Hi this is the lockpicking lawyer

​@@ironboy3245About to use C6 Plastic explosives on this titanium A graded lock.

"A locked door invites thieves." -Unknown

​@@ironboy3245 And this is who you take out a planet just use a ship using hyper beam and launch another planet to the planet to take out a locked up planet.

I believe their viability would depend on travel times and sensor tech. In star wars, a purely military megastructure would absolutely be spotted before completion and possibly attacked. In halo however, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of ftl sensor systems. You could have decades to invest before discovery and longer before any potential attack. Not to mention that it's almost guaranteed to have multiple purposes for each structure.

​@@warlock64c Even in star wars it took the rebels around 20 years to find out there was a death star over Scarris. In a non FTL universe by the time you see your enemy or even just another race building a megastructure, it's too late. In a slow one, they have more time to prepare for any would-be attackers.

Let's not forget that very advanced civilization could achieve Megastructures in a very short time. Just to give an idea, during WW1, the Germans were able to pull out of their ass a defensive lines with what was thought as the most advanced defense system possible : the Hindenburg line. Althought it didn't fare well against combined arm offensives of the allies, it was still the most advanced network a civilisation could offer, and was constructed in a very short time. Maginot could be an exemple of that too. So, it's not crazy to imagine that any Type II/III civlisation on the Kardashev scale could build Megastructure in a matter of a few year. Which is usually sufficient in peace time.

The best option in reference to "megastructures" is to take advantage of celestial objects such as asteroids and convert them into fortresses or use them as kinetic weapons directing their fall or converting them into shrapnel to "sweep" an area.

No. The whole point of megastructures is futureproofing. Your megastructure has to be a quasi-independent and nigh-indestructible structure. The Death Stars are actually a great example of a megastructure done right. It can operate independently for a long period of time and was all but indestructible, making the immense cost pay back in dividends… or at least it would’ve been if the Death Star didn’t share the flaws common in all Imperial projects. It is still a huge commitment to base your military around a single point of failure, but it’s a better choice than excessive R&D spendings or overproduction of miliary assets.

ah yes, that time we shot a manhole cover into orbit with a nuclear bomb

@@8vantor8 (Depending on your current view of the world) That is either the most American or Russian thing I have ever heard of and I would love to see that as an actual weapon! (Btw I have heard of the story before and I know it was the us that did it)

@@Thetankracer well, it was the US who did it, so its the most american thing ever

@@8vantor8 Did you click the read more below my comment? I already know it was the us XD

@@Thetankracer and i was using that fact to say it was the most american thing ever, sense we are the ones who did it

I was wondering when someone would bring this up. Yes you absolutely can dig deep to protect yourself, your manufacturing capabilities and your population from bombardment. And I'm not talking about a couple hundred meters under the soil. We're talking tens to hundreds of kilometers of soil, stone or even magma if you can withstand the heat and pressure. You won't run out of raw materials. Ever. So you can continue to manufacture, deploy, repair, and replace any surface to orbit cannons, drones, or even ships you lose. Also different worlds would be more useful than others. Lower gravity worlds like Mars or Mercury would be easier to dig down in and moons (Particularly icy moons like Europa or Triton) would be a great candidate for such a defensive tactic since at those temperatures, ice might as well be rock and you got miles of it.

Undoubtedly it is a totally effective tactic , but once the positive aerospace control is lost , the enemy can set up a network of satellites with sensors and weapons to go " goading " the defenders , in regards to the advance by land the best option is to seal/flood the tunnels that are found. Something similar was raised in the 1991 Gulf War. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iLmhfttkq62UfKs.html&ab_channel=TheOperationsRoom

@@mill2712also, it would maybe make the enemy less likely to use the exterminatus option. Think about it. A world with that much industrial output would be so useful to your forces, if you can take it. So there is a chance the enemy would rather spend years sieging a system and planet instead of just trying to glass the thing and being done with it. And that buys time for the defenders nation to build up their fleet in order to counter attack.

Or they'd need to take the planet.

The Empire was really into oversized solutions.

You can leave silos with missiles on land or at sea that are activated remotely to launch strategic attacks on the enemy both on land and in orbit.

And let's not forget the garrison of Gunstars to defend the frontier... oh, wait, wrong Star League. Brian's Cache's are actually genius if you have the resources and time to build the network, and the manpower to keep it viable. But of course, we're talking about Battletech/Mechwarrior where life is cheap, only 'Mechs are expensive.

