OK, in order to placate a fellow forum member, I'm soliciting opinions and treatises on the subject of (sigh) interplanetary war. So here goes.

You are the emperor of Earth. Those mean, no-good Martians have snubbed you for the last time and you've decided to give them their comeuppances. You've decided that war is the only option. Also, you are a ruthless ******* and you don't care how many of them you kill. So nothing is off the table. If you can come up with a way of dropping Mars into the Sun that's perfectly ok. I'm not making any assumptions about technology here. Anything you can dream up is fair game – but one stipulation is that the Martians have the same technology and the same recourses and will that you have.

So the question is, what are you going to do? How will you go about making war on another planet?

Military leaders call this process war gaming. You propose a strategy and then imagine how the enemy might defend against that strategy. If a defense is particularly effective, you can discard the strategy as ineffective. After a good round of war gaming, you should be left with a good solid plan of action.

I'll start us off with the obvious.

Plan: We'll put larger boosters on existing nuclear weapons. That will allow the nukes to Earth escape velocity and coast to Mars via a Hoffman transfer orbit.

Defense: The Martians will see the nukes coming and have plenty of time to think about destroying them. (that will probably be a factor in any plan) The Martians will build defense satellites equipped with lasers and burn holes in the nukes, destroying them. The defense satellites probably cost less than the nukes and boosters too, so the Martians win.

That plan is pretty ineffective. Anyone else care to try?

Create a virus that will destroy all life on Mars within 48 hours. Make certain we have a vaccination on this planet.

Send it by infecting an ambassador that is on his/her way to "negotiate" peace.

By the time they realize what has happened, there is nothing they can do.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Neogitate a truce. Then as a show of good will send Hoagland and his ilk over to teach their children science and mathematics. Slightly slower method than SciFi Chick's virus, but more devestating in the long run.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

The virus idea is good SciFiChick, but please remember, you have to ask yourself what the Martians will do to defend themselves. You can't get better than a C unless you think about the problem from the other side.

Defense: Before the virus kills everyone, the Martians will quarantine their top scientists and use them to create a Human virus.

BTW, you should also specify how the humans deliver the virus. You'll probably send it via some sort of munition, and as with my plan above, the Martians will see that coming and have time to react.

Well, the infected ambassador would infect others. Also, if they create a virus, we wouldn't let any ambassadors in and we'd shoot down any missiles full of the virus.

Of course, if we were really serious, we could just blow up the sun. But we may not like that either...

Even better: We send a ship full of "diplomats" to negotiate. The ship is actually just transporting a 500 Terraton warhead. Land it, set it off, no retaliation possible.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Fine. So I get a 'C', but I think it's more fun if someone suggests something and everyone else shoots it down. That's just me.

I did. You weren't paying attention. The ambassador is the method of delivery. They never see it coming. How can you defend against that, other than to not let anyone visit?

Hmmm... I suppose they could quarantine him and check him out, and then they would know.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Hmmm.. Lets see... use many warheads made from materials that is hard to detect, use reaction control systems that do not create heat, and individually shield them for reentry, radiate all heat away from target, small targets with minimal emissions would be harder to hit. When approaching target, launch them from the transfer carriers. Each warhead should be fitted with an autonomous guidance system, preferably capable of evasive maneuvers

You should also implement some sort of suicide trigger, if it is damaged, or hull temperature increases in a way that suggests energy weapons, detonate it, if you can, optimize the warhead for directed EMP, that should mess with their sensors a bit.

Make dummy warheads that will track the satellites, fit them with lasers or fragmentation bombs. Lots of high velocity fragments are good, clear out some satellites, jam sensors, and make it harder for them to launch a counter-strike.

If you do get a few through their defenses, the warheads should be made for maximum damage, high altitude salted air burst bombs for general mayhem perhaps, and some lower altitude weapons to take out important government and military targets. Sit down and plan defenses against these sort of weapons, but plan also for other types. They will likely have fired back everything they have as soon as they detected your weapons.

