The Role of Ground Forces in Interstellar Warfare

[Doomsought]

Movie inconsistencies aside, conventional artillery in sufficient quantity also wipes out cities, and if the city is well defended and has to be taken with ground forces, it will be used in said sufficient quantity anyway. So in that scenario, not using orbital bombardment to not destroy the city is kinda pointless.

The thing is you don't know the quality of enemy moral before hand. The city might roll over and surrender as soon as you overcome the official soldiery. If your standard operating procedure starts out with burning cities though, that will never happen. That type of reputation gets around, and can stick for generations.

 

[Marduk]

The thing is you don't know the quality of enemy moral before hand.

You do or you don't, intelligence in space invasions may be kinda important. You *may* want to know who your opponents are and whether you are invading Cadia or Space Iraq.
And speaking of, that's another potential grade of opposition. The kind packed with high end sci fi defensive technologies that look at general orbital bombardment and just aren't too impressed with that because the place is so fortified that it puts Taiwan to shame.

The city might roll over and surrender as soon as you overcome the official soldiery. If your standard operating procedure starts out with burning cities though, that will never happen. That type of reputation gets around, and can stick for generations.

The real shit starts when the official soldiery entrenches itself in the city and prepares itself for a grinding, Stalingrad style fight that may last years, as art of war gives many reasons for. What now?

 

[Doomsought]

The real shit starts when the official soldiery entrenches itself in the city and prepares itself for a grinding, Stalingrad style fight that may last years, as art of war gives many reasons for. What now?

You have to try to do things honorable first. You can always escalate your ROE, but you can't take back bombing out a city.

 

[Marduk]

You have to try to do things honorable first. You can always escalate your ROE, but you can't take back bombing out a city.

>always
Not always, you will never get back the time, landers and troops lost trying to act as if you are invading Space Iraq if it turns out to be a mistake. Whatever you do next, you will have to do it without those.

 

[JagerIV]

It is. Some better drones are about half as fast as subsonic missiles, still the range\cost curve can be *wildly* different. You are trying to shove extremely complex technological paradigms with a lot of cheats and exceptions and factors that matter in one application but not in other into simple graphs.

As above.

And you complained about bringing in pointless details... Battery packs are a tiny part of a missile's cost and weight budget either way.

And yet the recent military actions by major powers have been exemplified by use of 50 million dollar jets to drop few hundred k worth of guided bombs on targets that technically could be handled by a bunch of commandos with rifles instead.
Not because it was most cost effective, but because of political considerations, logistics, force preservation and timing.
Cost is not the only military consideration in what weapons get used, often its far from dominant one, we don't have to pretend otherwise.

Timing is in fact a big one that you are not accounting for - such quick acting, strategic weapons can hit a target before it takes cover, changes its position, spends its ordnance or otherwise hitting it becomes less viable or meaningful, that's what makes those weapons so valuable.

This comes back to your assumption that I'm an idiot, and not listening to what I'm actually saying: what was one of the "costs" I mentioned? Collateral damage. My entire argument about the 60 second impact vs 6 minute impact for a 300 vs 3,000 km range was time to target: that it gives time to reposition and respond that a shorter time to impact does. I spent paragraphs discussing things I'm "not accounting for".

Spending more money than the enemy is always an advantage. The idea that this makes all cost consideration, especially, as I previous said, "all relevant costs", which include political, logistical, and many others, as has has been pretty clear from all my previous discussions, which your argument seems to rest on not having read, or you play the hatching and just pretend normally assumed parts of a conversation are not in play.

Also, that the US did something does not mean it was cost effective, even using the proper broad conception of cost effective.

The people who will argue that the US was "cost effective" in spending 20 years, roughly 4k western dead, 70k ANSF dead, and 1-2.3 trillion dollars in order to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban are probably a very small portion of the population.

Notice how we do often talk about costs of "lives, dollars and years". As said, its annoying that I seemingly have to make explicit that when talking about the "costs of war", we are generally talking in broader terms than just dollars. We generally are talking broader when we discuss any "cost", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is honest confusion, and not a dishonest debate tactic.

Movie logic. The whole BDZ term comes from other Star Wars media, and they do orbital fire support in many games. We don't care about movie logic here.

You ran yourself into analysis of movie logic based events, not even an in-setting paradigm.

Base Delta Zero

That 'Base Delta Zero' initiative the Empire keeps talking about? The new 'key to planetary liberation'? Don't believe it. It's a military code phrase, and it means TOTAL EXTERMINATION OF A TARGET POPULATION. It's completely loathsome.Sabine Wren, in her private journal Base Delta Zero (Δ) was...

starwars.fandom.com

Orbital bombardment

Orbital bombardment, also known as an orbital strike, was a military strategy, where capital ships (such as Star Destroyers) would fire their main cannons from orbit to the surface of a planet, causing heavy damage to the designated target and its surrounding area. This strategy was used mostly...

starwars.fandom.com

"or the Star Destroyers are involved in general large scale strategic bombardment, glassing cities, not individual bunkers."
JagerIV

Oh look, you arguing I didn't address something I obviously did. You really don't actually read or think about anything I say do you?

Yes, a movie franchise has some movie logic.

Gungans were never truly a peer opponent to the Trade Federation to begin with, and they cared about taking the capital relatively intact. Neither side expected modern style urban warfare in the process, which would sorta destroy it anyway.
For what happens in modern warfare when an army faces even near-peer opposition in taking a city, even without use of strategic weapons, see: Stalingrad, Aleppo, Mariupol, Grozny.

Oh, are you suggesting that collateral damage... might be a cost?! A breakthrough! Embrace the broader conception of cost!

Also, why the hell would advanced space age capital ship weapons be unable to do do what WW2 warships absolutely can do? 20m m^2 may look impressive, before you realize that even something as boring as a 155mm artillery shell has lethal radius against infantry of something about 50 meters with optimal shells, which means about 8000 square meters.
Which means statistically, you would need to fire 2500 of such shells over such area, and the rest is statistics.
An artillery brigade of 36 guns doing sustained fire (2 rounds per minute) would take 35 minutes to provide the required amount of fire. Suddenly it's not unreasonable at all...
Back to the ship analogy, you might need something along the lines of WW2 light cruiser to provide similar level of fire support even quicker (12 6 inch guns, 8 rpm thanks to semi automatic loading).

Do not underestimate the power of artillery, which orbital bombardment can be a very good stand-in for.

Of course, then you can look at what artillery actually achieves. For 2,500 shells killing a Battalion, that's 5 shells per casualties. I'm not sure of very many situations where that occurs.

Doing more detailed math, 500 men would be, roughly, 500 m^2 of individual targets. So, of the 20 million m^2, 500 m has a person on it, .0025%, while assuming 155 caliber scale guns some 150 casualty range, for about 70k m^2, some 0.35% of a 5 km dimeter. This suggest roughly a 1-500 shots has a good probability of hitting someone, or roughly a 0.2% chance to inflict a casualty per round. If instead it inflicts 10 casualties on a hit, one could also say any individual round inflicts 0.004% casualties. So, 1,000 shots would produce roughly 20 casualties. 10,000 shots inflict roughly 164 casualties. 100,000 rounds should produce nearly 100% casualties, though your increasingly pushing some limits of the statically models I'm using.

And all this is assuming a fairly low orbit. Higher orbits make the efficiency of the orbital bombardment lower, requiring more volume of fire and strength of shot to compensate. Which gets into the other problems.

Rods from god are massively inefficient for destroying tanks (unless you make it some sort of cluster of frag weapon somehow, they are best suited against bunkers), and most of the cost would be the ridiculous modern day space lift cost.
How many times a day does a Javelin have a "window" to hit a tank thousands of kilometers away?

Which is where "marginal/opportunity costs" come in. You can put up a $100 million dollar satellite which has a 90% chance of not being over the target when you need it, a 99.9% if the enemy has good awareness of positioning. Or you can buy 100 Javelins for $25 million, A V-22 equivalent for $60 million, and $25 million on pay and training for a platoon, and you can, with a fair degree of reliability, move those Javelins where they need to be within a day. Giving you much, more utility and effectiveness for the same cost.

