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How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?

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How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by jvilnis   » Fri Sep 09, 2011 11:13 am

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How do yoou defeat a race of Aliens who control high orbit and can throw rocks at you down the gravity well?

Unless you can somehow get up to defeat their ships you are always going to be at a enormous disadvantage.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Bergie   » Sat Sep 10, 2011 3:22 pm

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The only way to deal with vessels which control the high orbitals from a planet is to have concealed weapons emplacements capable of destroying those same ships. As for how effective those weapons would be, that depends on the ships and their defences.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Talleyrand   » Sat Nov 05, 2011 3:19 pm

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It all depends on said aliens' objective. If their aim is to subjugate/enslave the human race, it isn't necessary per se to eliminate their ship(s) immediately. The only threat they pose is the ability to reinforce previously-deployed troops. In the long run, it would indeed be necessary to destroy the fleet, a feat that could be achieved in any number of ways:

- Re-targeting ICBMs

- Kinetic weapons (see the Planetary Defense MACs of the Haloverse)

- Capturing and utilizing an enemy shuttle to board a ship (or several simultaneously) and take it by force.

- Alter satellite orbits to crash into them. Assuming that's possible in sufficient quantities to do actual damage.

These all, however, assume that the xenos want to preserve as much of humanity as possible; if they don't, there's no reason for them NOT to drop Big Rocks on us the moment they start hitting major resistance dirtside.

If that second scenario is the case, the only possible way would be to quickly surrender, and then take however long is necessary to develop and deploy weapons capable of destroying the enemy fleet while also avoiding detection until it's too late for the enemy commander to react, evade, and order a retaliatory bombardment.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Sat Aug 24, 2013 7:00 pm

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One could always shoot them. Gerald Bull, before he went nuts, used to shoot 16" guns from Quebec into space. Presumedly a 16" battleship gun would do a fair amount of damage to anything in orbit. Let alone the 1000mm gun he designed for Saddam.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Spacekiwi   » Sat Aug 24, 2013 10:27 pm

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Lord Skimper wrote:One could always shoot them. Gerald Bull, before he went nuts, used to shoot 16" guns from Quebec into space. Presumedly a 16" battleship gun would do a fair amount of damage to anything in orbit. Let alone the 1000mm gun he designed for Saddam.


But shouldnt we assume that since they have managed to cross space, they probably have sensors and systems for avoiding fast moving objects? how fast does a shell travel? If they are in true space, how long would it take to get there? could they dodge? if so, us humans at the bottom of the gravity slope are screwed.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:12 am

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Spacekiwi wrote:
Lord Skimper wrote:One could always shoot them. Gerald Bull, before he went nuts, used to shoot 16" guns from Quebec into space. Presumedly a 16" battleship gun would do a fair amount of damage to anything in orbit. Let alone the 1000mm gun he designed for Saddam.


But shouldnt we assume that since they have managed to cross space, they probably have sensors and systems for avoiding fast moving objects? how fast does a shell travel? If they are in true space, how long would it take to get there? could they dodge? if so, us humans at the bottom of the gravity slope are screwed.


The standard 16" gun was 2500 ft every second.

Bulls super 5" was 10,000 ft / s.

His 16.4". Holds the record of 180 km in height.

His 39" was designed to put a 2000 kg shell in orbit.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by Spacekiwi   » Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:21 am

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Lord Skimper wrote:
The standard 16" gun was 2500 ft every second.

Bulls super 5" was 10,000 ft / s.

His 16.4". Holds the record of 180 km in height.

His 39" was designed to put a 2000 kg shell in orbit.




Ok then. Wikipedia and other sources state low earth orbit to be around 160 km to 2000 km, so lets call it 250km orbit. Thats 820,000 feet, or 82 seconds from ground to space for bulls super 5. so that gives a starting point for reaction time to avoid a shell/missile.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by 7thsealord   » Wed Sep 11, 2013 7:23 am

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Spacekiwi wrote:
Lord Skimper wrote:
The standard 16" gun was 2500 ft every second.

Bulls super 5" was 10,000 ft / s.

His 16.4". Holds the record of 180 km in height.

His 39" was designed to put a 2000 kg shell in orbit.




Ok then. Wikipedia and other sources state low earth orbit to be around 160 km to 2000 km, so lets call it 250km orbit. Thats 820,000 feet, or 82 seconds from ground to space for bulls super 5. so that gives a starting point for reaction time to avoid a shell/missile.


Then there is the RATE of fire for our space gun. If we accept that travel time to target is circa 82 seconds, how many rounds can it squeeze off per minute?

May be hard to believe, but I am not being intentionally sarky about this, no matter how it sounds. Just trying to make a point.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by munroburton   » Wed Sep 11, 2013 9:19 am

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Lord Skimper wrote:One could always shoot them. Gerald Bull, before he went nuts, used to shoot 16" guns from Quebec into space. Presumedly a 16" battleship gun would do a fair amount of damage to anything in orbit. Let alone the 1000mm gun he designed for Saddam.


The issue with this type of launching platform is its weight and hence lack of portability. If it's slow or fixed in place, counter-fire will neutralise it quickly.

A 16" battleship gun weights 120 tons. Bull's space gun had a doubled barrel length, easily adding another 30 or 50 tons. The Big Babylon gun was about 2,100 tons and 100 metres long. On land or water, something large enough to move either gun would be easily spotted with a projectile's backtrack, so it has to be underwater.

The Ohio class submarine is by comparison 17,000 tons and 170 metres long. The Typhoon is even larger at 25,000 tons. I'm no sub engineer and I imagine it'd be tricky designing a vessel to operate horizontally and vertically, but wrapping a submarine around a Big Babylon(think Shrike and graser) and surfacing in vertical mode would give you sea-to-space strike capability with reasonable stealth and mobility.

Might also be quicker to submerge in vertical mode - hell, the propeller would be available to assist on that axis, so it could aim from underwater, surface quickly, fire, submerge and run.

This is assuming the aliens don't have sensors that can see through water to the ocean floors.
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Re: How do you Defeat Aliens who control the Orbitals?
Post by biochem   » Wed Sep 11, 2013 12:53 pm

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Or the computer geeks of the world could learn the programming language of the the alien's computers, hack the computers and program the vessels to crash into each other. Much easier said than done since there is no reason to suppose that alien computer languages would bear any resemblance to human ones.
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