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Space Warfare

The short-bus space shuttle.

That’s no moon! Kereberos Productions’ Martin Cirulis joins the Caustic Soda crew as we venture into the final frontier and fight things we find there! This week’s intermission song is The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets’ “Frogstar”.

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A quick example of how B5’s Starfury fighter can rotate and keep moving in its original direction.

MOVIE RATINGS

STARSHIP TROOPERS
Toren: 6/10
Kevin: 9/10
Joe: 7/10

WAR OF THE WORLDS 1953
Toren: 7/10
Kevin: 7/10
Joe: 7/10

WAR OF THE WORLDS 2005
Toren: 5/10
Kevin: 7/10
Joe: (hasn’t seen)

STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE
Toren: 9/10
Kevin: 9/10
Joe: 9/10

SPACESHIP ZERO
Toren: 10/10
Kevin: movie? Album: 10/10
Joe: 9/10

16 Responses

  1. I would also highly recommend Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”.

    Humanity fights an alien race that is some distance away. The troops get to the battlefields by using jump point to travel as the speed of light. Thanks to relativity, by the time they return to Earth from their battle, decades have passed and the troops return to an entirely new Earth. Soldiers out of time if you will. Amazing book.

  2. I would also highly recommend Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”.

    Humanity fights an alien race that is some distance away. The troops get to the battlefields by using jump point to travel as the speed of light. Thanks to relativity, by the time they return to Earth from their battle, decades have passed and the troops return to an entirely new Earth. Soldiers out of time if you will. Amazing book.

  3. Seconding The Forever War, which was quite good.

    As for Starship Troopers, there was an earlier animated version in Japan that came out in 1988. It’s much closer to the actual book than the movie, and similar to the CGI series.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(OVA)

    It’s quite good, but the animation is quite dated at this point.

  4. A spacecraft that is in Earth orbit cannot “bounce” off the atmosphere and head out of the Solar System. A spacecraft would have to be exceeding the Earth’s escape velocity (~25,000 mph) after it bounced off the atmosphere to do that and no manned spacecraft has ever gone that fast.

    Contrary to popular knowledge, the Apollo spacecraft returning from the Moon would not go flying out of the solar system if they skipped off the atmosphere. They would go into a long elliptical orbit and die after they ran out of oxygen or co2 built up beyond the capability of the co2 removal system to remove. The spacecraft would eventually re-enter the atmosphere and most of it would burn up because it would re-enter in an uncontrolled attitude.

  5. A spacecraft that is in Earth orbit cannot “bounce” off the atmosphere and head out of the Solar System. A spacecraft would have to be exceeding the Earth’s escape velocity (~25,000 mph) after it bounced off the atmosphere to do that and no manned spacecraft has ever gone that fast.

    Contrary to popular knowledge, the Apollo spacecraft returning from the Moon would not go flying out of the solar system if they skipped off the atmosphere. They would go into a long elliptical orbit and die after they ran out of oxygen or co2 built up beyond the capability of the co2 removal system to remove. The spacecraft would eventually re-enter the atmosphere and most of it would burn up because it would re-enter in an uncontrolled attitude.

  8. Heinlein’s book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress would have been a good one to mention on this show. The people living on the moon use the rail gun built to lob containers of ore mined from the moon to Earth for splashdown to lob rocks at a populated area.

  9. You guys mention that there’s no such thing as a shield against kinetic impacts when in fact there is! It’s called a Whipple shield, basically a thin layer of metal offset from the main wall of the space craft that, when impacted by a very fast moving object, coverts the object to plasma that penetrates very little into the main craft, instead ablating a larger area.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

  10. You guys mention that there’s no such thing as a shield against kinetic impacts when in fact there is! It’s called a Whipple shield, basically a thin layer of metal offset from the main wall of the space craft that, when impacted by a very fast moving object, coverts the object to plasma that penetrates very little into the main craft, instead ablating a larger area.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

  11. Could’ve listened to you guys talk about this stuff for several episodes. This is right up my alley. Great guest, he brought a lot to the table!

  12. Peter F Hamilton’s first common wealth series Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained both have some creative space warfare particularly the use of wormholes. The common wealth in the setting is actually linked together by trains passing through star gate style wormholes and the ability to project these with a fair degree of accuracy opens up all manner of military tactics.

    Anywho the reason I bring it up is the author shares Martains assessment that once you have an engine capable of exceeding the speed of light laser guns and nukes become redundant. This is comes up in a particularly awesome scene where a captin of the common wealth navy, hopelessly out numbered, decides to over ride the navigation computer and fly straight into the nearest planet at five times the speed of light shattering it and taking out a fair percentage of the enemy fleet with debris.

  13. Peter F Hamilton’s first common wealth series Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained both have some creative space warfare particularly the use of wormholes. The common wealth in the setting is actually linked together by trains passing through star gate style wormholes and the ability to project these with a fair degree of accuracy opens up all manner of military tactics.

    Anywho the reason I bring it up is the author shares Martains assessment that once you have an engine capable of exceeding the speed of light laser guns and nukes become redundant. This is comes up in a particularly awesome scene where a captin of the common wealth navy, hopelessly out numbered, decides to over ride the navigation computer and fly straight into the nearest planet at five times the speed of light shattering it and taking out a fair percentage of the enemy fleet with debris.