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Deep Space bomber - Best bomb against Interstellar warship that is kilometers long in size

In continuation of the question above

Assuming we are successful on developing the following bombs. All bombs are rated at least meteor breakers

  • Alcubierre bomb
  • Anti matter bomb
  • Gravity bomb
  • Nuclear bomb
  • Warp bomb

Is it possible to cover up an attack by disguising it as a natural phenomenon or alien attack or accident? Or if possible any other way to coverup the attack made by the weapons above?

It is assumed that the stealth bombers manage to wipeout a supercapital fleet on dock of a space cradle undetected(No this is not pearl harbor)

L.Dutch
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mico villena
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    Is gravity bomb a bomb which falls according to gravity, or by using gravity as damaging agent? – L.Dutch Jul 04 '17 at 08:37
  • @L.Dutch yes, gravity will be the damaging agent for this bomb anything larger will be too powerful, anything less is too useless – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 08:40
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    You can always state that those were people that just bought Russian uniforms http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/04/putin-russian-troops-are-really-just-self-defense-groups-bought-uniforms-from-local-stores/ . A gravity bomb sounds a bit like my mother-in-law, but she isn't a meteor breaker. I feel like more information on those bombs is needed and what traces they leave behind in order for anyone to answer this. – Raditz_35 Jul 04 '17 at 09:44
  • couldn't you maybe use an EMP bomb to fry all the electronics? – Fl.pf. Jul 04 '17 at 09:53
  • @Fl.pf. Their electronics are kind of shielded for emp to even interfere with it – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 10:01
  • @Raditz_35 As far as i know bombs will always leave traces behind when they explode... like for example gravity bomb would create a noticable gravity waves that can be detected, warp bomb as space displaced the surrounding area and etc – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 10:03
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    Alcubierre bombs and warp bombs are the same weapon unless the warp of the warp bombs is different from the warp of the Alcubierre devices. Just saying. – a4android Jul 04 '17 at 11:10
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    @micovillena Since you made those weapons up you have to tell us what they leave behind ... and additionally what people would look for. If they leave behind let's say gravitational waves but nobody would look for them - they do not matter – Raditz_35 Jul 04 '17 at 11:11
  • @Raditz_35 The torpedoes or missiles are warp capable for short range of a t least 3 light hours to make sure that the torpedoes hit their target with out any obstruction through the guidance of covert FTL comms from observation drone and Bomber drones. The bombs wont leave any trail that can be traced from either bomber or the carrier even through transit by the torpedo since the torpedo is small enough to be undetected by conventional warp radars. After they explode they will leave traces gravity waves for gravity bomb, Antimatter residue for AM, Space displacement for warp bomb – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 14:07
  • Energetic particle left over from alcubierre drive and of course alot of radiation for the nuclear bomb – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 14:07

5 Answers5

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Let us first assume there are no witnesses - it is fast. All persons and devices capable of offering contemporaneous data are destroyed. Otherwise there will be some dude who says "Yeh! I was back in the shed there doing stuff, and then here's Villena with a bigass gravity bomb and then he started swinging it around and yelling and then whoa!"

Let us assume also that whatever happens takes all present by surprise to the degree that the dude in the shed cannot send a message about what is going down before he is blown up.

So: your investigators are late to the scene, arriving after transmissions stop. In essence they are a detective, searching the rubble for clues. How to cover up an crime? I can think of 3 ways.

  • You simulate things that happen naturally in that circumstance to disguise your involvement - an accident or natural event.

  • You remove all evidence pointing to you.

  • You frame a third party.

The first: human activities at the base lead to destruction. A warp core breach from mechanical failure. Maybe researches going on at the station go out of control. Maybe they have made a secret discover of some alien item (which you have faked slightly in advance, using coded transmission) which turns out to be bad. I keep waiting for news of the immense explosion at the North Korean nuclear facility, presumably because they did not know what they were doing. You could plant items in the debris field to lend credence to this scheme. You could fake transmission from the base (after it is gone) - distress calls, the dude in the shed (the fake dude in the shed) reporting what is happening - etc.

The other method is a second slower and more methodical destruction greater than the first, to wipe out all evidence. Perhaps something you can engineer but is too slow for the element of surprise - like the giant asteroid. One of my favorite Stargate episodes is where Carter uses a black hole and a star gate to trigger a star into a nova. If the space station is dead and you can use your mega weapons to get the star to go nova that could sufficiently alter the crime scene so as to make your prior strike difficult to detect. The giant asteroid mass could sweep through afterwards and carry everything out of the way. If you have FTL tech maybe you could open a wormhole to move everything to some distant locale - sweeping it under the rug so to speak. If you have antimatter you could spray tiny bits into the debris field until everything had reacted away.

