On 26 June 2015 at 15:56, Joseph Paul <josephnjody@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 6/26/2015 12:41 AM, Greg Chalik wrote:

On 26 June 2015 at 00:35, Joseph Paul <josephnjody@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 6/25/2015 1:37 AM, Greg Chalik wrote:

Dan,

The asteroid belt is very neat :-)

I see a vastly more 'populated' system.

In any case, perhaps I'm overstating that part.

But, what if "if a squadron of warships appears, you should be able to ID and track them when their EM wave front crosses your sensor
pickets.", but its not a squadron of warships?

What if the ships are not even a squadron?

What if they don't even look like warships?

What if they appear at different times and for different reasons?

By the way, where would you suggest looking for affordability calculations?

Greg

Workout some volume calculations for space and then take another look at what it takes to be as 'populated' as you imagine. If it is not as dense as nested Dyson Spheres it is really open. Consider also that further improvements in cameras will mean that it is cheap to set up pickets with the capability to just watch for changes over arbitrary periods of time to catch things that are moving out there. We have a system now that will take a scan of the entire sky from Earth and check for Near Earth Asteroids once a week. By Traveller (or 2025 (if Man is still alive....)) that will probably be a continuous real (light lagged) -time process. Your objections are basically up against the 'Hot Equations' concerning detection in space and those have been debated here for a decade or more.

Which scan system is that?

PAN-STARRS in Hawaii http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/

three-quarters of the entire sky

, and its not real time but with several days delay.

All I know is that there are 47,000 asteroids out there without us having done very much polluting as yet.

There are quite a few more than that. 150 million over 100 meters in size. More being discovered all the time. See this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=40&v=xJsUDcSc6hE Notice the jump in discoveries when NASA's WISE satellite comes online. It uses IR detection that reads dark asteroids that are warmed by the sun. Think on that. And warmed means a few degrees above background. SO if your ship is dark you have almost no way of keeping it from being seen and if you make it shiny it is certain to be seen.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2145699/New-Nasa-sky-scan-reveals-47-000-hazardous-near-Earth-asteroids-330ft-wide--BIGGER.html

Mind you, I wouldn't want to be close to an impact by a 50m in size object either

So what happens after a system has been exposed to 3,000 years of spacefaring civilization?

Salvage sounds good, but realistically in space salvage is quite expensive, not like on surface where ships just get towed to India and hakced appart by illiterate workers.

Derelicts are towed to a Lagrange point, stripped of useable parts, and feed the rest into a solar furnace for recycling down to elements. Not hard. At least not hard with Traveller's assumed cheap energy. 3000 years of living in space - I think they will have it down.

Yes, well we had different objectives in our game, and never completed the task to get to the solar furnace phase...and actually didn't have one planned. Our group invested heavily in droids, all of which were either destroyed or seriously damaged when it was discovered the internal security system was showing deactivated, but had reactivated, and was perfectly functional

One of the few games I was in and enjoyed way back when was in fact about salvage, and we soon discovered its not so easy.

I wonder if anyone has tried to produce a formula for calculating amount of artificial objects in system based on length of habbitation, size of populations, number of habbitats, TLs, etc.

The same problem exists for submarine detection in the littoral which is very congested under the surface, and that is even without the man-made junk. I'm not aware any nation ahs a full coastal sensor array in place.

I would suggest to you a book called "The Hot Equations" - it lays out the math for what several people have been telling you about detection capabilities in space.

I got it but not read it yet. I imagine it compiles much of the discussions that led to Ad Astra's Attack Vector game engine.

>What if the ships are not even a squadron?

Doesn't matter - either they are going to concentrate at some point or they don't.

>What if they don't even look like warships?

Doesn't matter - ramming planets is such a concern that it gets tracked and size calculations alone will be used to rate it's potential for trouble. And of course there is the problem of form following function and how much you can tell at a distance. And in the 3I the fact that they have had 1000 years of space warfare. Q-ships have been tried. Protocols have likely been created.

>What if they appear at different times and for different reasons?

If the 'fleet' straggles in looking like liners (that have never shown up before) and subsidized merchants that pass boarding inspections and is successful in taking a planet the new plan for other planets is to keep traffic the hell away from the planet until each ship is boarded or otherwise made a non-threat. I like a hefty nuclear mine attached to the hull over the bridge. Deviate from flight plan, look suspicious, disgorge fast attack craft, or tamper with the mine and things will not go well for you.

If the next opponent in my Traveller wargame is thinking like you, it should be a 'snap', over in a minute.

