Qaanol, on Oct 11 2005, 04:31 PM, said:

Relativity, my man. Watch what happens to distances as your speed increases.
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ehm... at those speeds (whatever a .5 rating really means), all of those radicals become square roots of negative numbers. I don't think you would measuer i*10^n miles in parsecs, but you never know...

You can always chock these things up to the charachter himself being a dumbass, but that doesn't really make sense here.

Anyway. Those suggesting that the families of the defenders should live on the planet are neglecting that, while the masses are stupid, there are always those who will understand they are being abused (or deliberately endangered for military purposes), and so long as there is any kind of free communication, that tactic really wouldn't go down so well. Unless you vastly restricted data access and communication, but in addition to requiring tons of effort in monitoring, it would cripple scientific thought and societal advancement.

Hey I'm just jumping in here, so don't hate me if I'm retreading past or future points, but it seems to me...

Admiral Benden, on Oct 2 2005, 07:23 AM, said:

Size does not correlate to speed.

Size may have some impact on acceleration, but not much. As a ship gets larger or smaller, it can be assumed that the engine will be scaled to fit. Thus, it may be assumed that a drive with a linear effeciency rating will provide the same acceleration as long as the mass/drive ration remains the same.
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Due to the geometry of scaling, a smaller ship can accelerate faster because its structural girders or whatever have a larger cross section in relation to the weight of the craft. Therefore they may have higher rates of acceleration without crushing the craft between it's engines and it's inertia. Now a human pilot would not be likely to survive at these extremes of acceleration, but a computer pilot could be designed to. While quite possibly impractical, I envision a wing of fighters with high speed CPUs all communicating with eachother to act as a processor cluster and running a Marathon-type personality construct. Incredibly dangerous, no?

Edwards, on Oct 2 2005, 09:52 PM, said:

About the fighter issue, fighter-scale weapons cannot harm larger ships- they would need to deliver large explosives, which would leave little room for anti-fighter weaponry on anti-ship fighters. So, the primary purpose of your anti-fighter fighters would be shooting down "torpedo bombers" (which, as someone pointed out, can also be referred to as "missiles", as I see no reason for them to be manned).
So, which is better at anti-missile/torpedo work, fighters, point defense, or both?

Edwards
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Have you ever heard of the WWII german Virus House project? it was a very simple nuclear bomb concept in which two chunks of uranium would be suspended in the bomb and slammed together by their own inertia upon impact with the ground. Imagine a Gauss, quench, rail, gas, or rocket type gun that fired shells operating on the Virus House concept. 50 to 100 tactical nuclear warheads per battery per fighter per second is nothing to sneeze at.

space combat...

Here's my view on the future of space combat and war...

Most likely for fear of lasers and bullets spaceships will start out with heavy metals like Iron, and Steel. But when Magnetic Distorters are made, which will crumple metal, these metals will be useless. Which will mova research to Aluminum which is not magnetic so making the MDs useless, though when the Gravity Distorter comes out nothing can block it, making it the best weapon...

@koshinn, on Oct 8 2005, 12:09 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:

Well the way the quote goes, it's wrong. Kind of like parsecs being used as a measure of time rather than distance. Then again he says "I made the Kessel Run in (insert number) parsecs." which could mean that the Kessel Run isn't a race as you'd think, but instead a thing where finding the shortest path is the goal, not going the fastest... but that'd just be weird.

Kestrel run is who can cut the shortest path by going the closest to a black hole cluster without dying.

erm, i mean kessel

This post has been edited by Satori : 26 August 2006 - 09:38 PM

Well. :startled blink:

I'd just recently been thinking about this thread, and how it never really got much decided. Sure, it split off into the Interstellar War Game, but that only had one round, and depended far too much on the technical details of the technology (particularly the inner workings of the wormholes). Now that it's been most of a year, it seemed like it might be time to re-open the debate.

I'd also been thinking of starting a new thread about "The Future of Space Combat", with more of a focus on general things, such as "where and at what speeds would battles be fought", and less of a focus of technology, such as "what's wrong with turning a nuclear submarine into a long-range bomber". However, since this thread itself has resurfaced, albeit via a very pointless gravedig, it seems we have a choice. Let the whole issue die again, start a new thread, or continue this one, with all of its baggage?

Regardless of what anyone else thinks, I'm probably going to have a long-winded post on the subject sometime during the next couple of days.

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 26 August 2006 - 10:21 PM

How do I see space combat?

Well.. with my eyes, of course!

(quote name='Hugh' date='Sep 7 2005, 09:11 PM' post='1469914')
In space Nukes will not create a shock wave as, ther is no air for it to compress or reflect off. As a result it will just be a massive burst of EM radiation reflected off the hull of the ship. The same thing will happen with conventional explosives, they will just refelect off. As a result the only weapons that will have an effect are projectiles, or weapons designed to penatrate the sheilds/armour before detonation. Railguns would be effective, as if the crew wore vacum suites, then they would still have to worry about explosive decompresstion. An effective deffece against this would be some outer layer matterial which wouldn't break when hit by a high velocity object but rather strech, spreading the stress of the impact over a much larger area of the armour ( a similar principle to kevlar vests).

the explosive decompresion might not happen because people have tried to recreate this event with airplanes but all that happens is the air just leaves thorugh the first hole not dragging the whole side of the plane off with all the passengers.

If you think about space combat would more likely be just people running at each other hooking on to the enimie and riping as much of the ship off ass possible to kill the crew and maybe some small close range weapons like say a gatiling gun and some missles nothing more. like the reavers off serenity. or when they run in just smash into the side and cut a hole in the hull and board them.

