Ask Slashdot: What Would Real Space Combat Look Like? 892
c0mpliant writes "Two friends and I were up until the wee hours of the morning over the weekend debating what real space combat would look like. I've spent some time looking it up online, and there doesn't seem to be any general consensus. So, I thought I'd ask a community of peers what they think. Given our current technology and potential near-future technology, what would a future space battlefield look like? Would capital ships rule the day? Would there be equivalents of cruisers, fighters and bombers, or would it be a mix of them all?"
noise (Score:5, Funny)
It would be a lot louder than what you see on TV
Re: (Score:3)
There's always the interstellar medium. There's not much of it, but its there. With all the cheesy "turn images and graphs into computer generated sounds" that I've had to suffer thru over the decades, that is one that I've never heard but would enjoy hearing. Sample, Fourier transform, play back at a substantially accelerated speed, all done.
Re:In Space no can hear you scream (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, the "silent space combat" meme comes across to me akin to the "there's no ice in Iceland and no green in Greenland" meme -- things people say to try to sound smart that are based on elements of truth but which get taken too far. Sound may not travel through space, but a supersonic-propagaing sphere of compressed gas from high explosive warheads do. A missile slamming into your spaceship sure as heck is going to make some noise (even a laser ripping it up). A shower of debris from exploding craft near you is definitely going to make noise. Etc. And spacecraft are often (at least with current tech) rather noisy places to be to begin with; sound isn't dampened well. So yes, "sound" doesn't travel through space effectively, but that doesn't mean space combat will be quiet.
Re:In Space no can hear you scream (Score:4, Informative)
The maximum transmissible frequency of sound is proportional to how fast stuff is bouncing off other stuff.
Even in a fairly dense cloud, of 1 atom a cubic centimeter, this interaction happens around every billion kilometers, and thousand years.
This means that the highest frequency that can be transmitted over long distances is about one pulse every ten thousand years.
You're not making any sounds.
Re:In Space no can hear you ... (Score:3)
WOOSH!
Re:In Space no can hear you scream (Score:5, Funny)
Re:noise (Score:5, Insightful)
Only once have you actually seen sound depicted in space? And you say you've seen a *lot* of scifi? I've seen sound depicted in Star Trek and Star Wars, not to mention hundreds of other shows and movies. Firefly stands out from the crowd because it's the only one I can think of which actually depicted no sound at all in space.
Or do you perhaps mean conversation? In that case, Spaceballs is the only one I can think of where characters actually carried out a conversation in space, without the benefit of space suits or any kind of environmental protection.
swift, distant and anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
unmanned drones sniping the shit out of each other over ridiculous distances using lasers and maybe perhaps anti-matter "nukes".
It would be brief, anonymous, and if any of the targets where manned, mercifully swift. It'd make a boring anime.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, pretty much that.
Little to no action inside line of sight. Probably a lot of use weapons that can hit indirectly (flak shells, nukes, etc.) Area denial (spreading a bunch of ball bearings all over the place) likely as a last-ditch MADD-type effort. My money'd be on cheap, small, one-time-use smart missiles being the most common weapon, probably just trying to get close enough to fire a ton of shrapnel in the direction of their target rather than actually hit it. As a rule, the bigger the object th
Re:swift, distant and anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
One show I think did do a good job was Babylon 5. The battles tended not to be overdramatic. In particular acceleration was used to accelerate.. There was use of kinetic bombardment which seems to be the consensus method to kill a planet.
I think we are seeing the beginning of what space battles will be like. Namely, drones controlled by remote operators. I am sure we will see autonomous. drones playing a key role.
Re:swift, distant and anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you have weapon-grade lasers, how are anti-matter warheads viable weapons? Seeing how anything trying to get close would be a prime priority target precisely to shoot them down.
Cool them down to 2.7 kelvin with liq He, make them outta composite plastic or whatever, toss them out like mines. Can't see them in IR because they're as cold as space. Can't lidar them because they're black. Can't look for occultation because they're too small. Hmm.
Hit one, it blows up into a big cloud that you can't laser thru for a couple seconds at least and who knows whats coming behind it, such as say a railgun drone hiding off axis watching the whole thing who now knows exactly where you are. Don't hit one and it blows up your ship on contact. Something to think about.
Re: (Score:3)
Kind of a waste of time, though, isn't it? I'd be cheaper and just as effective to throw high velocity normal matter at the target.
Given the vastness of space... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Given the vastness of space... (Score:5, Insightful)
My prediction: slow and boring.
Based on my experience in the military 20 years ago, it will remain the same as today... 99.99% boring as all hell; a bad dilbert cartoon would be better, and 00.01% holy cow. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
No, dark and fast (Score:5, Interesting)
The key to combat anywhere is stealth and ambushes followed by application of maximum force. In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small. Once you get close to the system, land in the cometary cloud. Spread through the cloud over a couple of centuries. Build fusion drives on every comet you land on. Paint each one a nonreflective black to make them undetectable by any means other than star occlusion. Fire the drives to alter orbits in such a manner as to bring maximum amount of comets impacting each habitable planet at the same time. If the poor shmucks detect anything, it will be very close to impact time and with the number of huge rocks flying at them, a few hundred will get through and turn each planet totally uninhabitable. For best results, follow through with additional bombardment to keep the dust up for a few decades; this should come close to sterilizing the entire surface. When the dust clears, land the colony ship. Repopulate the biosphere with Earth stock. Exterminate anything else. This is the only realistic kind of space combat there's going to be.
Re:No, dark and fast (Score:5, Interesting)
you're assuming 'combat between people and some other species we simply want to annihilate', which is all well and good, but it's not the only possible type of combat.
it's pretty much a given for anyone who's thought about it for more than thirty seconds that kinetic bombardment is pretty much unanswerable, and hence the only type of combat that it's worth really thinking about is the kind in which kinetic bombardment of a 'stationary' target doesn't really achieve anything - so we're talking about, say, combat between two factions, whether human or non-human, for control of existing resources which have value to both sides. There's no point kinetically bombarding a planet if the whole point of the war is to gain control of something on the planet.
