some vested interest in practicality. Obviously every avenue must be explored, because you never know for sure just where the tools for the next technological/scientific breakthrough might be hiding, but when the options are literally infinite, and your time and resources, whether on the planet, in your astral system, in your galaxy, or even to the heat death of the universe, are all very much not, priorities have to be considered. What might happen to the math of a civilisation at the end of time? If they, like us humans surely would, still always look up, and still struggle to find any escape, any loophole, any tool to cheat their death, but all the "obviously practical" kind of math has either run out, or more likely the terms "practical" and "obvious" are things that you and I today can't even begin to comprehend how they might apply to a race of intergalactic gods; Well, what then? Do you take shots in the dark and just hope your salvation, if there ever was one, waits round the next corner? Maybe, most likely now that I think about it, there's advanced fields of meta-math, math that you can use to predict where the math you need to do is hiding, and meta-meta-math too, and so on and so forth, but what if your program "returns 0", so to speak? What if your equations tell you that no, you can't escape, that even though the realm of tautology is infinite, still nowhere in it lurks anything that will give you ftl, time-travel, the power to defy entropy or anything else? What then? I suppose you could always make more advanced theories of meta-meta-meta-meta times a billion-trillion -math, but it's not like there _has_ to be some solution there, and seeing as you're running out of time, is this really how you want to spend what will probably be your last moments? In a black, empty world, delving madly into ever more obscure and abstract math, divorced from all physicality and intuition, logic on logic on logic that describes logic on the subject of logic, surrounded by nothing except your buzzing thoughts, like an ant fallen in the middle of the Pacific trying to swim its way to shore, not even knowing in what direction or if at all there's land anywhere? Anyways, good night

My favorite was weapons that take so long to charge, he had the time to kill them. And it took so long because of how ridiculously powerful it was. One beam could take out the eastern seaboard of North America. Given that regular weapons were effective to a limited level against First Ones, who exactly were they planning to use this giga gun? Going to war with God? Dial it back to 10% and your refire rate is much better.

i dont know how the orbits would work

@@andyf4292 if you place three or four of them around the equator, far enough for their fields of view to overlap, the other two or three could orbit in polar orbits that take them along a meridian from pole to pole. Like that solar probe that took pictures of the suns poles for the first time?

Oh thats interesting. So the defence system is so effective that it essentially becomes the offensive weapon. And whichever sides defences overwhelms the opposing sides defences first, can then be turned into offensive weapons.

Okay, but why not put a giant field of solar arrays in space around the elevator station? That way you get 100% power output all the time, because there's no wheather, you don't need to worry about making room on the ground in what I'd assume is one of your busiest economic hubs on the entire planet with truly insane real estate prices, but you wouldn't even need to worry about getting the power up there without major losses (assuming convenient superconductors don't exist, because then that argument is mute). But also, you'd have an enormous solar power plant during peace times (so 99% of time that's not plot related), driving down the insane cost of orbital defense. Oh and in case the elevator cable gets snapped (people on the ground might not see this as a win, though) the elevator station will simply turn into an autonomous weapons platform instead of a dead counterweight with just a few rounds of ammo (energy in supercapacitors) left. Yes, I see the problem with making your station about 1000 times larger in diameter with those solar arrays, but if you run the cabling right, even if they turn those arrays into swiss cheese, you will probably only loose a few % of power output. It would still be way more economic to target the actual station where all the connections run together and that does the shooting anyway.

@@midnight8341 How well do solar panels work after being peppered with buckshot?

@@GoranXII pretty irrelevant at orbital velocities, because even heavy armour isn't gonna safe you then. Or how well do you think your giant lasing lens is going to work after that (hint: it has to point directly at the enemy/oncoming rounds to fire).

@@midnight8341 Such weapons are also useful against the attacker. as for lasers, other than at firing, they can have lens caps.

The Prime did that in Peter F. Hamiltons Commonwealth Saga. Solar flare bombs that, when deployed would create an enormous exotic matter vortex in the stars coronasphere and just pump plasma from there in the direction of where the planet will be. They sterilized an entire planet with a week-long mega flare.

Problem with that is that space is even bigger.