How do you make Military science fiction without destroying a world every time?

How do you make Military science fiction without destroying a world every time?

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I suppose you mean, how do you establish something like massive post-earth scale without sacrificing whole planets to demonstrate how high the stakes are?

Yes

Make everybody live on space stations.

Habitable worlds, or those that can be easily terraformed, are rare. Thus, neither side will risk fighting within a biosphere, least it be damaged beyond repair.
The majority of warfare would therefore be between space navys, ground fighting being reserved for attacking bases on non habitable planets and fortified asteroids.

Watch the Starship Troopers series.

Pirates!

Infinity. Most combat is a shadow war since anything bigger brings down the wrath of a neutral human space-spanning AI, so small special-ops teams are the norm.

Warfare is heavily ritualized to avoid suicidal RKV warfare.

The second some dipshit glasses a world they're on their fucking own and everyone is going to want them out of the picture. Have the power players understand this very basic fact and make them work around it.

by having a lot of resource rich worlds. The only time that schorched earth is a good idea is when the place you are destroying has little to no strategic resoruces or when you want to send a messege. Space flight is expensive, ships need special materials that arnt well recycled and they need a fuck ton of fuel. A faction wont dear to destroy a world that has a lot of materials in it, so battles will be mostly done either in space or via the same methods we use today allthough more advanced. Also re-coloniing a whole world requiers a lot of people, make it so there is not that much people to move around

If you have RKV, you have Dyson Spheres. If you have Dyson Spheres, most people wouldbt live on planets anyway.

Memetic warfare.

My suggestion would be to have the players be a part of a big-small ship's crew.

So you only ned to blow up a ship of the same size or larger toshow the pressure.

In Traveller terms: Have the players working on a 2000 T ship, large but not a capital ship. and once shit get's serious bring in capital ships with their spinal cannons which punches holes in smaller ships, large asteroids and small moons.

All groups, even different civilizations, move all arms manufacturing and other war efforts off world onto moons and asteroids to make it more difficult to wipe them out with a single strike.

Taken far enough, there might not be any justifiable military targets on the planets themselves, any damage to your enemy's planet just strengthens their resolve to fight and causes you to lose prestige in the intergalactic community without actually improving your situation militarily.

As a side effect, once a military victory is obtained in the surrounding space, conquering the planet itself is relatively easy. Think France in WW2 after the Manginot line failed to stop the German troops.

Terra-forming is hard. Theres a pseudo-geneva convention type thing where if anyone is retarded enough to glass a planet they become a target by everyone.

Make it hard instead of soft. There's no fantastic technology that allows for extravagant weapons of mass destruction, nukes are still the best humanity can offer, and no one dares use those on habitable planets, much less their own.
Especially when the amount of time that passes between reinforcements is enough to rebuild whatever damage was done. FTL may be quicker than sublight, but it's not so quick that you can just pop from A to B. Think Forever War.

>Thus, neither side will risk fighting within a biosphere, least it be damaged beyond repair.

Well, there is this strategically important planet here that we really want, but unfortunately it's defended by a guy down on the surface who refuses to give up no matter how nicely we ask him, so we just can't take it.

There are Things out there, that REALLY get angry when a planet's biosphere is removed.
Very powerful Things. As in, remove the biosphere of a planet, and they'll send out something that just straight up will kill your entire civilisation.

That's how Earth went through four different galactic empires in a period of 300 years. The fifth galactic empire finally got the message that there are Things out there that care really for preserving biospheres.

>make it hard

>nukes are still the best humanity can offer

>no one dares use those on habitable planets

as somebody who runs mostly hard sci-fi games i find this revolting.

Just ignore the end of the 3rd movie.

Because destroying planets is dumb.

If there is a planet that actually has life on it, colonized or not, that world IS WHAT YOU ARE FIGHTING FOR. It and its organic resources are more valuable than literally anything else in the universe.

What a lot of scifi settings overlook is the fact that, by the time you actually expand out into your own solar system, much less by the time you are ready to visit other stars?

Gold and platinum are fucking worthless. Iron is so cheap that the thing that sets the price is essentially just the cost to fly there and back, since these metals literally just float around in easy access in space in MASSIVE quantities. There is a SINGLE ASTEROID in our solar system that has more iron on it than the entirety of human history has ever mined collectively. There is another on that is a chunk of platinum the size of a 70 story building.