Re:Given the vastness of space... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
My alternative prediction: over in seconds, but planned ahead days/months/years* in advance.
*Orbits are like that.
Are we talking human on human battles? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure space combat would consist of humans trying to kill each other in space considering if there are aliens, we are unlikely to ever meet them, and if they make it this far, they aren't going to waste their precious resources trying to kill us.
And as far as mankind on mankind action, I'd guess it would amount to throwing small masses at high velocity at each other (throwing rocks in a glass house).
Re:Are we talking human on human battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
> and if they make it this far, they aren't going to waste their precious resources trying to kill us.
Actually, if they make it this far, killing us (if they are inclined to do so) would be a trivial exercise, like shooting fish in a barrel.
Re:Are we talking human on human battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Better comparison -- Like spraying insecticide on an ant nest.
Re:Are we talking human on human battles? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time someone makes that argument I think of stories like The Road Not Taken [wikipedia.org] (summary: aliens show up, detect no FTL drives on earth, conclude we'll be an easy target, land, try to take over using matchlock weapons, get slaughtered, humanity realizes what a bunch of idiots we've been for not figuring out FTL travel on our own, galaxy is fucked....)
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks for pointing that out, seems like an amusing story!
But probably not very likely. Thing about even our human history -- ability to sail long distances correlated pretty strongly with superior weaponry and technology.
Re: (Score:3)
And as far as mankind on mankind action, I'd guess it would amount to throwing small masses at high velocity at each other (throwing rocks in a glass house).
Doubtful -- distances get pretty big pretty fast in space. I would think of something more like "grapeshot," mounted on a radar or laser guided missile with a proximity fuse. Then, once a spacecraft was destroyed, all the other spacecraft would run away to avoid being hit with debris. Expect plenty of electronic warfare, since communicating is going to be even more important when trying to organize battles in space.
I also envision lots of really interesting technologies. Long range communication or
Re:Are we talking human on human battles? (Score:5, Funny)
Fancy name for a camera you have there.
Try Project Rho/Atomic Rocket... (Score:5, Informative)
Humans or no? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Humans or no? (Score:5, Funny)
In the early sixties. It stopped in the early eighties and has been sort of loafing about the place ever since, spending more time reminiscing about "the good old days" than anything else, and barely paying the rent. (I've been keeping score.) Nevertheless there are some signs it may actually be proceeding at a breakneck pace while we're not looking... [ibm.com]
The truth is that by the year 2100, speculative theories will be so advanced and so reliably misguided that we'll be able to calculate anything and solve any social problem simply by asking futurists a question and assuming the opposite.
Re: (Score:3)
You're assuming that there is nothing else going on in space other than war.
By the time space war becomes possible, that's pretty much not going to be the case.
(Neglecting for the moment the argument that ICBMs are a form of space-based warfare)
In order to be able to 'project force' into space, there has to be an existing space economy to a degree.
This may involve mining, colonies, power generation or habitats, or some combination of these.
Consider the large number of naval blockades in the past that strang
Slow and distant (Score:3)
First, actions would take place over distances of 1000's of kilometres. Maneuvering would be slow and expensive in fuel use - as would any change in course or speed. In that respect it would be like a naval action from the days of sail.
However the weapons would be directed energy, rather than projectile and the vessels themselves would be almost impossible to detect - partly because of the distances and partly because of the stealthy designs they would employ. Visual detection methods would be almost obsolete, the only exception being to look out for occultations.
Re: (Score:3)
and the vessels themselves would be almost impossible to detect - partly because of the distances and partly because of the stealthy designs they would employ. Visual detection methods would be almost obsolete, the only exception being to look out for occultations.
So all the ships would operate at a temperature of 3 Kelvin?
One small rock (Score:4, Insightful)
One small rock accelerated for a long enough time then steered at a large ship (or moon or planet) would pretty much be the end of it.
Can't really imagine much combat going on when it's a mutually assured destruction scenario any way you look at it.
Most mass entertainment scenarios make sure that the attacking force needs to capture (not destroy) what they are attacking to make sure this doesn't come up.
I suppose lots of tiny enclaves (small hollowed out asteroids) on both sides could duke it out with small ships. Still can't imagine a large enough industrial base to keep things going very long, though. Anything big enough to build ships would just be destoryed.
Same as always (Score:3)
History Channel did it (Score:3)
Blast to the past (Score:3)
I imagine it would bear a resemblance to the old sailing ships. Any maneuvering would have to be done before you engaged the opponent, as it takes quite a bit of energy and fuel to maneuver inside of a vacuum. Ships would try to come at their opponent at a T while firing large mass drivers. Although lasers are more effective in space than on land, I don't think they would be nearly as effective as huge chunks of mass. Electronic launch systems would solve many of the problems with recoil. Lasers would only make sense if the fuel required to power them is more mass-efficient than the combination of fuel required to power mass drives plus the mass itself.
Fighters/bombers like we traditionally think of them probably wouldn't be used. Instead, small single-manned ships could be used to stealthily deliver a single-shot payload - they would operate more like mini-subs carrying a single torpedo.
Gunbusta! (Score:4, Funny)
If I've learned anything from anime, it's that space battles will consist of giant armadas of robots piloted by people who all get slaughtered until a random girl in a giant robot suit with infinite capabilities eventually achieves the self esteem she needs to take the fight straight to the bad guys and wipe them out, escaping at the last possible second.
Two ships (Score:3, Insightful)
The first ship would power the weapons.
The second ship would not, so as not to seem hostile. There's a sense of bravado; manly posturing, but dialogue is the weapon of choice.
The first ship fires a single anti-graviton phase beam.
