Mental Exercise: Anti-Dragon Task Force, Government/Megacorp Forces taking on Dragons Options

[Jaid]

there are no official orbital laser platform stats, but we do have lasers for ships that have a maximum range of 200,000 m (or 200 km). that should be sufficient for (very?) low orbit, shouldn't it?

[Angelone]

That's the big problem with threads like this. As we have a fairly good idea of what dragons can do, but almost none about what a military can.

[Adarael]

You know, that's a hilarious yet true reply.

[mfb]

Why not? Thor has seakers in the crowbars. Think of them as equivalent to the laser guided concrete bombs (http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/10/991007-iraq.htm) ... no they won't turn corners... but I did mention deorbiting about 1000 of them... yah raining steel crowbars is going to suck, but so is letting the dragon rampage around.

i believe that Thor shots may be significantly larger than you're imagining. certainly their destructive potential is a lot greater than what you're describing--a single shot was enough to completely obliterate a dug-in underground bunker complex, in System Failure. it seems to be a step below nukes, but a large step above conventional explosives. each one is quite a bit larger than a crowbar, and if you dropped a thousand of them in a given area, 999 of them would be overkill.

That's the big problem with threads like this. As we have a fairly good idea of what dragons can do, but almost none about what a military can.

haha, that is so damn true.

[KCKitsune]

there are no official orbital laser platform stats, but we do have lasers for ships that have a maximum range of 200,000 m (or 200 km). that should be sufficient for (very?) low orbit, shouldn't it?

except the orbital laser would have more power as you don't need to supply power for propulsion. Also, the atmosphere ends right at about 96 km. So you're shooting through 37,504 km of vacuum and then 96 km of atmosphere. I think that those laser cannons would do wonders... and eat a dragon for lunch. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[mfb]

i'm not sure they'd necessarily have more power. a ship-mounted laser, on a big enough ship, can draw on the ship's nuclear power plant. that's not the kind of thing that's going to end up on a satellite, simply because the satellite is going to need to be relatively maneuverable in order to be effective--it's going to have to change its orbit if it's going to have global reach. shifting that much mass that far that frequently... i wouldn't call that cost-effective. and definitely hard to hide. solar power won't provide quite as much juice, but it'll be a lot easier to move quickly, and it won't be constantly putting out the heat of a thousand suns.

i know that no price is too much if the right executive wants a big enough epeen, and i know that anything can be hidden, i just don't think it's likely that the right combination of epeen-lacking and money have yet come together in SR that a full-sized nuclear power plant will hae been lifted into space to power an orbital laser.

[Adarael]

My guess is that you could probably mount one of them lasers on a satellite and you'd rely on high-power capacitors, and just end up with a very limited shot-per-time ratio. I think there was a lot of discussion about this in Greg Bear's "EON", but I'm not sure I'm remembering it right. So you might end up with the same "30P -10AP" or whatever that you would from a big-ass ship laser, but you'd have a shot limitation of "one every 48 hours."

At least that's how I understand the discussion was going during the latter days of SDI's kill sats.

[kzt]

No, you take a 4 GW SPS that's a KM wide and mount the laser on that. Or a maser. Either way, it's kind of dead. IIRC, you could produce a 10 meter wide spot that would apply something on the order of 2.5 Kj per cm^2. That will raise the temp of a cm thick steel plate by about 750C per second. You essentially have an oxy-acetylene cutting torch applied to its entire body.

[FrankTrollman]

i'm also trying really hard not to pitch a hissy fit about SR's handling of extremely long-range shots. ten seconds... -3 dice...

Well relax then, we are talking about Coil Guns, Lasers, and Masers here. These weapons cover 10 kilometers in less than half a second, and less than a hundredth of a second respectively. It takes less time for a laser to cross a 10 kilometer gulf than it takes a bullet to cross the room, so if anything you should be offended that the Dragon still gets a defense pool despite the fact that the attackers are little dots on the horizon and the incoming attacks are traveling literally faster than the eye can see.

Even the comparatively slow round from the coil gun is traveling faster than the electric impulses in the retina could deliver that information to the brain, let alone the amount of time that it would take to make a decision or take an action.