Asteroid mining devalues anything you can find in space. So the only resources that matter are the ones that can only be found on a habitable planet. Like soil, which takes millions of years to make and cant be found anywhere else than a planet with a complex microbial ecosystem. Or oil, if for some reason you still care about that?

You probably care about the soil the most. If you are a space empire, you need to feed your people. Hydroponics helps a lot, but not every plant takes to hydroponics well and hydroponic systems are very fragile and failure prone. Growing food the old fashioned way is preferred.

Oh, and meat. Unless you want to eat ground up bugs for protein the rest of your life, you need a planet to raise livestock on. Cows on a space station cost more than fusion reactors.

Basically this,
also water is more common than one would think. For example there is a cloud of water vapour in space with an estimated mass 140 trillion times that of earths total water.

>soil
Aeroponics doesn't need it and is more productive to boot.
>oil
Titan is covered in an ocean of hydrocarbons.
>livestock
It's easier to just grow meat in a vat.

Mutual assured destruction.
During the cold war both sides had nuclear weapons and could destroy the opposite side with a flick of a switch,
but not before the other side flipped their switch.
That didn't stop them from having proxy wars,
it just stopped them from pushing the other side to far and forcing them to flip the switch.

Now to go back to your sci-fi setting.
You have a stealth drone that is essentially one big ass engine.
It accelerates to the a fraction of the speed of light and crashes into the planet.
Even if they manage to detect your stealth drone, it's is so close behind his own light trail that it really can't be stopped
and even if they shoot it down the debris will still destroy the planet.
Of Course you can't hit mobile targets with it, but planets aren't going anywhere fast.

Everybody has the power to destroy habitable planets, but nobody dares to do it lest the other side flips their switch as well.

I meant the cg series, not the movies

I'm pretty sure shooting the guy from a kilometer away with a high powered laser/fancy future tech sniper rifle won't endanger the biosphere.

Is that not offset by the amount of precious metals you need to build spacefaring craft, equipment, etc?

Sniper rifle? why even bother landing?
You don't want to surrender to my battleships in orbit? okay.
Glass a couple of cities, maybe they will reconsider.

There's nothing like skimming out a freshly grown beef steak out of the protein vats with your own fishing net your dad bought for you.

Glassing entire cities would endanger the biosphere.

Send in the xenomorphs.

> Aeroponics doesn't need it and is more productive to boot.

Really? Because everything I've heard on the subject of aeroponics told me it was totally unfit for food crops.

Like, it would be great for things like herbs or air-refreshing plants in space. But while a controlled aeroponic environment can result in some well crafted high quality produce, that produce took up way more space to generate than a plant of its kind normally would (since you have to minimize contact between it ant any kind of other physical object, including its own support structure) and infrequent misting being your only transmission medium creates a bottleneck for nutrients that means that you essentially have to throw out the whole plant and start over after every harvest.
Aeroponics isn't efficient and doesn't scale well. Its an excellent tool for researchers that care about eliminating variables and sterile environments, but its not fit for trying to feed thousands or millions of people.

> It's easier to just grow meat in a vat.

You mean the bacterial poop-meat? Because that's the only 'meat growing' tech that exists.

Like, that will keep your space truckers alive. But thats below even bug burgers.

Give it a couple of years and it will bounce back. Nature is tough it can take a blow.

Memetic warfare is always underrated.

Nah, that just creates the demand.

The good news is that all of this metal is going somewhere, and the easy availability of the metal means that producing a bunch of space stations and ships is actually economically feasible, since the materials are so goddamn cheap.

Its probably good money to be an asteroid miner. You'll never go out of business, and there is a constant demand for your product. It might be worth pennies a pound, but you move so much in volume you're rich anyway.

If we get there we might aswell forget about preserving biospheres entirely.
"It'll get better in a few thousands years, we don't need the land until then, it's okay."

>You probably care about the soil the most. If you are a space empire, you need to feed your people. Hydroponics helps a lot, but not every plant takes to hydroponics well and hydroponic systems are very fragile and failure prone. Growing food the old fashioned way is preferred.
Hydroponics isn't that sensitive, the simplest systems are literally a bucket of nutes and a light and come back in a few weeks. There's some risk of disease spread in large systems if you don't filter or cycle your water regularly but that's not a huge problem to work around.