The second ship explodes because Picard is a pussy.
That's how future space battles are fought.
My take (Score:3)
I'm going to start from a few first principles here. First - and I don't think this one is seriously open to dispute - (A) space is an exceptionally harsh, unforgiving environment. Failure in any one of these systems: the hull, the carbon dioxide collectors, the heating unit - will render a space vehicle uninhabitable. A failure in either the engines or navigation system will likely lead to a ballistic course to nowhere.
Now, (B) if the history of human space exploration is any indicator, we really don't know how to build fault-tolerant space systems at all. Almost any malfunction tends to produce a catastrophic outcome. Putting principles A and B together, any battle damage of any sort is likely to render the vehicle unsurvivable and kill all the crew.
Now, consider the expense of launching anything of size. Remember, the ISS is the most expensive structure ever built by man. So the idea of putting large, fragile, massively expensive craft (where they can be shot down by space-capable ballistic or nuclear missiles, or damaged with a ground-based lasers) is a total non-starter.
If you want to know what a real war in space looks like with our current level of technology, it's going to involve small, expendable space-based satellites hiding from ground-based things radar and weapons.
And lastly, *any* space combat is going to dramatically increase the amount of space debris in orbit of earth (as China's test a couple years ago did, or the accidental irridium satellite collission did). Just a few incidents could turn dramatically render Earth's near space too dangerous for manned craft for a long time to come.
Re: (Score:3)
Space being a vacuum would help if spacecraft cooled down via conduction. They don't. They cool down by emitting blackbody radiation, which all warm bodies do.
On Apollo 13, they lost the heating system and within a day the craft had cooled to below freezing. Another two days and it would have become uninhabitable.
It would be pretty boring. (Score:5, Interesting)
Silence. Occasionally a small flash off in the distance as a projectile smashes into its target. No need for explosives, just high relative velocity and a high mass projectile. Actually, this is probably what a planetary defense network would look like - thousands of massive projectiles in different orbits, with some means of nudging each one to meet an incoming ship approaching from any direction.
No space fleet would ever fly in close formation. You'd probably have 100km spacing between vessels. Evasive action would be a matter of nudging your heading by a tenth of a degree, thus missing pursuers by hundreds of kilometres. Whoever can detect threats first wins, period - and evasion, not confrontation, probably makes the most sense.
Actually, fleets probably don't make sense - easier to see a cluster of ships travelling together than to see ten ships all on wildly different orbits, all arriving at a specific attack point within minutes of each other. Worse, once you deploy your ships you probably won't have enough fuel to react effectively to a change in the tactical situation. Your plan is locked in at launch. God help you if your enemy's intelligence gathering is good.
Human crew would be nearly useless, unless there were resources to be captured from the enemy which required EVA. Shock troops only, no return trip.
All the pew-pew-pew zoomy shit we see in movies with Cylons banking like fighter jets is just not workable. And honestly, the more I think about it, the less defensible a planet seems to be without massive improvement in detection tech and energy weapons. Even fleet warfare is unlikely; two fleets could easily miss each other and pass in the night.
I think the only space warfare we're likely to ever see is between two enemies sharing a planet. Whoever gets the upper hand in orbit wins.
Mass Effect (Score:5, Informative)
Gunnery Chief: [as the character enters the Citadel] This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
Re: (Score:3)
That was my first thought, too. Reading the codex, someone put a LOT of thought into what real space combat with real physics might be like.
Screw ships, go RKVs (Score:5, Interesting)
Remove ships out of the equation entirely. I don't quite see what they could contribute. They're slow and inefficient, and impossible to give orders in time over large distances.
Relativistic kill vehicles [wikipedia.org] are far more menacing weapons than any ship. It's a reinvention of one of mankind's earliest weapons: The humble rock, thrown at the enemy. But this rock is accelerated very near the speed of light, making it nearly impossible to detect, and completely impossible to stop (if you blow one up, it just increases the destruction). Even a fairly modest RKV can carry the destructive force of a hundreds of atomic bombs and absolutely obliterate it's target.
Random thoughts (Score:3)
I believe it will end up being a lot like that described in Niven's "Protector"... you launch your weapons, and, five years later, you look to see if they hit.
That's for interstellar combat. For orbital combat... a lot would depend on the goal. Are you trying to knock out the enemy's satellites? Drop bombs on his population centers? Stop his transport ships from leaving Earth and getting to their destinations?
The easy answer is "drones, drones, and more drones", but this assumes ECCM will equal ECM well enough to make it at least a tossup that you'll get through the other guy's defenses. I'd also make a guess that we'll never get as much damage potential out of a beam weapon as we will out of an explosive, and the simpler the technology, the less things can go wrong. I'm seeing, basically, drones that get as far as they can from the enemy, analyze their motions, and then launch direct-fire weapons based on prediction algorithms as to where the enemy will be when the projectiles get there. I'd also speculate that anything launched, including the drones, would be absolutely blind to any kind of orders to go home, change targets, respond to IFF, etc, because the chances of being fed false data are too great. This would lead, of course, to the launch of basically uncontrolled weapons armed with considerable destructive power, so, if they were hacked pre-launch... oops...
This, in turn, might lead to remote control, where the drones have no "brains" but are piloted by humans. Of course, this opens the same problem -- if the drones are controlled in any way by an outside signal, an enemy can and will find a way to hijack that signal. So, back to self-guided vehicles with no way to turn them off or shut them down. (And even this leads to problems... if there's a "mission complete, go home" algorithm, you run the risk of someone figuring out what the drone needs to "see" to conclude "mission complete" and finding a way to fake it. So, logically, you just have the drone explode when it's done.
If the general area being fought over is well defined, you might have some kind of minefield, using virtually-inert devices that rely on passive sensors to come to life and go 'boom' when something is near, but I've read a lot of people arguing that nothing is inert enough to not be trivially detected far off.