@@DTSephiroth You have been recruited by the Star League, to defend against Xur and the Kodan Amada. Funny enough, the larger a population becomes the cheaper life becomes.

@@Ishlacorrin Pretty much the same in 40k.

The Castles Brian (Not Brian Caches, those were Clan dumping grounds where they stashed old equipment) worked so well, in fact, that the "quick" way to capture them was to have your troops just get assigned to the garrison force over time.

Unless the population on the planet is massive (with their own massive infrastructure and logistic needs) no fleet would get close to reaching the mass of a planet. They would either bring their own planet to attack, or come with such overwhelming force that simply destroying the planet ouright is the easier option.

There is one scifi that used core taps to power some crazy weapons, and the whole planet was turned into basically a no-go zone, as it provided enough firepower to take on the largest fleets, almost single handedly. AND they put it at a nexus point

Or to add another interesting layer: The civilization is attempting to update their old ships, but the process is slow and often done with duct tape.

@@HappyBeezerStudios isn't that what I said?🤔

@@HappyBeezerStudios Skip the tape, make inflatable battleships!

Gigastructural Engineering is my absolute favorite mod for that game.

I see your planetcraft and raise you an entire solar system.

@@Talon1124 I see your Stellar Systemcraft and raise you a Mobile Weaponized Supermassive Black Hole.

@@vi6ddarkking Blokkats.

Based.

And yes you other nerds I know that’s not the quote. It’s an example line for the video. Frack off! 😂

That whole series was fantastic. Also Black Tide Rising, one of the few zombie settings I like.

@@alendonvaldor5808 Interesting, I've never gotten into zombie stories. something about how it demands everything go wrong always felt off to me.

@@benjaminconnor6640 He takes a more realistic approach. One, not undead. Harder to kill, yes, but they also starve out and cannibalize each other over time. Some start to display actual survival instincts and even avoid survivors showing some people were resistant. You have several groups actively working on vaccines to prevent spread once order begins to reestablish. Essentially you have a small family, with a father and uncle who are former Aussie SAS who takes the family to sea, begin clearing boats, killing infected, and taking on survivors. Eventually, the crazy bastards clear a cruise liner, with a nuclear sub watching them. One thing leads to another, and there is still a minimal military presence in several countries. He takes the approach of, shit hit the fan fast, things fell apart, but enough plans were in place that just enough human society survived to be able to make a comeback and claw and fight their way back. Frankly love it.

@@alendonvaldor5808 Sounds interesting, I've often wondered about cannibal zombies. Good to see that addressed at least. Along with multiple vaccine efforts

In some Sci-Fi universes, if based on the Napoleonic wars or WW1/2, static defences have a longer firing range.

In star wars they have shields that can tank bombardments from entire fleets for months without stopping to recharge so it makes sense that static ground defenses would be more viable.

What do you play?

@@justawhiskey41 used to play Total Annihilation, forged Alliance, Dawn of War and a few other games over the years, became the norm for me to build the base whilst others focused on army building and covering. These days I play Stellaris and a bit of Age of Empires and Total Warhammer.

And here we have found the prodigy of Rogal Dorn

I, too, am a student of General Monty.

Yes

Her name is abeloth

@@darthzasheic3352 Yeah that creepy woman with the universe's nastiest Glasgow Grin.

@@darthzasheic3352 yes

You can always hide a big cannon and it's energy output as industrial plants and silos as mining operation.

I was about to mention the Pariah Nexus….literally a near-perfect defensive solution by slowly draining the life from all standard life forces….absolutely wrecking psykers and warp-sensitive foes….with literally zero negative effect for any Necron units. It’s expanding, which gives it an offensive element as well. It’s supremely well-suited to a gradual decay of the enemies of the necrons….which they can simply outlast given their near-infinite lifespans.

Machiokia world or however you spell it

Static and Passive defenses while looking really cool sadly are really only a delaying measure. If there are no incoming reinforcements then your enemy will simply turn the battle into a siege. If you can’t harass your enemy‘s supply lines or threaten their positions with your own mobile force, then your only hope is that the enemy gives up (or is forced to give up).

Rogal dorn

Begging?

@@mill2712 it's better to be a living beggar, than a proud death corpse. So begging for your defense sounds good to me.

It‘d be problematic if your enemy just starts using mirrors as armor.

