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PhD Candidate Talks About the Physics of Space Battles
darthvader100 writes "Gizmodo has run an article with some predictions on what future space battles will be like. The author brings up several theories on propulsion (and orbits), weapons (explosives, kinetic and laser), and design. Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie."
That'll be boring: round ships, round planets, round explosions, and round movie goers.
Table-ized A.I.
"Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie"
Or maybe like Doc Smith predicted in the Lensman Series?
emt 377 emt 4
that I've found thus far in her Merchanter / Alliance-Union books ---esp. Heavy Time / Hellburner --- though I'd be very interested in suggestions on other authors to read who've put forth a similar effort to have realistic physics and effects thereof.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
When the future Enterprise flew at the other ship all perpendicular?! That was crazy.
The point that nukes wouldn't generally be useful is a good one. And the point that kinetic weapons would be ideal also makes sense. However, I'm not completely convinced by the emphasis on orbital mechanics. In order for that make sense, one needs space travel to be cheap enough and convenient enough that one can easily have lots of ships in space. If that's the case, one needs efficient enough propulsion systems that will make orbital mechanics not matter as much. They'll still matter probably (and certainly matter more than they do in standard scifi) but I'm not at all convinced they'll matter as much as he makes it out.
Also, he doesn't address the issue that long-range kinetic impactors can make most space combat irrelevant if they are going fast enough. There's not much Earth could do if there were large mass drivers on say Demos and Phobos sending fairly small projectiles at targets on the Moon or Earth or targeting large space installations. Again in this situation orbital mechanics would matter. But when the planets are in the correct positions, such setups would render local space combat irrelevant.
More powerful weapons, with greater range. Any direct hit with intended kind of weapon knocks out of the action at the least. Mostly only active countermeasures are effective, unless you can exploit the environment somehow or are good at camouflage. Never stay put. One big cat & mouse game. And so on.
The factors that shaped this will be even more pronounced in space, with the added fun of predicting position (speed of light limit). Which makes majority of SciFi depictions that more disappointing; limited in popular formats to somewhere between WW1 and WW2 state of affairs.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I've long been looking for a space-fighting video game that actually uses real laws of physics. The closest I've seen so far are things like 2D Gravity Wars (sort of like Scorched Earth except your shots are affected by gravity of small planets between you and your target. Heck, even the classic Asteroids is more realistic than just about any other space shooter these days.
Most space games since Wing Commander and even Descent have strange limits like maximum speeds, and never let you go into uncontrolled spins... so it's kinda like there's an artificial atmosphere always present around your vehicle. Of course, if you could just keep accelerating towards your opponent, the gameplay would become decidedly different, like jousting. But even that seems more fun that what things like EVE have turned space combat into.
Anyone have good recommendations? My favorite 6DOF games so far are Descent (though it's hard to find a modern version of this) and Vendetta. VegaStrike and Beyond the Red Line shows some promise as an engine, but never really got into them much.
I have always respected JMS for how 'realistic' he chose to portray space physics with the movement of his StarFury ships and the beam weapons. (As a side note, I could never understand how the station was able to rotate under the support struts when the station was obviously move massive.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Only point I'd add is that differences in velocity between enemy ships in nearby (but not identical) orbits may be on the order of thousands of mph.
Targeting such a fast moving object is difficult, and launching any kind of projectile or missile to intercept it will require enormous energy and reaction mass to get to it, assuming even that you launch it at the most efficient instant.
High power lasers are easier to point and shoot, but you'll only have a few seconds with the target in range. I don't think beam divergence will be a problem, but aiming at something hundreds of miles away, moving at thousands of mph, the slightest vibration in the ship will send the beam several feet off course by the time it gets there. You won't be able to steadily drill a hole in the enemy ship, you'll just illuminate different parts of the hull w/o much heating or impacting any specific area.
