Posting here as I don't have a lot of advice/ideas on /k/ and other forums. Perhaps you might help me? I'm making a game based on a hypothetical war on the moon anywhere between 2100 to 2250. It will be a FPS with some limited base building but it will feature realistic physics and weapons & equipment for the setting. Think the game Boundary + Red Orchestra 2 (especially for the dynamic campaign map) with also some influence of Tiberium Sun aesthetics
I need help on a plausible conflict (not aiming on 100% realism but at least that it seems plausible) that takes place on the Moon, anything from weapons, equipment, tactics, ships, politics, everything really. I want to do it specifially on the Moon as I feel it's underused in video games and I feel it has unique aesthetics. Here's some brainstorming I did with my limited knowledge:
>conflict must take place somewhere between 2100 to 2250 because in my opinion the future will be AI & machines only + it's more relatable to our technology
>why people are fighting: helium 3 to power fusion reactors and other minerals/metals
>no alien artefact
>option 1: conflict takes place in the early 22nd century between various private/national mining companies and PMCs as it's a sort of gold rush/scramble for africa. A literal wild west
>option 2: conflict takes place early 23rd century as a proxy war between Earth and Mars. It might seem super obvious that Earth will win but I made a scenario where Mars might have a chance if anyone is interested
Tell me how do you think a war on the Moon will look like. I imagine lots of orbital bombardment but if it's not possible, how will it look like on the ground?
 CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
 |
CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
If you are going to make shit up like this you may as well ditch the idea that what ever you are making is "realistic"
Why not? I find it challenging but fun. So tired of sci-fi games with so little creativity in gameplay they feel the same
Yes and helium 3 is the new "spice trade" of the future. I don't know how realistic it is to make fusion reactors work out of helium 3 but I think it's about the only really valuable ressource worth fighting for on this barren Moon. Why the frick the universe gave us the most boring and featureless Moon in the solar system? Imagine if we had Titan or Io
Those moons were formed beyond the frost zone, not possible to have an interesting moon inside the warm part of the disc
Basically this
Just make it as silly and and nonsensical as possible instead, it's a video game after all
conflict between nations for claiming it because there's lots of some much needed resources. the most likely scenario
It it ever happens, it won't be over resources, but the ease of launching things into space. But even that seems unlikely, as there is plenty enough of room.
It'll be over control of ice craters
Who cares about ice craters? Anything you make on the Moon has a super cheap way into space.
Ice = hydrogen = incredibly valuable on the moon for refueling orbital depots
Largely irrelevant, once you can manufacture on the moon, asterpid mining becomes viable, like with current rocket tech viable.
>>why people are fighting: helium 3 to power fusion reactors
Mining helium-3 from the moon is incredibly fricking dumb. It'd be better to get it from the gas planets. It requires a huge amount of energy to extract helium 3 because the concentration's fricking low.
https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/NSS-JOURNAL-Nuclear-Fuel-Resources-of-the-Moon-2021-June.pdf
>>and other minerals/metals
the Moon isn't a very good source of mineral and metals. Like it's basically all slag. The limited water on the Moon might be worth fighting over. It might be argued that the Moon is a strategic location for space expansion. While the Moon has basically the same stuff Earth has, it's a lot easier to launch stuff from the Moon than it is from Earth. There's no atmosphere and less gravity. If you're making space colonies, lunar resources are pretty fricking useful.
There might also be strategic locations on the Moon worth fighting for. The Moon might have HUGE lava caves. Like big enough to put a city in. They're nice because they provide free radiation shielding. The military also investigated lunar combat in 1959 with Project Horizon. An interesting conclusion is because there is no air, small projectiles have a much greater range. The claymore on a stick in pic related is a pretty great weapon. Because there is no air, radiation can be a surprisingly good weapon. Unshielded nuclear reactors should be capable of delivering lethal doses to people wearing spacesuits from pretty great distances. And if you have fusion, another option is to just fly a fusion powered spacecraft by the Moon. Fusion powered spacecraft designs like VISTA could render the Lunar surface uninhabitable from thousands of kilometers away.
Water makes extracting metals a helluva lot easier. Hydrogen's a lot easier to use as propellant than other stuff available on the Moon.
