I think that the TIE and X wing, in fact all small craft in SW were repulsor powered in gravity- aerodynamic surfaces thier wings certainly were not! In the SW world you can probably have vast flying cubes that would perform as well as any TIE or X wing.

Chrome Falcon, on Sep 18 2005, 09:43 AM, said:

Think of Star Wars - the X-Wings, TIEs and other assorted ships were used both in space and as ground support ships. Having air superiority would be a big factor in an invasion unless you were willing to shred the resistance from orbit - hardly professional or subtle: you do want the planet intact, don't you?View Post

UE_Research & Development, on Sep 18 2005, 10:41 PM, said:

Very well, except this assumes that whatever mechanics are used to move the ship between star systems will either be very small or take up no room altogether. It's unrealistic to dream about hyperdrives, it's even more unrealistic to assume that something used to functionally violate the very laws of physics will be magically compressed into a tiny 'black box' while weapons and defense systems remain 'real-world' in regards to their specifications.

You wouldn't need to worry about hyperdrive, though, if your vessel moved between star systems at relativistic speeds...in which case, you'd still need a whole heck of a lot of room for supplies and redundancy. Oops.

Or maybe combat takes place in one system exclusively. In which case planet-destroying warfare would be a rather stupid/racially suicidal proposition (considering the limited number extant). In that case, ships would indeed do well to be as small as practical.
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I can't make any judgements about interstellar travel: pretty much anything capable of busting the light barrier would also be a pretty powerful weapon. In that scenario, where you no longer have a relation between cause and effect, the most powerful ship would probably be any two-bit freighter which, as a consequence of travelling the stars, can put a black hole anywhere it pleases. Then, by exceeding the light barrier, could do the same at any arbitrary time of human history.

As for relativistic ships: I see these as largely non-combatant ships. Any c-fractional ship would have a drive that could be spotted exactly from several light years out. In that case, the defender has a few leisurely years to assemble a much bigger fleet. In that scenario, slow ships will probably resemble biblical arks and commercial freighters instead of battleships and death stars.

I think technologies that we associate with most interstellar scifi (grav control, ftl, etc) would make war so very deadly that any major conflict would have to involve Mutually Assured Destruction. Intrastellar we have the same problem, but with the caveat that you mentioned: if these are the only planets we have, we'll probably play nicer with them.

rmx256, on Sep 18 2005, 11:42 PM, said:

I think that the TIE and X wing, in fact all small craft in SW were repulsor powered in gravity- aerodynamic surfaces thier wings certainly were not! In the SW world you can probably have vast flying cubes that would perform as well as any TIE or X wing.
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True, but if you've read any of the books, you'll know that the wings help the thing to be maneauverable. In any combat arena, you want every edge you can get - having wings both reduces target aspect and reduces air resistance, allowing higher speed and greater agility for an (trans)atmospheric ship.

Going back to different possibilities of weapons, we've ruled out lasers and particle beams (due to lack of damage). But what about antiparticle beams? The random debris in space would knock off damage and range fairly quickly, but damage would be inflicted at a high rate. Probably a weapon of choice for the aforementioned cloaking strike craft?

Antimater weapons release the same amount of energy as kinetic weapons were the shot to travel at c (clearly impossible), so yeah. It depends on how difficult it is to produce, store, and fire antimatter projectiles. So long as the debris wasnt on the same scale as the shot, it wouldnt make all that much of a difference. Bits of space dust would wear it down, but not all that fast. I figure it would register as medium range with our current scales.

The question is, how do you propel it? Do anti-protons/anti-electrons carry a charge? If they don't, how will you move them without some mechanical means?

Admiral Benden, on Sep 21 2005, 03:15 AM, said:

The question is, how do you propel it? Do anti-protons/anti-electrons carry a charge? If they don't, how will you move them without some mechanical means?
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Oddly enough, a positron (anti-electron) carries a charge of +1, making it the opposite of an electron's charge. The "anti-" prefix ain't just for looks. So yes, one could charge up a bunch of anti-Hydrogen ions of what have you into some sort of beam. The problem then becomes how one gets their hands on non-trivial amounts of antimatter.

