Life & Temperatures on Titan

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Titan would be too cold for most nanotech

Yet another option I'm now considering for 'reasonably big guns for reasonably big emergencies' weaponry: orbital weapons platforms.

After some quick envelope-back doodling with Spaceships' numbers, I'm thinking of some SM+8 platforms, say a constellation of a dozen (plus spares) so that at least four are in range of any point on Titan's surface without needing to manoeuvre. (A 6-hour orbit around Titan has a radius of 2,940 miles, or 1,330 miles above the surface.)

Titan's atmosphere blocks particle beams, and because of its particular kind of constant cloud-cover I'll say it blocks UV lasers pretty thoroughly as well, but some near-IR lasers (which I'd build in Spaceships as "lasers") could poke through some transparency-gap frequencies. At 1.5 atm, the atmosphere also provides dDR 30 from those lasers, meaning we need at least an SM+8 spinal mount beam to do much of anything to the surface.

A SM+8 spinal laser is 1GJ, with a range of 1500/3000 miles, doing 4dx5 - 30 dDamage, or about 400 normal-scale damage every 10 seconds. (Going up to SM+11, about as high as the budget could possibly stand, would only increase that to 1,800 norm-damage per 10 seconds.) Not much, really, compared to even man-portable missiles; but it can be applied near-instantly to anywhere on Titan's surface.

For more serious damage (that won't trigger protests from any anti-nuclear activists), we could throw in an SM+8 spinal-mount 40cm missile launcher. With a delta-v of up to 20 mps, and dDmg of 6d*100*mps, a typical impact will do an average of 420,000 normal-scale damage. (Which is on roughly the same order of damage as the pressure from a 100 kt nuke warhead, minus the radiation.) Of course, it takes about 5.5 minutes to accelerate up to that speed, which takes place over 3,335 miles, so it's only a "near-instantly" available weapon instead of a light-speed one.

(Another option might be to swap out the missiles for the bombs from SS4p40, which only cost $67k a pop instead of $2M; but without a speed stat, I'm not sure how to calculate damage for them, or how long they'd take to impact the surface.)

(EM guns would also be cheaper than missiles, and only doing half the damage isn't really much of an issue; but SS3 seems to imply the rounds travel at 60 miles per minute, so travelling 1500 miles would take 25 minutes, which could be more problematic.)


Anyone care to point out important flaws in the concept, before I work out a full Spaceships writeup? :)