Is the ground forces always going to be the best choice? Of course not. Well, currently its basically always. But assumedly in the future things will change to the point where sometimes orbital fires are a better option than planetary fires. The big question is not if orbital weapons make sense at all, but whether the balance is 80/20 planetary/orbital (my rough feeling), something 50/50, or 10/90, where almost all firepower is delivered from orbitals and planetary forces are just a tiny support to an orbital force.

Put a nuclear 16x200kt MIRV on top of it and you have a 50-100m USD weapon, which will rout an armored division or few, with some proportion of it destroyed and the rest damaged, not destroy single tank, which looks far better economics wise - you're not getting an armored division for 100m.

If you account for the cost of deploying whole divisions of troops from the orbit, and fighting through hundreds of kilometers of unknown terrain to get your own tank with its support and logistics within 2 km of the enemy tank, and the losses they will take in the process, it can be much cheaper.

Yes, autistically focusing on a narrow definition of cost suggests nukes makes everything else obsolete, just as it did in 1950.

I think your underestimating even direct financial cost there, but lets broaden our definition just a tiny little bit and consider collateral damage to be a real cost. Maybe you want to capture a more intact economy and people to tax them. Destroying everything is more stuff you have to spend to fix, and cuts into your revenue. Maybe the place has people you actually care about. Lets assign a material cost to this.

US median household income is roughly $70,000. Lets round up to $100,000, for simplicity. Average build cost of a new house is $200,000. Lets very roughly value a destroyed/killed household at $500,000 then. Global population density (land excluding Antarctica) is about 60 per km. Say then an average of 10 households per km^2, for a (effectively lowballed) estimate of $5 million in collateral damage you care about. A 200 kt bomb devastates about 100 km^2. Therefore, the collateral damage cost of using a nuke comes out to $500 million dollars per warhead. The cost of the 16 nukes therefore is at least $8 billion collateral damage under extremely optimistic numbers.

Somewhere as population dense as NY State, which is still not particularly population dense overall at 166 per km^2, would suggest around $16 billion dollars in damage per missile, or roughly $200 billion dollars in overall cost. And this is still probably a low ball estimate. If collateral damage matters at all, nukes start looking a lot less cheap, on top of all the other issues with them.

 

[Marduk]

This comes back to your assumption that I'm an idiot, and not listening to what I'm actually saying: what was one of the "costs" I mentioned? Collateral damage. My entire argument about the 60 second impact vs 6 minute impact for a 300 vs 3,000 km range was time to target: that it gives time to reposition and respond that a shorter time to impact does. I spent paragraphs discussing things I'm "not accounting for".

Spending more money than the enemy is always an advantage. The idea that this makes all cost consideration, especially, as I previous said, "all relevant costs", which include political, logistical, and many others, as has has been pretty clear from all my previous discussions, which your argument seems to rest on not having read, or you play the hatching and just pretend normally assumed parts of a conversation are not in play.

Also, that the US did something does not mean it was cost effective, even using the proper broad conception of cost effective.

The people who will argue that the US was "cost effective" in spending 20 years, roughly 4k western dead, 70k ANSF dead, and 1-2.3 trillion dollars in order to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban are probably a very small portion of the population.

Notice how we do often talk about costs of "lives, dollars and years". As said, its annoying that I seemingly have to make explicit that when talking about the "costs of war", we are generally talking in broader terms than just dollars. We generally are talking broader when we discuss any "cost", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is honest confusion, and not a dishonest debate tactic.



"or the Star Destroyers are involved in general large scale strategic bombardment, glassing cities, not individual bunkers."
JagerIV

Oh look, you arguing I didn't address something I obviously did. You really don't actually read or think about anything I say do you?

Yes, a movie franchise has some movie logic.



Oh, are you suggesting that collateral damage... might be a cost?! A breakthrough! Embrace the broader conception of cost!

But only if you decide to...
But in a peer opponent, large scale planetary invasion... If you act like it is, then it's the enemy who will be left with the benefits of your "cost savings" as your invasion force gets completely destroyed on landing.
Hence things like "broader conception of a cost" are very situational, and reluctance to use heavy firepower is generally a luxury afforded to peacekeeping operations and other already vastly overwhelming forces, not for peer warfare.

Of course, then you can look at what artillery actually achieves. For 2,500 shells killing a Battalion, that's 5 shells per casualties. I'm not sure of very many situations where that occurs.

And by general military economics, that's a fine deal, dumb shells are cheap.

Doing more detailed math, 500 men would be, roughly, 500 m^2 of individual targets. So, of the 20 million m^2, 500 m has a person on it, .0025%, while assuming 155 caliber scale guns some 150 casualty range, for about 70k m^2, some 0.35% of a 5 km dimeter. This suggest roughly a 1-500 shots has a good probability of hitting someone, or roughly a 0.2% chance to inflict a casualty per round. If instead it inflicts 10 casualties on a hit, one could also say any individual round inflicts 0.004% casualties. So, 1,000 shots would produce roughly 20 casualties. 10,000 shots inflict roughly 164 casualties. 100,000 rounds should produce nearly 100% casualties, though your increasingly pushing some limits of the statically models I'm using.

And all this is assuming a fairly low orbit. Higher orbits make the efficiency of the orbital bombardment lower, requiring more volume of fire and strength of shot to compensate. Which gets into the other problems.

I have no idea what you did there with that math. 100k shells, evenly distributed, covers 800 million square meters, considerably more than the previously mentioned 20 million.
Still, at modern prices, and hypothetical basic artillery shell, we are talking of ~50 million USD.
Still worthwhile for a non-shitty infantry battalion, and that goes with an assumption there are no other enemy targets within 5km. A single advanced AA system can cost more than this.

Which is where "marginal/opportunity costs" come in. You can put up a $100 million dollar satellite which has a 90% chance of not being over the target when you need it, a 99.9% if the enemy has good awareness of positioning. Or you can buy 100 Javelins for $25 million, A V-22 equivalent for $60 million, and $25 million on pay and training for a platoon, and you can, with a fair degree of reliability, move those Javelins where they need to be within a day. Giving you much, more utility and effectiveness for the same cost.

And the enemy buys a pickup truck and puts a nice SHORAD on it for $5 million.
Platoon gets shot down on approach in their V-22.
You can do this sort of "economy warfare" if it's some low intensity guerilla conflict, something like Somalia, not in even near peer large scale warfare where mobility has to be limited by enemy action.

Also sats would be *much* cheaper in the age of transporting whole armies between planets, currently its lift costs and related optimizations that make them so pricey.

Is the ground forces always going to be the best choice? Of course not. Well, currently its basically always. But assumedly in the future things will change to the point where sometimes orbital fires are a better option than planetary fires. The big question is not if orbital weapons make sense at all, but whether the balance is 80/20 planetary/orbital (my rough feeling), something 50/50, or 10/90, where almost all firepower is delivered from orbitals and planetary forces are just a tiny support to an orbital force.

My point is that if you are invading a planet, you already necessarily have to bring along huge amounts of orbital support to make the ground force deployment possible in the first place.
If so, that or slight increase in its size, can massively outweight the firepower of the ground component. Use it or not, it's there, and if the going gets tough down there (which in peer opponent scenario would from the first second) using it would be the obvious option.

Yes, autistically focusing on a narrow definition of cost suggests nukes makes everything else obsolete, just as it did in 1950.

I think your underestimating even direct financial cost there, but lets broaden our definition just a tiny little bit and consider collateral damage to be a real cost. Maybe you want to capture a more intact economy and people to tax them. Destroying everything is more stuff you have to spend to fix, and cuts into your revenue. Maybe the place has people you actually care about. Lets assign a material cost to this.

US median household income is roughly $70,000. Lets round up to $100,000, for simplicity. Average build cost of a new house is $200,000. Lets very roughly value a destroyed/killed household at $500,000 then. Global population density (land excluding Antarctica) is about 60 per km. Say then an average of 10 households per km^2, for a (effectively lowballed) estimate of $5 million in collateral damage you care about. A 200 kt bomb devastates about 100 km^2. Therefore, the collateral damage cost of using a nuke comes out to $500 million dollars per warhead. The cost of the 16 nukes therefore is at least $8 billion collateral damage under extremely optimistic numbers.

