AHC: Earliest Possible Space Battle

Well it'd be a very small front in a much larger war.

I stand by my comment since it would not be a "front" at all :) Seriously it is the equivalent of someone dueling with flare pistols on the Hindenburg. There's dying for you country and beliefs and then there's just dying for no reason :)

Thanks for showing me that! I'd never heard of it before.

No problem :)


Suppose WWII ends differently, where no nukes are ever used. Butterfly away the Rosenbergs so that their is no nuclear arms race. Is Orion now politically feasible, or is any large space program out of the question now that there's no soviet nuclear threat?

Well arguably you need the advanced work on nuclear weapons to get the capability of making pulse units and then once 'someone' has nukes the race is on but lets also point out that Truman TOLD Stalin the US was developing nuclear weapons which made it a priority for Stalin whether we actually used them or not. Lastly while not necessarily 'inevitable' the understanding of the basics of making a 'simple' (gun-type) nuclear weapon were clear by the late 1930 in the physics community. The sticking point was the calculations for critical mass, (the Germans got that one wrong) and the industrial and economic capacity to build and support the infrastructure to make such weapons, (both Germany and Japan lost that capability early on while Russia had to wait till the war was over to recover and rebuild to that capacity) so it ends up coming down to the will to do so. And once you actually dig in and begin to study the process the implosion type bomb quickly comes to the fore as the most efficient and practical type to build. And you pretty much need an implosion type to get a decent pulse unit.

Given all that you still face the problem that building an Orion is essentially giving up on any possibility of controlling nuclear proliferation and dissemination, something that even today is politically unacceptable. Now don't get me wrong as I feel it is VERY much something that could happen. Imagine if the Tunguska meteor had been a few minutes off back in 1908 and Saint Petersburg had been wiped off the face of the Earth by a 'stray' rock from space...

As for a space program in and of itself that's something that follows heavy development of ballistic missile technology. As it was in OTL no one really saw a pressing need for such development even though the basic technology was maturing in the 1920s. Other than Germany that is and they specifically did so in an attempt to overcome the limits of the Versailles Treaty articles on artillery. They spent the current equivalent of a couple of billion dollars even though it was clear the actual utility was questionable and then reduced support for the project once war began and the treaty no longer mattered. Now no matter how one feels about Space Travel it is pretty clear that the really effective weapons that came out of Peenemunde was NOT the V2 or related rocket technology itself but the transference from amateurs in a garage hand building individual rockets to the beginnings of industrialization and mass production of missile and rocket technology.

That can't be overstated, it was a literal paradigm shift in both the public and political acceptance of missiles, rockets and space travel. Even after WWII for the most part while 'accepted' in general the utility and development of missiles beyond a tactical level still lagged. Meanwhile the US was producing intercontinental bombers in large numbers and the leadership of the USSR were aware they could not reasonably hope to meet that challenge head to head. So they went for ballistic missiles instead. And as they say...

So in essence without WWI and it's aftermath it is likely that missile and rocket technology would have remained much longer at a lower level of development with all that implies for space travel itself.
(Ironically the DAY before Sputnik went up the US Department of Defense by Presidential order directed ALL Senior officers and officials to STOP mentioning space travel and satellites in public speeches or face penalty :) )

Space travel could have been much slower than OTL's development, (my favorite example is Alan Sheppard flying suborbital before Gagarin's orbital flight which would have had a major effect on the US effort) or it could have developed faster if the need was clear. (See above about Tunguska :) )

Probably a more pointed bit though is having a 'battle' in space is VERY hard as "killing" something that can actually be launched from the surface of the Earth into space is relatively easy. (Even Orion as I shouldn't need to point out your also tossing shape-charge nuclear weapons around willy-nilly :) ) That makes justifying putting up lots of 'targets' for someone else to shoot a rather pointless endeavor. On the other hand as we know in OTL satellites are highly useful so doing something to protect them makes some sense as does developing the ability to rapidly replace them. On that note though it is quickly apparent that someone will get the bright idea to simply deny EVERYONE satellites. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

Love that video, I was wondering if someone would post it!
I would imagine that a shuttle could be used for troop transport, or for raiding a station with a boarding party. That's a little ASB though, I'll admit!

The Shuttle's not really a good drop ship though. (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astromilitary.php)

Randy
 

MatthewB

Banned
What is an argument erupted during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project while the modules were connected, leading to a brawl?
I was just thinking that. The hatch opens and someone throws a wrench but in zero gravity it just harmlessly passes by. Then a good old Three Stooges slap fight begins but no one can get a strong hit in without floating away in the opposite direction.
 
Which at a minimum you need to have the capability and infrastructure to build those hundreds of bombs in at most a couple of years if not per year.
But both the United States and the Soviet Union had that IOTL. You can see that by just looking at the numbers: the United States built over 32 000 warheads between 1945 and 1967 (the peak arsenal size), which necessitates, at a minimum, that it could build 1 450 warheads per year, and in reality we know that since it had a much lower production capacity in the 1940s it actually built significantly more than that in the later 1950s and 1960s (not coincidentally, this was when Orion was a thing). Similarly, the Soviet Union built around 55 000 warheads between 1945 and 1991, or about 1 300 per year. Again, much like the United States the production rates were not constant and so were very much higher some years than others.

Therefore, this objection doesn't make any sense: both of the major nuclear powers, including the only one that looked seriously at Orion, already had the capability and infrastructure to build hundreds of bombs per year, and used it heavily. Diverting that capacity to making small fission pulse units instead of large fusion warheads would have been a deescalation, not the opposite.
 
Therefore, this objection doesn't make any sense: both of the major nuclear powers, including the only one that looked seriously at Orion, already had the capability and infrastructure to build hundreds of bombs per year, and used it heavily.

Production of the Davy Crockett that used the low yield W-54 warhead, along with the SADM and nuclear Falcon AAM, had a production run of 2,700 being made from 4/1961 to 6/1966
 
"Olympus Has Fallen" (2013), Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart.

Retired astronaut, now President of the United States Benjamin Asher visits his former berth in the International Space Station in 2008 as part of his election campaign. Accompanying him is Mike Banning, his Security Services detail played by Gerard Butler. Due to the sudden assassination of Dimitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the government in Russia falls to anarchy and they attempt to evacuate. But it's a trap and their plans are foiled by a traitor, and the station is surrounded by three pop-up capsules launched from North Korea (originally China in the script). Banning is left helplessly adrift, accompanied only by a Russian astronaut (Sandra Bullock in a cameo). Can Banning re-enter the station and save his boss in time for STS-124 to arrive, or will the faceless North Korean astronauts with vacuum-hardened Kalashnikovs capture the President? Famous for its space battle at the end between a Marine squad going EVA from Discovery and a waiting crew of enemy astronauts...
 

Kaze

Banned
Soviet citizens are allowed to carry guns along their spacecraft - this is because when they crash down, it lands into wolf infested Siberia sometimes miles from the rescue crew. So at the time of Apollo-Soyuz, there could be a fight inside the cabin - therefore a space battle.
 
The earliest possible battle is when two or more spacecraft are in the same orbit at the same time. The combat might be restricted to them throwing random objects at each other (or trying to ram), but that's not much different from early air-to-air combat.
Maybe rams involved.
 
Top