Cheap and scarce
Hardware is cheap. Metal is abundant, low gravity makes big structures easy, and automation does most of the work. Hulls, missiles, flechettes, drones and armour plate cost little, so even a small colony can build a lot of military hardware.
Reach, chips and people are scarce. Reach is limited by water: fighting near home is cheap, and sending a fleet across the belt is expensive. Chips are imported, so smart weapons cost more than dumb ones. People are few, so crews are precious.
The result is forces that are hardware-heavy and crew-light: drones and missiles, commanded by small crews. Nobody can steer a drone swarm from light-minutes away, so crewed command ships go out with their drones, and people stay at the centre of combat.
The models are the age of sail, the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and the Caribbean in the age of piracy.
Fleets in being
A great power fields a few dozen armed ships and a few thousand fighters, plus many more drones. Its capital ships are fusion-powered, with huge radiator wings, and Brannock holds most of them.
Moving a capital fleet across the belt burns water a town could drink, so great-power fleets mostly sit docked, and their value is the threat. When one does move, it is visible for months, and it changes the politics of a whole region.
Forces by bloc
| Bloc | Forces | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Ceres Assembly | A small standing fleet guarding water convoys | Its real weapon is the threat of cutting off water |
| Shackleton League | No unified navy; member ports contribute convoy ships and hire mercenaries | Like the Hanseatic League |
| Charter Companies | Corporate navies; Brannock's is the belt's strongest and holds most capital ships | Drone-heavy, with Marr chips; like the East India Company |
| Red Clans | No navy; every adult is militia, and the Debtless raid Company shipping | Crewed ships and boarding |
| Seedkeepers | None | Protected, because attacking a vault turns the belt against you |
| The Scatter | Privateers, pirates and Wreckers | Raids and salvage |
How wars are fought
- Orbits set the calendar
- Long-range attacks happen only when orbits line up, so wars follow launch windows everyone can calculate. A fleet under burn is visible for months, and its course is predictable. Surprise needs a ship launched early on a long, cold, unpowered coast.
- Sieges, not battles
- A habitat is a closed system, so the way to beat it is to deny what it can't make: ice, fuel, chips, spare parts and seals. A water blockade is the most powerful weapon in the belt, and Ceres knows it.
- Capture, don't destroy
- Ships and habitats are too valuable to wreck, so the aim is to take them intact, and boarding parties matter as much as guns. Prize law makes captured ships and cargo the captor's property, judged by the prize courts at Shackleton Port.
- Information war
- Relay hacking, attacks on the credit ledger and forged contracts. The Solar Web is a battlefield, and the Aurelian Company's rival ledger is a weapon.
Engagements take hours or days, because burns are gentle and missiles are the only fast thing. Whoever has more water in the tanks decides whether a fight happens at all. See Power and travel.
Claiming a rock
The frontier is where combat is routine. Getting there is expensive, but once there, neighbours are close, so it behaves like the Caribbean or the American West: constant low-level conflict. A claim is three things together:
- A charter, which gives the legal right. The Hygiea Settlement's charters overlap, so two colonies can both lawfully claim the same rock.
- A beacon on the rock, which registers the claim on the Solar Web. The Lamplighters keep the registry, which gives them quiet power over every dispute.
- Someone willing to hold it. Holding decides most disputes. An undefended claim gets jumped.
Mercenaries
City-states with small populations hire out their fighting, as Renaissance Italy's cities hired condottieri. Free companies of Longhaulers and ex-Company crews sell their ships, drones and skills to whoever pays.
A mercenary captain's loyalty lasts exactly as long as the contract and the water.
