[ExI] Power sats as weapons

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 5:00 AM,  John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> I agree, we already have an excellent method for instantly vaporizing
> cities and I don't see what additional advantage a laser would provide in
> accomplishing that task. And a huge but delicate power satellite powering a
> enormous laser in geosynchronous orbit would be a sitting duck for anybody
> who didn't like it.

I don't exactly see how.  Perhaps you could explain.  To me, trying to
target a propulsion laser satellite is a bit like a rock fight between
someone on the top and someone on the bottom of a well.

 "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

snip

> It wouldn't be used for accomplishing that task.  A laser wouldn't need to
> nuke the whole city, but rather just punch holes in the engine compartments
> of the battle tanks,

They are not *that* good, beam diameter would be a couple of meters at
the best.  And you can armor tanks to some extent with highly
reflective shields.

But you can't make the dirt reflective.  Tank isn't going to do so
good with a ton of TNT per second equivalent energy heating the dirt
around it.  It would not take too long to sink the tank in molten
rock.

> cook the missile batteries, slice wings off of fighter
> planes, that sort of thing.  The war would be over, the people in that town
> would read about it the next day in the press.  Then we get to retire those
> methods for vaporizing cities, as that system is expensive to maintain.
>
> A disadvantage I can see is that a space based laser might not be effective
> in maintaining the old paradigm of mutual assured destruction.  With Iran
> getting nukes soon, I don't know how to map the future of that notion.

It's worth thinking about this as a single player.  Because whoever
builds the first propulsion laser has a veto on any other group
building one.

Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

snip

>. More importantly a broken solar sat
> produces *loads* of fragments in the same orbit: it might be that you
> don't need any weapons for MAD, but that the Kessler fragmentation
> cascade will make any solar-sat system impossible. And even if the enemy
> has not fired on your satelites, you could in principle fire on your own
> to trigger the "everybody loses" result.

Spike is right on them all going the same way.  There are ways to loop
a load of ball bearings out around the moon and put them in a counter
orbit at GEO, but it's not going to be easy to do under the watchful
eye of the laser propulsion traffic control.

> Hmm, this is worth thinking about. I like Keith's scheme a lot, but it
> will involve many loads into orbit and some big structures up there. A
> debris management solution is probably vital for it.

Laser propulsion gives you debris cleanup virtually for free.

Keith