Finally you could frame some other intelligent agent. Maybe a mutinous or mentally ill sailor sets off bombs. Framing the Indians was always a good strategy, Boston Tea Party style & if there are locals you could pin it on them. This would work best if it were someone plausible, like blaming Saddam for 911. Or something little known, like obscure space monsters.

Willk
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    Throwing it out there but in a universe where FTL is possible can you ever have no witnesses? We could always just wander across the site, try and predict when it happened and then travel FTL a sufficient distance away to witness the events. Assuming we have an advanced enough telescope to try and observe the events unfold. – Firelight Jul 04 '17 at 13:45
  • @Firelight thats why its deep space... away from any orbiting body or at least far from it to observable through lenses (1LY at least from any orbital body) unless the enemy has warp/energy/scientific observatory that i didnt detect then they might detect what i did. – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 13:58
  • @Firelight that is a very, very cool idea for a SF spin on a detective story. Extra cool because an investigative angle not available to earthly detectives. I can imagine how it would go - the detective racing away from the site FTL , a little more, a little more - and then watching. When they get far enough away that the site appears intact (light from the event not having reached them yet), they can watch it blow up. But... the angle is wrong. The detective wants to see from the other side. Then a third side. The exasperated crew must do a lot of geometry and a lot of FTL jumps. – Willk Jul 04 '17 at 15:10
  • @Will The question now is how do you evade such way of observation – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 15:22
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You don't need some kind of special bomb. Take a big piece of rock (like maybe 10 km in diameter) and accelerate it to speeds of a meteor (around 70 km/s). When that thing hits the spaceport, there would be two consequences:

  1. There would be nothing left
  2. It would look perfectly like a accidental meteor hit
Fl.pf.
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  • I just wrote something similar under dutches answer: How does an advanced space ship get hit by a meteor? In order for this to happen a serious malfunction needs to be occurring - which would make this very suspicious – Raditz_35 Jul 04 '17 at 09:56
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    Ten kilometres in diameter is an asteroid not a meteor. That said I really like this idea, because of devising a similar scheme for wiping out L5 colonies. The main drawback is that it will be easily detected. Spacefaring civilizations have a bad habit of having good radar & lidar systems. Just the thing for detecting runaway asteroids. Smaller rocks might work better. There is the time factor. The rock needs to be accelerated a long way for the spaceport. It will take weeks to months before striking. – a4android Jul 04 '17 at 11:08
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    @a4android yeah you could make a "asteroid swarm" of many small rocks couple cm or meters in diameter. You can accelerate those a lot faster, and it would be like an extremely big and damaging shotgun shot. You could destroy the fleet beyond repair – Fl.pf. Jul 04 '17 at 11:09
  • The real trick is how to accelerate the rocks of whatever size and not being detected doing so. That will be a very long way away, on the scale of a planetary system, so it will take a lot of time to hit its target. – a4android Jul 04 '17 at 11:19
  • @a4android If they have things like gravity bombs or whatever, I'm sure they found a way to accelerate rocks faster. Like a particle accelerator, but for rocks or whatever. So you would only need a ring with 30 km radius. I mean it's fiction, right? – Fl.pf. Jul 04 '17 at 11:21
  • Of course, nobody's going to notice a 30 km ring are they? You need, for example, a 700,000 g acceleration field to get your rocks up to speed over a short enough distance to hide the fact. – a4android Jul 04 '17 at 11:32
  • Well... nobody is going to notice that Meteor or comet hitting them when no one is alive to detect it... One way to cover up the attack i should say – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 14:00
  • @a4android I think you're really overcomplicating a fictional scenario.

    A 30km diameter structure in a solar system spanning maybe 1-2 light-hours? Not really that detectable tbh

     – Fl.pf. Jul 04 '17 at 14:52
  • No. I'm just thinking through the consequences. Rocks travelling at 70 km/s it take 4,285.7 hours to travel one light hour. This is almost six months. You can hit the docks, but there's no guarantee the supercapital fleet will still be there. Two light hours will be worse. – a4android Jul 05 '17 at 02:30
  • The farthest out you could reasonably be and not let the enemy have any time to react (assuming they don't see you, only your projectile) is going to be on the order of magnitude of "a light millisecond" (which is still 4 hours of projectile travel time at 70km/h) or about 300km. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 05 '17 at 18:44
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If any of the current bombs are not known to exist yet, then aliens would be considered a likely culprit. If the starships use anti matter, gravity, nuclear or warp engines then an attack on their engines with a similar weapon would appear as an accident. I don't see how a natural phenomenon could be used unless you want to randomly use a wormhole to tear the ship apart but really use a gravity bomb. Or set off some nearby stellar event like a mega flare or super nova with gravity or some other bomb.