Assuming technology exists to accelerate space ships to interplanetarily practical speeds, what's to stop warring planets from accelerating an asteroid in the same way and in the direction of the enemy planet? Or take that acceleration technique and speed up some ball bearings to ridiculous speeds and send them on their way towards something with a predictable position like a space station? Hell, you could use millions of ball bearings like a mine field, because any ship traveling through the bearings will have such a high speed relative to them. I just wonder that if we currently get so butthurt about orbiting space debris, a space war will focus on simple kinetic weapons at huge speeds and from huge distances.
The ideal shape will depend on the materials available and what its capabilities need to be. eg. does it need to be able to fly in an atmosphere, what type of lift propulsion is available, etc.
Spheres are great but also difficult to design and build around. In other words, complicated and expensive. Sometimes a cheap, simple, easy to build box is the best.
Could end up being anything because we aren't even close to actually creating something like this.
His last option, Peace, is the most likely. Space is so dangerous that most battles would end with both sides dead or dying.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
That assumes that there aren't technological advances that allow spacecraft to brute force the problem. Launch delays in terms of orbits mostly occur because of energy and fuel requirements. If you've got propulsion licked, you can pretty well launch when you wish.
That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.
Correct. Burning fuel just to change the ships' direction is a waste. Utilising conservation of angualar momentum with a gyroscope is efficient and technologically feasible. Sapcecraft that are large and non-sperical are going to be very difficult to manoeuvre. Concentrating most of the ships mass in tight near the center is the way to mitigate this problem.
I don't think kinetic impactors are the way to go here. A high energy neutral particle beam is demonstrated to work effectively and doesn't spread out too much over a vast difference. (not more than a few cm over 1000 km) There is no hope of stopping it either. A few GEV beam of particles shows no mercy and can punch through several meters of shielding.
Lasers ablate material off the hull which obscures the target. Not quite the most effective weapon.
modified plasma window technology can function as a shield in a sense. Thick armor on the hull impedes the ship's ability to rotate.
Ammo is a problem. How many impactors can you have on an orbital defense platform? Just use particle beam technology to wipe out the ground force.
Only if you don't plan on re-entry as a sphere is non-optimal for utilising the effect that shaceship one was supposed to use; that is using a flat surface to force a ubble of air to pool in front of the craft and buffer against the heat.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series
and how in the end it was about making sure your opponent didn't have the time to react, FTL planets are fun.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That's no moon...
Explosions are basically a waste of energy in space. On the ground, these are devastating because of the shock wave that goes along with them.
This I would heavily disagree with. Explosions are usually devastating on the ground because of the amounts of shrapnel that are generated by them. I don't believe a grenade is deadly because of the shock wave caused by them. Bits of metal flying in all directions is deadly both on the ground and in space.
I have a question about the Nukes in space thing. I know that, without an atmosphere, you don't get the massive shockwave which causes much of the damage that you see in atmospheric detonations. . . but, wouldn't the Nuke still generate several million degrees of thermal energy? Wouldn't it tend to vaporize anything nearby, and melt things that are a little farther away, but still within like a mile or two? Wouldn't it also release a massive amount of Neutron radiation? (I'm not sure - could you effectively shield against that much neutron radiation? I know that space craft have to have a certain level of shielding just to remain safe from 'normal' Solar radiation, but could you effectively shield against the radiation released from an H-Bomb?)
Since theres no friction, there may be some ships really cruising along. Maybe not so much in orbit battles, but at lagrange points for example. Your enemy could be sitting at L2 waiting for you to fly by, but your coming from mars with a ion drive, and have approached 2/10's C. Now every second to you is 2 or 3 seconds to the defending guy...
Were gonna need some faster computers...
Lasers lasers lasers! I'd imagine long distance battles (10's, 100's, 1000's of km) so anything traveling less than the speed of light would be horribly ineffective against evasive maneuvers.
And someone needs to invent something that makes laser pew pew sounds in the void of space!
