Zurich Orbital, how would you turn it to slag or tiny bits? Options

[Daylen]

I've always liked the thought of using a non-nuclear EMP to fry some electronics at a critical event. Such as before an orbital maneuver to avoid space debris.

[KarmaInferno]

Well, we know that spirits can't get up into space. Yes.

But how high up can they actually go?

How much can they accelerate, say, a barrel of tungsten marbles if they they grabbed ahold of it and flew up as hard as they could and let go when they got as high up as they could get?




-karma

[IceKatze]

hi hi

Physical Barrier + Telescope = Crash Test

(What is the body damage multiplier for something moving over 20,700 meters per turn?)

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Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I would think that ZO has some maneuvering capability to get out of the way of space debris and mass drivers. I also imagine that they probably have the most intensive cargo screening anywhere, and I would imagine most of their day to day operations are handled by self sufficient systems.

I don't think the technology exists in Shadowrun to get anything up to .9c, but even there was a way, there would be plenty of advanced warning.

[kzt]

Not as described in any material I've seen. It's tinkertoy assembly of modules that has accumulated over time. It has no ability to maneuver rapidly. But debris is tracked, it doesn't need to rapidly maneuver, it can move out of the way of most anything that isn't an attack. And it can burn down most anything that attacks. The tinkertoy complex seems very vulnerable to a high energy laser attack.

[hobgoblin]

What is the body damage multiplier for something moving over 20,700 meters per turn?

instant nuclear dis-assembly?

[LurkerOutThere]

Maxes out the ramming table, no more no less. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Ascalaphus]

Lasers in space would be pretty nasty. You don't lose nearly as much energy passing through atmosphere as you would down on earth after all, and light-speed makes dodging pretty much impossible.

[Wasabi]

Ringu delivered via Dragonfly drone using the grenade option but modified to be a chemical grenade instead of the HE grenade. Ringu eats through chemical suits (-4 to Chemical protection) and at 20P base damage is damn hard to survive. The "no known cure" coupled with no magical treatment in space means someone is dying in spades. Contaminate all the engineering, command, and security rigger/spider areas to hinder responses to an assault team then use lasers to breach armored spacesuits so the Ringu does its work on any Troll Marines guarding the place.

A close second place is irradiating the air supply with some weapons grade plutonium. The air itself then kills and all the filters in the world will not clean it completely since the air passing through irradiated filters will still have a degree of radiation. If it is sieged long enough that spacesuits are the only air and cannot be exchanged then eventually you'll get everyone. Applying enough pressure for the 72 hours for space suits to auto leak would probably take a sick amount of funds and manpower and you WOULD take losses.

[TommyTwoToes]

It would be slower but more feasable to just keep wreckign the resupply launches. They can probably only afford to miss a very small number of those in a row before they will start running low on something critical.

[Greek Letter Mos...]

Ringu delivered via Dragonfly drone using the grenade option but modified to be a chemical grenade instead of the HE grenade. Ringu eats through chemical suits (-4 to Chemical protection) and at 20P base damage is damn hard to survive. The "no known cure" coupled with no magical treatment in space means someone is dying in spades. Contaminate all the engineering, command, and security rigger/spider areas to hinder responses to an assault team then use lasers to breach armored spacesuits so the Ringu does its work on any Troll Marines guarding the place.

A close second place is irradiating the air supply with some weapons grade plutonium. The air itself then kills and all the filters in the world will not clean it completely since the air passing through irradiated filters will still have a degree of radiation. If it is sieged long enough that spacesuits are the only air and cannot be exchanged then eventually you'll get everyone. Applying enough pressure for the 72 hours for space suits to auto leak would probably take a sick amount of funds and manpower and you WOULD take losses.

Wasabi, I'll concede on the first paragraph due to lack of books and knowledge.

However, I have to disagree with your second paragraph - especially since, thanks to cosmic radiation, you, me and everyone reading this is actually breathing irradiated air.

If you're looking for a radiological hazard, there are far better options than WGP. For starters, Pu is only a weak alpha emitter - a couple sheets of 80 gsm paper will stop alpha radiation cold (device cases do a bang up job, too). The primary health hazard is from inhaling finely divided Pu particles and the resulting lung cancer a few decades down the line - you're actually safer mainlining Pu than heroin.