Brooks Nelson
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Target the Capitol Ship's munitions locker(s)? Make it look like whatever happened was one of their own weapons misfiring and triggering all the others in the room.

That said, explosions happen in similar ways... The blast goes out... the epicenter will be the point with the most damage and stuff thrown away from it. FAA investigators can easily tell when a plane explosion is external or internal by the nature of how the remains are damaged (internal explosions will curl the materials away from the interor space, external will do the oposite). There are also specific distribution patterns... in any investigation, a piece of shrapenel is just as important to where it was found. Locard's Exchange Principle ("Every Contact Leaves A Trace") demands that with enough investigative powers and resources, the true perpetrator will be found.

Having said that, physical evidence, even when tampered with, will show some signs of being faked. However, it comes down to what the investigators want to happen as a result of the investigation. The person in charge of the investigation may have a political reason to falsify the report because he does not like the results or likes the results pointing to a different culprit. For example, the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine is now known to have been the result of an accident but it was used as a rallying cry and "why we fight" argument for justification in the Spanish-American war (it was not officially causus belli for the war... but many people who already wanted to declare war on Spain said it was.). Considering the, ahem, human factors in wanting to prosecute a war against both your target and your fall guy... How close will the evidence proving the real culprit be looked at?

hszmv
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A bomb is clearly recognizable in its effect, therefore cannot be really disguised after its explosion. See a nuke or conventional TNT.

I think the closest you can get is to induce an industrial accident resulting in massive explosion, like

  • nuclear powered ship simulate an accident resulting in fusion/explosion of the engine
  • fertilizer carrying ship which explodes (a la Texas City disaster)

So, let's say you have not yet declared war on your target, and one of your spaceships sends an SOS. When approached by the soon to be enemy ship, you can induce a large explosion (the load of the ship may be explosive, or the nuclear engine can be hacked to turn it into a bomb, or you can carry a disguised bomb) and your "helper" will be blown up together with your ship.

Of course this will work only once at best.

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L.Dutch
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  • That sucks... we cant really cover up the attack – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 08:51
  • I would love to see a reference or some other kind of explanation for your first statement – Raditz_35 Jul 04 '17 at 09:45
  • @Raditz_35, I don't get your point. A bomb gently releasing its energy over time to pass unnoticed would defeat to purpose of using a bomb, or not? – L.Dutch Jul 04 '17 at 09:47
  • @L.Dutch And if they would release their energy over time you could cover them up as an accident? "natural phenomenon or alien attack or accident". So how can one unmistakably distinguish a gravitational bomb (since you apparently know what that is) from a meteor hit for example? Not that a meteor could hit any advanced space ship, but that's maybe not the point – Raditz_35 Jul 04 '17 at 09:53
  • We can go by your way and detonate antimatter bombs... but the stealth bombers operation will be restricted to only engage docked ships from any space cradles that is servicing them... After all it is not unheard of something disastrous happening while docked... – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 09:59
  • @micovillena, actually you can cover it (see my edit) in particular circumstances. – L.Dutch Jul 04 '17 at 10:03
  • @L.Dutch the thing is we are already at war... the primary aim of the operations is to render super capitals and capital ships out of commission before or after battles by following the condition that they are far away from busy space lanes or inside it but within 5LY range of the covert FTL comms – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 10:06
  • @L.Dutch but you've given me an idea... i will only attack the ships why they are being resupplied... this will give the investigation an alibi that it happened due to mishandling munitions – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 10:09
  • @micovillena, I think in WWII some ships used to show false flags and colours to pass unnoticed through enemy lines. You can very well disguise your suicide ship as a peaceful Nowarranian convoy... that will mess up your reputation, but you are at war, not at the local golf club... – L.Dutch Jul 04 '17 at 10:09
  • @L.Dutch indeed it is... i can even go by self style space bucaneer to operate behind enemy line legally. its called false flag operations if i am right. It is used to covertly insert troops behind enemy lines or supply guerrilla to conduct irregular warfare – mico villena Jul 04 '17 at 10:10
  • @L.Dutch Your SOS dirty trick will take only a few ships at best. The OP is ambitious & wants to take out a supercapital fleet. British used so-called Q-ships in World War I, flying false flags, to lull enemy vessels into coming close & then bringing out the guns to send them to the bottom of the sea. – a4android Jul 04 '17 at 11:15
  • @L.Dutch the ships you mentioned were specifically used against commerce raiders and rely on the fact that the target wants to capture the ship and its cargo. This did not work anymore after the German Submarine Command decided unrestricted submarine warfare. – Doomed Mind Jul 04 '17 at 15:48