If you fly at near the speed of c. since time on your ship would slow down, looking out your view port would it appear as if your ship was traveling faster than c.?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
the peace treaty was signed in december 1814. but a major battle in the war, the one that made andrew jackson's name, took place in new orleans AFTER the peace treaty. the combatants didn't hear about the peace until february 1815
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans
i think we'll see a return of that in space warfare. sure the wide open vacuum of space changes everything, but so does the sheer vastness of it all. in future space battles, it wouldn't be surprising for a peace to be signed, the agreement beamed to combatants at light speed... and yet the battle still rages on for weeks, months, maybe even years. the battlefield might be lightyears away from the capitols
i don't even know if the idea of central command will work. we're used to modern tom clancy style special operations nowadays where forces engage the enemy while analysts watch them in realtime in pentagon/ cia warrooms as infrared images on massive screens, caught from spy satellites high above
but you can't do that in space
so warfare in space will deevolve from this sort of highly vertically integrated command and control aspect. you can't, for example, have a commander on earth relaying instructions to his troops on mars in real time, simply because the radio signal takes 10-20 minutes, one way (depending upon orbital locations)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
. . . i'ma gonnin' ona' space battle!"
But the LHC thing seems to have the reliability of a blunderbuss.
For my next space battle, I'm planning to pack something that ejects gamma ray bursts.
Y'all behind the weapon might want to take cover . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
..predicted spherical battle cruisers decades ago in the Lensman books. The only exception to the rule were "needle" ships designed for covert operations that required entering and exiting planetary atmospheres at high speed.
Of course, before we can fully emulate the staggeringly majestic deepspace battles of the Lensman series, we'll have to discover/develop/be given the inertialess drive which enabled "planet smashing", where two planets with directly opposing radial velocities would be made inertialess, stuffed into hyperspace tubes that terminated on either side of the target planet, and once they imerged, the inertialess drive would be switched off, causing the planets to resume their previous motion smashing together with the target in the middle.
Bitchin'.
The Mote in God's Eye http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye by Niven and Pournelle had a combat scene which directly addressed the issues of large distances and the large G forces required to accelerate to get close enough to interact with other vessels (in this case a vessel heading straight into a sun). They also talked about the issues of doing this in a universe with no 'inertial damping fields', so the humans on the vessel were completely subject to the large G forces (max about 3G sustained for a combat vessel).
"Therefore, I contend that the most effective kinetic space weapons would be either flak shells or actively thrusting, guided missiles."
Right...because flak shells which emit hundreds or thousands of tiny projectiles are a great idea in orbit. Some will probably reach escape velocity, some will impact the orbited body, but a many will likely remain in orbit. I don't think it's in the aggressor's interest to generate a load of space junk.
"If launched from the ground, armor must be minimized to reduce the launch weight of the spacecraft. But if built and launched in space, it would make sense to plate over vital systems of the vehicle"
Until we have active mines on asteroids or the moon, space-based construction doesn't buy anything. If you still have to haul the raw materials out of Earth's gravity well, then you still have to pay the launch costs, sorry.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Now I am not a scientist or physicist. Hell I don't know crap. But, let's assume that there are not alternative power sources out there. We have the sun, and our limited fossil fuels. But, if we expand the idea of space we see that many of the resources are near unlimited. Unlimited once we have the resources to harvest them.
For instance, Titan has large methane clouds that could be harvested as a fuel source. You could repeat that for many different fuels it's just a matter of finding those resources and getting them into space.
But what about the idea that we use a star for an energy source? There are big stars and smallish stars. There are old stars and young stars? Aren't there small stars? Couldn't we harvest a star for an energy source?
Once we see space travel through the idea of nearly unlimited powerful energy we really change many of the ideas. A laser with enough energy becomes a Trekian phazer.
From the Strange Horizons website, oldie but still a goodie: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050606/hunter-1-a.shtml. It comes in 2 parts and there is a link to it at the end of the article. Also, while you're there, this is my favourite (off-topic) article: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badger.shtml.
Babylon 5 is still the only sci-fi show/film that had battles that I felt could be real, in particular the EA Starfury fighters, or the SA-23E Mitchell-Hyundyne Starfury if you want to be really nerdy. I believe NASA asked for permission to use the design.
