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But in space, especially at the long ranges that space combat would likely take place, there would be drag: the drag from the firearms' barrels. The longer the range, the longer the barrel would need to be to allow for accurate aiming, even in an atmosphereless condition without atmospheric drag. That would mean more surface area in contact with the projectile before it is released and the more of the bullets' energy would be lost to the rifling— or even without the rifling of the barrel. Larger firing charges could offset this, but then you need a heavier, less responsive barrel with aiming mechanisms that take up more space. Then with these big guns you're going to start having recoil problems, and these would add up in a gravity-free environment such as space, throwing each sucessive shot (already guaranteed to be inaccurate IMO) increasingly off target. My point is that although firearms will fire in space, at space combat range they're impractical.
Look, with all of that AI, your ship will likely not need a huge crew, mabey a coupel of people to fix complex problems and tell the ship what to shoot at. Next, if you use Gamma lasors, you get a much higher charge, and the crew of the target ship has a harder time figuring out where it is comeing from. Next, if your ship is fast, you can fly behind a planet and enhemey ships will be forced to dent the trophy or face an ambush. Also, the range will be incredable, so not being detected will be an issue. a small force of radar camofloged fighters buzzing around will be hard to hit, and they need not broadcast IFF, because they are so spread out. Antimatter Has many nice qualitys for space combat 1. you can eat through an ebnemey's armor, with the mass of the projectile removed directly from the hull. 2. it releases a huge amount of radiation, further damiging the ship. 3. it can be used to trigger nucler fission, saveing energy in an explosive. Nucler reactions could be used as lasor lights, thereby reducing the power needed to run the lasor. finally, said small crew compartments need not be on the ship at all. they could be far away remote controlling the ship. once people develop wormwhole tecnology, you can simply open a wormwhole (If you know the coordinits of the enemey vessay) in the vessa, and depressurise the ship. or send a projectile through one end and on the other end slamming into an enemey ship nucler weapons: I am no expert, but have examened many mushroom clouds. the reaction not only takes place on the ground, but the reaction rises up into the air. if that is because it is pushing down, well dang it. but if it is because of pressure, it will, in space stay where it occors, thereby inflicting more damige (Jut a theory). Next: lasors. you can have a huge lasor but you have to point it quickly. If the ship that carrys it is smaller than the weapon the turet will rotate the ship. so you have to ether put thrusters on the lasor, wich will make it less accuret, or make a huge heavy ship to anchor it, wich will make the ship it'sself harder to propel. Also, a weapon must be able to fire in all directions, so you cannot have deck guns like we have today. Oh, and will self propeled explosives be called missiles or torpedos?
This post has been edited by Phoebus Xebdaz : 21 September 2006 - 12:49 PM
/me hangs head in shame
Fighters fighters fighters.
Capital ships will be too big to risk in actual combat.
And the range is too great. That Rebel fleet in Star Wars 6 was about the worst thing that I ever saw. All those big ships that have a lot of inertia would not be well blessed to be compacted that close together where a minor mishap could result in a collision.
Look, with all of that AI, your ship will likely not need a huge crew, mabey a coupel of people to fix complex problems and tell the ship what to shoot at. With all of that AI the USS Ronald Regan still has a crew of over five thousand. Even with AI there will be too many issues to allow them significant ship operations control. One sabateur can attempt to negatively impact a vessel crewed by thousands, but when faced with a large ship with much empty and unguarded space because the AI is in control and the crew is small his or her job has become much easier. Plus an AI, as a computer device, will be subject to stresses like a human would, although not exactly the same stresses. IMO they are not a logical canidate for starship pilot.
Next, if your ship is fast, you can fly behind a planet and enhemey ships will be forced to dent the trophy or face an ambush. Also, the range will be incredable, so not being detected will be an issue. a small force of radar camofloged fighters buzzing around will be hard to hit, and they need not broadcast IFF, because they are so spread out. If your ship is fast then either a) it is small and manouverable with low inertia or it is large and terrifyingly not-so-manouverable due to its' high inertia. Although I am not certain what denting the trophy is, as long as a ship is not flying close to the speed of light there will always be some clue or another to give away its' presence. Even radar is sensitive enough that unless you were physically touching an object that you were hiding behind you could be detected, especially if two ships a significant distance apart compared their sensor readings and could triangulate the presence of an object unknown. Even at an 'incredible' range there will be some trace- and here your AI could help: If you have a computer programmed with star charts and told it to look and see if there was anything that was not where it was supposed to be or new or whatnot you could very easily detect, in one range of light or radar or another, something at any significant range would be revealed; and by triangulation again its' position could be inferred. And outside of a certain sphere of death— where the inaccuracies of long-range weaponry when combined with the fact that as an opposing ships' captain could not nececarally predict where an opposition ship would be given evasive manouvers and normal manouvering around threats non-military in nature such as space-borne debris and the like— an attack becomes less of a threat and more of a waste of ammo. The best hope is to be able to slip into that sphere and be able to get off an attack before the opposition has enough time to react. I don't think that field saturation would help matters much unless the ships were incredibly close to each other- from a distance of tens kilometers, say, an object the size of a modern naval battleship (for exampe) could not sufficiently saturate an area of predicted enemy placement thoroughly enough to account for its' possible evasives. Thusly: fighters.