There are plants that are not especially suited for hydroponics, but that's where selective breeding and genetic modification comes in. We don't need everything to grow in space, just enough to cover basic sustenance.

Growing stuff in soil is still going to happen, but mostly for luxury items and local consumption. The cost of pulling that much mass out of a gravity well every day is going to far exceed the cost of running another hydroponics module.

>Aeroponics doesn't need it and is more productive to boot.
Having messed around with some hobbyist aeroponics, the misting system is a massive pain in the dick to set up and there's at least three critical failure points that lead to quick plant death. Hydro is slower but much more fault tolerant.

To keep your cold war setting from going full nuclear Armageddon, just play games about coups and bush wars in the third world instead of having it about NATO and USSR going full retard.

While a large push into space would increase the need for many metals, asteroid mining would also provide a lot more metals.

On the other hand, expansion of your population will increase the amount of food necessary, and there the asteroids do not provide an ample and relatively easily available source.

So even if asteroid mining could only help cover the increased demand then the metals and whatnot would still become a lesser concern relative to food, since the importance of that has now increased.

On the other hand, if we push into space without kicking up the population to start filling new worlds, then I'd consider it very unlikely that the space industry would have enough of a hunger for materials to match the massive amounts that have suddenly become available. The amounts out there are, simply, astronomical.

It's easy to glass a planet.

Drop a big enough rock on them from space and they're fucked.
Of course, it also wipes out everything you might have ever wanted about that planet - natural resources, people, technology.
It makes it impossible to colonise for years to come.

Why would anyone want to do that?

To defeat a planet, all you need to do is part your fleet in orbit.
Anyone on that planet looks at your invading force funny and you can drop a single weapon from orbit and wipe out an entire block, an entire borough, an entire city.
Besides, if anyone starts glassing planets, everyone else shows up to glass theirs.
Mutually assured destruction at it's most potent level.

I mean... why NOT have extinction-level events and RKVs be a thing? What's so bad about that? If the human race is spread throughout the stars, the destruction of a single planet isn't as massive an event as it would be if we only lived in our solar system. Depending on the scope of the setting it could be like a city being nuked. Which we've done - twice.

Mutually Assured Destruction would still be a thing, so you don't have to come up with a complex reason for why we aren't just RKVing everything willy-nilly. But you still have the possibility of Cold-War-gone-hot and rogue state scenarios, just like today with nuclear weapons. And the idea of tactical relativistic impacters could be neat.

Plus this.

Genetic manipulation is only its infancy, I assume that when we reach interstellar travel tech, we would have also mastered genetic manipulation.
Or at least can make a nice steak in a tank.

Thats because memetic warfare is stupid. Why not just go full-impossible and make time torpedoes that teleport a terminator into the past to kill the baby version of any person the missile hits?

Its exactly as feasible, and the science is just as sound.

Why isn't your setting dominated by robots that do all the work and fighting. No economic activity justifies large manned presence in space beyond something like a 6/12-man crew like in Alien.

Uh... what do you think memetic warfare is?

Growing meat in a vat isn't a genetic manipulation problem. It doesn't matter what the genes in the steak are, we don't have a magic vat that just makes meat happen.

Even if you just grown cloned animals in vats, that isn't meat you'd want to eat. Those animals have no chance to grow muscle mass or exercise. Would you really want to eat a baby chick, hours out of the egg, over the meat from an adult chicken? Because thats the difference.

If space commies demanded america to surrender, because they have a fleet of battleships in orbit.
But america refused because muh freedom and told them to "come down here and fight like a man"
Do you think they would still resist after Las Vegas and Detroit where glassed to the ground?
Yes, glassing cities is bad for the biosphere, but we have used over 2000 nuclear explosions in our atmosphere and we are still doing fine-ish here on earth.
And I assume that glassing is not as bad as nuclear bombs.
Hydrogen bombs are relatively clean and not that harmful to the biosphere.