Martian colonists get angsty, and decide to get liberated. The Earth-based companies that own the colonies decide (naturally) to launch a transport full of a few thousand space marines to retake control. That trip takes a few months, minimum, even on the fastest, least fuel-efficient course that the transport is capable of making. So the colonists know that the marines will be dropping in, well in advance of their showing up in orbit.
Now, instead of using the ship's main engines to decelerate completely on arrival, most of the Earth-Mars ships aero-brake in the thin Martian atmosphere, which conserves fuel (which can instead be used at the beginning of the trip, to accelerate out from Earth, so that the whole trip takes less time). The ship slows down partially with its engines, and then flies into the beginnings of a very close hyperbolic "slingshot" pass that grazes the upper reaches the atmosphere. The added friction slows the ship down, curling the orbit inward and turning the actual course into a parabola. In theory, if done correctly, the ship would end up in a stable "parked" orbit, with zero fuel expenditures after the slowdown and course-correction it performed at the beginning of the approach.
But, unfortunately for the intrepid space marines, a crafty scientist amongst the colonists builds a small, cheap solid-fuel rocket with a basic guidance system and a nasty payload: An explosive packed with scrap-metal shrapnel. As the marines' ship approaches and its pilots initiate their aero-braking manoeuvre, the lone colonist launches his flak rocket into the ship's approach path, where it explodes and scatters a cloud of metallic debris.
The ship's radar detects the sudden appearance of the cloud of space junk, and the navigation computer performs an emergency space-ward course adjustment to avoid a collision with the potentially dangerous debris. But the new course is too high in the atmosphere to burn off enough of its momentum, and its course stays hyperbolic--the transport ship "skips" off the Martian atmosphere and continues back out into space at high speed, on a random new course. Sorry, no invasion, this year.
The troop ship has enough fuel left to change course toward Jupiter, and it takes a conventional hyperbolic return course around the gas giant to get back heading toward the inner Solar system. Eventually, it DOES manage to get into a Martian orbit (much more carefully, this time), but the additional Jupiter round-trip buys the colonists the extra time they need to prepare to handle the invaders on the ground.
Amazing stuff, fantastic book (and trilogy, too).
Space battles are still the realm of science fiction. Depending on how far out we push the speculative technology, we could stick with relatively hard SF with direct extrapolations of current technology or softer SF with more fanciful tech employed in a plausible and self-consistent fashion.
There are certain things you would expect, regardless of the technology. For example, consider the Starfury from Babylon 5. You have omnidirectional thrusters. This would be expected in a combat ship. It might be considered economical for a civilian ship to have one big thruster in back and for the whole ship to rotate ass-backwards for deceleration. But it might also be the case that a military ship would require the omnidirectional thrusters as well so that it can perform significant delta-v in various directions while keeping a specific attitude. One example I could think of is if the ship's primary armament is a big gun running the length of the ship necessitating the entire ship be maneuvered to aim it. You wouldn't want to have to point it away from the enemy just so the ship could maneuver.
I think the only thing that's really safe to say is that space warships will not be directly analogous to anything in our current or past experience. It's not going to be Horatio Hornblower in space, it's not going to be WWII in space, it's going to be different. I like watching the scifi movies and seeing how fairly contemporary industrial design is simply ported into space. Bulky monochrome CRT's in the 70's, color going into the 80's, flat panels start showing up in the 90's. Star Trek completely missed the idea of brilliant pretty displays though I would have to imagine trying to simulate them with the sfx budget at the time would be difficult. Robots were seen as being able to walk, that's the easy part, but doing math is hard! And those old writers had no idea just how much math something like Asimo has to do just to walk. Likewise, the robot could understand your spoken question of what's 2234*542 but it takes a minute to compute.