(Of course, I'm not sure there's anything to fight over in space other than to knock out the other guy's satellites, and there won't be anything else up there for a long, long time... so long that making predictions about the kind of tech used is probably impossible. As for the satellites, it's probably much easier to just fire some ground-based or plane-based missiles at them than to try for any kind of "space war".)
Beams and missiles (Score:3)
We don't have any kind of "shields" technology, so a laser is a pretty useful weapon in space. You can aim it from a long distance, you can overheat just one spot on a target, and you can reuse the laser once you get it into space. So there is likely a place for lasers in near-future space combat.
And with the kinds of speeds that things travel in space, even small masses can wreak major harm if the vectors are opposed. If you can fling a cloud of ball bearings where a satellite's orbit will take it into collision, you can likely destroy the satellite pretty cheaply. So I'm definitely not ruling out some sort of kinetic weapons.
But the space weapons that are sufficiently non-classified that I have been able to read about them are all missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [wikipedia.org]
I think for the near future, any space combat will be anti-satellite operations. For example, if the USA were fighting a land war, and the enemy could take out the GPS satellites, that would put a crimp in the high-tech armed forces of the USA. (A crimp only. As far as I know, they still train in the use of map and compass, and not all guided weapons are GPS-guided.) So I pretty much figure the first actual space combat might be someone knocking out GPS satellites. (I don't think Iran can do it, but they might try to pay someone else to do it.)
steveha
Movement is where to look... (Score:5, Interesting)
Moving around in space is nothing like flying around in the air or scratching around on the surface of the Earth. And in combat, regardless of its form, it's all about movement and positioning. The key always lays there from the most basic form of hand to hand combat to the most advanced stealth jet fighter combat.
If you are serious about getting an Idea about how a space battle would look like, I suggest the following. Get the Orbiter space flight simulator [ucl.ac.uk] and try it out a little. Figure how you move around in space. Search around a little and do the tutorials.
My guess is that, like most people, you'll get bored after the first 2 days waiting to reach a target... you'll quickly (or rather very slowly and longingly) notice that space travel is slow and complex. When most people think of in-flight combat, they think about dogfight, with quick instant maneuvers to evade immediate danger or quickly engage a target. Space, its another business. Orbits are planned months ahead, years or even decades in advance for some satellite. Even on very short term missions, you do small precise maneuvers that will have noticeable impacts hours or days later.
The most accurate movie depiction of space combat is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey... sort of. There's just no combat, but it wouldn't feel any different.
Jack Campbell novels worth reading (Score:3, Interesting)
Just in case, (Score:4)
Unmanned (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that most of science fiction gets wrong is that spaceships, even small and maneuverable fighters, are not airplanes. They do not contend with air resistance and accordingly do not require a wedge-shaped bow - let alone wings. Spheres or cylinders are more likely for small ships, while larger and slower ships might afford less compact designs that would deal poorly with high acceleration.
The second is manned flight. Hell, we've mapped much of the Solar system and been in orbit around about half(?) of all planets, without going further than the moon, or in fact leaving Earth orbit for very nearly 40 years. Even on Earth, it becomes increasingly more practical to wage war with remote-controlled drones than manned planes. Add the possibility of AI advancing far enough for autonomous drones, and I don't think an organic individual would be within light-hours of the battle.
Which brings us to the third part: Soldiers say that battles consist of long periods of waiting followed by brief bursts of excitement. Space battles would consist of months, possibly years, of unmanned travel and intensive computation, followed by seconds of computers trying to out-maneuver and out-predict each other, followed by hours or days of the leaders waiting for news of the outcome.
subwarfare + drones (Score:3)
If your "base" or "ship" is located it is going to be targeted. Targeted things will die in a swarm of smart munitions that shoot mass and high energy and at the same time do mecho-kamakazi dives.
The way to survive is to not be found. So stand off a long long way. Shed heat out of system, put a cloak on yourself from an insystem perspective. Send in your drones to locate the enemy and destroy them. Do not enter any area unless you are sure it is safe.
At the least you will be blanketed by a massive set of drones to find and destroy any drones near you. And locate and destroy any main/mother ship if it is detected.
There won't be any space warfare (Score:5, Funny)
The better question is what to fight over (Score:3)
Everyone jumps to space opera when the question of space combat comes up. Cruisers. Remotes. Lasers fired from absurd distances. F***ing death stars. Rail guns. Doomsday machines.
Sure they could happen I guess, but the events that would get us there remain bad science fiction. My first thought when I think about space combat though is...
Marines. Hand to hand.
Blowing stuff up is one thing. Capturing cargo ships is where the value lies in space combat. So how do you capture that load of ore/food/gas? Or to the other side, how will you and your crew of 7 stop those 23 hardsuited boarders from taking your ship?
Try going for a dose of reality (Score:3)
If you're looking for space combat in the far future where people hop about the system at FTL speeds, then hell if I know what it'll be like.
Reynolds (Score:3)
I think the books of Alastair Reynolds are quite accurate, describing fleets moving near light speed. In such a case all you really have to do is arrange for some debris in the path of the oncoming fleet (e.g. sand) and that will take it out.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that I've never seen a reasonable treatment of space wars in orbit. No one gets the orbital mechanics correct. There are a lot of counter intuitive things there. For instance, you wouldn't want to shoot a missile directly (line of sight) toward an enemy. If he's in a lower orbit you'd actually fire it backwards from the perspective of your orbit. The missile would lose orbital energy until it reached the target's orbit. Likewise, if he's in a higher orbit you'd fire it forward, in the direction of your orbit. (Thrusting toward or away from the planet you're orbiting serves to make your orbit elliptical, but doesn't raise your orbit) One also needs to be very careful about overtaking your target. There may be tactics like overtaking an enemy by dropping to a lower orbit, then thrusting back to the enemy's orbit. A dogfight would be a very counter-intuitive affair. I wish someone would make a little space sim that had the physics correct, and let players figure out the appropriate tactics.
