First, that 20m array and full sky can would likely be fairly possible in short order with today's tech. I know scientists who worked with Hubble and on NEAR doing instruments for scanning space, so i'm pretty positive I trust their judgement. Certainly such things will be militarily feasible with some investment within 10-20 years if that long. So realtime full sky imagining to high accuracy will soon be within our grasp.
Second, any defense system that relied solely on a single array is.... ridiculous. You'd have various arrays scattered on satellites and mobile platforms and on other system bodies. Yes, they couldn't share data in realtime if they were on other system bodies or very far away, but even a momentary look at your 'cold stealth missile' from a non-frontal angle would clearly give it away and they would report its location and vector at detection within a few seconds (near space) or few minutes (near planetary bodies) to the target installation which would *really* reduce the amount of space they have to check. Then that system would put up some interceptors and array-extenders into the general cone the incoming missiles would be coming from and widen out their array in real-time and thus give them targeting for lightspeed or near lightspeed point defenses.
If your attack was construed to threaten from multiple directions, its detection odds go up dramatically. If it had countermeasures for their array-extender satellites or interceptors, then you again are revealed.
Plus, the 'keep at 2.7K' task is a lot harder than you think over the longer term especially if married to a thrust motor, batteries, electronics, etc. that generally don't love 2.7 K temperatures and that tend to emit heat.
So the attack isn't nearly as viable as you think and will be much less viable within 20 years.
Detection isn't that hard. Thermal can get you simply because it is hard to appear, over any lengthy period of hours or days, as if you have the same signature as the cosmic background (some fractions of a Kelvin above absolute zero). An modern optical detection is pretty good on its own right, but it pales compared to the detection of your heat versus the background. It's almost impossible to mask over any length of time required to close from interplanetary distances at non-relativistic speeds.
Mind you, weapons ranges are practically no more than a few thousand kms.
So for two fleets to meet, they have to want to and work at it by bending their vectors to intersect. If they are coming from opposing directions with any speed that gets them there sooner than days or weeks, the conflict will likely be a single pass, then a rethink on whether to revector to meet again. Momentum from decent amounts of interplanetary speeds is a huge issue.
If you want to be able to enter weapons range fast enough to prevent an enemy getting too many shots, then your closure has to be fast. That means the engagement is short. If you want a longer shootout, then you can go a bit slower and have more manouver options. In either case, you can manouver a few hundred meters or a few kms either way in a random erratic way around your main vector of motion and make fine weapons targeting a bit more challenging as well as rotating ship to bring different faces to bear versus enemy beams or weaponfire.
Defenders have an interesting conundrum from static locales:
a) They are an easy target b) They can likely mount larger weapons arrays than mobile vessels and will have a fair bit of time to engage any incoming ships or missiles
In the long run, installations can be attacked by stand off or ballistic means. But any fleet closing in is going to get a rough ride.
The US has spy sats now, drones in the air, etc. and yet insurgencies continue to present problems. Most areas where you might engage have civilians and sorting out civilians and enemy combatants is at best a tough prospect and at worst a horrible disaster when you get it wrong.
This is why over the horizon missiles aren't much use in most smaller scale conflicts on Earth. ROE requires you to have eyes-on and know who you are shooting. If you don't, then you shoot down unassociated airliners for instance.
Whoever holds the high ground, likely mostly the US, China and maybe a few other nations for the forseeable future, will have an advantage in any conventional conflict. That merely means less capable enemies will not engage in conventional conflict.
If forces in orbit decide they have an issue to resolve at laser-point, then that gets into actual space combat.
Many of the fights on earth are about a) not being able to live the way you think is right or b) not having the resources do live the way you'd like.
If we can get to space on any large scale, it is possible that there is enough space for a) for a long time. You don't need to live anywhere near the people you dislike or have anyone up in your grill. b) will possibly go away too by the time we can meaningfully colonize other planetary bodies even in our own system. Energy could be harvested from the sun and resources from various places around the system. If we go interplanetary, having one more Earth-ish planet would allow us to vastly reduce populations rubbing elbow to elbow on Earth.
Of course, that's all in theory. All of Israel could move to Nebraska and have better neighbours, but that land is sacred to many of them. So of course, it'll be fought over. That same logic will make Earth a battleground for as long as I can imagine.
Similarly, I happen to believe getting out of this system is hard to envision ever and that our biospheres capable of supporting human life on a large scale are limited to exactly ONE. We can create other populations, but they will end up like the space stations in the TV series 'the 100' - too small to be truly viable independent of Earth.
So I do expect the wars you talk about. But it is at least possible that they might not be necessary.
It's also possible Earth becomes a massive sinkhole for the ignorant, violent, overpopulated underclass and the intelligentsia and the rich (two very different groups) end up living off-earth and harvesting enough resources from elsewhere while keeping the bulk of humanity in quarantine on Earth. Earth can then have nasty little wars, but the only space conflicts will be some small scale scuffles because the rich and wealthy and the scientists will want to keep their limited ecosystem intact.
Prove such a thing is possible and that the bomb won't consume the laser. This particular idea is trotted out and used, but I don't think we are anywhere near seeing one even if this idea is possible (which I still debate).
With modern optics, it is possible to make out any sizable object at rather long ranges visually. With thermal, even moreso. It's hard to hide against cosmic background temperature if you have any sort of engine, electronics, etc.
So, let's posit a best case missile: a) launched from a railgun (no initial thermal heating, kept near 0K before launch, dark outer skin, decent launch velocity) b) no manouvering until final attack phase (requires a stupidly non-manouvering target for a long time so your missile can close without having to use thrusters)
b) is pretty unlikely. The minute you know an enemy ship is out there (see my first observation - provided to me by a NASA instrument scientist of my acquaintance who worked on the NEAR mission), you'd start some form of manouvers just to eliminate the blind ballistic launch.
a) This may make the missile harder to spot. The chaff cloud would make it very easy to spot the cloud and the chaff cloud can't manouver like the missile (and the missile might hit the cloud to its detriment) so evade the cloud with your ship and you force the missile to manouver and thus reveal it and remove its cover.
The amount you'd have to manouver (how hard) is inversely proportional to engagement range. At longer ranges, a relatively mild set of course altering thrusts would rapidly ensure that no chaff cloud would come anywhere close and any missile would have to start manouvering to be in any position to hit you.
So your long range attack scenario is pretty unlikely unless your opponent for some reason has their sensors (passive) off.
Modern telescopes (not even future arrays) married to a decent computer can do fast sweeps of the sky and spot optical and thermal differences. Marry this to computers 20 years in the future and it'll be realtime (if today's take a few minutes). And once you've made the initial spot of an enemy ship at a distance, then you can focus your array and processing time drops further as you don't need a full sky sweep, so missile spotting becomes very likely even if they are trying to be within a few degrees of absolute zero (background thermal level) and not manouvering. If they manouver, you have them sighted.
If a missile has to manouver a lot to keep up with ships, it has to carry lots of reaction mass and burn it. Hotter signature, ejected hot trail, and more weapon mass devoted to propellant.
Covering areas of space with any sort of projectile saturation (or even a chaff cloud) is impossible at any range. The dispersion rate of the cloud and the manouvering rate of an enemy target at any range to speak of will be enough to render the amount of projectiles you'd have to lob as 'vast'. For ballistic projectiles, you'd have to predict the enemy location at time of intersect and set your scatter to attain your chosen volume at that particular point. Any enemy manouver to speak of ruins that option.
