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Originally Posted by kdtipa
People keep talking about GSO... but... that would be a fairly limiting thing for a space station using lasers to attack the ground. Its options for targets are limited to the side of the planet it's on. Maybe it can manage a continent? |
From GSO one can cover about a third of the globe, though the edges of that area will have annoyingly steep angles of fire and vision. However, if you're not in a tearing hurry you can just adjust your orbit a bit and let the planet slowly rotate until you're over whatever you want to blast, and then adjust your orbit back to an exact 24-hours.
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You might be better off with Lagrange Points. That way the station would have visibility to any place that also has visibility to the moon (assuming you don't choose point #2 in their diagram in that wiki article).
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That's a lot further away, outside the range of any of the beam weapons in
Spaceships. Using
Spaceships 3, that's inside the 1/2D range of a 100TJ+ Graser, X-Ray, or UV laser. However SS says that Grasers and X-ray lasers can't be used for orbit to ground attack through an atmosphere. Given that UT also sharply limits the range of UV lasers, they should probably also be so restricted. Thus the L-points are too far away to make useful positions from which to make beam weapon attacks on Eath's surface.
Sitting at the L-points also means that you are exchanging covering a limited area at all times for limited coverage times over the whole Earth. Neither is ideal, of course.