Table of Contents

- Swords of Lok: A Historical Approach to the Edged Weapons of Larry Correia's High Fantasy World

by Whit Williams

- Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse: Part Four: Military Organization of Carrera’s Legions

by Tom Kratman

- Genetics Advice for Generation Starships

by Dan Koboldt

- The Evolution of Body Armor

by Michael Z. Williamson

- Warships of Sea and Space: Form Follows Function Follows Technology

by Jim Beall

- Warships of Sea and Space: Form Follows Function Follows Technology, Part II

by Jim Beall

- Do You Believe in the Singularity?

by Dr. Robert E. Hampson

- As Big as Space Itself: Building Our Own Space Megastructures—and Searching for Them as Galactic Signatures of Alien Civilizations

by Les Johnson

- The Universe Beyond the Plasma Frequency

by Kerry Hensley

- Man Caves: Humanity's Next Home

by Ken Roy

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2019

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Swords of Lok: A Historical Approach to the Edged Weapons of Larry Correia's High Fantasy World © 2019 by Whit Williams

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse: Part Four: Military Organization of Carrera’s Legions © 2019 by Tom Kratman

Genetics Advice for Generation Starships © 2019 by Dan Koboldt

The Evolution of Body Armor © 2019 by Michael Z. Williamson

Warships of Sea and Space: Form Follows Function Follows Technology © 2019 by Jim Beall

Warships of Sea and Space: Form Follows Function Follows Technology, Part II © 2019 by Jim Beall

Warships of Sea and Space: Form Follows Function Follows Technology, Part II © 2019 by Jim Beall

Do You Believe in the Singularity © 2019 by Robert E. Hampson

As Big as Space Itself: Building Our Own Space Megastructures—and Searching for Them as Galactic Signatures of Alien Civilizations © 2019 by Les Johnson

The Universe Beyond the Plasma Frequency © 2019 by Kerry Hensley

Man Caves: Humanity's Next Home © 2019 by Ken Roy

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eISBN: 978-1-62579-724-7

Electronic Version by Baen Books

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Swords of Lok:

A Historical Approach to the Edged Weapons of Larry Correia's High Fantasy World

Whit Williams

Larry Correia's high fantasy novel Son of the Black Sword is set in Lok, a mythical alternate world based on India and Southeast Asia. That world is one of the many features that go against the fantasy grain and set Larry Correia's epic apart. Despite that feature one classic theme of the genre, the magic sword, made the cut. This sword is Angruvadal, one of the Ancestor Blades of Lok that, like Excalibur, choose their bearer and endow the bearer with great skills. Setting magic aside however, Angruvadal stands in sharp contrast to the world it lives in.

"Unlike most swords in Lok, Angruvadal was straight, not curved in any way.

It was double edged, sharp enough on either side to effortlessly lop off a man's

arm. The grip was long enough for two-hand use."

From that brief description from Correia's Son of the Black Sword we get straight, double-edged, really sharp, and with a long two-handed handle. Let's start with that first quality, straight.

Double-edged Ulfberht sword. Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

It is a common belief that the curved blade out-cuts the straight. It is such a common belief that the principle argument of saber design is straight versus curved, your opinion resting on whether the cut or the thrust is more important. That particular query was answered nicely by Samuel Colt in 1847, but they were still arguing about it when the Germans answered it with machine guns in WWI. Even then, Patton annoyed Pershing with it in later years. Like most assumptions in this field the truth is more complicated than binary options. The right answer is: sometimes. Curved blades perform better with certain types of cuts through soft material. They are likewise lacking in other areas. Before we get into the trouble with the curve though, let's take a look at the positives.

It is a common belief that curved swords are superior because they make contact with less surface area. That idea is an extension of the wedge concept, the mechanical rule by which all blades work, mass and force focused on a tiny point. The curve can work this way as well provided that you are cutting into a flat surface. Real world things however, people for example—tend to be curvy and create their own small surface area at the point of contact with any blade.

The first thing we really gain with curvature is sheer. Sheer is cutting force developed by an edge pulled across a surface. It works the same way as a steak knife or saw. All edges on a microscopic level have teeth, and just like serrations they bite and tear whatever they are drug across. With a straight sword this is achieved by the draw cut or push cut. Both techniques create sheer, but both have the disadvantage of adding complication to the cutting stroke and diminishing force by redirection. In other words, a chop is a simple movement with all of the energy traveling straight into the target. The draw or push cut moves in two directions, one of them indirect to the target. Additionally, both are hard to perform from horseback. The curved sword by contrast can simply be swung through in a straightforward manner, its curvature providing the draw and the sheer.

Sword blade with temper line. Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

The second thing we gain is edge geometry. That's a fancy term for the acuteness of angle that makes an edge. For obvious reasons a thin wedge cuts better than a thick one, but you quickly get into diminishing returns here. The loss of mass becomes less potential energy, and the thinner blade is a weaker one. An alternative is to make the wedge longer (blade wider) so the transition to thickness is more gradual. This works well, but requires the carrying of a wide, cumbersome sword. Enter again our friend the draw cut. By pulling the blade through the cut we force the material to cross the blade diagonally, in effect creating a wider blade with less dramatic pitch. Or, again, we can just hit them with a curve.

An abrupt edge (top) and an appleseed or rolled edge (bottom).

Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

One simple but ignored effect of curvature is mass. All other things being equal, a curved blade is heavier than the same length straight. For most of history that didn't matter. One made a sword as light or heavy as needed within the limits of technology and material. In later years when the sword is a distant second or third to firearms, it mattered because a shorter blade was easier to carry. Of course, this means the straight blade will be faster, but it remains that the curved should cut better.

Hank Reinhardt cutting mail armor on a pig shoulder.

Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

So with all that in mind, why does most of history give us straight swords? There is a popular myth that curved swords require more advanced technology. Considering the enormous energy man has spent trying to make his world straight, I find this almost as funny as the idea that the no edge sword (rapier) is an advance. Curving a blade is easy, it's what it wants to do when you hammer out an edge. As you flatten the edge you are expanding its lateral dimension. In a perfect world all of that expansion would go straight outward from the spine. In imperfect reality it is more of a pancake effect and you end up with the edge longer than the spine. Thus the blade must curve. This is in fact the simplest explanation for the world's preference for double edges. The easiest way to keep things straight is to hammer out the other side.

Reproduction falcata. Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

The best answer as to why we have straight edges is armor. To understand this we need to look at a different type of curved blade, the kind carried by Ashok's childhood friend and brother in arms, Devedas. Devedas comes from southern mountain dwellers so it is rather fitting that his sword resembles a knife of the Himalayas. It is described by Ashok as curving forward with the edge on the inside, just like the kukri of Nepal. This forward curvature gives all the advantages of sheer and edge geometry and one other I haven't mentioned yet. To see this one in action place a kukri edge up on a table and slide the tip under a book. Now push down on the handle. Voila, the kukri is a lever. That leverage translates into great cutting force, penetrating mail with ease.

Just as the forward curve gives us leverage, backward takes it away. Thus, wherever there is good armor, swords are either straight or bend forward. But straight swords are the usual answer—which seems counter intuitive to our lever demonstration. This is because when dealing with armor the thrust does indeed beat the cut. It isn't that the thrust is more effective a penetrator, it's that it is required to penetrate less. Let’s take a look at the downward cut to the shoulder, perhaps the most effective cut against mail. This cut generates a great deal of force because it has gravity on its side and the point of impact corresponds with a relatively strong range of our shoulder rotation. Additionally the shoulder is where the weight of the hauberk is suspended, and the links are at their maximum stress. Those factors make splitting the mail here an easy task. Unfortunately, that is not enough. Splitting the links gets you a surface cut, or even less if the gambeson is thick and strong. To continue cutting deeper into the clavicle and subclavian arteries it is necessary to continue the cut through the links on the front and back of the shoulder. As armor improved this became increasingly difficult even for an axe. With a thrust once the width of the tip has penetrated it can plunge through with only the flesh to resist it.

". . . It was double edged"

Normans. Image courtesy of Allen Williams.

Nearly all sword cultures have at one point been dominated by double-edged swords and at another point by single-edged. Why? There are the simple answers. Keeping the sword straight, as I said above. Having a second edge to use when one gets dull is another. Then there's that reason that Larry surprised me with, that when you take the sword to hand you do not have to worry about where the edge is. That last is my favorite, for it falls into the realm of tactics. I am interested in swordsmen first and swords second so that is the realm we will look at.

The utility of the back edge is small in comparison to the front which has historically led to terms like "weak edge" or "false edge." There are far less cuts available to it, and the cuts are weak by comparison. Taking that into account, what is available to the week edge adds a world of strategy to the sword fight. To demonstrate let's take a look into a paradoxical source, The Book of Five Rings by Miyamato Musashi, the most widely read Japanese sword manual. Musashi advises us to follow up our cuts by cutting back on the same line. So we see that the first two of Musashi's techniques begin with a cut downward followed by turning the blade and cutting upward. This is to catch the hands in the counterattack. When you try this, you will likely find as I do that the grip and wrist position are awkward and the cut, by consequence, rather weak. There is also time lost at the bottom in the act of turning the edge upward. Granted this is less than a second of loss, but that is the kind of time lapse that fights are won and lost on. With a back edge it is a simple act of pulling the sword straight back and up in rapid fashion. It is quick, natural, and strong. It also facilitates a retreat as you back away from the counter cut.

Something else at play here is the "tell." That is tell in the poker sense, as in inadvertently indicating your intent. It is more commonly known in martial circles as "telegraph," but I prefer "tell" because it is more descriptive. Most of our tells come from our upper body simply because it is high in the enemy's line of sight. And assuming you're not looking before you cut, which would make you an easy mark, the biggest indicator is your shoulders. All hand movement starts at the shoulder and as you turn that edge upward the rolling of your shoulder tells all. And your target doesn't even have to be aware of it. It is a perfectly natural reaction to back away from motion in the shoulders. I personally reacted to it for years before I became aware of it.

This kind of thing also works with horizontal cuts. Take the common right to left cut, typically performed with the lead edge and the hand supinated, palm skyward. This is the fastest and strongest cut to your enemy's left side, but it is a large movement that can be easily detected and avoided. The tell of the shoulder roll is more exaggerated because the arm is extended. There is also a noticeable effect on balance. To see how this works stand with your feet together and stick your arm out to the side. Now rotate your shoulder until your palm is up. You should feel your balance shifting back and out, with more of your weight on that foot. Now try it on one leg or with your eyes closed. This is a subtle thing, and may seem trivial, but when you add the mass of the sword and the speed of fight it becomes magnified. The end effect is that your weight shifts heavily onto that outside foot, which momentarily immobilizes you. This is not to say that it is an ineffective cut, but it has natural weaknesses that can be exploited, or mitigated, through use of the back edge.

Enter the hook. I use the term "hook" from boxing as it is the most analogous technique. It's a short circular motion with the palm downward and the back edge leading. Unlike the boxing hook it is not particularly powerful, but it is sneaky. It slips in with nary a tell to slice the neck, eye or hand. The keys are first in that palm downward description, which eliminates the tell and balance shift. Second is the short circular motion which is subtle, harder to detect, and comes in at a different arc and angle than your opponent anticipates. It is particularly handy against a shield, slipping through the blind spot that the shield provides and under the lower shield edge to the thigh, or over the upper to the face. Another tactic is to flip the sword in mid cut. Start with a traditional cut at the hip or midsection. As the shield drops to intervene, flip your blade. This flipping motion will direct your cut upward sending your back edge over the top of the shield and into the head. You may have to follow up by flipping the sword again and cutting downward, but the important thing is passing the shield. The reverse of this is to use the back edge for a high cut at the head. As the shield rises, flip the sword and cut under the shield, or impact the shield and then rake the front edge down to the leg.

But the back edge isn't just for cutting. In fact, it may be more important in the thrust. Thrusts, while efficient, are low on the trauma production scale. Therefore, it is common practice to finish a thrust by cutting one's way out of the victim. Two edges make this easier, and it is in fact the back edge that is better for this cut because it is natural to pull upward as you pull the sword free. But what is vastly more important than the thrust you land is the one you miss. A common defensive tactic is to slip the thrust, that is to step inside or outside of the point. This both saves your opponent from your thrust and positions them in range to counter thrust. The best response to this is to cut into their new position. Two edges simply provide more coverage.

So with all that, why does the single-edge sword come to dominance? In a word, simplicity. The paradox of that is that the single-edge usually follows the double. Even in Japan the earliest swords are double-edge Chinese type swords. Why? What I have observed is that two edges dominate in cultures that are actively involved in close melee warfare. The single edge dominates cultures once they have moved into primarily missile-based warfare. We can see this in the sabers of the Mideast which show up with the dominance of archery. We can see it in Japan, for what are samurai first? Not swordsmen but archers. In fact, all of the katana manuals come after the battle of Sekigahara, in a time of peace and relative order. But no better example exists for me than the Bowie knife. Antebellum Bowies are big. If we consider a gladius a sword then we certainly must consider the early Bowie a sword, too. Antebellum Bowies are also distinct from their post-Civil-War progeny by the sharpened back edge. The shifting point is the Civil War, and the reasons are Samuel Colt and Christopher Spencer. Before that, before reliable repeating firearms, we had to follow the words of Colonel Rodgers to his Rangers and close with enemy with sword and hatchet (and big sharp double-edged knives)!

Katana. Image courtesy of Allen Williams.

So when the sword is a distant second or third weapon it is easier to make it single-edged. It is one edge to grind. It simplifies heat treating. It simplifies scabbard making, sword sharpening, and even training. And we can pretty well guess that simplicity was a major factor by the fact that it is curved, because again that's just what single-edge swords want to do.

A fortunate side effect of simplicity is that it is also easier to make the sword better in many ways. Particularly the heat-treating aspect can be better. The trick of heat treating is that you want a very hard edge and a softer, springier spine. This requires heating and cooling the two at different rates. This is easier when you can isolate one complete half of the blade from the other. You can also get better edge geometry with a single edge as you can taper the edge completely from one side. Better geometry and harder edges make for a great cutting tool, which brings us to a great paradox. Why was Europe, the most armored culture in history, dominated by double edge swords? We'll return to that mystery in a bit, as it ties into yet another factor.

It is a common belief that the single edge sword is lighter. That seems logical considering that it is really half of double-edged sword. I have come in contact twice with actual "half swords." These started life as double-edge swords and were irreparably damaged on one side. The inventive owners cut off the offending edge just a little shy of the spine and created the lightest fastest sabers I have ever seen. But this of course is not the way sabers are made. The time and material waste would be prohibitive. The truth is most single-edged swords are as heavy or heavier than comparable doubles. The katana, for example, weighs in at about two and a half pounds, which is typical of European swords as well. What's important to note here is that though the weights are similar the size is not. European blades are typically over 30 inches, while katanas are typically 28-30. So if we are going to compare apples to apples, or in this case short swords to short swords, I give you the sword of Henry V. Twenty-seven inches of double-edged blade, sitting on a wide guard and hand-and-a-half handle, and weighing just over two pounds.

Henry V sword. Image from Hank Reinhardt's The Book of Swords, Hank Reinhardt, Baen 2009.

So how is that possible? How were the double edge weapons larger and yet as light or lighter? Well they seem larger when viewed on the flat. If you turn them and look edge-on you will see that they are thinner in both edge and spine. I think three factors are at work here. First, a certain amount of strength simply comes down to mass, and there seems to be at various levels of technology a certain minimum mass that a sword's needs for strength. Second, there seems to be a minimum mass for a sword to cut well and generally function as a fighting tool. The light sword for example is quicker, but easier to turn aside. Double-edge weapons spread their mass over a wide, flat blade, while single edges keep it in thickness.

The third factor is again simplicity. Looking at that edge geometry a bit more closely, we find that most single edges are convex ground. The katana in particular rolls in one continuous arc from spine to edge without a separate edge bevel. This is very strong, but it is also heavy. European weapons by contrast are typically flat ground, which is lighter because it removes more material, but definitely more time consuming to create. This goes back to the factor in nature that prefers curves while man does his best to make his world straight. So keeping with the strategy of simplicity in manufacturing, single-edged swords tend to trade the lightness of the straight flat grind for the heavier curve of the convex. (I should note here that there is nothing simple about Japanese sword making, and that peculiar edge is very labor intensive. However, the complexity of that appears to be a product of ritual and abundant cheap labor. Sword polishing, as the sharpening process was dubbed in Japan, was an entire profession in itself.)

That brings us back to the paradox of double edges and armor. It would seem that the stronger potential of the single edge would be a more logical choice, just as the stronger, rounded edge would also seem more suitable. Both are true when we get into the plate armor of the late middle ages and Renaissance. So much so that we switched to the very rounded single "edge" of the mace and hammer. It was Hank Reinhardt's theory that this era is the death knell of the sword. But for more than a millennium prior to that armor was of a weaker construction, consisting of the metal rings of mail and coats of small plates typically attached to cloth. Both of these part better for the sharper thinner edge. But it still stands to reason that the longer and potentially better edge geometry of the single edge would prevail. My theory is that this comes down to friction. Once the edge passes then the rest of the blade must follow, and all of that blade produces friction through both width and thickness. I believe that the double-edged sword mitigates this through both thinness and by the friction falling off at the midpoint as the back edge follows in the vacuum of the spine.

So, double edges for the win? Personally, I'm a katana man first. Nothing feels more natural in my hands, and I've spent more time with it than any other weapon. I say this so you won't think this has been either a Western bias or Tolkien fetish. There are advantages to single edges. I fully believe that with the same technology and same attention to detail the single edge sword should be lighter, stronger and sharper. It's just that we rarely see it so. I have seen a few good ones. Among the best is in a friend's collection of talwars. The entire collection is exceptional, but this one in particular is light, fast and extremely well-tempered. It will bend ninety degrees and return to true, and it will take a file across its edge without scratching. Unfortunately, it is still a talwar and cursed with possibly the worst handle ever put on a sword.

". . . sharp enough on either side to effortlessly lop off a man's arm."

Is this accurate? If we are to believe Sigmund Ringneck and much of the HEMA community the answer is no. If we are to believe the Sagas, and with that Oakeshott and Reinhardt, then the answer is certainly yes. But let's look at the evidence.

We know for a fact that it is possible to sharpen a sword beyond shaving sharp, and that it is possible to remove a limb with a sword that is relatively dull. It is indeed a truth that swords generate enough force that they need not be very sharp to do great damage. And thus we see YouTube videos in which people demonstrate cutting with a dull blade. This is a product of both parlor trick and misunderstanding. First, there is the object being cut, which is usually a tatami mat. These are not hard to cut. They are in fact a popular cutting medium because they are easy to cut. So easy in fact that you can cut them with a dull sword. You can also do a pretty good number on them with a stick. Now, cutting naked flesh is also not that difficult, but, contrary to Frank Frazetta's wonderful artwork, most people do not go to war in naked flesh, or even mats of straw. They prefer to be clad in clothing, thick clothing in fact, and often clothing made of tiny metal rings. At the very least they have bones. All of this responds better to a sharp edge.

The misunderstanding part comes with that "force generated" part. If you watch these guys, you see they're using big sweeping cuts with a lot of power. In fighting we call these "misses," or on the receiving end we call them "opportunities." Big cuts are the equivalent of winding up a punch. The tell is actually in the cut itself. You should probably go full Hollywood with this and scream like a barbarian, so they'll really know you're serious. In reality, smaller contained strikes work while the big stuff usually fails. The big moves are usually just to sucker your opponent into missing the little jab that that slips in.

We know from historical and archaeological sources that swords were indeed very sharp. The Norse sagas tell us of limbs being removed without much effort. The graves at Visby in Sweden give us a skull that has been cleft cleanly in half, and a skeleton with both femurs severed by what appears by angle to be a single cut. Both of these examples require a very sharp weapon. The Japanese have manuals for the various techniques of cutting a man in half, the most impressive being the cut from shoulder through opposing hip. But this was known in Europe as well. Richard Burton wrote that he wanted to know if it was possible to cut a man this way with a single hand sword, indicating that he knew it was possible with two hands. He came close to it once when he cut an enemy down just so. As his blade was finishing the cut and passing through the hip his horse bucked and interrupted the cut. So he failed, but his opponent did not seem to have noticed.

We also have quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. To begin with, most of the surviving examples of swords we have aren't particularly sharp. This would seem to be definitive, but we must take in the context of surviving. Oakeshott points out in the Archaeology of Weapons that we see a lot of war hammers in illustrations, but don't have many examples. We do have a hell of a lot of maces. His explanation was that a hammer continues to get used even after the war is over, so they don't survive. I believe most of our surviving swords survived because they weren't used. Not being used they wouldn't need to be sharp.

But we cannot ignore the German fechtbuch fight manuals that have become so popular over the last few decades. These manuals are full of half-swording, and blade grabbing, and edge-to-edge blocking, all of which indicate dull weapons. We also have the murder stroke a la Hans Talhoffer, in which you grab the blade with both hands and strike with the pommel. I mention this last because it is the best example of why I dismiss much of the fechtbuchs. Even if we assume the sword is dull—and quite dull it would have to be, this technique is ludicrous and dysfunctional. In addition to the complete tactical disadvantage of the maneuver, it is mechanically ineffective. First, you are using a flat flexible piece of steel as your handle. It is not a good one. Second, you are striking with the tang, generally the most fragile part of a sword. Finally, a sword is designed to exert great force at the distal third of the blade, and it converts this force to great penetrative power through the wedge effect. You are trading that for a short strike using a flexible handle and a blunt and fragile striking surface. But having said that, I don't assume it is pure fiction. Talhoffer was recording duels he had observed. Duels are strange things. They are not really fights; they're more like deadly adventure sports. Duels often include both silly rules and weapons that would never apply in war or street fighting. Thus, for example we have the rapier, master of the duel and just about useless for anything else. In Talhoffer's book we see many examples of the strangeness of dueling. We have a man fighting a woman while he is waist deep in a hole. We have people fighting with strange shields with points on the ends. And then we have the murder stroke, which fits right in with the other two. I am convinced this is a duel with sword effigies either made of wood or cast in cheap metal as a single piece, handle and all.

The clue with the fechtbuchs is the time line. The bulk of them show up in the 15th century or later. To put this in perspective, we have cannon in the early 14th, and handguns by 1400, so we are clearly in the missile culture I spoke of earlier. One of the side effects of that is the advent of full plate armor. This begins shortly after the battle of Crecy in which the English longbow made short work of French mail. It only got worse with gunpowder. Swords are fairly useless against plate armor, and yet they were still carried. It is arguable that they became thick and dull in an attempt to use them on plate, or just so that they would survive the occasional contact with it.

But the timeline leads me to another theory entirely. Before Crecy was Sterling Bridge. Sterling Bridge is that battle you saw portrayed in Braveheart where pike warfare was more or less invented. Two decades later at the battle of Coutrai a group of peasants armed with a type of poleax called a goendac destroyed a company of knights. Then, there's Crecy. Then, there's the rise of the Swiss pikeman. Warfare as it had been known was rapidly changing. One of the interesting side effects of this change is the shield, or more specifically its absence. It didn't just disappear of course, but it gradually faded from the forefront of battle for logical reasons. All of these weapons we have described here, the pike, the poleax, the bow and the gun, require two hands to operate. There's no hand to hold the shield. You could still carry a shield, and some did, usually in the form of a buckler, but this would be for use with your secondary weapon, the sword, and would likely interfere with your primary purpose. So without shields what do you get? You get all the edge on edge contact that we see in the manuals. This destroys sharp edges.

So the way I see it, in the heyday of the sword it was very sharp. As it became less useful for a variety of reasons it became dull. As it became dull it became less useful. As it became less useful the emphasis was placed on dueling. As the emphasis was placed on dueling it became even less useful. Eventually the people who were still fighting threw it away and started carrying guns and Bowie knives.

". . . The grip was long enough for two-hand use . . ."

It is a common myth that the strength of the two-hand sword is in its large sweeping cuts. There is some utility in this but mostly we call those misses. They are even "missier" than the regular misses because using two hands requires more shoulder involvement and thus more tells. The strength is in the opposite, in the small, fast motions. The secret here is control. One of the reasons for the popularity of the two-hand weapon in modern times is that it is easier to learn how to manipulate a sword with two hands than with one. The signature technique, the one that makes all this control possible, is what I call the lever cut. This is simply using the upper and lower hands against each other to lever the blade around. This is accomplished with a single hand grip by the upper and lower portions of the hand, which is why single hand handles are more complex with pommels and guards that give the hand purchase. But the same is much easier with two hands. The best example of this is the cut to the hands from Chudan or middle position. The sword is held straight out in front with a slight elevation of the tip. To cut you simply push the upper hand forward and leave the lower hand fixed. The power generated is quite surprising. For more power lift up with the lower hand. This continues to work even as we move into the larger cuts. Don't use a big arcing motion—that is easy to see and avoid. First, you move your hands towards the target and then you lever the blade around. More important than the power this generates is the speed and control. Control equals accuracy, and control eliminates the fatal error of over commitment.

But there is power. Initial speed is generated by the hands moving forward. Exponential speed and power are generated by that sword whipping around the moving fulcrum of your hands. As you cut through, the blade is less likely to twist off line because you have two opposing grips to keep it straight. Finally, you can get a bit of your weight behind the blade for a really hard cut.

There is also more control in blade on blade contact. That contact is more likely with two-hand weapons because you end up essentially fighting for the center. For obvious reasons the two-hand weapon can push the single aside with relative ease.

Despite all of this, Musashi, Japan's most celebrated swordsman, used his katana in one hand, and he was quite good at it. To be fair he was quite good before he started that. There has been endless speculation as to how and why he did this, but the more interesting question is why it wasn't common practice already, because it certainly was the norm in most of the world. With all the advantages of two hands you may wonder why this is so. And the strange answer is that indeed two hands are better than one. It's just that two hands working independently are much better than two acting as one. We see that clearly in that Musashi used a wakizashi in his left hand. Most of the world has done the same throughout sword history. It was done both with daggers and short swords in the left hand, but most commonly with a shield there.

Using two weapons you are trading speed and control for greater options. You have more attacks available and more defenses. You have the exponential effect of both as you tie up your opponent's sword with one weapon and attack with the other. This can be done from either side. You can block his sword with your shield while you cut him down with your free hand, or you can tie up his sword with your own and strike him with the edge of your shield. There are ways to win this fight from the other side, but it is difficult.

But what about the power we talked about earlier? Strangely enough, I have found one hand strikes to be more effective for cutting armor than two. I attribute it to the greater range of motion I can achieve with one arm, and thus more velocity in the strike. Here again though we get into a strike that is easy to miss with, and even easier to over commit with. Interestingly enough, in the original game of Lacrosse as played by the Iroquois it was legal to strike with the crosse, but only if you used two hands.

Returning to the question of why Musashi's technique was not already common in Japan, it is my theory that it had been at one time. I say this in part because Musashi mentions shields in the beginning of his book where he argues for the sword in one hand, but mostly because of the fact that the katana, or in its earlier form the tachi, was designed to be used on horseback, which doesn't lend itself well to a two-hand grip. So why the long handle? Because it lacks a pommel. One of the main functions of a pommel is to counterbalance the blade. Long handles on Katanas act as a counterbalance. I don't think it is an accident that the longest handles tend to show up on the earlier swords from the warring periods.

So if you we get more control with the two-hand handle, the next logical step is to make the sword longer. Weapons first and foremost give man distance, and weapon design follows that trend. Angruvadal's "thirty-six inches of black steel" is a good example but falls far short of the forty plus inch blades that adorned the great swords of Europe. Having said that, three feet, in my opinion, is the upper end of usefulness in a sword blade. I am not the first to question the utility of great swords. Hank Reinhardt did so before me, and Oakeshott remarked that they were not particularly useful. The ironic reason for my opinion is distance. For when man reaches for "reach," he does not grab a sword, he instead picks up a spear.

According to archaeologist Richard Leakey, the first spear shows up around fifty thousand years ago. I think that's a gross underestimation, but good enough for our purposes. Since then the history of warfare is mostly the history of the spear. From the flint tips of the Cro-Magnons, through the lances of chivalry, to the pikes of the Swiss Reislauffer, the spear is only occasionally interrupted by various missiles. There we would be busily killing each other with spears when someone would invent a new variation of missile (better javelin, bow, sling, or tip) and change things for a bit, usually with great carnage as people adjusted. Shortly thereafter everyone would adjust, with better armor shields, etc., and get back to killing each other with spears. Best example of this was probably the Battle of Crecy, but it went that way until somebody invented that really cool bow known as a gun. Even then guns were used alongside spears until the invention of the bayonet made them one.