So, this sort of long ranged attack might work versus planets or stationary targets, but never against a military vessel that was aware of an enemy presence and most of the time they would be. Stealth in space is a fiction that's hard to justify given modern sensor tech and computer power and that available in the near future.
Instead, just simply closing under manouver and using carefully aimed energy weapons and perhaps close enough in some secondary batteries using railguns with high speed projectiles might work. Missiles could be used in swarms at short range.
For obfuscation, you can jam active sensors with EMPs or emissions, put modern passive thermal and opticals will largely render much of that EW useless. Passive targeting will be enough to hit cruisers and destroyers and so on.
It's funny - real space warfare with near future tech is horrible to game out. It is boring. Much of the action is closing and the nature of fights dictated by relative closure rates (a joust with one pass? an orbital gunfight at short range?). Stealth doesn't work. Planets and stations aren't defensible
Not sure the flight dynamics of White Stars and Shadows was properly newtonian. They looked like they used an inertia-less drive. Yes, the White Stars rotated and strafed, but the way they and the Shadows generally manouvered seemed inertia-reduced at the very least.
Mostly true, except stealth isn't nearly as possible as you believe if current existent technology or reasonably-expected technology is considered.
The 'near c rock' is the big bugaboo in in space game setting. You might even see it coming but stopping it isn't trivial. And if you have a lot of targets (populations on different planetary bodies or in orbit over them), then this form of defense becomes fraught and unlikely to succeed.
Even jump-drives of sci-fi often have issues - jumping a ship in an atmosphere might well liberate enough energy to significantly damage the ecosphere. Or create some sort of singularity that would consume the planetary mass.
Space wars will either be: a) Genocidal conflicts involving planetary decimation b) Small political conflicts that adjust borders, resources, etc. but don't endanger the larger polities enough to make them switch to mode a) c) Conflicts between groups who can't do a) yet, so are fighting with more limited means (and likely not an interstellar civilization, just intrasystem). d) War on Terror style conflicts with NGOs (not usually fought with fleet battles)
Defending large biospheres is ridiculously resource consumptive. Attacking them less so.
This makes for the interesting point that mobile Dyson Sphere type population movers might be the way to go versus actual planetary populations if you get the wazzoo imagine-tech of the space opera universe. Take your populations with your warfleets and give the enemy nothing to attack except perhaps some remote resource gathering operations. Then there may actually still have to be a fleet battle - usually when one fleet wants a shot at the other fleet's 'worldships'. A decisive fleet victory for the attackers allows a genocide but at least they have to fight for it, unlike shooting fish in a barrel (rock bombing panets).
I realize open space isn't a vacuum. There is a particulate density to open space. It is not zero. And an explosion that involves a chemical reaction or ejection of mass could add some density locally to that.
And I suppose in theory you can setup a shockwave in fluid mediums.
On the other hand, I am entirely skeptical that you could, in average open space in the solar system, generate enough of a shockwave to actually convey any sound that would be heard over onboard machine and human sounds during a battle.
To convince me that the shockwave you can generate in open space is sufficiently strong to convey sounds meaningfully at any distance over at most a handful of meters (and in a lot of cases it looks like 'swoosh' sounds from space opera ships would occur at distances in the 100s of meters to tens of kms) would require you to haul out some references and math.
I'm not saying you can't get a shockwave in open space, but I'm going to call you on its magnitude at any significant distance from its point of origins. And by significant, I don't mean 'detectable by advanced sensors', I mean 'loud enough to be heard over ambient machine and other noises', which I would say implies a significant number of decibels and a fairly significant amount of transmitted energy which I just don't buy.
I always thought those were the soundtracks the pilots played on ship audio... you know, like the Top Gun thing....;0)
The rebooted Battlestar Galactica tried for some newtonian physics and no-sound-in-space-battles. It was interesting... you heard sounds that you might here on the ships as damage was sustained and in the fighters, you heard the pilots breathing. The sounds were minimal compared to a Star Wars dogfight, but I found the eeriness of the silent space fights to be intense.
Any amount of matter that is in a compressed warhead that then expands in a spherical matter will have its density decay by the cube (possibly square) of distance. You'd be surprised how fast that means your density drops off. Any 'atmosphere' would be measured in terms of a limited number of meters I suspect.
I had read somewhere that we'd need some sort of imaginary tech like gravitic lensing to get us past a few thousand kms range. Plus I'm also assuming that a 1 - 2 m beam width at the target means that your energy density sucks in terms of burning off, in a few seconds at most, significant amounts of hull (possibly with mirrored or ablative coatings).
I would have thought your target area would be more in the range of 1-5 cm in size. I assume with the limits you stated that the range is then much less than 3000 km.
If my output energy density is X at the 'barrel' (emitter) with a beam width of a few micrometers or nanometers, if I have it arrive at my target as a 1 m beam width, I'm looking at a fraction of the energy density.
A laser like you are talking about, unless I'm not fully grokking matters, would be useful for spotting or perhaps even for slow heating of a target, but not or punching through.
I'm also assuming their are physical limits at the moment (and perhaps theoretically) to emitted energy density. People have postulated bomb pumped lasers, but as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated this as a feasible option yet.
1. Lasers have a focus issue that is profound at distances over a few hundred kms if we are trying to deliver very high energy very quickly. That's not going to be easily addressed. Even small bits of beam dispersion will rapidly gut the strength at the far end if the range is significant (as it is in space).
2. Why would a weapons grade laser have great output power but the mirrors not similarly improve?
I generally agree mirrors aren't the answer for several reasons. Mirrors are terrible for any kind of stealth (they make you a fairly obvious target). Mirrors less likely to work with non-visual light spectra. I'm assuming reflection in mirrors has some frequencies it works well at and others not so much. Lasers are generally one frequency and consequently if that frequency happens to be somewhere that a mirror won't perform as efficiently, I'm imagining the mirror will be less effective.
If you deliver enough power, you might burn through. Ablative armour has been suggested (some suggesting using ice). Ships can also spin or otherwise manouver to ensure that unless the power delivered is of very high instantaneous density, the ship's motion will disperse the energy of the attacking laser around the ship's hull in such a way as to make burn through a much lengthier task and possibly requiring multiple hits or long exposures if using a continuous beam laser.
The thing is you can't really argue paper, scissors, or rock because each of these is evolving. It may be that at any given moment, the energy density delivered by lasers at combat ranges IS enough to overcome mirroring of hulls (although there may still be some effect so it may still be an asset), or it may be that at that particular point in the evolution, the mirrors or ablative hulls are capable enough to make the laser a weapon of patience and multiple attacks to see notable effect. A lot depends on the exact 'freeze frame' moment in the respective developments.
Anytime we humans have developed a weapon, counters have been envisioned.
We made fancy state of the art tanks with layered ceramic army to defeat kinetic penetrators and with point defense systems capable of engaging incoming RPGs with 85-99% efficacy (Russians in Afghanistan). Those sorts of tanks with such heavy armour then get attacked by a culvert full of cheap military explosives or a collapsing building. There's always a counter measure, sometimes surprisingly low tech.
It's always a matter of just when you take your snapshot....
Except that those distances, given our sensing technology even today in visible and IR spectrum, is well beyond the range our weapons will achieve anytime soon - including guided weapons (too much reaction mass), ballistic projectiles (easily dodged at long range), hybrids (ballistic most of the way, manouvering at the end... better, but still too much reaction mass), and energy (can't focus lasers at those distances enough to do required damage quickly enough).
