[World Building] A Future History of Space Force

[sir_pudding]

A loitering "bus missile" with command authority is a warship. It may be technically unmanned, but the intelligence on board required to make tactical, operational and strategic decisions that support your goals means this is effectively irrelevant.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

A loitering "bus missile" with command authority is a warship.

True, but the only reason you make a loitering missile is because you're not sure if you're going to need to attack at all, and the uncertainty is high enough that it's not cheaper to just self-destruct the missile if it proves unnecessary. This basically means a 'warship' is not actually a tool of war, it's a tool for peacetime enforcement.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Anthony

True, but the only reason you make a loitering missile is because you're not sure if you're going to need to attack at all, and the uncertainty is high enough that it's not cheaper to just self-destruct the missile if it proves unnecessary. This basically means a 'warship' is not actually a tool of war, it's a tool for peacetime enforcement.

There are quite a few wartime situations in which it's probably not ideal to have no assets closer than months and no intelligence without minutes of lag.

[Polydamas]

Anyways, the OP wants to imagine active-duty US Space Force personnel outside of Earth's atmosphere, so we want to find a task for them to do before we focus on weapons systems. Stories are about people not autonomous grapple vehicle #563.

I already mentioned intelligence collection (or deploying intelligence collection systems) and the possibility of one or a few Space Force personnel on a ship with civilian or non-active-military crew.

If we postulate a settlement beyond earth, its not hard to imagine it having a mostly or entirely military staff, given the risks involved (cancer, bone degradation, lack of access to medicine and hospitals). Settlements beyond earth would also need policing but its harder for me to imagine the military getting that job given US traditions.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Anyways, the OP wants to imagine active-duty US Space Force personnel outside of Earth's atmosphere, so we want to find a task for them to do before we focus on weapons systems. Stories are about people not autonomous grapple vehicle #563.

The stand of the ROU Killing Time in the battle of Pittance would seem to be a counterpoint.

I already mentioned intelligence collection (or deploying intelligence collection systems). If we postulate a settlement beyond earth, its not hard to imagine it having a mostly or entirely military staff, given the risks involved (cancer, bone degradation, lack of access to medicine and hospitals). Settlements beyond earth would also need policing but its harder for me to imagine the military getting that job given US traditions.

Well, ultimately the only reason to put people in outer space is going to be a desire to put people in outer space (barring reasons for a lower-tech space program like the Lady Astronaut books, or The Cassini Division) so we can debate about how likely a goal that actually is, but it's probably still going to need to be a priority for anybody do it.

One obvious reason is that the political system doesn't or can't trust AI to make strategic policy decisions, or simply (and this is very likely) AI can't be held accountable for its decisions in a way the political system is comfortable with.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The stand of the ROU Killing Time in the battle of Pittance would seem to be a counterpoint.

I bounced off the one or two Ian M. Banks books I tried, but in stories where the main character is 'an alien' or 'a murderbot,' the alien or the murderbot almost always thinks like a human person and emotes like a human person (they are not stranger than a foreigner from a different class with a different neurotype). The exceptions tend to be hard to write, and RPG settings have to be settings in which half a dozen average Janes can improvise adventure stories after a day of work / school / parenting.

If we postulate that the Space Force sends a warship to guard the asteroid mines, that begs questions like "are the mines fully automated or do civilians decide which asteroids to send to the solar smelters?" and "guard them from who?" (and "guarding is boring, what will the adventure be about?")

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

given the risks involved (cancer, bone degradation, lack of access to medicine and hospitals). Sns.

The setting goals pretty much demand that you handwaive away the standard Gurps radiation rules. What works with those (even with full TL 9 anti-radiation tech) is that 18 month mission to Mars. Even then you probably have to use TL9 Gene Therapy for Cancer and Radiation removal from Bio-tech after every mission. That's more than an added 100k$ for every crew member.

TL10 anti-rad tech goes farther and with bigger ships built in orbit from space collected resources you can put off the radiation rehab for 10 to 20 years.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

If the battle is in Earth orbit, then any space-based weapons will be overwhelmed by missiles launched from earth as soon as a belligerent rotates into the right position and its missiles reach orbit. At least one nation has destroyed an object in Earth orbit with an anti-satellite missile whereas everyone's anti-satellite satellites, drones, and ROVs are secret and untested.

For lower altitude satellites you don't need to get something into orbit. Just launch a rocket straight up, such that it's trajectory intersects that of the satellite either on the way up or the way back down. The warhead can be as simple as a mess of nails or ball-bearing balls with a small bursting charge to disperse them to allow for the fact you'll almost certainly be get a near-miss otherwise. The closing velocity of the orbiting target will do the killing quite nicely.

I think big sounding rockets are rarer than they were in previous decades, but this is something a bunch of university undergraduates could manage with one. Even a small government could fund this out of petty cash, even without an off the shelf rocket.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

E
This is going to heavily influence the cost of the missile. Let's just use spaceships design as a rough benchmarking system: a missile with 18 fuel tank systems, 1 engine and 1 command center can have up to 6.75 mps of delta-v. This is enough to reach LEO and have a substantial amount of maneuver left over, but it can't reach higher or more distant orbits. A missile in LEO could target launch to *mars*(whether it is gonna survive the 9 month trip and be effective is a different story), as well as being able to intercept pretty much any target in cislunar space. To be able to target higher orbits, an earth based system would need to use staging, which increases the mass(and cost) of the missile substantially.

But you had to lift that orbiter into orbit, meaning an extra stage or two to launch it. If you can do that to an orbiter, you can loft a simple missile with the same system. The advantage a satellite has is that it can loiter until needed, possibly camouflaged as some civilian system (as many old Soviet satellites did) until it's needed. The disadvantages of this are a smaller payload (in this case mostly meaning less delta-V), and that it can be killed while dormant if the enemy identifies it.