[starlord]

I was wondering that: it is stated that the harbinger was already used before the deployment of the ursa.

My question is, how would it have been deployed? By capital ships? Transports?

[Nightmare]

The Fenris and the Leviathan used to have "Fusion Mortars", which uses the same model as the Harbinger. However, the FM is a rapid fire weapon that does little damage and cant be shot down; obviously for balance reasons.

[Mito [PL]]

Habringer's tech description mentioned something about bombarding planetary targets as their general designed use.

Also, the GTA must have had some sort of a different bomber prior to the deployment of Ursa - after all, there was 14 years of warfare before the events of FS1. It's possible that that other craft was carrying these bombs, too.

[starlord]

I personally understood it that the ursa was actually the first bomber to be deployed with such ordinance, and to me it seems that if capital ships could just so easily swap mortars for harbingers, then they would have done it before.

Maybe the previous harbinger wasn’t developed as a tactical tool, but rather strategical, like the meson bomb in FS2, which was housed in a container.

[Nightmare]

The FS1 CB was not really precise whether Ursa is a completely new kind: https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Briefing_texts_(FS1-Act3)

New Technology: Project Ursa

Reasearch and Development have nearly completed project Ursa, which should be our best bet at defeating the Shivan Lucifer Destroyer. For those of you that haven't been keeping up, Project Ursa is an attempt to make a new type of Heavy Bomber capable of carrying the Harbinger bomb.

We expect that a wing of Ursas will be available to you on your return trip from Altair.

[starlord]

Really? Aside from the briefing clip of an ursa firing fury rockets, I don’t really see how.

Unless you are implying that the ursa was a previous bomber modified to carry the n1 instead of a brand new creation maybe?

[Mito [PL]]

Also note that:

Fusion bomb surrounded by 3 salted fission bombs - propulsion unit is a half-size version of a regulation GTA fighter thruster (Class II) - given the weight of the payloads, the missile is slow despite the power of the thruster - as the Harbinger is exceptionally large, GTA bombers are limited to carrying 6 of these weapons at any given time - the resultant shock wave from this weapon is potentially deadly, due to the size of the payloads (5000 Mt in total) - use near allied installations or allied ship groupings is strongly discouraged by the GTA - most effective when used in preemptive defensive strike against non-military installations.

The Harbinger is our best chance of destroying the Lucifer.

It means that either the Ursa is capable of carrying more than six of these bad boys, or that there was/is a different bomber in GTA service that was also able to do it.

I'm generally thinking that what ships and weapons you've witnessed in FS1 main campaign aren't really everything that was used by the GTA - not only you're seeing the conflict in its ending stages, so you don't really see the previous 14 years of military technology, you also are set to experience it in only a thin part of the battlefield.

[Nightmare]

Really? Aside from the briefing clip of an ursa firing fury rockets, I don’t really see how.

Unless you are implying that the ursa was a previous bomber modified to carry the n1 instead of a brand new creation maybe?

My guess is that the only bomber in GTA use was the Athena until than, and that semi-canonical heavy Apollo from the FS1 intro maybe.

[starlord]

True, yet I think FS1 has marked a change of doctrine, as the ursa was mentioned I think as the first bomber designed to go after capital ships.

Then again, capital ships in the 14 year war might not have started out as the multi-kilometre behemoths of the Great War, so maybe that statement was simply valid in Great War times.

[Nightmare]

Also note that:

Fusion bomb surrounded by 3 salted fission bombs - propulsion unit is a half-size version of a regulation GTA fighter thruster (Class II) - given the weight of the payloads, the missile is slow despite the power of the thruster - as the Harbinger is exceptionally large, GTA bombers are limited to carrying 6 of these weapons at any given time - the resultant shock wave from this weapon is potentially deadly, due to the size of the payloads (5000 Mt in total) - use near allied installations or allied ship groupings is strongly discouraged by the GTA - most effective when used in preemptive defensive strike against non-military installations.

The Harbinger is our best chance of destroying the Lucifer.

It means that either the Ursa is capable of carrying more than six of these bad boys, or that there was/is a different bomber in GTA service that was also able to do it.

I'm generally thinking that what ships and weapons you've witnessed in FS1 main campaign aren't really everything that was used by the GTA - not only you're seeing the conflict in its ending stages, so you don't really see the previous 14 years of military technology, you also are set to experience it in only a thin part of the battlefield.

