Orbital Defense Platforms

In science fiction we often see immense starships attacking planets, crushing or besieging them, but in our own future we may deploy powerful orbital fortresses to defend our world.

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Credits:
Orbital Defense Platforms
Episode 423b; December 3, 2023
Produced, Written & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur

Graphics:
Fishy Tree
Jarred Eagley
Jeremy Jozwik
Ken York/YD Visual
Legiontech Studios
Rapid Thrash
Sergio Botero
SpaceResourcesCGI
Udo Schroeter

Music Courtesy of:
Stellardrone, "Red Giant", "Ultra Deep Field"
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Labyrinth", "Forgotten Stars"
Taras Harkavyi, "Alpha and ..."
Miguel Johnson, "So Many Stars"

[Thaumogenesis]

Nothing takes the fight out of someone faster than seeing a cannon larger than their whole spaceship.

[iainballas]

Just as long as the enemy doesn't infiltrate with a bomb. If they do though, make sure you have a supersoldier on hand to give it back.

[BastiatC]

The crippling problem with these sorts of stations is that you can't put a grate over the exhaust port.

[ShovelMonkey]

Lord Admiral Nelson’s famous dictum _“A ship’s a fool to fight a fort”_ accurately reflects the immutable advantages of strong, resilient, and offensively capable land-based forces against relatively poorly armored and fragile naval forces. This applies to planets in spades.

[kaymish]

I played an online game that had orbital defence platforms. I was in a faction that worked well together and we stacked up somany orbital platforms in our starsystems that when enemies jumped into the system and got into missile rangethe server would lag out and their fleet would explode once it caught back up to the calculations. After awhile nobody would fight us because of all the server lag we made when defending.

[harbl]

"Just leave fortress Sol alone. Where do you think the phrase 'a mass driver behind every chunk of rock' originated?"

[jayburn]

Reminds me of super Macs from halo, the orbital weapon stations that have rail guns bigger than most ships. They talk about them in the fall of reach and halo 2.

[marsar]

The SDS system in battletech is an excellent example of a orbital defense. ground based batteries supporting orbital drone warships, which are in turn stationed at orbiting battle stations when not in use. inflicted apocalyptic losses during the last few years of the Star League

[StacheMan]

Nothing cools the desire to assault a planet quite like a constellation of orbital forts, each of which masses significantly more than the entire attacking fleet.

[MrMusicman]

For an RKM, even if you manage to intercept it with a cloud of small mass objects, if it's already on target you aren't changing its momentum enough to knock it off target. You may have even made it worse by turning it into a beam of plasma headed toward your planet instead of a chunk of titanium or whatever. That still transfers 10^21 joules into your planet. Severe, rapid atmospheric warming.

You need to intercept it with something big enough to substantially change its momentum, or hit it with your own RKM, an anti-RKM if you will. Both defensive approaches are much harder than the initial RKM approach.

[animo]

"Cortana, you have the MAC"

I mean imagine trying to invade a planet that has possibly thousands of cannons firing projectiles that travel at an appreciable portion of the speed of light

[TheEventHorizon]

Halo probably had the best examples of how to do orbital defense platforms being absolutely huge guns, much larger then any ship based ones (Atleast until you get like the UNSC Infinity) powered by enormous surface power plants that ships couldn’t hope to match which were so effective at long range extreme damage, the covenant with their incredibly tanky ships literally could not approach these without getting huge parts of their fleets obliterated (like what happened with the few batteries Reach had despite that battle being a loss)

[stubbornspaceman]

One of my personal favorite ODPs from sci-fi is the Necklace of Artemis from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Those things were so effective that one of the main characters Yang Weng-Li had to launch massive multi km long chunks of ice moving a near light speed in order to destroy them.

[ilkoderez]

Jinking around is very important in avoiding weapons and debris. You could use super conductors to push and pull off of each other (using the super conductors just for the large fields, not the meissner effect because that breaks down in large magnetic fields). Thanks Issac, this is a great episode. I like the numbers thrown in! The distance, the jinking at distance and the percentage of hitting the target. That's good info! Love it!

[palehorseman]

In Miami, there is a statue of the man who invented air conditioning. I expect there will be several to the man who can efficiently remove space debris

[SecularMentat]

It seems like instead of firing a single large laser at a jittering target, firing an array of considerably less powerful lasers at a target. That is conveniently spaced so it hits every other meter at the engagement range.

You'd do less damage, but you'd be MUCH more likely to score a hit. And a hit in space can be detrimental real fast.

[ASpaceOstrich]

I've been idly working on a post apocalyptic sci-fi setting and I've known I wanted orbital infrastructure to exist in some form. This one got me thinking. Theres some really powerful imagery and fun narrative to be found in orbital defence platforms constantly shooting down *something* out there in the solar system that keeps trying to hit Earth. The question of what keeps attacking, and what happens if something slips through are fun ones.

[cannonfodder]

Another informative Sci-Fi Sunday episode Isaac.

Now if only more Sci-Fi implemented the tech well as you described...

[edstoutenburg]

BabV! "-it was the last-of the Babylon Stations..." The series pioneered some of the eRly CGI effects loke you said, even some before DS9. The show won some awards for its effects also.

[JosephHarner]

@14:25 this is an area where real world "phasers", or "Phased Array Lasers" shine. While less power efficient than a monolithic laser optic, phased arrays (already popular in modern radar and radio communications, such as Starlink) can steer a beam onto target without any moving mechanical parts.