The military wins here, and this despite the fact that the game rules repeatedly fall against the military in the realism vs. playability question.

-Frank

[mfb]

i'm talking specifically about the gauss cannon, actually. ten seconds is actually a bit slow for a weapon powerd by sci-fitonium; i'll go with five seconds, maybe even three. with that long a flight time, you don't need to know that the projectile is coming. i find it highly unlikely that a dragon who's been recently attacked by masers is going to remain stationary, or even fly in a straight line, for three seconds.

i agree that the military wins if a) they get the jump on the dragon, or b) the dragon stays and fights for more than a few minutes, with the second conditional being heavily impacted by the type of terrain the fight takes place on.

[cryptoknight]

i believe that Thor shots may be significantly larger than you're imagining. certainly their destructive potential is a lot greater than what you're describing--a single shot was enough to completely obliterate a dug-in underground bunker complex, in System Failure. it seems to be a step below nukes, but a large step above conventional explosives. each one is quite a bit larger than a crowbar, and if you dropped a thousand of them in a given area, 999 of them would be overkill.

Thors shots scale from 3 foot long, crowbard diameter javelins for anti-armor to the orbiting telephone poles you're thinking of. I don't envision shooting a dragon with a telephone pole.

[martindv]

Why don't you believe in the orbital laser? Between solar-collector mircrowave transmission satellites, existing fission reactors for satellites, and Shadowrun having fusion reactors I can't believe that it's somehow cost-prohibitive.

[Moon-Hawk]

This makes me think of The Hammer of Dawn, from Gears of War.

[Fortune]

Thors shots scale from 3 foot long, crowbard diameter javelins for anti-armor to the orbiting telephone poles you're thinking of.

Do you have a specific page reference for that?

[Jaid]

the orbital laser would actually have quite a bit of power. the standard laser from arsenal has 1,000 power built-in and expends 25 per shot (takes 6 combat turns to recharge 1 power from a vehicle iirc). if the orbital laser hasn't taken out the dragon by the time it runs out, it's not likely going to do it ever (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

also, i would argue that coming from 200 km away, at the speed of light, the dragon shouldn't get any sort of active defense on the first shot. even on subsequent shots, it's gonna be hard to do much of anything defensively imo... it can't really see where the blast is coming from, when it's going to come, or anything like that.

[Adarael]

I believe technically that would be a mid-combat surprise test from an unseen attacker.
Or at least that's how I'd roll with it. Cuz it's awful hard to dodge an attack if you don't know it's coming or where it's coming from, even if you're already in a fight.

[FrankTrollman]

Hey, the LAVs that the coil guns are mounted on take 3 seconds to cover 8 kilometers, I'm sure the electrically accelerated sabots are traveling a bit faster than that.

-Frank

[mfb]

what? no they don't. the fastest LAV in the book, the Banshee, has a 'top' speed of 1 klick every three seconds. am i missing something that will allow an LAV to travel twenty-four times faster than that? for that matter, Arsenal's fast fighter-bomber only tops out at 1200 mpt.

[kzt]

Movement power.

[mfb]

ahhh, right. i knew i was missing something.

still, the fact that magic is involved doesn't really convince me that railguns are more than four times as badass in SR as in RL, especially since gauss cannon didn't exist as a marketable technology until 2065 at the earliest.

[Kanada Ten]

I take the budget that they would have used on the dragon killing squad, invest it in a bank, and bribe the dragon to stop attacking the city with a min/maxed social adept and nine accountants for the group pool bonus.

[mfb]

Kanada Ten wins, flawless victoly.

[martindv]

ahhh, right. i knew i was missing something.

how were you to know Frank expected you to read his mind and infer that he meant "when you add Movement"?

What if you just hired another great dragon?

[kzt]

how were you to know Frank expected you to read his mind and infer that he meant "when you add Movement"?

Frank ALWAYS uses movement power in any sort of encounter like this.

[mfb]

well, it makes sense. a group of smart players who got together and tried something like this would do the same thing (obviously, since the group of players brainstorming here suggested it), so it's reasonable to me that military planners would do it.