On 29 June 2015 at 13:50, Joseph Paul <josephnjody@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 6/26/2015 5:08 AM, Greg Chalik wrote:

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

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

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.

Limitations of what it can see are due to being planet bound and working under new moon conditions. Space based ones won't have that much of a problem. Too slow for you? Computing gets faster, cameras go to petapixels, and more units doing the viewing helps up individual cycle times. A distributed network of these in space would make it hard to avoid detection by anything that changes brightness or moves. Add IR and you catch anything that is hotter than background.

No doubt, and more.

I just wondered about the system mentioned as I wasn't aware of the claimed performance.

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

Oh - just the Earth crossers bother you? Don't worry - in any well run system they will be eaten. Think about it - these are resources that come to *you*. No need to waste dV to go out and get it. Pick it up when it comes close and use your preferred method to alter it's orbit or mine it. If they are a threat to shipping they will be tagged and moved.

Yes, I think of them as free training resources :-)

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

Oh good - you base your deduction on what can and cannot be done in space on a plot from a game. How...outre. (By the way I am stealing that plot point...)

It wasn't a plot by the GM either! One of the newbies in the group, a low-grade tech PC stupidly asked "Isn't there an internal security protocol that would have been activated before the last crew departed the ship?" So the GM said "Good point!" and made us dice for it, then he also diced for it. We diced that there was a security system activated, and he diced that this was NOT known to be operational! Then he said...why don't you have a look! His plan didn't include all our droids and one PC being incapacitated within the first few minutes of the 'adventure' either!

My point is, don't assume ANYTHING. Not why the various objects in the system are there, not what the system administration intends to do with them, not what the procedure is, or what the outcome is going to be.

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?

Because you are rapidly following suite on this one.

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'?

This is what Soviet military art uses as the collective noun for units that will strike first in offensive efforts, at least what we know of what they seem to write about. If you are not familiar with the term I have to conclude that you did not do any research to find out what we believe their doctrine to be and then compare it to what you say you are discovering on your own.That would be a very shaky foundation for new deductions.

I only asked you what you call 'first echelon'.

I don't know who 'you' are, or what you or 'we' know

IF is an assumption, so here you have added two sentences which are meaningless because of the IF

Yet you make a conclusion based on this assumption, and this besides stating that 'we' believe something about Soviet doctrine, which is falsifiable.

I see this as an evasive answer where you not only not answering the question, but make two baseless assumptions that question my right to ask the question in the first place.

It would be easier to just say - I don't know.

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

No, actually there are BMP battalions and BTR battalions and the regiment gets some of both. For the Soviets the regiment is the smallest operational unit that the army cares about as far as doctrine goes special forces/specialty units not withstanding. Do you have any evidence that in war time the regiments have a different TO&E?

There were two types of MRR in the GSFG (with one late exception), those with two BTR-equipped battalions and one BMP-equipped battalion, and those with the reverse numbers. The smallest tactical unit in the Soviet Army was a division. However, operational missions were formed from divisional sub-units, e.g. regiments. The smallest operational formation is an army.

The regimental shtat (TO&E) is irrelevant because it isn't possible to maintian these in wartime. Handover of subunits in mobile 'battle' is a constant theme in Soviet military literature, i.e. that there isn't a problem for the officer commanding regiment X to find himself in the sphere of responsibility of a different division during the progress of an operation. He simply starts taking orders from a different senior ranking officer. In the breakthrough and exploitation operations this is expected.

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

Where have they been so used? And that defensive role would be why the BMP-2 was designed to be better at assaulting urban/elevated terrain. High angle of fire 30 mm cannon to take care of threats on buildings and terrain elevation for example. That is where they were taking fire from in Afghanistan.

BMP-1s and 2s are still mixed in battalions so mounted. The design of the BMP-2 explaination of being more suited to Afghanistan's terrain is a convenient 'cover'. In fact the program to upgrade the decade-old BMP-1 (designs are replaced every decade in Soviet Army) was started in 1974, five years before Afghanistan decision was taken, and had more to do with improving the BMP armour and anti-helicopter capabilities than engaging ground targets at high elevations.

<snip>

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.

I will be looking into Simpkin's work

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'.

Sorry that you are late to the TML. Leonard (Shadowgard) can tell you how long he has been telling us that you can't hide in space<for very long or very effectively> and I think he put some numbers to it and he wasn't the only one.If you have been on the TML for years as you assert elsewhere it would be hard to avoid having seen such. Ken put numbers to it in a way that can be verified.

How does this reply address what I wrote above?

I don't recall saying I want to "hide in space".

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.

Citations would work just fine. Cock-sure attitude that you have found very different answers from every one else amount to making an extraordinary claim - and that takes extraordinary evidence to support. None of which you have. You don't seem to know what an 'echelon' is in Soviet operational terms for goodness sakes.

Since I am working in the realm of national security, I will offer only what I think is appropriate in a public forum. You don't have to like this.

You decided I don't know what 'first echelon' means based on your two baseless assumptions (above).

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.

Col. David Glantz was "chief of research at the Army’s newly formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986." FM100-5 was published in 1981 with the AirLand Battle as the doctrine. So Col. Glantz was not the Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare at the time that AirLand Battle and it's predecessors were being formulated. I think that the answer to your question is the RAND Corporation because I at least get citations for their involvement with the Air Force looking to make deep strikes on the Soviet second echelons and beyond. So do you have a cite for Booz Allen & Hamilton as the authors?

You really think a major rewrite of a Field Manual is done by a single individual? Why do you think David got a promotion?

In fact Booz, Allen & Hamilton never asked the CSI for their input. Strange, wouldn't you say? My information comes from US Army internal sources that I'm not prepared to reveal either.

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.

So you seem to have a hard on for AirLand Battle but by 2003 it had been augmented/replaced by net work centric warfare as a doctrine. The failure you mention for the 3/69th is with network capabilities not keeping up with mechanized forces and to some extent being overloaded. Interestingly e-mail that was part of the Blue Tracker system seemed to work just fine. AirLand Battle directives such as deep attack and coordination of air assets with ground forces seems to have gone very well. I would point out that the vehicles designed for use with AirLand Battle, the M1/M2, did very well at Objective Peach utterly destroying three Iraqi brigades by direct fire with artillery and air support at night and suffered only 8 wounded. That is pretty much a vindication of the weapons chosen to change warfare in Central Europe and the doctrine that was made for them.

You miss the point.

This capability in Europe was sought in 1981/2, and sort-of-delivered in 2003.

It is typical of the failure to align want-need-does requirements in the US Army, and DoD in general.

The US military culture has boundless enthusiasm for unobtanium. What for you and others on TML is game, for them is perceived as achievable reality, and yet it isn't achieved, and it isn't achieved at an escalating rate.

I'm not sure how to explain it, but an analogy is trying to get from A to B by asking every passing person for a shortcut. Because these shortcuts are often undocumented on maps, and perhaps even poorly understood by the individuals providing directions, in fact the 'shortcut' route becomes the longest way possible, and you many not even get to B, but maybe exit at E or G, and would need to backtrack.

This unwarrented over-otimistic desire for 'advanced technology' and hope in Science solving all military problems while igniring the art of war is not a strategy.

Greg

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