For a decently long-lived radiohazard, you'd want something significantly more active than Pu , strong gamma emitter, yet long lived enough not to decay away between you producing or obtaining it, and emplacing it topside. Medium-life fission products (Sr, Cs) come to mind due to their 30-odd year halflives - active enough to be nasty, but long lived enough to be a pain.

As for scrubbing the air of radioparticles, a contemporary HEPA filter (to give us some numbers to work with) must be able to scrub at least 99.97% of the most penetrating (approx 0.3 micron) particle size. Eyeballing it, that's a 3.5 order of magnitude reduction in the number of particles (and, roughly, the radiation dose) after one pass through a properly fitted (I, personally, lean towards Z-O spending up on little things like life support - can't have the fatcats risking their OWN lives) air filter that, when too heavily loaded up with active particles, can be turfed out an airlock to burn up. Two such filters in series would reduce the particle count (and thus dose) by a factor of roughly 10 million.

Thus, especially to a mob able to access decent NNBC (nanotech, nuclear, bio, chem) decontamination kit, I doubt that you could seriously radiologically contaminate enough of Z-O to force its abandonment. Depending on who's where, the Corporate Court might not even be inconvenienced.

If you're in the asset-depletion game and wish to irradiate Z-O sufficiently to render it inhabitable, I'd guess your choices lie with either a couple of seriously powerful neutral particle cannon, or a few enhanced radiation devices bursted nearby to englobe the habitat - and if you can loft multiple devices that close, why not go for a hard kill?. My amateurish guess (the theoretical end of nuclear devices are somewhat of a hobby) is that would be your best chance of producing sufficient sufficiently penetrating neutron radiation to activate the station's structure.

In all, Tommy's suggestion of interdicting supply launches would most likely be easier and more effective in sodding up Z-O's operations. Surviving the retribution is your problem.

[Doc Chase]

Well, we know that spirits can't get up into space. Yes.

But how high up can they actually go?

How much can they accelerate, say, a barrel of tungsten marbles if they they grabbed ahold of it and flew up as hard as they could and let go when they got as high up as they could get?




-karma

Not fast enough to do the kind of damage I'd like to see a barrel of tungsten marbles do to an orbital habitat.

[Greek Letter Mos...]

You wouldn't need to loft the tungsten marbles (or box of used kitty litter) into an orbital track - just get it up there on a suborbital ballistic path for the station's relative velocity to do the damage upon collision.

[Doc Chase]

You wouldn't need to loft the tungsten marbles (or box of used kitty litter) into an orbital track - just get it up there on a suborbital ballistic path for the station's relative velocity to do the damage upon collision.

And now my astrophysics knowledge starts to wane a bit. If it were in geosync, would the ballistic path matter?

[Dumori]

You fund a group of mages to pratics magic in space then you uses there combined abilitys to throw up a physical barrier and a few wreck space station spells.

That or you make a Free spirit PC designed to be a master face/influence magic then use that to get as much karma from metas as possible while in creasing your power, force, know spells, edge ect. Then as you can easly flease one karma per person every 28 days in a year you could easly be in the 10000 karma range. Thus being a stupid force and having you drain stat maxed as well. Then with telescopes and the use of your massive edge pool to do the saem as a above.

[Doc Chase]

You fund a group of mages to pratics magic in space then you uses there combined abilitys to throw up a physical barrier and a few wreck space station spells.

Can't work. Won't work. The manasphere does not extend into a vacuum.

[Greek Letter Mos...]

Well, a ballistic path is an unpowered path - I was assuming the Kitty Litter of DOOM was accelerated upwards with a single impulse.

As for crunching numbers:

Specific orbital energy of GEO (relative to surface) is 57.5 MJ/kg, composed of potential energy and kinetic energy.

Since we know orbital velocity at that altitude, we can work out both components.

Synchronous orbit is defined as the altitude (approx 36000km in Earth's case) where a satellite in a prograde (same direction as primary's rotation) takes as long to orbit the primary as the primary takes to rotate.