So, why the hell then did we ever get into swords? Two reasons. First a spear is a bit of a burden if you are not actively using it. It's perfectly portable when you are hunting or headed for war, but inconvenient for the rest of life. The sword on the other hand isn't carried, it is worn. The sword is functionally the medieval pistol, out of the way on your side but always close at hand. If you're a Viking it also serves the same in warfare, on your side waiting to take over when you've lost or thrown your spear. This becomes difficult with a long blade. Up to about thirty-four inches wearing a sword is pretty comfortable depending on your size. Thirty-six to thirty-eight is cumbersome but manageable and requires constant attention to where the end of your sword is. In fact, Queen Elizabeth established a law that swords carried in the city of London could not have a blade greater than a yard just to deal with the clamor this caused. Past that you're getting into the ludicrous. An exception was the claymore which is the only sword historically carried on the back. But don't think Ninja style with this—the scabbard was worn like a pack and removed before drawing. That brings us to another major limitation: presentation. Like a pistol, or any other personal weapon, the sword needs to come to action in a hurry. From experience I can tell you that a thirty-six-inch rapier is a much slower draw than a katana. And thirty-eight is substantially slower than thirty-six.

But there is another reason for swords. Occasionally they too interrupt the dominance of spears. This was of course most famously accomplished by the Roman Empire. The Roman Legion did not abandon the spear—they had it in the form of the pilum and the pilium. They simply ran into the same problem everybody else had, the stalemate of opposing spear formations. They solved it by closing with the shield and Gladius. The important part of that equation is the shield. The shield protects the swordsman from the spear and is the device that pushes the spear to the side for closing. As important, the shield is the best defense against arrows and other missiles. There is a very strong argument that without the shield the sword has no place on a battlefield. It is a close equivalent to a naked charge against machine guns. Using a long sword in one hand is difficult. It is even more difficult with a shield. And the long handle does not help. As mentioned above the short handle allows you to lever the top and bottom of the hand off the guard and pommel. The long handle lacks this feature as well as placing the balance of the pommel and blade at a longer axis. This axis tends to continue with its inertia and roll out of your grip. You can of course use the sword like a short one-handed spear, but then why not just use a spear?

History, however, is repetitive, and in the fifteenth century we see again the stalemate of spear formations in the form of pike warfare. There were many attempted solutions. One of them quite similar to the Roman was the bucklers, who were named for the small shields used to roll underneath the pikes and close with the enemy. Another was variations on the poleaxe to hook and push the pikes aside. This period also corresponds with the rise of the big two handers of Europe such as the claymore, flamberge, and zwiehander. It was Hank Reinhardt's theory that these big weapons were used in the formations to push or break the pikes and close on the enemy. Inside the tip of your pike a big sword would be a scary thing to face indeed. We can see some evidence supporting this theory in the German word Doppelsöldner. It literally means "double pay soldier" and was applied to the Landsknechte who carried two-handed swords. This indicates that it had an important role.

One thing we can assume with certainty is that the big swords were popular for dueling. I say this because they are a heavy feature of the 15th and 16th century fight manuals which are mostly dueling manuals. Now dueling is always a questionable source for fighting suggestions because dueling is pretty silly. It is different from a fight if for no other reason than because you know ahead of time that you're in one. As mentioned above the weapons are a common silliness, at best they are arranged to be equal. But there is a similar, less silly phenomenon in the form of individual combat. The most common form of this is of course being stabbed in the back before you know what's happening. But there is the instance of two people facing each other and squaring off without formal arrangement. In this we can see some definite efficacy in the big swords against their most natural rival, the sword with shield.

“The basic strategy of sword and shield is to put your sword where his shield isn't," says Hank Reinhardt in his The Book of Swords. So where isn't the shield? It varies but there are three places that it has a hard time being. The first is the legs. There were big shields, like the kite, that were designed to protect the legs, but the typical shield held at the side covers only the knee to the shoulder. This is a choice of active defense over passive, historically the better answer in most fields. That the leg attack tends to be the easier of the two is because you can easily see a sword coming for your head. The leg shot is below the line of sight, facilitated by the shield being a blind spot to its bearer. The problem with a leg cut, however, is that you have to reach for it. Thus stooping or crouching to reach the leg is an enormous tell and makes you vulnerable by lowering your guard as well as bringing your head down where it is easier to hit. With the long sword you don't have to stoop. You also have the greater speed and change of direction provided by two hands. It is best to start by striking high so that the shield is raised in response. Then, using the lever cut described previously, change directions and bring the blade around the outside of the shield and down into the lower leg. The reverse technique gets the head. Feint low to get the shield down, then come up over the shield and strike down to the head or shoulders. The third option is the shield bearer's right (i.e., his sword hand) where the shield has a hard time reaching. With a one-handed sword you either push that space open with your shield or use a backhand cut to get inside his. Both methods put you in jeopardy by the close contact, and by placing your sword hand into the center where it is vulnerable to both blade and shield edge. With the two-hander you strike at the shield side, bounce off, and bring it rapidly around to cut at the sword arm. Alternately, you can pull your sword back, sliding off the shield, and thrust up the middle using your greater reach to keep your distance.

Okay, now let's shake this up a bit. In walks a third opponent armed with a spear. He has clear advantages, but who has the best defense? The sword and shield man may seem the most vulnerable, but remember that the shield was designed for this kind of fight. The shield can push the spear point aside, clearing the way to close in and strike with the sword. You might think the same can be achieved with the big sword, but it is a difficult task. The shield can move a spear because it is short, rigid and heavy. A sword blade by contrast is long, light and flexible. Generally speaking the heavier will move the lighter, and the flexible will bend to the rigid. Additionally, a sword is essentially a reverse lever. I say reverse because the load arm (the blade) is longer than the force arm (the handle), and the longer the blade the weaker the leverage you can muster. Now the spear is even longer, but it is mostly handle, so it has tremendous leverage.

Into this scenario walks a peasant armed with a quarterstaff. The staff is, of course, a short blunt spear, so our peasant likely loses that battle. He has much of the same tactics available against the shield as both the long sword and the spear, but if the shield guy knows his stuff, he should still win the day. But what about our longswordman? The peasant has more reach, more leverage, and more speed. He also has the stronger weapon. Despite what Hollywood teaches, cutting through hard wood with a sword is very difficult. And if you think you can't break a sword with a stick you're in for a very nasty surprise.

But in the words of Hank Reinhardt, "there is no best sword." The best depends entirely on what you are doing with it, and Angruvadal has very special purpose: the killing of demons. The demons of Larry Correia's Lok are large monsters with nigh-impenetrable hides that come out of the depths of the ocean. If we look around our world for an equivalent, we see it best in Africa. And our monster hunters there, dealing with large beasts with thick hides, swear by penetration. With thirty-six inches of straight double-edged blade, sharp enough to penetrate demon hide, and the strength of two hands powering it, Angruvadal seems to be the perfect sword for the task.

* * *

Whit Williams is a writer, a medic, and a protégé of the great Hank Reinhardt. His published work includes the short story "Lion Country" and the interim chapters of Hank Reinhardt's Book of Knives. Currently he is working on a new book, The Reinhardt Method of Rapier & Dagger, the first in a series of books about sword technique.

Principles of Organization for War and Organizing for War in the Carreraverse:

Part Four: Military Organization of Carrera’s Legions

Tom Kratman

Carrera, of course, being a construct with all those abilities and understandings I deemed him to have, understood most of this. Most of it, too, shows up in the central instrument of his story, the Legiones del Cid.

Those, however, come into existence, and morph and modify, in several forms. Initially, there is no one and nothing except Carrera, his rage and hate, and a set of instincts. From that, a core organization is formed, led to war, expanded, expanded, takes over a country, is expanded some more . . .

In fact, there are at least five forms the Legions take.

1. The recruiting, organizing, purchasing, and training organization.

2. The initial legion, of ten cohorts, that goes to war in Sumer.

3. The expanded counter-insurgency corps, of four legions, that fights the war in Sumer and Pashtia, via unit rotation.

4. The interim conventional corps, formed by stripping units and shifting them around, that intervenes in Pashtia to pull the Federated States’ chestnuts out of the fire.

5. The massively expandable, citizen-soldier militia army that engages both the Tauran Union and the Zhong Empire.

How Carrera commands the legions:

Command and control, though often confused, are different things. Control should be obvious; it’s when what the commander wants to happen happens because he’s managing it and supervising it directly and personally. Command, on the other hand, is when what the commander wants to happen happens, but he doesn’t have to do a thing—at least nearly nothing—to make it happen. That is an ideal, though; there will always be some control required even in a unit that is largely under command. Sometimes, too, one has to exercise a lot of control initially to create command; you don’t get there by “wishing and hoping.”

Control is both limited and exhausting. If you want an example, look at the progressive breakdown of both Hitler and his ability to control German society and the German armed forces, during World War II. As people and events displeased and disappointed, his routine solution was to take over personal control, as if he was omniscient and his energy infinite. He simply broke his span of control even as he had to leave so many things uncontrolled (the more he took, the less he had) that Germany largely devolved into a state of anarchy—feudalism at best—as the war progressed.

With that sterling bad example in mind, Carrera doesn’t do that. Instead, his approach is, in the first place, to be highly selective in who is commissioned and to be selective in particular ways for particular things. His method of selection is to have the cadre evaluate new soldiers in initial entry training for leadership ability. The roughly ten percent or so who are found worthy then go to Cazador School, a cognate of U.S. Army Ranger School but with more emphasis on selection and greater real and perceived danger. After that, many even among those who graduate are found wanting and are shunted to jobs—sub crew, plus aerial scout and fighter pilots, for example—that require a good deal of intelligence and guts, but not much in the way of leadership ability. The other ones, those who make the cut, are divided—certainly imperfectly—by raw intelligence into two categories, Centurion and Officer. Officers are trained from the beginning to lead and command larger units. Centurions get a good deal of the same things, but also, by contrast, are developed into thoroughly determined senior non-coms, who are also, incidentally, meaner than weasel shit, and perfectly willing to impose discipline physically, at need. Because they’re willing and allowed, there is rarely a need.

By doing this he at least arranges a set of leadership corps that can be relied on to create and lead soldiers, as well as well-trained raw material as soldiers exit the initial entry training base.

The entire recruiting, school, and initial entry training system is Carrera’s first leg of command. It produces people who can and generally will do what he wants, to the quality he wants, and with a degree of success he finds acceptable.

The second leg of Carrera’s command is his staff. He uses it pretty much as any other commander might. He is, however, notable for keeping his staff on a fairly short leash and being thoroughly unpleasant when the staff imposes administrative requirements he sees as needless or distracting. He can be equally nasty to subordinate commanders who put up with it, too.

He also—taking a leaf from German methods prior to 1945—has a staff structure that is not a committee, but instead heavily weights matters toward operations. This is fine for him, because he doesn’t need a staff for strategy; he does that on his own. The big exceptions to this on the staff are intelligence, which is actually an arm in itself, being Legate Fernandez’s entire intelligence and direct action apparatus, and diplomacy, which is certainly important to strategy, but isn’t generally entitled to a voice in military affairs.

The third leg to Carrera’s method of command is the Office of the Inspector General, which has four functions. It ensures compliance. It investigates systems. It ensures soldiers are not abused and are otherwise taken care of. It also serves as a directed telescope, looking deeply into matters Carrera either lacks the time and energy to, or thinks need a more subtle or objective approach than he is capable of.

The fourth leg is the Centro de Entrenamiento Nacional, the National Training Center, which ensures that units are being trained by their commanders, that those subordinate commanders have not lost sight of job one.

Fifth is Obras Zorilleras, or OZ, or, if I may be forgiven my little joke, the “Skunk Works,” which translates Carrera’s technological needs into programs and weapons.

The sixth leg is Professor Ruiz’s information ministry which, having control of legionary publications, also serves to focus legionary ethos and education on matters Carrera wants focus placed on, with the kind of focus he wants.

Given those six legs plus a certain willingness to accept imperfection, coupled to a strong preference for initiative and innovativeness in subordinates, Carrera achieves command rather than merely exercising control.

Phase I: The recruiting, organizing, purchasing, and training organization:

Carrera starts with nothing but a lot of hate, a decent—though not lavish—bankroll, and an idea of where he wants to end up. There are seven ways we can know that the army with which he fights the Zhong Empire and Tauran Union is approximately what he intended to build all along. A) He tells Kuralski and his initial staff to plan for that kind of army. B) The PERT diagram Fernandez sees in the basement of the Casa Linda, which shows that kind of army. C) The very easy way Carrera decides he can take on the Taurans, during the Invasion of Pashtia, which indicates he doesn’t need to worry about how to build that kind of army, because he’s already building it. D) The fact that he’s building infrastructure—roads, rails, barracks, training facilities, fortification, and industry—all along to support that kind of army. E) The fact that he destroys the civil government of Balboa so that he can build that kind of army. F) Then there is his plain admission that the organizational scheme originally chosen reeks, but has one main virtue; it is very suitable as a cadre for massive expansion. And, finally, G), there’s the fact that he builds that kind of army.

But he hasn’t much to work with, early on. There’s a residue of the small, brigade-sized force largely crushed by the Federated States invasion. They’re demoralized and not that well trained, in the main, to begin with. Worse, many, if not most, of their officers are cowardly and corrupt. Higher staff work even the better among them are not trained for. They have no arms to speak of.

These weaknesses he, for the most part, contracted out, using the Balboans for what they certainly could do, individual recruiting and initial entry training, while hiring foreigners for most of the rest. Over purchasing he maintains a pretty tight control, since money is, in fact, not lavish to his intentions. He hires full time a number of non-Balboan officers and senior non-coms, more for staff than for command.

Phase Ia:

The first deployed iteration of the legions, the original Legion Ruy Diaz de Bivar, consisted of ten cohorts (battalion equivalents), one Ala (Wing), and one Classis (Fleet), plus a rear detachment that included both the foreign training and the native recruiting, training, and medical organizations.

The cohorts were:

1. Principe Eugenio, Mechanized Infantry

2. Roberto Guiscard, Infantry

3. Ricardo, Corozon de Leon, Infantry

4. Barbarossa, Infantry

5. Carlos Martillo, Infantry

6. Vlad Tepes, Cazador (Ranger)

7. Tizona, Combat Support

8. Terremoto (Earthquake), Artillery and heavy mortars

9. Babieca, Service Support (Maintenance, Medical, Supply, Transport, etc.)

10. Santiago Matamoros, Headquarters (Staff, Signal, Intelligence, etc.)

11. Jan Sobieski, Aviation

12. Don John, Naval

Note carefully that Carrera completely broke several principles:

Span of control: There are simply too many subordinate organizations and commanders.

Simplicity: Placing that many different kinds of arms and services under a single, brigade-sized headquarters, will tend to confuse and fragment the staff, even as it makes support problematic. For example, Carrera has equipment, uniforms, weapons, ammunition, and parts coming from all over the world. Note, too, the incompatible speeds of his footmobile grunts, his mechanized cohort, and his airplane and helicopter-borne Cazadors.

Logistics (in practice if not by intent): I think not many readers saw or understood this, but Carrera’s group very carefully calculated the legion’s logistic needs, in terms of both cube and weight, then designed and built a transportation organization to deliver those needs, presuming no more than twenty percent efficiency (a historical norm), at a given distance, which distance was not supposed to be ordered to be exceeded, a condition written into their contract with the Federated States.

He did it; Carrera broke his own logistic system, in Sumer, by exceeding the maximum distance the transportation unit could support. Maybe he had sufficient reason for it and maybe he didn’t, but the fact remains that he broke it.[1] It was also totally unnecessary, insofar as he probably could have afforded another company of trucks if he’d wanted them.

On the other hand, he adhered as carefully as circumstances allowed to the principles:

Social cohesion: Rather than taking a mechanical, essentially soulless, approach to personnel management and expansion, note that those century commanders in this first deployed iteration will later become the maniple commanders for the next expansion, the cohort commanders for the next and the tercio commanders for the final version, while their subordinates will move up with them, occasionally being filled as losses may dictate but retaining as much of the social relationship as humanly possible.

Note that there are about a company’s worth of officers and a company’s worth of senior non-coms in the first legion. This is by design.

Flexibility and maneuver: Barring the incompatible speeds, he does have a force that can maneuver and fight over any kind of terrain he can reasonably expect to encounter.

Combined arms: Well, you can’t say he doesn’t have at least a little of everything.

Discipline: This is, of course, fierce. He shoots people for things other armies try to hide, or punish lightly, and has the assets—MPs, JAGs and Judges—to do that.

Attrition: With losses, by the time of the conquest of Ninewa, his previously fat centuries are down to about the strength of very handy platoons, and still quite combat capable.

Mass: All of his artillery is under a single command, which command has the ability to plan for, and direct, the fires of mortars of other cohorts.

Support: There is enough support—engineers, air defense, MPs, reconnaissance—to this initial legion, though a good deal of it has been pushed down and frittered away in little penny packets, half on the theory of social cohesion and half because of the needs of future expansion.

Specialization: This is probably a case of having done as well as one could expect. Every legionary is trained, via basic training, to be at least a minimally effective grunt. Every specialty is well trained enough for the job. It is perhaps fortunate that the force isn’t faced with terrain that required extensive specialized training.

State circumstances: Balboa is a reasonably prosperous, highly nepotistic and corrupt place, one which had the most fertile women on the planet and thus has a great deal of raw human material to use. There is little industry to begin with. Hence, initially he concentrates on exploiting native manpower while setting up a firm to manage overseas procurement.

Officers: As mentioned, they are kept few and, insofar as possible and can be known, of high quality.

Expansion (which, though not obvious to many of his follower—and most of my readers—at the time, was at or near the top of his priority list): The centuries of this iteration, large platoons or mini-companies, have integral to them most of the assets needed to form full maniples (companies) even after taking losses. The other assets needed are found at the next higher level, the cohort. The cohort also has most of what is required to expand to a tercio (battalion and, later, regiment) or legion (division) and what is not available is either found at the legion level in sufficient quantity to push some down to support expansion or can be produced by the recruiting and training base.

Frugality: See comments on not enough trucks, as well as a general observation that Volgan equipment, while “competent,” is less than brilliant. Note, too, the complete absence of offices that will tend to pull manpower away from preparation for war.

Compatibility: This is generally present, but shows up in glaring form in the organization of the helicopter assets of the aviation ala. It is designed, and this will hold true throughout the counterinsurgency phase of the legion’s existence, to lift the lightest infantry available, the cohort and later tercio of Cazadors, plus some of a regular, more heavily armed infantry cohort or tercio, in one lift, and the rest of the combat and minimally necessary combat and service support of the heavier tercio in the next lift, presuming an eighty-five percent operationally ready rate. It allows a fairly rapid insertion of serious combat power in a fairly short period of time.

Politics: One aspect unusual here is Carrera’s having dispensed with traditional rank structures and instituted—or, rather, reinstituted—parts of ancient rank structures, together with some linguistic and historical slight of hand, in order to prevent his employers and allies from playing politics with his force and leadership while allowing himself to play politics with them.

Principles he was somewhat lukewarm on, or couldn’t help, or was overtaken by events with include:

Purity: In the interests of future expansion and maintaining social cohesion while expanding, this was to some extent let go.

Rest: The legionary structure would actually allow rest with no problem, had Carrera intended to use it as just a large brigade. He doesn’t, he uses it as a division, taking on division level responsibilities, hence exhausts the troops. Rest does come, but it comes later, as men as sent back to form second, third, and fourth legions. Men are lost to this.

Leadership: To some extent he was stuck here, because he couldn’t, for reasons of morale and future expansion, use too many known officers and NCOs from first world armies, and couldn’t know the real quality of some of the locals.

Range: Again, largely in the interests of future expansion, he wastes a lot of his weapons’ ranges. A sixty-millimeter mortar, for example, in support of a largish platoon, is a waste of range. A battery of 122mm guns, range about twenty-two kilometers, is fine for the offense, since it is better if it needn’t displace so often, as the legion advances. In the defense, however, it is something of a waste. Conversely, though one may think of the Turbo-finch converted cropdusters, range about sixteen hundred kilometers, as being wasted range, it is not a waste, or not entirely, because the airfield on which they’re dependent on support is way the hell back there and they can, once again, lunge forward.

Environment: Though Carrera probably could have made his early legion more effective, with rather more emphasis on mountain warfare and city fighting, he neglected to do so, preferring to train them more for more general circumstances. On the other hand, his organizations were functional enough for the circumstances.

How, by the way, does Carrera get away with the weaknesses he’s allowed or cannot do much about? That goes to the environment, to include the human environment, of war. He knows his enemy and so he knows that, though they are frequently of admirable courage, it’s rare as hell for them to be able to create decent military organizations.

Phase II, the expansion into a rotational counter-insurgency corps:

The process by which Carrera expanded to a corps of four legions was initially, in fact, almost George Marshallesque, which is to say very nearly the bicellular fission I excoriated, above. Why? Because with the legion committed to combat in Sumer there was no other way to create a relief formation except by taking in replacements, then thinning the line and sending leaders and prospective leaders back for training and to organize the next legion. Needs must, and all.

But what’s more interesting here is that, eventually, after reaching full strength, Carrera manages to have a four-division corps with only about three divisions worth of troops, and a very austere division slice of around fourteen to fifteen thousand men. (Divide an army’s strength by the number of divisions and that is the division slice; in our case, and if we include civilians, it’s about sixty-five thousand men). How does he do this?

In discussing the below, keep in mind that each period lasts a year.

Start with the deployed legion, about eleven thousand men. It doesn’t need any outside support, except, per contract, that the Federated States must deliver its logistic needs to a point at no more than a certain distance away. This will be, by the way, a non-trivial savings, not least because the legion needn’t secure its own supply lines past that distance, needn’t provide trucks or drivers, needn’t provide maintenance personnel for those trucks, etc. By the time a deployment is halfway over with, the legion is probably at or slightly under one hundred percent in strength. Normally, by the time their tour is over, they will be somewhere between ninety and ninety-five percent strength. It will almost certainly get no replacements while deployed, barring only injured and wounded treated and returned to duty.

Behind that deployed legion is another legion. It is elevated in strength to one hundred and five percent to cover losses in training (including injured but perhaps returnable and disciplinary issues), and losses in combat. It is also training hard—most of the areas of the Isla Real, plus certain mainland areas, belong to it during this period—for deployment. It will get no replacements for the year it is training to go to war.

The next echelon starts their year at this level at about forty percent strength and gradually builds up to one hundred and five percent strength. They average seventy-two percent. Their job, for a year, is to receive and assimilate, and create cohesive maniples, from the output of the recruiting and training base. They get no school slots. They get few or, more likely no, personnel transfers in or out. (There is the potential, for exigent circumstances, for someone previously detached to the school and recruiting systems to be swapped back in exchange or in replacement for someone in the legion who needs not to deploy or who has died or been critically injured. Car wrecks happen and lightning does strike, to say nothing of the possibility of a short round while doing a maneuvering live fire exercise.)

The last legion is the one that has just come back from the war. Let’s say they come back at ninety percent strength, give or take, and thus have a deficiency of about ten percent in their leadership corps. This legion invites to re-enlist sufficient numbers of quality personnel to send to school to, accounting for attrition and the possibility of failure, make up their leadership losses. Others are either invited to re-enlist and, if they wish, re-enlisted, or they are conditionally discharged into the individual reserve. Very senior officers of the legion are sent to an eleven month long course in higher levels of warfare. The curriculum is updated regularly.

The rest split, with half going back to school for five to six months and half being turned into support details (Opposing Force and scut work) for the school system for five to six months. Then they switch. For those who need no qualifying schooling, there are some nineteen short—three to four week—courses ranging from Assault Demolitions to Camouflage and Deception to Xenoculture.

The aviation ala of this legion is stripped away and given to the aviation school for retraining for this year. The combat support and service support maniples and cohorts get a number of training events run for them by their respective base schools.

To recap, the cycle of events is: 1) Return from the war, 2) discharge of most men and re-enlistment followed by schooling for the rest, 3) individual and small unit training, assimilation, plus branch specific collective training, 4) major unit training for deployment, 5) off to war, rinse and repeat.

The percentages are such that those four “legions” only have the average personnel for about three and a fifth legions, or about thirty-five to thirty-six thousand men. Moreover, they generally don’t need the massive numbers of personnel managers, since the regiment takes care of professional development, nor personal transportation drones and such, most of whose duties revolve around moving people hither and yon, thus disrupting social cohesion. Instead, they leave a place and come back to the same place, while getting to school, which is not more than ten kilometers away is entirely on them (“Look into the new and improved Legionary Automobile Purchase Program, today!”) or their tercios and the public transportation system on the island.

The other fourteen to twenty-four thousand (depending on what stage we’re in), the largest single chunk of whom are running the school system, take care of the rest. Hence, yes, a division slice on average, of fourteen to fifteen thousand or so, with fifty to sixty thousand men capable of keeping one very full division-equivalent deployed at all times. By way of comparison, contemplate how many troops we could have deployed to Iraq if the entire U.S. Army and Marine Corps could have been built around the same kind of system? Eight? Ten? Might have gone some way to not losing the war and winning the peace, no?

This, by the way, is very much in accord with the principle of Frugality.

Phase III, the Interim Conventional Corps:

By the time the war in Sumer is winding down, Carrera has his full corps set up and running well. Therefore, he is, of course, fired. Sadly, he is vindictive, so when the Federated States needs him back he gouges them for the lost revenue, with interest and penalties.

For this mission he thinks he needs a pocket panzer division, three legions of infantry, a corps artillery, and corps tercios for engineers, air defense, and all the other arms and services. He doesn’t actually have them. Where he has the assets, already assigned to legions, he lacks the headquarters.

But Carrera does have the school system. And that is how he does it, basically shutting down most institutional training for a period of time to field a corps. He does not completely strip the legions of their assets, but divides them temporarily, forming an armored legion, for example, from three quarters of the legionary mechanized tercios, and using the armor and mechanized infantry schools to provide command for it, along with portions of the signal school military intelligence school, medical school, etc. Meanwhile, those schools, and others, also must provide cohorts for his corps headquarters.

There is precedence for this, by the way, notably in the way the German Luftwaffe continuously used and overused their training base as operational units. The difference was that the Luftwaffe kept doing it, screwing up the training base and training cycle more and more with each iteration, and losing skilled instructors, to boot, while for Carrera it is a one-time event, needful to gain treasure, and never to be repeated.

Phase IV: Return to Counter-insurgency:

There really is nothing much different that happens here; except that the corps grows by several, unspecified, thousand, the damage done by the temporary reorganization into a field corps is largely undone, while the foundation of the cadet academies is laid, then expanded, as well. The cadets are, of course, important and speak directly to principle, Expansion, as does the effort to acquire allies who can be used to fill in otherwise unfillable gaps in the nation in arms program. Additionally, naval, air, and special operations and partisan organizations are expanded or raised.

Phase V: The Nation in Arms and Defense of la Patria:

Remember, this was planned all along, though one assumes that the plans were modified as enemy and terrain—and especially logistic considerations—were studied and better understood.

Considerations of organizational principles Environment, Attrition, Expansion, Logistics, and State Circumstances dominate in this phase.

The Environment of Balboa is such that invasion is possible from the north, from the south, and from the east, but not in anything but a token way from the west. Accordingly, the force in organized around the defense of the port of Cristobal, in the south, which is Fourth Corps’ responsibility, the defeat of any attempt at taking the Isla Real (presumably as a prelude to landing near the capital), which is the job of Fifth Corps, a corps built around the previous Eighth Legion (training), via shifting of tercios, conversion of basic training tercios into lightly armed infantry, and the addition of a coastal artillery brigade.

To the east, the newly raised Sixth Corps, largely composed of discharged full citizens of the republic, reinforced by several mobilized tercios, and with a couple of tercios raised from Santa Josefinan citizens serving with the legions, is responsible for ensuring that Santa Josefina cannot be used as a base against Balboa and that any attempt to use the minor ports along the Mar Furioso coast fails to logistic problems. The Sixth Corps is less a formal headquarters, though there is a small HQ, than it is a commander’s intent issued to the armed citizenry and the uniformed reinforcements to make the enemy’s lives miserable.

Moreover, in terms of making lives miserable, a small set of small detachments and individuals, working for the most part for Fernandez’s intelligence organization, is dedicated to striking the Taurans at home, more to undermine morale and faith in the government, and the government’s ability to rule, than to physical damage. A single largish amphibious grouping is dedicated to striking a different enemy. There is also a tercio of Indian jungle runners, more adept out there than anyone else is likely to be, to screen and guard the west against the likely trivial efforts the Taurans and Zhong could logistically support from that direction.