Fights ARE likely to be close in, ARE likely to be within the range of lightspeed weapons like lasers, and will tend to be deadly, fast, and more about how long your vessel can survive and how much you can confuse the enemy's sensors or how you can overwhelm his point defenses than anything.
Our weapons reach is likely to be a fraction of our sensor ability for the forseeable future.
Also: Nukes in atmosphere get a huge blast effect that is a direct result of the interaction of the energetic release with the atmosphere. Without the atmosphere, that effect is not present. Any damage thus has to be strictly a radiation/energy effect. As energy density falls off with either the square or cube of distance (I think perhaps cube), your ability to concentrate energy falls off *very fast* so your nuke has to go off *very close* to any missile swarm.
The objective would be to have your attacking munitions come in over a widely dispersed arc of sky towards the target, thus making his point defense make choices and negating the effect of any such nuclear counter strategy. EMP weapons (useful but also similarly limited for the same reason nukes are and making highly focused directional EMPs isn't simple) would also be good against some forms of incoming missiles, but only within the same limited area of effect because of the rapid fall-off of energy density with distance from the explosion.
So, I respectfully submit that the fights will be close in, because of weapons limits (barring surprising developments that I don't see coming in the next 50 - 100 years). Anything beyond a 50-100 year window of prediction is masturbation because the whole nature of human existence could change depending on what we do to the planet in that 100 years.
Let's assume I am moving in a particular direction with much kinetic energy built up. It is true, I cannot easily reverse direction because I must overcome that kinetic energy and must then build up kinetic energy in the opposite direction.
However, it is also true that I can add kinetic energy at 90 degrees (which opens up a plane of thrust perpendicular to my existing vector) to the existing vector my ship carries. That constitutes a change of direction and does not technically have anything to do with the vector component that already existed because it is orthogonal to it.
So, yes, flying in circles is expensive. Changing your course by 15 degrees either way (which at a long range is significant in combat terms) isn't all that hard. Flying an erratic course around your 20 km/s thrust vector might not take that much energy and might be somewhat effective at longer ranges. A lot depends on the delivery time of attacks, how long you have to hold a target in your sights (forex beam laser that has to be on target for 5 minutes to burn through) and how fast your sensors are at processing changes (allowing you to retarget). Range is a factor because far enough away, it takes a while for your course change to propagate to the opposition, their system to process it, and their systems to retarget and then have that effect propagate back. But then again, those ranges start to look unlikely with current reasonable expectations of technology so perhaps more of a theoretical issue than actual.
And reaction mass is a real b**ch. Fighters start to look impractical over any distance over tens or perhaps hundreds of kms if the opposition is making significant changes to their vector because the small craft still has to carry a lot of mass to make the manouver changes. And one presumes they don't want to be swept away by an afterthought shot from a shipboard weapons system, so they have to be either armoured enough (more mass) or agile enough (constant motion, constant burning of reaction mass) to not just be snuffed on the way in by an enemy ship of the line.
It is true that you can have more and less agile ships and that will matter. However, unless our ability to project damage at 1000s of kms gets much better than it is now, the fights will happen at ranges where manouver might not be able to match up to the speed of light weapon systems and computers backing them. Fighters start to look less likely (as do missiles) in that setting, unless they come in large numbers and expect mass casualties.
Plus drones will be capable of more Gs than a human and require a computer, not a meat bag with G-force limits and life support and not much redundancy. So if there are fighters, they might be smaller drones (or the same size as a manned fighter with more reaction mass and weaponry).
This sort of reality of reaction mass in fights make a big difference as anyone who has ever played a space combat sim or game that tracks reaction mass will tell you.
It is interesting though then that defensive missiles and craft launched from stations or planets may have more ability to use high accelerations and erratic manouvers than attacking craft coming in from far away (who have to bring their reaction mass with them). That adds a pretty big advantage to defenders (somewhat offset if they are a station or planet for being stationary as a target).
I wonder if engagements of such stations and planets will just be long range kinetic or missile bombardment. It would make sense to only send weapons mass (rather than full ships) toward an enemy station with significant advantages for only needing short ranged defense missiles and small craft. Why risk your main fleet? Just pile in the missiles - the station can't move much.
There are lots of ideas to explore and potential settings depending what assumptions you make about the tech we discover or don't.
I read something a while back about the degree of focus you'd need with a laser to be able to do significant damage to a target in a short window at ranges in the thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers and the thinking at the time is that you would require something like gravitic lensing (which implies control of gravitational fields) to get the kind of focus that would make that possible. I am unsure if modern science has advanced to make that perspective incorrect, but there was math to back it up at the time.
It is unlikely we'll use any form of kinetic projectile at significant distances. The amount of reaction mass that would have to accommodate a manouvering projectile would largely kill that idea and a strictly ballistic launch still raises the issue of hauling around the projectle mass on your space platform at a cost in reaction mass. Of course, if you have magical reactionless thrusters, then you may of course freely ignore many inconvenient aspects of actual physics.
The best interpretation of space battles in the short run likely involve orbital, near orbit, or orbit-to-ground (or the reverse) engagements near planetary bodies (or other 'points of interest'). There, ranges can be from the few kms out to about a couple of thousand kms at the furthest, more often being in the tens or low hundreds of kms. This limits the reaction mass required and makes targeting feasible with optical or other sensor systems available today if coupled to a decent computer. At shorter ranges, kinetics might be feasible (as missile warheads or small short-ranged craft armament). Lasers would be an option assuming we can solve the 'delivered power' issue with sufficient focus and energy density. Presumably there are some railgun options or possibilities for bomb-pumped lasers and for some particle weapons as well. EMP weapons may be possible, but the issue is that creating a good directional EMP with any sort of range is tough (power falls off rapidly) and contact hits in space at any distance are non-trivial for projectiles or effects like EMPs or exploding nuclear weapons.
Stealth is not going to be much use shortly. What we can do with optics and infrared already pretty much rules it out. All you have to be is a few fragments of a Kelvin off of the stellar background and you can be picked up. And hiding a thermal signature by some techniques like sinking the heat internally or attempting to radiate it away in other directions is a) both very technically difficult and b) hard to do without detection while also c) making your stealth perhaps directional and d) definitely making it only work for a short time before your thermal countermeasures are unable to continue operating effectively. [I have several friends who work with NASA and other space programs, one of whom is a specialist in such sensor systems]
Fights will tend to occur where you would naturally have congregations of assets (both military and 'of interest to protect or as targets') which means that planets and perhaps planetoids/asteroids might be sensible places. The fights there can be reasonably short ranged and the vehicles consequently of reasonable sizes/mass/expense. This also means ground-based installations or space-based satellites or stations may be participants.
As space colonization seems likely to happen as a token multinational effort, you may see a fair few nations having a stake. On the other hand, the big players will get the biggest say and have the biggest military presence in space, so it will look a bit like the colonial era all over again perhaps.
Conflicts will probably be fairly limited because an all-out conflict across our star system would be tremendously damaging for all concerned. Typically, like the late 20th century and the early 21st, it will be large players beating up on smaller players (a safer fight, more sure outcome, more likely to produce a useful 'win' with resource or other gains).