Antimatter Has many nice qualitys for space combat 1. you can eat through an ebnemey's armor, with the mass of the projectile removed directly from the hull. 2. it releases a huge amount of radiation, further damiging the ship. 3. it can be used to trigger nucler fission, saveing energy in an explosive. Nevermind the danger being as great to the firing team as to the enemy. Plus the unplesant consequences that a miss would have to future manouvering- a battlefield strewn about with non-spent antimatter charges would expand and for some time become a significant navigational hazard.
finally, said small crew compartments need not be on the ship at all. they could be far away remote controlling the ship. once people develop wormwhole tecnology, you can simply open a wormwhole (If you know the coordinits of the enemey vessay) in the vessa, and depressurise the ship. or send a projectile through one end and on the other end slamming into an enemey ship And if they are far away controling the ship you'd need your wormholes for the radio link to control them; lest you subject a huge and expensive capital warship to control signal jamming and especially signal delay. And, at least in my opinion, making wormholes on demand is about the last thing that needs to be seriously thought about barring some breakage of the laws of physics becomming convienient.
nucler weapons: I am no expert, but have examened many mushroom clouds. the reaction not only takes place on the ground, but the reaction rises up into the air. if that is because it is pushing down, well dang it. but if it is because of pressure, it will, in space stay where it occors, thereby inflicting more damige (Jut a theory). In space nuclear weapons are less effective- I suggest reading this thread before throwing stuff out. Nuclear weapons require the atmosphere to make that huge pressure wave. In space they are big explosions, but not a lot of pressure or EMP from what I understand.
@rmx256, on Sep 21 2006, 02:18 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
<snip>
The best hope is to be able to slip into that sphere and be able to get off an attack before the opposition has enough time to react. I don't think that field saturation would help matters much unless the ships were incredibly close to each other- from a distance of tens kilometers, say, an object the size of a modern naval battleship (for exampe) could not sufficiently saturate an area of predicted enemy placement thoroughly enough to account for its' possible evasives. Thusly: fighters.
Capships and fighters will be useless. Capships because of expense, and fighters because small vessels can't carry enough fuel to do the kind of manuevering you're thinking of.
Capships would undoubtably like to remain at a distance to not only have ample reaction time in case of collision, but to stay at a range that prevents kinetic weapons from being effective. However expesive they are, I expect them because they are an efficient weapons platform.
Lasers, barring significant improvements in laser tech, targetting, and energy sources, will likely be ineffective for anything other than painting a target.
Seeking missiles will have to carry more fuel than their atmospheric counterparts, for use in at least three extra thrusters. Fighters suffer from the same problem. Rockets suffer the same problem as simple kinetics: target anticipation at long distances.
However, because radar will likely remain the primary method of detection for a good long time, and because we have already found methods to counter it, at least some kind of seeker missile will appear. Expensive, though, and useless against non-capships: Using current stealth tech, the missile could get fairly close to the target (Today's stealth bomber looks like a bird on radar, iirc.) By firing it like a kinetic weapon towards a point where you expect your target to be in the time your weapon to get there, and then by not using it's thrust, you don't draw any attention to it. When the missile gets close, it activates a passive sensor package (laser paint/target updates/fly-by-wire), orients itself, and hits the main thruster. Probably target updates or laser painting since multiple warheads would be able to use those. Debris > seeker > rocket
Too much trouble ship vs. ship, though. Much more effiecient to hit your opponent's planets. Bigger, less mobile targets.
It's been said, I think (I didn't read everything above), but aren't any manmade objects insanely small at even orbital distances? And can't these things move very, very fast relative to one another? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it take a long time to even confirm a new asteroid, let alone things far larger?