@@AnonD38 True, but then again, mirrors would most likely be difficult to maintain and keep effective if they'd be used as armor. Mind you, space within solar systems is not as empty as people believe they are, there is actually a lot of dust which would work like sandpaper. Then there would be a lot of other debris that flies around at high velocity during combat, like debris from rockets, destroyed ships/drones etc. and of course there are ballistic weapons and rockets as well, so classic mirrors might work for a while, but not for very long. And when talking about armor that contains, let's say, a high amount of microscopic diamonds as a means to disperse laser fire, then we are also talking about something that is less effective in reflecting a solar laser. And as someone already pointed out in the comments, using a layered defense and a mix of all kinds of defensive systems would be the smart thing to do anyway, it would be unwise to use solar laser arrays as your sole means of defense. And in that mix, they would still be a cheap and easy to maintain heavy hitter.

​@@AnonD38 mirrors fare poorly agaisnt any sufficiently powerful laser. And sure futuristic scifi mirrors might be able to handle it but then you just hit them with conventional weapons first, trash their mirrors enough they can't take the blast then vape them for thinking mirrors as armor was a good idea.

Ah yes the Stellaser. When you want the Death Star without the Death Star cost and have more versatility as well.

@@AnonD38 At the power levels we are talking, even if the enemy can reflect all the light, that many photons would give a significant thrust to the enemy vessel. Not to mention that the hull cannot be a perfect mirror surface everywhere. The enemy ship's own sensor and communication arrays have to be outside the hull and cannot be mirrored the same way as the hull. So even if they could repel the beam and correct their coarse without much trouble, they would then be flying blind and deaf.

How many Stonehenge complexes do you think would be sufficient to protect the planet? I have an idea but how about you?

@@marrqi7wini54 yes

​@@marrqi7wini54If you want to protect Earth's landmasses(and Antarctica) you need 24 Stonehenge arrays. I suppose it's guns can shoot directly into space, so while it would need 24 of them to cover Earth landmass, I suppose it can cover somewhat more of the space around the planet. Also, with 24 Stonehenges you get 192 railguns

Welp, time to re-read all the main Honorverse books again 😁

Yeah, Honorverse is stupidly Mary-Sued to make HH to be invincible. I mean, experienced Q-Raider captain knowing that his opponent is very experienced does max military run instead of continue to pretend be a cargo ship and go by cargo ship speed, then jettison coverings from weapon systems long before combat... And Solarian League would be so crap because again because of plot...

That’s pretty much a downside for everything isn’t it?

To pick a Sci-Fi example: The Amaris Coup.

@@super-zw3ep Sure, but static defenses suffer considerably more from this.

Bravo! That topic was covered in the “Lost Fleet” by Jack Cambell - an actual Navy officer who, when writing space battles took actual physics under consideration (distances, speeds, relativity). Stationary defenses are useless. Anything with an orbit that can be calculated ahead of time can be destroyed before it has a time to react. When an enemy fleet enters a system (from hyperspace) it can immediately see the stationary defenses. However the stationary defenses will not see the fleet that entered the system for hours (hello, Einstein). Since the defenses are stationary, knowing the distance you can calculate where the structure will be 24 hours from now, when a piece of junk, accelerated to 0.1 C, will turn it into a cloud of subatomic particles and hot plasma.

@@SmilingShadow-jl5tr I would not say completely useless. For example this assumes that you know that what you see is a defensive structure. Recently read a book where they used a self replicating defense network that looked like astroids for the attackers. However the value of such defenses is extremly limited and can only help in certain situations

Kirklin Mines, sleeper torpedoes that speed bump anything travelling to fast in the wrong direction Just Set it And Forget it!

@@r.connor9280 can you collect any unused ones after the battle?

@@dragonturtle2703 They're best as a preemptive measure and usually get used one at a time or in small clusters

@@r.connor9280 makes sense.

​@@r.connor9280space is generally far to big for this.

The Shkadov Thruster kzfaq.info/get/bejne/lbyVp6SenMyng2Q.html

The problem for this in space battles is distance. As you can fire weapons over vast distances there is no need for any ships to get as close to each other as they do in films. Ramming a fast moving ship from 1000km would take quite an aim. In a number of simulator ships are considered as point.

@@chrisyoung5929 True distance is a problem though it can also be helpful. If you are closer in your opponent has less chance to avoid a hit.

​@@chrisyoung5929every ship with ftl is a weapon of planet destruction.