Weapons
Cheap metal weapons do most of the work; chips and fissile material make the clever ones expensive.
| Weapon | What it's for | Cost and limits |
|---|---|---|
| Point-defence guns | Shredding incoming missiles, drones and boarders at short range | Cheap: bundles of solid steel flechettes, no explosives |
| Missiles | The only fast thing in a fight, with kinetic or flechette warheads | Chemical rockets guided by embedded minds, so smart ones cost chips |
| Drones | Scouting, screening and swarming, commanded from nearby crewed ships | Cheap hulls and narrow minds; light lag means they can't be steered from far away |
| Boarding parties | Capturing ships and outposts intact | Cost crew, the scarcest resource |
| Mass-driver rocks | Bombarding fixed targets | Free and devastating, but slow and visible; against habitats, the ultimate taboo |
| Nuclear warheads | Fleets, drone swarms and incoming rocks | Rare and expensive |
| Relay and ledger attacks | Blinding, isolating or bankrupting an enemy | Need Web access and skill; attacking relays themselves is taboo |
Why rocks are enough. At 10 km/s, a rock carries about 12 times its own weight in TNT, so a 1,000-tonne rock hits with roughly 12 kilotons. Mass drivers launch rocks without spending propellant, and habitats on predictable orbits can't dodge.
Nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons exist, but they are rare, expensive and held mainly by the great powers. Rocks make them unnecessary for destroying cities, so they are used tactically and industrially.
- Against ships and drone swarms. In space a nuke has no blast wave, but its burst of radiation kills crews and fries electronics within a few kilometres. A missile only has to get close.
- Against rocks. A nuclear device is the best way to deflect or shatter an incoming rock. The defence against the doomsday weapon is the old doomsday weapon.
- As mining tools. Nuclear charges hollow out rock far faster than drilling. Weapons and tools are hard to tell apart.
Fuel keeps them rare more than taboo does. Fission fuel comes mainly from Earth's crust in the debris field, and every warhead is fuel someone could have run a reactor on: years of a town's power, spent in a single flash.
Stealth
Infrared is the main combat sensor, and the belt is the best place in the solar system to hide from it. A crewed ship glows against a cold sky, but seeing something isn't the same as finding it: a sensor has to point the right way and pick one object out of millions of rocks. That gap allows a submarine-style game of cat and mouse.
- Run cold. Shut down what isn't needed, and store waste heat in sinks of ice instead of radiating it. Silence lasts until the sink is full, so a patrol's endurance is measured in tonnes of water.
- Radiate in one direction. Shielded radiators dump heat in a narrow beam pointed away from the enemy, if you know where the enemy is.
- Bury heat in rock. Land on an asteroid and pump heat into it. The rock re-radiates it slowly over weeks, leaving a warm scar that hunters search for, like a ship's wake.
- Hide in the clutter. A ship cooled to match the rocks around it becomes another dot in the noise. Debris fields are even better cover.
- Coast. Engines give you away, so stealth ships move on long, cold, unpowered coasts.
- Decoys. Metal is cheap, so heated shells that mimic a ship are cheap. A defender facing ten warm contacts has to guess which is real.
| North Atlantic | The belt |
|---|---|
| Silent running | Running cold on heat sinks |
| Thermoclines and ocean layers | Asteroid clutter and debris fields |
| Passive sonar | Passive infrared telescopes |
| An active sonar ping | Radar, which reveals the sender |
| Sonobuoys and listening networks | Sensor drones and picket lines |
| Surfacing or making noise | Firing your drive |
Light lag adds fog: what you see is minutes old, so you always shoot at where the enemy was.
Spoiler: heat in the wrong place
Burying heat in frontier ice warms Interloper material in the dark, exactly the condition that ends a Long Sleep. A war, or a rival's patrols, can wake a brood somewhere nobody expected.
Taboos
Raids, claim-jumping, blockades, boarding and capturing ships under prize law are all normal acts of war. A few things are not.
- The air right
- The Scatter's oldest law: anyone who asks for air is given it. Many blocs honour it in war too.
- Relays are neutral
- Attacking a Lamplighter relay hurts everyone, like attacking the Red Cross.
- Vaults are sanctuary
- Seedkeeper vaults are neutral ground.
- No nukes near habitats
- A nuke near a colony kills its irreplaceable electronics and its machine mind. Old-world chips are fragile, and losing them can destroy a city's memory of Earth.
- Never throw rocks at a habitat
- Earth died by impact, so this is the worst crime in the belt: the sin of the Conjunction.
Taboos are consequences, not locks. Anyone can break one; the cost is how the belt reacts, with sanctions, embargoes, lost trade and coalitions against the offender.