[World Building] A Future History of Space Force

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

(did those missions have crew with specific qualifications?)

I believe most astronauts had Secret or even Top Secret security clearance or similar, as by necessity they had access to national secrets involving the technology in their craft. Having that level of clearance automatically means you've been vetted as someone who won't spill the beans about the secrets you learn as a result of it, and thus can be similarly relied upon to not tell anyone that you dropped off half a dozen spy satellites during your mission. That seems like the only qualification required to undertake such a mission that might not have been required to be on any mission involving the deployment of satellites.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Unguided projectiles are not going to be very effective past very short distances and very close relative speeds. Rendezvous in orbit is not easy, not by a long shot, and it gets harder if the target is capable of counter maneuver. Muzzle velocity for chemical slug throwers is pretty low, around 1 to 1.5km/sec in terms of deltaV, which isn't a lot of budget to close with the target. Even something like a 120mm cannon is only pushing around 1.75 km/sec.

At around 2.7ish km/sec, kinetic energy of a mass is essentially equivalent to the detonation of an equal mass of high explosive. A shipkiller projectile just has to be a solid, inert mass, moving at several kilometers a second. So a missile that's capable of mid course correction *and* a final boost to kill phase is going to out perform guns by substantial margin.

I think the idea is to have a wide cone of effect. An impactor needs to directly hit the target to do anything. Something that explodes shortly before hitting the target will instead spread out into a cone of smaller high-velocity impactors, increasing the chance of a hit (the individual hits won't be as powerful as the original impactor hitting, but you don't need many of them to take out a typical spacecraft/station/satellite). In theory, something with a turret-mounted slugthrower or thirty could instead spit out a much wider cone of bullets than the proximity-detonated missile could. I'm not certain it actually would be able to do so effectively, however, and any energy added on from firing these guns would probably be less than what you'd impart to ~half of the fragments by using the mass needed for the guns and their ammunition for an explosive instead.