For the rules of space combat people have mentioned, let me add one more: money makes the world go 'round
Space is heck of expensive. Just to get a few dudes to a moon takes enormous resources and expends a ton of man hours, and they're very careful to pick and choose exactly what they need by weight, volume, energy consumption, and myriad other factors. Many people here know way more about this than I do, but bottom line, it's friggin' hard as hell and expensive as heck to do anything in space.
Just from a practical, budgetary standpoint, I think there will be no space combat of any kind. Everything will be about planets, 'cause that's where the real value is, and even then we've pretty much got that covered with existing tech (we have enough nukes already to destroy the entire surface, what, a thousand times over?). Orbital platforms are just not going to be practical to re-arm if they're ever used, but let's say they use focused lasers or something; the same lasers fired from the ground could take out the platform, and just from an accounting standpoint the ground-based platform won. You could build dozens of high-cost superweapons for the price of putting even one of them in orbit.
Bottom line is we, as a species, can't afford to make war at that level of expense. Human lives are way cheaper, all things considered, and I don't see old-fashioned killin' going out of style.
That said , man do I love to ignore all the pedantic, small-minded realities of it and fantasize about all things space-fictional...If someone's idea of space combat and travel and all that is entertaining, I'm willing to accept it as fact in the world they've created. Make it make sense for the story you're telling, 'cause we're talking about fiction here after all, and I'll never question its logic.
This post has been edited by Onyx : 22 September 2006 - 01:41 AM
Onyx, you are aware of course of WWII? When we, as a species, made so many ships and planes that were totally destroyed? I don't think that expense will limit the spread of warfare to space.
Ok the bullet problem has been solved today, today i saw a tv show about tommorows weapons one of them was a gun that didnt use a chemical reacation to shot the projectile it uses electricity to shock the bullet to make it fire. They made a hand gun that shot 3 bullets before the recoil , another weapon that could shot up to 1000 projectiles in a minute anything from bullets to grenades. The way they made it shoot so fast is the have the barrels of the weapon already loaded with the ammo but it would be charged with electricity and fire. This weapon has no way of jamming at all because there is only one moving part in it the projectile , the only problem that could happen is a bullet dosent shot but the next bullet with just push it out and way
:rolleyes:
Onyx has a point, and that would be the start of interplanetary combat - shoot directly at the planets.
If it becomes advantageous to have a ship-based platform to intercept any munitions headed towards the planet, then the attacker has to take out the ships first; thus you have the beginings of ship-to-ship combat.
I rember reading a speculative article about the nature of space combat. (Can't remember where) but one of the primary concerns was heat dissapation in space.
Apparently, getting rid of excess heat is difficult and inefficient in a vaccume. The only way to get rid of it is to radiate it, and apparently that's the least efficient method when compared to air or liquid cooled systems. Sure, you can cool individual systems with air and liquid, but those systems all produce heat too (just in different areas) and eventually that heat has to leave the ship. And the only way is by radiating it into space.
The point was that any large space ship would generate a lot of waste heat and would need very large heat-sinks to radiate it out. These heat-sinks would be obvious targets, (and easy to spot from a distance as they radiate) and very hard to protect. You don't want to radiate anything when you are trying to be stealthly.
This also limits what can be feasabily used as weapons. You need to balance power and heat to what you can radiate away. You need things that won't over-heat the ship.
I wonder if this situation would lead to heat batteries. A system designed to absorb and store excess heat, so that you could choose to vent it when it was tacticaly safe to do so. It might involve ejecting a physical object that has taken the brunt of all the heat. A heat core if you will.
I don't know how this would work. But if it did, I imagine it would be something like this:
As a ship captain, you can radiate heat normaly, but if you want to be stealthly, you can instead somehow route all heat into an insulated compartment containg some material heat core. This causes the heat core to rise in temperature, until it hits a critical point where it must be ejected (before the containment walls melt). This interveining time is your window of sealth operations. After which, you must operate in regular radiating mode. Unless you have multiple heat cores, once you eject it, no more stelath operations until you get back to base.
This post has been edited by Desprez : 23 September 2006 - 04:05 PM
@rmx256, on Sep 22 2006, 01:47 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
True, but we're talking about expenses several orders of magnitude greater with no real advantage. You lose a couple pieces of space-borne hardware and your budget committee is pulling the plug. Resources are finite, human lives don't replenish fast enough, and making money out of thin air (borrowing against the economy of the future) is self-destructive. Of course, we already do some of these things, but again, conventional arms are so much cheaper for the same tactical advantage. When your money runs dry, as in can't pay or feed the people who operate the machines of war, you've essentially lost.