Think about it: bullets require combustion, and combustion requires oxygen. Too little oxygen, and the projectile is ineffective-too much and BOOM! That's not to say that it would be impossible, but the resulting work-around would likely be too large and unwieldy to be an effective weapon.

-Flyboy.

Flyboy, this is what a Rail- / Gauss Gun is for. Bullets are accelerated, not by chemical combustion, but by electromagnetic forces.

I've seen videos on the internet about amateur Railguns (Ones that aren't the size of battleships), so yes, they are possible.

A quick (< 1 minute) search on YouTube brings up the following:
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=mR0HdqAchKA
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=h3nROLGX0eo
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=hnOZodP5YuA

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 27 August 2006 - 02:20 AM

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.

This post has been edited by UE_Research & Development: 27 August 2006 - 08:01 AM

actually, I think we'll all have killed each other before space combat

A spray of fire will be quite dense initially, but after any significant spacial distance it will have diffused to a number of widely spaced beams that would be much less a threat.

That's assuming it is a laser "spray". Railgun projectiles, on the other hand, could cause impressive amount of damage and surely spraying them probably wouldn't be too hard. Therefore, assuming there is a limit in the agility of a ship, a "target area" could be predicted easily enough after the first sign of enemy presence and just spraying that area with small, deadly quick projectiles could be enough to cripple/destroy the target.

On a somewhat related note, currently, space dust is already a dangerous thing, however, space dust follows orbits and gravity and since our own ships and satellites do the same it isn't really a threat, but at 29 000 KpH if that dust isn't going the same way you are, one can expect his armor/hull to deteriorate quickly. Therefore, unless ships of the future are much more tougher than our current ships, a railgun shooting peanut sized iron pellets could most certainly rip nice holes through many things before gravity and magnetic fields slow it down enough.

@mumbling-psycho, on Aug 27 2006, 09:46 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:

That's assuming it is a laser "spray". Railgun projectiles, on the other hand, could cause impressive amount of damage and surely spraying them probably wouldn't be too hard.

You still suffer from dispersal problems. At a range of multiple light-seconds (say, 3-5 times the Earth-Moon distance?), you will suffer from significant shot dispersal, no matter how tightly you pack your projectiles, be they railgun pellets or beams of light. If you have an extremely dense spray, there's a good chance that you'll hit a large ship if it's within a reasonable range, but that's true no matter what you're firing.

Still, I'd go with small, fast railgun projectiles over lasers, as I suspect that the energy requirements to do damage are noticably less.

@UE R &D:
I can't see any holes in your argument, except that it seems to assume that the battle is taking place in the middle of nowhere. I'll get back to you with my thoughts on that in a bit.

Edwards

Yeah, I'm basically assuming that both ships are orbiting a star that has nothing else around it. (I'm pretty sure that fighting anywhere near a planet would introduce new complications that could change a lot of what I had.)

We need an Axis and Allies style EV game.

There. I said it.

Thinking this because I am playing Axis and Allies in about three minutes.

The way I see it, there are three main forms of space combat between military forces, divided by where they take place in relation to settled regions, and how long the supply lines are: Intraplanetary, Interplanetary, and Extraplanetary.

Intraplanetary combat consists of two or more factions, resident on a single planet, fighting in orbit around that planet. In this case, space combat would probably become strategically similar to air combat in World War II: an accessory to the main ground war, with any side that gains orbital dominance also gaining a potentially-decisive advantage in the war as a whole.

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.

Extraplanetary combat is combat that takes place entirely in space, away from any planets or significant space stations. This is both the most common form of space combat in science fiction, and, in my opinion, the least likely to actually occur.

Before I continue, I want to be clear about what I mean by "combat": Combat is two or more enemy ships maneuvering around, firing at each other repeatedly until one side is defeated, either by destruction or retreat. A single-volley pass at a large fraction of the speed of light, although it has the potential to destroy ships, is not considered "combat" for the purpose of this argument.

The reason combat away from any planet, space station, or other choke-point is so improbable is quite simple:

Most of the time ships spend away from planets or bases will be spent traveling to another fixed location. In order to engage a traveling ship in combat, the attacker must not only intersect their course, they must match their own course to it very closely. Due to the high speeds and large distances involved in inter-planetary travel, this feat is nearly impossible if one side actively tries to avoid matching courses.

Deep-space ambushes are also very unlikely, except against well-established trade runs. In order to set up an effective ambush, you must know your target's flight path long enough in advance to drift a heavily-stealthed ambush force into position without the target noticing. Quite often, this would probably require knowing the target's flight path well before it launched, which would not be common for military targets.

Note: All of this assumes that FTL travel, if it exists, cannot teleport ships directly into orbit around a planet, or directly next to/inside another ship. It also assumes that the sub-light engines do not use inertial dampers, and thus have accelerations limited by human durability.

Edwards

@flyboy, on Aug 27 2006, 02:15 AM, said in How do you see space combat?:

Think about it: bullets require combustion, and combustion requires oxygen. Too little oxygen, and the projectile is ineffective-too much and BOOM! That's not to say that it would be impossible, but the resulting work-around would likely be too large and unwieldy to be an effective weapon.

-Flyboy.

Have you ever fired a rifle or shotgun before? If you have, you should know that the cartrige, the thing that holds the bullet, powder, and primer, is completely sealed. There is no air transfer between the outside world and the cartrige. This means the powder must already have an oxydizer mixed into it, otherwise the rifle will not work.

A modern-day weapon does not require a breathable atmosphere to be used. My proof is the paragraph above and a Mythbusters episode in which the Mythterns fired handguns, rifles, and shotguns underwater. All the weapons worked, but at limited range. Firearms fired in space would not have a range problem because there is very little drag.

I think it is completely possible to take a rifle into space, and with little to no modifications, fire said weapon at a target in the vaccum of space, safely.