All that was assuming attacker and target are in parallel orbits (concentric circles). If the're not, say one is in a polar orbit and the other is in an equatorial orbit, there is such a substantial difference in their energies that any collision would be devastating, so again just dumping debris that intersects the orbit of the target would be sufficient to wipe him out.
There are lots of other tricks. The slingshot effect, for instance, is used to hurl probes out to the outer reaches of the solar system. Essentially, the probe steals angular momentum from the planet, boosting its own velocity. The lowest-energy and highest-speed path to reach a given point can often involve such bizarre trajectories. NASA uses big computer programs to find these paths, see the Cassini [wikipedia.org] probe's trajectory for an example. If you have thrusters, you can enhance your slingshot by thrusting at the point of closest approach (the velocity bump you get by thrusting there is more than thrusting at other times).
You might claim all this orbital mechanics junk can be circumvented by using lasers or particle beam weapons. But light feels gravity too, so one has to calculate the effect of bending on the laser's trajectory from planets and other orbital bodies. Another important point is that diffraction from the aperature of the laser's lens is substantial when the target is planetary-distances away. Your nice narrow laser beam will be a harmless diffuse mess by the time it gets to Jupiter.
Finally one should bring up the Lagrange points. These would probably be the ideal place to put weapons platforms, refuelling depots, etc. But there are only a handful of them, and an attacker would know where they are on approach, so would probably send the first volley toward them, before he could resolve any infrastructure there.
All in all, I think orbital wars would involve a lot of calculation, a lot of waiting, a lot of un-spectacular deaths (e.g. no explosions but running into debris instead), and a lot of speculative offense. You want to fire before you can see your enemy, to take advantage of orbital mechanics. Your weapons don't need lots of energy or explosive power, you can just use orbital mechanics to your advantage. But you have to be willing to wait.
strategy (Score:3)
In terms of war, the main location of interest is Earth, so battles would be in earth orbit, not deep space. The other locations of interest are asteroid fields, for mining. Planets are uninhabitable, and the gravity wells surrounding them are too expensive for resource extraction.
Because asteroid fields are large and asteroids are plentiful, battles there would be unlikely - the attacker would need too many weapons to cover the field, and the defender could hide too easily.
Cheap transport to Earth would depend on gravity slingshots and Lagrange points, which move about and change as matter circles the sun. Those would probably not be good locations for battles - even if they were, what would be the point? The resources sent from the asteroids would still have to travel to Earth whoever was winning.
So it would most likely all be battles in Earth orbit. Since sending material up into space is expensive and even then it's going to be low volume, whoever can deploy weapons first should have a strong advantage. Then it's a game of king of the hill.
If a nation controls Earth orbit first, then it can threaten other nations that might want to go into space. Any other nation that tries to build launch capability would be targeted easily and bombed. So having a space battle to wrest control of Earth orbit will be a low success proposition.
I suspect the most likely "space" battles would be terrestrial. If the enemy can invade the king's land/take control of the king's assets, electronically or economically or politically, then they'll get the space weapons for free and become the new king. At that point they can send their own weapons up safely to upgrade or modify the system.
All about the optics (Score:3)
My aunt was in Iraq with the army the first time around and had a good story. She described a US armor force who had detected a line of Iraqi tanks and decided to engage them. They took out the first one in the line, then the second one. The Iraqis couldn't see the US tanks, so they had no idea where the fire was coming from and therefore couldn't return fire. After tank 1 and tank 2 blew, the US forces could see the guys scrambling out of tank 3. They gave them a few seconds to get out and get away then blew the tank, and so on down the line.
The lesson is, the force with the better detection/sensors/eyes can engage an enemy before that enemy even knows there is a fight, provided their weapons have sufficient range. A slight edge in information becomes overwhelming superiority.
Applying this to space, if we have two opposing forces, and one has a Hubble telescope level optics capability where the other doesn't, those with the capability will be able to engage in the fight at a much greater distance, and pick off the adversary at will.
Of course they will need an advantage in weapons range, too. In space you can't afford to use up your limited mass to attack, because sooner or later you'll run out, and it will affect your trajectory. It will be all about energy weapons, including lasers. And making those effective at distance is also dependent on your optics.
So, optics for observation and optics for achieving high range with energy weapons leads to force superiority in space.
Re:some sort of guided explosive device (Score:5, Funny)
Re:some sort of guided explosive device (Score:5, Funny)
Re:some sort of guided explosive device (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised no one has brought up submarine warfare for comparison here. When in a sub war, one does not try to destroy their opponent. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And THE enemy is water. Let the enemy in is the name of the game. Same with space. Vacuum is the enemy. Let the enemy into your opponent's ship and then sit back and watch the show. (for as long as it lasts anyway)
Space introduces dynamics as unique as underwater. Craft can be insanely delicate and lack any armor and still be a potent force. Range is dictated by your ability to detect/track your enemy (without becoming a beacon yourself) and to focus laser and other particle weapons at long distance. Stealth is very important.
So I think it's fair to say that any hit with a kinetic or explosive weapon would be fatal. Point-defense against missiles would be mandatory because it would be trivial for even the smallest ship to launch a few dozen little missiles that fan out in a very wide trajectory and track you. Mines would be big - think autonomous boxes that sit quietly playing asteroid until something big that lacks the FOF beacon comes into range.
Due to the extreme decompression risk, crew would probably wear very minimalistic suits that carried very little air and power but could be tethered at their stations, and drop the face shield down in case of breech, to prevent a small breech from voiding the ship. Trying to armor critical areas of the ship would be mostly counter-productive because more mass means less maneuverability. The suits the crew wear may even be similar to flight suits that can help with high-Gs, allowing even greater maneuverability.