It's a bit unclear how far off we are from having civilian populations not carefully selected
I think the point here is that the issue is one perceived by the Sales team (rightly or wrongly) and that they believe has business implications. It seems also likely that they do not see/understand the open bug tracker as a sales asset and something they should be openly advertising to their customers and using to challenge their competitors ("No software is perfect. We admit we aren't perfect but work aggressively on constant improvement (here is our open bug tracker and a list of all of the fixes and features added as requested by customers). What do our competitors do? They hide their defects so you have no idea how many or how bad and they have no visible and verifiable record of being responsive to their customers....in the worst case, they may be afraid to share their bugs with customers because they have so many that are serious.... we aren't. We think you'd rather know and see that we deal with our issues each and every day.").
If you sell this idea right, you can use the fact that you are willing to be open and honest as a spike to impale your competition on if they insist on being closed and opaque. But your sales force has to make that happen and be willing to use your openness aggressively to market your product.
It seems like the sales team in question is letting the other side describe the product and set the tone for how it is viewed in the market rather than they themselves doing that. That seems to me like a major sales force failure.
Then again, I've been in a number of companies (that I've worked directly for or been placed at) over the last two decades where the sales force is short lived, rarely truly accountable, and who don't seem to be able to work with development teams worth a damn. I've come out with a generally low opinion of most sales teams. I have had the good fortune to meet some truly excellent sales people (and even a few excellent marketing people) who understood that a symbiotic relationship with the development team and the customers was the route to the best success. Most of the others just seemed to want to shuck off a product on someone regardless of whether they needed it, whether it met their needs, or whether they'd end up trashing it and badmouthing the product (because by then, the sales guys would have moved on).
I've also seen firms deserve poor sales forces by treating good sales staff stupidly. One friend of mine hit all of his targets as head of sales and then some, generating a huge bonus. Then one of the top guys came to him and said 'That's too much... we can't pay you that, you have to accept a reduced compensation.....'. In other words, he did everything they asked and then some and they made lots of money off his efforts but then they didn't want to reward him in accordance with his contract. I've also seen another case where another sales manager upped his business unit's sales by over 100%. That generated a big cheque (again, in line with what had been negotiated at the outset). So what did the company do for next year? Did it incentivize this great progress in sales by continuing a similar approach? Or did it totally gut the incentive by doubling the sales target minimum? No prize for guessing.
Companies routinely treat their sales staff like crap and get crappy sales staff as a result. Marketing is also similarly poorly managed and staffed.
So, I think there should be an effort to educate the sales and marketing staff and to convince them to sell the product with the open tracking of defects as a huge asset, rather than liability. Challenge competitors to have the balls to do the same or call them on not doing it and cast aspersions on their product based on their fear of exposing their actual issues.
But don't be surprised if the sales and marketing force or the management behind them aren't willing to expend the effort. Many companies work hard at managing themselves in a race towards the bottom. Then they wonder why things get worse as they make changes....
Won't this strategy fail if the email address you don't mean to send something to IS a valid email in your address book? If so, you can still send the email to the wrong place pretty easily.
Autocomplete and lack of sleep once had me send an email to my Ex's Ex. The content was benign thankfully. They had very similar email addresses and names so I then changed one of them significantly and removed the other entirely from my address book.
There are plenty of collaborative technologies that can be quite useful to a team.
Wikis are a great example. You can have everyone contribute to them in areas they have expertise (even if the contributions are small).
Email gives communications with a backtrail - often necessary when someone in the situation is being an obstruction and you need to have a record of what you did, when you did it, what their response was (and I love the ones who always respond by calling or visiting to avoid email responses, but I deal with them by writing a summary of the call or visit and conclude with 'I assume this matches with your understanding and if I do not here a reply, I will proceed accordingly'), etc.
Conversations F2F are faster, more clear, and take less time. They do help resolve simple questions. Often, people won't want everyone to know they have a question they feel is dumb/ignorant, but they know they need to ask someone, so they'll go talk to one other person. They'd never post the question on a social network as it would reveal their self-perceived dumb/ignorant moment to everyone. Sometimes that is just a lack of self confidence, sometimes it is the key to job success (not appearing dumb to the key people above you - depends on how sensible your management is about all the stuff people have to know and learn in an ongoing career).
IME, if your work environment is such that you have to focus extensively on formal/informal distinctions in your work activities, then your work environment is not as productive as it could be. In places where that worry really exists, less actual communication and thus less actual work occurs.
c. Have already established a friendship with the person who can fix the problem. I brought cookies for you! Hope you like them. By the way, there's a small problem with the X. Could you look at it sometime?
I agree with all of your points (for large companies). I think this is generally a result of siloing and reporting chains that are vertical when necessary job activites are often horizontal across reporting chains.
I'd like to single out your point c. as a key example of why it is better to get along and go along and to be friends with key assets in your company. As an employee and a consultant working for other companies and requiring their technical assets to assist (when time is rarely budgeted for those assets to do so), I can say that it has always been a great idea to know, make friends with, and be thought of as a friend by:
i) IT staff (someone has a non-critical problem, I have a non-critical problem, that other person is a jerk to the IT department, I have lunch and commiserate with them.... guess whose non-critical problem gets first attention?) ii) Admin/reception/payroll staff (timesheet issues and invoice issues get solved much more easily) iii) Key developers in customer organizations (who then make the time to help a friend moreso than to help 'the contractor') iv) Key developers and project managers in your own organization (who then listen to your issues if you present them carefully and sometimes this buys you extra time or management support)
A lot of times, it is just about listening to other people's issues re the job or their home life and being a bit sympathetic. Sometimes it means spending a few minutes of your time helping them out when you aren't obliged to. Combine these, and you've got both a sense of debt and a sense you are a friend and those go a long way in ANY setting.
This isn't a mercenary/manipulative concept - I actually do care about the people around me and their troubles. I know that if I help them, they'll usually help me if they can. Sometimes they can't and being understanding about that is pretty important too. If someone is swamped, recognize that and let them be - just ask if there is a time you might be able to talk to them once they are less swamped. Often times they'll be able to help you later in the day or the next day.
Exhaust all your own resources and solutions first before bothering others (unless they will take exhorbant amounts of time). When you go ask for help, you want the other asset to understand that you've done your due diligence and have actually hit a wall.
Another problem with some social networks inside companies is that they end up being trolled by management, HR, managers, etc. and so nobody wants to speak up much on them. Honesty that would come out in meetings of a few people who didn't feel threatened by one another or their manager won't come out on larger public forums where anyone in the food chain could be watching.
The United States is not signatory to all of the Geneva Conventions.
The Geneva Conventions (a number of them at any rate) extend generally to uniformed combatants in the armed services of a government, not non-uniformed combatants working for an NGO or nobody (except in a very diffuse way).
However, for them to be criminals, there would have to be jurisdiction for legal process to occur. I'm fairly certain that the there is no law enforcement jurisdiction belonging the US in some of the places these combatants have been detained and removed from.
All of that said, these foes are best described as insurgents or terrorists. They are willing to engage both military and civilian targets, to impersonate members of any local police or military, and are not themselves signatory to the Geneva Conventions and thus denied their protections. Their tactics involve terrorism and generally involve destabilization of a region which would basically be an insurgency against the existing power structure.
The Republicans aren't responsible for Gitmo, nor are the Democrats. The US electorate and America is. It is an American prison. Governments placed by American electors created it and maintained it.
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First, that 20m array and full sky can would likely be fairly possible in short order with today's tech. I know scientists who worked with Hubble and on NEAR doing instruments for scanning space, so i'm pretty positive I trust their judgement. Certainly such things will be militarily feasible with some investment within 10-20 years if that long. So realtime full sky imagining to high accuracy will soon be within our grasp.