Carrera maintains a main maneuver force, consisting of two infantry and one heavy corps, the latter containing two mechanized legions and an artillery legion, plus the usual support.

Finally, there are assets the control of which is retained at army level, naval, to fight the war at sea, air and air defense, to context the skies over the republic, signal, intelligence, and deception tercios, as well as additional engineer troops, and a hefty slice of service support. In all, it is about four hundred thousand uniformed and/or armed men and women.

However, Balboa doesn’t have four hundred thousand armed and trained men and women. It has perhaps three hundred thousand. The remainder come from four main sources. First are the rather young cadets and scouts (aged thirteen to seventeen, for the most part; yes, Carrera is absolutely ruthless and not a very nice person, either), the former enrolled in full time schools with a great deal of military training and the latter much similar to our Boy Scouts, absent the political correctness and plus a lot more firearms training. Perhaps thirty thousand of these are enrolled, serving under regular, adult leadership.

Second are the allies, some seven tercios’ worth of Latins, one of Sumeris, and various smaller additions from lesser Latin states. In addition, individual reinforcements/volunteers come from all over, while a group of the Castillian Legion defects en masse to Balboa after a Tauran attempt at arresting their commander.

Third are certain apparently civilian enterprises, among them a heavy construction corporation, an airline, and a helicopter company. That’s not exhaustive, either.

The last are the discharged veteran-citizens, tens of thousands of them, who kept their arms after discharge, had a short but thorough course in resistance warfare before discharge, and are tasked to make the countryside hostile almost to the point of impassible.

It’s also worth noting at this point that not only did the combat tercios increase in number, over the years; their size grew, too. Where, during the counter-insurgency campaigns, they had been at a strength of eleven to twelve hundred, usually in six maniples, by this time they have grown to about thirty-six hundred, with three maneuver cohorts, a light cannon cohort, a combat support cohort with reconnaissance, engineer, and air defense maniples, as well as a headquarters and support cohort.

The last peculiarity of the legions’ organization at this time is what is called “the tercio system.” It doesn’t just mean a regimental system, though it is that, too. Tercio, you see, is an odd word. It originally meant “third.” When organized in old Spain it began with that meaning. Gradually however, it acquired the meaning of “regiment.” But it never lost the meaning of “third.”

In the case of Balboa and the legions, the tercio system also means three echelons, each of which is about one third the size of the next level down. Thus, that thirty-six hundred strong tercio, mentioned above, consists of about twenty-seven hundred militia, men who train for a bit under one month a year, about six hundred and seventy-five reservists, generally having a better quality of man than the militia, carefully selected, and training a maximum of seventy-seven days a year, and two hundred and twenty-five regulars. Legion and corps organization mirrors this approach.

What that means is that every corps is a brigade or regiment, ready to fight on short notice, every legion is a cohort (battalion, same), and every tercio is a maniple (company, same). It also means that those echelons can increase in size and power to a legion, a tercio, and a cohort, on very short notice, and that full mobilization into a frightfully large force only takes a bit longer.

There are, of course, downsides to this, notably that a) the leadership of a unit is very vulnerable, b) the troops are, on average, less well trained, and c) they are overly dependent on leadership which is, again, vulnerable. On the plus side, this is a) affordable, b) produces a great deal of combat power, c) serves as a coup d’etat preventative, d) preserves carefully nurtured social cohesion and command realtionships.

How do they deal with principle Attrition in this scheme? I ought to say a word or two about the training establishment and the training tercios turned into combat tercios. The short version is that, with a few exceptions, a combat tercio has its own basic training company, commanded by one of its own officers, with an exec from its own officer corps, with platoons led by its own centurions. (It also provides basic training to newly enlisted men from other, less blood and guts-oriented branches.) Note the close correlation here with principle, Leadership; those couple of officers and dozen or so centurions are responsible to their own tercio leadership that the men produced be properly trained. Compare this to the U.S. system, where the connection between basic training, AIT, and OSUT and the units in the field is basically non-existent, and drill sergeants are not held as personally responsible for the job they do by someone in a position to actually see the end result of the job they do.

In any case, the training maniples, during full mobilization to fight the Taurans and the Zhong, are a pool of manpower for each tercio out on the line somewhere.

Postscript:

As I intend eventually to do with Training for War, I may turn this into a book. Anything contained herein, including but not limited to terms, structure, definitions, and historical examples, can be questioned, argued with, refuted, etc. In other words, I invite your comments, either on Baen’s Bar (look in the KratsKeller), on my Facebook page, or privately go to tomkratman.com and click the link.

Footnotes:

1) Of course, the sandstorm didn't help any.

* * *

This is the final entry in this series. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, are available. Tom Kratman’s latest entry in the Carerra series is November’s A Pillar of Fire by Night. Tom Kratman was a Regular Army infantryman much of his adult life. After the Gulf War, and with the bottom dropping completely out of the anti-communist market, Tom decided to become a lawyer. Every now and again, when the frustrations of legal life and having to deal with other lawyers got to be too much, Tom would rejoin the Army (or a somewhat similar group, say) for fun and frolic in other climes. He no longer practices law, but instead writes full time. His novels for Baen include A State of Disobedience, Caliphate, and the series consisting of A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, The Lotus Eaters, The Amazon Legion, Come and Take Them, The Rods and the Axe, and A Pillar of Fire by Night, as well as three collaborations with John Ringo, Watch on the Rhine, Yellow Eyes, and The Tuloriad. Also for Baen, he has written the first three volumes of the modern-day military fiction Countdown series.

Genetics Advice for Generation Starships

Dan Koboldt

Disclaimer: This article is for entertainment purposes, and should not be considered medical advice. Also, it discusses primarily the science, and does not attempt to address relevant ethical, social, cultural or political issues in depth.

Image: Shutterstock

Recent years have seen a rapid acceleration of the discovery of exoplanets—planets that reside outside of our solar system. Though most of the planetary bodies discovered so far are not suitable for human life, it's only a matter of time until we find some that are. The challenge, of course, is that space is pretty huge. Beyond our solar system, the closest star (Proxima Centauri) lies 4.243 light years away. The fastest man-made spacecraft yet recorded (Helios 2, an unmanned probe that reached a speed of just over 157,000 miles per hour) would realistically require 19,000 years to make the journey.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can send a nuclear rocket at one percent of the speed of light, and make the trip in about 424 years. That's around seventeen generations. Once the ship arrives, the descendants of those brave travelers will be expected to colonize the new world. Yet there would only be room for so many individuals on board the ship, which raises the question: who should we send?

I should disclose at this point that I'm not a physicist or an aerospace engineer. I can't help you design the ship. However, as a human geneticist, I can offer some advice on choosing the founders of your future colony.

There are a few stages of a generation ship's journey when human genetics considerations come into play. The first, of course is before the ship leaves, when we're deciding who should take part in the crew. Assuming that there are many more volunteers than berths on the ship, there would necessarily be a selection process. As the ship's crew is selected, we're witnessing the first step in what's called a population bottleneck: a small number of individuals chosen from the larger population, who will go somewhere else and become the founders of a new population.

Population Bottlenecks in Human History

There have been several population bottleneck events in human history that should be informative. One of my favorite examples took place in Finland. In the sixteenth century, most of Finland's population lived in the southern and coastal regions. The king of Sweden—who ruled both countries at the time—sent families to settle in Finland's northern regions. One group of about twenty families undertook the longest journey north to the Lapland region. Over time, the founding families married and had children.

Since then, the population of Finland has grown rapidly, rising from a few hundred thousand people in the eighteenth century to 4.5 million Finns today. Yet there is also a strange phenomenon in modern-day Finland: a number of extremely rare genetic disorders are far more common there than in the rest of the world. The reason for this has to do with the population bottlenecks of the middle ages. During those early migrations, some extremely rare genetic variants that cause recessive disease (meaning you need two copies of the variant to get the disease) were selected for the journey north. Many others were not, and generally won't be found in the Finnish populations today.

But the handful of rare variants that tagged along remained in the population as it grew. And because of the limited number of founders, a lot of people who had children were distantly related to one another. This dramatically increased the odds that a child born in Finland will inherit two copies of a recessive disease gene.

The Finns call this their "rare disease burden" and although it is devastating for the patients and their families, it has also provided a remarkable opportunity to study recessive genetic disorders that are rare elsewhere in the world. Many of the diseases that we know and can diagnose today were first studied in Finnish populations. Yet, coming back to the generation starship, this rare disease burden is something we'd like future generations to avoid.

How do we go about doing that? Step one is simple: maximize the input diversity. That means (1) sending as many colonists as possible, and (2) selecting colonists from a wide range of genetic ancestries.

The human genome comprises 3.2 billion base pairs. Most of these are the same from one individual to the next (we’re all 99.99% identical at the DNA level). Even so, Each of us has about four to five million genetic variants. Most of the variants in a given person are common in the population, having arisen a long time ago. In terms of sequence diversity, people with African ancestry have the highest, followed by European ancestry and then by Asian ancestry. There are also ancestry-specific variants that arose after ancient migration events, i.e. expansion out of Africa into Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. We want to capture all of it.

Next, we come to another important consideration for generation starships: genetic testing. Thanks to recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies, we can sequence a person’s entire genome in about a week, at a cost of around $1,200. It stands to reason that by the time we can build a fast enough spaceship, genetic technologies will have progressed even further. Any candidates for the ship would undergo genome sequencing. We’d use the data in a couple of ways: first, to catalogue the genetic variation, and second, to screen for possible disease-causing alleles that we might not want to allow on the ship.

On the Generation Ship

Image: Shutterstock

Now we get to the fun part: the journey on a generation ship. The passengers and crew will get together and have children. That's kind of the point, isn't it? Unfortunately, as geneticists sometimes lament, it's not ethical to carry out carefully-designed breeding programs in humans the way we do in mice. Free will and all of that.

However, I think that those aboard the generation ship would employ a couple of strategies to look out for future generations. Some of these touch on ethical issues on which there may not be a consensus. I think that the organizers of the mission, in consultation with geneticists and medical professionals, would need to plan this ahead of time and write it into the mission charter. Some of these measures may seem severe, but they're all part of a common goal: ensuring the health of future generations and the colonists on the distant world.

1. Continued Genetic Screening.

Given the relatively small and completely isolated population size aboard a starship, couples should receive genetic counseling prior to starting a family. Part of that discussion would include testing to determine whether or not they're distantly related.

Consanguineous unions between blood relatives (even distant ones) should be avoided if at all possible. The devastating effects of such unions are apparent in groups that are geographically and/or culturally isolated, such as Amish communities and Ashkenazi Jews. These groups arose from relatively small founder populations, and only married within their communities. This dramatically increased the odds that two people each carried one defective copy of a gene (i.e. heterozygous carriers).

If you learned about genetics and inheritance with Punnett Squares—probably during your Biology 101 class—then you might remember that about one fourth of the offspring from two heterozygous carriers of a recessive gene will get the recessive disease. This is why there's a much higher burden of rare metabolic disorders in Amish, Ashkenazi, and other isolated communities.

Any recessive genes that make it onto the generation ship—or arise during the voyage—would have similar consequences over time. It's a game of chance that no one on a generation starship would want to play.

2. Genetics meets in vitro fertilization.

Children born on the ship would undergo genome sequencing, both to record which genetic variants were inherited from the parents and to catalogue any new mutations that appear. Each of us is born with fifty to sixty mutations that arose after conception, meaning that they're not present in our parents. These de novo mutations occur somewhat randomly throughout the genome. Most of them will have little to no effect, but if they land in the wrong place they can have severe consequences. I happen to study rare genetic disorders in children, a significant proportion of which are due to unlucky de novo mutations.

If disease-causing mutations do arise (or slip past the screening), it might be possible to prevent them from being passed on to future generations. Doing so would require in vitro fertilization, during which fertilized embryos would be screened for the mutation. Only non-mutation-carrying embryos would be implanted.

Recent technological advances have greatly improved our ability to make precise, directed changes to the DNA of living cells. In principle, this opens the door to gene therapy for patients suffering severe genetic disorders. On a generation ship, human genome engineering would be a huge asset to remove deleterious mutations from the population before they can rise to prevalence.

Of course, these powerful technologies would allow for genetic manipulations well beyond preventing disease. Everything from physical appearance to athleticism to baseline intelligence might be on the table. This raises the difficult question of whether people aboard the ship would be permitted to design their babies any way they want.

That's a tough decision. I can't offer many arguments why this should not be permitted, as long as it doesn't get in the way of more medically important decisions. However, I will say that many of the traits we might want to propagate in our offspring are also exceedingly complex, and result from subtle variations in many genes. Thus, it would be much more challenging, borderline impossible, to design a baby exactly the way one would like. Besides, any time you make a change to DNA, even a well-intentioned one, there are risks involved. Current technologies have "off-target" effects that can alter sequences other than the desired ones. This is an argument for only permitting genetic alterations that have a medical necessity.

3. Population Control

So here's a tricky issue about generation ships. For the reasons we've discussed, genetic diversity should be maximized by bringing as many unique chromosomes as possible. At the same time, procreation during the journey will increase the size of the ship's population in a finite space. As fun as it might be to allow the passengers to reproduce freely, population controls would be necessary. I don't want to go into the math, but not everyone who wants to have a child will have that luxury.

Birth control would be mandatory for everyone aboard the ship. Genetic counseling, too, and it might even come into consideration when passengers choose mates. A lottery system might be employed to select which couples were allowed to have a child. I can't imagine that any couples would be allowed more than one. This seems harsh, but it's a necessity of living within the finite resources of a ship that has a long way to go.

One could imagine that it also opens some interesting social opportunities, because there would be far fewer children than everyone might want. I'm not a sociologist, but I think the role of biological parents might change to involve more members of the community in raising children.

Populating the Distant Planet

On the new world, we can reasonably assume that the population would grow rapidly. Some genetic variants will disappear, while others will become more prevalent. This is called genetic drift, and there’s no way to predict how it will go.

However, the colonists will need these processes when adapting to a new environment. The population bottleneck of the ship, and the ensuing voyage, will have reduced the overall genetic diversity. That's going to hurt the colony initially, especially when it comes to things like immune resistance. Even so, the success of bottlenecked populations in human history—like those who migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia—suggests that the colonists have a good chance.

Ironically, the colonists may consider relaxing their efforts to (artificially) remove newly arisen variants from the population. A mutation that appears deleterious in one context may be favorable in another. Sickle cell disease offers a classic example of this. SCD is a recessive disorder, so you need two altered copies of the gene to get the disease. One would think that natural selection over time would keep SCD at very low levels in the population. However, it remains somewhat prevalent because, while two copies of the gene gives you SCD, having one copy of the gene is protective against malaria. In central Africa and other areas where malaria is endemic, this offers a strong survival advantage.

One can imagine how such scenarios might arise on a new world. Although the colonists should continue genetic testing, counseling, and surveillance, it may be best to let nature take over.

* * *

Dan Koboldt is a genetics researcher at a major children's hospital. In the last fifteen years, he has published more than seventy papers in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other scientific journals. He is the author of the Gateways to Alissia series with Harper Voyager, and the editor of Putting the Science in Fiction, a collection of expert-written advice published by Writer's Digest. Koboldt's previous articles for Baen.com include “Chimeras: Science and /Science Fiction,” and “Dark Matter of the Human Genome.”

The Evolution of Body Armor

Michael Z. Williamson

As long as human beings have been fighting, and probably even before modern human beings existed, the counterpart to offense was defense—lashing out, holding up arms, standing behind something to soak up the attack, or bringing something with you to use as a shield.

Some of the most "primitive" societies carved sections of wood to use to deflect blows—early shields. And for a long time, the shield was the primary means of defense, first as that carved stick, then as wicker or hide, eventually of metal.

The disadvantage of a shield, of course, is that it leaves you only one hand to fight with.

Parallel with the shield, and eventually displacing it almost entirely, was body armor. Shields still exist for riot control, for example, but not presently for combat usage, and it seems unlikely they'll return.

Armor at its simplest is anything that will prevent or reduce damage to the person wearing it. In a street fight, a thick coat helps prevent against knife slashes or softens the impact of thrown rocks. In modern combat, laminated ceramic with aramid fiber backing can stop most rifle bullets or fragmentation.

The earliest armor has not survived, but we assume it would have been sections of animal hide. However, once textiles enter the picture, hide, wood, bone or horn laced together, or even just heavy cording braided into a sheet became available, allowing for better fitting, replaceable sections, and stronger armor that still has flexibility. Even clay and stone plaques were used on occasion. It all served the same purpose—keeping internal organs and fluid inside where they belong. Examples of all these, including slabs of animal bone lashed together, appear at least 3500 years ago.

Animal hide can be hardened by drying, or heating until the collagen toughens. Wood, bone or tusk sections serve to both prevent penetration and disperse impact. All these were likely common through the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, some continued into the Bronze Age and beyond. The same concepts persist today with plastic armor used for police riot control, or for impact sports.

In the early Bronze Age, with bronze being very much a status symbol, men of status might wear a bronze breastplate—typically just round or rectangular, over the critical areas of the chest. In addition to serving as protection for critical organs, it indicated status or wealth, making the leaders easier to see, and was often polished for spiritual protection. This and a helmet would be worn over leather or quilted fabric, which provided additional protection against slashes and some amount of impact.

Some of the other early armor is almost a capote—draped over the shoulders, protecting the chest and upper back.

The Chinese seem to have been the first to take the notion of the laced sections to the next step, making beautifully scaled bronze armor, though the technology quickly appears with the Persians, Indians, and others, and has remained in use all the way to the present. Initially laced to a garment, it wasn't long before the scales were braided to each other, and of course, decorated. While predominating in Asia and the Near East, the technique has been found across Europe and North Africa. Useful knowledge is always transferred when encountered.

Chinese scale armor of the Han Dynasty. Image: Qiushufang, Wikipedia.

However, metal scales were expensive. Hardened or lacquered leather, wood, even stone or lacquered paper scales also came into use in China. Anything that reduces a thrust, cut or blow increases a warrior's survivability. Worn over padding, most melee attacks could be blunted or stopped with some effect.

Any of these armors might be reinforced with an additional chest plate, or additional shoulder guards.

The West took a different route:

Urnfield Celtic bronze cuirass—a design familiar to this day. Image: Calame, Wikipedia.

A breastplate and backplate, shaped to fit the wearer's torso, constitutes a cuirass, and the design has persisted because it works. It doesn't protect the limbs or head, but other armor can do that. It does cover the critical organs with what one hopes, for the technology of the day, is a near unbreachable shell.

Possibly the first modern armor ensemble is the Dendra Panoply from the late 15th Century BCE.

The Mycenean Dendra Panoply. Image: Schuppi, Wikipedia.

It was a cumbersome assembly that turns a warrior into a tank, reminiscent of Elmer Fudd in "What's Opera, Doc?" Nevertheless, the torso armor had breast and back plates, along with a lamellar kilt for the thighs, lamellar shoulder guards, and armor for the neck, all held together with thong and leather backing. Included was a helmet of boar tusk slices, and arm and leg guards. Movement would have been difficult, but not impossible. It does allow range of motion for sword or spear use. It would certainly have been imposing to look at. While heavy, it offered strong protection against spears and arrows of the era. However, it was probably mostly ceremonial. Not many such outfits could exist. The construction technique will be relevant again, though.

What our predecessors understood, but possibly not mathematically, we can put numbers to. If you wear the armor 100 percent of the time you are facing a threat, and it stops 80 percent of the threats you face, and covers 70 percent of your critical areas (heart and both major arteries, liver, lungs, kidneys, and let's add the helmet for brain), then you have 56 percent survivability of those hits. You can make the armor tougher, though probably heavier, or increase the covered area, likely with reduced mobility, and increase that percentage into perhaps the 70s. But, you must consider the loss of mobility and the increased probability of hits. This is harder to calculate individually, and must be done statistically after the fact. The Dendra armor increased protection significantly, but reduced mobility and effectiveness considerably.

The next development brings armor to what we recognize now. Chest/shoulder protection, possibly something for the groin, and a helmet. The Celts and others used the hammered bronze cuirass mentioned above. The Greeks used bronze, or the laminated linen linothorax—precursor of modern ballistic fiber. Tests show it to be flexible, easy to make and wear, and very resistant to spear thrusts and arrows. Keep in mind they stood behind a three foot shield of bronze, leather, wood and felt, sometimes with a drape against arrows. Add a helmet and greaves and they were very well protected against anything short of modern firearms, and even against some of those. Layered cloth is in fact the primary modern body armor. Historically, it was also used in Persia, Korea and China.

Alexander the Great, wearing linothorax armor of layered fabric. Image: Wikipedia.

The Celts developed mail, worn over padding, which was adopted by the Romans and others. Welded or riveted mail backed with padding will stop most cutting edges, and reduce blunt trauma. Mail is far tougher than people credit it, especially if they've only seen that made with rings butted closed and not riveted or welded. Then, consider it being supplemented with the standard helmet and shield, with a second layer of mail over the shoulders. It even stops most arrows and crossbow bolts. Of course, if you then forge a long iron point for your arrows . . .

Lorica Hamata—Roman mail with additional shoulder protection, the concept acquired from the Celts. Image: Greatbeagle, Wikipedia.

The Romans used mail and scale, and eventually improved the lamellar bands of the Dendra armor into something portable, flexible, and easy to mass produce—the Lorica Segmentata (this is our modern name for the type). You'll notice an obvious lineage between the two. Though as effective as Segmentata was, it seems not to have displaced either mail, scales or hammered cuirasses.

Lorica Segmentata, possibly the best working development of banded armor. Image: Wikipedia, Medium69.

Through the Dark Ages in Europe, and into the Middle Ages, mail remained popular in many countries, but padded and quilted fabric—gambeson—was the go-to for the working classes, and the base under other armor. Relatively easy to make and repair, it would reduce slashes, slow and hinder thrusts, and cushion blows. Those with money might have additional armor layers and protection for the limbs, but everyone who could armored their torso and shoulders, and almost always with padding first.

The Middle East also went with mail and reinforcing segments, often elaborately decorated for art and spirituality. I've seen an Arab mail hauberk where every ring was engraved with one of the Names of Allah—The Beneficent, The Merciful, The All-Seeing, etc. Certainly the owner deemed this would strengthen the armor through divine intervention. As the armor survives to this day, he obviously did something right.

Turkish mail armor with reinforcing plates. Image: JoJan, Wikipedia.

I've seen a Turkish piece where every other row is of stamped rings that have a cross-piece, like a digital Ø. The alternating rows were perfectly scarf-welded closed—overlapped, heated and beaten. And the rings were tiny—about 1/4". This would have been incredibly strong for its weight, and was very flexible. It is almost 400 years old, but still being worn for fighting by a modern re-enactor.

Mail, it should be noted, was very labor intensive—even butted mail can take forty man-hours for a hauberk, using just butted links. This doesn't include the time to draw the wire. Riveted can take three times that. Even with apprentices working, production is limited, the labor adds up, and the metal is expensive. It was less common than often portrayed. Cloth armor was ubiquitous, or even things like quilted reindeer hide in some parts of Scandinavia. This had the advantages of being very tough to penetrate, warm in winter, and if you fell overboard in the Baltic, you'd float for while. Metal armor would simply take you 30 meters straight down...

This brings us to the ever-popular leather armor, which certainly was popular, when one could get it. The best leather for armor comes from bulls of a certain age, and off the back and sides. This precludes using the animal for quality meat, or draft use, and thus makes it expensive to produce. Leather can be hardened with hot (but not quite boiling) water to shrink the collagen and other fibers. However, it will eventually soften from sweat, rain or oil, and can mold if not treated. Again, it was used, but not as commonly as movies would suggest. And of course, poorer warriors would certainly grab a blacksmith's apron, a spare hide, or a large chunk of tanned leather, and use it on its own or over padding to improve their defense.

Still, if you were outfitting an army, or had money, forged iron was far more effective, cost effective, and durable.

A common accessory throughout the later Dark Ages and well into the Middle Ages was what we refer to as "jack chains." These are articulated rods along the outside of the arms, providing protection against any kind of edge or impact. The blow is dispersed along the length. While not as good of coverage as actual forged arm protection of vambraces, elbow cops and rerebrace, they are much cheaper to forge, far easier to shape, and significantly better armor than padding by itself.

Notice that most armor still starts with the upper thorax, then the rest of the torso and limb joints, and skull. Protecting the extremities is tertiary, more expensive, and also hinders motion to some degree.

Though armorers are an inventive lot, and fully articulated armor was demanded by their sponsors. There are three forms of this: that worn for actual fighting, which might be very pretty, but was also very sturdy. That worn strictly for dress, which was often chased, engraved, enameled, and might be a bit less sturdy, though still functional. And that worn for tournament fighting, the equivalent of modern football or hockey padding. This is very commonly seen in pictures, but upon examination sacrificed a lot of mobility for safety.

Italian armor of about 1450. Image: Walters Art Museum, Wikipedia.

Parade Armor from 1562, belonged to Erik XIV of Sweden. Made by Eliseus Libaerts and Etienne Delaune. Image: Göran Schmidt, Wikipedia.

Jousting armor, meant more for sport, and with very limited mobility. Image: Sandstein, Wikipedia.

I'd like to debunk a common myth—that plate armor was over 100 lbs and rendered one incapable of standing up after a fall, or even more ludicrously, required a crane to mount a horse. In fact, good articulated armor was in the range of 40 lbs, and there are videos of modern dancers wearing reconstructed suits and performing all kinds of maneuvers up to somersaults and hand springs. If the armor didn't work, it wouldn't have had a market (We are speaking of field armor, not dressier parade armor, or dedicated sporting armor).

Of course, this stuff was custom made and expensive. What did common soldiers wear that offered good protection?

Brigandine armor was a variation of the lamellar, with the scales being sewn inside a leather or fabric "jack" or jacket.

Brigandine armor. Image: Wikipedia.

A modern re-enactor in brigandine—plates riveted into a leather jack, over gambeson, with additional armor protection. Image: Oleg Volk, OlegVolk.net.

Much of Asia continued to use variations of scales and mail, linked or laced together, lacquered for beauty, durability, and additional strength. Against the weapons they faced, it worked well. Shields were less common, since two-handed sword use and spear use predominated.

Mongolian mail with a small breast plate. German Federal Archive, Wikipedia.

Japanese armor of mail and leather scales. Image: Samuraiantiqueworld, Wikipedia.

And with metal scales. Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikipedia.

Japanese lamellar armor, scales woven together with cord. Image: Samuraiantiqueworld, Wikipedia.

One Eastern variation on the gambeson was layers of silk, which were both tough and likely to stop cuts and thrusts, and also could encapsulate a stabbing point or arrowhead, thus keeping the wound relatively clean and much easier to treat.

We should note at this point (into the 1500s) that early European martial arts were every bit as complex and athletic as Asian arts. Blocks, parries, elaborate movement and flexibility were all taught and well-regarded, including defense against mounted cavalry while "fencing" with a spear. A look at several manuscripts from the era show dramatic moves and techniques.

So what happened to those arts?

Firearms.

This was a massive game-changer. Elaborate one-on-one fighting failed against bullets. Strong formations crumbled against massed musket fire, even more than they had to archery. The archers had taken months or years to train. Massed musketeers could be drilled in days. While the bow offered many advantages—rate of fire, better penetration at many ranges, accurate indirect fire, and better wounding for trauma with deep piercing cuts, it was a fact that musketeers could be more numerous and replaced faster. Nor was forging gun barrels any more time intensive than carefully drying, tillering and shaping bows, splitting arrows, forging tips, fletching shafts, and twisting strings.

The shield disappeared almost entirely. One needed both hands for a bow or firearm, and making a strong enough shield meant a lot of metal and a lot of mass. We still see them for riot control and such, but not as credible battlefield tools.

Armor persisted, however. During the English Civil War, Cromwell's troops often wore a double layer of steel armor capable of stopping most musket balls of the day, and very effective against swords or impact.

This latter was important. As long as firearms had to be charged by hand for each shot, with long seconds in between, plenty of lances, sabers and spears remained on the field, along with bayonets. Musketeers often wear heavy leather coats with an additional breast plate, and cavalry wore the cuirass we've seen all along, now in tempered steel, through the Napoleonic era.

1854 French cuirass. Image: Rama, Wikipedia.

Armor fell out of style for a short time after this. Firearms became powerful and accurate enough that most armor was not cost effective. Certainly, it might save some of the troops from wounds, but it also cost a lot of money for larger armies, used copious amounts of metal, weighed down both baggage trains and cavalry horses, and was deemed not worth the expenditure against return.