Somewhere as population dense as NY State, which is still not particularly population dense overall at 166 per km^2, would suggest around $16 billion dollars in damage per missile, or roughly $200 billion dollars in overall cost. And this is still probably a low ball estimate. If collateral damage matters at all, nukes start looking a lot less cheap, on top of all the other issues with them.

No one sane calculates stuff that, even the battle lawyer infested GWOT western armies.

The core problem is, that this gets flipped on its head if your invasion fails, because all that wealth keeps serving the other side. It also becomes collateral damage if the enemy decides to defend it from your ground forces in urban warfare. That's the point i'm trying to make - in peer interplanetary warfare, there would be inherently a lot of incentive to reach for big firepower toys, because a lot of stuff is bound to be destroyed in the end no matter how you try to take it, and if so, better destroy it the easy way quickly than the hard way slowly.

Sure, you can forego flattening some less important cities that have no defense beyond a police station and some MP company, but any place with likely serious opposition? Easier to whack it with the biggest stick you can spare than grind your painstakingly transported between planets/star systems divisions, who will mostly destroy it in the process anyway, even if they win.

 

[JagerIV]

But only if you decide to...
But in a peer opponent, large scale planetary invasion... If you act like it is, then it's the enemy who will be left with the benefits of your "cost savings" as your invasion force gets completely destroyed on landing.
Hence things like "broader conception of a cost" are very situational, and reluctance to use heavy firepower is generally a luxury afforded to peacekeeping operations and other already vastly overwhelming forces, not for peer warfare.

All costs are situational, so this isn't a particularly impactful critique. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure the number of situations where killing a 100,000 civilians, potentially your own civilians, to kill a 1,000 enemy forces is the right move is a particularly large category. Accounting for other costs is optional. Not accounting for relevant costs, or accounting for them badly, is also stupid and self destructive.

Say Poland got occupied by the space Nazis, and the free polish space force had to come in an liberate Poland. Option 1 is general nuking to clear out the space Nazis, killing 30% of the polish civilian population, about 12 million civilians, in the preparatory bombardment, then only lose 30k troops. Or, you don't use more limited, less indiscriminate means, lose 10x as many soldiers of 300k or so, but civilian casualties are closer to France in WWII, around 1%, or about 400k casualties. Is each polish soldier worth 42 polish civilians?

Is the above consideration something the Polish high command can simply "decide" to take into account or not?

Say it was space America liberating you from the space Nazis: are you going to feel indifferent between a space America willing to sacrifice 40 poles per American life, vs a space America willing to sacrifice 1 American life to save 40 Poles? Would you suggest that choice would have no impact on your opinion of the new masters/liberators?

And by general military economics, that's a fine deal, dumb shells are cheap.

From my quote: "I'm not sure of very many situations where that occurs." That is the important part, my critique of your point, not my restatement of your point.

I have no idea what you did there with that math. 100k shells, evenly distributed, covers 800 million square meters, considerably more than the previously mentioned 20 million.
Still, at modern prices, and hypothetical basic artillery shell, we are talking of ~50 million USD.
Still worthwhile for a non-shitty infantry battalion, and that goes with an assumption there are no other enemy targets within 5km. A single advanced AA system can cost more than this.

The math is fairly simple: in a random distribution, the position of any one shell is independent of the prior one: this is a measure of the spread within the limit of the ships accuracy, not some purposeful grid pattern. Any one shot covers roughly 1/250th of the area. Lets assume it down to a 1/250th chance to hit on any one shot, in case with my complexity I made a mistake, just to illustrate the math.

So, the first shot had a 1/250th chance of scoring a kill. Or, another way, everyone has a 99.6% chance of surviving.

What's the chance of killing someone on the second shot? Well, they're independent, so its still 1/250. People thus had a 99.6% chance of surviving the first shot, and a 99.6% chance of surviving the second. Or, we could write that as 0.996^(2), or 99.2%. Statistically this suggest, out of 500, 498 survive the first shot, 496 survive the second, etcetera. 100 shots, .996^100=66.97% survive, or 334.

Its possible though I made an error there though, redoing my math gives a different order of magnitude.

And the enemy buys a pickup truck and puts a nice SHORAD on it for $5 million.
Platoon gets shot down on approach in their V-22.
You can do this sort of "economy warfare" if it's some low intensity guerilla conflict, something like Somalia, not in even near peer large scale warfare where mobility has to be limited by enemy action.

Also sats would be *much* cheaper in the age of transporting whole armies between planets, currently its lift costs and related optimizations that make them so pricey.

Huh, its almost as if extra range might, cost more? Perhaps? But no, you've already proven this is an absurd general assumption! Surely your not reversing yourself here!

Eh, Sats might be cheaper. Satellites are likely to be expensive for many of the same reasons ground based precision weapons are: they're highly complex machines that need to work in tough situations under exacting standards: a kinetic round has to be guided to be worthwhile, as I think we've established: the ranges are too great for plausible ballistic accuracy under most reasonable assumptions.

A 50 kg planetary Excalibur round cost roughly $50,000 dollars, an equivalent to $1 million dollars per ton. Falcon Heavy based on the first sketchy source I could find suggests Falcon Heavy is already under $1,000 per kg to LEO, so delivery cost would thus be roughly $1 million per ton. So, cheaper transport costs to "free", assuming space Excalibur would be the same per unit cost as planetary Excalibur is a 50% cost saving. Which is nice, but 1) not plausible, and 2) not as much as one would hope for.

In actuality, space Excalibur is likely to actually be more expensive per kg and heavier than planetary Excalibur: with longer ranges at higher speeds, finer maneuverability is needed to preserve accuracy. It needs some ability to course correct in space, thin atmosphere, and thick atmosphere. It needs to not burn up in the atmosphere. Conventional heat shields seem to be in the 5-20% of rentry mass range, so that alone might grow the weapon weight by 10 or so kg. Getting through atmosphere fast you want something like 10 tons/meter. A current Excalibur only has roughly 2.7 tons/meter. So you would also likely want some mixture of more weight and narrow round to get through the atmosphere with good speed, which is going to increase cost.

So, a tactical orbiting weapons platform might have a 100 rounds for roughly 10 tons of weight at $250,000 per round, in line with a Javelin, for a total ammo cost of $25 million dollars, and when a Gripen costs $30 million flyaway, $4 million per ton, if the vehicle had overall dry weight of 10 tons, that would be roughly $40 million for the vehicle, total cost roughly $65 million. Current, still quite high, transport costs boosts this overall cost to $85 million, a roughly 30% increase.

Its my impression we are already approaching, if not already, at a point where for many of the tasks we've discussed in this thread, space launch cost would already not be the driving cost concern.

This is especially true when nukes are involved: direct cost estimates are extremely hard to find, but the US current costs seems to be in the $20 million per warhead range for a roughly 200 kg weapon, a per ton cost of $100 million dollars per ton. At such a price point, nuclear weapons transport cost would be just 1% construction costs even at current high costs.

The tech involved has such high innate costs that I'm not sure relatively cheap transport costs will actually make "cheap" orbital platforms. As you mention earlier, ground SAM systems can cost $50 million each, and a space system is likely to be more demanding than current SAMs, not less, and have a higher cost point. Your OSM (Orbit to Surface missile) platform could quite likely cost $100 million, with transport costs being relatively minor proportion, outside of cheap lift being necessary for the logistical operation of such a craft, such as the ability to refuel and re-arm at relatively non-crippling costs. It might not super matter if your $5 million dollar a ton SAM costs $100,000 a ton to deliver. It does matter if the 10 tons of $1,000 a ton rocket fuel you need to deliver every week to maintain maneuverability cost $100,000 per ton.

 

[Marduk]

All costs are situational, so this isn't a particularly impactful critique. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure the number of situations where killing a 100,000 civilians, potentially your own civilians, to kill a 1,000 enemy forces is the right move is a particularly large category. Accounting for other costs is optional. Not accounting for relevant costs, or accounting for them badly, is also stupid and self destructive.

Say Poland got occupied by the space Nazis, and the free polish space force had to come in an liberate Poland. Option 1 is general nuking to clear out the space Nazis, killing 30% of the polish civilian population, about 12 million civilians, in the preparatory bombardment, then only lose 30k troops. Or, you don't use more limited, less indiscriminate means, lose 10x as many soldiers of 300k or so, but civilian casualties are closer to France in WWII, around 1%, or about 400k casualties. Is each polish soldier worth 42 polish civilians?