>Like, it would be great for things like herbs or air-refreshing plants in space. But while a controlled aeroponic environment can result in some well crafted high quality produce, that produce took up way more space to generate than a plant of its kind normally would (since you have to minimize contact between it ant any kind of other physical object, including its own support structure) and infrequent misting being your only transmission medium creates a bottleneck for nutrients that means that you essentially have to throw out the whole plant and start over after every harvest.
>Aeroponics isn't efficient and doesn't scale well. Its an excellent tool for researchers that care about eliminating variables and sterile environments, but its not fit for trying to feed thousands or millions of people.
In the context of a space station supplied by asteroid mining, space is cheap - just slap together some more panels into an airtight module as big as you need. Current day stations are tiny but that's because literally everything is supplied from planet-side.

Aeroponic growth is faster than standard/hydroponic growth because the nutrients are atomized into a size that facilitates absorption and the absorption of carbon dioxide from the roots is actually a pretty big deal (a more hardcore grow op will actually flood the root chamber with carbon dioxide). The necessity of the support structure in zero-g is debatable, you could theoretically design an artificial support structure for bigger long-term plants, and for small plants like vegetables you aren't leaving anything between harvests anyways.

It most definitely is a genetic manipulation problem and it's not a magic vat.
If you program the cells to create muscle and tell it to move / exercise, it will do that.
It only needs nutrients and sugar and if you do it good I doubt you will even be able to taste the difference.

I'm sorry, I need my meat to have the taste of slaughterhouse despair.

I just want to say, shit like this is why I love this board.

"How does I military scifi?" turns into nerds arguing about how best to grow food crops in spaaaaaace inside 50 posts.

Dark Eldar go and stay go.

maybe we can program in pain and despair... no, that would not work.
We can make more money if we sell a special sauce made out of orphan tears.

Now with extra despair for only 9.99$

Logistics wins wars.

The desperate last ditch defense is made one jump away from the home system.
As soon as the home system comes within enemy nuking range most surrender.
Think Pacific island hopping WW2

That, and the less fantastical tech you need to introduce to make your setting work the better.

Meat growing vats remove a powerful economic constraint with fantastical technology... for what? Why, from a narrative perspective, does this tech need to exist?

That sort of thing works for Star Trek because humanity being above shit like petty resource wars is vital to the setting. But if you want military scifi, there needs to be a REASON to go to war.

"We'll starve without X" is a pretty damn good reason.

"I dunno, maybe the aliens are just huge assholes and won't leave us alone and we don't know why but its certainly not OUR fault so we can play the victim" is shit.

>What is Kinetic Bombardment
>What are Fusion bombs
>What is Antimatter

Hard sci-fi offers the most devastating weapons. Hyper-accelerated slugs of tungsten are better than nukes, and harder to defend against unless you have soft sci-fi magic like planetary shields or similar.

>you need a reason to go to war
Ideology, same as ever.

>Hyper-accelerated slugs of tungsten are better than nukes

The problem is getting them to such speeds in a practical way while staying in the hard SciFi realm.

if animals require more nourishment to grow then they provide once you eat them, why don't you just eat the nourishment you were giving to animals to grow them in a vat? Even if for soem reason you can't do that, that's a fuckload of nourishment you are giving those animals, where do you get it from?

I assume you havent heard of either railguns or gravity.

Get both. You've heard of the Casaba Howitzer, a nuclear shaped charge, so evolve it and use a nuclear explosively forged projectile. The limiting factor is obviously the temperature of the projectile, so even with the tiniest nuke, the projectile is going to be fairly large. Probably several dozen tons.

Meat vats aren't really that fantastical of technology, we could do it today except it's not commercially viable given existing industry. Space stations are an entirely different context, although it may still be cheaper to use factory farming with veal stalls instead.

This.
The main reason people would want to perfect vat-grown faux meat in the future would be as a 'luxury' food. If you have limited food production space, you sure as fuck arent going to waste some of it on making food for your livestock when it could be making food for your crew.

On planets, of course, you have little to no issue unless you go ham on urbanisation and build Trantor or Coruscant.

Because you want meat to spice up the menu.

But if you're looking to sustain the maximum amount of people with the minimum amount of resources, then you're going to live pretty close to hardcore vegan.

Any interstellar warship, even interplanetary one, is a weapon of mass destruction. You dont even need weapons. Throw garbage at a fraction of C and enjoy the giant crater.

>Glass a couple of cities, maybe they will reconsider.

We don't need battleships for that, nuclear missiles do it today. Funny thing is, no-one does it, even to nations without the power to fight back with their own nukes.

Well memed, that's an appropriate response to soft scifi.

