I had not heard that anti-matter had actually been identified in a laboratory environment; I'll have to read up on it.

<-> <->

A 25 megaton nuclear weapon would produce 1.046x10^17 joules of energy.

Assuming that your warhead detonates, say 10 kilometers off target, inverse square law says that you'll spread that energy over a surface that's 1.25936x10^9 m^2.

Dividing, we find that there'll be 83,058,061 joules of energy per m^2. That's 83 megajoules; enough to vapourise metal faster than the speed of sound.

I would consider a 25 megaton warhead to be a very powerful weapon, and not one widely in use.

Looking at something you might be able to throw at the enemy en masse , like a 10 kt nuclear weapon (the Hiroshima bomb was 13 kt), we find that it produces 4.184x10^13 joules of energy. At that very same distance of 10 kilometers, we find ourselves with 33,223 joules of energy. 33 kilojoules; enough to singe the paint.

So to answer your question about how powerful nuclear weapons are, it all depends on your missile design philosophy and the proliferation of nuclear materials in the proposed future. If you guys are throwing 25 megaton warheads at eachother like they were candy, you better hope to God or whatever else you hold sacred that you have something other than bare steel protecting you. One the opposite extreme, if you guys are tossing a small number of 10 kt warheads around and nothing more powerful, then you can feel pretty safe in the fact that about all that will take you out is a direct hit.

<-> <->

LIDAR can be rigged to function like Radar, sending out omnidirectional beams. It would render radar-absorbing paint futile; I had no point beyond that.

<-> <->

There is no point to visual cloaking unless your starships are massive enough to blot out the light of several stars when seen from a distance. Why? Because on interstellar ranges, finding a ship that's even 1,000 meters long with visual scanning alone is completely pointless; you will not find it in any reasonably useful amount of time. Sensor masking and silent running are also difficult. Why?

Temperature of space? About 3 degrees K.

Comfortable temperature for humans? About 285 degrees K.

Operating temperature for a nuclear reactor? About 800 degrees K.

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. "Well, couldn't I refridgerate my ship and radiate it in a direction that you're not in?" You could, but that assumes you know where all of my sensor arrays are.

Qaanol, on Sep 12 2005, 08:05 PM, said:

If you accept that Superman can fly, it shouldn't be that big of a stretch for you to accept he can turn back time as well.

By which I mean that if you accept hyperspace in the game it shouldn't be too hard for you to accept cloaking devices either. Furthermore, it shouldn't be too hard for you to accept that there can be weapons in the game that behave however the scenario designer wants them to.
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Besides which, off the top of my head I can think of several vaguely plausible possibilities for working cloaking devices. It all depends on how sensors work in 'the future' - for example, if we still rely on visually seeing our target to make shooting that bit more accurate, simply creating a hologram generator that projected an image of empty space around the ship would cause gunners headaches. Relying on things like radar isn't foolproof either - modern stealth fighters prove that.

Also part of the whole close-combat question is how FTL travel works. Is it accurate enough to spit out your warfleet a few km from the enemy? If it was, defenders would potentially be at a huge disadvantage - a few scoutships could transmit general coordinates of enemy ships to the attackers, who could open up immedietly they achieve normal speed, probably ripping apart a big section of the defenders before they can even lock on.

Can't say that I've heard of Tachyonic conversion before, Skyfox - I tend to work on the principle of either artificial wormholes or splicing a ship across two 'planes of reality' so that the ship has no mass in our universe. The main problem with FTL travel, according to Einstein, is that as you approach c, your mass increases until it becomes infinite. Having greater than infinite mass is impossible, hence FTL is impossible. Hence, if we take mass out the equation, that isn't a problem - all c particles I've heard of have zero mass.

I like the tachyon thing. That would be neat, if they exist.

Would war exist if there was no FTL travel/communication?

We would need to invest in figuring out suspended animation. Getting a ship to .5c would either take thousands of years or produce way more Gs than humans can take. So we freeze em all in such away that they arent to jostled.

