> *From:* Ken Wallewein
> *Date:* Thu, 11 May 2006 17:30:18 GMT
>
> Presumably sci.space.tech is not exclusively about propulsion.
>
> Has there been much study about what kind of weaponry a manned
> spacecraft
> might carry with near-current technology? There are a number of
> things
> that would work in vacuum that wouldn't work in air.
>
> Possibilities that come to mind include xray lasers, particle (e.g.,
> electron/positron) beam weapons, and electromagnet slug launchers
> (tiny
> antimatter slugs?). Clearly conventional atomic weapons would be far
> too
> massive to be accelerated very much, and therefore pretty useless. A
> disk-shaped vessel might have counter-rotating circular particle
> accelerators. Hmmm...
>
> Has much been done on this? I don't recall it being discussed here.
You have to be careful to avoid littering LEO with thousands of bits of
shrapnel. It's rather a Pyrrhic victory to deny space to both sides of
the conflict!
So the most ecologically sound way to attack an orbiting satellite would
be to use a small unmanned tug to match orbits with it then deorbit it.
The victim burns up in the Earth's atmosphere, along with all the
evidence that you shot it down!
You could also use an aircraft-launched ASAT to put a steel mesh net or
a cloud of ball bearings at the right height in the path of the target.
The target's own orbital velocity will then cause it significant damage.
The problem with this is that the ASAT is unlikely to have enough mass
to decelerate and burn up the resulting mess, leaving lots of nasty
remains in orbit.
Beam weapons aren't too useful if you want to avoid polluting LEO as
they do nothing but make holes, blind sensors or cause outgassing and
consequent random orbital changes. They're better for dealing with ICBMs
which are never intended to reach orbit.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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