quote]Nowhere near doomsday.[/quote]
True its nowhere near doomsday people have envisioned. Death would only happen slower for the unlucky that would have to survive. Possible weather patern changes, colapse of a world economy at large, Massive political power vacums, and the enriched urainium/plutonium set loose by the explosions would filter through every part of the ecosystem.
FYI, we have detonated nukes in space, Teak and Orange shots, both 3.8 megatons in 1958.
I concede this part of the arguement, I spoke to soon.
Ask yourself if that makes any sense what-so-ever when trying execute a combat mission.
It does, disassembling weapons as a meens of transport has been military pratice for generations. Its why modern soliders are trained to assemble multible weapons from a box of assorted parts containing 3 complete weapons and random parts. Guerallia fighters have longed used the pratice to aviod detection. Countries used the pratice as a meens of devloping weapons but keeping them hidden. Its a sound military pratice used time and again.
Seeing is not the same as having a target lock,please learn about how targeting is done before making statements that will come back to bite you in the ass
I'll concede this argument, What I want to say I have no meens of conveying into a plausable argument.
Not in dispute, but the military will have stronger and thicker armor plating, and far more advanced sensors and scanners.
Misidentifications have happened before, USSR nearly launced nuclear arms (less than 2 min away from doing at one point) over a small research rocket was fired by the US. (they knew it wasn't large enough to be a nuclear missle, they just didn't know what it was for sure) And had actualy shot down a passenger jet (and knew what it was) that had acidently flown into thier airspace. It is proven to have happened before and will happen again. Its just a matter of time. Far more advanced sensors and scanners may help deter but not prevent.
No, idiots came into positions of power and hid the realities of nuclear power and deceived people into believing it was an evil. Nuclear power is incredibly safe and far cleaner than coal fired plants. Solar power doesn't scale up to what we need, wind doesn't scale up for what we need, and Geothermal doesn't scale up for our energy needs. Try doing some unbiased research.
For starters, unbiased research is impossible since it is performed by humans and its proven impossible for a human to be truly unbiased. And I agree, idiots came to power and will countinue to do so. We have our people at large to thank for that. Nuclear power may be safe but far from being as efficent as it needs to be. We are currently hidding a mountain of nuclear waste under a mountain and pretending its not there.
Not a reasonable argument, this is not a trial, this is an open debate.
Yes it is, if you tried using the nuclear debate 300 years ago you would have been dismissed as unreasonable.
Those were conventional warheads, we are talking about nuclear tipped warheads. FYI in the 50s based on those results it was decided to just slap nukes on the missiles so even a near miss ensured a kill. It lead to the AIM-47 Falcon which incorporated the W42 nuclear warhead with .5 kiloton yield, but some idiots decided to go for a 100 lb high-explosive design instead. Far better to reliably kill an enemy bomber carrying a 40 megaton bomb with a half kiloton bomb to ensure a kill.
FYI In refrence to the dogfighting, I failed to point out the US planes wern't even equiped with guns. Missles were thought to be supreme and guns were removed since a one shot = confirmed kill was the concept. When actual dogfighting came about US planes found themselves time and again at severe disavantages against thier soviet MIG counterparts. "Some idiots" were highly trained military engineers and stratigests, you can only call them that now since you have the luxury of aquired knowledge and experiance.
Which we can analyze through mathematical models to see if they work. This is not Star Trek where you just build something and it just works. You do design studies first to see if it is feasible, then go to prototype phase to see if its pracital, then pre-production to iron out any bugs and rigorous tests, then finally full production.
True, its not Star Trek. But then again you can go through all the models you want, get to the trial and find find it doesn't work.
Yeah ignore what the Airforce is doing with drones today and ignore the fact this actually began in WW2 not the 50s, and ignore the fact that what applys in an atmosphere doesn't apply in space.
You also ignore that all our missions to other planets have been done by drones which reached them by traveling at speeds that would have killed a human.
Your wall of ignorance is quite disturbing.
Well your wall of ignorance is more disturbing, You've shown calcs showing missle vs fighter. I asked for a scenerio where missle vs fighter calcs determined an outcome in war. Not drone work. Drone work in WW2 was trial and error. How many of these intersteller drones have we crashed into other worlds? Why are we even bothering to plan sending humans when drones could do the work anyways?
what applys in an atmosphere doesn't apply in space
I concede this argument, I'm not an authority in interplanetery physics.
Yes you do or concede.
No I don't.
"Sigh" I find you lack of logic disturbing.
"Sigh" I find your opinon of my logic disturbing.
"snip useless permavirgin fantasy"
Insert self important opinionated comment.
Not a reasoned argument, again this isn't a trial. Educated guesses are facts which are backed by mathematical models that can be proven or disproven, yours and that raging hobo are not as they are opinions. Learn the difference between fact, expert opinion, and a layman's opinion.
The track record of "expert" opinon vs "layman's" opinon hasn't been good. And educated guesses are by fact guesses which often are diven by opinon.
Cutting you short as it was all one unreadable mess.
Sorry.
Then do your own further research. The non fiction writings of Stuart Slade are excellent source material. Yeah he is the same guy who wrote the "The Big One" where over a thousand B-36s nuked Nazi Germany. But, you'll never find a more knowledgeable man on nuclear weapons and targeting.
Thank you for the link.
It provided answers to alot of questions I had about weapons grade enriched uranium.
Its unbelievably expensive.
Its very time consuming
.
Its consumes a very large ammount of material.
It consumes a massive ammount of electricity.
Its impossible to conceal.
Nuclear reactors are not efficent. Clean and powerfull, yes. Efficent, no. Argue all you want, all the time and energy that is spent on building, maintaining nuclear reactors vs their output durring thier entire lifetime is horrible.
Thats just enriched uranium, plutonium is even worse,
It only exists in nature in extremely trace ammounts.
It can only be produced/refined in a nuclear reactor.
One reactor can produce the ammount needed for one bomb in 2 months.
Low efficenticy reactors (20% enriched uranium aka fuel grade) can produce plutonium.
High efficenticy reactors (90% enriched uranium aka weapon grade) produce very little if any plutonium.
Specifically built breeder/production reactors can be built.
Weapons grade enriched uranium/plutonium degrades with time.
Nuclear weapons require constant upkeep and repairs, Thier own payloads "eat" away at the weapon itself.
Building reactors on ships requires weapons grade uranium or plutonium to be used as fuel. (keeps the cores small)
That just covers the costs uranium and plutonium, not the cost, energy and material consumption of the other aspects to nuclear weapon manufacturing. Heavy water manufacturing, material for handling and transport of the nuclear material, ect.
So I would like to say again, Nuke spamming = not pratical.
The costs of building and then maintaining a nuclear arsenal cappable of combat on a scale of space combat does not seem feasible. Its simply to great for a military's warmachine to sustain.
Possible? yes
Cost efficent? no
Energy efficent? no
Your weapons are very diffucult to build and maintain and are constantly in need of repairs and replacing regardless of being used or not.
Your reactors, the very heart of your warmachine and thier supporting systems are screaming, sitting targets.
Wars now and in the past have been won through supply, the ability to produce a large force of anything and keep producing it over and over and over. Napoleon failed his invasion of Russia over supply, Hitler's German warmachine failed over supply, The US failed at Vietnam over supply. Say what you want, each had in common that they had better weapons, better tatics, and still failed due to the lack of being able to sustain the effort.
How do you expect to build them and damn what everyone else says? Are you serious when you said that?
If you think that you can just build and damn everyone else and still have the material, energy, and money to build a force large enough for space combat. You unfortunately live in a fantasy world not unlike Star Trek.