Of course, nothing less than a world superpower would have the ability (i.e. bankroll and industrial base) to devote enough resources to a project to make it see the light of day in any reasonable amount of time. Even then, it'd be too major a piece of the military budget, sacrificing myriad proven ground-based programs and weakening the strength and health of the entire military. I dare say, the budget crunch would cripple things so much as to basically be laughable. This is why we don't already have these things.
Past trends, in my opinion, have stated that once one major world power has a new toy, the rest tend t oeither get it or go broke trying to.
Plus we have to be considering more than one planet here. If it was just one planet then you are right, Onyx, but if you take several planets with dependant trade ties and have one of them try to hold out on the other I'd be willing to bet that a bunch of expensive space hardware would be put at quite the considerable risk then.
All space warfare would stem from pirates in mechant ships attaching remote-controll machine guns to the outside of their ships and shooting and other merchant ships.
I'm really happy this topic reactivated again :).
@ue_research---development, on Aug 27 2006, 08:59 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:
Regarding Long-Distance Space Combat...
I don't know how far ships can be if they're engaging each other using the aid of sensors that are exclusively speed-of-light or slower (no tachyonic detectors or anything!). I think it depends to a great deal on how easily a ship can move out of its present orbit.
If two ships, 'A' and 'B', were more than a few (let's say, around 10) light-seconds apart from each other, and ship 'A' wanted to scan for and attack ship 'B', ship 'A' might have to use LIDAR to scan for ship 'B'. The problem is that it isn't inconceivable that ship 'B' has technology that detects the incoming ping.
So ship 'B' knows that ship 'A' will, in a couple of seconds, know its position, quite a bit of time before 'A' knows 'B's position, or even its presence. Depending on how advanced 'B's thrusters are, it can change its velocity and orbit to throw off a potential attack (at least until the next ping). If 'A' didn't bother to change its own position and orbit, 'B' might even be able to successfully counter 'A'. At long distances, as seconds increases into minutes, 'B's advantage theoretically grows.
Alternately, ship 'A' might listen for background radiation from ship 'B'. Forgetting things such as any decoy heat and radiation sources that ship 'A' may be employing, ship 'B' learns of ship 'A's position several seconds after the actual event (half the time of the active scanning). This scanning also does't doesn't give away ship 'A's position. However, there are two problems with this situation.
- Ship A is also probably listening for Ship B's radiation. - Depending on how easy it is for Ship B to change orbits , ship B may or may not be in line with the projected vector by the time the weapon is fired. If it were feasible, ships would probably have to constantly change their velocities and perhaps orbits in order to evade a possible attacker.
It seems that in this case, long-range combat is feasible if it is an ordeal to change orbits (and becomes a 'quick-draw'/MAD type of thing, where the fastest ship or both ships are destroyed), and if convincing decoys have not been developed yet. Potentially ships may travel with cheap, tethered decoys that have their own basic thrusters and emit large amounts of radiation (compared to the shielded reactors of an actual ship).
Both these issues could be counteracted with a 'spray' of fire, either multiple laser beams or railguns targeted towards an area where the ship is likely to be able to move within the time delay. However, as the ships get further apart, that projected area grows in size. As well, depending on how much power these things draw (a lot, by current standards), it may be infeasible to make the weapons very powerful.
They could also be countered with missiles, which would be extremely expensive (relative to the cost of the ship, as they would have to do almost everything a normal ship does) and liable to be shot down by point defenses upon nearing the target.
Therefore, it may be feasible to have relatively close-range combat.
Are there any big holes with my line of reasoning?
Oh, and on a tangent someone mentioned asteroid fields as a way to hide. Unfortunately, that doesn't work quite well, because the actual asteroid density is so small that the enemy would have to be scanning an enormous volume of space.
That's a fairly good run-down of ideas. The best defense in any space combat situation is to random-walk. You can't random-walk a planet or space station, so what you are ultimately fighting over can't be defended using this method... but let's just pretend the only objective in whatever situation here is to destroy an opposing fleet while maintaining the integrity of your own fleet. War games are like that, you can have any rules you want.
Okay, so close combat might be an option, because otherwise, you may just not be able to hit your enemy any better than he can hit you. Statistically, larger fleets (by mass) would be more vulnerable, just because they take up a larger area in the "sky". Essentially every ship firing at random is hostile to every other ship, in practice if not by plan. It's just a numbers game, and over large distances you'll probably hit a lot of your own ships. The only way to prevent this is if your random-walking (and every other friendly ship's) isn't so random, but that opens your fleet up to danger from espionage and pattern analysis.