>the Moon isn't a very good source of mineral and metals. Like it's basically all slag
Lunar regolith is an excellent source of both aluminum and oxygen. Not sure where you get the idea that it's "slag"
Depending on where you land, lunar regolith can have roughly as much aluminum(5.6-10.7 wt%) as steel slag(4.5wt%)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258661774_Metallic_species_oxygen_and_silicon_in_the_lunar_exosphere_Upper_limits_and_prospects_for_LADEE_measurements
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283230689_Study_on_replacement_of_coarse_aggregate_by_steel_slag_and_fine_aggregate_by_manufacturing_sand_in_concrete
I wouldn't exactly call it an excellent source of aluminum. I mean you can extract aluminum from just about any rock you find on the ground here on earth, but it's not very economical to do so. Separating out the aluminum from the other crap isn't economical, so we get aluminum from rocks that have relative high concentrations of aluminum. Rocks that have certain mineral/element concentrated are called ores. And you're less likely to find them on the Moon than on the Earth because water tends to play a heavy part in concentrating minerals and the Moon has frick all.
there is unironically too much. It basically becomes a waste product if you're processing regolith.
Moon mining's always gonna suck, but hey you gotta work with what you got.
On the moon the sunlight and vacuum gives you extraction options you don't have on earth.
As far as I know, one of the main appeals of fusion is that it does not emmit any kind of radiation. And about concentration of helium 3 and other ressources, well has the whole Moon been thouroughly prospected? Have the Apollo missions sampled hundreds of meters deep? That's where I take some liberty in my plot, helium 3 is in general rare on the Moon except some areas that have way higher concentration, hence the conflict
I think there's some neutron radiation with fusion. but you don't need heavy radioactive elements which can be hazardous
>>As far as I know, one of the main appeals of fusion is that it does not emmit any kind of radiation
lol no. Even with near magic fusion it emits lots of neutrons. Using He-3 doesn't reduce the neutron radiation hazard from fusion rockets much. Pic related.
3 is in general rare on the Moon except some areas that have way higher concentration,
Not geologically possible. Helium-3 can only be on the surface because it's deposited there by solar wind.
>>has the whole Moon been thouroughly prospected?
no, but it's pretty unlikely to have anything worth fighting for. A lot of processes that really concentrate minerals require water, but as far as we know the Moon basically never had much water. Our current understanding of the Moon's formation is that it formed in a big impact event. This blew away a lot of the water and other volatile elements. But yeah, the Moon has most of the same stuff Earth has only easier to launch into space.
>radiation
It only produces those neutrons while it's powered on (no lingering radiation) and I'm sure there are ways to shield from it
>geologically impossible
I'll run with this, I don't think there are a lot of sci-fi that make so much effort into realism. I have to find a valid reason for people to fight on a barren, featureless hostile rock WITHOUT using some gay predictable boring alien artefact. Every sci-fi show/movie/book did this. I'm sure it's way way harder to extract helium 3 from gas giants and bring it back to Earth
Yes, you can shield from it, but it can completely disable infantry movement on the surface. There may be some value in holding the Moon for military reasons. There's no stealth in space, but not so on the Moon. You could have a tank or some drive around on the surface of the Moon and plant some missiles in the ground for later launch. It would be very hard to find them from orbit around the Moon. It might also be worth putting bases on the Moon for potential harassment of cislunar space. X-ray lasers and ultrarelativisitic electron beams could have the reach to hit stuff pretty far away. They may be better placed on the moon than in space because you can dump a lot of heat to dirt. There is some argument that cislunar space control is valuable. It's been argued that it's better to put a propellant depot in cislunar space than earth orbit because thermal radiation from earth isn't present so it's easier to store cryogenic propellant. So basically it'd be like Hawaii at the start of WWII a good place to base a space navy and refuel it
>disable infantry movement
If the reactor is shielded, how can it disable infantry movement?
>no stealth
Even if you were to power down your ship + whatever kind of stealth coating?
The more I read into it, the less appealing helium 3 is. Too little, hard to extract, cheaper to manufacture from tritium on Earth, feasability of helium 3 fusion reactor. In my setting, I really wanted Mars to be a faction of its own for my game. The general idea I had is the Moon is an important starport, dockyard, ressource mining and most important of all helium 3. The Moon is lawless and kinda is like the wild west/gold rush. Private companies don't really respect their mining sectors (oops we went further than expected to have a few more km2 of rich helium 3 field teehee what are you going to do about it 😉
There's no unified government on earth and no nation wants to start policing the Moon so now there's PMCs/private security. Earth private mining companies especially encroach/bully Martian sectors as they have no power to stop them and have quite rich fields. Mars wants more independence and secure their helium 3 supplies so they partner up with [insert emerging power]. Situation escalates and eventually they start a war but doesn't directly involve Earth, it's like a PMC proxy war but mostly against these private mining companies as they are so rich and powerful
I specifically want no aliens in my setting. Been done to death and gets super boring
>If the reactor is shielded
Shielding all radiation eats into rocket performance too much because it adds a lot of weight. It's important to only shield the crew and just dump radiation to space. The shielding absorbs heat too, this is really bad when you're talking megawatts of neutrons
>stealth
nope. Don't make me tap the sign:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth
>>the Moon is an important starport, dockyard,
it's pretty sensible
>I specifically want no aliens in my setting.
