as long as we're on the subject of realistic space combat, i should throw this link out there: Atomic Rockets.

i'm not certain what orbital speeds are, but kinetic mines are usualy the most cost-effective weapon in space warfare. now, considering how cluttered low earth orbit is in the '70s, dropping a cloud of kinetic mines would be about the same as carpet bombing a residential neighborhood in order to destroy a single house.

Lasers are the next best option, but i'm assuming that the Corporate Court is staffed by people who are inteligent, and have reenforced thier space station with that laser-reflective armor (not a very realistic solution, but within the SR rules...okay). so they're not going to be of much use either.

i'm not convinced that missiles are going to be of much use, since an active rocket engine is really easy to detect, and from what i understand they've deployed a decent point-defense network. sure, you could put enough armor on the missile to withstand a few hits, and give it a guidance system sophisticated enough to avoid getting shot down, but if you're spending that much nuyen, why not just launch a manned assault?

Not in 2070 standards. The stealth technology is there, it just needs to be put into missile form. Any tech shadowrunner can do all sorts of things to improve stealth on a drone, so doing so on a missile for a small corp, rogue government, etc is going to be very simple. Launch a rocket into space, which deploys the missiles.

right...but you're looking at several thousand for the basic missile (we're not talking about a man-portable anti-tank missile), several thousand for the mods, and several more thousand to launch the whole thing into space.

kinetic mines are chunks of metal. 'nothin simpler than that.

You contact Mr. Roboto and ask him to build you a gravity beam. When he asks for a bonus, toss him into your sharktank. Laser equipment for the sharks optional.

ZOH probably doesn't grow its own food and almost certainly doesn't make its own blue toilet goop. One way to do it would be to replace a drum of toilet cleaning/sanitizing goop with liquid explosives on the ground before it gets sent up. The same principal applies to shipments of coco-cola, toothpaste, slurm, blood of the innocent, and etc.

You have a hugely more complex system there, with many more vulnerabilities. You can jam the missiles, you can see the missiles (as missiles, they have motors and emit heat) and hence you can kill the missiles, you can find you surplus stealth tech doesn't work against 8 different sensor platforms, each running a different WL from a different aspect, etc.

The box of rocks approach is very simple. You launch a heavy lifter - like 500 ton payload - that is destined for GEO. Like most boosters, it accelerates fast, then coasts. But midburn, and the moment that it's trajectory will intersect ZOH (several thousand km away), you blow it and dump 100,000,000 nitrogen cooled black BBs in an expanding cloud, propelled by the nitrogen. The should will be several km wide when ZOH intersects it in 180 seconds or so. If you do it right ZOH collides with several thousand BBs at 10km/sec or so relative no matter what terminal defenses they have.

Wave bye-bye ZOH.

Except you never get the rocket off the ground due to one of the mega anti terrorist teams geeking you before you launched. The massive intellegence operation dedicated to monitoring the safty of ZOH would of flaged the rocket, the fuel or launch equipment or the talent to do this. At worsed the launch would of been flagged and orbital counter measures deployed in case it was IBM.

If you have the resources to launch ZOH-killing tubs of fast moving pellets into GEO, you probably also have:
1) The ability to hide the fact that you're doing it,
2) The ability to false-flag enemy intelligence operations and muck with their data,
3) The ability to reliably protect high-importance assets from anti-terrorist teams.

To whit: if you're chucking sat-killers like it ain't no thing, you're a AAA, or are backed by a AAA. Period. No one else has launch facilities for this kind of shit, because as far as I recall, all the governments sold off their launch sites and tech to the AAAs back in the 2020s and 2030s.

if we're assuming that its a AAA operation, why would they be attacking thier own guys on the ZOH? if they've got the backing of a major corp, then why launch a missile strike that may or may not work? why not just use your clearance and send a strike team to the satalite itself?

Exactly, no one who can do it, would want to do it. I don't claim ZOH is invulnerable, it's NIGH invulnerable.

and the suits on the ZOH breath a collective sigh of relief. saved by virute of no one wants to go through all the trouble to kill them.

...but he would be detected by one of the oldest forms of sensor technology, radar. He may blend into the sky visually but he still has mass and that will reflect a radar pulse.

I still like the idea but it only works if he surfs back to earth on part of the wreckage.

Either way you'll have to use a rocket to get whatever you're deploying into space, so they're equal on that part.