Is the above consideration something the Polish high command can simply "decide" to take into account or not?

Say it was space America liberating you from the space Nazis: are you going to feel indifferent between a space America willing to sacrifice 40 poles per American life, vs a space America willing to sacrifice 1 American life to save 40 Poles? Would you suggest that choice would have no impact on your opinion of the new masters/liberators?

In that scenario you have already went with the assumption that the enemy opposition is not fighting very hard for whatever reason, because "France in WW2" represents a tired, distracted army that's undersupplied and isn't into making fortified urban stronghold in the way of the enemy. Combined with the implied assumption that the attacking side can, politically and militarily, afford to lose 300k soldiers and still win, seems like this scenario is yet again a case of simply overwhelming force that can afford a considerable malus due to the sheer advantage it already carries.

OTOH, if the invasion force has barely 300k soldiers in total, obviously if they would lose that much, they haven't won, they got bled out fighting on the ground with lacking FIRES, and the place is not liberated anyway.
On the third mutant hand, this being a liberation, possibility opens up to functional enough local recruitment and support, so a meaningful part of that number can be local conscripts\guerillas.

From my quote: "I'm not sure of very many situations where that occurs." That is the important part, my critique of your point, not my restatement of your point.



The math is fairly simple: in a random distribution, the position of any one shell is independent of the prior one: this is a measure of the spread within the limit of the ships accuracy, not some purposeful grid pattern. Any one shot covers roughly 1/250th of the area. Lets assume it down to a 1/250th chance to hit on any one shot, in case with my complexity I made a mistake, just to illustrate the math.

So, the first shot had a 1/250th chance of scoring a kill. Or, another way, everyone has a 99.6% chance of surviving.

What's the chance of killing someone on the second shot? Well, they're independent, so its still 1/250. People thus had a 99.6% chance of surviving the first shot, and a 99.6% chance of surviving the second. Or, we could write that as 0.996^(2), or 99.2%. Statistically this suggest, out of 500, 498 survive the first shot, 496 survive the second, etcetera. 100 shots, .996^100=66.97% survive, or 334.

Its possible though I made an error there though, redoing my math gives a different order of magnitude.

Law of large numbers, which this is, of course still applies - if you do it in practice, chances are you will get a pretty nice spread pattern. Sure, with bad luck 20% or 40% or so may even survive, but we didn't calculate for larger wounded\neutralized effect radius, so even if some were not dead, the survivors would be a mess of confused, wounded and shellshocked survivors, instead of a remotely effective fighting force, so the friendly ground forces who called orbital support could mop them up easily anyway.

Huh, its almost as if extra range might, cost more? Perhaps? But no, you've already proven this is an absurd general assumption! Surely your not reversing yourself here!

Again, depending on the fight profile, it may bring little to no extra cost.

Eh, Sats might be cheaper. Satellites are likely to be expensive for many of the same reasons ground based precision weapons are: they're highly complex machines that need to work in tough situations under exacting standards: a kinetic round has to be guided to be worthwhile, as I think we've established: the ranges are too great for plausible ballistic accuracy under most reasonable assumptions.

Are they really? Doing a basic calc, if you achieve 0.5 MOA accuracy from 300km height, not that crazy for even modern ballistics, you get a 43 meter deviation. Considering the delays and reentry effects probably degrading that further, kinetic kill rounds and hitting moving targets is out. However, cluster munitions, HE against large area targets and nukes are still in.
Though due to cost of a nuke giving it a more capable delivery vehicle may be worthwhile at little relative cost. Leaving HE and cluster munitions. Of course we won't be talking of sniping tanks and bunkers with few shots like modern artillery can do with good fire correction, it would be more along the lines of abovementioned WW2 cruiser, if not worse - "i want those 10 kilometers of frontline hit from the orbit". Reminds me of Rogue Trader, which does have rule for this, and the scatter for orbital macrobattery bombardment even on a perfectly aimed hit covers an area of 10 square kilometers, and on bad one scatter can go up to low double digit kilometers. Precision weapon this isn't, but no one can deny the military utility of such fire support.

As for sat costs, there is nothing magical that means unmanned space hardware has to be super complex and expensive. Once weight and dimension limits become lax, they will have the solution of "when in doubt, slap on more steel and lead protection". And in a scenario where you are casually transporting whole armies across planets, obviously lift costs have gotten quite reasonable.

A 50 kg planetary Excalibur round cost roughly $50,000 dollars, an equivalent to $1 million dollars per ton. Falcon Heavy based on the first sketchy source I could find suggests Falcon Heavy is already under $1,000 per kg to LEO, so delivery cost would thus be roughly $1 million per ton. So, cheaper transport costs to "free", assuming space Excalibur would be the same per unit cost as planetary Excalibur is a 50% cost saving. Which is nice, but 1) not plausible, and 2) not as much as one would hope for.

In actuality, space Excalibur is likely to actually be more expensive per kg and heavier than planetary Excalibur: with longer ranges at higher speeds, finer maneuverability is needed to preserve accuracy. It needs some ability to course correct in space, thin atmosphere, and thick atmosphere. It needs to not burn up in the atmosphere. Conventional heat shields seem to be in the 5-20% of rentry mass range, so that alone might grow the weapon weight by 10 or so kg. Getting through atmosphere fast you want something like 10 tons/meter. A current Excalibur only has roughly 2.7 tons/meter. So you would also likely want some mixture of more weight and narrow round to get through the atmosphere with good speed, which is going to increase cost.

Sticking a ceramic shield in front of the shell is always an option, and not a very expensive one.
It doesn't need to maneuver in space unless it's a round meant against space stations or for use on atmosphereless planets. Fired against a habitable planet, it can do the course correcting after it is in atmosphere already and it also happens to get slowed down closer to terminal velocity (which in Earth conditions is considerably lower than the muzzle velocity). It would be expected for a military to know whether the planet they are invading has an atmosphere and what is it made out of, and load their transports with equipment and ordnance appropriate to that specific atmosphere...
There is no need for very expensive universal rounds.

I would go with assuming the lift costs to be negligible, because we are discussing it in the context of a bloody planetary invasion. If you are bringing along not just a few mechanized divisions, but whole armies measured in millions, few hundred thousands at very minimum, we are talking of megatons of transport capacity. If you can provide that in the first place, imagine the "weight premium" that would have to be applied to tanks, and even things as simple as supplies. One "weight saving", paratrooper style light armored vehicle will already weight about 20 tons. You would need at very minimum bring low tens of thousands of those for even an easy planetary invasion. Each of them weights as much as several hundred of those shells, and probably needs again as much at least in fuel, ammo, parts.
A single MBT goes into the territory of tens of thousands of artillery shells sized munitions logistics wise.
And unlike with orbital bombardment munitions, you will also need some kind of landers or dropships to actually bring them down, which will also have their own weight, and their fuel would also have weight and so on.

This is the logic indicating that invading forces would generally be encouraged to do a lot of their work with orbital fire support as possible. Losing one platoon of 4 tanks is logistically worse than spending a thousands or two of light precision munitions delivered from orbit to prevent that loss in terms of the invading force's mass budget.

So, a tactical orbiting weapons platform might have a 100 rounds for roughly 10 tons of weight at $250,000 per round, in line with a Javelin, for a total ammo cost of $25 million dollars, and when a Gripen costs $30 million flyaway, $4 million per ton, if the vehicle had overall dry weight of 10 tons, that would be roughly $40 million for the vehicle, total cost roughly $65 million. Current, still quite high, transport costs boosts this overall cost to $85 million, a roughly 30% increase.

The thing is that Gripen doesn't run on air and shoot bad words.
Let's even say our SpaceGripen is an aerospace fighter and doesn't need a massive specialized dropship to safely bring it down to the ground.
Or its not, but then it has to piggyback on the dropships you use to land tanks or even more oversize cargo, and it will take a whole lot of space in one of those.
Still, it will need fuel for the whole campaign (few tons for every single flight if its jet or rocket based, if its some fancy nuclear powered aerospace fighter, it may run on whatever locally sourced reaction mass but probably will weight far more than 10 tons), parts for the whole campaign, and to actually fight, you will need to bring munitions for it... As this is a serious war, probably not 500$ dumb bombs, but at least 100,000$ a piece guided missiles, and all of these things will also have their own weight.