I think current sci-fi fighter designs are closer to realistic. Babylon-5's star-furies showed excellent insight, I recommend looking at those for reference. Those also showed how ships need to be able to maneuver in zero-g, featured crew in suits, etc. The only thing not really serious there were the energy "pulse guns". But limited ammunition and fire recoil makes sci-fi space battles a lot less interesting. I think we need to break away from the "pulse gun" concept in sci fi fighters, it's a tired crutch that's unlikely to ever become reality.
A lot of this is considering larger ships. Probably the only "big" things will be moon/asteroid bases and the occasional "space dock" carrier-type large ships, I don't think a "capital class" space battleship will be anything short of a nuke-magnet. (again reference several examples in B5, bigger ships generally lost to smaller ones, for good reason)
The other crutch is unlimited energy, particularly in the fighters. Capital ships could have reactors, but at a great weight and size penalty. I think fighters are going to have to rely on smaller consumable fuel. Fuel logistics will be big, considering the difficulty of getting fuel into orbit or acquiring it in space. Other different ways of storing energy will probably be found, such as being able to produce hydrazine from raw elements found in space, with the synthesis (energy input) from solar power.
I could probably muse about this for several more pages but I'll take a break now I think.
Re: (Score:3)
Probably not as effective in space. Submarines have to handle tens of atmospheres of pressure differential, spaceships only
Re: (Score:3)
It probably will be like subs in that victory goes to the sub that makes the detection.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Had to say it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Interesting)
Given game theory, the answer to this question is to make a game like Eve Online where you encourage space battles and allow more free-form creating of weapons. Then the game will be the answer, presuming the parameters are accurate and open enough. But most space games assume "instantaneous" for light speed, as that's easiest. And games usually limit creativity in creating new weapons (making cluster bombs, tactical nukes, "smart" shells, such as detection-shielded mines with directional capabilities for closing in once close enough) and weapons designed to target secondary and tertiary systems (using a tac-nuke to cause an EMP, and following that up with a barrage of other weapons while electronics are down. Or just overloading sensors with the radiation from the blast. Not to mention the finer points of zero-g combat are almost inconceivable with the maneuverability and such.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4)
There are, of course, additional complexities to using lasers in space -- no show stoppers, though. The Soviets experimented with a high power chemical laser system in space. The one of the many advantages of chemical lasers is that much of the waste heat (which all high powered lasers generate in droves -- think of how much heat you want to impart to your target, now multiply it by 3-10x for laser losses and more for losses during transit) is carried off in the exhaust; they're really kind of like rocket engines. But in that regard, they also provide thrust like a rocket engine. So you have to carefully and very precisely cancel out the thrust provided by the laser when it's in operation. The exhaust also gives away your position and it's chemical signature makes obvious what you're doing (the Soviets went to great lengths to disguise the fact that they were testing a laser).
Still, laser weapons in space are an obvious choice. No need for deuterium-fluoride lasers or anything of that nature, either, since atmospheric absorption isn't an issue. Even when it comes to missiles, due to the tremendous relative speeds involved, even missiles themselves would likely just be drones that carry lasers or other equivalent weaponry.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Informative)
The fundamental problem with MASERs is the M.
Microwave.
What you need to bear in mind for near-term optical and RF beam weapons is the Airy Disk.
(see wikipedia).
In short - if you have something emitting lots of energy, it's generally a good idea to have it able to hit the enemy, rather than shoot off into a broad cone.
If you want to make a 1m spot on a craft with a beam of light, at 10000km, you need a mirror (about) 12 million wavelengths across.
For microwaves, this is about 120km across.
Generally problematic.
For green light, 25m.
And yes, this means that you need to focus the beam weapon - for the green light case, if you're off by 1000km in range, the spot grows to 3.5m, with a tenth of the energy per unit area.
Instead of melting the mirrored surface, it bounces off.
Not possible! (Score:3, Funny)
Laser Beams.
Won't work; the sharks can't survive in space.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Insightful)
Laser Beams.
That's all.
my mirror shields will take the day
I think this exchange about sums it up. Your great-great-...-great-grandparents could have sat around 150 years ago wondering what air combat would be like. With hindsight we know that the relative strengths of propulsion, maneuvering, aiming, homing, countermeasures, and automation have been constantly changing, with the result that air combat has looked different in each successive war.
There's no reason to think that the qualitative nature of space combat wouldn't change just as drastically as the eternal arms race continued. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not fun to think about or that there's nothing meaningful that can be said. The exercise is to make a few essentially arbitrary assumptions about available tech, and then try to extrapolate consistently to their implications. AKA writing sci-fi, minus the character development. AKA writing sci-fi.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Insightful)
Guns, smart and dumb. Missiles. Bombs, smart and dumb. Maneuvering for position in gravity wells. People will discover that common, everyday tools make great weapons, with the application of imagination.
What will war look like? Just like it has always looked. Messy, confusing, chaotic, adorned with lots of blood and gore.
My question is, why does everyone ignore the guns? Guns will work wonderfully in space. Projectiles won't be deflected by dust, mirrors, or other fancy tricks. Guns have been pretty reliable since they were invented. Guns probably won't last long as a primary weapon, but they will always have a place in combat. Energy weapons won't rule until we've figured out cold fusion. Until then, guns will remain as end-game deciders, if nothing else.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Insightful)
My question is, why does everyone ignore the guns? Guns will work wonderfully in space.
The main issue with using large guns in space is the recoil. A missile, for example, could be just tossed away from the ship with minimal impulse, and it fires up its own propulsion and goes on its way. Also, you really don't need the massive kinetic impact of a gun in space. Making a little pinhole in the side of a ship with a laser would be pretty effective in space and lasers would offer several other advantages over guns, including less recoil.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Interesting)
The "large" in "large guns" was not from my post. I used the word "guns". Unless, and until armored ships appear on the scene, a standard .30 caliber machine gun will be devastating to almost any spaceship. Even more so if the ammo is explosive and/or fragmenting. The ammunition is so cheap that you can spray and pray a large volume of space with the thing, for little cost. The greatest drawback to this approach is, the cost of transporting all that ammo. The problems with recoil are manageable with fire discipline, I would imagine.
