This is my first attempt at fiction. You have been warned.
Already in the early half the twenty-second century USA and China had started waging war in the orbital space around planet Earth. It had started with then communist USA shooting down some of fascist China’s spy satellites, and from there the conflicts had spiraled. On each side of the battle, engineers tried to out-smart their opponents with new and better ways to take down the enemy’s orbital spying capabilities.
In the beginning small nukes were used against the satellites. The main effective component of the nukes was radiation, knocking out the electronics of a target satellite. Of course regular bombs were utterly useless out in space since they are weapons based on gas expansion. Any gas explosion in space simply disperses too fast to be effective.
Soon the satellites were given defensive weaponry to ward off oncoming rockets. The first generation of countermeasures installed on the spy satellites were huge lasers. However, laser-based weapons proved to consume way too much energy even when when fired only in short pulses. They were soon replace with kinetic impactors — weapons firing small slugs of metal which were propelled at ever greater speeds against the incoming rockets. These slugs knocked the rockets off their course and wreaked massive destruction to the warheads, often totally disabling them.
As more and more costly weaponry was installed on these spy satellites it became quite hard, not to say impossible, to target them effectively from the surface of Earth. Instead some ingenious engineers had the bright idea to use the kinetic impactors which was already present on board the satellites to target enemy craft. Through an ever increasing arms race between the nations, with the goal of wiping out all the enemy’s orbital spying capabilities, these satellites had soon become full-fledged battle stations.
The space battle stations were huge objects with attitude rockets protruding on long, spike-like, booms from a spherical core. They were large enough to house a full crew of twenty men. The outer parts of the ship were mostly covered in protective shielding, with no windows or observation decks. Navigation was performed by a cluster of computers near the core. The crew was there simply to service the machinery which could not service itself. In the very middle of these spiked balls of doom was the gyroscope. The gyro, together with the attitude rockets, aided in turning the ship around, aiming one of the eight main cannons at some hostile target. The cannons were the most expensive parts on these ships. They were machines capable of accelerating small pellets up to speeds nearing that of light. When one of these pellets hit an unshielded target it would completely rip through it, shredding anything in proximity with force equal to any atomic bomb.
Now the interesting thing about these battle stations was that they did not fire metal slugs as kinetic impactors. They fired super-compressed organic material. Often human excrement. With no other waste disposal options than burning or evacuating into space, it should be an honor for any turd to be fired out of a twelve billion dollar weapon at 98% the speed of light. Not to mention the humorous fact that these space wars were quite literally orbital shit-flinging battles.