Would it be possible to send routing orders midflight? Perhaps, but no human would be able to look at them unless the ship stopped accelerating enough. A computer automatically accepting the orders would be rather vulnerable to sabotage.

Omni-directional lidar seems rather impossible. I dont know the calculations, but space is impossibly empty. A kilometer wide ship at one AU takes up such a tiny arc of space, you would need so many stations processing so many bits of data I find it nearly impossible.

I would suggest hiding in the sillouhette of a star, but that assumes the enemy has exactly one scanning post.

Its funny, everyone either says the attacker has a huge advantage or the home team has a huge advantage when it comes to siege. Id say, so long as the attacker wants to keep the planet intact, the infinitely smaller supply lines for the defender cancel out the gravity well advantage of the attacker, in general. Therefore its a case by case basis.

Admiral Benden, on Sep 13 2005, 02:07 AM, said:

LIDAR can be rigged to function like Radar, sending out omnidirectional beams. It would render radar-absorbing paint futile; I had no point beyond that.
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So, your equivalent of radar absorbing paint would also absorb LIDAR. So it would be really really black.

Admiral Benden, on Sep 13 2005, 02:07 AM, said:

There is no point to visual cloaking unless your starships are massive enough to blot out the light of several stars when seen from a distance. Why? Because on interstellar ranges, finding a ship that's even 1,000 meters long with visual scanning alone is completely pointless; you will not find it in any reasonably useful amount of time.View Post

But in system, all you'd have to do is to have a computer compare a sensitive light map of the surrounding area with known sources, find unknown sources and scan those more closely to see if they may be a threat. The technology may not exist now, but we don't have space combat yet either.

Correct on the first point:

Keldor Sarn, on Sep 13 2005, 09:03 PM, said:

So, your equivalent of radar absorbing paint would also absorb LIDAR. So it would be really really black.
But in system, all you'd have to do is to have a computer compare a sensitive light map of the surrounding area with known sources, find unknown sources and scan those more closely to see if they may be a threat. The technology may not exist now, but we don't have space combat yet either.
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But I still think the sheer amount of number crunching is impossible. You can use moores law and estimate the computing power arbitrarily far in the future, add 20 years for "world class" supercomputer. Itl be a while before we can crunch appreciable distances in anywhere near to real time. I think I might look into this myself, it sounds neat. What resolution colors are we talking about? Is "millions" enough? (presumably 256^3) How many pixels would a ship need to take up before the variation is considered "significant"?

Ill assume there are multiple listening posts, so background noise would very generally cancel out (ie directly in front of a star from one perspective, but off by a bit from another... though it occurs to me that listening posts in other systems would have that pesky relativity problem in their warnings. Maybe sillouhetting is rather a significant effect).

Also, what role could asteroid fields play? It seems to me they represent an amount of cover in a critically empty void. This would make for fun fighter bouts, I doubt a govt could establish sufficient surveilence to monitor an entire field.

Hugh, on Sep 7 2005, 07:11 PM, said:

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).

Sorry but I totally disagree w/ this. For one shock wave does not come of air it comes of particals. If you detonate a nuclear weapon in space. You will feel the shock wave. The billions of space particals and small rocks would be the shock wave. And to be technical the Nuke would make that area of space a HUGE Claymore mine. The Particals of space would use as projectiles and the force they would be coming at the ship would be VERY fast. Enough to tear apart any fighters and more than likly damage teh heavier ships pretty nicely too.

Ohh also For my theory on "Space Warfare" is that it will be no different than it is on the ocean and in the air here. Just you people are basing it of this game mainly.

Rail guns.... I dont think they will be using those you forget that a railgun the size of the ones we have here on the our current Battleships would literally roll the heavy ship. Unless they had thrusters or sumthing to that extent to counter the roll but I still think it will be to strong and probably tear the ship in half if they decide to use counter thrusters. They will more than likely use recoiless cannons. Hense "Lasers". Though you do not really need to consentrate the beam, yet you can "charge it" so to speak to create a high heated pulse of energy. Thus creating a very highly damage able projectile.