Don't get me wrong here - energy weapons will be more and more important, militarily, as technology progresses. I just don't see lasers replacing guns for a long, long time to come. Even then, when the best equipped and best supported navies have cast away their last guns, less wealthy forces will probably create situations where their obsolete weapons can overcome the better equipped "Imperial forces".
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest as much. The US/NATO forces are vastly better equipped than the insurgents, but the US/NATO still suffer casualties. What's that term? "Improvised Explosive Devices".
Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
Barring a completely different future propulsion system, everything in space is either in orbit, on its way into orbit, or on its way back to Earth. Current space ships have extremely little ability to adjust their trajectory on more than a very occasional basis.
So, for any near-earth combat, one would simply launch a missile from earth or a high altitude aircraft to destroy the target in orbit.
For combat near another celestial body, you would probably just toss some marbles in the other party's orbital path.
If you can get there. If something is in orbit around the moon, the only thing capable of touching it will have to get to the moon first. And that's not an action that happens on a whim.
For any extra-orbital combat, relative speeds and distances between objects are likely so great that there isn't any combat at all.
Re:Where? (Score:5, Interesting)
Current space ships have extremely little ability to adjust their trajectory on more than a very occasional basis.
Yes. And assuming you have a laser or relativistic weapon, even with an amazing ability to dodge, the first to detect will fire and "simultaneously" (from the target's perspective) obliterate the target before the target notices they are even under attack. I'm assuming near-term space combat would be decided by stealth, not firepower: anybody detected is destroyed. Probably the only way to return fire would be to have drone fleets surrounded by dust, so that somebody survives to see the laser passing through the cloud and get some sense as to the direction it came from.
Also, it's possible that any significant combat in orbit would destroy everybody involved: see Kessler Syndrome/ablation cascade [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3)
I think projectile weapons (railguns etc.) are likely to be used. But they do have a serious drawback - you are essentially launching a small, fast, heavy satellite. If it doesn't hit the target, it's going to keep going - somewhere. That somewhere might well be your own behind, depending on how the orbital mechanics works out. And if they do hit the target, you've just created a large number of new projectiles with unpredictable orbits. Beam weapons would be cleaner.
Hmm. I wonder if neutron bombs wou
If we were sane (Score:4)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Interesting)
Guns are great as long as you don't take into account one problem that they share with lasers: Heat.
Heat is easy to dissipate on a planet with an atmosphere. Heat sinks, whatever shape they might take, work wonders in an environment where you have a medium to take said heat and move it away. Be it air or even preferably water, any medium will do as long as it somehow moves heat away.
You lack exactly this medium in space. There is no way to dissipate heat but by radiation. Which is surprisingly little.
Your problem is that pretty much anything creates entropy, and hence heat. Propulsion solves this problem by simply tossing the hot stuff out behind. It might work if you somehow manage to transfer the heat from the propellant explosion into the shell, otherwise... well, try to get rid of it.
Lasers actually increase that problem. Since there's nothing you could possibly load with the heat and jettison.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Insightful)
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless of course some bright, young thing figures out a way to use the recoil of a projectile weapon to tactical advantage. Much of the history of warfare consists finding new lemonade recipes for the new lemons that keep showing up.
Oh, and not all projectile weapons have recoil or at least recoil that has to be absorbed. There was a fairly brief, by military standards, love affair between militaries and recoilless rifles.
Re: (Score:3)
A mirror doesn't look like a mirror at other wavelengths, and that there is no such thing as a perfect reflector. The rest of your argument aside, that initial exchange you reference meant very, very little.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Interesting)
As for capital ships, unlikely, they are too big targets and no amount of armor will really prevent a dedicate enemy from putting peppering them with hyperkinetic pinballs.
Barring exotic supertechs spaceships would probably operate on the basis of being relatively small vessels, axial gunmounts with minimal cross section towards the enemies, very powerfull lateral engines and heavily networked to sensor and targeting grids to allow them to simply strafe to whatever tiny safe zone the sensor grid suggests is availible from that metric fuckton of spacegravel coming your way at 120km/s.
As for lasers, sure, they might work at short distances. but as soon as you can do a random walk flight and escape the beam targeting due to the 0,6second light-lag they too turn rather inefficient.
My vision of space combat is rather few ships, but very nasty and advanced supermunitions to blow the shit out of the enemy staging area/home base, and some additional to clear any ships or large munitions passing in the no-mans-land that is the cold black vacuum.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Insightful)
So if you're envisioning combat to be far enough away that the light speed delay poses a problem, exactly what weapon are you envisioning that *doesn't* have this problem? If light is too slow.... Plus, if you're that far away, you're not going to be closing in on each other worth a flip. You've got plenty of time for your system to make guesses about how the target is going to move; it'll nail them sooner or later. And if you think running that laser takes a lot of power/fuel/whatever, what do you think rapidly changing the trajectory of an entire spacecraft for days on end (enough to move it out of the path of a laser in under 0.6 seconds) will consume? The reality is that if you're far enough away that light is too slow, then your combat will just be conducted closer.
Sooner or later nuclear weapons or similar would become part of space combat. There's so much empty space, true high population space colonies are so far off, and it's easy enough to set "no nukes near planets" as a MAD boundary, it seems it's going to happen. Aka, even if not a conventional nuclear weapon, with the increasing energy density demands required by space propulsion, you'll at least end up with something similar. They impose interesting constraints on space combat, as they're very different from on the ground. Almost no pressure wave, but the radiation threat is dramatically greater (nothing absorbs it and harder to block it in space)
Combat would presumably be a "you're on your own" thing. Reinforcements would take *way* too long to arrive except perhaps right near a planet or base. Space is just really, really big and most of your time in space, you're drifting or providing a constant accel.