1st off that can be done too... they just need a bigger engines... and 2ndly Why do sumthign we already have? we already go long-range strategic bombers. no need for a "Flying submarine" And seeing you put it like that what you are also saying is that is aint possible to make a space craft carrier seeing it is larger than a nuke sub but it will have "Jet engines" And finally Atmospheric fighter converted to Space craft can be done. Just takes Time and Money... I swear no one here is really opening there imagination to the expansion of space. Take a REAL Deep thought about space.... Think of all the Trillions and Trillions of Planets stars and galaxies. When it comes to making space craft all it takes is imagination and ingenuity. Not what analysts think...

UE_Research & Development, on Sep 17 2005, 07:53 AM, said:

Funny- before I read rmx's post, I thought to myself 'someone's been reading/watching too much Macross'.

Operationally, saying 'we'll adapt atmospheric fighters to space combat' is as ridiculous as saying 'we'll adapt nuclear submarines into long-range strategic bombers by giving them jet engines'.
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Coolest Spaz, on Sep 21 2005, 04:38 AM, said:

1st off that can be done too... they just need a bigger engines... and 2ndly Why do sumthign we already have? we already go long-range strategic bombers. no need for a "Flying submarine" And seeing you put it like that what you are also saying is that is aint possible to make a space craft carrier seeing it is larger than a nuke sub but it will have "Jet engines" And finally Atmospheric fighter converted to Space craft can be done. Just takes Time and Money... I swear no one here is really opening there imagination to the expansion of space. Take a REAL Deep thought about space.... Think of all the Trillions and Trillions of Planets stars and galaxies. When it comes to making space craft all it takes is imagination and ingenuity. Not what analysts think...
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You know what else takes time and money? Just building a ######ing spacecraft from scratch.

What are you saving? Lets see... the gyroscope is useful, the lights on the dashboard, and the seat the pilot sits in is nice and comfy under high G.

Ok, well what about the get engines? Aha, right. just make them bigger. Now you can suck in a full square meter of air at once and.... oh wait. THERE IS NO AIR IN SPACE. So you tear the engines out, the fuel tanks, the fuel lines, and all the pumps and electronics used to monitor and control said systems. Missiles can be countered by point defense, etc, since its damned easy to shoot something in space with a lazer (even now), so at the very least we need to redesign hardened missiles, so you are scrapping all of that. Gravity bombs (for carpet bombing/etc) dont work either, so you are pretty much left with... nothing. Just a shiny aluminum/titanium/carbon fibre shell that has control surfaces on it that are only useful when you are flying in atmosphere. But if you designed a fighter that was optimised for space combat, it wouldnt need all that extra damage, and therefore be at an inherent advantage. I guess we could chop them off, giving us...

A gyroscope and a comfy chair.

As for everyone saying "spheres are the most efficient, due to their high volume to surface area", you forget we are not optimising for surface_area/volume, we are optimising for many more things. Target_sillouhete/volume, for example. If you are rather certain you can keep the enemy directly ahead of you (say 90% of the time), then the optimum ship would be long and skinny. Line it directly up with the enemy and he will be hard pressed to hit such a small area. Something else you need to optimise for: keeping unfriendly devices away from one another. Like chemical engines and living quarters or giant magnets and CRTs. Or ion thrusters and radios. Naturally, these examples aren't the best, either irrelevant or over too large of a scale for opposite sides of a ship to be enough, but you still need to think about it. There are more problems here than just figuring out how much junk you can fit into N square meters of carbon fibre laminate.

A good way to think about this sort of thing is to game it out: Pick a good stellar domination strategy, then figure out all of its weaknesses, and design a new strategy to counter it. Then figure out the weaknesses of this new strategy. This is what i was talking about with removing fighter wings, ridding yourself of excess mass increases the delta vees you have, lets you accelerate faster and for cheaper, and is therefore and advantage. The fleet that used vacuum only fighters would have a huge advantage over the enemy, unless the enemy found a way to force the battle out of the range of the fighters. We can reasonably assume that large ships have a hard time getting into atmosphere (and indeed most wont be able too), so the attacker must figure out some way to counter this. Well, they could just drop stuff on the defenders, and if the defenders come out to play, the attackers superior fighters mince them, and if they stay bundled up the attackers basically have them under siege.