Its my impression we are already approaching, if not already, at a point where for many of the tasks we've discussed in this thread, space launch cost would already not be the driving cost concern.

This is especially true when nukes are involved: direct cost estimates are extremely hard to find, but the US current costs seems to be in the $20 million per warhead range for a roughly 200 kg weapon, a per ton cost of $100 million dollars per ton. At such a price point, nuclear weapons transport cost would be just 1% construction costs even at current high costs.

The tech involved has such high innate costs that I'm not sure relatively cheap transport costs will actually make "cheap" orbital platforms. As you mention earlier, ground SAM systems can cost $50 million each, and a space system is likely to be more demanding than current SAMs, not less, and have a higher cost point. Your OSM (Orbit to Surface missile) platform could quite likely cost $100 million, with transport costs being relatively minor proportion, outside of cheap lift being necessary for the logistical operation of such a craft, such as the ability to refuel and re-arm at relatively non-crippling costs. It might not super matter if your $5 million dollar a ton SAM costs $100,000 a ton to deliver. It does matter if the 10 tons of $1,000 a ton rocket fuel you need to deliver every week to maintain maneuverability cost $100,000 per ton.

Again, you are running with the assumption that despite space lift costs being cheap, even cheap sats have to still be loaded with insane electronics because space, which isn't even true for modern "economy sats" with prices well below a million USD. SAMs are expensive due to the sensors they need to detect aircraft who don't want to be detected. A platform meant to whack a certain specific spot on a planet with a JDAM like missile does not need those.
If you want orbital air superiority platform, sure, it may cost that much, even more, but that's a different kind of a weapon.

Also, you are bringing up a... small scale warfare problem with the support platforms needing to spend a lot of time and fuel maneuvering to change orbits and provide support in various places.
Sure, if you had only one or two, that would be a huge pain.
However, that's less of a problem the larger the invasion gets. Once you have hundreds of those spread over lots of different orbits, there is little need to move them at all, because each time the ground forces call for support, statistically at least one of them will be in the right spot in no more than a few minutes.

 

[JagerIV]

@Marduk
On the French example, you aware the 1% rate is throughout the entire war, correct? Its the initial conquest of France, the Allied bombings, and the reconquest. Are you suggesting the Nazis didn't do as well in France because they were just too nice and didn't kill more Frenchmen?

I tend to assume, especially with nukes, that wars are pretty bimodal: you have Limited and Unlimited War. Limited your looking for some negotiated end, Unlimited your looking for total destruction. 90-99% of wars are going to be limited. In such cases, mass killing and genocide are going to be counter productive to your aims.

So now your claiming a guy on a truck with a SAM is not cheaper than a V-22? This is such a basic, self evident point, I really have trouble grasping why this is such an issue to you.

You may be right there on the accuracy consideration: I get the same answer with a 1/2 MEO. Actual artillery seems to be something around 150 meter error at 20 km however, which suggests an achieved accuracy of 27 MEO. Which is much lower than what rifles get. I'm guessing you have an issue of degrading accuracy with increased range: crosswind issues alone are probably much bigger issue on a 20-30 second arcing flight than a half a second flight of a 400 m rifle shot.

Orbital shots achieving an MEO of 27 (8 million nrad, what my calculator works on), 300 km is 2.4 km. Which as you say is not necessarily all that bad. Getting 10x worse with the increased range would be 24 km diameter.

I'm not sure you understand my point on cost: the point of the argument is that the equipment is already approaching's costs where the transport cost of the equipment is a relatively marginal at our current transport costs: transport costs getting even more marginal is not actually likely to make the equipment much cheaper, because boost costs are already starting to not be the limiting factor. We can be confident of this by looking at planetary equipment which isn't limited by launch costs, and see how expensive they are.

Your example actually supports my point: the micro satellites seem to be 4 gram chips for $100 bucks each. That means your cost per ton is roughly $25 million dollars per ton. Thus, at current high costs, transport costs to the orbit would be roughly $1 million, say variable cost per chip in everything else (receiver, monitors, etcetera) comes out to $10 dollars a chip, that would be $2.5 million. Thus, total deployment cost would be roughly $28.5 million, of which only 3.5% is transport cost.

Are you suggesting planes would need refueling when there's 10 of them, but not when there's a 100? Fuel and ammo use are facts of combat. Maybe each one would need less fuel and ammo if you have so many that each one is involved in much lower intensity, and the enemy is already basically defeated so can't shoot back anymore. But I would expect that overall fuel and ammo use would likely be generally higher. Especially if they're involved in the "defeating enemy" stage, not "kicking helpless puppies" stage.

 

[Marduk]

@Marduk
On the French example, you aware the 1% rate is throughout the entire war, correct? Its the initial conquest of France, the Allied bombings, and the reconquest. Are you suggesting the Nazis didn't do as well in France because they were just too nice and didn't kill more Frenchmen?

Not because they were nice, but because they didn't care for trying hard at it, they mostly saved their try-harding for the eastern front - and there were many ruined cities to show for it.

I tend to assume, especially with nukes, that wars are pretty bimodal: you have Limited and Unlimited War. Limited your looking for some negotiated end, Unlimited your looking for total destruction. 90-99% of wars are going to be limited. In such cases, mass killing and genocide are going to be counter productive to your aims.

In an age of planetary invasions i doubt the modern taboos about nuclear weapons would be there to stay. For one orbital non-nuclear weapons would serve to destroy the distinction, as a half kiloton hypervelocity bunker buster is quite easily doable from orbit, and if you have that, why not half a kiloton nuke? And then there's the clean(ish) fusion warhead option.

So now your claiming a guy on a truck with a SAM is not cheaper than a V-22? This is such a basic, self evident point, I really have trouble grasping why this is such an issue to you.

Where did i claim that?

You may be right there on the accuracy consideration: I get the same answer with a 1/2 MEO. Actual artillery seems to be something around 150 meter error at 20 km however, which suggests an achieved accuracy of 27 MEO. Which is much lower than what rifles get. I'm guessing you have an issue of degrading accuracy with increased range: crosswind issues alone are probably much bigger issue on a 20-30 second arcing flight than a half a second flight of a 400 m rifle shot.

Accuracy effects of this sort for artillery are variable with velocity. Anything going down from the orbit, especially if assisted with a railgun or something like that, would be going far faster than the average howitzer shell, which will make it more resistant to wind, thermal layers and the like. Also, 150m at 20km scatter, that's cold war artillery, not sure if with spotted follow up shots or on first shot.
There are already tricks being developed to make guidance considerably cheaper than Excalibur apparently.

Orbital shots achieving an MEO of 27 (8 million nrad, what my calculator works on), 300 km is 2.4 km. Which as you say is not necessarily all that bad. Getting 10x worse with the increased range would be 24 km diameter.

Yup. It's not great, but for some types of targets and munitions, good enough given some weight of fire.

I'm not sure you understand my point on cost: the point of the argument is that the equipment is already approaching's costs where the transport cost of the equipment is a relatively marginal at our current transport costs: transport costs getting even more marginal is not actually likely to make the equipment much cheaper, because boost costs are already starting to not be the limiting factor. We can be confident of this by looking at planetary equipment which isn't limited by launch costs, and see how expensive they are.

For space equipment, if transport costs get much lower, then a lot of expensive, miniaturized at great expanse components can just be replaced by simpler, cheaper and more robust equivalents that achieve the goals with additional mass. For example, those infamously expensive space-certified electronics? Replace them with commercial ones and cover them in some lead shielding.

https://www.eetimes.eu/changing-trends-in-designing-space-electronics/

Why spend US$80,000 on a qualified space-grade FPGA when an industrial device that costs US$800 might meet the reliability needs of your mission? For some spacecraft manufacturers, the use of COTS parts is the only option to meet the performance and cost needs of a mission. For many OEMs, the price and long lead times of fully qualified components make them unaffordable. Many COTS devices are operating successfully in orbit today.

Its already being done to a degree due to cheaper, smaller, more advanced commercial electronics being available, and with cheap lift, paying for miniaturization and very long term reliability would be even less necessary.

