Rule 5.7

[abbamouse]

Planetary defense grids are silly in the world of Freelancer. Let's look at a few proposals:

1. Missiles. You're kidding, right? Using actual rockets to lift tiny payloads -- sure, there's no way that a bunch of warships that just blew away a whole fleet that was already IN space would be able to pick those off during boost phase.... C'mon, you gotta do better than that.

2. Defense shield. It wouldn't drive away anyone. Moreover, energy fields require generators that increase in power in proportion to the cube of the size of the field. Take the energy required for a fihgter-sized (100 feet circumference) shield. The Earth is about 417,000 feet wider at its surface. The energy required to shield an Earth-sized planet is therefore about 72,000,000,000,000,000 times as much as for a simple fighter shield. That's a figure in the QUADRILLIONS for Americans (mere TRILLIONS for most Europeans). If the size of the generator is proportional to its power output, we're looking at Moon-sized generators for even a weak planetary shield.

3. Rail guns and other high-velocity projectiles. There's this thing called an atmosphere. As things move through it, they generate friction. The larger the projectile, the more friction (it increases with area, so it's a square relationship). High velocity = disintegration of smaller projectiles before hitting anything on the other side of the atmosphere. Look at what happens to meteorites. They have to be truly huge to survive the atmosphere, and even then they generate huge shockwaves as they move through it. Trying to fire a projectile the size of a city block would be difficult enough -- but now think of what happens when the proposed "Space Cannon" actually fires -- the local effect on the SURFACE of the planet is the equivalent of a small-yield nuclear explosion. So I doubt throwing things upward at high velocity is feasible.

But enough talk about feasibility. Consider this: the planetary defenses didn't look all that impressive in the Coalition-Alliance war, so if they exist in FL, it must be due to some new technical advance. Yet what we see are really incremental advances in technology rather than quantum leaps over the earlier times. Moreover, the only areas with generators in the SP campaign -- even Nomad areas! -- are small in size: the top of Tekagi's Arch and the entrace to the Dyson sphere.

It seems plain that throughout the SP campaign, then, the main defense for any system is its fleet, backed up by stationary weapons platforms and bases in space. We can always just make stuff up if we feel like it, but don't pretend these ideas are some natural consequences of the Discovery world.

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I go by abbamouse, but my characters are the Cryer researcher Daniel Moss, the very boring and ordinary trader John Smith, the borderline-insane civilian Mr Joker, and a Bundschuh activist who goes by the alias Rosa Luxemburg. I am not them and they are not me.