.... ridiculous. You'd have various arrays scattered on satellites and mobile platforms and on other system bodies. Yes, they couldn't share data in realtime if they were on other system bodies or very far away, but even a momentary look at your 'cold stealth missile' from a non-frontal angle would clearly give it away and they would report its location and vector at detection within a few seconds (near space) or few minutes (near planetary bodies) to the target installation which would *really* reduce the amount of space they have to check. Then that system would put up some interceptors and array-extenders into the general cone the incoming missiles would be coming from and widen out their array in real-time and thus give them targeting for lightspeed or near lightspeed point defenses.
Second, any defense system that relied solely on a single array is
If your attack was construed to threaten from multiple directions, its detection odds go up dramatically. If it had countermeasures for their array-extender satellites or interceptors, then you again are revealed.
Plus, the 'keep at 2.7K' task is a lot harder than you think over the longer term especially if married to a thrust motor, batteries, electronics, etc. that generally don't love 2.7 K temperatures and that tend to emit heat.
So the attack isn't nearly as viable as you think and will be much less viable within 20 years.
Detection isn't that hard. Thermal can get you simply because it is hard to appear, over any lengthy period of hours or days, as if you have the same signature as the cosmic background (some fractions of a Kelvin above absolute zero). An modern optical detection is pretty good on its own right, but it pales compared to the detection of your heat versus the background. It's almost impossible to mask over any length of time required to close from interplanetary distances at non-relativistic speeds.
Mind you, weapons ranges are practically no more than a few thousand kms.
So for two fleets to meet, they have to want to and work at it by bending their vectors to intersect. If they are coming from opposing directions with any speed that gets them there sooner than days or weeks, the conflict will likely be a single pass, then a rethink on whether to revector to meet again. Momentum from decent amounts of interplanetary speeds is a huge issue.
If you want to be able to enter weapons range fast enough to prevent an enemy getting too many shots, then your closure has to be fast. That means the engagement is short. If you want a longer shootout, then you can go a bit slower and have more manouver options. In either case, you can manouver a few hundred meters or a few kms either way in a random erratic way around your main vector of motion and make fine weapons targeting a bit more challenging as well as rotating ship to bring different faces to bear versus enemy beams or weaponfire.
Defenders have an interesting conundrum from static locales:
a) They are an easy target
b) They can likely mount larger weapons arrays than mobile vessels and will have a fair bit of time to engage any incoming ships or missiles
In the long run, installations can be attacked by stand off or ballistic means. But any fleet closing in is going to get a rough ride.
Assuming the atmosphere doesn't preclude that.
The US has spy sats now, drones in the air, etc. and yet insurgencies continue to present problems. Most areas where you might engage have civilians and sorting out civilians and enemy combatants is at best a tough prospect and at worst a horrible disaster when you get it wrong.
This is why over the horizon missiles aren't much use in most smaller scale conflicts on Earth. ROE requires you to have eyes-on and know who you are shooting. If you don't, then you shoot down unassociated airliners for instance.
Whoever holds the high ground, likely mostly the US, China and maybe a few other nations for the forseeable future, will have an advantage in any conventional conflict. That merely means less capable enemies will not engage in conventional conflict.
If forces in orbit decide they have an issue to resolve at laser-point, then that gets into actual space combat.
Many of the fights on earth are about a) not being able to live the way you think is right or b) not having the resources do live the way you'd like.
If we can get to space on any large scale, it is possible that there is enough space for a) for a long time. You don't need to live anywhere near the people you dislike or have anyone up in your grill. b) will possibly go away too by the time we can meaningfully colonize other planetary bodies even in our own system. Energy could be harvested from the sun and resources from various places around the system. If we go interplanetary, having one more Earth-ish planet would allow us to vastly reduce populations rubbing elbow to elbow on Earth.
Of course, that's all in theory. All of Israel could move to Nebraska and have better neighbours, but that land is sacred to many of them. So of course, it'll be fought over. That same logic will make Earth a battleground for as long as I can imagine.
Similarly, I happen to believe getting out of this system is hard to envision ever and that our biospheres capable of supporting human life on a large scale are limited to exactly ONE. We can create other populations, but they will end up like the space stations in the TV series 'the 100' - too small to be truly viable independent of Earth.
So I do expect the wars you talk about. But it is at least possible that they might not be necessary.
It's also possible Earth becomes a massive sinkhole for the ignorant, violent, overpopulated underclass and the intelligentsia and the rich (two very different groups) end up living off-earth and harvesting enough resources from elsewhere while keeping the bulk of humanity in quarantine on Earth. Earth can then have nasty little wars, but the only space conflicts will be some small scale scuffles because the rich and wealthy and the scientists will want to keep their limited ecosystem intact.
Lots of different possible scenarios.
Prove such a thing is possible and that the bomb won't consume the laser. This particular idea is trotted out and used, but I don't think we are anywhere near seeing one even if this idea is possible (which I still debate).
With modern optics, it is possible to make out any sizable object at rather long ranges visually. With thermal, even moreso. It's hard to hide against cosmic background temperature if you have any sort of engine, electronics, etc.
So, let's posit a best case missile:
a) launched from a railgun (no initial thermal heating, kept near 0K before launch, dark outer skin, decent launch velocity)
b) no manouvering until final attack phase (requires a stupidly non-manouvering target for a long time so your missile can close without having to use thrusters)
b) is pretty unlikely. The minute you know an enemy ship is out there (see my first observation - provided to me by a NASA instrument scientist of my acquaintance who worked on the NEAR mission), you'd start some form of manouvers just to eliminate the blind ballistic launch.
a) This may make the missile harder to spot. The chaff cloud would make it very easy to spot the cloud and the chaff cloud can't manouver like the missile (and the missile might hit the cloud to its detriment) so evade the cloud with your ship and you force the missile to manouver and thus reveal it and remove its cover.
The amount you'd have to manouver (how hard) is inversely proportional to engagement range. At longer ranges, a relatively mild set of course altering thrusts would rapidly ensure that no chaff cloud would come anywhere close and any missile would have to start manouvering to be in any position to hit you.
So your long range attack scenario is pretty unlikely unless your opponent for some reason has their sensors (passive) off.
Modern telescopes (not even future arrays) married to a decent computer can do fast sweeps of the sky and spot optical and thermal differences. Marry this to computers 20 years in the future and it'll be realtime (if today's take a few minutes). And once you've made the initial spot of an enemy ship at a distance, then you can focus your array and processing time drops further as you don't need a full sky sweep, so missile spotting becomes very likely even if they are trying to be within a few degrees of absolute zero (background thermal level) and not manouvering. If they manouver, you have them sighted.
If a missile has to manouver a lot to keep up with ships, it has to carry lots of reaction mass and burn it. Hotter signature, ejected hot trail, and more weapon mass devoted to propellant.
Covering areas of space with any sort of projectile saturation (or even a chaff cloud) is impossible at any range. The dispersion rate of the cloud and the manouvering rate of an enemy target at any range to speak of will be enough to render the amount of projectiles you'd have to lob as 'vast'. For ballistic projectiles, you'd have to predict the enemy location at time of intersect and set your scatter to attain your chosen volume at that particular point. Any enemy manouver to speak of ruins that option.