Your example actually supports my point: the micro satellites seem to be 4 gram chips for $100 bucks each. That means your cost per ton is roughly $25 million dollars per ton. Thus, at current high costs, transport costs to the orbit would be roughly $1 million, say variable cost per chip in everything else (receiver, monitors, etcetera) comes out to $10 dollars a chip, that would be $2.5 million. Thus, total deployment cost would be roughly $28.5 million, of which only 3.5% is transport cost.

Obviously no one needs sats that consist of tons of chips. More likely, our orbital weapons sat would consist only of some kilograms of chips and a massive railgun\magazine assembly with a power generator of some sort.

Are you suggesting planes would need refueling when there's 10 of them, but not when there's a 100? Fuel and ammo use are facts of combat. Maybe each one would need less fuel and ammo if you have so many that each one is involved in much lower intensity, and the enemy is already basically defeated so can't shoot back anymore. But I would expect that overall fuel and ammo use would likely be generally higher. Especially if they're involved in the "defeating enemy" stage, not "kicking helpless puppies" stage.

Either way, delivering precision munitions by plane does require adding the weight and cost of plane's consumables *and* a munition itself, even if in long term the plane itself may be spread through its multi-use nature (though in that case its expected longevity is a major variable, heavy air defense pushes the calculation towards disposable long range/orbital weapons). Again, it suggests the perfect mix is to front-load orbital bombardment to early campaign, and reserve risking more flexible but also more vulnerable FIRES delivery like aircraft for after the heaviest defenses got at least partially destroyed.

 

[JagerIV]

Not because they were nice, but because they didn't care for trying hard at it, they mostly saved their try-harding for the eastern front - and there were many ruined cities to show for it.

In an age of planetary invasions i doubt the modern taboos about nuclear weapons would be there to stay. For one orbital non-nuclear weapons would serve to destroy the distinction, as a half kiloton hypervelocity bunker buster is quite easily doable from orbit, and if you have that, why not half a kiloton nuke? And then there's the clean(ish) fusion warhead option.

Where did i claim that?

Accuracy effects of this sort for artillery are variable with velocity. Anything going down from the orbit, especially if assisted with a railgun or something like that, would be going far faster than the average howitzer shell, which will make it more resistant to wind, thermal layers and the like. Also, 150m at 20km scatter, that's cold war artillery, not sure if with spotted follow up shots or on first shot.
There are already tricks being developed to make guidance considerably cheaper than Excalibur apparently.


Yup. It's not great, but for some types of targets and munitions, good enough given some weight of fire.

For space equipment, if transport costs get much lower, then a lot of expensive, miniaturized at great expanse components can just be replaced by simpler, cheaper and more robust equivalents that achieve the goals with additional mass. For example, those infamously expensive space-certified electronics? Replace them with commercial ones and cover them in some lead shielding.

https://www.eetimes.eu/changing-trends-in-designing-space-electronics/

Its already being done to a degree due to cheaper, smaller, more advanced commercial electronics being available, and with cheap lift, paying for miniaturization and very long term reliability would be even less necessary.


Obviously no one needs sats that consist of tons of chips. More likely, our orbital weapons sat would consist only of some kilograms of chips and a massive railgun\magazine assembly with a power generator of some sort.

Either way, delivering precision munitions by plane does require adding the weight and cost of plane's consumables *and* a munition itself, even if in long term the plane itself may be spread through its multi-use nature (though in that case its expected longevity is a major variable, heavy air defense pushes the calculation towards disposable long range/orbital weapons). Again, it suggests the perfect mix is to front-load orbital bombardment to early campaign, and reserve risking more flexible but also more vulnerable FIRES delivery like aircraft for after the heaviest defenses got at least partially destroyed.

1) And this try harding got them... what? You do realize there's plenty of destroyed cities in France, right? Killing civilians is generally not a good in and of itself.

2) Do you have any idea what a conventional half kiloton round consists of?

3) Its the point you switched to arguing against, after point out its truth.

4) Eh.

5) Please read my actual argument on equipment cost, and respond to that. Repeating your previous argument, ignoring my counter argument, is not going to be persuasive. If you can't understand what my argument was, tell me and I'll try to make it even more explicit.

6) Are you suggesting space assets don't consume fuel and munitions? I truly don't understand what point your trying to make, unless your saying placing a weapon in space gives it space magic, and I don't think even you would make an argument that ridiculous. Edit: the plane was an example of how ridiculous your initial argument was. Your argument amounted to that 10 planes consume fuel, but a 100 would not. Plainly ridiculous, and equally ridiculous when applied to orbital weapon platforms.

 

[Marduk]

1) And this try harding got them... what? You do realize there's plenty of destroyed cities in France, right? Killing civilians is generally not a good in and of itself.

How much of it was due to urban warfare rather than allied bombing?

2) Do you have any idea what a conventional half kiloton round consists of?

About 3000m/s is the equivalence for kinetic energy of a mass being equal to its mass in TNT, which would mean a 500 ton rock, though it may deliver that energy in a very suboptimal way.
However, what if someone makes some clever design that works better of it? Say, some kind of pre-fragmented impactor that breaks into a rain of high velocity flechette fragments in low atmosphere. 6700m/s is where a 50 ton one would have 0.5 kt energy. If you can transport divisions of MBTs between planets, that's not an unreasonable size. Mach 20 is a hard speed to deal with, but also not impossible even with current technology - many ICBM reentry vehicles reach similar speeds. Made in the shape of a ~25 meter long dart from a dense material like tungsten, it could stay with that well below terminal velocity according to this calc.

3) Its the point you switched to arguing against, after point out its truth.

Not really.

5) Please read my actual argument on equipment cost, and respond to that. Repeating your previous argument, ignoring my counter argument, is not going to be persuasive. If you can't understand what my argument was, tell me and I'll try to make it even more explicit.

In that case you do need to restate it more clearly.

6) Are you suggesting space assets don't consume fuel and munitions? I truly don't understand what point your trying to make, unless your saying placing a weapon in space gives it space magic, and I don't think even you would make an argument that ridiculous. Edit: the plane was an example of how ridiculous your initial argument was. Your argument amounted to that 10 planes consume fuel, but a 100 would not. Plainly ridiculous, and equally ridiculous when applied to orbital weapon platforms.

A plane needs fuel for each sortie. But it's not exactly like that with orbital weapons ats or ships moonlighting as them. If you have weapon sats pre-placed in 100 orbits, well, it's like GPS. If someone calls for fire support, there is no need to move any sats to the right orbit, just have a computer assign the right sat to the mission and time, because with a sufficient number of sats providing a coverage, there will always be several in the right orbit at a time.

 

[JagerIV]

How much of it was due to urban warfare rather than allied bombing?

About 3000m/s is the equivalence for kinetic energy of a mass being equal to its mass in TNT, which would mean a 500 ton rock, though it may deliver that energy in a very suboptimal way.
However, what if someone makes some clever design that works better of it? Say, some kind of pre-fragmented impactor that breaks into a rain of high velocity flechette fragments in low atmosphere. 6700m/s is where a 50 ton one would have 0.5 kt energy. If you can transport divisions of MBTs between planets, that's not an unreasonable size. Mach 20 is a hard speed to deal with, but also not impossible even with current technology - many ICBM reentry vehicles reach similar speeds. Made in the shape of a ~25 meter long dart from a dense material like tungsten, it could stay with that well below terminal velocity according to this calc.


Not really.

In that case you do need to restate it more clearly.

A plane needs fuel for each sortie. But it's not exactly like that with orbital weapons ats or ships moonlighting as them. If you have weapon sats pre-placed in 100 orbits, well, it's like GPS. If someone calls for fire support, there is no need to move any sats to the right orbit, just have a computer assign the right sat to the mission and time, because with a sufficient number of sats providing a coverage, there will always be several in the right orbit at a time.

1) How much of Poland's casualties because of Germans being determined in fighting the Soviets, vs the Nazis trying to kill Poles, because killing civilians was part of the Nazi war goals?

2) Fair enough. Its still, as you suggested, a very inefficient weapon. Which hits the problem of nukes, of generally being excessive against most targets.