SO the defender gives up planetary defenses all together and builds its bases inside of asteroid fields. They find ways of jamming all communications and detection systems, this makes a blot on the radar so bright there is no way to navigate except through visuals. The defender sets up silent ambushes in the asteroid fields, decoy bases and big explodey thingys that go off when nosy fighters get too close. Except the attacker uses the jammes signals to his advantage, randomly sneak attacking what convoys they do find. The defender can't call in reinforcements, because its transmitting too much garbage over every possible frequency. So they ease up on a few of them to call in reinforcements, but the attackers notice this too and now know the positions and vectors of the reinforcement fleets, so they can have surprises waiting for them. The attackers look to be winning, but are far too spread out. So the defenders counterattack the attackers industrial complexes, little do they know about the attackers ace up the sleve...

All in all here we're trying to predict the future by extrapolating current technologies that we're aware of- if we're thinking about ships flying around in space it's also reasonable to assume that by that point we're going to have new and better- as well as more efficient versions of old- technology that may render many of these points moot. Now a lazer or particle beam may have to power up and produce lots of extra power; or extreme manouverability on a large ship's part may suck up lots of fuel- but we can't say that in the future that this will not be the case. You take an oil-fired ship today and it does have limitations to it's maximum range and does affect the captain's decisions in regards to how the sh is to manouver- but a nuclear powered ship has an effectively infinite range as far as game terms would go. Not having to refuel is a tremendous advantage- and having the available power at all times for evasive coutermanouvers would be a tremendous advantage that I definately do forsee in the future.

I'm thinking of submarine-style warfare- Medium sized ships hurling compensated/recoiless missile - style rounds at one another from a "blind"(windowless) environment. I am thinking a bit nearer to current tech than not, but I still think that it would be more energy - efficient to utilize a self- propelled round than having to compensate for a slug shot or having to carry the extra reactor/power/whatever for the laser. This will create a more maneuvorable ship, albiet there still needs to be some form of backup for the 'torpedoes'.

I'm too tired to think much else through.

-H^3

Windowless need not mean blind. The problem with sonar is you have to make a ping to get good data. In space, you just need a camera on arbitrary wavelengths and a fancy number cruncher.

And be aware that the amount of fuel needed to compensate for the recoil of a shot is exactly the same as the amount of fuel needed to fire a shot with the same amount of energy (the same charge would give you half the energy in a recoiless gun as compared to an arbitrarily immobile gun, since half the energy is flying out the back end). So assuming the machinery doesnt mind being whacked around, it would probably be a bit of an advantage to use non recoiless weaponry. Well... there are a bunch of points on both sides i dont really want to go into right now, and recoiless is probably easier to reload/more durable, but im not sure how much either of those will matter in the clean vacuum of space.

And rmx, While I accept that there are huge holes in newtons theories, the center of gravity of any closed system cannot change velocity. Which means to move forward you are going to have to shoot something out the back, pretty much no matter what.

I am refering more to advances in power source technology, such as the kinds that kind of make old Midway-class carriers obsolete when compared to the Nimitz-classes: The main difference is that he Nimitz classed carriers are nuclear powered and have something like a 17 year duty cycle (still needing 6-month refit to replace consumables and take on crew, etc)- these ships are more or less free ranging and do not need to be escorted by tankers (except for the aircraft fuel). Even assuming modern physics, a ship that does not need refueling and can consume during manouvering as much power as it needs on an arbitrary basis would have a tremendous advantage over a conventionally fueled ship, which would use a lot of fuel in erratic manouvers. At no place am I suggesting that we'll be casually violating the laws of physics: I'm saying that technological advances in engines, reactors, ship construction et cetera will make possible- eventually- ships that can move and manouver as thier captain sees fit. Look at the relative power of a modern diesel electric locamotive and a turn-of-the-20th century steam engine- this is just 100 years of constant development. There was once a great debate between paddle wheeled steamships and screw-driven ships that took lots of effort to overcome on the part of a few engineers versus the British admirality. Eventually we'll see different methods of propulsion and power generation in space, some more advanced than we are aware of today or can even predict. Everyone going on about recoiless rockets and fuel consumption and lazers etc in my opinion are barking up the wrong tree and not thinking far enough into the future There are probably permutations of existing theories and sciences and whole new technologies that are going to come into play that are eventually going to change everything and we're not going to be able to sit back today and in any way predict the power sources of the future, nor how 32nd century or any future centuries engines or propulsion systems or anything is going to work, or how they are limited or not. We simply cannot tell from here.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 22 2005, 01:34 PM, said:

And rmx, While I accept that there are huge holes in newtons theories, the center of gravity of any closed system cannot change velocity. Which means to move forward you are going to have to shoot something out the back, pretty much no matter what.
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Coolest Spaz, on Sep 21 2005, 08:38 AM, said:

1st off that can be done too... they just need a bigger engines... and 2ndly Why do sumthign we already have? we already go long-range strategic bombers. no need for a "Flying submarine" And seeing you put it like that what you are also saying is that is aint possible to make a space craft carrier seeing it is larger than a nuke sub but it will have "Jet engines" And finally Atmospheric fighter converted to Space craft can be done. Just takes Time and Money... I swear no one here is really opening there imagination to the expansion of space. Take a REAL Deep thought about space.... Think of all the Trillions and Trillions of Planets stars and galaxies. When it comes to making space craft all it takes is imagination and ingenuity. Not what analysts think...
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We needed you at the start of the Cold War, working for the Soviet Union. Then the United States could have bested the Russians in half a decade, not half a century, and we wouldn't have had to worry about all that 'Mutual Assured Destruction' nonsense.

Quote

All in all here we're trying to predict the future by extrapolating current technologies that we're aware of- if we're thinking about ships flying around in space it's also reasonable to assume that by that point we're going to have new and better- as well as more efficient versions of old- technology that may render many of these points moot.

Definitely. If we ever develop a working diametric or disjunction drive, spaceships won't need to worry about carrying reaction mass. As well, if scientists ever find out how to induce small singularities, laser or particle beam weapons may soon be relegated to a secondary status. It may even be possible (although very, very unlikely) that the typical future interplanetary war will be a conflicts of ideology and propaganda, in which planets and colonies are 'won' and 'lost' not by military intervention, but by the tide of public opinion. Very unlikely, again, though.

Now, I have a flying submarine to sell someone...

Skyfox, on Sep 12 2005, 09:52 PM, said:

A lot of the way space combat would be fought would have to depend upon the method of Faster-Then-Light travel.View Post

Faster than light is theoretically possible, but anything traveling FTL must also be traveling BIT. Backwards in time. Fun.

Also, to "accelerate" from STL to FTL you must "skip" the speed c (or else use infinite energy), and thus your acceleration is not continuous and therefore not differentiable, and at some point (in time), as a result, your speed does not exist.

Wheeeeeeee!

Admiral Benden, on Sep 13 2005, 05:07 AM, said:

Your heat emissions will betray you even if your drive signature does not. You cannot just magically make that heat disappear; it must be radiated away from the ship.
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I set my Condense-o-Matic to Antientropy and turn that radiant heat into popsicles. /nod

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 17 2005, 10:42 AM, said:

Entropy is also a bitch. At these scales it is SO much easier to destroy stuff than to create it, it wouldnt be long before battles decomposed into dark ages of pretty much anarchy.
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Yeah, but she's my bitch. And she's having puppies. And I named one of them "Cuddly". Isn't he cute?

UE_Research & Development, on Sep 18 2005, 06:41 PM, said:

Very well, except this assumes that whatever mechanics are used to move the ship between star systems will either be very small or take up no room altogether. It's unrealistic to dream about hyperdrives, it's even more unrealistic to assume that something used to functionally violate the very laws of physics will be magically compressed into a tiny 'black box' while weapons and defense systems remain 'real-world' in regards to their specifications.
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Ooh! That gives me an idea for a plugin where every outfit's name is "Black Box" and all of them have the same picture and weigh the same, and their descriptions don't say what they are. So then you don't know whether you're buying a 12 gigaton warhead or a really big carton of two-ply quilted toilet paper. I'm sure you can guess which will be useful more often on a multi-day space flight.