Taking it all the way to hard SF, however, planets beat warships every time, because they're already there, have more mass, and fractional-c works against incoming forces due to the Kirklin mine dynamic.

That's becuase we're on the same planet, with a pretty large cultural acceptance of not nuking shit.
If you've flown a couple dozen light years to fuck someone up, nuking a couple of their cities to get them to sit the fuck down isnt such a big deal.

PLus, in the kind of future where solar systems are going to war, their populations are going to be such that glassing a city or two doesnt mean jack shit in relative kill number.

Compare it to drone bombing a village in a middle eastern town.

Or a middle eastern town*

Yeah, I'm sure cranking up railguns eleven orders of magnitude or so will be a cakewalk. Just let the nanomachines sort it out.

As for gravity, dropping shit from orbit is a lot harder than it sounds, because anything up there is already in free fall. Making it fall down instead of round and round will take some hefty rocket thrusters, and then you either have a real long way to go form geostationary, or you're hoping you've got a re-entry window for your target location right when you need it. Nuke start flying in five minutes. It's also a sitting duck for any anti-sat missile around, and those aren't even science fiction, they're already tried and tested. At lower SciFi levels simply getting the shit up into orbit in the first place will also be hilariously expensive.

Or you can spend the next three decades trying to drag something from out in the solar system onto an intercept coarse, as before, the nuke start flying in five minutes, so you better start making launch sites not exist in a similar time frame.

The human body does not produce all the necessary amino acids to survive, so we consume proteins which are broken down into the missing amino acids. Meat is an excellent source of those proteins, though not all meat provides all the necessary amino acids (see rabbit starvation). Animals are essentially being used as bioreactors to convert feed into the proteins we need.

So you're willing to accept a future with FTL such that wars are possible between rival planets, as per the point of the thread, but the concept of a more powerful railgun than is currently possible with modern technology is utterly impossible to you?

>Compare it to drone bombing a village in a middle eastern town.

Your unawareness of reality seems to be the supporting force behind your argument. IRL, "drone bombing towns" almost never happens. Drone pilots wait, often for days or even weeks, until targets leave town in a convoy in order to avoid damage to the surroundings.

Historically, mass casualties become less and less acceptable as technology improves.

In the future, carpet bombing a town with non-lethal, no-fun, certified rape free nanobot octopi to capture every adult and drag them to a mind-reading machine for IFF seems more likely than incinerating hospitals by the dozen and streaming it back to your elected officials.

I didnt say it happens in real life, I meant that's the equivalent scale for the modern world - which yes, is something that is generally seen as unnaceptable to us - not nuking a modern city.

Considering Mars is the only other planet in our solar system that is remotely livable and everything past that is gas giants and moons, a non-FTL sci-fi setting will most likely be limited to the inner solar system. And a setting that can't even get to light speed probably isn't going to have planet busters. In other words, think smaller.

Sure it will. But in the meantime you just moved your fleet through space and they absolutely need to refuel before going back to rejoin the armada. This will require
>Populace cooperation
>Populace existance
>Your mining and refining efforts to not be stifled by Sieverts revenge

Space travel isn't free and jumping back and forth at will between combat lines is something reserved for Propaganda-holos. If a planets leader really avoids surrender at all cost, it is far cheaper and more effective to turn his population against him or leave him be alltogether. Once his fleet has been taken care of, he poses no threat anymore and you are sure to find some amount of the population willing to help you refuel.

tl;dr: Surrender is worthless on a galactic scale. Just destroy whatever ships a potential threat has and move on. Leave the rest to memetic warfare.

If you're staying to hard SciFi then I think you're going to have a royal buggery of a time slipping that FTL under the radar as well.

What is the difference between hard and soft?

Weapons have limits that cant just be handwaved away. You'd call bullshit on a sword that swords so good it knocks high altitude stealth bombers out of the sky.

I call bullshit on a railgun that can fire at relativistic speeds. Any ship with such a weapon would fucking vaporize itself firing it.

Write military hard scifi?

What if you made a thousands of kilometres long one shot railgun drone that got its power by detonating a bunch of fusion nukes?

