[ExI] Power sats as weapons

[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012  Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Granted that power satellites and platforms for propulsion lasers are
> relatively delicate.  But in order to damage one, you have to deliver the
> agent of damage.
>

A bucket of sand moving at several miles per second would play havoc with
the optical elements of a huge laser, and you'd be unlikely to destroy all
the grains before they hit, and even if you did get that lucky I'd jest
send in another bucket. Sand is a lot cheaper than gigawatt lasers and
power satellites, you'll run out of lasers before I run out of sand.

> Nukes require physical delivery.


That's true, you do need to deliver thermonuclear bombs. If you want to
send a package from Korea to New York City one way to do it is to strap the
package to the top of a rocket and blast it on a 10,000 mile ballistic
trajectory to that city, another much cheaper way to deliver your package
is to use UPS or Federal Express. There is another advantage, its
anonymous. If I launch a rocket with a nuclear warhead it's obvious that I
sent it, but if New York were to just blow up one day, well who knows how
it happened.

 > Launching one from the ground as an attack against a propulsion laser is
> possible, though very expensive.
>

Using a nuke against a space laser would be the waste of a good nuke, sand
is cheaper and would work better.

> It will take hours to get there and the hostile intent will be obvious.


Yes, so a terrorist organization wouldn't even bother attacking a space
based laser, they'd attack big cities, and they can do that without warning
and anonymously. And your big laser will be of no help whatsoever in
preventing that.

>> It would take months for a space laser to deliver as much energy to a
> target as a H bomb could do in less than a millionth of a second, so I just
> don't see the advantage from a military perspective.
>

> The trend for a long time has been precision rather than raw power.
>

But for MAD you need raw power, and terrorists aren't big on precision.

  John K Clark
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