So random-walk is a great defense for yourself, so how do you attack another fleet effectively? The best thing I can figure is drones, and lots of them. Rather than firing kinetic weapons or some kind of death ray (lasers wouldn't work, as we've endlessly discussed, assume some magical weapon replaces it), fire smart projectiles at high enough speed in a statistically effective burst so that they end up "close enough"; <0.1 lightsecond could be enough. Yes I used a semicolon. So then you have this rapidly moving drone passing near another ship, which, in most cases, will be out of this narrow window very very quickly. The best bet would have a very good computer onboard capable of locating with a greater probability where the enemy ship will be in a reasonably short period of time, based on passive scans. At this point, fire a spread of some kind. I recommend a shaped charge capable of sending fragments of a heavy metal in a somewhat narrow spread. All it should take is one drone to do it's job. But you'll still need to launch thousands of these drones to get that one hit. There would probably be a lot of little flashes of light with the rare big one. Meanwhile, 10 or more lightseconds away, you'd be trying to detect incoming drones, and hopefully swatting them with some kind of kinetic PDS or EM radiation to attempt to interfere with the targeting computers.
@edwards, on Aug 27 2006, 07:36 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
Interplanetary combat is similar to intraplanetary combat in that it takes place in the local space of a planet. However, it differs in that one or more (possibly all) of the factions have no base on the planet, and are thus largely prevented from having a long-term war, due to the problems of setting up a supply line over interplanetary/interstellar distances.
I am also including combat around space stations and inhabited asteroids in this category because, althugh they do not take place around planets per se , they do take place at established points in space, rather than just some random location.
I'd take issue with your inclusion of space stations and other inhabited areas. Since these are relatively stationary, they suffer the same weaknesses of the Castle vs. the Bomber. If you're going to fight around a space station or asteroid, you might as well slag it or blow it up at the onset of battle. It's cheaper to build a new base than capture and convert one for your uses. Combat around an uninhabited planet however, you have just about right. Probably the best thing you could do is establish a perimeter around some hemisphere and attempt to slag any bases they set up, while trying to establish bases of your own behind your perimeter. One of the two combatants will eventually give up and retreat.
@rmx256, on Sep 2 2006, 02:10 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
But in space, especially at the long ranges that space combat would likely take place, there would be drag: the drag from the firearms' barrels. The longer the range, the longer the barrel would need to be to allow for accurate aiming, even in an atmosphereless condition without atmospheric drag. That would mean more surface area in contact with the projectile before it is released and the more of the bullets' energy would be lost to the rifling— or even without the rifling of the barrel. Larger firing charges could offset this, but then you need a heavier, less responsive barrel with aiming mechanisms that take up more space. Then with these big guns you're going to start having recoil problems, and these would add up in a gravity-free environment such as space, throwing each sucessive shot (already guaranteed to be inaccurate IMO) increasingly off target. My point is that although firearms will fire in space, at space combat range they're impractical.
They're impractical for a different reason, too slow. To get a large enough projectile to shoot at a target over those large distances, you'd need a LOT of explosive power to get it anywhere near the speed needed to hit something. Heck, somebody with a shotgun shooting at a flying duck less than a football field away needs to fire a fair bit ahead of the duck in order to hit it. You're better off with some kind of railgun or, say, a nuke surrounded by fragments of tungsten exploding off the bow of the enemy's ship.
@rmx256, on Sep 21 2006, 05:18 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
Yeah, that's the gist of it. But assuming you can make them cheaply enough, they could act as blasting caps inside of asteroids to send kinetic weapons towards your enemies. Over distance the energy is pretty small, but stick a nuke inside of something heavy and you've got an effective long-range weapon.
@artanis, on Sep 22 2006, 01:59 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:
I expect capital ships to be primarily for planetary defense, not ship killers. They can random-walk and prevent incoming kinetic attacks (if necessary, by getting in the way of them). Think about Battleplates in the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Ship killers would be your drones. Cheap, fast , and in great, great numbers. Fighters are extremely impractical. Anything you launch you don't want to spend the energy getting back.
The biggest liability in any space-based military situation is the denizens of your local rock.
@onyx, on Sep 22 2006, 02:38 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:
I don't think old-fashioned killin' with go out of style. And with exponential population growth and many many planets, there will always be soldiers.
And amen to your last paragraph. Let not the practicalities of reality get in the way of good science fiction.
@desprez, on Sep 23 2006, 05:04 PM, said in How do you see space combat?:
Perhaps when you eject your superheated mass, you do it towards the enemy or their incoming heat-seaking missiles?