Hmm... For the defense, the satellites should be hardened against radiation, impacts, and EMPs. Deploy swarms of fragmentation mines in high orbit, use contact, radiation, and laser perimeter type triggers. use self organizing minefield technology. Make systems capable of taking out the transfer carriers that could be powerful lasers, perhaps nuclear detonation pumped lasers.

Sit back in despair as the world around you dies as a result of your foolishness, some of the weapons they fire back will probably get through your defences... You, and a few others may survive in some shelter, but you would still have lost.

Edits: forgot a word, added suggestions for a few defenses...

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

oops! I must be blind!

I don't care what format people submit these things in but it is very very important that you try to be critical of your own ideas. You can't just suggest, "I'd throw a comet at them" and then sit back and smile. You have to try to devise a defense. I'll save you the trouble for this case. If one race can move a comet then so can the other. If you point it at me I'll steer it away, or hit it with another rocket to knock it off course.

Okay, well then, I don't really see the point of this "game". The whole reason we didn't go to war with the USSR during the cold war is because we were pretty sure everyone would lose.

Basically, you've devised a game with no winners, so what is the point exactly?

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Not quite with the comet scenario. It'll take some years, but if you work in the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud, alter a lng period comet, or a KBO into an orbital path that makes it come out of the sun at your target. If it's big enough, nuke diversions won't matter, and they won't have enough time to react once it comes out of the solar glare. It assumes you can operate in secret, which means the opponent can't spy on the whole of KB/Oort space all the time, and that you can conceal the infalling comet until past their ability to deflect. One 10 km body oughta do it, but feel free to overkill with a 50 km.

If you have a war of equals, you need some type of space fleet (as do they) which depend on tactics instead or raw power. You need to defeat the Martians with your Space Combat Skillz instead of strength, then you've got the high ground in his orbit and can literally just drop rocks or nukes on them until they surrender (or die). Assuming you win the high ground, you take them out city by city or base by base. Strafing with lines of nukes would be a pretty dumb tactic.

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“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.” – Earnest Renan

In a multiplanetary arrangement like that, you are most likely also dealing with smaller colonies, like the moon, or major asteroids like Ceres, in which case your battle becomes one centered not so much on annihilation, but containment and control.

Orbital seiges and seizure of other assets in the solar system with the asteriod/moon operations taking equivalent to the proxy wars fought in Viet nam, Korea, the lesser skirmishes in the European theaters and the insurgency operations in Central America between the US and USSR. If things get really hot, strategic bombardment of spaceport and manufacturing centers on the homeworlds, or general destruction of orbital assets.

Keep in mind, in these cases, victory is more acheivable through denial of access that straightforward destruction of a planetary population.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

ok with these assumptions, I'll give it a shot...

Assumptions
1) Mars is colonized by humans and not little green men
2) Mars has not yet been Terraformed and has large pressurized colonies.
3) Mars is self sufficient
4) Earth needs some type of relationship with Mars.
5) There is some type of communication and trade going on with Mars
6) Earth will want to retain all the resources and infrastructure already in place.
7) Mars has a defense weaponry system

Earth's Plan
I would send partial virus code on a communication transmission sideband. No single transmission would be harmful. These pieces would store themselves in very specific areas of various computer systems and if located will look perfectly harmless.

Then you have to put a team close, possibly on Phobos. These guys would would "hijack" Mars communication sattellites and inject an assembler on a carrier wave. Once the assembler is in place, they send an activation signal and suddenly the entire system is in the hands of the guys on Phobos.

Once central control is hijacked, you open all airlocks and shut down life support.

They then remotely deploy any defense weaponry to take out anyone that comes close to the compounds, and launch any long range defenses to detonate harmlessly in the martian desert.