There were some "bulletproof vests" in use in the U.S. Civil War, made of heavy hardened steel plate. Some WWI machine gunners likewise had very crude armor to protect them while sitting exposed and laying down fire. Once again, the key protection was torso and head. Though as articulated armor had gone largely out of style, the versions of that era are crude and clumsy.

German trench armor of WWI. Image: PHGCOM, Wikipedia.

Brewster Body Shield, American. WWI. Image: Bashford Dean, Wikipedia.

Everyone is familiar with the thin steel helmets of WWI and WWII, which mostly protected against thrown fragments and debris. With firearms reaching the level where they could shoot holes through any steel plate, there was no reason to encumber oneself with armor at all when maneuvering—the armor moved onto the tank and its tracked cohorts, which is another discussion.

And so it remained until another technological advance.

The big development for WWI was precision artillery with timed fuses so as to detonate over the enemy, and scattering fragmentation—shrapnel. The helmets helped protect the head from that, and from bumps and strikes. The torso, though, had been neglected. There was effectively no cavalry, and bullets weren't able to be stopped effectively.

Post-war studies, though, showed that fragmentation was the primary cause of wounds.

This was largely neglected until WWII came along, with thousands of bomber crews taking flak—anti-aircraft fire, full of fragments.

Shortly, bomber crews (fighter craft were usually too cramped for it) wore ballistic armor of layered nylon—the Greek linothorax updated as a nylothorax, if you will. Unaerodynamic fragments were slowed and many stopped, reducing both wound numbers and severity.

Meanwhile on the ground, certain exposed troops—Canadian medics among them—were equipped with steel plates. The Russians did the same for assault engineers. They were proof against pistols, might deflect an angled rifle shot, and did stop most fragmentation.

Meanwhile, Japanese pilots gained steel plates in vests to reduce wounds in combat.

Some very heavy armor was developed for landing craft crews.

Doron, a Dow product, was a fiberglass based laminate plate inserted into vests for some troops during the Okinawan campaign. Scale or brigandine armor was back for yet another round. It did not stop bullets, but it did protect against shrapnel.

During the Korean War, the U.S. Army developed a nylon armor with reinforcing plates of plastic or aluminum sewn in. However, it was still not effective at stopping most rifle bullets.

Moving into Vietnam, nothing changed in style, but materials somewhat improved. A different nylon provided improved fragmentation protection, while being lighter and, if not more comfortable, at least less uncomfortable. This remained in U.S. issue into the 1980s. It should be familiar from movies and newsreels.

A Vietnam Era U.S. Soldier in a nylon flak jacket. Image: Dwight Burdette, Wikipedia.

The same strategy continued with the PASGT (Personnel Armor System for Ground Troops) body armor of the 1980s, and its worldwide counterparts. However, instead of nylon, the aramid fiber Kevlar came into use. In fiber form, it is about five times stronger than steel for the same mass, and used in multiple layers. While no exact modern rating exists for this, it is nominally Level IIA, unofficially tested to stop several pistol calibers, but not rifle fire. However, it was very effective at stopping fragmentation, and came with a matching Kevlar helmet that replaced the ancient steel pot.

PASGT vest and helmet. Image: U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, Wikipedia.

I wore this many days and nights on active duty, and didn't find it terribly uncomfortable, except while in Florida in May while wearing chemical warfare gear as well, or while in the Middle East.

This armor is still in use with dozens of nations, a few Army Reservists, and Naval personnel who wear it while crewing weapons on deck. While no longer state of the art, it's still effective and worthwhile.

It should be noted that early ballistic plates existed for certain special operations and police SWAT use from the 1960s. The plates tended to be small and rectangular over the heart—much like those early Bronze Age plaques.

Moving into the 1990s, though, materials science improved again.

We finally enter the era of modern body armor. Aramid fiber—Kevlar or Spectra, tough enough to stop virtually all pistol calibers—backed up with ceramic or steel plates capable of stopping most rifle bullets at least once, and if there isn't time to swap out during an engagement, usually survivable for about eight hits on the torso plate. The newer plates are rated for a single hit from armor piercing ammo, with good survivability for a second hit.

Compared to the early armor with its mid 50 percentile protection, we actually now get close to 70 percent survivability, against much more powerful threats than our Bronze Age counterparts. Then, of course, we have far better medical technology.

Interceptor Body Armor with additional coverage as worn by turret gunners in Iraq. This display does not include the ballistic plates.

Image: Collectorofinsignia, Wikipedia.

U.S. Marines Modular Tactical Vest as worn. Image: Sgt. Ethan E. Rocke, Wikipedia.

MTV shown disassembled with plates and accessories. Image: Bahumut0013, Wikipedia.

ARMOR OF THE FUTURE:

Armor will continue to get lighter. Trending now are polyethylene plates that pass the same specs as the ceramic plates, sort of, for about half the weight. On the plus side, they don't shatter when dropped. On the downside, they won't quite stop armor piercing 5.56mm, and degrade after a while in heat or ultraviolet.

Still, it is a matter of a few years at most before 35 pounds of armor will cover head to ankle and stop all standard rifle rounds.

In the constant game of offense vs. defense, this is going to cause a reconfiguration of weaponry, as much as heavy plate armor did against swords and spears. The logical notion of just using bigger, more powerful ammunition fails against the logistical issue of carrying it. We can't equip every troop with a .50 BMG rifle and enough ammo to fight even a short engagement. There are limits on how fast you can push a bullet in atmosphere. Blunt trauma behind the armor might eventually bruise someone to death, but with non-Newtonian materials that stiffen on impact, even that can be dispersed.

So instead of harder, the response will have to be smarter.

Options include a slightly larger bullet with a shaped charge penetrator that can punch through armor. If this happens, armor must again become heavier. Or, if it can't be made sufficiently strong, it goes away entirely for the time being, in favor of mobility. At the same time, larger rounds mean a lower number carried for the same mass and volume. This affects the logistics supply curve.

Multiple "smart" rounds impacting the same location will degrade the armor until it can be breached. Currently, 2-3 rounds can do that to most plates. There are ways to put multiple projectiles into one cartridge, or fire bursts at much higher rates to accomplish this.

Blunt trauma, if it can be delivered sufficiently, will still disable. "Leg" infantry might disappear entirely in favor of small dune-buggy style vehicles with 15-20mm launchers with hyperexplosive rounds. The troops would dismount as needed, but use the vehicle as a weapon carrier. Powered armor with mounted weapons becomes more promising, but carries with it its own need for maintenance, power, support, thus further increasing the tail to tooth ratio of an army, but with a concordant increase in lethality for the smaller tooth.

Railguns are also a possibility, but the first challenge is making one small enough to be man portable and usable, along with its power supply. Then, we come back to atmospheric velocity limits for small projectiles. They might be insanely fast at close range, but within a hundred meters or so, down to the range of modern bullets. Larger projectiles can retain velocity better, but that reduces ammunition loadout again. Nothing comes free.

Of course, you're all thinking, this would be a prime moment for energy weapons to appear, and indeed it would. We have no concept at present of how to make a laser efficient enough and powerful enough to be man portable, man lethal, and avoid massive amounts of waste heat. However, David Drake's Powerguns, as an example, use a cartridge that releases energy from a matrix when fired.

Energy weapons themselves are not a magic counter to armor, however. All armor has some ablative effect. The response would be armor that ablates better, boiling off and degrading the impact, while soaking up the energy and releasing it in the resultant plasma.

No matter how the evolution progresses, the armor will primarily be a cuirass over the torso, and protection for the brain. After all, medical science improves as well, but those remain the vital areas to protect.

And then there's forcefields...

I'll let a physicist address that.

* * *

Michael Z. Williamson is retired military, having served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Fox. Williamson is a state-ranked competitive shooter in combat rifle and combat pistol. He has consulted on military matters, weapons and disaster preparedness for Discovery Channel and Outdoor Channel productions and is Editor-at-Large for Survivalblog, with 300,000 weekly readers. In addition, Williamson tests and reviews firearms and gear for manufacturers. Williamson’s books set in his Freehold Universe include Freehold, The Weapon, Rogue, Better to Beg Forgiveness . . ., Do Unto Others . . ., and When Diplomacy Fails . . .. He is also the author of time travel novel A Long Time Until Now, as well as The Hero—the latter written in collaboration with New York Times best-selling author John Ringo. He’s the editor of Forged in Blood, an anthology set in his Freehold science fiction universe, as well as upcoming anthology Freehold: Resistance. Most recently, Williamson has a novella in the John Ringo and Gary Poole edited Black Tide Rising anthology Voices of the Fall. Williamson was born in England, raised in Liverpool and Toronto, Canada, and now resides near Indianapolis with his wife and children.

Warships of Sea and Space:

Form Follows Function Follows Technology

Jim Beall

The shapes of both ships and planes have always depended on technology, so it should come as no surprise that space warcraft should be similarly affected. Such design considerations go back to the earliest warships.

Although usually equipped with sails, the earliest warships were generally propelled in battle by oars. Weapons were both short ranged and inaccurate, especially on those small, moving and pitching platforms. Unsurprisingly, ramming and boarding became the standard tactics. The earliest recorded naval battle appears to be the Battle of the Delta, fought about 1175 BC, when the Egyptians led by Ramses III repulsed a major invasion by the Sea Peoples. (Note 1)

Battle of the Delta

(Source: Wikipedia—Public Domain)

Until this time, the Egyptians appear not to have even had a word for "warship" and had to create one. (Note 2)

Many notable innovations did occur despite the technology constraints of manual warship propulsion. One of the most significant was the Roman "Corvus" (Note 3), introduced in the First Punic War, that allowed Legionnaires to board and capture Carthaginian galleys. Bows, ballistae, onagers, and crossbows (Note 4) were just some of the weapons used with the intent to kill or disrupt enemy crew to facilitate boarding. Grappling hooks were particularly effective. (Note 5)

Warship designs hardly changed at all conceptually for well over the next two millennia! Hulls grew broader but remained much more slender than their cargo-hauling contemporaries, trading capacity for faster oar-propelled sprints, and with prows designed for inflicting damage by collision. Even the early naval cannons were slow to impact warship design, as their short range combined with long reload times meant the enemy could close to board before a second shot could be fired. In fact, the primary use of those first guns was to inflict crew casualties to assist in boarding—the same role as the ballistae of antiquity.

The Battle of Lepanto (1571) has often been cited as marking the beginning of "The Age of Sail," as it was the last fleet battle where all of the nearly five hundred combatants were oar-propelled designs.

Battle of Lepanto, 1571

(Source: Wikipedia—Public Domain)

The new "Age" resulted from improvements in cannons in the years following Lepanto that allowed warships to destroy enemy combatants (or compel surrender) prior to boarding. As a result, warship design changed dramatically. Ships became larger and beamier than oarsmen could propel, because greater size and breadth made them better gun platforms (and more resistant to projectile damage). Masts and sails—previously limited in size and extent due to ram impact effects—increased in height and area to drive the larger ships through the water. Galleys still proved useful in special circumstances, such as becalmed conditions (Note 6), or as counters to threats posed by their opposite numbers in confined waters. Nonetheless, oar-propelled warcraft soon disappeared from fleets; the advance in weapons technology had radically changed warship design.

One-on-one ship battles shifted from hand-to-hand brawls to something more like pistol duels. Only when one vessel and its crew became seriously degraded would boarding actions typically take place, and often not until the losers had struck their colors. Enemy fleet engagements tended to become ranged affairs much like contemporary land battles between blocks of musket-equipped soldiers. The effects of wind direction on maneuverability and waves on gun ports became serious tactical considerations, and many battles were decided by suboptimal decisions concerning them. One such was the Battle of the Chesapeake during the American Revolution. The wind direction allowed the French to use their lower gun ports, while the British could not. (Note 7)

Battle of the Chesapeake, September 5, 1781

(Source: U.S. Government Image—Public Domain)

Just as the Battle of Lepanto signaled the beginning of "The Age of Sail," so did another battle mark its end: the "Battle of Hampton Roads," between the steam-powered ironclads CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor (1862). The engagement followed Virginia’s easy destruction and neutralization of a Union sailing ship squadron, showing that wooden ships driven by the winds could not hope to defeat armored ships powered by steam.

Battle of Hampton Roads, March 9, 1862

(Source: Naval History and Heritage Command—Public Domain)

As had happened when sails replaced oars, warships again leaped in tonnage as steam power produced much more driving force than wind-pushed sails (and also independent of wind presence, strength, or direction). A massive convulsion of ship redesign followed with wood giving way to iron and steel, and sailing masts being replaced by steam boilers and propellers. Naval guns moved into turrets (like the Monitor) or behind armored bulkheads (like the Virginia)—some designs had both.

Sailing ships soon left the fleets of world navies. Naval warship design had once again been revolutionized, this time by the advance in propulsion technology associated with the new "Age of Steam."

One interesting (and perhaps counter-intuitive) result was the revival in the pre-Sail Age attack of ramming! That is, the new technology of steam allowed ships to maneuver, gain speed, and drive into the enemy far better than oar galleys had been able to do. In the American Civil War, the navies of both sides used steam-powered, paddle-boat rams to considerable effect. Indeed one such vessel (CSS General Sterling Price) rammed and disabled Union ships in multiple engagements, was sunk in battle, raised, and put into service in the Union Navy (as USS General Price) where it served for the remainder of the war. The Battle of Lissa (1866) between forces of Austria and Italy also featured ram tactics. The result was that many navies built rams for a few decades, and included "ram bows" in many of their warships for even longer.

Ram attacks were feasible in the early years of steam because gun and shell technologies initially lagged that of armor (once steam propulsion allowed smaller freeboard and greater than previous armor thickness). The point here is that new technologies can revive previous dead-end tactics. Nor did SF ignore this. In H. G. Wells' 1897 War of the Worlds, HMS Thunder Child (a fictional torpedo ram in the Royal Navy) heroically engaged three alien fighting machines by shelling and ramming while defending a convoy of refugees, destroying at least two before succumbing. In homage, many authors and game designers have included vessels named Thunder Child in their storyverses ever since, including Star Trek.

Major fleet combatants continued to grow in size over the next several decades. Armor would get thicker and guns larger, and all the while steam technology advances continued to produce ever more powerful engines. The demands and complexity of the designs soon outpaced the ability of most nations' shipyards to construct them. (Note 8) The costs of these huge warships rose to the point where only the Great Powers could build and sustain fleets, few nations could construct the shipyards capable of producing them, and most could not even afford to purchase a single one from a foreign shipyard. (Note 9)

The belief in the importance of having one or more such ships in a nation's navy was not mistaken. Smaller ships mounting lesser guns and thinner armor could not hope to defeat larger adversaries in battle or, in many cases, even harm them. A nation without any was at the mercy of any other nation that had even one. Lesser ships looked like they might become relegated to duties away from the heart of battle, such as scouts or raider protection.

Soon, however, technology advances once again changed naval design and, by doing so, created the need for new ship types. Some designs specifically targeted the great-gunned, thickly armored, and vastly expensive vessels. Others then became necessary to operate in support of those compatriots to help ward off the new threats.

The first of these advances was the torpedo. (Note 10) The significance of this weapon was that it could damage or sink even the largest warships, yet be launched by small vessels difficult to destroy at a distance, especially when attacking at speed in numbers. This advance in weapons technology mandated new classes of warships with different characteristics. The new designs were optimized to better launch the new weapon or to defend the fleet against such attackers, and some to fulfill both roles. The new attacking ships sacrificed armor for speed and agility. The new defenders needed to be nearly as fast and armed with guns optimized for engaging the quick but unarmored attackers. The key point, however, is that these new warship designs did not arise until weapons technology produced the new threat.

The torpedo also led to a new warship of an entirely different type: the submarine. In this case, the new design was built simply to employ the new technology, rather than modifying existing designs to incorporate it. Here, the new technology dictated the creation of a class of warships completely unrelated to any previous ones.

The second technological advance was the airplane. The first generations of these posed no direct threat to armored warships. However, improvements in range and reliability soon enabled planes to find enemy ships at distances far beyond naval scouts and improve long range gun accuracy as shell spotters. (Note 11) At first, ship designs changed only modestly, mostly by simply the addition of a seaplane or two, so as to be able to utilize these potential advantages to the ship’s benefit. (Note 12) Some proponents advocated for a new class of ships dedicated solely to operating airplanes, with the thought of greater scouting capabilities and the potential to gain an advantage for their large gunned warships by driving off enemy scouts and spotters.

Continued aviation technology improvements in speed, range, and lift eventually made them direct threats to even the most heavily armored warships. (Note 13) The result was another new warship class, the aircraft carrier, far larger than the seaplane tenders for air scouts. Meanwhile, all ship designs were steadily modified, with the most visible changes being the addition of massed batteries of anti-aircraft weapons. One good example is the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), with the images below providing a clear contrast of before and after air attacks were considered a clear threat.

USS Pennsylvania, BB-38—As-built (1918) and after Pearl Harbor Rebuild (1943)

Source—Official U.S. Navy Photographs (cropped)—Public Domain

Besides replacing the existing secondary armament with new five-inch twin turrets (dual purpose, capable of anti-aircraft fire), ten quad mounts of forty millimeter and fifty-one twenty millimeter anti-aircraft guns were installed, thus adding an additional ninety-one barrels dedicated solely to shooting at attacking aircraft. As these changes were being made, all new ship designs were modified as well to increase anti-aircraft weapons. A new class of light cruisers (CL) emerged gunned only with weapons able to shoot at aircraft (CLAA).

The last technology that changed naval warship design to be examined is electronics, the changes occurring over the last fifty years.

First, the new weapons changed the dimensions of the battlespace, pushing fleet engagement ranges far beyond the reach of conventional naval artillery and, in doing so, rendered large gun warships effectively obsolete as naval surface combatants. Like galleys, nearly four centuries before and sailing ships hardly one century earlier, they increasingly served in limited niche roles before disappearing altogether from the navies of the world.

Second, once steam, armor, and heavy cannons had become the basic warship elements at the start of the Age of Steam, the designs themselves became "mass limited." That is, the capabilities of the warship were directly affected by changes in mass, such that increases in mass improved the ship by thickening armor, increasing gun number/caliber, adding shaft horsepower, and/or other attributes. The advent of electronics and missiles changed the designs to "volume limited." Heavy armor was no longer used. Massive gun barrels and their heavy shells were replaced by slender launchers and low density missiles. The new requirement to keep electronics cool mandated multiple air conditioning plants, with large capacity ducts. Now, increasing the volume of a ship increased its performance by allowing greater numbers and more powerful missile and electronic systems to be incorporated into the design.

This effect can be tracked in the three images below. The first is USS Chicago, one of the last large, pre-missile warships, completed in 1945 as a heavy cruiser (CA-136). The second image is the same ship after its conversion in 1964 to a guided missile cruiser (CG-11). The third image below "the Chicagos" is the USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) guided missile cruiser, built from the start as a volume-limited design.

USS Chicago, CA-136

USS Chicago, CG11

USS Ticonderoga, CG-47

Source—Official U.S. Navy Photographs (cropped)—Public Domain

The USS Chicago was originally commissioned with armored main turrets and numerous anti-aircraft guns. The conversion design replaced all the main guns (and nearly all the others) with missiles, added missile directors and more powerful radars, and increased volume where practicable. The Ticonderoga design plainly maximizes volume to the point that it begins to resemble more a box on a hull (Note 14) than the cruisers that came before her. These changes were the natural result of optimizing the design for electronics and missiles.

The spaceships of science fiction (SF) follow the same principles traced above in the naval vessels of history. In SF, however, the author posits the technologies, allowing vast variances among authors and "storyverses." One persistent theme in the history of SF is that the fictional ships have often been extrapolations from the most advanced technologies present in the real world when the authors wrote their stories.

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) was written nearly forty years before the Wright Brothers took to the sky at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The best technology then in existence for getting a mass to a high altitude was the cannon. Thus, Verne extrapolated to a massive cannon that fired an inhabitable projectile (nine feet in diameter!) that would fly to the Moon. It achieved this by detonating so much gunpowder that it was visible for scores of miles, knocked down all anywhere nearby, and was recorded as a meteor burning up in the atmosphere by ship captains as far as a hundred miles out to sea. The point here is not realism (or lack of same, as the acceleration forces necessary would have crushed all passengers into paste), but that the shape or design of the "spacecraft" was that of a cannon shell. Verne may have been the first to use this design, but he was far from the last. (Note 15)

The "Spaceship" and Its Launch

Jules Verne—From the Earth to the Moon

Source: Wikipedia—Public Domain

The Excelsior was perhaps the first SF spaceship in motion picture history. It appeared in the movie, "Himmelskibet" ("A Trip to Mars"), a silent feature film released in 1918. (Note 16)

The Excelsior Spaceship

The Excelsior in Flight

Source: Stills (Cropped) from the 1918 Film, "Himmelskibet"

Public Domain (Note 17)

The design of the Excelsior combined the two best flight technologies of the time: biplanes and dirigibles! It even had a pusher propeller on the back. These technological aspects dictated the shape of the craft.

Within a decade of the release of "Himmelskibet," airplanes had become so commonplace and well understood (including their limitations) that they were no longer SF spaceship fare. Rockets came next and an especially notable early example was Frau im Mond (1929), by Thea von Harbou. Translated from German, it became known variously as The Girl in the Moon, Woman in the Moon, and Rocket to the Moon, depending upon editions. This was an extraordinary work in many respects, and then it was made into a movie which itself contained many nearly prescient elements.

Book Cover

Movie Still

Source: Wikipedia—Public Domain

Source: NASA Image—Public Domain

The author consulted German rocket developers while writing her novel and screen play and their influence showed. Among the many details of technical (Note 18) interest:

—Size of the rocket, roughly equivalent to Saturn V,

—Constructed in a tall building and then rolled upright to launch point,

—Multi-stage rocket, ejected first stage in flight,

—Crew reclined horizontal during launch due to acceleration forces, and

—Crew used straps in space due to weightlessness.

Rockets soon dominated SF, and came in a great many designs ranging from unadorned to highly decorated. Two of the most famous are from Buck Rogers (introduced 1928) and Flash Gordon (first appearance 1934).

Buck Rogers' Battlecruiser

Rocket Ship from Flash Gordon

(Courtesy of CoolRockets.com)

Source: Wikipedia—Public Domain

(Note 19)

(Note 20)

Rocket spaceships continued to roar across the covers of SF novels and magazines in the decades that followed, as well as in serials and feature films. The specific design elements varied, but most generally featured long cylinders and fins. They were armed with a wide variety of weapons, including rocket guns, atomic mortar guns, space bombs, heat rays, gas launchers, and many more. The shape, speed, and agility of rocket powered attack craft apparently brought back memories of days of yore to some. As happened in early in the Age of Steam, the new technology revived interest in a previously discarded tactic: ramming! (Note 21)

Pulp magazine covers in particular regularly featured bright, energetic images that excited the imaginations of young readers. One of the earliest and most influential artists was Frank R. Paul, hired by Hugo Gernsback in 1914 to illustrate a science magazine. Gernsback next tasked him with the cover of the inaugural issue (April, 1926) of his Amazing Stories magazine. This was the first magazine dedicated to science fiction, and Paul's work appeared on all the covers for over three years. His images of huge robots, streaking spaceships, and strange aliens were the first such images seen by a great many future SF artists and authors, as well as young readers considering careers in science. (Note 22)

The next generation of authors included Frank Kelly Freas and Chesley Bonestell. Freas was amazingly prolific as an artist and would be nominated twenty times for the Hugo Award for Best Artist and win ten. (Note 23) The style of his drawings of spaceships and exotic locales was so distinctive that they were easily identifiable.

Many of Bonestell's paintings included not only spaceships, but also the locales where they operated or had landed. His experience in photography, miniature modeling, and astronomy helped him create images of breathtaking realism and impact. His 1944 "Saturn as Seen from Titan," (see below) was so convincing that it seemed photographers must have set up on that distant spot.

"Saturn as Seen from Titan, 1944"

(Image Confirmed in Public Domain by Bonestell LLC)

Geza Gyuk, vice president of Astronomy, Research and Collections at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, described (Note 24) his influence as follows:

“Bonestell's work was seminal in the birth of the Space Age. His paintings invoked a sense of location, causing a generation to grow up thinking of the worlds of our Solar System as real places to which we could journey. His was the inspiration that launched a thousand careers.”

In the decades after World War II, rockets soon became sufficiently commonplace (Note 24) that SF writers sought and invented new technologies, essentially broadening their technology palate significantly.

Well thought out fictional systems, however, imply design attributes just as technologies do in the real world. One early and highly popularized example of the transition from rockets to such a new technology can be seen in, of all places, the Tom Swift, Jr. series.

The new series first appeared on the scene in 1954 with the publication of no fewer than five separate novels! Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship was one of those first five. The protagonist was the son of the main character of the predecessor series (forty books, 1910 - 1941) and typically featured a new invention (as had the original series). Visually, his "Rocket Ship" design followed the basic decades-old pattern of the sleek and pointed cylinder, multiple fins, and fire-spouting from the back. Just four years later, however, the new spacecraft invention in Tom Swift in The Race to the Moon looked entirely different.

Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship

Tom Swift in The Race to the Moon

1954

1958

(Author's Collection)

(Author's Collection)

Gone were the fins on a streamlined silhouette atop a fiery plume. Instead, readers were greeted with what looked like a huge box built inside a massive gyroscope! The vehicle ("Challenger") probably looked equally weird to rocketeers as the USS Monitor had to veterans of the Days of Sail. Yet, as odd as it appeared, Challenger's design was just as consistent with its new technology as the Monitor had been four years shy of a century before the Tom Swift book's publication.

Challenger did not use rockets as main propulsion, but "repelatrons" which could push against things like planets for propulsion (and against meteors for protection). Since the thrust could be gradual and steady, there was no need for the design to concern itself with wind resistance. Since the repelatrons could be swiveled, thrust could be gained in any direction, obviating the need for fins while making a spherical shape an obvious way to maximize their arcs. In short, the design form followed the function and the technology!

This theme would be repeated over and over in SF with well thought-out fictional technological systems. For example, the "Starfire" series, originated by David Weber and Steve White in 1990, began based on the game system by the same name (created by Stephen V. Cole in 1979). The fundamental design technologies were rocket-style engines, missiles, beam weapons (Note 25), shields, armor, and wormholelike interstellar transportation. Within those boundaries, ship types vary significantly. Some classes sorted by weapons, with several devoted mainly to missiles, and others to beams. Other types sorted by mission, with sensor platform vessels at one end of the design spectrum and heavily armored and shielded semimobile bases at the other.

In Death Ground 1997

Stars at War II 2005

(Author's Collection)

(Author's Collection)

The images above are from the covers of two of the many books in the series. (Note 26) Note that the ship designs on the In Death Ground image vary somewhat as they approach a wormhole ("warp point") reflecting the human tactics there. On the other hand, the ships emerging from the warp point on the The Stars at War II cover are identical, consistent with the alien race tactic of using one class for that mission.

An additional design aspect in the Starfire series is that fighting power increased with ship mass and volume (combining the historical elements of the Age of Steam and the effects of electronics). Greater size historically meant more defense (armor), firepower (weapon projector number and size), missile capacity, and electronics capability. The fiction parallels that, though the systems are considerably different. The unusual SF element is that different species see different ways to utilize the greater size. The humans see the chance to include larger missiles and heavier beams, while the "Orions" see them as higher capacity strike fighter bases.

In effect, the different attitudes reprise the historical debates around World War II about the relative importance and roles of the battleship versus the aircraft carrier. The two species champion two completely different ship types to make the best use of the same increase in size. In the SF series, however, the outcome of the debate is uncertain, as technologies can change especially as each race focuses on developing ones that improve their choice. Here, then, "Form Follows Function Follows Technology Follows Species Mindset."

The next novels of interest are those in "The RCN Series," by David Drake, with the cover of the first book in the image below.

With the Lightnings 1998

(Author's Collection)

The technologies assumed by Drake in this series are far different from the ones in Weber's Starfire series. There are no shields, no warp points, and no energy beam weapons (beyond very short range, mostly for missile defense). Ships must take off from planetary surfaces. Faster than light (FTL) travel is effected by a drive that transitions the vessel into "bubble space" and then, once there, extending telescoping tall masts with sail-like surfaces to allow Casimir effect force on them to "push" the ship.

The spaceship designs must conform to these factors and result in far different vessels in appearance than the Starfire ones. Even the largest RCN warships cannot begin to match the size of the Starfire craft because they must be able to stand upright in planetary gravity (with all its mass on whatever struts or fins might be provided) and then take off under its own power. Pure beam ships serve no purpose since those weapons cannot damage enemies beyond impractically close range. Even small ships, however, pose mortal threats to the largest because of the absence of shields to defeat missiles. This allows smaller, more agile craft to be useful in fleet battles due to their abilities both on defense and offense.