Thus, an object in GEO, 36,000 km above Earth's surface, itself 6400 km above the core, is 42,400 km up from the core, and traces a (roughly) circular orbit of that radius in 24 hours - 266,400 km in 86,400 s, for a velocity of 3100 m/s. Said object has a specific kinetic energy of ~ 4.8 MJ/kg, leaving potential energy of 52.7 MJ/kg.

Down on Earth's equator, the launch site's "orbital" velocity is 1600 km/h, or 470 m/s, for a net closing velocity (when the KLoD gets up there) of ~ 2600 m/s. The vertical impulse required (neglecting atmosphere) to propel the KLoD to synchronous altitude is what's needed to give it a kinetic energy (relative to surface) of 52.7 MJ/kg - works out to roughly 10,300 m/s.

Assuming everything goes off sans hitch, we have a box of used kitty litter soaring skywards on a collision course with Z-O. According to Rick Robinson's First Law of Space Combat (referenced here), a collision at 3 km/s relative does damage equal to the projectile's mass in TNT - since our collision velocity is 2.6 km/s, each kilo of KLoD would do (2.6/3)^2 kg TNT, or 0.75 kg TNT.

[Dumori]

Can work will work. Its only a manawarp not a full out don't work. The negatives would be quite high but it would be doable.

[Xahn Borealis]

But outside the manasphere is an astral void, right? According to Street Magic, IIRC, magic is still possible in an astral void, it's just hard as fuck. So the stupidly high force free spirit could make that thing it's BITCH. Then the CC uses it's handwavium powered astral teleporting cyborg drones to smush you into a puddle.

[Doc Chase]

Which should more than do the job. I just can't help but think we're missing something - wouldn't the granules of kitty litter vaporize before they can transfer that full kinetic force?

edit: Above regarding relativistic weaponry. Below regarding casting in space.

From what I remember of it, any mage trying to cast in space basically goes crazy. I'd really rather keep the blood magic out of this thread as well. =P

[Xahn Borealis]

Or on the Matrix side of tihngs, hire a group of dissonant technomancers and get them to unleash entropic sprites on any nodes they can find to do with the ZO, then have them write some Resonance malware and join in with the strategy above with nanites and shit. Any other Matrix ideas?

[Greek Letter Mos...]

Doc, that's sorta the point - the energy to vapourise the KLoD comes from the collision itself - I neglected any spall from the station's structure etc, but your point would probably be the reason why something with a bit more structural strength would be used, such as tungsten.

[Doc Chase]

Doc, that's sorta the point - the energy to vapourise the KLoD comes from the collision itself - I neglected any spall from the station's structure etc, but your point would probably be the reason why something with a bit more structural strength would be used, such as tungsten.

No no, I get that. But I can't help but feel that the kitty litter itself isn't going to transfer that full kinetic force because its structure can't handle it.

Though the site you cited has the Whipple Shield, which I would assume ZO has a few of in order to bleed off micrometeorites.

[Mordinvan]

hi hi

Physical Barrier + Telescope = Crash Test

(What is the body damage multiplier for something moving over 20,700 meters per turn?)

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Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I would think that ZO has some maneuvering capability to get out of the way of space debris and mass drivers. I also imagine that they probably have the most intensive cargo screening anywhere, and I would imagine most of their day to day operations are handled by self sufficient systems.

I don't think the technology exists in Shadowrun to get anything up to .9c, but even there was a way, there would be plenty of advanced warning.

I'm sorry, did you just say plenty of advanced warning with a .9c shot? You do realize that would cross the distance from the earth to the moon in just about 1 second right? So assuming you're firing from within Luna's orbital confines, you have at most 2 seconds to find the projectile, track it, and then steer the station out of the collision course.

[Doc Chase]

I'm sorry, did you just say plenty of advanced warning with a .9c shot? You do realize that would cross the distance from the earth to the moon in just about 1 second right? So assuming you're firing from within Luna's orbital confines, you have at most 2 seconds to find the projectile, track it, and then steer the station out of the collision course.

I'm pretty sure that without an FTL drive you aren't going to get .9c on the Earth/Lunar distance scale.

[Mordinvan]

Can't work. Won't work. The manasphere does not extend into a vacuum.

I was under the impression it was only a -12 to the force of all spells, and a +12 to the dv of the drain.