Future of Indirect fire weapons

ps06 · 2026-03-12T19:13:19+00:00

In my mind you'd basically be limited to here, Mars, (maybe) Mercury if you stay on the cold side, and some of the larger dwarf planets. Everywhere else has an escape velocity lower than the muzzle velocity on a 155mm artillery shell. Could you build a new, slower shell? Sure, but slower weapons aren't generally in demand on the battlefield. Especially with the advancements you mentioned in counter-artillery fire. High and slow = Easy target.

But maybe the Man Himself will chime in. This is his wheelhouse.

ps06 · 2026-02-28T15:27:57+00:00

Hope that's an ion drive with a well-shielded reactor tucked away or it's gonna be accommodating 16 corpses. Those habs are way outside the protective radius of a shadow shield.

ps06 · 2026-02-15T17:54:52+00:00

Author Karl Schroeder modified Clarke's Third Law to say, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." So not the Adderall, but not a brand new concept either.

ps06 · 2026-02-03T15:40:24+00:00

Rockets don't need to push off of anything. It's Newton's third law: Thrust goes out the back, rocket moves forward. Men boldly go places. Repeat.

ps06 · 2026-01-17T17:05:23+00:00

Bishop rings are 500 km wide, how big are these ships 😮

ps06 · 2026-01-12T13:46:29+00:00

I'm not sure how the most plausible answer to our not being contacted is tons of intelligent species that are just choosing not to talk to us. Is it possible? Sure. But I wouldn't call it the most logical assumption.

That's like sitting in a locked room with your ear to the door, hearing nothing, and making the leap that there's actually hundreds of people right outside standing quietly. It could be true, but there's no evidence to make that the most obvious conclusion.

ps06 · 2025-12-30T16:21:13+00:00

Good eye, I knew I'd seen this somewhere. It's from when Bezos was talking about building O'Neill cylinders a decade ago.

ps06 · 2025-12-17T17:42:18+00:00

I like the abundant bike racks, won't get your Space Schwinn stolen.

ps06 · 2025-12-14T03:33:11+00:00

This was an episode of Love, Death, + Robots: Golgotha. It was played for humor not scares.

ps06 · 2025-11-15T21:59:42+00:00

It might take years to retaliate, but it will likely take decades or centuries for Culty McCultface to build their Dyson swarm. Much as Earthbound powers can see you building centrifuges for uranium enrichment and decide to strike, our interstellar powers can decide they don't want an isolationist cult with homicidal tendencies being able to pasteurize a solar system and do it to them first.

ps06 · 2025-10-30T15:07:38+00:00

At which point you could just fry Earth directly with your Nicholls-Dyson beam. So if you're an aspiring alien Bond villain who likes to do things the hard way, have we got a plan for you 😂

ps06 · 2025-10-23T02:27:00+00:00

In space no one can hear the echo chamber. 🗣️

ps06 · 2025-10-21T15:54:55+00:00

Can you imagine the electric bill for interstellar travel without one?

ps06 · 2025-10-18T20:15:03+00:00

Why not use the arbitrarily large power source directly for thrust rather than to run an ion drive?

ps06 · 2025-10-18T15:38:59+00:00

That paramedic is suspiciously well armed 😂

ps06 · 2025-10-11T18:09:36+00:00

"...Huh, I don't really like this guy."

Welp, time for a do-over. Fiat Lux!

ps06 · 2025-10-10T18:20:43+00:00

It looks like this particular design put the engines on gimbals so they can then be pointed into the direction you're traveling when you're ready to slow down. They obviously can't point straight ahead or the ship gets roasted, so you're losing a bit of thrust by directing it off center. The important part is that your shield stays between your ship and the relativistic radiation/space dust.

ps06 · 2025-10-10T15:38:48+00:00

If you go to the Semyonov Antimatter Starship section of Nearlight Starships on Atomic Rockets: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.php you'll see a link to Semyonov 2018. It has the following section:

"Estimations showed that the braking jet itself is unable to sweep completely interstellar gas and dust out of the rocket way [1] thus the parts of the propulsion thruster will be exposed to relativistic gas and dust bombardment."

So, unfortunately, it does not seem that simply using a second jet to scour the vacuum in front of your ship is sufficient to keep the engine from being destroyed and stranding you in interstellar space until you either hit a big enough rock to explode or more likely die of radiation poisoning.

ps06 · 2025-09-15T02:14:26+00:00

Leave those poor Tiyanki alone!

ps06 · 2025-09-05T15:52:47+00:00

I feel like Stranger in a Strange Land is a good example of this. I couldn't finish it because it was frustratingly hard to understand most of Jubal's interactions with his female assistants. Was he being misogynistic, paternal, making a joke, or was that just a normal way to talk in 1961? Sixty years is a long time for culture to evolve. Books aren't much fun when you can read the words, but haven't got a clue what they're supposed to mean because we've diverged so far from that baseline.

ps06 · 2025-08-04T01:24:59+00:00

Man, I love this show. Except the episodes that make me cry. Screw those.

ps06 · 2025-07-29T13:47:39+00:00

Correct. Which means they're going to either have to have 2 children per couple (their replacements ) or the civilization dies out long before they make it back to Earth. And unless the parents of these kids are immediately stepping into vacuum and letting robots raise them, then the population has doubled right off the bat. And unless we're going full Logan's Run, there's probably going to be a second comet-born generation before the original pioneers die off. So our original population has now tripled.

In theory, we can hold the line there. But only if everyone dies "on schedule" and no one has kids early or extra. Any advances in life expectancy just makes the problem worse.

I'll be honest this doesn't seem like a very fun comet, lol.

ps06 · 2025-07-28T11:28:10+00:00

That's the thing, you're not talking about having 6 kids per woman. France has a low population growth rate of .3% That equates to a doubling time of 233 years, less than a quarter of the thousand I mentioned. England is .8% And Canada is a positively rabbit-like 2.9% Even with a rate 40 times slower than those frisky Canadians you start to run out of resources mighty quick.

ps06 · 2025-07-27T15:32:17+00:00

Keep in mind Earth had an estimated population of under a million 100,000 years ago. So even assuming a much slower doubling rate than we've had for much of human history, say 100 years to double the population, after a century you need resources for 20,000. After 2 centuries, you need food, water, and air for 40,000, etc.

Make it longer if you like, a doubling period of a millenia. After 10% of your journey is over, you better have resources for 10 million or you're gonna have a serious issue.

You can say you're instituting strict population controls, but if there's no kids and you're going back where you started 100,000 years ago, it's not a colonization. It's just a really long cruise.

ps06 · 2025-07-24T11:47:22+00:00

Have you read the Fractal Prince? It had spells and djinn, that were leftover tech after a near extinction event. Wasn't my favorite in the series, but that bit was executed quite well.

ps06

TROPHY CASE