It could be a dead alien or just the mistaken idea that it is alien. Early estimates made people think one of the Martian moons was hoolow, and from that a lot of alien base theory thinking started.
The impactor seems to be fairly solid so it might be highly metallic. If so it might be cheaper to excavate it than travel to 16Psyche.
Mistaken that it's an alien
While I will never kneel to how easy and plot convinient it is to add aliens, I could perhaps make people speculate really hard about it like let's say the US made some highly dangerous experiments with super intelligent AI (super illegal in the future) for military technology and the AI made a sort of anti matter bomb/reactor and produced a significant amount of energy that everyone noticed. The US tries to cover up hard but like a data core from rhe experiment finds its way on the moon and everyone fights for it. Idk just brain storming
Have you read Asimov's story "The Key"? The macguffin is an alien item that in terms of the story is there to raise the stakes. The story as such flows along two lines:
the first is a "wheredunnit" about trying to recover the item (this is not a spoiler)
the second is to tease the reader (herein lies a spoiler).
So your story could take the same approach: there is something alien but aliens do not act within the story itself.
>It'd be better to get it from the gas planets.
That requires far longer travels deep into space, and getting in and out of deep gravity wells. I don't think you have thought this through.
>advice/ideas on /k/ and other forums
No surprise, /k/ never delivers.
Go for a resource scenario such as Helium 3 or polar ice in the polar craters (useful as rocket fuel).
Or go for strategic positions uch as Peaks of Eternel Light.
Or go all out such as the impactor for the Aitken Basin was an alien probe.
obviously drones (without the propellers of course), and something that could chuck a moon rock on a ballistic trajectory could probably put a 5 ton boulder right on top of a target from a thousand kilometers away no problem
In my setting, drones aren't used that much because of potent EW, regolith because very harsh on electronics + static (as far as I understand it's like mini EMP too?), limited autonomy and needs someone onsite to reduce time lag
No one has the capacity to chuck an asteroid at the Moon (for option 2 and at least in the beginning) as the war kinda happens all of a sudden. No one has an adequate navy for orbital bombardment as they only built a patrol navy to pacify the asteroid belt and protect shipping lanes and asteroids will be viewed as a big escalation (kinda how Russia doesn't send its nukes against Nato or downs their AWACS). It will also destroy fields of helium 3 which is extremely valuable. Both parties want to limit the conflict to the Moon
sounds like all rods from gods then if not pinpoint strikes with tactical nukes, if they don't want it to escalate to that level and can keep a lid on it then commando strikes by special forces like the US does now on the downlow I guess, oh and don't forget cyber attacks against infrastructure
If for some reason orbital bombardment were out of the question, it would be a lot of artillery spam. The low gravity and lack of atmosphere means artillery has godlike range and accuracy. Plus the need for pressurized suits, vehicles, and habitats means shrapnel is extremely dangerous.
Drones won't be used much because they would require rockets to "fly", which are absolutely awful for loitering.
>The low gravity and lack of atmosphere means artillery has godlike range and accuracy
this, that's what i was getting at with my "bolder thrower" idea. Also i read once about how you could conceivably fire a high-powered rifle horizontally on the moon and have it come back around and hit you in the back of the head like 20 minutes later, really wild stuff, keep stuff like that in mind.
is it possible tho? you'd need an extra maneuver at apogee or something
>is it possible tho? you'd need an extra maneuver at apogee or something
no, as long as it clears the terrain (even by an inch) it basically does one "orbit" and comes back to where it started. And the velocity was not even crazy high, I think even modern small arms/M-16 tier. Read it a few years ago.
not sure you can get something in orbit with one impulse.
You can if you fire it from the highest terrain in it's path. It's a pretty specific hypothetical but it's possible.
Realistically, you only need to the capability to make a bit more than half an orbit. Then you just rotate your gun to strike anywhere on the surface.