This is exactly what I meant when I said that those that have an over-reliance on technology are in for a disappointment.

Well let's hear it.

Ok, next time we have a game.

(PS - Your analyses of Soviet doctrine match nothing that I can find and I doubt that you were given access to anything classified by the military on the subject. You are missing some points like - "Filling the soft shoulders of a flank" does not match with throwing the BTR s and BMPs of a Motorized Rifle Regiment into the first echelon right behind the tanks. "BTRs are for use on roads to give operational agility" ignores the fact that BMPs and BTRs are used in the same regiment. The regiment will move at the pace of the slowest part and if you put the slower BMPs off-road (for that flank protection) you get yet slower advances. It looks an awful lot like you want to be creative with the research and derive function and doctrine from looking at the vehicle rather than taking what we have that the Soviets have written at face value or digging into actual AARs.)

If you want to discuss Soviet doctrine further, contact me off the list.

For now I would just repeat that one should not assume anything.

No. You have shown to me that you are not at all a source that I value in that subject.

So why bring it up in this thread?

You are not going to find anything because to my knowledge no one else has done this research because its 'old history', and not 'interesting' at that. Except it is pertinent to another problem in doctrine development. A 'link' if you wish to think of it that way.

Just because something is classified by the US military (which probably doesn't know about it), means I couldn't figure it out on my own?

Did you hack into my security file?

What do you call 'first echelon'?

The BTRs and BMPs are issued to battalions in the same regiments, in peacetime. So what?

The BMPs are not intended for offensive operational movements altogether. They are built for tactical manoeuvre, but usually used in defense.

Yes, the Soviet designers were constrained by doctrine to design the vehicles' functionality and features. This is not how it works in US DoD.

In order to hide or at least mask these, and hence the doctrinal implications, every trick in the book was used through the Cold War, successfully. The 1981 poster of the seven most dangerous sytems put out by the US Army Europe omited the BTR.

The actual AARs are all from the Second World War. No Soviet description of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary exist that I know of. However, Conrad Crane famously said that there are only two typess of warfare: asymmetric and stupid.

The Second World War studies confirm my research, and David Glantz (Col. US A ret.) agreed with my finding.

The Soviet military leaders during the Second World War sought to integrate an asymmetric element (khitrost') into every operation from the Moscow counteroffensive onwards.

I don't know you and your fields of interest, but when analysing another nation's armed forces, while that nation does not wish to advertise when, how and by what means it will use these forces, it really helps not to take ANYTHING at face value and be highly creative, or at least be able to put oneself in the other guy's shoes and ask yourself 'would I really do THAT?' The late Brig. Simpkin (British Army) just about figured this out after 40 years in the military, and only doing so after learning Russian, and getting down to meters and liters. Jenuine discovery takes time. I 'stand' on the shoulders of others.

The booklet you suggested by Ken Burnside wasn't printed by him for 15 years from starting Ad Astra, and I remember him participating in online discussions on the same subjects in the 90s. There have been A LOT of authors publishing about space combat until 2015, Marc Miller included, yet not one published the same sort of research Ken did. So in 2014 you wouldn't have found a good publication to explain thermodynamics as it applies to sci-fi space combat in one easy place for non-academics. His LinkedIn profile says his education is in University of Alaska Fairbanks, Bachelor of Arts, English, and his greatest experience, consistent with this, is in Publishing. No mention of Astrophysics. Yet I'm not calling Ken a 'bad source'.

So of course I shouldn't compare myself to Ken because his well written research is confirmed by hard science.

'Military' is only partly 'science' i.e. technology, and quite a bit of art.

Who's research was used to produce the AirLand Battle doctrine by Booz, Allen & Hamilton? Not the US Army Staff College Soviet Studies Centre that Col Glantz headed at the time. I can find you any number of retired US Army and USAF officers from the 80s that would in minute detail explain how and why AirLand Battle doctrine was unexecutable when it was tried in late 80s. It was written with one express reason - to make the new and very expensive systems then in final pre-production testing or early block production look very convincingly good for the Armed Services Committee. In part this was because of a number of assumptions taken about the availability and effectiveness of C3I systems that didn't materialise. Not even by Iraq 2003 (for example Marcone's 69th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division in advance to the Baghdad airport). These assumptions were pursued into the FCS program, but as someone else said, "you can't sell a combat vehicle on its ability to network alone". Any by then, 2006, it was a very different war.

Greg

----- The Traveller Mailing List Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml Report problems to listmom@travellercentral.com To unsubscribe from this list please goto http://archives.simplelists.com