Hmm. I was okay with the movie, saw it twice at the theaters before wondering why I did that. I don't think I rented the movie, and only watched it on cable if nothing else was on.

But I loved the book. I've read it literally about two dozen times, and shared it with my friends, who have opinions ranging from "like it" to "love it" to "love it so much I shared it with my mother." I don't think Heinlein's proposed government system in Starship Troopers would work perfectly, but I still find the novel very enjoyable.

You are quite correct - my bad. I was just trying to show where it first showed up in the FASA scheme of things.

Dang...I knew I was forgetting something. It will have to lose quite a bit of that in order to de-orbit in a reasonable time frame, but certainly not all of it. Probably around as much as you gain from PE to KE. So, more like 8 km/second. Darn it. Of course, the less energy you lose deorbiting, the longer your flight time.

As I said earlier, it's possible, but is going to be technically extremely difficult. Adding enough guidance to make sure you hit a static target is assumed as par for the course, but a guidance system that can hit a moving target is going to be really expensive. Aiming at a tank (for example) that could be moving at 100 km/h makes terminal guidance a problem. To deflect the projectile by a few hundred meters over the course of 10 seconds is going to take some serious maneuvering capabilities. Again, technically quite possible, the real question is of usefulness. You can make a thor rod (or cluster) that you can use against moving targets, but do you really want to bother? Sure, spending 100 million to take out an ICBM makes sense, but to take out an armored car?

Dang it. Correct again. I plead not being an engineer.

Another argument for why guidance is not such a good idea. I would state that you have to hit it early in the descent phase to deflect it significantly, which is when the rod is hardest to find, or hit it with one hell of a laser during the later part of the descent.

A Thor shot could be made into a truly killer weapon, that can home in moving vehicles and utterly erase them. However, lofting the weapon into orbit is incredibly expensive (tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars/nuyen). Even if you can engineer a good enough guidance package to target moving vehicles, it's simply not worth the expense. Never mind the tactical difficulties of a weapon that on a good day will take a few minutes to arrive on target.

On the other hand, Thors are great strategic weapons. Flight time doesn't really matter if your target is a building. It's also effective against undergound and hardened targets. In sum, it's as good as an ICBM, but without the messy radiation problems, and has a much smaller impact footprint to boot. Perfect for taking out facilities in populated areas without causing excessive collateral damage. And with some effort, you could make a semi-guided weapon that could be fired in clusters to take out naval vessels, which is also a good thing.

Anyway, those are just some of my thoughts. Dang it Cray, I'm going to have to wake up earlier in the morning if I'm going to out out-nerd you.

- Runner Smurf

Depends on production quantities, launch capabilities, and where you're deploying the Thors from.

*According to the rocket scientist IMG (masters of 'space systems engineering'), spacecraft costs tend to be 2-10x the estimated cost for the first spacecraft, roughly on target for the second copy, then drop rapidly in price, to as low as 1/10th the estimated cost (particularly when built within the space of a year). Mass production does good things to spacecraft purchase prices.

*Further, launch costs from Earth can be dropped radically with reusable, rapid turn-around, single stage-to-orbit vehicles, to under $100 a pound by some optimistic estimates (vs ~$10,000/lb for the US shuttle). Launch vehicle operating costs are also helped (greatly) by higher frequency of launches (fuel costs are a minimal factor in launches - it's facilities and labor that get you). Frequently launched SSTOs get to defray all those costs over more launches. A ground crew of 50 (or 10,000, like the shuttle) are going to get paid the same in a year whether you launch 3-4 times (like the shuttle) or 50 times. Notably, Shadowrun does feature relatively cheap launch systems, like semi-ballistics and suborbitals.

*Shadowrun is playing around with lunar mining facilities (Ares and SK). Getting Thor bombardment platforms from a lunar factory to Earth orbit is much easier than getting them from the Earth to Earth orbit. You could meet things halfway and supply most of the mass of Thors (the tungsten rods) from the moon, while the lighter guidance and motors come from Earth. This leaves the fancy, expensive factories on Earth, while relatively simple facilities can be installed on the moon.

If launch costs get low enough (and they might be in Shadowrun), and if you build Thor bombardment platforms in sufficient quantity (a constellation of 24-96 platforms), costs per Thor shot might be comparable to a fancy cruise missile, especially if the Thor platforms can be re-loaded and re-used.

