won't bore you all with the main thrust of my WIP but I'm stuck at one point .... Character A and others are held prisoner on a base of sorts built inside an asteroid Character B is approaching in a ship for a rescue attempt but how the hell does he do it? With scanners and sensors etc how can he get close and execute a rescue? There's drones etc so little scope for surprise ! Any ideas you wonderful people ?
Bluff ... he makes out that hes an authorised flight (he'd need to somehow have the right codes and stuff)
This would have been the first solution that came to me too. Either that or he goes in all lazers blazing and risks his own life.
or he has some sort of stealth tech that enables him to ghost in undetected .... although that could be taken as handwave if its not already established
Thanks guys, seriously appreciate the thoughts. Sometimes having too much tech actually can hinder a story because everytime i come up with an angle i think of a tech way it would be stopped! For example in the Force Awakens, why is there no CCTV on starkiller base?! Anyway i think i am going to go for the bluff idea, just slightly adapted to make it more of a trojan horse concept.
Beam me in, Scotty... You might find some cool ideas by researching military/infiltration tactics. I would research modern and historical military strategies. I pasted a link below for quick reference; there are better sources out there, but it will get you started. Disruption communications (offensive section), feint (deception section), and disinformation (deception section) might be easy tactics to integrate into the story based on the circumstance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_tactics Or... I'm assuming that, like most places, there will be deliveries to this base for resupply. Character B could hi-jack or hide aboard a cargo ship and infiltrate the base that way. Getting out might be a bit trickier. the hi-jack/hide is kind of cliche though...
Thanks- will give that a read. Yes is the cliche I'm trying to desperately avoid, to some degree it's unavoidable (the whole concept of a rescue has been done before to death) but I think I've a way of i not making it unique making it interesting! I've also made it more 'real' by doing a lot of research into asteroids so I've actually identified by name the one that will be the setting for this section.
Character B blows up the prison with a nuke and kills everyone (including character A). This proves he's a total badass and you can't use his friends against him ( if he has any left).
How would enemy sensors work? My recommendation would be to fly in with the sun to your back. No sensor will get a good reading from the direction of a star (at least within a few hundred million miles.). Maybe choose a day where the sun is particularly stormy. Does that ship have clearance? Yes sir, it's an older code, but it checks out.
A nuke would likely barely do anything (I assume the prison is underground ala Wrath of Khan.). In cosmic terms, a nuclear weapon is barely more than a firecracker. You might want to throw a few hundred nukes at the surface though to obliterate any sensor equipment near the surface.
If they are not equipped to go in guns a blazin', the best route would be to basically bluff like a few have said. Outfitted with the right type of ship and wear the proper uniform. If they make him then he is screwed and he and his friend can be cellies. So it is a massive gamble. I did it in my first novel, and it did not go the way they hoped it would. If you take the guns blazin' brazen approach, you better have the fire and man power to back it up. If it is one guy in a dinky little fighter, then they are screwed. Unless you have some stealth tech that will help him fly under their radar. They aren't going to be looking at a million miles, more like within 10,000-50,000 where the odds of intercept and/or shooting him would be easier. Kinetic weapons like railguns or coilguns would do plenty of damage if fed a lot of power. The draw back to railguns is that the more juice, means more potential to melt/warp the rails from the plasma created in the firing process. Know the weaponry and the pros/cons. Another way they could get to the base, is to find an asteroid to use as 'cover' and slowly propel themselves toward the base. The illusion of another hunk of space rock floating by, and jump over to the base. They better be good at finding a way in, cause they more than likely aren't going to open the front door if he knocks selling cookies.
I will share a real-world experience from my time on an aircraft carrier. A Soviet TU-95 Bear surveillance aircraft took off from southern Russia while we were in the Indian Ocean, but filed a flight plan as an Aeroflot, their passenger airline, bound for some civilian airport in the Middle East. He tracked down his flight plan, which just happen to pass very near to us, making position reports, squawking IFF, doing all the things a passenger airliner would do. And we tracked airliners, monitoring their reports, but did nothing to interfere with their flights. He got within our 200 mile boundary for Bear intercepts, and made a radio call "Riyadh Center , this is Aeroflot 123, cancel my flight plan, I proceed VFR (visual flight rules) from here." He did, and made an unescorted pass over us. My admiral was furious, but the Russky was good. If he had done this during a war, we would have been toast. Sun Tsu: "When you are near, make yourself seem far away, when you are many, appear to be few, when few appear to be many"
What do you mean by "base of sorts." Also, are the operators of the prison of the same race or share a culture with "Character A" and "Character B"? I guess what I am getting at is if the prison is operated by aliens from a different culture then maybe the prison system operates differently from the prisons we are see on a daily basis. This might let you develop an original and interesting escape/rescue based on the rules and defenses established by the prison. For example (a dumb example), maybe the prison walls are integrity; there are no physical walls just a prisoner's promise. The prisoners won't leave the prison because they sign an agreement that they won't, and then "Character A" walks out of the prison when "Character B" arrives. My example is ridiculous, but I hope it makes sense.