My personal guess is that neither PVN nor GTA had any significant military/space navy assets before fighting that war, simply because there was no real necessity for it. Also, regarding bombers, I'd presume that the cruiser-mounted Fusion Mortar things were doing what they were expected to do (mostly orbital bombardment) so there was no need for super heavy bombers. Very few Orions were destroyed, and I presume the same could be said about Typhons, so the only capships getting blown up on a regular basis would be Atens and Fenrises which don't make supernukes necessary.

[General Battuta]

I think you'd have to start building military space assets as soon as two things became true: interstellar travel and nuclear weapons. In fact they'd probably be the first things built.

Amusingly, I don't think the fusion mortar (or any FS bomb warhead?) can actually generate the delta-V to conduct orbital bombardment from a circular orbit, but that's headed into the foolhardy realm of game physics discussion.

[Nightmare]

I think you'd have to start building military space assets as soon as two things became true: interstellar travel and nuclear weapons. In fact they'd probably be the first things built.

Are you talking about FS or sci-fi in general? I think you'd need something more exotic than nukes anyway.

[General Battuta]

Nah.

[Goober5000]

Maybe the previous harbinger wasn’t developed as a tactical tool, but rather strategical, like the meson bomb in FS2, which was housed in a container.

This is my view.  It's heavily implied that the Harbinger was used in a planetary assault role, so they may have been deployed directly from capital ships.  I don't think there is necessarily a connection to the Fusion Mortar, because Volition is known for re-using assets in unrelated places.

This is also a great opportunity to pimp my campaign Deneb III, which goes into a bit more depth on my fanon theories about the Harbinger and its uses.

[Rhymes]

Are you talking about FS or sci-fi in general? I think you'd need something more exotic than nukes anyway.

Why would you need something more exotic than nukes? Their primary value is in their destructive effect, not the mechanism by which they achieve it.

[Nightmare]

Depending on what you expect to encounter out there generic nuclear weapons might not be particular strong.

[General Battuta]

They’re enough to knock rocks into collision orbits.

[Mito [PL]]

Nukes aren't *that* powerful in many sci-fi universes. Consider an amount of antimatter equivalent to the mass of a normal bomb's nuclear load, for example, which would be a scientifically known factor. If I recall it correctly, the mass to energy conversion efficiency of a standard fission warhead should top off at about 0,4%, and a hydrogen fusion bomb at about 0,7%.

Other interesting but not really weaponiseable, at least in a conventional fashion, methods of harvesting energy out of matter are: dropping matter onto a neutron star with about a dozen percent efficiency, harvesting energy from a black hole's rotational speed, at about 29%, harvesting energy by dropping matter into a black hole's accretion disk and catching the resulting radiation, in the whereabouts of 10%-40%. Then the most efficient proccess is gathering a black hole's Hawking radiation, at just shy of 100% (due to astronomical timelines and the gigantic rise of emitted energy when the black hole nears the end of its life).

In comparison, matter-antimatter annihilation is theoretised to be capable of allowing for a conversion efficiency of about 50% minimum (due to vast amounts of heavy neutrinos resulting in the annihilation proccess escaping into space), theoretically up to also just shy of 100%, if you manage to specifically annihilate only electrons with positrons. I presume the latter to be achieveable in some sort of reactor but not in a bomb.

So comparing fission/fusion (taking the max fusion efficiency) bomb to the minimal antimatter reaction efficiency, there's over 70x more explosive power for the same amount of mass (of the payload itself, not counting the rest of the system) in an antimatter bomb.

A single antimatter Habringer would probably be able to crack if not snap a planet in half.

[General Battuta]

Okay but what does all this numberwang have to do with the problem, in the FreeSpace universe (or any other), of somebody jumping into your system and dropping some nukes or rocks onto your colony/homeworld. You need some kind of defenses if interstellar travel is possible and a ship in orbit can carry enough nukes to **** up your civilization. Interstellar travel alone is enough to be a threat, nukes are just the lowest-tech convenient way to blow up your **** or drop rocks on you.

[0rph3u5]

Remember, reliable beats powerful - and nuclear fission is comparatively reliable to other forms of Sci-Fi WMDs as far as the technical requirements go - with the notable exception of the asteroid strike of course. No vaccum or magnetic containment required.