3) You did, but since you do seem to accept more capacity actually is more cost, as long as its not the explicit basis of an argument, I'll try to work arround that.

4) Okay.

A: Advanced equipment like were discussing already $1-5m per ton on earth.
B: Equivalent space equipment is likely at least as expense, and likely more so.

Therefore, space equipment like were discussing is likely to also cost in the $1-5m per ton.

A: Space equipment is already in the $1-5 million per ton range.

Therefore, transport cost already is not the driver of the expense of the equipment, and cheaper transport is likely not going to make the equipment cheaper.

6) Okay. If they are using ammo, re-arming is still required, and if the enemy has any ability to fire, some level of manvering is necesary, so really cheap and easy methods of intercept won't work. I'm thinking moving is also going to be preferable than not.

Assuming small fighter scale craft of 10 tons or so you could have a 100 spread out for broader coverage, but that inevitably means most are not in optimal positions. You move them to concentrate, your efficiency is much higher, and even using 10 tons of fuel, 1,000 tons of fuel, likely at something like $1,000 a ton, $1 million in fuel expended is probably on net a gain for improving the survivability and effectiveness of billions of dollars of equipment.

 

[Marduk]

1) How much of Poland's casualties because of Germans being determined in fighting the Soviets, vs the Nazis trying to kill Poles, because killing civilians was part of the Nazi war goals?

Who the hell knows. In places where the Germans were determined to do urban warfare, the cities involved were 70-80% ruined, with major civilian losses too.

2) Fair enough. Its still, as you suggested, a very inefficient weapon. Which hits the problem of nukes, of generally being excessive against most targets.

Which depends on mostly political considerations of whether that's a bad thing or perfectly acceptable thing.

A: Advanced equipment like were discussing already $1-5m per ton on earth.
B: Equivalent space equipment is likely at least as expense, and likely more so.

Therefore, space equipment like were discussing is likely to also cost in the $1-5m per ton.

I disagree with the base assumption. Only some most complex, electronics packed gear even approaches that scale, like high performance AA systems and tactical jets. A glorified SCUD launcher doesn't even get close to that.
For a more reasonable "composite" comparison, a high tech warship like Zumwalt costs 4 billion for 16k tons, an amazing cut to mere quarter million per ton, and even then, the AA systems are the expensive part, but it can make a stand-in for a well defended system, or even a support spaceship. SSBNs, aka long range nuclear missile launch ships with isolated life support, cost similarly per ton, if not a bit less.

A: Space equipment is already in the $1-5 million per ton range.

Therefore, transport cost already is not the driver of the expense of the equipment, and cheaper transport is likely not going to make the equipment cheaper.

Space equipment is not made equal. Obviously a hi tech sensor sat will cost more per ton than a simple missile launch platform.

6) Okay. If they are using ammo, re-arming is still required, and if the enemy has any ability to fire, some level of manvering is necesary, so really cheap and easy methods of intercept won't work. I'm thinking moving is also going to be preferable than not.

Assuming small fighter scale craft of 10 tons or so you could have a 100 spread out for broader coverage, but that inevitably means most are not in optimal positions. You move them to concentrate, your efficiency is much higher, and even using 10 tons of fuel, 1,000 tons of fuel, likely at something like $1,000 a ton, $1 million in fuel expended is probably on net a gain for improving the survivability and effectiveness of billions of dollars of equipment.

Except the fighters are useless when not actively using fuel (and boy they use fuel fast, they can use their own weight in fuel in a day), they need to be spending it whether they are fighting Space Afghanistan or Space USA, if not, they are sitting on the ground, landed and useless. Weapon sats and other spacecraft for that matter only need to use fuel when avoiding enemy fire or needing to change orbit - both of which are less necessary the more degraded enemy defenses get, the latter being hardly necessary ever if used at large scale. See the difference? Free 24/7 loitering support vs sortie based support that needs regular refueling and maintenance while also being easier to shot down. That's a big advantage. Both need to use precision munitions optimally so the cost won't be dramatically different there, unless they can go with lasers or something super cheap like locally manufactured kinetic impactors.

 

[JagerIV]

@Marduk

The basic contention is that you generally need fairly high tech equipment to get particularly useful performance. The equipment needed to do high performance stuff is high cost: a laser for example is going to be a fairly expense weapon. For a laser weapon platform, we see costs are already high enough that even very expensive transport is not going to be the primarily driver of cost: your mass budget for a laser system going from, say, 10 tons to 100 tons for the system itself likely doesn't make your laser system particularly cheaper.

What is does allow for is to make the platform more effective: if your laser is 10 tons, being able to logistically support a 100 ton means that instead of having just a naked 10 ton laser, you can add 20 tons of armor, 10 tons of engines and other systems, 10 tons of back ups, and 50 tons of fuel. This is a more expensive system, but a much more capable system than an unarmored zero margin effectively immobile laser.

So, a more subtle point that cheaper transport is unlikely to result in cheaper weapon systems: the core drivers of the cost of space systems seems independent of that transport cost already. It is however quite possible that the costs might scale slower than mass, for lower per ton costs while overall system costs increase.

And the ability to resupply is a big benefit of lower transport costs: lower transport costs might not be able to let you afford the ticker price of more weapons platforms, but if it lets you refuel and rearm 10x as much in a time period, you can afford 10x as many strike missions, much more repositions, and thus a generally higher tempo. This would then make your "cost per strike", maybe not 10x lower, but perhaps 8x lower through the higher achieved tempo.

In summary, I'm not sure transport costs will actually allow much cheaper space weapons as a practical matter, though they will allow you to do more expensive weapons but with lower marginal cost per ton, including things like armor which is useful, generally cheapish, but not low mass generally.

I also think as a practical matter space assets are going to be more sortie like than your suggesting, though that is more dependent on the nitty gritty specifics.

 

[Marduk]

@Marduk

The basic contention is that you generally need fairly high tech equipment to get particularly useful performance. The equipment needed to do high performance stuff is high cost: a laser for example is going to be a fairly expense weapon. For a laser weapon platform, we see costs are already high enough that even very expensive transport is not going to be the primarily driver of cost: your mass budget for a laser system going from, say, 10 tons to 100 tons for the system itself likely doesn't make your laser system particularly cheaper.

What is does allow for is to make the platform more effective: if your laser is 10 tons, being able to logistically support a 100 ton means that instead of having just a naked 10 ton laser, you can add 20 tons of armor, 10 tons of engines and other systems, 10 tons of back ups, and 50 tons of fuel. This is a more expensive system, but a much more capable system than an unarmored zero margin effectively immobile laser.

So, a more subtle point that cheaper transport is unlikely to result in cheaper weapon systems: the core drivers of the cost of space systems seems independent of that transport cost already. It is however quite possible that the costs might scale slower than mass, for lower per ton costs while overall system costs increase.

There is one way how cheaper transport results in cheaper weapon systems. Namely, skipping miniaturization costs. Keeping things small and compact costs money in design, materials, maintenance. If mass is cheap, you can throw in 10 tons of cheap heatsinks and 10 tons of cheap batteries to get a significantly more capable laser.
If mass is expensive, you may pay 10x the price to make the laser half as heavy with super finicky gold plated tech.

And the ability to resupply is a big benefit of lower transport costs: lower transport costs might not be able to let you afford the ticker price of more weapons platforms, but if it lets you refuel and rearm 10x as much in a time period, you can afford 10x as many strike missions, much more repositions, and thus a generally higher tempo. This would then make your "cost per strike", maybe not 10x lower, but perhaps 8x lower through the higher achieved tempo.

In summary, I'm not sure transport costs will actually allow much cheaper space weapons as a practical matter, though they will allow you to do more expensive weapons but with lower marginal cost per ton, including things like armor which is useful, generally cheapish, but not low mass generally.

Another good example is radiation shielding. Building radiation shielded, light, highly capable electronics is hard and expensive. However, if mass is no big issue, you can slap a plate of lead here and there, problem solved. It doesn't drive down the cost beyond a certain level, but it would get closer to terrestrial equivalents.
Hell, even in aircraft our lack of cheap lift is the reacon why we don't have flying tank like aircraft straight out of BT or 40k.

I also think as a practical matter space assets are going to be more sortie like than your suggesting, though that is more dependent on the nitty gritty specifics.