Other SF series with distinctive forms based on posited technologies include Star Trek. Warp drive FTL, advanced shield technology, teleportation, food replicators, and antimatter power plants are just a few of the series technologies which affect ship design. With two warp cores posited to be optimum and their radiation dangerous, ships designs generally have two nacelles attached to the main hull but extended a considerable distance away from inhabited areas. This can be seen not just in Human designs, but in those of the Klingons and Romulans, to name but two. This would appear to significantly degrade hull strength, but "structural integrity shields" handle that. These two factors lead to a plethora of exotic ship designs that have to "obey the Star Trek rules" but are largely unimpeded by most others, including inertia, gravity, and atmospheric constraints. (Note 27)

In many stories, authors shape their technologies by "working backwards" to fit the stories they want to write. In some cases, the intent might be to replicate historical conflicts in future settings. In other cases, it may have been to allow certain desired tactics. One interesting case is presented in The Mote in God's Eye (1974), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The Mote in God's Eye 1974

(Author's Collection)

The novel is set in a far future setting within a previously established (by Pournelle) storyverse ("CoDominium"). (Note 28) The fictional technologies include an FTL drive, shields, missiles, and beams, but the authors craft a way within their tech to include boarding parties by Marines. Like ramming, this tactic appears implausible on its face, but the storytelling appeal is so great that many authors orchestrate ways within their posited high technologies to achieve it nonetheless and readers appear not to complain! In this and similar cases, the function came first, then the form, and then the technological "loophole" needed to make it happen. Thus, the phrasing might more properly be, "Technology Follows Form Follows Function"!

If boarding enemy starships is a major story element, authors can also use a very different approach, as Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski did in The Two-Space War (2004).

The Two-Space War (2004)

(Author's Collection)

The storyverse posits that FTL is not possible, that is, within the three dimensional universe. To go faster than light, one has to go flat! Instead of using massive warp engines or stargates, starships are sailing ships because engines of any type require three dimensional moving parts. Sails, however, are two-dimensional! Ship-to-ship duels and fleet engagements are fought with cannons right out of the Napoleonic Era, with sword-slashing boarders often settling matters precisely as Roman Legionnaires did in the First Punic War. The story is admittedly fanciful to the extreme but a great read. In this author's humble opinion, any story that contrives to have ship cats duel alien vermin, while loyal dogs battle aliens alongside their human allies can never be bad!

Authors telling stories in more "pure" hard SF style always have to balance real-world technology and fictional "handwavium." The choices each writer makes to achieve the setting and capabilities are a major part of reader enjoyment.

For example, without truly advanced technologies, major beam weapons might not be practical at all aboard ships. Space is a vacuum, making shedding heat slow and inefficient. Waste heat from generating and channeling the energy necessary for high-powered beamers would quickly overwhelm a ship's systems. Indeed, firing even one of the mighty broadsides so popular in SF would likely destroy the attacker before the beams ever reached the target! Square miles of superconductor radiators would be necessary for each dreadnought main beam weapon. (Note 29) It would also be easy to "see" and target the glowing ship. Alternatively, a large ship could have a massive internal heat sink (large tanks of ice slurry, perhaps), fire a few shots, and then disengage for several hours until the now-hot heat sink could be rechilled. (Note 30)

The above are formidable challenges to any author in telling a story. The three most common solutions are to ignore the problem (historically, by far the most common approach), use beam weapons only in close quarters as brief missile defense (David Drake's RCN series uses this approach very well), or employ technologies not present in the real world.

Nor are missiles without their own real-world issues. Given the vast ranges of most space battles, the flight times become so great that countermeasures would appear always to have a decisive upper hand. Reducing this time window via huge missile velocities requires handwavium of its own, due to the missile internals having to withstand thousands of gravities of acceleration, let alone the propulsion system and fuel required to achieve it.

One SF solution to the missile problem is to reduce missile acceleration somewhat and lower the engagement ranges. In these cases, the defense retains much of the upper hand, but not all of it. What the attacker must do, instead, is to use lots of missiles. The technological handwavium lessens significantly, but the author now has the additional challenge of justifying the massive missile quantities required. This means that ship designs must support such numbers or the battlespace itself has to be managed to allow the missiles to otherwise be present. The "Troy Rising," series by John Ringo (first book, Live Free Or Die, 2010) definitely uses the "many missiles" approach, as the cover of the third book clearly demonstrates.

The Hot Gate (2011)

(Author's Collection)

Another missile problem solution is to reduce missile technology and engagement ranges even further, along with missile defenses. Much less handwavium is required but one major consequence is that probable battle locations become fewer. That is, the low ranges render deep space meeting engagements very unlikely, making battles seem mostly restricted to choke points (like wormhole openings) or deep within solar systems. The RCN series by David Drake uses this approach.

Another solution to beam and missile problems is to "handwavium" them all away. Posit warships with massive engines, equipped with ultra-long range missiles with tens of thousands of g's acceleration, powerful beam weapons of staggering variety, shields with stunning resistance, and then tack on the vast multitude other technologies needed to make it all both coherent and consistent. To build such ships would require spaceyards tens of cubic miles in volume with several hundred thousand workers operating mostly-robotic machinery the size of skyscrapers. Sustaining that technological infrastructure would require more than one star system. Sustaining it for book after book after book would require more than one author.

This brings U.S. to the "Honorverse" series created by David Weber, first book On Basilisk Station (1993).

On Basilisk Station (1993)

(Image Courtesy of Baen Books)

In this series, the author not only wanted large-scale fleet battles between very large FTL warships, but also wanted them fought with mighty broadsides of both missiles and beams. Additionally, important duties and missions were desired for smaller ships, both in those same battles and on detached missions. The posited technologies and settings to enable such battles to seem reasonable require considerable structure of their own. Consider the image below:

Honorverse Minotaur class LAC carrier, 6,178,500 tons, 1131 × 189 × 175 meters

(Image by BuNine, courtesy of Baen Books)

Clearly the infrastructure necessary to field a fleet of ships that size (some were larger) would be immense. In fact, the fleet tonnage of the two largest warship classes in the protagonist's navy alone was portrayed as over two billion tons.

Consider next the hull shapes of the two larger space vessels in the above image. Both are compact, double-ended cylinders with most (or all) weapons mounted in broadsides. Many other storyverses mount much of any warship's armament aiming forward. Weber wanted broadside battles, so ship design form followed function and technology came last, adjusted as necessary to make it happen.

The technologies and analyses required to continue beyond a couple books were significant. Where did the waste heat go? How could bows and stern be vulnerable despite shields? How did planetary defenders detect invading fleets approaching in FTL? How many g's did the missiles have to sustain to be effective, and how did they do that? Technologies would improve over time during an extended series, but which ones and how? New technologies might create new designs (like submarines in the real world) that would potentially upend the status quo—avoid or embrace? These are merely a few of the many questions to be addressed for the series to continue.

In the earlier Starfire series, Weber and White worked within the fictional structure of an established gaming system, playtested and otherwise exercised by a great many people. As the Honorverse stories grew in number and scope, keeping the overall structure consistent and coherent posed increasingly tough challenges. These might have been enough for many authors to pull back and start a fresh series. Perhaps to avert that, a support team of fans formed with resumes including aviators, naval analysts, military veterans of multiple services, professional artists, and IT professionals. (Note 31) They called themselves BuNine, and the name stuck and even became a legal entity! BuNine continues (Note 32) to help the author as consultants to maintain coherence and consistency, as well as explore the implications and effects of potential technology changes.

In summary, history shows that warship design changes with technology, sometimes adding threats that are totally new, while other times restoring threats previously rendered obsolete. SF history is replete with warship designs based on extrapolations of known technology, but also with ones using handwavium tech. The reasons behind the technologies chosen by the author also vary, with some choosing ways to retell stories from history or tell new ones that will feel familiar to readers despite the futuristic settings. Gadget SF featured the invention as the story, but modern SF makes the technologies more a part of the setting. In space warships, the same applies. That is, it matters little which came first, the technology, the form, or the function. What matters most is the story and, if it is good enough, fans will eagerly step up to help with all three.

Notes

1) Recorded in stone! The battle description is inscribed (with drawings!) on Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. The drawing is a detail from an upper corner of one wall. For a complete and authoritative rendition of the many Ramses III temple inscriptions, see the 1930 University of Chicago Press document, "Earlier Historical Records of Ramses III," by the Epigraphic Survey. This magnificent work can be found on-line at:

https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/oip8.pdf

2) The literal translation of the new term has been rendered as, “ships of fighting (in the heart/midst of the sea)” by one source and “ships–of–warriors–on–the–sea” by another. See: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/34903185.

3) Battle of Mylae, 260 BC—for more details, see the author's earlier article available on this site, From Corvus to Keyhole: Shipyards—Past, Present, and Science Fiction.

4) Julius Caesar references his "ships of war" driving off barbarian attackers by "slings, arrows, and engines." (Commentaries on the Gallic War, Book 4, Chapter 25)

5) Grappling hooks appear to have been used at the Battle of the Delta, with the Egyptians casting them into rigging and pulling on the lines to capsize enemy vessels. Archimedes would use them to defend Syracuse in, from the Roman point of view, a most effective and terrifying way. See "Claw of Archimedes," also known as "Archimedes Iron Hand."

6) For example, during the Battle of Orbetello (June 14, 1646), galleys towed the artillery-heavy galleons of both forces into position due to light winds. Sailing warships would also use their rowed small boats on other occasions when becalmed.

7) Also called the "Battle of the Virginia Capes." This engagement was indecisive tactically, but decisive strategically because the failure to drive off the French fleet and support the British land forces led to the British surrender at Yorktown. The British admiral was criticized for his choice of tactics, including his failure to engage more closely. Allowing the battle to remain one of maneuver greatly increased the chance of a draw which, for the British, was a war-ending defeat. The British admiral returned to New York, repaired damage, and set off again to return and reengage, but his departure was two days after the surrender at Yorktown.

8) Construction times also lengthened, requiring the long-term application of a great many skilled workers on each vessel. Gone were the days when Venice's Arsenale shipyard could build a warship in a day. Once, in 1574, the Venetians had even built, launched, and armed one in a single hour to impress King Henry III of France. (Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance, New York, Arno Press, 1979, p. 144)

9) Possessing a "dreadnought" in a nation's navy became such a status symbol in the years leading up to World War I, that several nations contracted with Vickers (Britain) or AG Vulcan (Germany) to build them despite the ruinous expense.

10) Torpedo was originally the name given by Robert Fulton to his invention (first demonstrated in 1800) of an underwater gunpowder charge towed into position and detonated by a timer. The term became the word used for what are now called naval "mines." During the Battle of Mobile Bay (August 5, 1864) when Admiral David G. Farragut ordered, "Damn the torpedoes . . . full speed [ahead]," he was referring to the risk of mines, one of which had just detonated and sunk the monitor, USS Tecumseh. The invention of a mobile underwater weapon with similar properties was initially called a "locomotive torpedo" after the style of motion, or "Whitehead torpedo," after its inventor.

11) Smoke (from fires, muzzle blast, and steam plants) limited the reporting of where a ship's shells landed with respect to the target to allow correction. Designs soon incorporated armored boxes high above the water surface, but even under optimum conditions, the curvature of the Earth itself prevented observing the impact points at the maximum ranges of the largest guns. Airplanes flying overhead equipped with wireless communications equipment had the potential to dramatically improve gunfire accuracy and range.

12) Commander Charles Rumney Samson was the first British pilot to take off from a ship (January 10, 1912) and then from a ship underway (May 9, 1912). The redoubtable Samson was one of the first air pioneers in the Royal Navy (the Royal Navy Air Service or RNAS) and would go on to have a remarkable career. One of his anecdotes was perhaps the first engagement of two new technologies. On May 27, 1915, he attacked the U-21 that had just sunk HMS Majestic. When he ran out of hand-bombs, he continued by firing at it with his rifle. The first successful attack on a submarine by aircraft appears to have been suffered by the French submarine Foucault (Q70) by two Austrian seaplanes on September, 1915. It was scuttled after being seriously damaged.

13) Many armored ship proponents denied the threat, but the Pearl harbor attack and the sinking of the RN Prince of Wales and the Repulse effectively ended debate. Actually, the first instance of an enemy ship being sunk by aircraft in wartime was on August 12, 1915, when Commander Charles Edmonds (RNAS) air-dropped a torpedo from his seaplane and sank a Turkish ship. Source: Edmonds' Report to Admiralty, reprinted in full (pages 41-42) in Royal Naval Air Service 1912-1918, by Brad King, Hikoki Publications.

14) Ironically, the USS Monitor (that had kicked off the Age of Steam) represented a similar visual dissonance to all the USN ships then in commission, and was often called, "a cheesebox on a raft."

15) Two other examples include J. J. Astor’s 1894 novel A Journey in Other Worlds, which may be the first story with a true spaceship in it (in the sense that it was piloted). It was shaped like Verne's projectile, but larger and used "apergy" to achieve what amounts to anti-gravity. The book in its entirely can be read here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1607/1607-h/1607-h.htm

Gustavus W. Pope's 1894 novel, Journey to Mars also featured a piloted projectile-shaped spaceship and, additionally, also used "anti-gravitation batteries" to drive it on its way. This work is available on-line (no charge) here:

https://static.torontopubliclibrary.ca/da/pdfs/37131098499437d.pdf

16) For more information on the film, including plot, see:

https://www.dfi.dk/en/viden-om-film/filmdatabasen/film/himmelskibet

17) "A Trip to Mars" can also be viewed in its entirety at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYflIj6QR-I

18) Among the "non-technical" details of interest:

—The launch team counted down aloud from ten ("zehn") before ignition

—The Nazis banned it (1933) due to similarities to the secret V-2 project

19) The Buck Rogers image is courtesy of modeler-extraordinaire Jeff Brewer (many other images, including those of other spaceships, can be found at coolrockets.com). The author confesses spending hours at that site!

20) The Flash Gordon image is a Still from "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe," which can be viewed in its entirety at:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Flash_Gordon_Conquers_the_Universe

21) For an image of the Amazing Stories issue (February, 1941) cover art one of ramming story, by author Don Wilcox:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?393068

22) Paul's cover of the October, 1929 issue of Gernsback's Science Wonder Stories magazine may be the first portraying a flying saucer spaceship. The author (an amateur paleontologist) is also partial to another cover image from the same magazine (for the story, "One Prehistoric Night," November 1934), which showed a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the correct posture, rather than the upright one used by all others (including museums) until the 1970s.

23) Freas may have been even more prolific in his non-SF artistry, including a stint with MAD magazine, pin-up girls for U.S. World War II bombers, posters for Skylab, and over five hundred saint's portraits for the Franciscans.

24) Launches even began to be televised live in 1958. See:

https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/above-amp-beyond-aw-hell-television-is-here-37158859/

25) The USN fielded its first beam weapon in 2014 aboard USS Ponce (LPD-15). The "honor" of the first photonic naval weapon ever employed, however, appears to belong to Archimedes during the Siege of Syracuse (214 - 212 BC). According to some accounts, he directed soldiers how to align their polished shields to focus reflected sunlight on the Roman ships, causing them to ignite. Often disputed as impossible, Greek engineer Dr. Ioannis Sakkas reportedly reenacted the event in November, 1973, at the Skaramagas naval base outside of Athens. Seventy Greek sailors holding polished copper shields, three feet by five feet, on a pier were able to ignite a plywood boat mockup floating about one hundred sixty-five feet away.

26) A fresh branching of the Starfire series, authored by Steve White and Chuck Gannon, began with Extremis (2011), followed by Imperative (2016), and Oblivion (2018).

27) Many other SF "storyverses" are of such breadth in numbers of alien species with their own technologies that ships of one race bear little or no resemblance to those of other space-faring species. Babylon 5 is one example. Another is David Brin's "Uplift Universe." In the latter, a very great many alien species have been faithfully storing all information (including ship and weapons designs) in a central library for hundreds of millions of years. Thus, a species can use and adapt any technology that has ever been recorded, even though the inventing species might be far away in distance and might possibly have even been extinct for millions of years. In one battle scene alone (in Startide Rising), a loose federation of alien species in a single fleet each have many different shapes, propulsion drives, and FTL systems, including this author's all time FTL favorite in SF: "The Denial of Reality Drive."

28) Pournelle's first story published in this series was the three-part serial, "A Spaceship for the King," beginning in the December 1971 in Analog. This author still has his copy (art by Kelly Freas) and will not lend it.

29) The International Space Station masses under 500 tons, hardly warship-sized, and has no engines, generates no internal power (solar panels), and reportedly has no beam weapons. Nonetheless, it has two cooling systems and nearly two thousand square feet of radiators to shed heat.

30) Some discussions of these and other hard science technological challenges can be found at:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php

31) Resume descriptions from House of Steel, the Honorverse Companion (2013).

32) The Honorverse book count, including anthologies, stands at about thirty-five as of this writing, with more to come.

* * *

Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in nuclear engineering and power systems began as a naval officer. Experience after the USN includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).

Warships of Sea and Space:

Form Follows Function Follows Technology, Part II

Jim Beall

NOTE: This is part two of a series by Jim Beall on warships past, present, and future. Part one can be found here.

A previous article (Note 1) traced how the form of ship designs depended not just on the function of the craft, but also on the technology available to the designers. How might a crewed space warship look using only current (or near-term) technology? Perhaps more important, how do we get from the first image below to the second?

Apollo—Artist Drawing

Cobra Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

Source—NASA—Public Domain

Image Courtesy of Baen Books

(Note 2)

Any answer to those question has to address how the design deals with three of the main challenges of space:

1) Vacuum,

2) Radiation, and

3) Freefall (zero-g).

Certain aspects of these challenges remain unsolved. That is why Science Fiction (SF) authors wanting large ships or great capabilities in their stories routinely postulate new inventions and even completely fictional technologies.

It may appear counterintuitive, but interplanetary travel might not be possible if space were not a vacuum. Otherwise, frictional resistance and consequent hull heating would prevent the great velocities needed to reach distant destinations in any practical amount of time. (Note 3) The presence of vacuum, however, poses different and even more formidable problems. The most obvious one is that crewed ships must have constant atmospheric life support which, in turn, requires onboard systems of substantial cost and complexity.

The absence of gas pressure can also adversely affect materials. (Note 4) One important mechanism, called "outgassing," is the release of volatiles by evaporation, sublimation, chemical reactions, and desorption (the reverse of absorption). It occurs most frequently when materials are exposed to reduced pressures or higher temperatures. Two familiar cases are the visible tails of comets as they warm up during their passage through the inner Solar System and, more prosaically, that "new car smell."

Outgassing changes the properties of materials. Once surface layers of oxidation or volatiles have been removed, bare surfaces can "cold weld" together (Note 5), including (formerly) moving parts. The emitted volatiles can redeposit on surfaces causing things like lens blurring, short circuits, human health effects, and even arc flash.

Arc Flash—You Do Not Want This on Your Ship!

Image Courtesy of PCX Holding LLC https://pcxcorp.com/

Plastics and lubricants are prime candidates for use in spacecraft but, unfortunately, both are particularly susceptible to outgassing. Large scale testing programs aimed at reducing the problem have identified some materials less vulnerable to outgassing (such as dry lubricants including graphite), treatments (e.g., coatings) and methods to pre-condition others (like baking components). Various products of those scientific and engineering efforts to address outgassing include enhanced testing techniques, such as Standard ASTM E1559 (Note 6). Successful space programs only become possible after a great many systematic programs that produce such standards. Developing those standards requires major investments in skilled personnel, hardware and facilities (Note 7). As has been said by many over the years, "Space is hard."

Outgassing of materials in vacuum may be a tough problem, but the properties of vacuum itself are behind an even greater challenge: heat.

Spacecraft heat up due to external energy deposition (e.g., solar or energy weapon), internal power generation (or use), and engine operation. Of the three main methods to shed heat, only radiation (emission of thermal energy as electromagnetic waves) is available. Unfortunately, radiating thermal energy is by far the least efficient of the three major mechanisms in removing heat. (Note 8) Space may be cold, but shedding heat to it is slow. (Note 9)

To illustrate the challenge, consider the International Space Station (ISS), which has no significant internal power sources. Instead, it relies on solar panels, which intercept some of the sun's rays, while the Earth itself sometimes shades it more. Nonetheless, the combined inputs of sunlight, internal electrical use, and the humans aboard require significant heat shedding. As stated by NASA:

The Station's outstretched radiators are made of honeycomb aluminum panels. There are 14 panels, each measuring 6 by 10 feet (1.8 by 3 meters), for a total of 1680 square feet (156 square meters) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat exchange area. Compare that majestic radiator with the 3-square-foot grid of coils found in typical home air conditioners and you can begin to appreciate the scope and challenge of doing "routine" things in space. (Note 10)

Operating lights, life support, sensors, and various scientific instruments at distances too far from the sun for solar panels to provide adequate power would require generating power internally. One such craft was proposed for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission, intended to survey the moons of Jupiter.

Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter

Source—NASA—Public Domain

The JIMO spacecraft would have been powered not by solar panels, but by a 200 kW(e) nuclear reactor. Note that this is one fifth of one megawatt; commercial power reactors typically run over one thousand megawatts. As can be seen in the image above, the reactor is hardly more than a tiny dot at the tip, while the rest of the vehicle is mostly radiators. Per NASA, the radiator surface area was to be nearly three times that on the ISS. (Note 11)

The radiator arrays themselves were comprised of state-of-the-art (2005) heat pipes which were a product of a targeted development and testing program. (Note 12) Heat pipes are passive heat transfer devices; this means that no additional power needs to be generated (and resulting heat to be shed) to operate them. Basically, they are closed tubes with one end at higher temperature and the other at a lower one. Internal fluid boils at the hot end, the vapor travels in the center section to the cold end where it condenses, and the fluid then wicks back to the hot end by capillary action along the pipe walls.

Heat Pipe (Cooling Device in Space Is Radiator Array)

Image Courtesy of Radian Thermal Products (Note 13)

A large cylindrical spaceship with its hull completely covered in such radiators could dissipate about three hundred fifty megawatts. (Note 14) There are other radiator concepts, such as the liquid droplet radiator (LDR), which hold the promise (mathematically) of significantly higher heat shedding capacity. However, LDRs would require powered pumps and specific, precise geometries, and have not yet been tested in space. Empirical data are needed to establish certain key parameters, including sublimation rates, mass loss rates, and thermal transfer. Among the questions that need to be answered: which fluids lose the least mass in operation, which geometries are most efficient, and how much heat do droplets simply transfer to other droplets in the streams? (Note 15)

The next challenge of space is radiation, with the two main constituents being solar and galactic cosmic radiation (GCR). (Note 16) The sun's contribution is mainly photonic or electromagnetic in nature (Note 17) and can be adequately shielded against. Even during solar flares, astronauts are relatively safe unless they are outside the ship when they are exposed.

GCR pervades all of space and is comprised of a spectrum of energetic charged atom fragments—ranging in mass from electrons and protons all the way up to uranium nuclei—that originated as part of distant supernovae. Earth's mass and electromagnetic field shield those on the surface from most GCR but, away from the planet, GCR is essentially impossible to completely shield against with current technology. In fact, when the heavier GCR particles impact hull, bulkheads, and other physical objects, they create a shower of charged particles that emerge on the other side of the barrier.

The GCR radiation level experienced by astronauts on the ISS is many times that at sea level on Earth. Away from Earth's shielding mass and magnetic field, the dose increases even more. The actual doses humans will experience during deep space missions remain somewhat unsettled, but the current consensus appears to be that a mission to Mars (including the expected planetary stay time) would likely exceed current (very conservative) NASA limits. (Note 18)

Radiation also affects both electronics and materials. The former requires shielding much like humans do. Many materials experience an increase in outgassing when exposed to radiation. This unfortunate synergy has effects that are significant enough to require testing programs all their own.

The final space challenge to be discussed is the lack of gravity, or zero-g. Humans evolved in Earth's gravitational field and experience several adverse physical reactions to its absence. These include inner ear issues, bone mass loss, edema, vision degradation, blood chemistry changes, and digestion difficulties. Many scientific studies have examined these effects, and mitigating measures have been developed to partially offset some of them, including on-board exercises with weights and tension straps. Perhaps the most significant study involved the one year stay aboard the ISS by one of two identical twins while the other remained on Earth as a scientific control. (Note 19)

Any further treatment of zero-g is beyond the scope of this article except for the following aspect. Absent artificial gravity handwavium or some not-yet-existing drug protocol, any ship intended for extended human occupancy where the crew is expected to operate at high efficiency with quick reflexes may need to include design features to provide at least some gravitylike environment. The method most commonly postulated is a rotational element that substitutes centripetal acceleration for that of gravity. (Note 20) It should be noted, however, that this solution has potential problems and has never been tested. (Note 21)

So, keeping all these challenges and difficulties in mind, what would the first armed, crewed spacecraft look like?

That is a trick question. The answer is the image below:

Salyut 3 (OPS-2) (Note 22)

Salyut 3 was launched on June 24, 1974, and was equipped with a 23 mm cannon. The cannon was fired at least once during the 213 days the craft was in orbit. (Note 23)

Potential, near-term ship-to-ship space weapons would appear to come in three categories:

1) Energy - basically lasers,

2) Bullets - any non-guided projectiles, and

3) Missiles - with guidance systems.

As discussed above, generating and shedding the waste heat associated with powerful beam-style weapons are essentially not feasible with current ship-suitable technology. A notable possible exception would use only pre-stored energy (e.g., battery or accelerated flywheel). That is, the ship would not generate the weapon’s power during the engagement, limiting heat to the firing itself. Reloading would probably not be possible in any tactically useful interval. Quite possibly, the weapons would be one-shots, due to internal component heat failures after firing. Repeating weapons would require a very large ship with lots of power generation.

Bullets would rarely be useful at any sort of range. If used, they would probably be multi-part projectiles that spread during flight. They might be hexagonal rods, solid polyhedrons, or other forms initially tightly packed into one solid. They might be accelerated by electrical power or some sort of energetic event (like cannon firing). Unless they were launched recoilless rifle style (rearward ejection of equal momentum material such as energetic propellant gas), any projectile firing would affect the speed and trajectory of the attacking vessel. Using electrical power would create the same problems as firing energy weapons, such that stored power might be the better choice.

Missiles are the probable weapon of choice for the near future. They need not add heat to the crewed craft, and could be deployed in a great variety of methods and designs.

For example, missiles could be ejected a considerable time before an engagement, and not energize their engines until quite far removed from the launch vehicle. Alternatively, large numbers of missiles could be controlled by a small crewed craft with a similar signature, operating independent of the parent warship. (Note 24)

Missiles might have powerful warheads, shaped warheads to power one-shot laser-type weapons, small warheads used to spread penetrators, or no warheads at all (simply using their high kinetic energy). They could have multiple independently targeting submunitions. In that design, each central missile would generate the approach vector, but actually be more a bus with numerous smaller missiles being shed or dispersed at one or more moments. This approach is conceptually similar to that of the CBU 97 munition. (Note 25)

Turning to defense, perhaps the most important elements involve intelligence. Detecting adversaries while remaining undetected can be a decisive advantage. Beyond simple detection, the more one can learn about an adversary, the greater the advantage. What is their vector? What type of craft? How armed and equipped? Also, is it a true ship, or is it a decoy?

Millions of words have been written on the subject of stealth in space (or inability to achieve it). Summarizing them fully is beyond the scope of this piece, but consider the following two points:

• Voyager 1 is far beyond Pluto but its tiny signal can be detected, but

• Chelyabinsk meteor was not detected until it entered the atmosphere.

In the first case, detectors knew where to look and the craft emitted energy in the form of a signal. In the second, detectors had no specific focus and the object had no energy signature. The significance of emitting detectable energy cannot be overstated.

Any crewed spaceship requires life support, and the waste heat generated needs to be shed. An internal pre-chilled heat sink could delay emissions, but not prevent them. (Note 26) A shroud could be interposed between the radiator and the detectors, but stealth by directional emissions would only be possible if the locations of all the enemy detectors were known. A robotic craft could have a lower energy footprint, but not a zero one unless all onboard hardware were depowered. As was discussed earlier, electric power use creates heat.

