This man should not be placed in charge of earths defence

[Shadowcatbot]

Was derping about the interwebz when I found this:

Thread title: How should we defend Earth against aliens?
Answer: Sky trenches.
Basically you create a giant floating defensive network above a city, that has weapons designed to fire upwards towards the sky. These would be on weapons platforms that perpetually hover above a city or other points of interest in order to protect it from descending attack aircraft. I imagine these platforms would be absolutely massive, like a floating fortress. These would probably look something like this (but with a ton of guns not air-strips);
[Picture of shield like sky carrier that I'm too lazy to copy over]
Those floating fortresses would be able to move and move anywhere they are ordered to, in order to protect said area. Whenever an enemy force descended from the sky a sky trench (or multiple sky trenches) could be floating there waiting to engage them.
Obviously elements of the city owner's interceptors and ground army would be engaged, but the floating fortresses would provide the majority of air defense.
How would this hold up? Why or why not? What would you do differently?



Let the flogging of this shit begin.

[Error]

Links please, then the merciless flogging can begin.

[Shadowcatbot]

I doubt you'd go there, Found it on a site that'd make half the members here pop a vein.

[Error]

Linky please, I need more detail to carefully and sadistically dissect it.

[Shadowcatbot]

I'm warning you it's full of rainbows and Moboquestrians and shity writing.

[Vinyl]

Simple - orbital bombardment. We need a Death Star not a "skii trench".

[Error]

Best means of defending a planet? Preventing the enmy from attacking.

In other words, he looks like he's readying for invasion, slam a bunch of relativistic kill vehicles into his planet. Wham, problem solved.

[Shadowcatbot]

I would say instead of letting the enemy get into orbit of your planet then defending how about you make some spaceships and defend it from orbit?

[Error]

Yup. Stop him before he gets to orbit, then just throw high-speed rocks at his planet.

Most efficient means of winning interplanetary/stellar wars: deorbiting asteroids into planets at great speed.

[Shadowcatbot]

Yes but we're assuming we don't know where the enemy is coming from and that they'd like something other then a charred gravel pile when their done.

[Error]

Then yes, kill sats and orbital weaponry is probably best.

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

However no one would trust a single country, even a responsible and trustworthy one like the US, to have even as much as a handgun in orbit around Earth.

[Iv121]

TBH if such race actually visits us they'll prob just bombard us from the moon orbit or something. Moreover why not just fking place em on the ground ? They gonna act the same in both cases anyway, waste of money. Because they can move around ? Heh, for the price you make en do so you can build a whole giant network of bunkers and/or AA stuff. Most of our AA stuff is missiles anyway = wide covering range, plus considering who we face our AA will prob come in the form of ICBMs targeted at those things. Prob is they'll prob shoot em all down in no time so even if you mount it all on flying fortresses it wont change a thing ...

TL;DR: We're dead, better hurry into the space age.

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

For all we know we could kill them by spraying water on them, so..

I suppose the greatest problem with finding tactics against aliens is that we won't know shit about them until they attack. We humans may be the most violent race in the universe by far, or the least. Alien military tactics could be to bombard us from the moon, or they could be to shower us with super-advanced weapons and what would to them be poison but to us be efficient medicine and assume we kill ourselves with it all.

[ACH0225]

"We have the enemy in range, Commandant."

"Good. Prepare to drop the P-Bombs. I'd almost feel sorry for the humans, having to suffer through this."

The ship releases thousands of air burst bomblets, saturating major population areas. Mumbai, Beijing, Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, New York, all the major cities. Their skies begin to cloud with the bomb's contents, the most lethal disease to the invaders.

Penicillin.