In all honesty, I'd put my money on a realistic space warship as driven by expert systems and automation. The humans may give operational guidelines and issue a specific command here and there but everything else is automated. No captain on the bridge shouting commands, no sweating rated crew struggling to load photon torps, no engineer running around the engine room. I think that it would make for fairly boring cinema unless the story is not about the adventure of the fight. Look at drone operations in the current wars. Guys sitting behind monitors blowing up people on the other side of the planet, then going home to the family. You're not going to get people on the edge of their seats describing the fight but there could be fertile ground for exploring the dehumanization of this remote control warfare. Joe Haldman explored it before it was a reality, now we can see how much he got right.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
They would be useful. Article is simply wrong. Sure, you don't have the shockwave but that much pure energy (even just the part that's shipward) would do a whole shitload of damage. You detonate the nuke when it hits the ship, I mean physically touches the ship. The ship will be destroyed. It's not like a ground based nuke where most damage comes from detonating in the air.
FTA: "It's different than land, sea and air battles in that the enemy can come at you from any direction". I don't know what kind of aircraft you fly, but mine generally operate in 3 dimensions.
Second, are we assuming that the aliens have equal technology as us? If we set up our defense network in an orbit as they suggest, and the aliens have alternative means of propulsion, we are hosed.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Sounds like the premise of Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". Revolutionaries on the Moon take control of a mass driver and start flinging multi-ton barges at Earth, with just enough remote-control maneuvering that the shooters can call up Earth afterward and ask if they'd like to surrender.
Revive the Constitution.
I can't agree with his thoughts on armour or nukes; my preference for a space weapon would be nuclear missiles with a warhead wrapped in polystyrene and a vast number of depleted uranium rods. No point in armour with something like that around; stealth and agility are the important things.
Do we really need to fight over it?
In earth battles its the assault on the senses: incredibly loud noise all the time, the smells of gunnpowder and burning. And you are in hand-combat situation, you have the bitter smells of sweat and blood, the shooting and screaming. This all helps pump up the adrenaline. In contrast space battles would be mostly sterile and silent, until you took a direct hit.
Has to be some speed of light weapon, laser being the most obvious one. The hard part will be predicting where the target is
. Even if you are 3 light seconds away, that is more than enough time to zig zag your way to safety.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
SPOILERS FOR THOSE THAT HAVEN'T READ STEPHENSON'S "ANATHEM"
I'm surprised no one has brought up Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" yet. True, the Geometers vs. Arbreans is (initially) a space-based weapons platform vs. ground-based targets affair, but there's a ton of discussion of orbits, etc. that make for very interesting (and compelling) reading.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Somebody what actually awarded a PhD for that tripe?! It better have come from a school that also offers a degree in small engine repair.
As a PhD in a hard science, that is offensive.
Sheldon
In combat, you want to minimize the surface area the enemies can fire at, to increase the chances that they'll miss. If your ship is at the back and it's elongated, you can point it in the right direction and you'll have a very low surface area in which the enemies can hit with the same firepower. You could say that with computer assisted aiming everyone has 100% accuracy, but in reality that's way incorrect - space battles will not be occurring at 200m distance like in Star Trek, you'll start firing at a hundred thousand kilometers, where there's a mandatory 700ms sensor delay.
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies2.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Warshippowersystems
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/10/Orbitalkineticweapons.shtml
what's to stop warring planets from accelerating an asteroid in the same way and in the direction of the enemy planet? Or take that acceleration technique and speed up some ball bearings to ridiculous speeds and send them on their way towards something with a predictable position like a space station?
The attack will be confirmed within a matter of hours. You will be very, very fortunate if the tech allows you any second thoughts. Because you haven't got a prayer of countering the retaliatory strike.
I read the article - despite many correctly spelled words, it is absolutely devoid of strategic or tactical thought and shows evidence that the author has no combat planning experience - and I'll go out on a limb and say that there are so many artificial constraints that I very sincerely he ever read - or understood if he did - the Art of War.
You're a Mars Colonist. You revolt. OK - you're _expecting_ an attack. You won't wait for anything orbital from Earth - you'll pre-position killer drones - a mine field if you will - beginning at the LaGrange point between Earth and Mars and in layers anticipating the attacking fleet. Somewhere within the field - or to its edges - you'll arrange tracker-transmitters that will generate fake attack messages seemingly from Earth friendlies in an effort to steer the attackers into the mine field.