Chrome Falcon, on Sep 19 2005, 02:44 AM, said:

True, but if you've read any of the books, you'll know that the wings help the thing to be maneauverable.View Post

This is true, but isn't it easier to just put the angular thrusters at the nose or tail of the ship (if the ship even has a nose or tail)? Hmm, I'm picturing a spherical ship with weapons and engines and things on the outside, and on the inside a slightly smaller sphere "floating" in oil or something so it can rotate freely with respect to the outser sphere. Inside you have living quarters and cargo space and whatnot. Then your ship can spin around you and you won't feel a thing. And if a projectile or asteroid or something hits your ship at an angle it might make the outer hull move but the inside not so much. At least not angularly.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 21 2005, 11:34 AM, said:

A gyroscope and a comfy chair.View Post

Amen. Seriously. We can all stop talking now, Neb has won this thread. The future of space combat looks like a gyroscope and a comfy chair.

That is all.

Qaanol, on Sep 22 2005, 11:37 PM, said:

Faster than light is theoretically possible, but anything traveling FTL must also be traveling BIT. Backwards in time. Fun.

Also, to "accelerate" from STL to FTL you must "skip" the speed c (or else use infinite energy), and thus your acceleration is not continuous and therefore not differentiable, and at some point (in time), as a result, your speed does not exist.

<snip>

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Due to the fact that (looks in relativity book) mass increases as you approach light-speed using the equation:

M=m/sqrt(1-v squared/c squared)

where M = Resultant mass and m = mass at negligable velocity, you can see that once you reach c, you get mass/0=infinity. That produces two problems - a ) it's impossible to have infinite mass (or at least it would produce the mother of all black holes) and b ) due to f=ma, it would be impossible to go faster than c. Simply strapping huge engines onto a ship won't cut the mustard.
Which is why, as mentioned above, I go for artificial wormholes as the only viable interstellar travel method. Getting that to work with today's science, though... wormholes are still a theory! Damn you, scientists! Why can't you keep up with science fiction? </rant>

Right. It's impossible to accelerate an object from less than the speed of light to c. However, an object traveling backward in time (in its own frame of reference) with initial velocity greater than c (in the frame of reference of an object traveling less than c) works fine with relativistic equations. Kind of screws with your head a bit, like realizing that a photon from the sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach earth 93 million miles away but the photon itself experiences no passage of time or change of position, but it fits the equations.

Qaanol, on Sep 26 2005, 06:52 PM, said:

Right. It's impossible to accelerate an object from less than the speed of light to c. However, an object traveling backward in time (in its own frame of reference) with initial velocity greater than c (in the frame of reference of an object traveling less than c) works fine with relativistic equations. Kind of screws with your head a bit, like realizing that a photon from the sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach earth 93 million miles away but the photon itself experiences no passage of time or change of position, but it fits the equations.
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Fair enough. But how do you get the thing to be at super-c speeds in the first place? It might be alright equation wise, but if nothing can end up FTL in the first place, you can't make it whatever temporal tricks you use.

Besides, I don't quite get how you end up going BIT. In the aforementioned book, the equation that explains how time changes with speed is the same as for mass, replacing "m"s with "t"s. That means that you once again end up with t/0=infinity. Thus, as with those photons, you would never experience any change in time. You'd be stuck at c for eternity.

Did my reasoning go wrong somewhere?

No, your reasoning is perfect. Anything slower than c is forever doomed to stay slower than c. The only way for something to travel FTL is for it to have been traveling FTL since the universe began, and continue traveling FTL forever. In its own reality it would "start" traveling at the "end of time" and continue until the "beginning". In our reality it would just zoom by and we wouldn't be able to notice it.

Thus, there could be an "alternate universe" where everything travels "faster than light" which in effect would constitute the "reflection" of the time cone of our universe. Of course, in that case I'm pretty sure our physics wouldn't necessarily apply, so the whole point is moot. There's no FTL.

This thread was not really intended to turn into a 100% real physics : how-space-combat-would-be-boring thread. More like what can be made mostly believable.

Qaanol, on Sep 30 2005, 10:57 AM, said:

There's no FTL.

Most likely.

And there are plenty of ways of taking shortcuts through space. Wormholes come to mind. The trick there is finding negative energy, a biiiiig amount of negative energy.

I think it would be really cool if solar sails was kinda a throwback to the sailing ships. Can you say glory days of piracy? Yarr. Space Pirates. Now there be one mighty fine idea thar.