This wouldn't work. I would assume a compound capable of detecting and monitoring nearby spacecraft is also monitoring nearby asteroids. Asteroids will follow perfectly straight geodesics, which would be easily calculable, and any variation from that would be very obvious. I also imagine the velocities are far too low. Most asteroids move with speeds in the tens of thousands of miles per hour. I'm assuming your spacecrafts are traveling millions of miles an hour, or else a trip to the asteroid itself would take a decade. Because of the distances involved, the angular parallax is tiny. It is entirely possible to keep the sun at your back until you are right on top of the asteroid (less than a thousand miles.) Any radar would have to be light-based, which would be totally blind until it's way too late. Once they see me, I'd then launch an arsenal of powerful weapons. A few hundred nuclear weapons should be able to sterilize the surface. You need a lot of them because a nuke's destructiveness is severely limited in space because there is no air to create a shockwave. You'd have to physically destroy equipment, you couldn't knock anything out with an EM blast because anything in space would have to be radiation hardened, space puts out far more radiation than any nukes. Then I'd launch search and destroy robots all over the surface to overwhelm human and automated defenses. I'd let them get inside, then follow them in once it's secure.
Thanks it does make sense! It's all humans and we haven't escaped the solar system yet. It's some sort of abandoned mine in one of the larger asteroids (spent a lot of time researching them overnight!).
Thanks for this- my scene won't be as violent as perhaps you are thinking but you make some good points. Drones as a concept can be a blessing and a curse. I'm now looking at binary asteroids which are real and are very close together I wouldn't mind, this bit of the story isn't crucial but it's a nice set piece and gets a few characters to finally meet!
There are very few known binary asteroids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_asteroid. They have so little mass that they have a hard time holding onto each other. It's also quite difficult to find these things. Asteroids are for the most part black. They reflect almost nothing in visible light, a tiny amount of IR light, and not much else. The majority of asteroids are less than a quarter of a mile across. This makes them almost invisible to us, especially as far out as the main asteroid belt. Asteroids that we know a lot about are Near Earth Objects or objects we've actually flow spacecraft past. There are still tens of thousands of kilometer sized rocks in the main belt, lots of them may have small moons, but we'd never be able to see them from Earth. Where is your asteroid by the way? Most asteroids exist in the main belt between Jupiter and Mars. There are then more asteroids in each Sun/Planet Lagrange points called Trojans. Then the smallest group are in free orbits around the sun and usually was one of the others that got a gravitational kick out.
you know this is fiction , right ? if he wants a binary asteroid he can have one ... hell if he wants one that turns out to be made of cheese that is also possible
He asked for real ones in the previous post though. Didn't see the close together aspect. Luckily, all binary asteroids are extremely close together, they have to be or else Jupiter would pull them apart through constant perturbations. The only known asteroid that would fit your criteria is 90 Antiope. It's a pair of asteroids each about 50 miles across and separated by about 100 miles. It's in the outer ring of the main asteroid belt. They complete an orbit around each other every 16 hours and go around the sun every 3-4 years. There are likely many smaller asteroids in the same ring, we just know about these because they're in the 500 largest asteroids so we can see them fairly clearly. Gravity may be something you're going to have to write around. A 50 mile wide asteroid has negligible gravity, assuming that your aim was perfect you could probably literally jump the hundred miles from one asteroid to the other.
Yep Antiope is the one! There are some really cool asteroids we know about, I was attracted to some of Jupiter's Trojans but settled on Antiope after a lot of reading. Thanks everyone
Interestingly tonight I was reading about New Horizons being woken and to examine an asteroid in the Kuiper belt which they now think is a binary! Only discovered them 48 hours ago and now can't stop reading about them
I've not heard that, interesting if true, I'll look later. The physics suggest that binary systems should be far more common in the outer solar system. Left alone, most objects will end up or form with companions. Out in the depths of the Kuiper belt, the pull of Jupiter and Saturn are diminished enough that binary pairs should stay together.