Hard is realism - Europa Report, Moon, The Expanse slightly less so, some parts of Babylon 5

Soft is varying levels of fantasy tech - Star Trek, Star Wars, other parts of Babylon 5

You don't really NEED relativistic to cause a lot of destruction - sure it causes by far the most, but even just high speed with a decently heavy projectile is going to fuck things up, and with far less ability for detection than a conventional nuke carrying icbm

The way to do it is with a Nicoll-Dyson Beams. Use the beam to accelerate a projectile at a fraction of C.

way to much effort for me

Good luck getting future taxpayers to spend their HARD-EARNED future money on a doomsday device.

Come to think of it, how many sci-fi settings with non-authoritarian governments deal with funding? Do they generally assume some sort of debt and deficit-free environment with perfectly willing taxpayers? Granted, the taxpayers can't exactly control where their money is going, but you'd expect somebody to be miffed about somebody that would spend quintillions of future money on black projects or super-advanced spaceflight.

It has civilian uses, like propulsion your ships at C for a fraction of the prize. As for taxing, I don't think there are many jobs that can't be done by robots or AI.

>implying gigantic planet busting doom cannons are not high on any respectable fun loving humans list of 'shit id like the government to spend my tax money on'

>own a habitable planet
>fill it up with your forces
>enemy won't attack because "muh habitable planets"
>your troops live off the local produce happily ever after while the enemy stews in orbit

>good lucking getting future taxpayers to spend their HARD-EARNED future money on a doomsday device
t. Manhattan project denier

Easiest shit to justify: we built ours to dissuade others from using theirs without fear of retaliation or to take out some really fortified target world that otherwise would cost our boys lives. There are non-military applications we are working towards. What's more, we're willing to work towards putting down the doom weapon, if every other nation does the same. To say nothing of privately owned doom weapons that are emerging from ancapistani terrorists orbital doom gun projects, no tax payers required. Perhaps it's borderline treasonous to question that kind of decision.

Plus tax payers have been getting shat on since forever: US income tax was supposed to be a temporary solution, and they said "We'll only take from the rich guys, honest" and here we are today a hundred years later. You think the people jacked up on the future anti-depressants and dulled by being raised on video feeds from the descendants of what passes for news and journalism in our own time are going to give a shit? More likely nobody would care enough to do more than organize a protest or some pointless march and then blog about it, and then it'd pass into consensus as regular.

Using them is harder to justify. It'd be rare and horrifying, primarily on uninhabited worlds just for testing and deterrence. You can bet anyone using it offensively is either an idiot or desperate, and you don't get a hand on the doomsday weapon controls legally by being stupid but just having such a weapon changes the face of war: you can't put all your eggs in one basket if there's a chance it could explode. Suddenly they have to spread themselves more thin and scramble to make countermeasures or get some of their own. It's another step in the ever growing game of catch-up that is technological advancement in war and by not advancing with the rest you weaker as a whole.

>The Expanse
>any part of "OMG ALIEN SOULS BE MIGRATING INTO HYUMONS STOP THIS GENOCIDE", "The ancient aylums have a beef in this battle, will you stop fighting like you do not now?" Babylon 5

Toppest keks.

>Ctrl+f
>no Dune (first 4 books)
Wat
It's very simple, pretty much the same as RL. Everyone has an arsenal of giga-nukes. If anyone uses a nuke on anybody else unprovoked, the rest of the empire gang up on them and nuke them off n retaliation until their planet is glassed.
Therefore even though the stakes could be high, they're forced to be lower because of MAD.

remind me of this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=KOYToS_pdFs
maybe it can help.

[VGS]

Whats the closest thing you can get to an energy shield while still staying hard sci-fi.

Plasma shields that create electromagnetic fields that dissipate energy weapon discharges

>have plasma
>shit it out of ship and control it with magnetic fields to form a wall in front of incoming projectile
>somehow heat the plasma and use it like a whipple shield

Would this work? I think it would also effect lasers.

I don't know about this, what do you mean by 'energy weapon discharges'? Particle beams? I think there are better ways to disrupt those.

No defense works on everything. Its all rock paper scissors shit.

Laser PDS burns down missiles and torpedos. Armor/evasion is your only hope against slugs.

The hard scifi answer to lasers is anti-laser chaff that creates a cloud that scatters lasers and disperses them. Higher tech civs might have optical bending tech, which can make lasers go around your ship, but thats going to be an overheating nightmare.

Against stuff like plasma, emp burst to try and push the plasma off course. Same principal as the electromagnetic bottle, but as a defensive tool.