I say a bit more than half because the rotation of the moon might add or subtract a bit to your requirements, depending on where you and your target are.
tunnel warfare, anything valuable on the surface will be destroyed unless one side did a successful first strike and made the enemy surrender without retaliation.
Lunar warfare will look just like the current war in Ukraine except the FPV drones and artillery will have much longer range due to the low gravity and lack of atmosphere. The FPV drones will have to incorporate compressed gas propulsion instead of propeller blades but that's not too difficult to engineer.
Titan apparently has more hydrocarbon based oil near its surface than the whole of earth. It's one of the few moons with a potential for life too and it has a giant underwater ocean. A lander has been there before, the surface looks pretty much like Mars. Maybe in the year 2200 earth experiences peak oil and our reserves run low so mining begins on titan
You could also look here for ideas or help too
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
>build base on moon
>launch rockets to mars
>create martian colony
>launch rockets to titan
>extract oil
>burn on mars
>free CO2 and other gasses
>fix the magnetic wind issue that mars suffers from
>only need N2 or some other inert gas
>just get more titan oil and perform whatever operation necessary to not extract N2
>send it to mars
>tons fuel anyways, entire upper layer of titan is free fuel
>go trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt on earth
>don't give a shit because you've just primed mars for terraforming
>leave earth
>investors seethe
>don't give a shit
>I've got a planetary empire now Black folk
>use robots for gold mining on mars
>send it back to earth (again infinite fuel from titan)
>crash prices
>pay back loan
>ez pez lemon sqeez
interplanetary empire in one generation
prove me wrong Black folk
I can do this right now, just need some fine investors for a gofundme
>what would it look like?
Drones.
all spacial activity is controlled ... imagine you're just adam and eve in the garden of eden.
>laser guns and laser swords pew! pew!
Me throwing rocks at you.
I can give you my idea on how blaster works. It requires extreme energy, to shoot, but that is delivered by fast beta-decay of ammo.
For small arms?
For everything where you can replace gunpowder with some isotope, that decays into shitton of electrons when suspect to radiation.
I cant think of a scenario where you would ever have a war on the moon.
Maybe start with that? How would that war even start, why wouldn't you fight the war on earth instead? Even if the moon was what the fight was about? There is few industries on the moon, even fewer where humans are actually useful in flesh. Its more likely that Rovers or specialized robots will do resource extraction on the moon. I don't think there will ever be a scenario where a significant amount of humans settle on the moon.
In any case, a war on the moon will be fought with nukes or specialized sattelites that can be deployed and act as kinetic impactors.
The moon is an unhospitable place and it would be more likely that your soldiers would have to fight their own equipment and lifesupport instead of fighting eachother.
Maybe some billionaire spray coated and pressurized some lavatubes that cant be hit with nukes? Could be interresting to have an atmosphere and low gravity. It could be like an african slave mining operation, where you have to work to get money for your ticket back home. Could be a prison colony because "killing is inhumane", so you put prisoners on the moon and let them scratch nuggets of rare minerals out from beneath the kilometers of caves, eating eachother and sleeping in the coarse lunar dust... Moon Zombies?
I dont know man its your game?!
if anything i see a wholesome moment when they just go to each other's bases to have lunar dinner
you could use the moon as a base to bombard the Earth, like in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." So maybe it's a battle for the high ground.
>lavatubes
could be quite large
even if you could destroy them, they are probably valuable enough that you wouldn't want to. They shield stuff from radiation, they insulate stuff from thermal extremes, and you can potentially pressurize them.
DARPA's interested in taking over the Moon. They want to look for resources on the Moon and even develop mining techniques to extract minerals at low concentrations.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/the-us-government-seems-serious-about-developing-a-lunar-economy/
They even want to build Moon trains.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/northrop-grumman-to-conceptualize-moon-trains-for-darpa/
They seem to believe the Moon has strategic importance. I think there might be ways to justify mining, even if geology says there probably isn't anything on the Moon. So if you want there to be a gold rush, instead of helium-3, I'd say go for metals. Some fusion rocket designs call for ridiculous amounts of tantalum, like 6% of world production in a year for one rocket. It may be that fusion fuel is basically free, but reactors require rare resources. So there's a need to mine lots of these rare minerals, because more reactors means more economic growth. You might be able to say the Moon has lots of these rare minerals because that's what the mass concentrations are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)
The Moon is gravitationally one of the lumpiest bodies in the solar system. You could say, that this is due to heavy dense elements like tungsten, rhenium, tantalum, all good stuff for fusion reactors, getting concentrated. Worst comes to worst, well it's been proposed one could drill to the center of the Moon with nuclear bombs and mine the lunar core.