As for the "Fighter class" there will probably be just modified F-22 Raptors and Modified Y/F-23's Both have Stealth capabilities and both carrier capable. Though the raptor is faster and more manuverable, I think they are capable of being modified for space flight. And missiles would also have to be completely re-modified also. The dorsal fins on the missiles would need to be taken off reason being there is no air resistance in space. They would probably need to put a rotatable engine on it. So it can track in space. Also I imagine that the warships would be a in a circular shape. Reason being circles are the universal shape and the strongest shape. I could go on for about another hour of my thoughts in the space warfare but It will take way to long. Good luck on life people.

~Sp@Z

Modified F-22s and Y/F-23s will not cut it.

Why?

They're built for combat on a planetary scale. I don't know what their operational range is, but whatever it is it is much shorter than it has to be. Do you comprehend the range of one light second? 299,792,458 meters? The distances we're talking about would require entirely new designs, not just modifications to air-breathing fighters. Besides which, I already made my thoughts on fighters clear earlier in the thread.

Railguns and mass drivers are workable. A ship would mass several hundred (thousand?) tons. A railgun pellet would mass less than a fraction of that. As the reaction to the force applied is equal to the force applied, you're finding x newtons of force applied to y kg, and x newtons of force applied to y times several thousand kg. The appreciable effect will be negligable.

As a side note, it's early, so I don't remember if newtons is the correct measurement for force. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Admiral Benden, on Sep 16 2005, 05:50 AM, said:

Modified F-22s and Y/F-23s will not cut it.

Why?

They're built for combat on a planetary scale. I don't know what their operational range is, but whatever it is it is much shorter than it has to be. Do you comprehend the range of one light second? 299,792,458 meters? The distances we're talking about would require entirely new designs, not just modifications to air-breathing fighters. Besides which, I already made my thoughts on fighters clear earlier in the thread.

Railguns and mass drivers are workable. A ship would mass several hundred (thousand?) tons. A railgun pellet would mass less than a fraction of that. As the reaction to the force applied is equal to the force applied, you're finding x newtons of force applied to y kg, and x newtons of force applied to y times several thousand kg. The appreciable effect will be negligable.

As a side note, it's early, so I don't remember if newtons is the correct measurement for force. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
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I garuntee that the Space naval craft will not exceed the size of the Largest battleship. And more than liklly teh ammo will not change either. But yes notice I said "Modified" F-22 and Y/F-23. They are the most tactical air supiorority fighters... There will be air tanks and things like that of course And By then we will need to have found a more useable fuel source... Therefore the Modified fighters would work. And as I said for the guns if they use "rail guns" they would also need to have pin point accuracy... cuz for fighting long range in space Shells or Rails w/e you wanna call them will no work. You will have more of a chance of hitting a planet than a ship a fraction of the size of a planet. That is why "Laser" technology has to come into play. Shells are not ment for Space.

modesty_blaise_us, on Sep 10 2005, 01:54 PM, said:

Actually why will there not be fighters. Of course they will not have the ablity to travel far. But they can be launched from a mothership. And I think the mothership will benefit from having them.

This suddenly became very complicated. I'll post this while I think some more.
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Ok People in that far span of a future there will be more fuel sources.... Fighters willl be there The fuel source willl be enough to make them travel far enough to do combat sorties and return. I am telling you all it will be just like Modern Naval and Air Combat. Sure the weapons and Vehicel models will be different and technology will be more advance more it will turn out exactly like Today Just in a bigger "Ocean"

The fuel sources that look viable for space travel are not ones that you can just casually throw onto a fighter. They generally involve initiating chemical reactions behind your ship and riding a wave of nuclear fusion.

Fighters:
The problem with the F-whatever fighters is that they are simply not built for spaceflight:

1. Engines. Jet engines are built to suck in air, heat it up, and shoot it out the back. There is no air in space. You could replace the engines, but they are very thoroughly integrated into the plane.
2. Steering. Atmospheric fighters use their wings for steering, by diverting the flow of air. There is no air in space. You could add maneuvering thrusters to them, but the wings will still be useless mass.
3. Pilot exposure. Modern fighters have an exposed glass cockpit. In space combat, you really don't need to be able to see out, and the radiation from the local star would likely kill more pilots than enemy fire.