So, this sort of long ranged attack might work versus planets or stationary targets, but never against a military vessel that was aware of an enemy presence and most of the time they would be. Stealth in space is a fiction that's hard to justify given modern sensor tech and computer power and that available in the near future.
Instead, just simply closing under manouver and using carefully aimed energy weapons and perhaps close enough in some secondary batteries using railguns with high speed projectiles might work. Missiles could be used in swarms at short range.
For obfuscation, you can jam active sensors with EMPs or emissions, put modern passive thermal and opticals will largely render much of that EW useless. Passive targeting will be enough to hit cruisers and destroyers and so on.
It's funny - real space warfare with near future tech is horrible to game out. It is boring. Much of the action is closing and the nature of fights dictated by relative closure rates (a joust with one pass? an orbital gunfight at short range?). Stealth doesn't work. Planets and stations aren't defensible
Not sure the flight dynamics of White Stars and Shadows was properly newtonian. They looked like they used an inertia-less drive. Yes, the White Stars rotated and strafed, but the way they and the Shadows generally manouvered seemed inertia-reduced at the very least.
Mostly true, except stealth isn't nearly as possible as you believe if current existent technology or reasonably-expected technology is considered.
The 'near c rock' is the big bugaboo in in space game setting. You might even see it coming but stopping it isn't trivial. And if you have a lot of targets (populations on different planetary bodies or in orbit over them), then this form of defense becomes fraught and unlikely to succeed.
Even jump-drives of sci-fi often have issues - jumping a ship in an atmosphere might well liberate enough energy to significantly damage the ecosphere. Or create some sort of singularity that would consume the planetary mass.
Space wars will either be:
a) Genocidal conflicts involving planetary decimation
b) Small political conflicts that adjust borders, resources, etc. but don't endanger the larger polities enough to make them switch to mode a)
c) Conflicts between groups who can't do a) yet, so are fighting with more limited means (and likely not an interstellar civilization, just intrasystem).
d) War on Terror style conflicts with NGOs (not usually fought with fleet battles)
Defending large biospheres is ridiculously resource consumptive. Attacking them less so.
This makes for the interesting point that mobile Dyson Sphere type population movers might be the way to go versus actual planetary populations if you get the wazzoo imagine-tech of the space opera universe. Take your populations with your warfleets and give the enemy nothing to attack except perhaps some remote resource gathering operations. Then there may actually still have to be a fleet battle - usually when one fleet wants a shot at the other fleet's 'worldships'. A decisive fleet victory for the attackers allows a genocide but at least they have to fight for it, unlike shooting fish in a barrel (rock bombing panets).
Um.... come on now....
I realize open space isn't a vacuum. There is a particulate density to open space. It is not zero. And an explosion that involves a chemical reaction or ejection of mass could add some density locally to that.
And I suppose in theory you can setup a shockwave in fluid mediums.
On the other hand, I am entirely skeptical that you could, in average open space in the solar system, generate enough of a shockwave to actually convey any sound that would be heard over onboard machine and human sounds during a battle.
To convince me that the shockwave you can generate in open space is sufficiently strong to convey sounds meaningfully at any distance over at most a handful of meters (and in a lot of cases it looks like 'swoosh' sounds from space opera ships would occur at distances in the 100s of meters to tens of kms) would require you to haul out some references and math.
I'm not saying you can't get a shockwave in open space, but I'm going to call you on its magnitude at any significant distance from its point of origins. And by significant, I don't mean 'detectable by advanced sensors', I mean 'loud enough to be heard over ambient machine and other noises', which I would say implies a significant number of decibels and a fairly significant amount of transmitted energy which I just don't buy.
I always thought those were the soundtracks the pilots played on ship audio... you know, like the Top Gun thing.... ;0)
The rebooted Battlestar Galactica tried for some newtonian physics and no-sound-in-space-battles. It was interesting... you heard sounds that you might here on the ships as damage was sustained and in the fighters, you heard the pilots breathing. The sounds were minimal compared to a Star Wars dogfight, but I found the eeriness of the silent space fights to be intense.
Any amount of matter that is in a compressed warhead that then expands in a spherical matter will have its density decay by the cube (possibly square) of distance. You'd be surprised how fast that means your density drops off. Any 'atmosphere' would be measured in terms of a limited number of meters I suspect.
I had read somewhere that we'd need some sort of imaginary tech like gravitic lensing to get us past a few thousand kms range. Plus I'm also assuming that a 1 - 2 m beam width at the target means that your energy density sucks in terms of burning off, in a few seconds at most, significant amounts of hull (possibly with mirrored or ablative coatings).
I would have thought your target area would be more in the range of 1-5 cm in size. I assume with the limits you stated that the range is then much less than 3000 km.
If my output energy density is X at the 'barrel' (emitter) with a beam width of a few micrometers or nanometers, if I have it arrive at my target as a 1 m beam width, I'm looking at a fraction of the energy density.
A laser like you are talking about, unless I'm not fully grokking matters, would be useful for spotting or perhaps even for slow heating of a target, but not or punching through.
I'm also assuming their are physical limits at the moment (and perhaps theoretically) to emitted energy density. People have postulated bomb pumped lasers, but as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated this as a feasible option yet.
1. Lasers have a focus issue that is profound at distances over a few hundred kms if we are trying to deliver very high energy very quickly. That's not going to be easily addressed. Even small bits of beam dispersion will rapidly gut the strength at the far end if the range is significant (as it is in space).
2. Why would a weapons grade laser have great output power but the mirrors not similarly improve?
I generally agree mirrors aren't the answer for several reasons. Mirrors are terrible for any kind of stealth (they make you a fairly obvious target). Mirrors less likely to work with non-visual light spectra. I'm assuming reflection in mirrors has some frequencies it works well at and others not so much. Lasers are generally one frequency and consequently if that frequency happens to be somewhere that a mirror won't perform as efficiently, I'm imagining the mirror will be less effective.
If you deliver enough power, you might burn through. Ablative armour has been suggested (some suggesting using ice). Ships can also spin or otherwise manouver to ensure that unless the power delivered is of very high instantaneous density, the ship's motion will disperse the energy of the attacking laser around the ship's hull in such a way as to make burn through a much lengthier task and possibly requiring multiple hits or long exposures if using a continuous beam laser.
The thing is you can't really argue paper, scissors, or rock because each of these is evolving. It may be that at any given moment, the energy density delivered by lasers at combat ranges IS enough to overcome mirroring of hulls (although there may still be some effect so it may still be an asset), or it may be that at that particular point in the evolution, the mirrors or ablative hulls are capable enough to make the laser a weapon of patience and multiple attacks to see notable effect. A lot depends on the exact 'freeze frame' moment in the respective developments.
Anytime we humans have developed a weapon, counters have been envisioned.
We made fancy state of the art tanks with layered ceramic army to defeat kinetic penetrators and with point defense systems capable of engaging incoming RPGs with 85-99% efficacy (Russians in Afghanistan). Those sorts of tanks with such heavy armour then get attacked by a culvert full of cheap military explosives or a collapsing building. There's always a counter measure, sometimes surprisingly low tech.
It's always a matter of just when you take your snapshot....
Except that those distances, given our sensing technology even today in visible and IR spectrum, is well beyond the range our weapons will achieve anytime soon - including guided weapons (too much reaction mass), ballistic projectiles (easily dodged at long range), hybrids (ballistic most of the way, manouvering at the end... better, but still too much reaction mass), and energy (can't focus lasers at those distances enough to do required damage quickly enough).
