It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill

Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by logfromblammo on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @11:31AM (#10738682)

16 Psyche is the most massive M-class asteroid in the Sol system. It has mass ~2e19 kg, which could be reworked into a spherical iron shell 100m thick with outer radius ~1400km. Rather than fill up the whole interior with incomprehensible machinery and bottomless pits, I'd just put everything interesting near the surface shell, rotate the whole thing at 40 minutes per revolution to get some decent artificial gravity in the equatorial region, put the spaceports at the poles, and use the big empty space in the middle for the boron-11 plasma containment and proton beams. Panels on the inside surface of the shell could convert charged particles from the center reactor into electricity.

Skip the big weapon. The propulsion system is your weapon.

It's a good thing Earthican engineers can use stories received from distant galaxies as cautionary tales on how not to build non-planetary habitats.

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Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by pavel_lishin on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @12:10PM (#10738904)

> Skip the big weapon. The propulsion system is your weapon.

Ah, the Kzinti Lesson.

But I think that a hollow asteroid that big would be difficult to aim, and to move - you're a very slow sitting duck that may not be able to swing its guns around on the enemy in time - and that's assuming there's only one target at a time.

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Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by logfromblammo on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @12:50PM (#10739178)

If you need destroy smaller, more nimble targets, you launch nuclear missiles. Or you spray cheap gravel into your expensive target's flight path.

Space combat is won by the guy who detects the enemy first.

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Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by stcredzero on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @03:10PM (#10740119)

And yet, most space combat know-it-alls discount the utility of stealth in space. Stealth doesn't have to be absolute and bullet-proof to be useful. And there's nothing against the laws of thermodynamics in restricting all of your emissions beyond that of a 3-deg Kelvin blackbody to a 20 degree cone.

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Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by Shivetya on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @12:34PM (#10739060)

better yet, EE Doc Smith and using planets moving at light speed (including an anti-planet) and using them as weapons. Lensmen series had some seriously over powered weapons but throwing planets was one of the better one. I think one example was taking a planet from an alternate universe which itself was moving at light speed and dropping those puppies into ours

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Re:It's a Trap: Emperor Palpatine's Poison Pill by arethuza on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @01:53PM (#10739612)

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has even the puny humans using kamikaze neutrons stars while the main players the Xeelee (in the Baryonic corner) and the Photino Birds (in the Dark Matter corner) slug it out with cosmic strings and weaponized galaxies.

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