The point here is that any spacecraft uses energy during operation and will eventually be detected even if there is no engine operation. Space is big, but (in energy emission terms) it is quiet. The Chelyabinsk meteor remained undetected partly because it came "out of the sun" such that the solar energy emissions helped blind detectors. Space warships may always be detected, but they still gain significant advantages in intelligence when they detect the enemy first. (Note 27)

Another factor is that not all intelligence is equal, and comes in "levels." One simplistic version:

• Detection - basic location but object remains unknown

• Identification - parameters and major characteristics resolved

• Acquisition - information sufficient for targeting

Even if both combatants detect each other, having better intelligence or advancing the intelligence level sooner remains a potentially decisive advantage.

Complicating the matter further is that sensors can be active or passive. Ones that are active emit energy and may produce better intelligence. Their emitter platform, however, can be detected at much greater ranges than it can detect targets. Active sensors also use more energy, but both types use some, increasing the heat signature of the host platform.

One approach to deal with the perils of employing sensors is to deploy them on remote drone craft, or even on stations like asteroids. This is analogous to hunting for submarines by dropping sonobuoys in the water, either to listen passively or to emit active sonar pulses. Separating the sensor signal from the parent ship helps keep the vessel undetected, but each sensor platform would have limited duration.

The next aspect of space warship defense is dealing with enemy weapons.

Unpowered, bullet-type projectiles would be the toughest to detect but the easiest to evade. Small, random course changes would be simplest, but energy blooms from evasive thruster taps would refine target solutions for beam weapons and smarter incoming ordnance. Small vector changes are possible without heat generation, but generally involve ejecting mass (e.g., liquid hydrogen expelled as gas jets), which limits the extent and frequency of this tactic.

Beam weapons might be hardest to evade, but ship rotation would significantly spread (hence dilute) energy deposition. Reflective and ablative materials would reduce risk, as well. Absent immensely powerful weapons, the ranges of likely ship-to-ship engagements would appear to limit the effects as the beam spreads and weakens in intensity with the square of the distance. Meanwhile, the operation of any ship-borne energy weapons create huge targeting signatures on their own craft.

Missiles appear to present the toughest challenge even though their heat signatures while under acceleration would be easy to detect. Individually, they can be defeated (once detected) by counter-missiles, or even bullets. Missiles need not come singly, however. Additionally, as discussed above, missiles might well not need to impact or even get very close to a ship to inflict damage. The variety of possible attack methods further complicates the defense.

A central "bus" type missile would continue towards the target after releasing submunition missiles, with its high heat signature potentially masking the cold ones that it had transported. Those with one-shot laser-style warheads might detonate beyond normal intercept range, or possibly be programmed to detonate immediately prior to being intercepted by hot counter-missiles. Some might detonate early with EMP events to attack the target sensors, with others then lighting off active emitter and others poised to use that detection information. Still others might employ only passive heat sensors and would not activate their engines until very close to the target.

The targeted ship retains the significant advantages of shorter counter-missile flight duration (the missiles could be smaller, simpler, and carried in larger numbers), defense choices (bullets, lasers, counter-missiles), and time (detected enemy launch might enable evasion). Nonetheless, the most effective defense would be to induce the enemy to fire at the wrong target. Decoys good enough for that purpose are probably not possible, however, once an object applies thrust in the battlespace. Detection algorithms would calculate mass by comparing the vector change and the thrust energy, thus separating out ship from lighter decoy. One tactic might be to eject the crewed portion of a larger craft early in the engagement, supplement its onboard AIs remotely, with the intent to rejoin or proceed independently.

Perhaps the major conclusion to be drawn from all of the above is that space battles are complicated, and they might well be decided long before the weapons impact.

Above was presented the first deployed armed space vessel, a product of the former Soviet Union. What would the first feasible space warship design by one of the armed forces of the United States look like?

This is another trick question. The answer is the image below:

U.S. Air Force Orbital Battleship

Image Courtesy of William-Black (Note 28)

The Orion design would use nuclear shaped-charge bombs to push it. Most of the Project Orion (which ran from 1958 to 1965) efforts were associated with the Engineering sections, but there was also a small "Space Warfare Analysis" team comprised of three USAF junior officers (Note 29). Their efforts caught the attention of the most senior officers and resulted in the USAF proposing that Orion-style craft be fully funded—included preliminary designs such as the one in the image above—during the development of the 1962 Air Force Space Program. (Note 30)

Unfortunately for space exploration, the Orion projects were all cancelled (for one thing, the atmospheric detonations would conflict with the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). That approach to ship design remains, however, the most feasible way to lift great mass from the Earth's surface into space, and then achieve high speed with large payloads anywhere within the Solar System. (Note 31) Orion remains a favorite of various space-interested on-line communities. There are many websites that feature Orion-type designs. (Note 32) The author's favorite is a video depicting how a battle between squadrons of Orion-class ships might play out in deep space! (Note 33)

Orion ships would have enough mass (over twenty times that of the entire ISS), lift, and endurance to be mission-flexible fighting craft, adaptable to many roles. Other types of space warships would probably need to be more specialized and "reverse engineered" from a designated mission. To have both endurance and tactical flexibility, they would need more fuel than they can likely carry into orbit.

Orions also launched in their mission configuration. Absent such immense mass and associated propulsion energy releases, optimum mission geometries in the vacuum of space would not be compatible with escape velocity through the atmosphere. For example, the JIMO probe would have launched in the "Stowed Spaceship" configuration (the image in the corner of the JIMO figure presented above). Then, resembling an insect emerging from its chrysalis, it would have unfolded origamilike into the mission configuration. A crewed space warship with enough ruggedness to survive acceleration and other battle stresses seems an unlikely candidate for that approach.

If Orions are ruled out, the above factors suggest (to this author) that any near-term deep-space warship would likely be built or assembled in space, or at a base on the smallest gravity well available: the Moon. If computer advances—including security—permitted, the craft would not be crewed. If humans were deemed required, the crew would be as few as practicable, consistent with the mission. The craft would have as many semi-autonomous, detachable sub-units as possible, each capable of executing various portions of the mission. These would include sensor platforms, missiles, anti-missile defenses, communication units, and any others that might require energy emission to operate. The vessel would depart with a pre-chilled heat sink and endeavor to keep it cold until arriving at the battlespace. At that time, the warship would minimize heat generation and shed it to the heat sink. The intent would be to detect the enemy first and gain actionable intelligence sooner.

In summary, the answer to the questions posed in this article's lead paragraph is to build Orions. If a deadly threat were detected inbound to our Solar System, whether it be elephant-looking aliens (Note 34) or a dinosaur-killer object, Orion-style ships would be the only craft of sufficient power and range to get significant mass out into space to deal with the threat well beyond Earth orbit. Some of the designs even resemble the ones in that second image at the start of this article!

Notes

1) See: https://www.baen.com/warships

2) Apollo 8 was the first crewed craft to leave Earth's orbit and travel to another destination: the Moon. The vehicle that actually arrived at the Moon for the landing Mission (Apollo 11) consisted of the command module, the service module, and the lunar lander module (the process or rotating and reconnecting the lunar landing module is shown in progress in the drawing).

3) Air resistance requires higher thrust to attain any speed and constant thrust to maintain it, raising fuel requirements enormously. Any gas pressure would also impose a maximum speed due to hull heating. For example, spacecraft atmospheric reentry burn up concerns are significant.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdO151wNPkI

4) Some metal surfaces can benefit from vacuum (greater fatigue cycle life) due to evaporation of surface oxygen that could otherwise move into cracks and promote crack growth. These potentially beneficial aspects are, unfortunately, both few and minor compared to the many negative ones.

5) Non-U.S. scientific bodies (e.g., European laboratories) also use the terms "adhesion" or "stiction."

6) See: https://www.astm.org/Standards/E1559.htm

7) One example of the vast investments required was what was built to test full scale rocket engines operating at full thrust in a vacuum. See the two links below:

http://www.nimr.org/systems/rockets/72-001.htm

https://history.nasa.gov/monograph45.pdf

8) The other two major methods to transfer heat—convection and conduction—require direct contact with other matter. Astronauts do not have enough surface area to radiate away their body heat, so their suits use a fourth method during spacewalks: sublimation. Their suits evaporate one pound of water every hour they space-walk and release it to space. The constant loss of mass makes this method impractical on any larger scale. Additionally, it costs about $10,000 to lift each pound up to Earth orbit.

9) Which is why vacuum thermoses are so effective in keeping hot contents hot, and cold contents cold. For those wishing more mathematical treatments, the terms "black body radiation," Planck's Law," and "Stefan–Boltzmann's Law" are excellent research entry points.

10) From, "Staying Cool on the ISS," at NASA.gov.

11) Per NASA, JIMO was to have a 200 kW(e) reactor and 422 square meters of radiators (compared with 156 square meters of the ISS). This is roughly 2000 square meters of radiators per megawatt.

12) The heat pipe concept was proposed by several individuals over the years but the modern version was theorized (and patent filed in 1963) by George Grover at Los Alamos Laboratories, who noted that it would be useful in space applications. NASA developed the technology for satellites, where its success in zero-g led to expanded use. Heat pipes are ubiquitous today, especially in computers and smart phones.

13) A great variety of heat pipes and other thermal solution products can be found at:

https://www.radianheatsinks.com/

14) A cylinder 1000 meters long and 200 meters in diameter has a surface area of about 700,000 square meters. Dividing total surface area by 2000 meters per megawatt yields 350 megawatts-electric. Note that this assumes waste heat can be moved hundreds of meters to the radiators without generating additional heat; that the reactor (or other power source) operates at about the JIMO design efficiency (twenty per cent); and that heat pipes can be built to function over lengths far beyond the current limit of a few meters. It's these sorts of numbers that drive SF writers wanting stories populated by ships with gigawatt power plants and terawatt lasers (let alone petawatt!) to handwavium.

15) It should be noted that any droplets that “escaped” would become potential micro-meteors, with all those attendant risks.

16) A third source of radiation emanates from Earth's Van Allen Belt, but this would not apply to craft while operating either in low orbit or sufficiently away from the planet.

17) During relatively rare solar coronal mass ejection events, protons can be swept up by the solar flare and accelerated out into space, thus adding significantly to dose.

18) Radiation levels vary by solar activity, and solar fluence changes cause the opposite change in GCR levels! That is, a Solar Minimum will decrease radiation levels from the sun, but that very drop in the solar wind will allow greater GCR levels. This means space missions have to consult the weather forecast—space weather! Shielding geometries and thicknesses are still being explored and tested, including multiple thin layers (sandwich style) of different materials. Space is not only hard, it's also complicated!

19) For more information, see the two links below:

https://www.nasa.gov/hrp

https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study

20) Perhaps the most famous examples of substituting rotation for gravity are the station and ship in the classic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another approach might be constant, low thrust such as an ion engine might provide. This might be sufficient, but also remains untested and also would seem impractical for a warship trying to avoid detection.

21) For a good discussion of this and other related issues, see the following article by neuroscientist Rob Hampson (writing under the pen name "Tedd Roberts"):

https://www.baen.com/translunarlab

22) The Salyut 3 image appears to be a colorized drawing similar to the one that can be found on the Wikipedia site, in Public Domain. The same image was once credited to a former USSR facility that replied to the author's inquiries that they have no knowledge of the image.

23) One of the cosmonauts discussed his experiences while he had been aboard in the video below. The gun firing portion begins at about 4:12.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=SLsNDdS4ie0

An article devoted entirely to the gun itself:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18187/here-is-the-soviet-unions-secret-space-cannon/

24) The single-crew "pinnace" controlling a missile swarm approach is used extensively in the excellent Praxis series, by Walter Jon Williams.

25) The video at the following link depicts the CBU 97 and also shows the munition being field tested:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ioe20

26) A case can be made to include a double-walled hull in the design, and to fill it with heat sink material, possibly an ice-water slurry. It might also add to radiation shielding.

27) Asteroid 2017 OO1—maybe twice or three times the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor—was not detected until about three days after it passed within about seventy-thousand miles of Earth. No energy emissions again, but it was detected. It simply took longer, but any delay could be critical in a space battle.

28) William-Black is the on-line name used by a very talented graphics art professional with a long interest in the Orion project. His work, including many more Orion images, can be found in the galleries at:

https://www.deviantart.com/william-black

In particular, the author suggests these images:

https://www.deviantart.com/william-black/art/USAF-12-Meter-Orion-Bomber-Diagram-782615796

29) Lieutenant Ron Prater and Captains Don Mixon and Fred Gorschboth.

30) For more on this, see the following article by Dr. Brent Ziarnick and Peter Garrison:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2714/1

Dr. Ziarnick also gave a broader presentation on this subject at the science-focused Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW)—attended by the author. All TVIW materials and presentations can be accessed through the main website here:

https://tviw.us/

Dr. Ziarnick's presentation can be viewed in its entirety here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYo7nfwEXw

31) The Air Force Office of Scientific Research symposiums on "Advanced Propulsion Concepts" explore various potential space systems. The Fourth Symposium (April 1965) considered the Orion-style approach in detail, including many technical areas and potential missions. See:

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/space/AD0385959.pdf

32) Two such links:

http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/ev2n2.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtYisD7RqWk

33) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXeUkrlxQ98

34) Footfall, by Larry Niven

* * *

This is part two of a series by Jim Beall on warships past, present, and future. Part one can be found here. Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in nuclear engineering and power systems began as a naval officer. Experience after the USN includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).

Do You Believe in the Singularity?

Dr. Robert E. Hampson

The singularity. Many Science Fiction writers and futurists postulate a future when humans have assisted their own evolution with genetic engineering, cybernetics, and prosthetics such that they are no longer human. This definition for human singularity is often (mis)attributed to inventor Ray Kurzweil, a proponent of technological advancement that can—even will—result in fundamental transformation to something so different that those creatures would no longer be recognizable to us mere primates as being human.

An SF convention panel asked the question: "Do you believe in the singularity?" It shocked the panel that a neuroscientist and SF writer, a person who works on developing the means for humans to transcend physical disease and limitations, would answer "No." So perhaps it would be more appropriate to title this essay: "Why I don't believe in the Singularity." There are many answers—the first involves the very definition of singularity from both the biological and the classical physics points of view. From there, the reasons progress from an in-depth understanding of the human brain and body to end up with discussions of what it means to be human. These are discussions that take center stage in both my fiction and nonfiction writing, and I am at heart an optimist (and human-centrist), so I was delighted when Baen Books invited me to take the time to explain my fundamental faith in humans and why I think that humans will inherit the stars.

Definition

Mathematics:

The simplest explanation of singularity comes from mathematics, as illustrated by the image below:

This graph shows the results of "dividing by x" where every possible value of x results in a valid outcome except for when x=0. As values of x approach 0, y approaches infinity. When x=0, y cannot be calculated or defined. By some definitions, the result is infinity, but in practicality, the result is unknown and undefined—a singularity.

Note that reading the graph from left-to-right or right-to-left, there is a discontinuity at x=0; i.e., it is not possible to graph a continuous function along the horizontal axis. Thus, using the mathematical analogy, a human singularity could be a discontinuity in the evolution of the human brain or body, beyond which it is not possible to extrapolate the new form from what has come before.

There's more to the notion of human singularity than this, but we'll move on to another definition, first.

Physics:

The physics definition of a singularity is quite similar to that of mathematics—namely, a point where physical observation breaks down, as illustrated by the classical space-time graph of a black hole:

There are many aspects of cosmology and physics that represent the singularity of a black hole. For example, there is the event horizon which delineates the region in which the escape velocity for photons exceeds the speed of light; hence, an electromagnetic singularity is formed. A second type is that of gravity, where the singularity exists in the zone where gravity is so intense that no physical matter can survive. Finally, there is the space-time singularity where the curvature of space is such that the physical constants of "flat" space simply do not apply.

In all of these cases, the singularity consists of a point that cannot be observed, measured or described using the physics that exists outside the singularity. We have no idea what exists on the "other side" of a singularity.

Biology:

Physiological and genetic references to singularity generally involve humans "assisting the evolution of the human form via biological engineering, prosthetics, cybernetics, and human-machine integration such that the resulting creature is no longer recognizable as human.” However, the biological model of singularity is typically applied to intelligence and follows the prediction of British (later American) mathematician I.J. Good, who predicted what he termed an "intelligence explosion" (Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, 1965). The "explosion" results when a highly intelligent "agent" (i.e., computer) designs even more sophisticated agents with the potential to far surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Like the mathematical and physical singularity, the singularity consists of that inflection point beyond which mere human intelligence cannot even conceive of the resulting artificial intelligence.

Popular Usage

Even though the concept of a biological, nay human, singularity is attributed to Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, the idea is much older. John von Neumann was the first to use the term "technological singularity" to rapid and ever-accelerating technological development. SF author Vernor Vinge, heavily influenced by von Neumann and Good wrote in a 1983 Omni op-ed of "an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole." While he did not explicitly call it a technological singularity, he later did so in the introduction to his short story "The Whirligig of Time" [Threats and Other Promises, Baen, 1988]: "When we raise our own intelligence and that of our creations, we are no longer in a world of human-sized characters. At that point, we have fallen into a technological ‘black hole,’ a technological singularity."

To understand this manifestation of the term singularity, imagine standing on the right side of the y=1÷x graph above:

As you look at the upward curve of the plot and continue to look upward, it becomes an infinite wall that cannot be scaled, crossed or penetrated. Whatever is on the other side cannot be seen or even imagined. To futurists like Kurzweil, Vinge or Good, the human singularity is a point at which change is so rapid, faster than the ability to comprehend that there even is change, that it might as well be a wall separating the merely "human" Homo sapiens sapiens from our replacement H. sap. superior.

While some might argue that any evolutionary improvement of the human body could contribute to some form of singularity, both Good and Vinge say that the critical ingredient is the development of super- or ultra-human intelligence. It should also be noted that Vinge's interest in the singularity is quite firmly anchored in SF, given that his primary concern was the impossibility for a writer to generate convincing post-singularity human characters since it was not possible to understand any of the characteristics that his audiences could comprehend.

In that case, we might as well treat post-singularity humans as aliens.

Transhumanism

The concept of the transhuman or superhuman is also not a new one. It's also a complicated history and usage with many negative connotations such as eugenics, so I'll not delve into the full derivation of the term(s) here. Instead, let's look at general cases and how they are used in SF. Essentially a transhuman is one that has been "improved" by pharmacological, cybernetic and genetic means to have capabilities far in excess of the average human. One of the most influential books for my own career was Cyborg by Martin Caidin. This novel, from which the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was derived, popularized the idea of prosthetic limbs that not only restored human abilities but added superhuman speed, strength, and agility. David Weber's popular heroine Honor Harrington is a superhuman, with longevity treatment that keeps her young, improved durability, and an genetically manipulated metabolism that allows her to eat what she wants and maintain fitness without exercise! John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion shows us a human who was already quite smart, then modified his brain chemistry to give himself an intellect that is so far advanced that mere humans seem little more than animals.

How much of this is real, and how much merely fiction? Is there a possibility of creating or evolving humans into a superhuman state? An interesting dichotomy between Caidin’s Cyborg and the Six Million Dollar Man was that Caidin proposed the "bionic" legs and arms, but not the bionic eye (or ear from The Bionic Woman). In this, Caidin was mostly correct in that as of 2019 there are effective prosthetic limbs for legs, arms, and hands, but not so much for vision and hearing (at least in the manner shown on TV). Within the last five years, we’ve seen incredible advances in brain-controlled upper limb prosthetics (see my Baen Free Nonfiction article “Fixing Broken Memory.” The eye and ear prosthetics are still in very early days. On the other hand, we also have drugs that facilitate focus and cognitive ability, such as Provigil and aniracetam.

The problem is that none of these items, prosthetic or pharmacological, provides the superhuman ability proposed by the transhuman and singularity enthusiasts. Lower limb prosthetics are still primarily passive, consisting mainly of springs and clockwork with no tactile sensation, no balance feedback, and limited ability to adapt to changing terrain. Upper limb prosthetics are limited by weight, and the tactile sensation is still under development. Despite the promises of the movie and TV show Limitless, the cognitive enhancing drug aniracetam has so many side effects and contraindications, that its use is severely limited, and can even result in death or brain damage.

The issues listed above don't address genetic engineering. A recent news article cited the work by a Chinese researcher to gene-edit embryos intended for in-vitro fertilization treatments here. The announcement was immediately greeted with uproar, followed by condemnation of the researcher, sanctions against his original U.S. university, and even colleagues under suspicion of providing U.S. Government-funded intellectual property to the experiment. Society as a whole might be willing to tolerate minor edits to fix a congenital disability, but the study under fire edited a disease resistance trait that had no immediate benefit to the children born from the procedure. Transhumanism has a long, hard path to climb.

Being Human

To me, there are several issues with singularity and transhuman concepts. The first is that somehow as we progress with bionics, pharmacology and gene editing, that we will somehow lose what it means to be human. As I usually inform people in talks about my research, it is our memories that provide an essential feeling of “self.” As long as we have memories of being human, we are human. Hence, as long as there is still a human core to the individual who has been patched up, rebuilt, cured and enhanced, the singularity has not yet occurred since we can always trace the path from unaugmented to augmented human.

Likewise, as we move our human civilization off of Earth to other planets and even star systems, we face the questions of whether to transform our environment to suit humans (at significant monetary and material cost and difficulty) or to change ourselves (at high societal cost) to fit the situations we encounter. If I may be permitted a book plug, these are precisely the questions asked in the anthology Stellaris: People of the Stars, a September 2019 Baen book. In that volume, co-editor Les Johnson and I collected stories from authors who explore themes of what it means to be human. The stories range from Sarah A. Hoyt's "Burn the Boats" in which colonists may be giving up their humanity to survive, to Brent M. Roeder's "Pageant of Humanity" which presents a unique view on deciding just who is, and who is not, human.

To make the jump to gene-tailored humans will require scientists, ethics boards, and the rest of society to work hand-in-hand to decide what and how much gene editing will be allowed. As with the recent news case, some commentary suggests that fixing defects is fine, but aside from that, gene editing humans should be forbidden. That will likely change in the future, but we don't know when. On the other hand, when it does, we will definitely face the prospect of a new human subspecies (or even species), but it will not take the form of the singularity as proposed by Kurzweil, Good, and Vinge, but as a speciation event such as has occurred countless times throughout the history of life on Earth.

Artificial Intelligence

What of the underlying fear of the futurists that humanity will be supplanted by a superintelligence, either machine or biological? Tech billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk is on record as stating that many of his technological endeavors arise from the concern that artificial intelligence could supplant humans. Kurzweil proposed that as computers become more complicated (100 million processing elements = one human brain in his writings), artificial intelligence could arise, and take a hand in its own development and enhancement. AI developing the next generation AI, as described by Vinge, would create a superintelligence that meets the definitions of singularity, with a rate of change that approaches infinite and beyond the understanding of mere human intelligence.

There are several problems with the concepts of AI as superintelligence . . . at least as compared to the current understanding of the human brain. Kurzweil's estimate was too low by at least six orders of magnitude. His assessment of the number of neurons was too small by three orders of magnitude; the human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons. Since computer scientists like to compare processors to neurons, it’s not unreasonable to predict computers having 100 billion processing elements given current technological trends.

Unfortunately, single neurons are not the basic processing unit of the brain. Depending on an individual neuroscientist's bias toward their field of study, researchers consider either the synapse (between neurons) or the neurotransmitter/receptor pairings in a synapse, as the primary processing unit of the brain. There are typically thousands of synapses per neurons and can be hundreds to thousands of neurotransmitter packets released into a synapse to bind with the receptor proteins. This yields from 100 trillion to 100 quadrillion processing elements if a computer is intended to mimic the capability of a human brain. And if it is matter of numbers.

But what about AI now? We have seen marvelous claims of AI capabilities from Google’s search engines to Siri’s speech recognition. Surely we have at least a rudimentary synthetically generated intelligence serving us now? (Although to be honest, I somewhat prefer Vonda McIntyre’s term “Artificial Stupid.”)

Not really.

At the DARPA60 conference last September (2018), there was much talk about the current state of AI. What we currently have is certainly artificial—in the form of computer programs which process information—but it is far from intelligence. In an article in Psychology Today (Nov 28, 2018), Dr. Neel Burton provides a dictionary definition: "the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct." (Collins English Dictionary) and his definition of basic intelligence “. . . the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to respond to environmental pressures.”

The unfortunate limitation of Dr. Burton’s definition is that by “responding to environmental pressures,” even plants and animals show traits of intelligence. Moreover, the well-documented difficulties of elderly dementia patients in adapting to altered circumstances would have us conclude that such individuals are not intelligent.

Burton's article progresses from an inadequate definition of intelligence and into a degenerating criticism of IQ tests and the futility of equating intelligence with reason and analysis. However, what I feel we can take away from the article is the second dictionary definition he cites: “. . . the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge." (Macmillan Dictionary). From these concepts we can perhaps create our criteria for intelligence:

(1) detect and react to the environment (i.e. ". . . respond to environmental pressures . . ."),

(2) adapt to (or learn from) changes (i.e. ". . . gain and use knowledge . . ."),

(3) to reason, think about or understand the knowledge gained (i.e. “. . . the ability to understand and think about things”).

I chose three criteria to correspond to what the speakers at DARPA60 referred to as the three phases of AI development. Phase I was getting computers to interact with humans and look up information. Essential computer programming, look-up tables, expert systems, and input-output have all been part of AI Phase I. Phase I is all around us, from Google searches to the dreaded “press one for sales, two for customer service” phone trees used by businesses.

We are currently in the maturation part of Phase II, with speech recognition, face (and image) recognition, and "learning systems" that optimize their interpretation and retrieval systems. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana require minimal voice training and can interpret commands and retrieve information. Facial recognition can secure your computer, tablet or phone, and image processing software performs multiple functions ranging from reconnaissance to detecting copyright infringement. These interfaces give the illusion of AI, but at heart, the underlying programs are still expert systems equipped with a comprehensive list of criteria in lookup tables utilized to complete an automated function. Note how closely this compares to the exclusionary criterion in the Collins English Dictionary ". . . instead of doing things automatically or by instinct . . ." Current generation AI systems return the same result when presented with the same input. Oh, the programmers may get smart and include functions that point to a limited number of "random" responses, but if you could see the underlying program code and data, you would see the same result every time.

We are poised at the cusp of Phase III AI, generating programs that at least give the appearance of thinking or reasoning abilities. The next push in AI development is to combine the data retrieval of Phase I with the interfaces of Phase II and the ability to truly learn and interpret. The limitation so far has been that such programs still show evidence of automation: witness the "Deep Dream" photo pattern analysis AI from Google which seems obsessed with finding eyes and puppy-dog noses in every picture, or the Google and Facebook algorithm that keeps showing you ads for items you've already bought.

We're just not there yet, and even when we do get a real synthetic intelligence, it will still be a long way from humanlike. For one, there's the problem of duplicating the human brain with its quadrillions of processing elements, and then there's the issue of reproducing the human growth and learning experience which shapes our experience and reasoning.

I think AI is possible, but I hesitate to say what form it will take. I love the approaches taken in several recent books: In Ellay (formerly City of Angels) by Todd McCaffrey, nascent AI starts in an infantlike state and learns rapidly. Like a child, the titular AI imprints on a person. Fortunately, it's a genuinely good person, and the AI develops an altruistic streak and forms a partnership with several humans. In Today I am Carey, Martin Shoemaker posits AI as caretaker, who mourns the brief lifespans of his human companions. I think AI will be what we, as humans, make it; personally, I hope they are friends, rather than slaves or overlords!

Do You Believe?

Thus, it all comes down to what you or I believe about the singularity. My position is that as long as there is a direct trace of humanity, there is no singularity. From a biological point of view, it is possible to change the human body so that it no longer resembles what we know as human. However, as long as the genetics retain the same basic codes and the result can interbreed with humans, they are human. Otherwise, they are a different species, which is not a singularity at all.

Likewise, enhancing human forms with prosthetics and cybernetics still retains essential biology up to the point where scientists learn to download human intelligence into computers. Computers could potentially be inhabited by naturally derived or synthetically derived intelligence; however, as long as that intelligence has a memory of a human body, we would still consider it human. In contrast, synthetic or artificial intelligence is a new species. Once we make that jump, the general concept of singularity does not apply. The referenced intelligence was never human in the first place, and may never be understood by humans, making the definition of "rate of change beyond understanding" a moot point.

What about enhancing human intelligence? Certainly, all this talk about neural prosthetics will result in enhancements? If you talk to researchers in the field, you hear a familiar refrain: "We're not doing that, we're working on restoring lost function." It's true, as one of "those researchers" I can reiterate that our goal is fixing what's broken. We're concentrating on that first, and dreams of enhancement are just that . . . the ideas of people other than us.