Find another way to out-nerd me. I get up at 4:20am so I can use an exercise machine without annoying the neighbors. (When they're awake, they move into rooms below my exercise machine and complain mightily about the noise. I've found it helps to turn on my air conditioner, which is right outside their bedroom window. They can't hear me exercising because the AC is blaring and, gee, they can't complain about the AC. There's a whole farm of ACs right outside their window.)

And to boot, there's in canon a space station at the lunar/terran lagrange point that would be nifty for that. I believe it's ares too.

Pretty bug contradiction there! is it a modern weapon in use now, or are we still researching it?

Actuall it has MANY disadvantages to it compared to an orbital drop. You aren't going to get close to the same velocity, it has to travel much farther through low level atmosphere adding much drag bleeding away even more potential energy, and it's going to take a lot more power at the time of launch. And, I'll say again, it's going to be a LOT lower velocity.

Read "Sky Masters" from Dale Brown or look up Pegasus and ASAT on Google. Basically Missiles using a plane (A DC-10 in the book, a B52 and an F15 in real life) as a first stage. Now use a sub-orbital with 200+ passengers (> 20to payload) and just go up to 100km (Doable, X15 did it as did Spaceship One) and release the missile.

With a rather small booster you can get a sizeable satellite in a Low Earth Orbit. Granted, it will come down after a few weeks/month but it makes a great "In time of crisis" THOR carrier.


Birdy

There's not a lot of difference in delta-V between a long-lived low altitude orbit and a short-lived low altitude orbit. If you're using suborbitals to launch satellites, you probably have the sophistication to add the extra 100-200m/s and circularization burn that will give you a very long-lived satellite.

I'm not a math whiz, but I'm pretty sure that 1600 kilometers per hour is just under 450 meters per second.

Dale Brown? No thanks, I went through my "slightly informed but mostly masturbatory military porn novels" phase back in High School. Thanks, though.

Fraggin' Flight of the Old Dog...

Novels that blatently promote / glamorize the military, warfare, and our capacity to kill people and destroy things.

Kind of like Shadowrun, but without the magic.

So Nicked for a Sig.

There hasn't been a lot of prospecting on the moon, either.

Fair enough, though an associated question is: can they deliver the same effects as a Thor shot?

If the tactical ability is "blow shit up," yes, there are alternatives. However, hypersonic cruise missiles (1-2km/s), artillery, and bombs are unlikely to deliver quite the same effects at the target. The flight time in minutes is also typical of long-ranged artillery and even hypersonic cruise missiles - particularly when they're trying to compete with a Thor system's ability to hit something on the far side of the planet.

I'd qualify that with, "you just aren't joing to see it used to take out tanks on an active battlefield." Sure, conventional artillery and pals are definitely superior to Thors in that role, at least in SR. (In different settings, like BT, if you have a warship that can drop some NAC, NGR or capital missiles on a battlefield without being strangled by other players, do eet!) In SR, as a first strike weapon against tanks parked around a military base...

What like dropping tactical nukes in a game of dirtside cos your losing..... But that was over 10 years ago....

incorrect. realism in the sci-fi areas of a sci-fi/fantasy game enhances the believability of the fantasy elements. suspension of disbelief is easier to sustain in a game that pays attention to realistic detail in the parts of that game that are based in reality. ignoring reality because your game has elves and dragons in makes it more difficult to sustain one's suspension of disbelief. if anything, the inclusion of fantastic elements makes it more important that the sci-fi elements be realistic, because the inclusion of fantastic elements stretches suspension of disbelief already. stretching it further with poorly-researched and -implemented sci-fi makes the game less fun to play.

edit: i'd like to note that "Thermonuclear interactions, such as hydrogen fusion, may take place in the tomato sauce" is very, very funny.

No, the Arrow is going nowhere near orbit. It's just climbing to 70 miles altitude. Altitude is important for orbit only so far as it involves getting away from atmospheric drag (at 70 miles, I don't think a spacecraft could complete 1 orbit). What's far more important is speed - the key to getting into orbit is being able to miss the horizon by the time gravity has pulled you back down. That takes about 17,500mph parallel to the Earth's surface, but the Arrow is only going to peak at about 2500mph.