I see no reason in terms of physics why a laser should ignite our atmosphere. Lightnings pump insane amount of energy through the skies and yet, this never happened. Also, the energy degradation would not really be a problem as well, as there are ways to prevent/circumvent that. An option, for instance, would be to use a smaller laser in order to create a pre-heated channel in the atmosphere and _then_ fire the main laser. Shooting kinetics skywards would be problematic not just because you would need to shoot them _out_ of the gravity well, but because _here_ the atmosphere and the friction it causes would become a huge problem. You would need to fire high-velocity projectiles in order to damage targets in space, which also means a lot of friction and thus, a quite substantial energy loss. And high velocity + high friction also means you have to deal with the degradation of your projectiles. Rockets are not without problems as well. They would need to be very fast and you would need _a lot_ of them in order to overload any capable point-defense system. Sure, you can hope that the target would still get hit and damaged by the debris, but this is not a given.

@@FurzkampfbomberKinetic weapons would also have the massive downside of friendly fire potential. „What goes up, must come down“ is the saying after all.

Energy weapons actually aren’t affected much by the atmosphere, as long as they use frequencies/wave lengths which can pass through the atmosphere freely. (aka maybe don’t use a UV laser)

@@AnonD38 As long as we are talking about projectiles meant to hit things in space, I think we would not care that much about collateral damage on the ground. This would not be ballistic artillery after all and the velocity they would need to have, as well as the fact that they would be fired in a straight line, would most likely assure that nothing falls to the ground. Also, we would most likely talk about relatively small projectiles without any ballistic payload - tungsten rods for instance.

Missiles are too slow to engane targets in orbit effectively. Or to be more precise, the entire process of launching a missile is going to be obvious enough to any hostile fleet looking down that by the time it approaches them, the point defenses have gotten tired of waiting. Best to keep missiles up high on stealth satellites that might catch defenders unaware. Load them for penetrating enemy armor and shields or even nukes then watch the fireworks as your sat reveals itself and opens up the biggest ship to an easy kill by the ground installations (if you didn't just nuke their asses).

You don’t need to use a nuclear weapons for that. Conventional explosives will work just as well, and won’t give off any radiation that could be detected.

​@@addisonwelsh a nuclear warhead would also wipe out the attacking force, maximizing casualties the enemies takes.

@@8vantor8 We have non-nuclear weapons that can do that just fine. Just look at the MOAB

@@addisonwelsh The MOAB is has a yield is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT and a blast radius of a mile. Little Boy from WW2 had a yield of 15,000 tons of TNT, and wiped out a city. considering the tech and the sheer size of the attacking armies, Nuclear Warheads are the best choice for their cost effectiveness to destruction ration

The explanation in those books is somewhat shitty. However in general static defenses are limited in their usefulness.

Wha- Hold on- It's the same video? Nothing is different excpet i fixed the image rendering issue? What you mean the old one?

It's almost impossible to. Any defenses set up to thwart attackers are gonna be almost as good at thwarting escaping vessels. Escapees however have the advantage of time in order to find holes in the net/make their own. Buying drinks for the guys in the local garrison can go a long way.

Or the even bigger question: why would you even care about this question?

I want to state this aint meant to be like, mean spirited. This is just a great chance to start a conversation and explain stuff I failed to convey in the episode for time constraint reasons. Firstly, technically incorrect. In halo a shield world IS a dyson sphere, although a little different. We see on multiple occasions in the books and games that forerunner dyson spheres count as such since they contain stars, planets and sometimes even entire solar systems in compressed pockets of space. The one we see in halo wars is a great example, but the one in halo 4 counts as well. Also, terms in sci fi shift a lot over time as genres mature and evolve, look at 'Mechs or power armor as an amazing example. The idea of a dyson sphere at its most correct is what you described, but over time people see a big spheroid thing and call it a dyson sphere. The term has become a descriptor of a certain style of megastructure as much as it remains a solid definition. Like the terms rocket/missile/torpedo having a very specific real world definition, but being used together by laymen in sci-fi to describe anything that shoots flame in one direction to move in the other. Second, that is also half incorrect and based mostly on limited information. There are tons of examples in star wars of different shields. The rebel base from episode 2 has a small local shield that does exactly what you say. I assume the one on scarriff acts the same. But Coruscant has a planetary shield that covers the entire world and during the battle over it from episode three, is stated to stop everything from blaster and turbolaser fire and debris. They state in extended material and cut scenes that they explicitly had to lower part of the shield or anakin/obi-wan/palpatine would have exploded on contact when they hit it. Also, most sci fi is very soft, it doesn't follow its own rules and bends things for drama all the time and shields are often a uniquely soft sci-fi element. (star trek/40k/halo/dune. etc) More often than not shields do whatever the writer wants them too even within the same universe. Inconsistencies, mmmm, 40k says hello. Alright, lets see if this gets some discussions going. Come on kids, have at it.