You're an Earth administrator and you're not idiot - your agents on Mars tells you that not only is the violent revolt coming, deep space assets are being prepared to thwart your approach.
You're a Mars propagandist - you shape public messages in order to inflame Earth, but one of your messages is seeming fuck-up, and you accidentally give away a secret regarding your strategic forces - but it's a plant to entrap Earth forces at a point besides the (kinda) mid-flight-point minefield - you're actually planning to outflank Earth.
You're a Mars agent - you seize an Earth civilian spaceliner and announce terrorist demands. You're not Earth, so you're not evil, it's a complete distraction, so your partner agents already on Earth can try to mess up launch logistics for Earth forces while paying attention to the wrong crisis.
And after a mile of more text like this - you can have all the space opera that the author wanted.
Space is simply not Earth.
TFA reads to me like Mars is supposed be some kind of Fort Apache - and I don't buy it.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
And quite a bit more really.
Also, wouldn't all things in space, including battle, have to be 4D by definition?
and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"
IMHO the best space battle model was created by David Weber in the Honor Harrington series.
The technologies and limitations he created make up for interesting and also "realistic" space battles.
It's a bit like mixing 3D solar system mechanics with WWI and II battleship tactics.
There's a great essay in the starship combat supplement of the pen-and-paper role-playing game 2300 AD which is very entertaining reading. The space combat it describes is based on stealth. To avoid detection, ships rely heavily on remotes, which can use radar to illuminate and identify targets without the controlling ship giving itself away. Similarly, a lot of weaponry, usually lasers, is fired from drone 'submunitions'.
Rather than trying to actually collide with you or explode near you, "missiles" fly near you and zap you. Some use detonation lasers, channeling the radiation from a nuclear explosion through a short-lived lens, punching you with a nice concentrated blast of gamma rays.
Under fire, ships can release "shields" - clouds of water (or other) crystals to diffuse incoming laser light.
Re-read "The Warriors", by Larry Niven, 1966. Warship == spherical is not a new idea.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
A bunch of coke canned sized projectiles packed full with self replicating nano-machines that eat carbon? Pointed of course at enemy's origin planet.
It talks about space battles the way someone from 16th century (or earlier) might imagine late 20th century naval battles.
All those limitations author gets stuck at (gravity, trajectories, armor, weapons, energy limitations, shields... even dropping space-marines on a planet FFS) are basically what WE would face TODAY.
Not some civilization that considers an actual possibility of battles in space. Heck... you could take out today's spacecraft with a slingshot - once in space.
With all those limitations, which ARE correct, there would be NO space battles.
Worst case scenario - there would be some orbital bombardment platforms with limited shuttles and most probably completely robotic crews.
Why drop humans when you can drop terminators or screamers. Or just chuck an asteroid at the rebellious colonists.
On the other hand, if you have the capability to launch (or have permanently stationed) several fighter squadrons into space - you are way beyond most of those limitations.
Energy, fuel, efficient and maneuverable non-rocket engines are certainly not your problem at that stage.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As far as I know Independence War series (1 & 2) are the only PC games that implemented 100% true Newtonian physics. They took care of movement, heat issues, detection by heat and visual, whole shebang.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
An atmosphere is not absolutely necessary. Just have a look at the design of an fusion bomb. The nuclear warhead evaporates the styrofoam and you have your shockwave.
No other games come close to I-War 1&2, I agree. Really, really well-executed space combat simulators... it's hard to go back to video game physics once you've played them.