Yes, you could fix those problems, as well as any others you find, but it would be far easier to build a new model from scratch.

Summary: An air fighter is basically weapons, wings, and an engine. In space, you don't need the wings, and that changes the entire structure.

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Railguns:
The point of a railgun is to fire a hyper-velocity projectile, capable of hitting a ship before it has time to dodge. The accuracy of a railgun is far higher than any cannon, as a railgun has a very long barrel and can adjust the acceleration of the projectile all the way to the end. For aiming, just extrapolate the current rate of computer improvement a few decades into the future. Do you really thing they won't be able to pick off a ship at several thousand kilometers, given that level of accuracy?

About the recoil issue, you would place the railgun(s) directly in line with the main engines of the ship, so recoil would be absolutely no problem.

Summary: Railguns are the best method of launching a dumb projectile at an enemy. They cannot be jammed, and they are at least as likely to hit as anything else.

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And about your first post (nuclear shock waves), yes, there are particles and small objects in space, but they are millions of times less dense than an atmosphere, so there will be no noticeable shock wave. Now, if you put the nuke in a large metal shell and turned it into a shrapnel bomb...

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In summary, anyone would love to have you as their enemy in space combat, as it would be so easy to rip your forces apart.

Edwards

Edit- I just noticed that if I had read the rest of the topic (sorry- I don't read the furums as much anymore) instead of just the parts about an F-16 (?!?!?!) in space I would have noticed that Edwards did a great job of refuting this idea/claim/whateveritwas. My post below is therefore no longer required, but I will leave it in for historical reasons.

Jack McKinney- the pen name of the novelizers of the 'Robotech' cartoons (very popular in the US in the early 80's)- had to do a lot of cover work when he took on the job of writing novels aimed at adults based on a badly converted/totally butchered set of Japaneese anime (three distinct and totally unrelated cartoon series that each totaled no more than some 36 episodes a piece) that featured possibly the first examples of our modern "F-16 fighters in space" paradigm. They even took off from and landed on actual naval aircraft carriers (Supercarriers Promethus and Daedalus ) that had been moored/attatched to a mile-long space battlefortress. Although other anime had covered space aircraft carriers, none had ever before covered space carriers that hauled rather conventional fighters into combat. None of this could be rationalized without bringing into play advanced alien sciences that managed engines workable in both space and air (also allowing for the wings partially as the fighters were designed to be transatmospheric)- the engines were fusion-powered (the whole of the fighter being powered/maintained by 'protoculture', other than the engines). The wings being retained were explained by the fact that the weapons hardpoints were on the wings, and the overall choice of design for the whole 'conventional fighter/conventional carrier' paradigm was that most of the pilots were ex-Naval pilots (water navy, not space navy) and would not be able to adapt to some new style of fighter.

I've talked to lots and lots of ex-Naval pilots and other ship crews to learn as much as I can about life on-board the closest things that currently exist to the vast fleets and independant operator space paradigm of EV while doing the legwork for Kemet. Lots as in over a hundred. Naval pilots are some of the most adaptable and best trained people! Although there is a great deal of specialized training involved, from what I understand that the controls are all pretty much the same (though there may be many more/less of them and in different places, etc) and that the flight process is pretty much the same in one plane or another. I can see how this would extrapolate to any kind of small offensive ship/'fighter', regardless of design. You would not need for any reason whatsoever- in space based combat- wings. They would be extremely detrimental to even transatmospheric fighters, who would loose all t/a capacity after taking a few rounds in the wings (see what falling foam can do to a winglike surface? Remember Columbia? Imagine actual offensive fire!). The shillouette of an F-16 whatever is good in atmospheric fighting as it is very narrow from behind and in front- the most likely angles that enemy fightercraft would be approaching from- but in space, where a prospective enemy could be coming from any concievable direction at any time a more basic shape (someone has already proposed a spherical shape; I argued something similar a few months ago in another topic).
Basically in space there is no real reason for conventionally shaped fighters as we know them and probably no real reason for the tradtional carrier as we know it today, with exposed flightdecks and deck parks vulnerable to enemy fire. Sorry for the rant, I'm tired.