This would kill off most life in the colonies. Any life tht remained would be weakend to the point they would have no choice but to surrender. Troops move in and clear them out. You still have infrastructure in place, just not pesky martians

Martian Defense
Due to rising Tension, you know something is about to happen. You also know that Earth most likely cannot sucessfully land enough troops to take over due to distance and logistcs. You also know they will want the infrastructure intact. This leaves few options. Chemical, Biological or Electronic warfare will most likely be the solution.

One could pretty much rule out chemical warfare, as earth would have to transport HUGE amounts of chemicals to Mars, and could possibly leave contaminated residue in or on the infrastucture.

This narrows it down to Electronic or Biological warfare. To defend against biological warfare, you disallow people from moving from section to section unless they spend a several days in quarantine, or remaining in their sealed pressure suit. you are free to come and go with pressure suits on, as long as you are willing to be disinfected. The sections would be fairly large, so it wouldn't be like people are trapped in small pods. If there is an outbreak, that section is sealed off and quarantined until the biohazard is identified and a vaccine is developed.

This leads us to Electronic. introduce an security layer between all systems that communicate with each other. This would be highly encrypted with the code being changed every 6 hours. If a system tells another system to open an airlock, then it would have to verify the code. Since the code is changed every 6 hours by a human this shouldn't allow any type of sleeper or backdoor to be effective. The code could be a random scan of a random martians retina and run through an encoding device thats off the grid.



Man, I have WAAAY too much time on my hands

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The More I learn, The More Ignorant I Become

Eagle Eye Observatory

Use antimatter warheads transported by fusion rockets. Give the rockets a good coating of radar-absorbent material. If the Martians manage to detect the missiles and blast them with lasers, the antimatter will leak out of magnetic confinement, hopefully costing the Martians a few of their defence satellites.

Martian defense: The Martians send out small nuclear missiles, which get as close as possible to the Terran antimatter missiles and detonate, disabling most of them either directly or via the magnetic pulse created by a nuclear explosion. Any remaining missiles are dealt with at a safe distance from Mars by robotic combat spacecraft equipped with laser weapons.

Possible solution for Terrans: some sort of magnetic shielding could be used to decrease the number of missiles disabled indirectly by the Martian nukes. Also, active phase cancellation devices* could be used to makes the missiles less visible in certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, e.g. the infra-red and microwave ranges. Fusion engines could be replaced with ion engines to deal with the heat emission problem, but that would require a longer trip (ion engines can't provide rapid acceleration), probably even if some sort of fusion booster were used in Earth orbit.

*Devices of this sort work by detecting electromagnetic radiation (e.g. microwaves used for radar) and reemitting it out of phase with the original signal; they are planned for use on fighter aircraft to reduce the likelihood of detection by radar.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

A few comments to skrap1r0ns suggestion.

Dividing the code is not useful if you have people that have hijacked a part of their system, they could just inject it there. If you had to inject the code into the Martian system from earth, you might camouflage it as something else(troyan), or use some sort of exploit. But most likely, any base would make use of systems that could only be accessed on site:

The airlocks should be utterly incapable of opening both the inner and outer doors at the same time, at least without combining all classes of verification (something you know, something you have and something you are). That would mean, someone would have to verify their credentials with both passwords and biometrics. The something you have token would be keys. These keys would have to be used in location, to unlock electromechanical locks that is not under computer control.

Or you could have designed the base with ring type airlocks, you know, a big rotateable ring with a doorhole that can either be inwards(outer doorway sealed by backside of the ring), outwards(inner door sealed) or in-between(both doorways sealed). This system is used here on earth in places you want to prevent something from coming in or out.

The life critical systems would be on a separate network, any new software would have to be quarantined in a test environment before allowed on this network. Both software/firmware and hardware systems would prevent any life-support system going outside the advised bounds, they would have to be updated from separate locations. Separate backup systems should be available.

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

The point is just to discuss it. But if possible we really should try to be critical of our own ideas. It's an important part of the process.