Fights ARE likely to be close in, ARE likely to be within the range of lightspeed weapons like lasers, and will tend to be deadly, fast, and more about how long your vessel can survive and how much you can confuse the enemy's sensors or how you can overwhelm his point defenses than anything.
Our weapons reach is likely to be a fraction of our sensor ability for the forseeable future.
Also: Nukes in atmosphere get a huge blast effect that is a direct result of the interaction of the energetic release with the atmosphere. Without the atmosphere, that effect is not present. Any damage thus has to be strictly a radiation/energy effect. As energy density falls off with either the square or cube of distance (I think perhaps cube), your ability to concentrate energy falls off *very fast* so your nuke has to go off *very close* to any missile swarm.
The objective would be to have your attacking munitions come in over a widely dispersed arc of sky towards the target, thus making his point defense make choices and negating the effect of any such nuclear counter strategy. EMP weapons (useful but also similarly limited for the same reason nukes are and making highly focused directional EMPs isn't simple) would also be good against some forms of incoming missiles, but only within the same limited area of effect because of the rapid fall-off of energy density with distance from the explosion.
So, I respectfully submit that the fights will be close in, because of weapons limits (barring surprising developments that I don't see coming in the next 50 - 100 years). Anything beyond a 50-100 year window of prediction is masturbation because the whole nature of human existence could change depending on what we do to the planet in that 100 years.
Um, sort of.
Let's assume I am moving in a particular direction with much kinetic energy built up. It is true, I cannot easily reverse direction because I must overcome that kinetic energy and must then build up kinetic energy in the opposite direction.
However, it is also true that I can add kinetic energy at 90 degrees (which opens up a plane of thrust perpendicular to my existing vector) to the existing vector my ship carries. That constitutes a change of direction and does not technically have anything to do with the vector component that already existed because it is orthogonal to it.
So, yes, flying in circles is expensive. Changing your course by 15 degrees either way (which at a long range is significant in combat terms) isn't all that hard. Flying an erratic course around your 20 km/s thrust vector might not take that much energy and might be somewhat effective at longer ranges. A lot depends on the delivery time of attacks, how long you have to hold a target in your sights (forex beam laser that has to be on target for 5 minutes to burn through) and how fast your sensors are at processing changes (allowing you to retarget). Range is a factor because far enough away, it takes a while for your course change to propagate to the opposition, their system to process it, and their systems to retarget and then have that effect propagate back. But then again, those ranges start to look unlikely with current reasonable expectations of technology so perhaps more of a theoretical issue than actual.
And reaction mass is a real b**ch. Fighters start to look impractical over any distance over tens or perhaps hundreds of kms if the opposition is making significant changes to their vector because the small craft still has to carry a lot of mass to make the manouver changes. And one presumes they don't want to be swept away by an afterthought shot from a shipboard weapons system, so they have to be either armoured enough (more mass) or agile enough (constant motion, constant burning of reaction mass) to not just be snuffed on the way in by an enemy ship of the line.
It is true that you can have more and less agile ships and that will matter. However, unless our ability to project damage at 1000s of kms gets much better than it is now, the fights will happen at ranges where manouver might not be able to match up to the speed of light weapon systems and computers backing them. Fighters start to look less likely (as do missiles) in that setting, unless they come in large numbers and expect mass casualties.
Plus drones will be capable of more Gs than a human and require a computer, not a meat bag with G-force limits and life support and not much redundancy. So if there are fighters, they might be smaller drones (or the same size as a manned fighter with more reaction mass and weaponry).
This sort of reality of reaction mass in fights make a big difference as anyone who has ever played a space combat sim or game that tracks reaction mass will tell you.
It is interesting though then that defensive missiles and craft launched from stations or planets may have more ability to use high accelerations and erratic manouvers than attacking craft coming in from far away (who have to bring their reaction mass with them). That adds a pretty big advantage to defenders (somewhat offset if they are a station or planet for being stationary as a target).
I wonder if engagements of such stations and planets will just be long range kinetic or missile bombardment. It would make sense to only send weapons mass (rather than full ships) toward an enemy station with significant advantages for only needing short ranged defense missiles and small craft. Why risk your main fleet? Just pile in the missiles - the station can't move much.
There are lots of ideas to explore and potential settings depending what assumptions you make about the tech we discover or don't.
I read something a while back about the degree of focus you'd need with a laser to be able to do significant damage to a target in a short window at ranges in the thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers and the thinking at the time is that you would require something like gravitic lensing (which implies control of gravitational fields) to get the kind of focus that would make that possible. I am unsure if modern science has advanced to make that perspective incorrect, but there was math to back it up at the time.
It is unlikely we'll use any form of kinetic projectile at significant distances. The amount of reaction mass that would have to accommodate a manouvering projectile would largely kill that idea and a strictly ballistic launch still raises the issue of hauling around the projectle mass on your space platform at a cost in reaction mass. Of course, if you have magical reactionless thrusters, then you may of course freely ignore many inconvenient aspects of actual physics.
The best interpretation of space battles in the short run likely involve orbital, near orbit, or orbit-to-ground (or the reverse) engagements near planetary bodies (or other 'points of interest'). There, ranges can be from the few kms out to about a couple of thousand kms at the furthest, more often being in the tens or low hundreds of kms. This limits the reaction mass required and makes targeting feasible with optical or other sensor systems available today if coupled to a decent computer. At shorter ranges, kinetics might be feasible (as missile warheads or small short-ranged craft armament). Lasers would be an option assuming we can solve the 'delivered power' issue with sufficient focus and energy density. Presumably there are some railgun options or possibilities for bomb-pumped lasers and for some particle weapons as well. EMP weapons may be possible, but the issue is that creating a good directional EMP with any sort of range is tough (power falls off rapidly) and contact hits in space at any distance are non-trivial for projectiles or effects like EMPs or exploding nuclear weapons.
Stealth is not going to be much use shortly. What we can do with optics and infrared already pretty much rules it out. All you have to be is a few fragments of a Kelvin off of the stellar background and you can be picked up. And hiding a thermal signature by some techniques like sinking the heat internally or attempting to radiate it away in other directions is a) both very technically difficult and b) hard to do without detection while also c) making your stealth perhaps directional and d) definitely making it only work for a short time before your thermal countermeasures are unable to continue operating effectively. [I have several friends who work with NASA and other space programs, one of whom is a specialist in such sensor systems]
Fights will tend to occur where you would naturally have congregations of assets (both military and 'of interest to protect or as targets') which means that planets and perhaps planetoids/asteroids might be sensible places. The fights there can be reasonably short ranged and the vehicles consequently of reasonable sizes/mass/expense. This also means ground-based installations or space-based satellites or stations may be participants.
As space colonization seems likely to happen as a token multinational effort, you may see a fair few nations having a stake. On the other hand, the big players will get the biggest say and have the biggest military presence in space, so it will look a bit like the colonial era all over again perhaps.
Conflicts will probably be fairly limited because an all-out conflict across our star system would be tremendously damaging for all concerned. Typically, like the late 20th century and the early 21st, it will be large players beating up on smaller players (a safer fight, more sure outcome, more likely to produce a useful 'win' with resource or other gains).