How deep are these lava tubes? Are there many? Structural integrity of it?
we think big ones can exist. We know some have holes that reach the surface.
Till now everyone (rightfully) criticized my ideas as dumb/impossible/not viable. Fine, maybe lunar warfare is not possible in our reality but give me a plausible scenario (politics, weapons etc...) where there is actual fighting over/on/in the Moon. Closest to reality would be great but take some liberty to change some stuff to better suit your plot (example: helium 3 concentration of the Moon surface is low but because of X mineral a few feet deeper, it traps the helium 3 better so higher concentration + we uuhh figured out a way to make helium 3 fusion reactors viable). The only thing I don't want is anything involving aliens
I'd focus on politics. Not every war is fought over resources. In fact it seems to me like most of the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries have been fought for political and ideological reasons, essentially to force an answer to the question: "what should the world look like?" The only reason I can imagine for fighting on the Moon itself would be some sort of political dispute that can't be resolved on Earth. An independence movement, maybe? The logistics of getting to the Moon would need to be reasonably difficult for the lunar side to have a chance. They would need to be developed enough to function independently of Earth as well. Most of all they would need a motivation for doing something so drastic. Why can't their complaints be resolved with negotiations? That would have to be tied to why they're there in the first place. Are they researchers? Wayward rich types? Probably not laborers since there isn't much industry possible. If you want Mars involved it could be a sort of solidarity ideologically that causes Mars to support them, or perhaps politics of their own, opposing Earth's (presumable) hegemony. Of course, then you need to answer the question of what Earth's politics look like. Depending on who the lunar colonists are actually opposing, they would probably find many allies on Earth also acting on their own political motivations.
As for the shape of the war itself, you should let that be driven by gameplay more than realism I think. Nobody actually wants to play a realistic war simulator.
I'm off to work but yes I thought in details about this. I'll write it in a few hours so if you're interested take a look at around 8pm EST
Whoops srry finished later than I thought. I think you're right about Mars and finding allies. The way I see it in the future is a multipolar world with the US still a military superpower but has lost a lot of it's influence, being a bit more authoritarian and isolationist. It has a vested interest in Mars as most of the heavy lifting in establishing the colony comes from the US private companies. Next you'd have something like the european union which is also a super power in the future, haven't thought that much about the rest but you'd also have a superpower in asia and it will not be China with its current crashing demographics and bad foreign relations with its neighbors. Point is, the conflict starts with a joint martian-US private mining complex discovering the motherload of ressources/lava tunnel complex but [insert superpower] has been steadily encroaching their territory and war starts over it. This way Mars will take the backseat in the co flict but while still being involved. I know it might not be that convincing but I have too much ideas and have to reorganize it coherently but that's the jist of it
Thanks for the support but I'm a long way off. I am still getting accustomed to UE5 but made progress in the environment, physics and plot/equipment/technology but I need competent people for 3D assets and especially experts in astronomy/space and military buffs to help me share their opinions to make it more believable
Battle for high ground...yeah I haven't thought about that good idea
>Battle for high ground...yeah I haven't thought about that good idea
That used to be a serious rationale for militarizing the moon. Later people reaslised this had limited utility in practice. Later yet, people realised the Lunar regions have the "Peaks of eternal light" which are very limited but valuable for lunar bases. Nearby you have craters where the crater floor is in eternal darkness and where water ice is expected to be found. This too is highly valuable and limited.
Also the Lagrange points are limited and possibly of value.
You can find a lot of openly published military articles about space power that could be relevant for your project.
>weapons
During the SDI era, gamma ray lasers (aka "grasers") were hot. In vacuum the beam would strike fatally at great distances.
Another weapon mentioned in a lunar warfare book by Asimov of Clarke (sorry, cannot remember which one of the two), the lunar fortresses had cannons that shot liquefied metal at great speed. This could be launched electrically or magnetically.
Railguns are a staple of science fiction.
Did some search, find that Google is getting really bad at finding what once was easy. So here is the story (from 1955):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight
and the tech is known as MAHEM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAHEM
It seems MAHEM was inspired by the book.
I will buy this game if you ever release it. Please make it Linux compatible or at least work through proton on steam. Who am I kidding, I’ll buy it anyway.