There is no reason for them to do so if designed properly. Of course a space fighter with 8 missiles will soon need resupply if moonlighting as orbital support, but a properly designed automated OWP with hundreds upon hundreds of munitions? That could last much longer.

 

[JagerIV]

There is one way how cheaper transport results in cheaper weapon systems. Namely, skipping miniaturization costs. Keeping things small and compact costs money in design, materials, maintenance. If mass is cheap, you can throw in 10 tons of cheap heatsinks and 10 tons of cheap batteries to get a significantly more capable laser.
If mass is expensive, you may pay 10x the price to make the laser half as heavy with super finicky gold plated tech.

Another good example is radiation shielding. Building radiation shielded, light, highly capable electronics is hard and expensive. However, if mass is no big issue, you can slap a plate of lead here and there, problem solved. It doesn't drive down the cost beyond a certain level, but it would get closer to terrestrial equivalents.
Hell, even in aircraft our lack of cheap lift is the reacon why we don't have flying tank like aircraft straight out of BT or 40k.

There is no reason for them to do so if designed properly. Of course a space fighter with 8 missiles will soon need resupply if moonlighting as orbital support, but a properly designed automated OWP with hundreds upon hundreds of munitions? That could last much longer.

On the other hand, miniaturization is often something that makes things cheaper, not more expensive: computers are a strong example, but many of bits of equipment show similar effects.

I'm not sure how much of the equipment driving costs will really benefit from looser weight limits. Some stuff will be, but its also probably not the parts dramatically driving costs: the big cost of a laser is likely to be reaching the needed level of precision and perfection of the mirrors for example, not necessarily something like heatsinks and batteries.

There's certainly some stuff that benefits cost wise from not being less mass constrained, but I don't feel like its likely to be enough to drive per unit costs down.

We are still dealing with vehicles in this conversation too, so weight isn't going to be a non-issue. I thus don't see it as particularly plausible for returns to scale to push space costs bellow planetary costs, especially in mobile weapon platforms.

Well, this comes down a bit to what the limiting factor is: my instinct is that the limiting factor is capital costs, which makes spending more fuel to get more out your capital a generally smart option.

Lets say our vehicle "only" costs $1 million per ton, for a $10 million dollar 10 ton vehicle. Air freight costs is roughly $3-5k per ton, so lets say shipping is roughly that for an initial conservative estimate. Fuel cost might be nearly entirely consumed by transport, but lets round up even there to $10k per ton of fuel, and a high mobility strategy is 20 tons of fuel per sortie.

If the choice is 2 $10 million platforms, or 1 platform consuming fuel, the 1 platform consuming fuel is more cost effective than 2 for about 50 sorties. If fuel consumption increases survivability, even better. If 5 tons of fuel is enough to dodge a $50,000 missile, your coming out even with the defender cost wise, and way ahead over losing a $10 million dollar platform to a $50,000 missile.

Expending fuel is likely to be cheaper than expending capital, unless your in a situation where transport costs are high.

 

[Marduk]

On the other hand, miniaturization is often something that makes things cheaper, not more expensive: computers are a strong example, but many of bits of equipment show similar effects.

The advances that allow it do... But when used to the bleeding edge, that's always expensive.
On the other hand, you can always get a PC of the same capabilities as a laptop or phone for a far lower price.

I'm not sure how much of the equipment driving costs will really benefit from looser weight limits. Some stuff will be, but its also probably not the parts dramatically driving costs: the big cost of a laser is likely to be reaching the needed level of precision and perfection of the mirrors for example, not necessarily something like heatsinks and batteries.

These things can be made smaller or bigger. The smaller variants will naturally use fancy materials, more precise manufacturing, better QA and get much more expensive.

There's certainly some stuff that benefits cost wise from not being less mass constrained, but I don't feel like its likely to be enough to drive per unit costs down.

Oh it absolutely is. Between materials, redundancies, resistances and so on, a lot of cost saving can be done. Hell, even in reliability - no need to gold plate an auxiliary system to have just 0.01% chance to fail per year, if you can have extra mass budget and use 4 10x cheaper replacements with 5% chance to fail per year.

We are still dealing with vehicles in this conversation too, so weight isn't going to be a non-issue. I thus don't see it as particularly plausible for returns to scale to push space costs bellow planetary costs, especially in mobile weapon platforms.

That would be proportional to how much it needs to move and what drive technology is feasible to make it move.

Well, this comes down a bit to what the limiting factor is: my instinct is that the limiting factor is capital costs, which makes spending more fuel to get more out your capital a generally smart option.

For cheap and semi-disposable system, for sure. For a space missile cruiser or transport ship that you expect to serve at least 50 years with a lot of moving, you may want a fancy gas core nuclear reactor or fusion drive for sure.

Lets say our vehicle "only" costs $1 million per ton, for a $10 million dollar 10 ton vehicle. Air freight costs is roughly $3-5k per ton, so lets say shipping is roughly that for an initial conservative estimate. Fuel cost might be nearly entirely consumed by transport, but lets round up even there to $10k per ton of fuel, and a high mobility strategy is 20 tons of fuel per sortie.

If the choice is 2 $10 million platforms, or 1 platform consuming fuel, the 1 platform consuming fuel is more cost effective than 2 for about 50 sorties. If fuel consumption increases survivability, even better. If 5 tons of fuel is enough to dodge a $50,000 missile, your coming out even with the defender cost wise, and way ahead over losing a $10 million dollar platform to a $50,000 missile.

Expending fuel is likely to be cheaper than expending capital, unless your in a situation where transport costs are high.

With those numbers 5 tons of fuel don't cost 10k per ton, but 13-15k per ton plus assorted logistical burden (need to invest into tanker fleet), as you have to ship in the fuel itself too.
And then it comes down to expected survivability. If it's 1-5 missions, going as cheap as possible is the best option. Or just skip the platform completely and make the missiles longer ranged or space based to launch from a safer platform that would be used to supply and refuel the platforms.
5-50 or so, the jet style paradigm can work, unless, again, the previous paradigm applies and shifting the fund and logistics into longer ranged or space based missiles is still more optimal.
Still, fighters in war conditions are expected to fly one or several sorties per day, so it's not that great figure. At just one a day, a fairly short 3 month campaign is ~90 sorties, 1800 tons of fuel, at 15k per ton with shipping, that's $24m...
If they are expected to have US military level loss rates and generally fly around for decades and survive hundreds of sorties... Even doubling the weight and cost for the sake of dodging fuel logistics with nuclear engines or something like that is a deal of the century.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

This is further complicated by how sci-fi armies tend to employ approaches we twenty-first century people wouldn’t find out of the ordinary (once they’ve been deployed to the surface from space, anyway). In fact, some commentary I’ve seen even remarks that their tactics and approaches are even quite primitive, such as Warhammer 40K’s Imperial Guard relying on sheer numbers and stubbornness to drown the enemy out or the Droid Army on Naboo marching in large, easy-to-target formations that the Gungans can see coming from a million miles away.

It does bear pointing out that the Trade Federation's droid army is literally the dumbest army in its own universe because they are the cheapest possible mass-production droid infantry/security models. and that even so, deploying in the open was entirely reasonable because the Gungans couldn't shoot through their own tactical shields anyway.

Fire control.

If you can't estimate where your target will be when the shots get there you might as well be firing blind. A WWII-era battleship's electro-mechanical fire control systems, if designed for time to target at light-speed and starship combat, could probably bracket a target a third of the way to Mars while orbiting Earth.

BTW: That was light-speed, not FTL.

The ability of a fire control system to compute lead is still going to be limited by the range and accuracy of sensors.

One will note that even with the electromechanical fire control throwing out "perfect" ballistic lead for a given range and relative motion, the hit rate of WWII battleships was typically below 5%. Washington scored 10% against Kirishima, but that was with the most advanced radar fire control system in the world at the time *and* opening fire at almost point-blank range.

 

[Zyobot]

It does bear pointing out that the Trade Federation's droid army is literally the dumbest army in its own universe because they are the cheapest possible mass-production droid infantry/security models. and that even so, deploying in the open was entirely reasonable because the Gungans couldn't shoot through their own tactical shields anyway.

Hence my remark in the OP that you just quoted.