Since all combat seems to be heading this way anyway, one might as well just say: Drones. Due to the light speed delay, they'd have to be much more automated, but again, we're headed that way anyway. Carrying around a person and a life support system is a *huge* mass and complexity penalty.
Re: (Score:3)
So if you're envisioning combat to be far enough away that the light speed delay poses a problem, exactly what weapon are you envisioning that *doesn't* have this problem? If light is too slow.... Plus, if you're that far away, you're not going to be closing in on each other worth a flip
Also you're gonna be a point source. You can just squirt plain old air from a drone precisely station keeping between you and the target and that small amount of air will completely defocus and decoliminate the beam... there is a reason why commercial laser cutters don't keep the expensive optics 20 feet away like they would like to protect them. Furthermore as a point source you just toss unfolded umbrellas along the vector... can't lase thru a fireball, so you get at most one hit per umbrella.
I'm think
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Interesting)
To dodge a laser you need to alter your trajectory enough that none of your vessel's body is where it would be without acceleration after the transmission time. Also you need to alter your acceleration vector often enough that you aren't predictable enough and you assume that lasers cannot be fired often enough that an enemy could just saturate the area around you with shots to get some hits in.
Lasers have the massive advantage of lacking recoil, using kinetics will shake your craft around and likely spread your shots more than you'd want them to for proper target saturation. Their slower movement also means that you'll need even more shots at .6 lightseconds (that's 180 million meters!) to land a significant number of hits and you'll need to scale down their individual power accordingly. I don't think you'll be able to use kinetics past a few kilometers of distance and I don't think you'll be able to get them to 120 km/s (actio = reactio, remember). Hell, the recoil from firing those bullets would be enough to kill any human crew on the vessel and even then your shots take half an hour to cross the .6 lightseconds that you put on the laser fight.
If you can build a laser with enough power, focal distance and cooling to do significant damage at .6 lightseconds you're going to mop the floor with anyone attempting to use kinetics at that range.
Re:Laser Beams (Score:4, Insightful)
I think if you've got a laser with enough light pressure to generate significant recoil, you've won with the first shot that actually hits, regardless of what the target is made of.
As for what space combat would look like, assuming no exotic tech like controlled gravity, shields, reactionless engines or faster than light travel:
-Manoeuvring would be limited by the g forces the crew can withstand on manned craft. Small combat craft would be drones, without exception.
-Range would be longer than any current theatre of battle. Including strategic nuclear warfare.
-Any drive worth using for long both range force projection and combat manoeuvres would be a fearsome weapon in itself. Think "thermonuclear blowtorch". With an Orion or antimatter engine, the fuel is potently explosive.
-Stealth is flat out impossible.
So, messy, expensive and strategic would be a good guess, and it probably wouldn't look very interesting to the naked eye (lots of bright flashes and empty blackness). Think less "Top Gun" and more "Wargames".
Re: (Score:3)
How would you know the laser was fired before it hits you?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I was going to say most people have a serious misunderstanding about lasers vs smoke and mirrors because all they've ever seen is the low power kind that get refracted or reflected. Shoot a nice high powered laser into smoke and that smoke is going to vaporize just like if it hit a target it was meant to destroy, and probably won't even be affected much in the process. As for mirrors, they may give a bit of protection, especially vs certain frequencies, but not long, as you said, because they are not
Re:Laser Beams (Score:5, Funny)
Laser Beams.
That's all.
my mirror shields will take the day
Laser shots would be preceded by a barrage of Gummi Bears to stick to your shields and absorb the laser energy. Haribo's stock will soar due to military Gummi Bear purchases and they will become the largest and most wealthy company in the universe. Even larger than MicrAppleSoft who supplies the PADD handhelds for the fleet.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If your ship is 100% covered in perfect mirrors, then you'll never be able to fire back, or even see where you are going.
that's why they're 100% perfect two-way mirrors. like on law and order.
Re: (Score:3)
Slow news day, eh?
Yeah, go ahead, just dare them to post yet another raspberry pi article. Remember when we had to sit thru 3 e-ink display astroturfs per week? Ugh. Weird as it is, at least this doesn't get posted on a regular basis... thats why I upvoted it in the firehose.
Re: (Score:3)
Given an infinite amount of computational power and tech, simply shoot the rail round out of the "sky" with one of your own rounds. CIWS is old/ancient stuff on naval ships, I can't imagine something unimaginably more advanced not being deployed.
That works against long range, because its so easy to lock and and pop them enroute. There will exist a short range where one side's super-CIWS will lose its control loop, then the other side wins. I would imagine that intel info would be very valuable...
Too far
Re: (Score:3)
Offensive ship minimizes defense area by being needle like with weapons/CIWS launchers at the tip. Nice and long... if you get to flank it, its dead, but point on its indestructible and and dish out amazing damage per exposed frontal area.
Defensive ship tries to minimize its surface area from all directions so its a sphere. You don't gain much by sneak attacks or flanking maneuvers on a sphere. I'd be a smart ass and make it as featureless as possible... Am I gazing into an engine nozzle, a railgun hole
Re: (Score:3)
Any battle around a planet would leave so much debris floating around that it would make entire orbits unsafe. Think about how much trouble was caused when two satellites collided now imagine the remains of a large number of ships or USV (Unmanned Space Vehicles) floating around. One battle could leave earth with no safe place to orbit satellites or a safe trajectory to leave.
Finally someone mentioned the debris problem. >200 posts about kinetic weapons and flak shot and nukes and nobody considered the crap that misses is just going to come around in orbit and hit your back. The oft-posted Wikipedia article is on the Kessler syndrome [wikipedia.org].
I expect actual space combat to be almost entirely electronic warfare. If you can take control of a satellite, you can simply program it to de-orbit itself, possibly onto a target of your choice. The most effective physical ordinance would b