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 17 September 2005 - 07:41 AM

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'.

The one advantage to wings is the weapon hardpoint bit: minimise target sillouhette while still allowing a large surface area on both sides for cooling. If you stack all the weapons right near eachother, there might be cooling issues. You could have radiators on the top and bottom of the 'wings'. It would light you up on an IR scanner of the system, but if you only fired when you were already well within every kind of range, it wouldnt be that big of a deal.

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.

I think that something could be said for having a dedicated transatmospheric fighter role in space combat, but seeing the rediculous ammount of overspecialization in modern US carrier based aircraft it seems to me that the trend points to dedicated types of fighters for specific roles.

Well, there probably is a point to be made about the similarity between modern air/sea combat and short-term futuristic space combat. For instance, the sizes of the ships involved, though probably larger then the current in order to accomidate whatever propulsion system needed to get the high velocity required for space flight, will be as small as possible to minimize the targeting area. (A 1km long warship would be much easier to hit then one thats only a few hundered meters. So much for the death star.) Also due to limited metal resources we have here on earth, we wouldn't be able to build gargantuan starships by the millions.

I just remembered an interesting book I read a long time ago, involved space combat on ships using solar sails. Using one of the sails to capture and focus light from the star into a thin laser, the target would be the enemy ships sails, trying to disable the target. The tricky part with sails would be trying to controll the direction and acceleration, as they are more sluggish then a conventionaly powered engine. Perhaps some great similarty between solar sail ships and the old sail ships of sea.

This post has been edited by Skyfox : 17 September 2005 - 05:26 PM

Going back to 'ships with wings' idea, we need to keep in mind that unless battles ONLY occurred in space, we'd still need atmospheric fighters of some kind. Hauling them around would be a waste of space which could be used for tanks, men etc. 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?

Skyfox is spot on - having ships km long is stupid from angles of resources, targeting area and agility. Yes, you could get a super-battleship up to speed to overtake those nippy pirate corvettes, but by the time it had equalled them, f=ma would have ensured that said corvettes would be on the other side of the system. The biggest ships around would be carriers - they don't need to be fast, they've got fighters for that. There would be big ships, agreed, but nothing bigger than Auroran carriers or Polaris Ravens - 1.2 km is a bit of an upper limit.

I don't buy the idea of a ship too much larger than (at the most) an American supercarrier. Why? The destructive power of weapons in the future (and the present, for that matter) means that pretty much unless your ship is gargantuan, one or two hits with a missile/beam/projectile will turn it to scrap. A big ship is, as has been mentioned previously, a giant target. In order to offset that, it must have something to make it worth constructing.

More weapons? If we're sticking with the "one hit KO" idea 10 missile launchers would probably be just as tactically useful as 100. Even if there is such a numerically superior force fighting against you that you really need all of those missiles firing simultaneously, I think ten 50m 10-gun corvettes would be a much better buy than a 100-gun km long man of war.

More fighters? My objection to fighters as a viable military strategy has already been voiced. They wouldn't be that much faster, they wouldn't be very well armed, and they'd be a nightmare to rearm and refuel. That's not to say that there wouldn't be some sort of small craft with the ability to enter and exit the gravity well. If only for logistical purposes, pretty much every capital ship will need a "launch" or two capable of shuttling men and materiel dirtsde to shipside. I think the old "dropship" idea might actually be useful, as a conduit between planet and space that could project force beyond the operational areas of the fleet (let's remember that force projection is what this is all about).

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I don't buy the idea of a ship too much larger than (at the most) an American supercarrier. Why? The destructive power of weapons in the future (and the present, for that matter) means that pretty much unless your ship is gargantuan, one or two hits with a missile/beam/projectile will turn it to scrap. A big ship is, as has been mentioned previously, a giant target. In order to offset that, it must have something to make it worth constructing.

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.