You're misunderstanding something. With sufficient speed, you don't need an explosive charge. At 3km/s, you pack your own weight in bloom. In fact, the only explosive charge on most space weapons is probably a 'range safety' like how modern AA rounds detonate when the tracer burns out (to prevent a whole round from coming back down to the ground and damaging what you're attempting to protect). 6.3x10^16 joules is 15 megatons, or one Tunguska. That's 6300kg hitting the planet at 10,000kps. 630 tons at 1,000kps. 63,000 tons at 100kps. Now, 100kps is major speed. 11.2kps is escape velocity for earth, but you only need ~7.6kps to get to orbit. Once you get into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere, if you can take your time getting there. Getting there quickly takes a lot more delta-Vee. Slowest boat to Saturn is a total of ~15.2 kps (yes, it takes just as much to get to freaking Saturn as it does to get out of Earth's atmosphere). Interplanetary travel in Infinity uses Vila boosters (picture the rings from Cowboy Bebop or the relays from Mass Effect), so it's roughly Brachisochone, or continuous acceleration. Massively fast. Earth to Mars at 0.01 gee, call it 10cm/s/s, takes 30 days and has you at 185kps at midpoint. If you didn't turn over, you'd impact Mars at 370kps. So something the size of a Very Large Crude Carrier (~200,000tons) can easily get to terrifying speeds in Infinity. PanO was the first nation to have EVO hackers. Then YJ reverse-engineered the system and hacked the original EVO hackers. And everyone else developed/bought/stole the tech, too.
Well, I think the key part of Metatron, and Darao alongside it, isn't that it makes Evo hackers BETTER at hacking, but that it lets the Evo hackers be eating Cheetos on Neoterra, Brainblasting and Skullbusting enemy hackers on Paradiso with no risk of being counter-attacked. Its an advantage, your PanO Evo hacker based three systems away working through Metatron is safer and thus superior to the Haqq Evo hacker in a spaceship orbiting right above the battlefield, but since Infinity the Game doesn't actually include any of the hacking warfare between Evo units, just the relatively minor support they provide to clandestine specops teams, the advantage provided by Metatron or Darao never comes up on the tabletop. .
One thing is that an object going VeryFast(tm) is extremely predictable in where it is going. This means any heavy ordinance you might have sitting around the planet can quite feasibly smash something into the side of it also going very fast (fat slugs fired from railguns) which would gift the resulting debris cloud quite a lot of lateral velocity, just a little of which would likely send most of it bouncing off atmo if it even came that close. Honestly in any setting with ships going that speed and without defensive measures in place, terrorists would've destroyed at least one planet by now because people are rubbish. Luckily, it is theoretically quite possible to divert something going fast enough to avoid it getting a nice flat hit, and planets with atmosphere are pretty good at deflecting glancing hits.
The other point is that things going very fast generate massive resistance in atmosphere. This means that they ablate more mass prior to surface impact. So you can't just keep increasing the velocity to increase the energy: some bright spark has probably worked out the formula though.
Now you're in the territory of "how do we stop a large comet from hitting Earth and erradicating all life?" problem. (A problem we haven't solved yet, as far as I know) You can probably scrap the idea of surface-to-space artillery, though, since in order to make any real impact on a spaceship's velocity, the projectile which is considerably lighter would have to be fired at proportionally enormous speed compared to the spaceship, which in turn means that the projectile would likely burn up before it got very high. You'd need a missile for a much slower burn up out of the atmosphere, which means advance warning and some fairly spot-on calculations on where to put it in space so that you can detonate the missile such that the spaceship is spread out over a sufficiently large area of the atmosphere.