Frankly, most neuroscientists don’t think we can enhance human cognitive abilities too much past the current state. We can allow a person to stay alert and pay closer attention (with amphetamines and Provigil), remember better (with memantine and aniracetam), and work a little bit faster (again, aniracetam and other nootropic drugs). Still, all of those functions add up to abilities shown by some of the more extreme talents in human history. Can we make everyone a Hawking, Nash, Mozart, Picasso, etc.? We might enhance the ability, but the human mind remains shaped by experience and environmental factors. Furthermore, the old trope "we only use 10 percent of our brain [power]" is false. Human brains are 100 percent active all the time. The activity is not always directed to the functions we term "thought" or "intelligence," and when it is, it still only makes up a small portion of the total neural activity at any given time.

So no, I don’t believe in the singularity—at least not the human/biological one. Not in the sense of humans changing so rapidly that we can no longer detect, let alone keep track of the changes. I also believe that the continuity of what we know as “human” will be retained for as long as possible, again defeating the popular concept of the singularity in producing such a change that the subject no longer considers themselves human.

When it comes to downloaded human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, the jury is still out. I know that the ability to store and mimic the human brain is still many iterations away. What is popularly called AI is well within the realm of computer programming and does not truly think for itself. However, without explicitly duplicating the environment and experience of a growing human, the resulting creation is not going to be human intelligence. Perhaps if we grow it, we’ll approach something humanlike. Otherwise, it is a separate species, and not a singularity at all.

I do believe that rapid changes are on the horizon. Some of the concepts of singularity may well come true, and I’ve just “rules lawyered” them away by quibbling over definitions. Still, my argument boils down to this: I believe in humanity, and think that we will remain human as long as we (and others) believe that we are human.

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Scientist, author, educator Dr. Robert E. Hampson turns science fiction into science. He advises SF/F writers, game developers and TV writers on neuroscience among many other scientific matters. In his day job, Hampson’s research team developed the first prosthetic for human memory using the brain's native neural codes. Hampson and fellow Baen author and space scientist Les Johnson are the editors of anthology Stellaris: People of the Stars (Baen, Sept. 2019), a look at the physiological, social and technological changes that will be wrought on human beings as we explore and colonize space. He is a member of the futurism think-tank SIGMA, and the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a service of the National Academies of Science. For more information, including links to prior Baen Free Nonfiction, see Hampson’s website here.

As Big as Space Itself:

Building Our Own Space Megastructures—and Searching for Them as Galactic Signatures of Alien Civilizations

Les Johnson

In the context of deep space and deep time, humans are newcomers. Astronomers estimate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old with humans arriving on the scene in only that last 200,000 years. For perspective, as a species, we've only been around for about 0.001% of the time since the universe began. If the age of the universe were one 24-hour Earth day, then humans would have only been around in the last second. We are a blip. To add another layer of humility, consider the diameter of the known universe: about 93 billion light years. To consider this vastness, we again need to put in context with distances we somewhat understand. The Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun and astronomers call this distance 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). The number of AU's in one light year and the number of inches in one mile are almost the same: 1 light year is ~63,000 AU's and 1 mile contains ~63,000 inches. If we scale 1 AU to be 1 inch, then 1 light year equals 1 mile. This means that Alpha Centauri is "only" about four miles away and the diameter of the universe is then "only" 93 billion miles, each "inch" of which is really 93 million miles! We are again only a blip.

We are only now beginning our first, tentative exploration of space as we seek to stretch our civilization beyond the confines of the planet that gave us birth. Though we are newly on the scene, we are already thinking of how to create and inhabit large structures in space. The International Space Station (ISS), currently circling the globe every ninety minutes, is the size of a football field—and we built it using technology from the 1970s (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The International Space Station, our first step toward space megastructures? (Image courtesy of NASA.)

In the next several decades, we will have the technology to build space sails with deployed areas the size of city blocks, space solar power stations that make the ISS look like a toy, and space elevators thousands of kilometers long to carry people and cargo to and from the surface of the Moon, Earth, or Mars. If we can do this, then what might an alien civilization that is thousands or tens of thousands of years older than ours be capable of constructing? With the resources of a complete solar system at their disposal, these hypothetical stellar engineers might be capable of disassembling asteroids and small planets to make structures many times their size—literally making new worlds for themselves among the stars.

These ideas have been explored in both speculative science and science fiction. From Clarke’s space elevator to Dyson spheres and ringworlds, intriguing possibilities abound. And, thanks to recent data from the Kepler Space Telescope, from which thousands of possible extrasolar planets have already been discovered, it is possible that reality is catching up with the fiction.

Analysis of data from one of the stars in the Kepler data set has led to intriguing speculation regarding "Tabby's Star." Named after one of the astronomers in the Kepler data analysis teams, Tabetha Boyajian, Tabby’s Star shows intriguing periodic dips in its luminosity that cannot be neatly explained as a naturally occurring phenomenon. One interpretation is that Kepler detected a Dyson sphere. Granted, a natural explanation is far more likely to emerge than one requiring intelligent aliens, but it is nonetheless an intriguing possibility.

Are space megastructures possible? Can humans eventually build them? And are we now detecting the first megastructures built by aliens? Let’s explore the possibilities in more detail.

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The International Space Station (ISS) is our first very large structure in space. A stunning 356 feet in length and weighing 450 tons, the ISS was designed, developed, built and launched into space by a consortium of nations including the USA, Russia, Japan, Canada, and member states of the European Space Agency (ESA). It required more than forty launches over thirteen years and has been continuously inhabited since 2000. The ISS is a child’s toy when compared with what today’s generation of spacecraft systems designers think is possible.

Since the ISS’s initial conception in the mid-to-late 1980s, space technologies have continued to advance—getting lighter weight, more robust, and more compact. Combine these innovations with cell phones (which are really full-blown computers masquerading as telephones), 3D printing, and advanced, lightweight materials, and you have a recipe for building structures in space that are many times larger than the ISS and of comparable or lighter weight. That last part is significant because the key cost of flying anything in space is the launch cost from Earth. Since launch costs are largely based on weight, if you reduce the weight of a payload, then you may reduce the cost of getting it into space.

Add another innovation into the mix—lightweight, thin-film solar cells—and you can now consider building, packaging and launching into space large area solar panels for collecting sunlight, converting into electricity, and beaming to the Earth by either a laser or microwave transmitter (Figure 2). A network of such space solar power stations could conceivably replace much of the terrestrial power generation facilities (coal, natural gas, or nuclear) and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. China and Japan have plans to build and test such systems in the next few years and their commercialization will likely soon follow.

Figure 2. Space solar power stations may be built and launched into space within the next decade, providing abundant power for Earth and, perhaps, a growing near-Earth space infrastructure. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

Now that we have relatively inexpensive space launch, thanks to companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the ability to generate abundant electrical power in space using space solar power stations, we have all the ingredients we need to begin industrializing near-Earth space.

What’s next? Thanks to advances in materials science and the discovery of strong, lightweight materials like graphene, we can now take the next logical step toward building space elevators and kilometer-scale solar sails or sail-derived structures. (For more information about graphene, see the Baen essay, “Graphene: Not Just Another Miracle Material.”)

Many science fiction readers are familiar with the concept of a space elevator thanks to the pioneering novels that contain them such as The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke and Ian Douglas’ Star Carrier series. The basic idea is simple: build a cable from the surface of the Earth, anchored somewhere along the Earth’s equator, and extend it upward into space to beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit, GEO (~22,000 miles), where it is counterbalanced by a large mass object like a small asteroid, and voila! You have an elevator (Figure 3) that can take you and your spacecraft from the surface of the Earth to just beyond GEO where the additional energy required to send you to nearly anywhere in the solar system is negligible (when compared to the energy required to use a rocket to get from the surface of the Earth to the same point in space). The marginal cost of getting from the surface of the Earth to space would be roughly the cost of the electricity to run the elevator. Dirt cheap access to space.

Until recently, the biggest stumbling block to building a space elevator on Earth was the material needed. Engineers simply didn’t have the recipe for building long cables that were strong enough to do the job. Then along came graphene—a 2D form of carbon that is one of the strongest materials yet discovered. In other words, the material we need to build a space elevator now exists. (Though to be accurate, the engineering does not yet exist. For one, we can only now make graphene sheets that are millimeters to centimeters in length; we need kilometer length cables. And then there’s the problem of constructing it—for instance, do you build up from the ground, or top down from space?)

Figure 3. Artist concept of an elevator to space. Building a structure >22,000 miles long would be a true megastructure. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The Japanese flew a 2000 square foot solar sail to Venus in 2010. (A solar sail is a lightweight, thin gossamer structure that reflects solar photons, light, to achieve thrust for a spacecraft just like an earthly wind-powered sail reflects air to propel a boat.) Within the next two years, NASA will fly the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout which uses a sail four times larger than the Japanese sail. Thanks to these pioneering missions, it is now possible to build sails that have areas larger than two football fields. Within the next few decades, and using materials readily available today, it is conceivable we will be able to build and launch solar sails larger than a city block, propelling spacecraft across the solar system quickly and efficiently.

And these sails may be useful for more than just propulsion. A flotilla of such sails could be placed between the Earth and the Sun to reduce the amount of incident energy reaching the Earth and mitigate the effects of climate change. The idea has been explored in detail by many research teams. One such concept, called Dyson Dots, calls for no less than 270,000 square miles of sail area to offset the effects of the carbon dioxide trapping heat in our atmosphere. (Dyson Dots are named in honor of the scientist, Freeman Dyson, whose name is now inextricably tied to a concept he created that will be discussed later in this article—Dyson Spheres.)

Space elevators. Giant space stations and solar power generation systems. Fleets of solar sail propelled cargo ships crisscrossing the solar system. Dyson Dots protecting the planet until we become a carbon neutral civilization. All these things are now within our technological grasp.

But what about the future? Or the present for some hypothetical alien civilization that has been around longer than we? What large structures might we one day create or observe that someone else has already accomplished?

To answer this question, it would be useful to consider a metric for a civilization’s capability to manipulate its environment. Fortunately, just such metrics were devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev and they are broken into three categories or types:

• Civilizations that use and/or store all the energy available on their planet. We would achieve this status if we can readily collect and use all the Earth-incident solar energy, totally approximately 10^17 Watts (100,000,000,000,000,000 Watts). For comparison, the current estimated global energy use is about 10^12 Watts. We are 100,000 times short of being a Type I civilization. (Drat!)

• Civilizations that use the total energy output of their star. Previously in this article was discussed a swarm of Dyson Dots measuring 270,000 square miles. These dots would be capable of capturing approximately 10^15 Watts. If you can imagine expanding the size of the “dots” until they form a complete spherical shell around the sun, capturing all its radiated power (approximately 10^26 Watts), you would have a Dyson Sphere. (This was original conceptual idea attributed to Freeman Dyson: Dyson Dots were derivatively named.)

• Civilizations that control all the energy on the scale of the galaxy, approximately 10^37 Watts.

Type I and II civilizations are no strangers to readers of science fiction. Consider Larry Niven’s Ringworld in which he envisioned a partial Dyson Sphere consisting of giant ring (like a wedding ring) surrounding a star at approximately the same distance as the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Niven’s ringworld is slowly spinning to provide simulated gravity and approximately one million miles wide—making it a positively huge habitat for its inhabitants with a surface area far larger than available on Earth. Yes, there may be reasons Niven’s ringworld as originally conceived is unstable, but any civilization capable of building such a structure will undoubtedly have the ability to build in a to-be-developed technology to stabilize it. We can’t invoke Type I status in one technology area and not assume comparable capabilities in others.

More recently, Niven collaborated with Gregory Benford on a series of books describing a civilization somewhere beyond Type I and on its way to Type II wherein the aliens create a giant bowl around a portion of their star (giant in this case means a surface area >1 million Earths!) and use it to propel themselves, and their star, through space. The authors describe how their solar system sized propulsion system works in the afterword of Bowl of Heaven:

“Our bowl is a shell more than a hundred million miles across, held to a star by gravity and some electrodynamic forces. The star produces a long jet of hot gas, which is magnetically confined so well it spears through a hole at the crown of the cup-shaped shell. This jet propels the entire system forward . . .”

Full up Dyson Spheres have also appeared in science fiction literature and film, including Tim Zahn’s Spinneret and Federation World by James White.

But do Type I civilizations exist and, if so, can we find them? The good news is that a civilization capable of building a Dyson Sphere should be readily detectable by our telescopes. Nearby Dyson spheres should be readily seen by looking at the universe in infrared light. Such a structure would capture and use most of the energy from its star, but that doesn’t mean that nothing would radiate from the outside of the sphere since we cannot assume that even an advanced civilization can cheat on the laws of nature, including the laws of thermodynamics. Simply put, no matter how efficient the machine, there will always be energy lost in the conversion and use of it, producing waste heat. The waste heat coming from a Dyson sphere would be seen as something called a “black body,” radiating in the far infrared (Figure 4). Such a black body in the nearby region of our galaxy should be readily observable by some of the space telescopes launched in the last few years and . . . none have been observed. Does this mean none are out there? It does not. It just means that if they are out there, then they are not in our region of the galaxy.

Figure 4. Even a civilization capable of encapsulating its home star in a Dyson Sphere and capturing and all its radiant energy cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics. There will always be energy lost in the power conversion process, producing waste heat that should be detectable across light years. (Image is in the Public Domain.)

Telescopes have observed something possibly related to a Dyson sphere that is worth mentioning. The star KIC 8462852 is a fairly typical star located about 1400 light years from Earth. It’s typical in that the star itself is normal and like many other stars in the galaxy. What is around it is not so typical. Before explaining why it is atypical, some background information is warranted.

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets these last few years resulted from the flight of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009. Kepler (the telescope) used a technique called the transit method to detect regular, small variations in the light output of stars to find and characterize planets circling them in the line of sight between us and the star in question. The average dimming caused by a planet passing between the star and the Earth is on the order of a fraction of a percent. So, when a team of citizen scientists were looking at the data and found a star that was dimming a whopping 22 percent, people took notice. The star, KIC 8462852, is now referred to as Tabby’s Star. Since its discovery and the media interest it generated, another star exhibiting similar behavior was found in 2018: star VVV-WIT-07. The light from this old, red star dimmed slightly for a few days and then plummeted by seventy-five percent for over a month before returning to its “normal” brightness. Various explanations have been put forward, most of them involving purely “natural” phenomena, and there is not yet a consensus as to what is causing the stars’ dimming. There is one “unnatural” explanation that has been offered: The decrease in light escaping the stellar system in question is due to a partial Dyson sphere surrounding the star. While this explanation is appealing to many, given the lack of evidence that intelligent life exists beyond Earth, it is considered a very low likelihood explanation—but “low likelihood” does not equal zero.

The bottom line is that we have yet to see any evidence that Type I or II civilizations exist. But what about Type III?

If there were aliens capable of using the energy of their entire galaxy, how would we know? Remember that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is typical as galaxies go. It is about 100,000 light years across and contains billions of stars. And it’s among billions of galaxies that make up the known universe. If aliens were capturing and using the energy of entire galaxies, we might expect to see evidence of their existence by looking for changes in galaxies, mostly likely by their shape changing or, like a galaxy-wide Dyson Sphere would create, by them vanishing entirely. Have we found anything like this in our observations of the universe? Perhaps!

Consider the Bootes Void.

When our telescopes have looked deep into the universe, we see galaxies almost everywhere. In fact, with one notable exception, we do see galaxies everywhere. The exception is the Bootes Void. Located in the constellation Bootes, the void is an almost spherical region of space devoid of galaxies. Located over 330 million light years from Earth and comprising approximately 0.27 percent of the observable universe (which is a lot), sits a great emptiness containing only about 60 galaxies. There should be more than 2000. The scale of the void is mind boggling: it is 250 million light years in diameter. It is growing. And it is not alone—there are other, though much smaller voids in the universe that are equally unexplained.

What if . . .

A Type III civilization arose in a galaxy within the void and began using the energy of their galaxy, encasing it in the galactic equivalent of a Dyson Sphere. They then migrated to the neighboring galaxies and repeated the process, causing an expanding shell of darkened galaxies that would have once lit up the sky. This would explain the nearly spherical shape of the Bootes Void and account for why it is growing. Unfortunately, the Bootes Void is too far away for our infrared telescopes to detect galaxy-scale black body radiation so we can’t use this to verify or disprove their existence.

Coming full circle, we’re building our first large structures in space and today can conceive of building Dyson Dots capable of intercepting enough of the sun’s energy to affect the energy balance on our home planet. From there, it will be a logical step to consider how to take the material left over from the formation of the planets, the asteroids and comets, and use it to build our own Ringworld or partial Dyson Sphere. Next would be a complete Dyson sphere and the expansion of the human species to other stars in the galaxy.

Is this possible? Physics says, “yes!”

To quote Freeman Dyson from his essay, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology” Perspectives in Modern Physics (1966), “When we look into the universe for signs of artificial activities, it is technology and not intelligence that we must search for. It would be much more rewarding to search directly for intelligence, but technology is the only thing we have any chance of seeing."

The universe awaits—and let’s hope we reach Type III status before the Bootes Void reaches us.

Further Reading

Greg Matloff and C. Bangs recently published book, Stellar Engineering (Curtis Press, 2019), provides an excellent summary of megastructures in space. I highly recommend it.

For more information about Dyson Dots and using sunshades to mitigate climate change, please refer to Kennedy III, Robert G., Kenneth I. Roy, and David E. Fields paper, "Dyson Dots: Changing the solar constant to a variable with photovoltaic lightsails." Acta Astronautica 82.2 (2013): 225-237.

To learn more about graphene and its uses, please refer to the book I recently co-authored on the subject with Dr. Joe Meany, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World.

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Les Johnson is a Baen science fiction author, popular science writer, and NASA technologist. He is the author of Mission to Methone, and co-author of On to the Asteroid and Back to the Moon with Travis S. Taylor, Rescue Mode with Ben Bova, and numerous general science publications. Stellaris: People of the Stars (Baen, September 2019), an anthology Les co-edited with Robert E. Hampson, is a collection of original fiction and non-fiction essays about what may become of humans as we become an interstellar species. To learn more about Les, please visit his website at www.lesjohnsonauthor.com.

The Universe Beyond the Plasma Frequency

Kerry Hensley

After centuries of watching the night sky with increasingly sophisticated tools, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the universe. Part of the challenge is that we’re stuck on a planet that’s surrounded by an atmosphere that blocks certain types of radiation from reaching the ground. It’s hard to complain too much, since if X-rays could make it to Earth’s surface humans would either be dead or a very different kind of organism, but it has certainly slowed our progress. We’ve managed to launch telescopes into orbit around Earth to observe most wavelengths of light, but there’s a huge chunk of extraterrestrial radiation that we currently have no means to observe. The culprit? A layer of plasma in Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.

A Brief Overview of the Ionosphere

In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi made a discovery that would change the way the world communicates: he received a radio transmission from over 2,000 miles away, demolishing the idea that radio signals can travel only as far as the visible horizon. Marconi was wrong about how the radio waves made it that far (he thought they would naturally follow Earth’s curvature rather than traveling in straight lines), but the discovery prompted Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly to propose that the waves had actually been reflected by plasma—atoms and molecules split into electrons and positively charged ions—in the atmosphere. Two decades later, scientists were able to prove that such a layer of plasma existed and dubbed it the ionosphere. (Fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals might remember a mention of the Heaviside Layer in Cats; the Heaviside Layer is another name for a part of the ionosphere. So while cats may or may not go to heaven, they do make it as far as the ionosphere. Now you know.)

Auroral emission, seen here from the International Space Station, is generated within the ionosphere by particles funneled into Earth’s atmosphere by its magnetic field. Credit: NASA

Despite their importance to radio communication, ionospheres are rarely referenced directly in SF. One exception that I can think of is Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1992 novel Red Mars, in which Mars’s small radius and tenuous ionosphere (about ten times less dense than Earth’s) are noted to make surface-to-surface radio communications more challenging. In Fritz Leiber’s 1951 short story, “A Pail of Air,” it’s the complete lack of an ionosphere that’s important; after Earth is knocked out of orbit, it ends up far enough from the Sun that its whole atmosphere falls to the ground as snow. As a result, the survivors lose the ability to communicate long-distance via radio. The ionosphere is also indirectly implicated in any SF story where a solar storm impacts radio communications or GPS on Earth; other than the electronics themselves being fried by high-energy particles and radiation, what’s being affected during a solar storm that causes communications to go haywire is the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is formed when ultraviolet and X-ray photons from the Sun, as well as high-velocity particles from faraway sources like supernovae, collide with the atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, stripping off electrons and generating a layer of plasma. Earth’s ionosphere ranges from about 60 km (37 miles) to over 1,000 km (621 miles) above the surface, encompassing many satellites in low-Earth orbit as well as the International Space Station. At its densest, the ionosphere reaches a few million electrons in a single cubic centimeter. The ionospheric plasma is highly variable, changing with the time of day, season, phase of the solar activity cycle, and in response to any transient solar events like flares or coronal mass ejections.

As Marconi discovered over a century ago, we can use the ionosphere to help us communicate over long distances. As radio waves pass through a plasma, the electrons respond to the electric field of the wave and begin to wiggle around at the same frequency as the wave. (The ions in the plasma respond too, but since they’re so much more massive than the electrons they do it much more slowly.) Depending on the frequency of the wave, the electrons will either keep pace with the wave and reflect it back toward the ground or be unable to keep up and allow the wave to pass through.

This cartoon shows how radio waves travel large distances around Earth by bouncing off of plasma in the atmosphere. Whether or not a radio wave can escape the atmosphere depends on its frequency as well as the angle at which it’s transmitted. Credit: NASA/GSFC

The highest frequency that the electrons can match is known as the plasma frequency. Let’s say you have a blob of plasma and you disturb it in some way. Maybe you push some electrons together so that one area has more negative charge than the rest. Because the like charges repel each other, the electrons spring apart and inevitably overshoot their original positions and end up sloshing back and forth, forming plasma waves. The frequency of these waves depends on how dense the plasma is; denser plasma has a higher intrinsic plasma frequency. For a density of one million electrons per cubic centimeter (typical of Earth’s ionosphere), the plasma frequency comes out to about 9 MHz.

This is glossing over a lot of the details of how radio waves interact with a plasma, but the bottom line is that high-frequency radio waves will be reflected at higher altitudes (where the plasma density is greater) than low-frequency radio waves, if they are reflected at all. This is true for radio waves that originate outside Earth’s atmosphere as well, so while the ionosphere enables radio communication, it also prevents us from observing the universe or receiving any potential SETI signals at any frequency below the plasma frequency.

This cartoon shows the wavelengths that are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. For any opaque wavelengths shorter than ~5 centimeters, absorption by atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere is responsible for the opacity. Above ~20 meters, Earth’s ionosphere reflects the waves back to space. Credit: NASA

What We Might Be Missing

So we’re unable to observe a huge chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum. How big of a deal is that really? It’s impossible to say exactly what lies hidden at those extremely long radio wavelengths, but here are a few examples of what we might expect to find.

The First Stars and the Epoch of Reionization

Long ago, the universe was a dark place. A few hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited and their starlight ionized the surrounding gas and allowed photons to spread outward into the universe. The period in which the first stars began to shine is known as the Epoch of Reionization.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about this time period. One of the best ways to study it is by observing the 21-cm (1420 MHz) emission line of hydrogen, which is usually visible from Earth—but not in this case. Since we’re searching for signals from far, far back in cosmic time, the 1420 MHz emission has been stretched out to far lower frequencies—low enough that they’re hidden from view by the ionosphere.

A timeline from the Big Bang to the present. The Epoch of Reionization is expected to have lasted hundreds of millions of years. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Fields (STScI)

Observations of the universe as far back as the cosmic dark ages would have a huge impact on cosmology, allowing us to test our theories of how the universe has inflated and how quickly stars and galaxies formed. Ground-based observatories like the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR)[i] have already begun the search, but the search area (in terms of frequency) is limited by the ionosphere. We do have one detection of the first starsii, but there is still a lot we don’t know. The lower the frequency, the farther back in cosmic time we can probe.

Exoplanet Magnetic Fields

Planets around other stars, otherwise known as exoplanets, are one of the hottest topics in astronomy right now, and they don’t show any sign of losing popularity. As we amass data from missions like the Kepler Space Telescope (may it rest in peace) and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)iii, we’re starting to be able to draw conclusions about exoplanets as a whole as well as individual planets.

One of the many lingering questions is how to determine whether or not an exoplanet has a magnetic field. Many scientists think that Earth’s magnetic field was important for the development of life, so we’d like to be able to tell from a distance whether or not an exoplanet has a magnetic field. Radio waves are generated when magnetized stellar winds—extensions of stellar atmospheres that flow outward from the star—interact with magnetized planets (as is the case for Earth). Searches for these signals are underway, but so far they’ve been inconclusive. Pushing the search to lower frequencies could help us detect exoplanetary magnetic fields at last, helping us to narrow our focus from the thousands of known exoplanets to those most likely to harbor life.

Let’s Get Speculative: Fast Radio Bursts

I love a good astrophysical mystery just as much as the next person, and there’s no better mystery than fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs are bizarre, energetic, millisecond-long radio signals, and astronomers have come up with dozens of theories for what could be causing them. (Neutron stars colliding, supernovae, magnetars releasing stellar flares . . .) As we observe more and more of these extremely powerful radio signals, we’re starting to eliminate some of the possibilities.

At first, it seemed like FRBs were transient, one-off events, which could mean that they were caused by something cataclysmic like a star exploding as a supernova. Then, in 2015, astronomers discovered the first ever repeating FRB, which means that not all FRBs have a cataclysmic source. The discovery of the second-ever repeating FRB by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)iv was announced in early 2019—expect this field to get really exciting as CHIME discovers more of these weird signals. So far, the FRBs detected have had frequencies in the 400-1,400 MHz range. The detection of FRBs at really, really low radio frequencies would negate some existing theories or help us come up with new ones altogether.

Extraterrestrial Communication

In Les Johnson’s novel Mission to Methone, the Guardian is thrilled when humanity finally gains the ability to communicate by radio since it can eavesdrop far more easily that way. If you were an alien species spying on Earth and didn’t want your own communications to be detected, it would be simple to tune your transmitters to frequencies that we can’t detect from the ground. This goes for beings spying on other planets as well, since any planet with an atmosphere that orbits a star will have an ionosphere.

Many SETI searches focus on radio wavelengths that are seen essentially everywhere in the universe, like emissions from neutral hydrogen and hydroxyl (OH) molecules, which fall between 1,420 and 1,720 MHz. Since so many astrophysical sources emit at these frequencies, anyone or anything that develops the ability to detect radio waves will observe at these frequencies, making them a smart choice if you’re hoping to be found by other civilizations.

Do the very low frequencies that we’re missing out on offer a good or better chance for detecting other civilizations? It’s not yet clear. One potential issue is that the Milky Way itself emits a lot of radiation at very low frequencies, providing a constant background of noise. Despite this, it’s almost certainly worth taking a peek once we get the chance; these wavelengths represent a huge chunk of the Cosmic Haystack[v]—a multidimensional volume of space, time, and frequency in which we might detect extraterrestrial signals—that we know nothing about.

It’s hard to know what we might find at these wavelengths, but we can look to the past for evidence of what could happen in the future: each time we’ve opened up a window into a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we couldn’t access previously, we’ve made unexpected discoveries. There’s no reason for this part to be any different.

What to Do About It

So we’re stuck observing the universe at frequencies higher than the plasma frequency, and there’s plenty of interesting stuff that we’re missing out on—including phenomena we haven’t thought of yet. What can we do about it?

The good news is that we’ve known about this problem for decades, and scientists have already come up with some ideas. In the 1980s, astronomers devised an experiment using the Challenger shuttle to make observations at frequencies below the plasma frequency. In the Plasma Depletion Experimentvi, Challenger astronauts fired the shuttle’s orbital maneuvering subsystem engines as the spacecraft passed over radar and radio observatories, releasing 244 kilograms of carbon dioxide, water, and hydrogen exhaust. The exhaust caused the positive ions and electrons to combine and reform neutral atoms and molecules, creating a depletion in the ionospheric plasma. Decreasing the plasma density means longer-wavelength radio waves can pass through the atmosphere and reach the ground.

In this experiment, the exhaust release was timed so that the absolute minimum plasma density could be reached: at night, in the winter, during the least active time of the solar cycle, at a location where the plasma density is unusually low under normal conditions—the “mid-latitude trough” over Australiavii. Through the “ionospheric hole” created in the experiment, they were able to observe radio waves from the Milky Way which are normally blocked from view. Just a peek, though—the hole disappeared after a few hours.

