Since the topic has come up for cities recently it got me wondering how one might do it for a place much more important to some Megas. Orbital collisions, hijacked THORs, magic using the dragon bones from mars?

Hijack a space shuttle when it is close to the sattelite and spend all fuel accelerating in the direction of it.

Concepts I came up with once upon a time:

1) Embed small kt laser fusion nuke on the shuttle of a CC member during a D check. Wait for a meeting to get called.

2) Use a gigawatt laser on an SPS to vaporize it.

3) Disastrous "accident" on a cargo booster filled 1000 tons of 1 cm cubes of radar absorbent material (that will sublimate in sunlight) and gets launched in the direction of the sat at 6 km/sec relative velocity. Must be done in darkness.

4) ASAT lasers on the ground.

I used 1 for the approach the Japanese Empire took as part of their withdrawal from the Business Recognition Accords, though they also had 2 & 3 4 ready to go as backups.

Assuming you'd tracked it down, get a t-bird with missiles and launch them at the defensive satellites from as high up as you can, in swarms so they can't all be shot down. Then, land, re-arm and do it again. Once all of those were done, slam an orbital hopper into it.

Probably wouldn't work, though.

I saw this post last night, and that's exactly what I was thinking. I ran through all the various scenarios in my head for how I would go about it, and you know what? They probably wouldn't work. If I understand correctly, every single mega has a vested interest in keeping the ZO up in the air. Any conventional method of taking it down would be nigh impossible. The best I could come up with would be a sleeper agent, who somehow got activated once on board, and did something to cause a disaster. However, it would probably take years to get into that sort of position, and it would be a suicide mission. Not exactly a walk in the park.

Relativistic weaponry. Send a container full of metallic marbles (tungsten ftw) and lob 'em out of a cargo pod that's been on full burn. Heck, leave them in the pod and when the defsats blast the intruder the shrapnel fills the space with nastiness.

Space junk is just a recipe for chaos.

The other option would be from the otherside. You run a deepspace mission out to the Asteroid belt. Then using some good math, and some key accelleration you accelerate a couple of meteors towards the Orbital's orbit. the only problem of course, is if you miss you wipe out half of meta humanity.

Meh. I'd rather not go big with asteroids; you're using a MIRV to swat a quail. Better off with birdshot, and you only run the risk of shooting one guy in the face.

Part of the reason the rediculous NYC thread has continued is because someone wasn't thinking and put a plot-device level power in fairly easy reach of PC's. THere is no such option for space as magic doesn't work there. I would tend to think that any trick you can think of the corps can one up you as they own the vast majority of space assets and have all the coolest toys.

Missed that part, but curiosity piqued. Details, please?

True, true. Physically, though, it's rather difficult to stop relativistic weaponry. Or would be, if we had any. I don't deny the difficulty of hacking a cargo pod, or changing the firing trajecetory of that railgun they were building off Kilaminjaro to make a bunch of space-chaff, but the ultimate danger of a basically unstoppable force in zero-gee is one I'd have to noodle for a while to come up with countermeasures to.

Find out where they get their supplies from, sneak a nuke onboard. Or even better, irradiate the food. Slow deaths for all concened. Why stop there? Seed EVERYTHING with weaponized nanites, cutters, shrikes, surtr, you name it. Then sneak AIs, sprites, hacker nanites, botnets, any form of discreet Matrix infiltration ware, and hack the fuck out of that node. Pretty soon, you'll have your own floating World Bank, and what's left of the Corporate Court unleashing the mother of all Omega Orders on everyone you've known, loved, passed in the street and of course you.

(Nb: This post has been Extremely Emphasised for Epicness.)

Just look at other scifi in space. Off hand, I can come up with the Halo series of books, in which MAC guns (railguns) were used, and the only defence was energy shields (handwavium) and VERY thick armour.

Time for attack of the Mooks. Get 200 top line comlinks with 2 agents per comlink. Use whatever that attack program is that slows response without crashing the target and blast em. If you do this to a shuttle you then can play bumpercars. It doesn't have to be a shuttle destined for the targetted orbital either. Put anything in a retrograde orbit and even if they shoot it down, you have retrograde chaff to deal with.

Agreed but there are options out there, point defense high energy weaponry and other items. The big difference between the scenarios is all the weapons against the ZO have a lot better front end controls.

I was thinking more along the lines of Schlock Mercenary, in which they could accelerate to about .98C and drop a line of tungsten sabots to obliterate a planet, or Planetes in which eco-terrorists hijacked a satellite and blew its thrust load to try and get it to impact a space station and gum up the orbit of Earth with enough space-junk to end the space program.

Along Halo's MAC line, I recall it was the Covenant shield arrays that kept them alive (that and the targeting AI's on the UNSC cruisers was abysmal). The UNSC just had, what, six-meter thick titanium plating? I also don't know how close to C they were getting with the MAC rounds, but if they went faster it'd only do more damage.

No, I'm not a fan of gauss weaponry.

Believe that is from Dunks will. There's a photo of dragon bones on mars with money being offered if people can explain/prove it. I think it turned out to be a big hoax.

EDIT: remember where I found it. AH delivers once more! Annotated Will. Its about halfway down the page.

The anotated will suggested that the bones weren't a hoax, nor were the Cydonian pyramids. The hoax photo was the one with the UFO and the 60's era probe, inserted to throw the heat off the mission findings from botht he unmanned and manned missions before/during the Balkanization of the United States.

He is talking about this.

Right, forgot to fix that part. It does mention that a sample was collected and that it was not a dragon, though. It's the second photo that turned out to be doctored.

I can think of plenty of ways of destroying the thing. The problem is, ZO has got to be defended by the combined intelligence networks of all the big players who are invested in its survival. So the question isn't just 'how do you get something dangerous past it's point defence + its ability to accelerate out of the way', the question is how do you arrange something like that without being noticed by anyone. Now, a scenario where one of the big players for some reason turned on ZO might work out, but random smaller organizations have a much harder time of it, it would seem.

Launch a swarm of nanobots to insersect with its orbit? They should be nearly undetectable...

ZO is defended by detente. Everyone, and I mean everyone knows that if you make a move on ZO, you and anyone possibly related to you will become vapor.

Not to mention it's more than likely that's where your money is sitting. Why would you make a hit on your money?

Thanks!

::kicks self for not thinking to check ancient files::

a few things to remember:

1. why assume players are trying to bring the bank down?

2. why assume the agent moving against ZO is sane or worried about where money is stored digitally?

3. Attempts don't have to succeed.

I think it would possibly be interesting to have a run, or set of runs, centered around a group/entity trying to bring down the bank. Players could easily be on the bank's side.

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.

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

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.

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.

instant nuclear dis-assembly?

Maxes out the ramming table, no more no less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.