As is these days so often the case, the RPG has a fair bit more to tell us about ship to ship combat in the Infinity universe. Spacecraft Armament Vessels use a variety of deadly weapons. Mass drivers are a common primary armament, propelling Teseum slugs or some comparable payload at high velocities (a little over 1% of the speed of light, in the most powerful cases). These are dedicated vessel-to-vessel weapons, and the impact forces are in the multi-kiloton range. The Concilium Convention classifies the use of mass drivers to bombard a planetary surface as a war crime and use in near-planetary orbit is heavily restricted due to potential for massive collateral damage. The recoil forces from a mass driver of that power are substantial, so the largest of these weapons can only be mounted along the length of a vessel, where recoil is absorbed by the same structure that withstands the power of the vessel’s engines. Many vessels mount broadside batteries of smaller mass drivers along their flanks for additional firepower at closer ranges. The longer the weapon, the higher the maximum velocity and impact force, so larger vessels invariably carry more powerful guns, and the spinal guns of a vessel are its most powerful weapons. After mass drivers, the most common weapons are self-propelled missiles, remote- or LAI-guided, carrying a wide range of different payloads. These are launched in massive quantities to overwhelm a target’s defences. Due to the short duration of most space battles, ammunition conservation is seldom a concern. As they do not travel as swiftly as mass driver shot, missiles are most effective at shorter ranges, where the delay between firing and impact is shorter. Larger vessels often supplement this with high-powered directed energy weapons, lasers and microwave projectors, though these are relatively scarce due to massive power consumption, heat generation, and component wear resulting in infrequent and short burst firing. Most vessels also carry a range of point-defence weapons. These are typically a mixture of rapid-firing cannons and missile launchers with ranges of less than a kilometre used to defeat nearby threats, such as missiles and fighters. A mixture of explosions, clouds of shrapnel, E/M bursts, and Infowar countermeasures (clouds of deflectors and signal jammers) disrupt incoming attacks and minimise what can reach the vessel itself.
Oh, I don't imagine a surface based defense, outside of possibly a 'HUGE LASER' which simply slagged smaller objects would be even remotely effective. You'd have to have defenses in space, likely orbitals and military vessels stationed there, which could get a good angle. Since stations are sitting ducks as much as planets, you'd really need to equip them with those sorts of defenses, likely missiles which could be fired at something at a slight angle before turning in and impacting the side to push it off target. Honestly the main disadvantage of the 'shoot from very far away' theory of space combat is that it A: gives the target a lot of time to dodge, and B: gives them a lot of time to deal with what you fired at them. I imagine most space combat, if it happens, would be around planets or other objects of actual strategic value, and would be fought at relatively short range (only hundreds of thousands of kilometers, practically knife fighting range), so you could actually lock on to things and hit them reliably.
This is a fantastic topic. It needs to be discussed. Its probably not entirely related to a qualitative assessment of the Uprising book so I've taken it upon myself to start a new thread.
As JCJF said, not a direct transcript, plenty of other future war in space fiction AND games used a similar thing. It's like all those fanboy nerds who thought that HALO was an original design (Sure, the plot was somewhat original, and the look of the aliens, but Ringworlds? Puh-leeeze. Larry Niven wrote about those in the 70s.) So ship based mass-drivers are spinal mounts (used in the Full thrust game rules from 20ish years ago, in addition to renegade legion Leviathan (FASA), Halo and Mass effect, and I'm sure David Drake and other writers in his genre have also done so in the last 30 years). Also "the expanse" uses the "railguns and missiles" thing for a more recent thing. The Donny's main railgun was a spinal mount.
Do you have a copy of the Paradiso book? It goes into pretty great detail about how the EVO Repeaters operate. It allowed a hacker to be in another star system and still be effective due to effectively instantaneous comms. When only PanO had the Metatron system, they were immune to counter-hacking and used it to great effect. Once YJ deployed the Darao, the formerly-invulnerable EVO hackers were now vulnerable and there were a lot of casualties among them. Now, most EVO hackers are in the same star system as their targets. Probably to allow them to draw combat pay. Good point. Spoiler: responses spoilered for lenght and OT Yes, but it takes a huge amount of energy to deflect a large mass going very fast, because if something is going 100kps and all you can do is give it a single 1m/s lateral push, you need to give that push more than 6 million seconds before impact or it will still impact Earth. (Earth's diameter being roughly 12,000km). 6 million seconds is 70 days. Most of the serious Spaceguard types are talking 25+megaton warheads to nudge asteroids around. You do get a lot of burn-off, but deep space velocities will still get a 10kg rock down to the surface. Tunguska was a rock some 150m in diameter that broke up before it hit the ground due to a very glancing angle of 'impact' (it entered the atmosphere roughly over Canada or the Atlantic ocean and exploded over Siberia, after passing over London and Moscow). If it hadn't broken up it might have actually passed clear through the atmosphere and kept going outward.
Writing style in recent infinity books is unappealing to me, to say the least, so I'm really glad that Outrage and Betrayal were released (less by the second, but oh well) and that there will be some fiction books to read this summer. I would prefer if the expansion books were written as stories rather than newspapers or history books, if that makes sense. Maybe it is because English is not my first language, but reading them was somewhat tiresome. Sorry for necroposting, just my thoughts on Uprising and subsequent expansion books. Yeah, N4 core book was not an exception.