After the engine burn at about 3:00 AM, the galactic radio emissions at 1.704 MHz increased. The emissions at the other frequencies weren’t affected as much since the lower frequencies still couldn’t make it through the ionosphere and the higher frequencies were able to make it through before the experiment. Credit: Ellis et al. (1988)

This is an interesting short-term solution, but it certainly isn’t feasible to send up a rocket every time you want to look out into the universe at these frequencies. The only long-term solution is to set up a radio telescope outside Earth’s atmosphere. This has been done before for small radio telescopesviii; Japan’s now-defunct Highly Advanced Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy (HALCA) satellite carried an 8-meter (26-foot) diameter radio telescope, which was designed to observe frequencies as low as 1.6 GHz (18-cm wavelength). Russia’s 10-meter (33-foot) Spektr-R satellite, which can go as low as 0.32 GHz (92-cm wavelength), lost contact with the ground earlier in 2019 and may not be salvageable.

Even if either of those telescopes were still operational, they wouldn’t be able to observe the wavelengths we care about because they’re just too small. We’re interested in wavelengths of tens of meters, if not longer. For a given resolution (the ability of a telescope to distinguish objects of a certain angular size), the size of the telescope scales with the wavelength you want to observe. That’s why radio telescopes are so much larger than optical telescopes; currently, the largest optical telescope is 10.4 meters (34 feet) in diameter, while the largest single radio dish is a whopping 500 meters (1,640 feet) acrossix.

This means we need to send some awfully big telescopes into space. Unfortunately, big telescopes are very costly, and we’re talking about scales much larger than anything that has been done before. The greater the budget, the greater the risk, and while space agencies across the globe have launched dozens of successful space telescopes, it’s still a risky endeavor (just ask any astronomer what they think about the possibility of the highly anticipated and long overdue James Webb Space Telescope malfunctioning a million miles from Earth with no hope of a repair mission . . . expect some nervous laughter and an immediate change of subject). Not all missions are as fortunate as Hubble, which has been operating more or less seamlessly for nearly three decades; in 2016, Japan’s Hitomi satellite (also known as ASTRO-H) broke apart after less than two months in orbit.

Let’s say we can solve our budgetary struggles and get a radio telescope into orbit. Why stop there? Another (potentially more challenging) option is to construct a radio telescope on the Moon. The Moon offers the same main advantage as Earth orbit: no atmospheric interference. (Technically, the Moon does have a sort of thin, wimpy atmosphere, but it’s nothing more than a little sodium, argon, and potassium released from the lunar surface as it’s bombarded by the solar wind.) Although lunar gravity isn’t as low as the microgravity environment of Earth orbit, it’s still low enough to mitigate an issue that plagues huge, steerable radio telescopes like the 100-m (328-ft) Green Bank Telescope in the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, WV. The telescope is so massive that it sags and deforms under its own weight, requiring tiny motors to push the panels of the huge dish to compensate.

The Green Bank Telescope, while not the largest radio telescope in the world, is the largest one capable of being rotated and tilted at different angles. It weighs nearly 17 million pounds and, at 485 feet tall, is just barely taller than the world’s tallest roller coaster. Credit: NRAO/GBO

Other the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum is the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It doesn’t look much like its larger cousin, and it works in a very different way. X-ray photons are guided to the detector by glancing off the mirrors, which are arranged cylindrically. Credit: Eastman Kodak; Marshall Space Flight Center

The biggest reason to put a radio telescope on the Moon is that the far side, which never faces Earth, is without a doubt the best place to make radio observations at any frequency. The Earth is practically shouting out radio signals, but on the far side of the Moon you wouldn’t hear a peep. The Sun is rather noisy in the radio as well, but would be hidden from view during the long lunar night, allowing for observations with incredibly low interference.

Even making the big assumption that you could ensure timely downlink of data from a telescope that exclusively points away from Earth, there are still, of course, huge challenges to overcome.

How do you make sure that your telescope stays at a safe, operational temperature during both the 14-day lunar day and the 14-day lunar night? Electronics don’t tolerate large temperature changes well, and the Moon swings between -298 and 224°F (-183 and 107°C). One solution is to place the telescope so that it’s either permanently in sunshine or shadow, so you only have to deal with one temperature extreme. Cold is a better choice; space telescopes operate at even lower temperatures. You could build the telescope on a Moon-encircling track to keep it permanently in shadow, but a better solution is to construct the telescope in the permanent darkness of a polar lunar crater, paired with some nearby solar panels or another energy source. (The polar craters could also be a good location for a lunar outpost since they have water ice.)

How are we going to get all the material needed to build a telescope (or better yet, an entire array of telescopes) up there in the first place?! Hauling tons of material to the Moon isn’t impossible, it’s just expensive—a lunar radio telescope will cost several billion dollars. Without interest from one or more national space agencies (or extremely enthusiastic billionaires with an army of rocket scientists on speed dial), it’s not going to happen. A way to get some of the benefits of a larger telescope without the huge price tag is to combine the signals from an array of many smaller telescopes. The array will have the same resolution as a single telescope with a diameter equal to the largest distance between two telescopes in the array. You won’t be able to see objects as faint as a larger telescope can, but the trade-off may be worth it.

With the recent announcement that NASA will attempt to send humans to the Moon by 2024, it’s high time to start thinking about answers to these questions and what our return to the Moon could mean for the future of radio astronomy and radio SETI searches. (It’s good to be skeptical of that deadline, which will almost certainly be pushed back as it has in the past. But it’s better to make plans now and have them ready when the time does come.) While there are difficulties to this accelerated timeline, it’s exciting to imagine what comes next.

NASA is far from the only space agency with Moon on the brain, though[x]; China’s Chang’e-4 mission is already paving the way to a lunar-orbiting radio observatory. The mission consists of a lander and rover, which touched down on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, and a relay satellite, which preceded the lander in May 2018. A future goal of the mission, to be achieved in the 2030s, is to establish an array of radio antennae in orbit around the Moonxi.

Schematic (not to scale) of the Chang’e-4 mission, demonstrating how the relay satellite helps the lander and rover communicate with receivers on Earth. Credit: Loren Roberts for The Planetary Society

It’s clear that we can expect increased interest in lunar radio astronomy as we prepare to return to the Moon and hopefully establish permanent outposts there. I’m excited to see how we solve the many technical challenges that a lunar observatory entails. Once we do, we’ll get to crack open the final hidden part of the electromagnetic spectrum and see the universe in an entirely new light.

Footnotes

[i] http://www.lofar.org/

ii https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02616-8

iii https://www.nasa.gov/tess-transiting-exoplanet-survey-satellite/

iv Learn more about CHIME here: https://chime-experiment.ca/

[v] You can read more about the Cosmic Haystack in this article: https://aasnova.org/2018/11/30/searching-for-alien-needles-in-the-cosmic-haystack/

vi Mendillo, M. et al. (1987) Spacelab-2 Plasma Depletion Experiments for Ionospheric and Radio Astronomical Studies. Science, 238 (4831). pp. 1260-1264.

vii Ellis, G. R. A. et al. (1988) Radioastronomy Through an Artificial Ionospheric Window: Spacelab 2 Observations. Advances in Space Research, 8 (1). pp 63-66.

viii Space history buffs will notice that I’m omitting spacecraft with radio antennae capable of observing the wavelengths we care about. There have been a few (e.g. Explorer 49), but their existence doesn’t preclude the need for large telescopes or telescope arrays in Earth or lunar orbit.

ix There’s a cool article about this massive telescope, which was recently constructed in China, here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/world-s-largest-radio-telescope-will-search-dark-matter-listen-aliens

[x] There are many, many planned and proposed missions for Earth-orbiting, Moon-orbiting, and lunar-surface radio observatories—too many to discuss here! I’m focusing on the Chang’e-4 mission because of its recent concrete steps toward a permanent lunar observatory, but some others that you might be interested in are the Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE; http://lunar.colorado.edu/dare/) and the International Lunar Observatory (ILO; would initially consist of a visible-light telescope but a small radio telescope would follow; https://www.iloa.org/).

xi https://www.isispace.nl/projects/ncle-the-netherlands-china-low-frequency-explorer/

* * *

Kerry Hensley is a native of West Virginia and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Boston University. She is a writer for the award-winning research news website AAS Nova as well as Astrobites, a graduate-student-run research blog. Her essay recounting her time at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, "Quiet Zone," received awards for both Nonfiction and Emerging Writers Prose in the West Virginia Writers Annual Writing Contest. After graduating from Williams College in 2014 with a BA in Astrophysics and Chinese, she was a planetary science intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Nan’ao, Taiwan, where she attempted to convince 200 indignant elementary schoolers that Pluto is not a planet.

Man Caves:

Humanity's Next Home

Ken Roy

Image: Shoham Charikar

We’re learning that planets appear to be plentiful, with most stars having a family of such bodies. As we venture into interstellar space it would be nice to think that we would find countless Earthlike planets having good clean breathable air, plenty of liquid water, a little ice, and be free of allergens, toxins, and bacteria that would harm us. A moderate temperature, a reasonable gravity, low background radiation, kindly neighbors, etc., all would be nice to have as well. With such a world, the colony lands and sets up shop, and lives happily ever after.

We shall consider such a world a habitable planet. Stephen Dole of the Rand Corporation estimated that about 1 in 200 stars has such a world. A more recent analysis by William Pollard of the ORAU Institute for Energy Analysis estimated that this number actually ranges somewhere between 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 10,000,000 stars. With Dole’s estimate, our space-faring descendants, on average, would have to search a spherical volume of space having a radius of 25 light-years to find a single habitable planet. With Pollard’s estimate, that radius would range between 200 and 1000 light-years. Habitable planets are probably not as common as we would like and by definition already possess life. This life may not take kindly to alien invaders (us). Indeed, its ecology could lack some essential amino acids that we require and could even be toxic to humans or even Earth life in general. There is much to be learned from alien life and certainly no reason not to study it, but there are real, practical, and even ethical issues involved in trying to colonize such a planet.

Martyn J. Fogg, in the book Islands in the Sky, (edited by Stanley Schmidt and Robert Zubrin) defines two other types of planets that our space-faring descendants would seek out. The first is termed a “Biocompatible Planet.” Fogg defines such a planet as possessing the necessary physical parameters for life to flourish on its surface. It would be initially lifeless but with the introduction of Earth life could host a biosphere of considerable complexity without the need for major planetary engineering. Planetary engineering could involve mega-structures, giant space mirrors, and probably the importation of vast amounts of volatiles such as nitrogen, hydrogen, and water.

The second he terms an easily terraformable planet. Such a planet does require planetary engineering to be rendered biocompatible, and then eventually habitable as Earth life is introduced and a vibrant Earth-based biosphere allowed to develop. Terraforming is a term that applies to both types of planets, one just requires more work than the other.

Habitable planets, biocompatible planets, and easily terraformable planets all must lie in (or at least very close to) a star’s habitable zone. This is a fairly narrow region around a star where the star’s radiation maintains the planet’s temperature above freezing but below the boiling point of liquid water. In our solar system, Venus and Mars are at the edge of our star’s habitable zone and the Earth sits comfortably in the middle. Mercury, the moons of the gas giants, and the dwarf planets need not apply.

According to Dole, stars smaller than 0.72 solar masses won’t have a habitable zone due to the fact that by the time a planet is close enough to the star to be warm enough, they are too close to avoid tidal retardation of the planet’s rotation. Their rotation will slow and eventually the planet will become tidally locked: one face always facing their star. He assumed that a tidally locked planet would be by definition uninhabitable. However, that may not always be the case, as some recent papers suggest that such planets might actually have habitable regions but habitable regions very different from that to which we humans are accustomed.

In any event, sterile planets are probably common, but “traditional” terraforming concepts require that they exist within a star’s habitable zone and that the star possess a light spectrum similar to that of our sun in order for plant life to survive and for the human eye to function properly. But there is one terraforming approach that bypasses these limitations, thus greatly increasing the pool of planets and even star systems available as potential new homes for humanity and any Earth life we choose to bring with us.

The Shell World Approach

The basic idea of a shell world is to build a material shell that totally encloses a planet and its atmosphere. This shell will contain the atmosphere, provide some radiation protection, and serve as a way to regulate heat and light. If we can regulate the light and heat under the shell, then the limitations imposed by the star’s habitable zone vanish. Mercury, Mars, the Earth’s moon, many of the larger moons of our gas giants and even dwarf planets, such as Pluto, become available as potential future homes for humanity. It is reasonable to assume that such planets, moons, and dwarf planets are probably common around other stars, certainly far more common than habitable planets or even easily terraformable planets.

This shell is in essence a hollow sphere with a planet or moon in the middle. We know how to calculate the tension in a spherical shell resulting from internal pressure—and with a shell the size of a planet the resulting stress is huge, big enough to rupture even the strongest material that we know of. But there is also a second force in play: gravity. A mass located at the center of a large hollow sphere pulls on the sphere and creates compression stresses in the shell. For a shell around a planet, or large moon, the resulting compression stress due to gravity is huge. Thus, we have two forces acting on the shell, both huge. One is positive and the other is negative. If we’re clever, we can make them cancel out.

Let’s consider Mars. If we constructed a metal shell 10 kilometers above the planet’s surface so as to totally enclose the planet, we would need this metal to be 70 times stronger than steel, assuming no atmosphere, just to withstand the gravitational pull of the planet. But Mars does have a small atmosphere. Suppose we brought it up to Earth-normal pressure (14.7 psi) by adding a lot of oxygen and nitrogen and raised the average atmospheric temperature to 60°F. We also assume that there is no atmosphere above the shell. Now, if we make the shell out of steel that is 2.2 meters thick, then the actual stress within the shell is now 0.0 psi. The tensile forces in the shell induced by atmospheric pressure on the shell counters the compressive forces induced by the planet’s gravity pulling on the shell.

Think about that for a minute. Under the shell Mars now has an Earth-normal atmosphere. The atmosphere is completely contained and will never leak away as long as we can keep the shell airtight. Sure, some leakage through the shell and its airlocks and maybe even outgassing from shell materials is bound to happen but as long as no significant atmosphere is allowed to accumulate on the outside of the shell the forces within the shell will remain balanced. If enough gases do accumulate on the outside of the shell to begin to upset the delicate balance between compression and tension then either more gases will have to be released under the shell or the gases outside the shell will have to be captured and either removed or re-injected under the shell. Another option is to begin to remove some of the mass on the shell, maybe dropping it on the planetary surface. Like a living thing, a shell and its world will need to be constantly managed and defended against asteroids and other space debris. But, as long as the balance can be maintained, the shell itself is under little stress and structurally could survive for millennia.

Once the shell is up and the atmosphere adjusted to Earth-normal composition and pressure you can now comfortably walk the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. Yes, it would be dark, but we will fix that problem later.

The smaller the central world, the thicker and heavier the shell needs to be to allow gravity to induce enough compressive force to counter the tensile force caused by an Earth-normal atmospheric pressure. Solutions for several bodies are shown in Table 1.

Because the shell is under little stress it is possible to build it out of almost anything. The examples shown in Table 1 assume that the shell is entirely steel. However, the actual stress-bearing portion can be relatively small with the rest of the actual shell mass being dead weight, needed to provide the central body with something to tug on and inducing compressive forces within the stress-bearing portion. In the case of Mars, a steel shell one meter thick with about 6.5 meters of regolith (dirt) on top of it could have the same small stress in the thinner shell as a solid steel shell.

Infinite combinations of metal, ice, dirt, and rocks are possible, but the shell must be airtight and the mass must be evenly distributed across the shell. It is possible that some of this non-structural mass can be in the form of vacuum-loving industries, solar collectors, heat exchangers, shuttle landing strips, communication systems, power plants, etc.

Larry Niven’s Ringworld is unstable. A ring around a star, if displaced, will continue to have the nearer edge pulled into the star, leading to a sad, but exciting, end to any ring inhabitants. Niven handled this by having his Ringworld engineers install control rockets. But a spherical shell enclosing a moon or planet is stable as long as atmospheric pressure varies with altitude more than the gravitational field. If a portion of the shell approaches the central world, atmospheric pressure will push it back into place. At the same time, the portion of the sphere moving away from the surface will be pulled back into place by the lower atmospheric pressure that it experiences. Note that placing a solid spherical shell around a star (this is known as a Dyson Sphere) is probably not structurally sound without using materials far stronger than any we know of today.

If we assume Earth-normal pressures and temperature on the central world’s surface, then the central world needs to have a mass of at least two times that of the asteroid Ceres in order to achieve the required pressure gradient to assure shell stability. This is not to say that a shell cannot be constructed around Ceres, but only that such a shell must be stabilized with cables and/or columns or even control rockets.

Shell World Design Considerations

The mass and size of the planet, or moon, will determine the gravity and surface area of the new world. The asteroid Ceres with a mass of approximately 0.00016 that of Earth and having a radius 0.07 that of Earth represents, perhaps, the smallest world that could be “terraformed” with a shell. The shell would be very thick and it would have to be stabilized with large columns and/or heavy cables. The builders would have to provide 363 metric tonnes of mass for every square meter of shell area. This doesn’t have to be all steel. In this case it could be 2 meters of steel, 354 meters of ice (Ceres has a lot of water ice) and 20 meters of regolith. This is a lot of mass but also a lot of radiation shielding. A Ceres colony with such a shell could survive a very intense gamma ray burst, one intense enough to destroy most life on Earth, the type of which may account for several mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Because Ceres has a rocky core covered by an icy mantle many kilometers thick, the atmospheric temperature under the shell would probably be below freezing. Another possibility is to melt the ice (yes, we’re talking about a lot of energy) and create a water world with the ocean hundreds of kilometers deep. Any cities would be floating structures but with an Earth-normal atmosphere, and human powered flight would be possible.

The height of the shell above the surface of the world is a design choice. If the shell is intended to rotate relative to the planet’s surface, then it needs to be high enough that any mountain would be unlikely to rip a gash in the shell. If the shell is stationary with respect to the planetary surface, then mountains could actually project through the shell. This presents some engineering challenges as the shell/mountain interface would have to be effectively sealed. For example, Olympus Mons on Mars is a shield volcano with a height of 22 km above the surface. If the shell is only 10 km above the surface the large volcano would extend through the shell and would make a good space port, as it would have no mass loading limitations.

But beyond that, the limit is only how much atmosphere you have available to import. It should be noted that atmospheres with pressures other than 14.7 psi (Earth-normal) and compositions other than 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen, and 1 percent argon are certainly possible, but all atmospheres discussed here are limited to Earth-normal compositions. Planetary engineering encompasses the importation of atmospheric gases to make up the atmosphere. With a shell world, the amount of gas needing to be imported can be significantly reduced. Using Mars as an example, oxygen could probably be manufactured using local sources, but nitrogen would probably have to be imported from the outer planets, or maybe Venus. A 10-km high shell requires only 36 percent of atmospheric gases needed for an uncontained atmosphere.

Oceans are nice. Once you have an Earth-normal atmosphere and temperature, the addition of water will result in lakes and maybe oceans fairly quickly, even on a low gravity world. Rains will wash salts from the soil into the new oceans, making the soil more fertile. Oceans can be useful for regulating heat and are vital to numerous ecological cycles. And if we’re thinking in terms of providing a new home to all of Earth life, then oceans become necessary. The size and extent of the ocean(s) is a design choice. To make the required amount of water, hydrogen may have to be imported, assuming that oxygen can be produced locally. And make no mistake, we’re talking about lots of hydrogen.

Climate can be a design choice. The entire world could be temperate, or it can be configured to have frozen poles and a tropical equator with resulting weather patterns. It could be a hot desert world, or a cold frozen world, or as we have discussed already, an ocean world.

There are no reasons structures can’t be hung from the underside of the shell, provided that the deadweight above the shell at that point is reduced to compensate. The entire underside of the shell might be utilized as living space, effectively doubling the living area of our Shell World. Heavy and dirty industry could be located on the outside of the shell.

Heat and Lighting

Because of the shell, everything beneath it would be in total darkness without some provision for artificial lighting. Structural penetrations in the shell need to be kept to a minimum and an alien star might not provide the correct spectrum of light required for Earth life. But artificial lighting offers many choices and could effectively duplicate our sun’s light spectrum along with the Earth’s 24-hour, day-night cycle regardless of the rotation rate of the planet/moon. Even a tidally locked planet/moon could have a 24-hour day-night cycle under the shell.

Humans need light to see, but plants need light to live. Earth plants use less than 250 W/m^2 out of the 1400 W/m^2 available from the Sun, and that mainly in the blue-violet and orange-red ends of the spectrum. This much is required over agricultural and forest areas. How much more than this would be provided for the humans? The choice of colors and intensities is almost infinite. Ultraviolet light could be provided over beaches to allow tanning and sunburns. Infrared could be provided to control temperatures within the shell. Some areas could be left in eternal night and others would be forever bright. The energy bill would be rather large and of course all of that energy would need to be radiated away as waste heat after use.

There are two types of heating problems. If the world is too close to a star, such as Mercury, the problem becomes one of minimizing heat input into the world and providing means for adequate dumping of waste heat. If the world is far out in the Oort Cloud the problem is one of retaining heat. These are engineering problems. The solutions will no doubt require large quantities of energy and power, but a civilization that can build planetary shells probably has the ability to solve those problems.

Radiation Protection

Radiation exposure is an issue that any proposed space settlement must address. On Earth, the average human absorbs 30 millirem (mrem) annually from space radiation. (A rem is a unit of damage done by radiation to the human body.) By comparison, the total average annual dose for each human from all sources is about 360 mrem. Most of this is from terrestrial sources such as radon. Most charged particles from the Sun and some cosmic radiation are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. Some do get through and hit Earth but most of those are attenuated by our atmosphere. Thus, the low 30 mrem dose from space radiation for Earth dwellers. Note that someone standing on the lunar surface has no magnetic field or thick atmosphere for protection, and with only a few centimeters of aluminum as protection would receive a dose of radiation far higher than their twin on Earth.

One advantage of a shell world is that the shell itself can serve as a radiation shield. Then there is the atmosphere below the shell to attenuate any radiation that penetrates the shell. Small celestial bodies generally have a slight to nonexistent magnetic field, making them prone to high levels of space-based radiation at the surface. But if one were to be transformed into a shell world, the shell could be used to reduce the radiation levels to some degree—perhaps below Earth-normal levels, and this on a planet with no magnetic field to protect it.

Construction of a Shell World: The Earth’s Moon

Construction of a shell world requires energy generation and material fabrication and transport on a vast scale. It could be done only by an advanced civilization capable of producing and using large quantities of energy and of safely moving large quantities of material around a solar system.

Let’s consider Earth’s moon. We could equally well choose Mars or Pluto, but let’s assume we’ve decided on Earth’s moon and somehow obtained the “rights” to it. The designers decide on a shell only five kilometers above the surface. They want an ocean that covers a quarter of the surface and has an average depth of 100 meters. Future locations for cities and forests are laid out. The initial sculpting is done with kinetic energy: rocks from space. The ocean basins are carved out, crater rims erased, and mountains and hills created. Final sculpting is done by automated dozers.

Now we have a lot of ice delivered and stored in the future ocean’s basins. This ice can come from the moons of the gas giants such as Jupiter, or perhaps from the Oort Cloud where countless icy comets have waited billions of years. We also need oxygen. This can probably be obtained by processing lunar materials and be stored in large depots. There is limited nitrogen on the Moon so it will probably have to be imported from Jupiter or Titan or Venus and also stored in large depots. Argon is entirely optional; plant and animals don’t seem to need it, but we can add a little to make our breathing air truly Earthlike.

Fabrication plants now begin producing a carbon-based fabric, perhaps using nanotubes or graphene sheets. We know how to make Kevlar® and, in the future, should be able to make large sheets of graphene. Both are incredibly strong in tension. This fabric must be strong, airtight, durable, and corrosion resistant. We cover the entire surface of the Moon with this fabric and seal up any seams. It is 25cm thick and designed to allow a stretch of one part in a thousand. On top of this we drop steel plates, each 25cm thick. These plates are connected in such a way as to allow the same stretch as the fabric. They are not intended to be structural but they will protect the fabric below and distribute any surface loads over a large area. On top of this we now dump regolith to reach a total loading of 52 metric tonnes per square meter. Assuming that regolith has a density of dry dirt, this requires about 36 meters of rock and dust. Industrial facilities intended for vacuum operation are sometimes substituted for regolith.

Now we slowly release the oxygen, nitrogen and argon under the shell. The shell rises off the surface of the Moon. The pressure under the shell stays at 14.7 psi. As we release more gas the shell rises. Eventually the shell is 5 kilometers above the lunar surface and the fabric structure goes into a slight tension. Now additional gases will result in increased pressure.

Next we start heating the oceans, converting them into liquid. This initiates a hydraulic cycle and rains begin to fall on the land, washing salts into the new oceans. Lighting and communications systems are installed on the underside of the shell, all run by power plants located on the outside of the shell.

Now comes the hard part. We introduce life from Earth to its new home and carefully nurture what once was a sterile world into a vibrant living ecology. It will have been a long and expensive undertaking, but at the end we will have a new home for humanity and all the other forms of life that shared Earth with us—except perhaps for certain pathogens and parasites. We’ve just increased the available habitable land area available to humans by about 20 percent. If we consider the underside of the shell as habitable area as well, then we’ve doubled this to 40 percent. True, we can’t walk on the underside of the shell but we can build structures that attach to the underside or even hang from it. Think of pictures from the Graf Zeppelin; and we have the entire underside of the shell to work with, not just a few gas bags. Lighting, communications, sensors, and other utilities would all have to be integrated into this suspended structure but it could become the preferred location for humans with the lunar surface left to grow wild with Earth life. And in the light gravity and Earth-normal atmosphere human powered flight is possible. And the view . . .

No doubt, there will be mistakes made and lessons learned from both the shell construction and the following terraforming work that will be available to future terraforming efforts.

Conclusions

Shell worlds could be constructed at any star that has something orbiting it with a mass greater than two Ceres. The type of star doesn’t matter. The location of the star’s habitable zone doesn’t matter. The radiation environment does matter but can be dealt with. In high radiation fields we want smaller bodies. This results in thicker and more massive shells. Such shell worlds could last for many thousands of years, and with proper maintenance and gradual improvements could last far longer, perhaps for geologic time scales.

The most common type of star in our galaxy is the small, unassuming red dwarf. These are M-class stars with a mass less than 0.45 that of our sun. They are generally not considered good targets for SETI. This may be a mistake. Such stars probably have many bodies suitable for being made into shell worlds. These stars have lifespans many times longer than our sun.

Alien civilizations having the technology to construct shell worlds may consider such stars for their long-term residence or even their retirement homes. There are probably even more brown dwarfs (or failed stars) in our galaxy than the numerous red dwarfs, and many probably have something akin to planets that could be transformed into shell worlds.

The shell world approach offers us the possibility of converting virtually any solar system with some orbital debris into a habitable star system, not just for humans but for as much Earth life as we care to import. When we finally head to the stars, we won’t be limited to finding habitable worlds or terraforming planets just in the habitable zone of a star, we’ll be able to transform lifeless planets well outside the habitable zone into Earthlike worlds. Surely the elder races can’t fault us for that.

REFERENCES

Corliss, W.R., Space Radiation, U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, Washington, 1968, pp.47-51.

Dole, S., Habitable Planets for Man, Blaisdell Publishing, New York, 1962, pp.6-22.

Fogg, M.J., Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, SAE International, Warrendale, Pennsylvania, 1995

Fogg, M.J., “A Planet Dweller’s Dreams” in Islands in the Sky, S. Schmidt and R. Zubrin (eds), Wiley Popular Science: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996

Goody, R. M. and Walker, James C.G., Atmospheres, Prentice-Hall, Englewood, 1972, pp.126-141.

Mader, S., Inquiry into Life, 4th edition, Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, 1985, pp.120-121.

National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Exposure of the Population in the United States and Canada from Natural Background Radiation, NCRP Report No. 94, 1987, pp.16-21.

Oberg, J. O., New Earths, Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, 1981.

Roy, K.I., Robert G. Kennedy, and David E. Fields, “Shell Worlds: An Approach to Terraforming Moons, Small Planets and Plutoids,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 62, pp.32-38, 2009.

Roy, K.I., Robert G. Kennedy, and David E. Fields, “The Question of Shell Stability,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 67, pp.364-368, 2014.

Zubrin, R., The Case for Mars, The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Whey We Must, The Free Press, New York, 1996

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Ken Roy is an engineer who lives and works amid the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge. He has published technology speculation pieces in such venues as the Journal for the British Planetary Society, and the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. His current interests include terraforming and geoengineering.