North Star Anti-Fleet Defenses Around the North Star System · 10:18am Dec 17th, 2015
Deep within the large military command headquarters on Þettaland, deep within the bowels of the facility, there lies humanity's second truly stable AI. Its comprehension spans the galactic sector's largest computer complex. In it's control lies the greatest defensive weapon humanity has ever conceived.
A defense system comprised by two simple things...
A enormous mass displacement FTL gate generator,
and billions of small rocks with control thrusters on them.
The system was originally conceived as a way to stabilize the North Star's dangerously erratic near solar hard debris. What was a system to preserve life on their new home planet, quickly became the greatest communications systems project conceived. The need to control and track billions upon billions of small objects at once drove and lead to several breakthroughs in the still somewhat controversial field of AI creation.
The billions of oort cloud objects became a massive source of ammunition, essentially dumb missiles. Thrusters would accelerate the object to a reasonable speed (usually capping out around mach 8 with the limited supply of fuel on some of the objects), and the FTL gate generator would simply open up two rifts in space, connecting a point ahead of the accelerated object, and another point that acted as the exit, usually with the intention of hurling the object directly into a fleet.
The system was designed to act in conjunction with the massive civilian traffic control system, and the long range FTL interdiction system. The two systems would interdict a incoming fleet, leaving it a sitting target for the Oort cloud defense system.
The project has been highly successful, preventing every attempted breach into the North Star- star system since it's creation.
That is an ingenious defense-system.
Lasers? NOPE!
Huge-ass-shields? NOPE!
With this, the Stone-age has begun...
World War III may be fought with lasers, but galaxy war 1 will be fought with rocks.
Wait, mach 8? ...But considering you use an FTL generator... Let's assume you use the ice as fuel instead.
If we assume that they use objects above 100 metres in diameter, and most objects they use are that... and given the estimate that the Oort cloud contains 2 trillion objects... and the assumption that most Oort cloud objects are maybe 70% ice, let's pretend they have a density of 1.31415. That gives us a mass of 688.6146 metric tonnes. Because ice can be used as rocket fuel with the right equipment (see Saturn I, Saturn V), let's use that as fuel. Let's pretend it'll give us a similar ISP to S-IVB, about 421 seconds. Let's go with 420 because numbers. This gives us 3774 m/s of delta-v, which is just enough to transfer from Low Earth Orbit to Low Mars Orbit. That means our asteroid can be moving at 3.774 km/s (mach 11 [i forgot how fast mach 1 was]) when it hits the target, assuming the portal has no speeding-up abilities. That remaining 275.44584 tons of mass... will hit with 3923196033003.84 newtons of force. Let's assume this spreads over 500 metres of our target. (yes, every fleet is a solid object, DUH) This gives us 7846392066 joules per meter, which is about enough to replicate that one mythbusters experiment where they made diamonds. Over 500 meters of target. Yeah. Alternatively, over 1 meter of target(yes 100 meter diameter objects hit on 1 meter of course!), you get the equivalent of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion
From 1 100 meter asteroid.
3624079 FTL generators made more recently can inflict some change in velocity, just not this one. It's a older model of FTL, and it's projection system just couldn't handle that heavy of a dimensional shift.
The thing is the size of the Empire State building, and is wayyyy too expenses to replace.
Honestly, you can do far better with a generator that can produce a remote wormhole.
Just open one end in the middle of the fleet, and the other at the center of the nearest star.
Nothing says 'Fuck You' like being bathed in a steady stream of nuclear hellfire.
3624625 That would be highly illegal according to intergalactic law. Stars are important, and they are already weak spaces FTL wise (harder to make holes), tearing bits of them out and destabilizing them is a very very bad idea.
3624079 Also, it's a ion drive that propels it, something cheap and easy to maintain on thousands of objects at once.
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3624625 Would love y'all's input on the latest blog.
4320065 Honestly, I like things like this that use things that would be normally overlooked as usable for things like that to increase their efficiency, or just are pretty creative though.