But doesn't that assume that you can get into orbit around an enemy's homeworld? They are going to see your battleships coming a long way away and have lots of time to hurl stuff at you and cook you with lasers.

If your battleships can produce X delta V, then so can the Martian defensive missiles. So there's probably little chance of dodging anything that's fired at you. You'll have to destroy any incoming projectiles. Of course at that point, the tables are turned. You have lots of time to see them coming and shoot back at them.

So I don't know, is this a contest to see who runs out of ammo first?

Now that's a good point! A comet that falls all the way in from the Kuiper belt is packing a heck of a lot of momentum. I'm starting to think there is no way to defend against it. Plus there are probably so many objects out there, and it's so dark and there's so much space, I don't know if you could hope to find all the objects that your enemies have equipped with engines.

So maybe an arms race would develop between Earth and Mars where they rush to strap engines onto KBOs. Then if they go to war they just send the signal to turn on the engines and slowly brake the KBO's out of orbit. And then decades later the comets arrive.

Wow.

Right, the trojan would have to be sent in many parts, remember the martians are nervous as hell during this time, so you couldn't blatantly hack their system.

These are good points. If it was a conventional 2 door airlock, then an override could open both doors. However, assuming this takes place over say a 2 year period, it would be possible to rebuild the airlocks, however it would be a hella lot of work. If it was a conventional 2 door airlock, then an override could open both doors. I will concede rebuilding the airlocks would be a martian defense.

This would also be a defense consideration.

Of course, if you want to read a really good book about something VERY similar, read Ben Bova's Moonrise and Moonwar books. The UN declares war on a lunar colony that declares independance.

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The More I learn, The More Ignorant I Become

Eagle Eye Observatory

It seems a bit like the plot of some sci-fi story really:

"…by which time the war was over and that weapon was shown as destructive to our own people as the one time enemy... The people who had friends and relatives on the Earth may have cried for blood, but no amount of finger pointing could undo the damage or bring back the ones that died. The marked, now so dependant on the trading between the worlds, had gone down faster than the comet. It will take a long time to recover, it may still be possible. But the loss to science and knowledge can probably never be undone.
...

...
But we will never know now if we could have recovered, the Earth had the technology of KBO engines too, it seems. It is only a few weeks away now. The streets are eerily quiet; almost everyone is with their loved ones, I guess... We will try to leave some records of who we were behind, Isn't that what doomed civilisations always do in the stories?. We have used the last few years to compile it, ever since the comets were detected, someone may find it interesting. But for us every picture, every sound, every bit of information we encode is another tear shed, how could we be so blind.
…"

Ah, well, it may be an OK story if some good writer were to write it, but I guess the doomed world(s) thing has been done many times before. :P

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

Not being an orbital mechanic...

I'm going to want to send a buncha missles with antiradar out on a long trajectory, prob'ly launched when Earth is on the far side of the sun from Mars and use Jupiter to whip them suckers in from the back!

Being a Martian, I will be watching Jupiter closely for just such a trick.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Have you guys ever read Harry Turtledove's Colonization Series?

The United States does that very thing to Several Asteroids.

Drives the Aliens who have taken over Half the Earth, nuts.

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

I would think they would be suspicious to any communication from earth, and so sending something that contains only part of a program, or if it is an encrypted virus, some junk data, may be suspicious. I would say the safest way to get into their system would be to use some newly discovered security flaw in their software. you could upload a backdoor worm that spreads to that entire system. It would be an automated attack, infect and rewrite the codes necessary to do what you want. You would likely want to do it fast, but stealthily(No "y0 h4v3 B33n 0wnz0r3d" or anything). I am not sure what you meant by putting it in a sideband though...

I don't think it would take much time to hack together some purely hardware based system to prevent both doors form opening.. It is quite likely that the computer interface use some sort of relays, if you pulled them the computer couldn't move the doors; then just wire them to prevent one relay from activating while the other is activated, or the door is open(use the feedback from the sensors on the door). The doors are likely to have solenoid locking bolts too, wire them to lock the outer door when the inner door sensor shows the door open, and the other way around.