Kinetic mines may be simple by themselves, unless you want to make them stealth. You'll spends thousands doing that, making them radar absorbent and all that jazz, so that's also basically equal to the missile. Sure you could opt not to make them stealth and then you run the risk of ZO detecting the "cloud" too soon and being able to maneuver out of the way or take other measures. If the cloud was detected, in theory a properly timed missile from ZO that explodes at just the right time could be used to push the cloud off course. Not simple to do, but certainly possible.

Its deployment that makes the difference. You have to send mass of simple metal which can't adjust itself on an exact course at an exact speed. If you're off by even a minute fraction in your calculations or more importantly, the deployment itself, you'll miss miles. That's not going to be simple, in fact the odds of deploying it just right will be ridiculously difficult. A missile designed for space won't have that problem because it will be able to correct its course. Therefore, its simpler to use and deploy.

theres a few things wrong with your argument, but i refuse to be the guy who "has to be right on the internet".

...aren't there linear mass drivers on the moon?

Also to make an orbital adjustment takes a lot of preparation. You just don't hit the manoeuvring thrusters button like in Star Trek and "step out of the way".

This is one of the reason that recon UAVs in RL are so much more versatile than spysats.

Antimatter cannon.

Of course, then you have a big burst of multispectrum radiation to deal with instead of a bunch of debris, but given the risk of solar flares they're probably prepared to deal with that.

Personally, I'd say your best bet would be nanites. Hard as hell to detect, but capable of doing any number of mean things to the station or it's personnel. Then again, they probably have some kind of uber blue goo pumping through the vents in that place.

Pretty much any attack in SR has some way to counter it, so you've got to assume that the ZOH is defended by counter-nanites and a cadre of mages as well as it's weapon platforms and whatnot. Your best bet would probably be a two-stage attack: One to punch a hole in or otherwise occupy the defenses, and a second attack to follow right behind the first and slip through the hole before it can be closed.

Waitaminute--astral forms can't leave orbit, right? (Functionally, anyway.) Awakened beings and objects are usually dual-natured, as I recall, meaning there's an astral form accompanying them wherever they go--same with spells...

...so doesn't that mean that neither magicians, spirits, magical artifacts, or spells can enter orbit?

Hmm, no magical defenses for the ZOH--but no way to chuck a spell at it either...

...still, the inability to, say, have a team of mages put up an uber-force barrier spell around the damn thing makes taking it out much simpler. You only have to worry about defenses that are physically possible.

A Magician can leave the planet no problem, he just has to not percieve astrally.

I do not know if the ZO has enough people on it to allow a mini-gaiasphere or something, but I suppose that if you put up a few mages and their magical dooddads, they could make a magical lodge out of the whole thing, then start using geomancy to beat magic into shape until it could be used there.

And if it is somehow possible to seal off the void outside, and start fostering a friendly magic area inside, as described above, then you can begin summoning spirits inside. Protecting the orbital from accidents and magical attacks. For an orbital, protection from the first one alone, would probably pay for having a resident team of mages doing geomancy until the whole thing had a positive and friendly background count to a fairly wide-spread tradition.

Oh, you couldn't put any barrier "outside" the orbital, but in this case you could use magic to give it additional armor.

Why a wide-spread tradition? Surely you would want it so the background cont is against all but your security mages and you'd have them all from one obscure tradition.

Magic can be cast outside the gaiasphere. Case in point, Damien Knight's initiated space mages, who trained up there, and as such, find magic to be incredibly easy on earth.

One of them played Knight's body double once and then magically fucked up an astral nasty, possibly a horror (it seemed implied, IIRC).


Uh... I'd assume if he's using ruthenium, then he's probably got the "Radar Absorbent Materials" mod up the wazoo.

And of course, he's also a space mage conjuror using spirit concealment.

[quote name='weblife' date='Jun 22 2008, 08:19 AM' post='695212'
I do not know if the ZO has enough people on it to allow a mini-gaiasphere or something, but I suppose that if you put up a few mages and their magical dooddads, they could make a magical lodge out of the whole thing, then start using geomancy to beat magic into shape until it could be used there.
[/quote]

would the fact that its moving at orbital velocities mess up the lodge? i thought they couldn't be mobile.

Yes, but its not inside any other gaiasphere, so its moving in relation to what?

Its up to local interpretation I suppose, but my take would be that its far enough away from Earth (outside gaiasphere), to count as a stationary location on its own. In relation to itself, it is immobile.

If this premise is not accepted, then all sorts of other problems ensue, since Earth moves in relation to the moon, the Sun, the galaxy and so on, and in this case I'd hazard "but they are outside the gaiasphere" would be the reason why wards are not blown away by the relative movement.