It's a bit unclear how far off we are from having civilian populations not carefully selected
I think the point here is that the issue is one perceived by the Sales team (rightly or wrongly) and that they believe has business implications. It seems also likely that they do not see/understand the open bug tracker as a sales asset and something they should be openly advertising to their customers and using to challenge their competitors ("No software is perfect. We admit we aren't perfect but work aggressively on constant improvement (here is our open bug tracker and a list of all of the fixes and features added as requested by customers). What do our competitors do? They hide their defects so you have no idea how many or how bad and they have no visible and verifiable record of being responsive to their customers....in the worst case, they may be afraid to share their bugs with customers because they have so many that are serious.... we aren't. We think you'd rather know and see that we deal with our issues each and every day.").
If you sell this idea right, you can use the fact that you are willing to be open and honest as a spike to impale your competition on if they insist on being closed and opaque. But your sales force has to make that happen and be willing to use your openness aggressively to market your product.
It seems like the sales team in question is letting the other side describe the product and set the tone for how it is viewed in the market rather than they themselves doing that. That seems to me like a major sales force failure.
Then again, I've been in a number of companies (that I've worked directly for or been placed at) over the last two decades where the sales force is short lived, rarely truly accountable, and who don't seem to be able to work with development teams worth a damn. I've come out with a generally low opinion of most sales teams. I have had the good fortune to meet some truly excellent sales people (and even a few excellent marketing people) who understood that a symbiotic relationship with the development team and the customers was the route to the best success. Most of the others just seemed to want to shuck off a product on someone regardless of whether they needed it, whether it met their needs, or whether they'd end up trashing it and badmouthing the product (because by then, the sales guys would have moved on).
I've also seen firms deserve poor sales forces by treating good sales staff stupidly. One friend of mine hit all of his targets as head of sales and then some, generating a huge bonus. Then one of the top guys came to him and said 'That's too much... we can't pay you that, you have to accept a reduced compensation.....'. In other words, he did everything they asked and then some and they made lots of money off his efforts but then they didn't want to reward him in accordance with his contract. I've also seen another case where another sales manager upped his business unit's sales by over 100%. That generated a big cheque (again, in line with what had been negotiated at the outset). So what did the company do for next year? Did it incentivize this great progress in sales by continuing a similar approach? Or did it totally gut the incentive by doubling the sales target minimum? No prize for guessing.
Companies routinely treat their sales staff like crap and get crappy sales staff as a result. Marketing is also similarly poorly managed and staffed.
So, I think there should be an effort to educate the sales and marketing staff and to convince them to sell the product with the open tracking of defects as a huge asset, rather than liability. Challenge competitors to have the balls to do the same or call them on not doing it and cast aspersions on their product based on their fear of exposing their actual issues.
But don't be surprised if the sales and marketing force or the management behind them aren't willing to expend the effort. Many companies work hard at managing themselves in a race towards the bottom. Then they wonder why things get worse as they make changes....
kaladorn
(too lazy to login)
Won't this strategy fail if the email address you don't mean to send something to IS a valid email in your address book? If so, you can still send the email to the wrong place pretty easily.
Autocomplete and lack of sleep once had me send an email to my Ex's Ex. The content was benign thankfully. They had very similar email addresses and names so I then changed one of them significantly and removed the other entirely from my address book.
There are plenty of collaborative technologies that can be quite useful to a team.
Wikis are a great example. You can have everyone contribute to them in areas they have expertise (even if the contributions are small).
Email gives communications with a backtrail - often necessary when someone in the situation is being an obstruction and you need to have a record of what you did, when you did it, what their response was (and I love the ones who always respond by calling or visiting to avoid email responses, but I deal with them by writing a summary of the call or visit and conclude with 'I assume this matches with your understanding and if I do not here a reply, I will proceed accordingly'), etc.
Conversations F2F are faster, more clear, and take less time. They do help resolve simple questions. Often, people won't want everyone to know they have a question they feel is dumb/ignorant, but they know they need to ask someone, so they'll go talk to one other person. They'd never post the question on a social network as it would reveal their self-perceived dumb/ignorant moment to everyone. Sometimes that is just a lack of self confidence, sometimes it is the key to job success (not appearing dumb to the key people above you - depends on how sensible your management is about all the stuff people have to know and learn in an ongoing career).
IME, if your work environment is such that you have to focus extensively on formal/informal distinctions in your work activities, then your work environment is not as productive as it could be. In places where that worry really exists, less actual communication and thus less actual work occurs.
c. Have already established a friendship with the person who can fix the problem. I brought cookies for you! Hope you like them. By the way, there's a small problem with the X. Could you look at it sometime?
I agree with all of your points (for large companies). I think this is generally a result of siloing and reporting chains that are vertical when necessary job activites are often horizontal across reporting chains.
I'd like to single out your point c. as a key example of why it is better to get along and go along and to be friends with key assets in your company. As an employee and a consultant working for other companies and requiring their technical assets to assist (when time is rarely budgeted for those assets to do so), I can say that it has always been a great idea to know, make friends with, and be thought of as a friend by:
i) IT staff (someone has a non-critical problem, I have a non-critical problem, that other person is a jerk to the IT department, I have lunch and commiserate with them.... guess whose non-critical problem gets first attention?)
ii) Admin/reception/payroll staff (timesheet issues and invoice issues get solved much more easily)
iii) Key developers in customer organizations (who then make the time to help a friend moreso than to help 'the contractor')
iv) Key developers and project managers in your own organization (who then listen to your issues if you present them carefully and sometimes this buys you extra time or management support)
A lot of times, it is just about listening to other people's issues re the job or their home life and being a bit sympathetic. Sometimes it means spending a few minutes of your time helping them out when you aren't obliged to. Combine these, and you've got both a sense of debt and a sense you are a friend and those go a long way in ANY setting.
This isn't a mercenary/manipulative concept - I actually do care about the people around me and their troubles. I know that if I help them, they'll usually help me if they can. Sometimes they can't and being understanding about that is pretty important too. If someone is swamped, recognize that and let them be - just ask if there is a time you might be able to talk to them once they are less swamped. Often times they'll be able to help you later in the day or the next day.
Exhaust all your own resources and solutions first before bothering others (unless they will take exhorbant amounts of time). When you go ask for help, you want the other asset to understand that you've done your due diligence and have actually hit a wall.
Another problem with some social networks inside companies is that they end up being trolled by management, HR, managers, etc. and so nobody wants to speak up much on them. Honesty that would come out in meetings of a few people who didn't feel threatened by one another or their manager won't come out on larger public forums where anyone in the food chain could be watching.
You've clearly never seen Leela of the Seva Team (aka Survey Team).
http://www.shadowlocked.com/images/stories/whoreviews/baker/leela.jpg
The United States is not signatory to all of the Geneva Conventions.
The Geneva Conventions (a number of them at any rate) extend generally to uniformed combatants in the armed services of a government, not non-uniformed combatants working for an NGO or nobody (except in a very diffuse way).
However, for them to be criminals, there would have to be jurisdiction for legal process to occur. I'm fairly certain that the there is no law enforcement jurisdiction belonging the US in some of the places these combatants have been detained and removed from.
All of that said, these foes are best described as insurgents or terrorists. They are willing to engage both military and civilian targets, to impersonate members of any local police or military, and are not themselves signatory to the Geneva Conventions and thus denied their protections. Their tactics involve terrorism and generally involve destabilization of a region which would basically be an insurgency against the existing power structure.
With comments like that, your sig line may need some work.
The Republicans aren't responsible for Gitmo, nor are the Democrats. The US electorate and America is. It is an American prison. Governments placed by American electors created it and maintained it.
That's who is responsible.