Re: Air Power was: REALITY CHECK TIME!

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>>My base assumption is that the majority of "Air Defense" weapons are
>>energy weapons that
>>operate at the speed of light with computers able to acquire targeting
>>information from multiple
>>sources and process it in real time (real time being millisecond time
>>scales or less).
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>Neat.	The problem is, the kind of sensor output coming from your air
>defenses has a tendency to draw missiles like magnets.  Even today, we
have
>satellites capable of reading your license plate from orbit and
anti-radar
>missiles that will use your own detection systems as guidance against
you.
>The Iraqis don't dare even turn on air defense radars in the no-fly
zones
>because they have a tendency to get shot quickly.
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>Which ultimately means that air control is probably going to go to
whoever
>has space control.  Space control means that the high altitude
satellites
>for communicating and detecting things will all be on that side.  Air
>defense sensors, anywhere on the planet, will be detectable by these
things
>and will, much as they do today, attract either orbital bombarbment or
>surface-skimming cruise missile attack very quickly.  And that's
assuming
>that they haven't bombarded from orbit with enough firepower to reduce
the
>surface population to mush in the first place.
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>E
>(aka Stilt Man)
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Sensors are both passive (Russian IR sensor on most of there latest 
fighters for example) and active.
The active sensors presently are like radar in which the transmitter and

receiver are at the same location
so you kill the transmitter and the receiver and the information 
processor are destroyed also. Lets go
a couple of steps further.

On active transmitters you cut their workings to minimum and detach 
receiver from transmitter and
processor from transmitter and receiver. When transmitter goes active it

is now a target which will
shortly be killed. It is however cheap enough to be mass produced so 
when transmitter number 126
is killed 127 goes active and there is still 2874 that have not been 
activated in this sector.

At the same time your satellites are being detected and fired at by 
multiple cheap (solid fuel mass
produced?) anti missle systems and between the shotgun killer weapons 
and the disposable into
orbit energy weapons you are going to be lucky to spot the weapon that 
killed you much less something
on the ground.

Next question is can a surface skimming cruise missle travel faster then

the energy weapon that is
firing at 186,000 miles per second. The cruse missle was detected by the

passive sensors, tracked by the
active sensors (yes active sensors are killed) and then fired at by the 
energy weapons (one shot disposable?).

Now if all you want in your game is to blow worlds to bits then I 
suggest you play "nucular distruction"
from Flying Buffalo in which the last player on the world with some 
population wins. I stoped playing this
game due to the number of  tie games (no players have  surviving 
populations). My answer to this is the
nuclear dampener field which can reduce the effect of high energy 
explosions (nukes) so low yield weapons
are reduced by at least 90% and high yield weapons are reduced by as 
much as 99.999%.  It operates in a
gravatational field so it is useless for ship to ship use but ships may 
land and turn the device on and has little
to no effect on nuclear power plants (energy yields are too low to 
establish dampener effect).

Scott Siebold

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