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

I've read Turtledove. The first bit was stil the best (where the Race micalculates by sending the invasion fleet 800 years after the recon fleet.) An excellent example of being ccolored by your own experiences (it took them tens of thousands of years to reacht he modern age, so they presumed that that was the galactic standard.)

Regarding the invasion, I would say: let them take over the earth. have you seen what the place looks like?

Just tossing out ideas now: how about an earth based laser right at Olympus mons? At Valles Marinaris?

No good. Lasers aren't perfectly parallel; such a laser would be worse than useless (we'd deposit more energy in the laser's neighborhood than we would on all of Mars).

You can't say "build a better laser"--optics has something to say about how tightly a laser can be focused; any interplanetary laser that we'd build would be visible from Mars long before it was fired, and unless the martians were exceptionally gullible, it would be immediately obvious what purposes this could be used for.

Similar to the way the messages were encrypted in Carl Sagan's "Contact" IIRC, it's a carrier wave just a tad off the frequency you are broadcasting and receiving on, enough to be recieved but subtle enough to be interpreted as static.

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The More I learn, The More Ignorant I Become

Eagle Eye Observatory

To broaden the scenario a bit I would like to add that an entirely new entity has just entered your solar system. The “ship” is one thousand five hundred miles square. A cube with roughly half the mass of Earth’s moon.

An ultimatum is given.

Stop aggressive hostilities at once. If not our intent is to park in close proximity to earth’s moon and let your oceans destroy you and Mar’s will receive 8 cloaked and shielded bombs that will rubble pile that planet. (After it is already pretty much destroyed.)

Sleep on it. Tomorrow is another day.

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It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Great, the Borg ...

Isn't Resistance, by definition, Useless?

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Hmmm... I do not think that would work, digital data is, well, digital, if the signal is hard to separate from noise, it is noise, and it will not affect the data received by the Mars gateway, if it is strong enough to affect the carrier, it will affect the data stream. But that would be detected as corrupted data, the packets would fail their checksum, and be dropped.. if there were nothing being sent on the carrier frequency, and the signal was strong enough, the receiver might lock to it, and attribute the frequency deviation to Doppler shift(all receivers would have to have systems for handling doppler shift).

You can hide malicious data in a stream, of course, by camouflaging it as something else. On the internet you might be able to hide it among all the useless data that tends to flow through a connection, which could be wrongly routed packets, viruses trying to find new machines and so on. But most of this stuff doesn't get through a firewall, so you would likely have to make the data stream look like some authentic data, at least enough to fool the firewall access lists... But it will be hard to get it to run, unless you have operatives with access to the systems in question, or know of some security flaw that lets you execute programs remotely...

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

Just use stenography to hide the virus codes in some pr0n pictures. Of course, using a virus to to open the air-locks woud be harder to do if each pressure dome used a different OS for its control - you would have to find vuribilities for each. And of courses, the domes might do the sensible thing and NOT attach the computer controling the airlocks to any sort of network. You can't hack a computer that you can't connect too.

All that's way too complicated. Just paint an asteroid jet black (easy in space) and use nuclear-powered ion engines (invisible on the backside from Mars' point of view) to cause it to hit that darn little Red Planet and all the baddie martians.

Wouldn't even need a big one - about 5 miles in diameter ought to do a nice job of turning the surface into lava...

Point: On one side of Mars is a vast crater. On the other side is Olympus Mons. How certain are we that the former didn't cause the latter?

Good ideas, but nuclear weapons won't work on Mars like they do here on Earth - most of the damage is due to blast, which requires a medium of transmission. Earth's atmosphere is that medium, but is 50 times more dense than is Mars.

Back to the drawing board...

Yes, you do. And so do I. By the way, "every six hours" is meaningless without the key space and data rate... Even WPA (802.11g Wireless) codes are changed more often than that!