From the article:
I disagree. He seems to think that AI has to be human-level AI. But I think the intelligence needed would be roughly at the level of wolves. The ships have to cooperate, they have to react on the enemy ships, they have to distinguish between own and enemy ships, they have to do a certain amount of tactics. For any more advanced tactics or even strategy, a lag of a few minutes in communication probably doesn't matter. If the battlefield is too far away, there would probably a manned ship in distance which is short enough to allow "low" delay communications, but far enough to not be directly involved in the fight (just to remind you: The sun-earth distance is just about eight light-minutes, so you can get quite far away if you can tolerate moderate communications lag).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We have 3D aerial battlefields now. Covering yourself all over with guns isn't efficient and you're always going to point at a target. The relatively sleek, low profile shapes will win out. In a space battle, it's all about not getting hit and shooting first, not Star Trek style slug fests. That means, the business end of your ship will have the lowest profile from the perspective of the target.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yes, we all know what goes down for physicist in a frictionless perfect vacuum. http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/experiment.png
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
So, the victorious orbital forces would have to bring in a transport ship chock full of Space Marines and drop them all at once in little capsules (little because they can only be so big for the atmosphere to effectively brake them, and because you don't want all your Marines perishing in some unfortunate incident
Ah, so I suppose a few of them perishing would be acceptable.
And thermodynamics, specifically the need to dissipate the enormous amount of heat produced by a spacecraft into the thermodynamically-inefficient medium of space, changes things.
For one, there's no stealth in space. The heat from the shuttle's main engines can be seen from Pluto, ~5.4 light hours away. This means that any reasonably powerful ship will be seen days and even weeks before it comes into contact. Given that engagement ranges probably won't be much further than one light second, due to sensor lag, there's no sneaking up on anyone, so the shape of your spaceship vis a vis radar stealth doesn't matter.
This also impacts tactics. Since you will see your enemy coming from a long way and, as mentioned in the article, operating in planetary systems means predicable orbits and vectors, tactics becomes something akin to submarine warfare: lots of long distance shots with guided weapons, and lots of math to figure out firing solutions.
Third, because of the need to dissipate lots of heat into space, any sizable ship will need a large amount of highly vulnerable radiator area. Sufficiently damage a ship's radiators, and you effectively shut that ship down, as it will need to power down to avoid blowing up.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I have a few notes on space combat, lasers, railguns, stealth, tactics, delta v, nuclear shaped charges, ship design, and whatnot on my website. I am not a Ph.D, but many of the people who contributed are.
Atomic Rockets (index)
Space War: Introduction
Space War: Detection
Space War: Weapons Intro
Space War: Weapons: Conventional
Space War: Weapons: Exotic
Space War: Defenses
Space War: Warship Design
Space War: Strategy and Tactics
Now do the math where we put a thick steel plate under a battleship. How thick does the plate have to be so it will last for 100 explosions? We'll need a few blasts to get out of the atmosphere and on the way to Mars, and several more to irritate Mars when we get there.
It's mentioned in the article comments, but Atomic Rocket is a good place to start, and almost as time-sucking as TV Tropes.
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Think about it this way. Which would you rather have fired at you, a solid kinetic penetrator or a nuclear warhead? Any argument about the difficulty of getting the nuke close to the target also applies to any other weapon. If I can't get that nuke within 1 Km of you, or 10 km or 50 km or whatever the kill radius is for a given sized warhead, then I'm sure not going to get a kinetic kill device to make a dead on hit.
I would expect space warfare to be a lot like naval warfare or modern air war. The main trick is not being detected and seeing the enemy first. Then you attack him with relatively stealthy weapons. Those could be heavily cloaked guided weapons with probably nuclear warheads or energy weapons (which are stealthy simply because they hit you before you could possibly detect them).
Unfortunately there are some pretty hard limits on energy weapons. Lasers CAN be effective but besides just the beam divergence caused by diffraction and other limits on columnation there are also internal effects in a high energy density beam which tend to cause the photons to spread. Ranges might be considered fairly limited depending on how good sensor technology is vs stealth. A missile on the other hand can deliver its payload over a virtually unlimited distance.
The other fundamental limit with directed energy weapons is simply the speed of light. You can't easily hit something that can maneuver fast enough to shift its position on average by half the distance of its shortest profile length during the flight time of your weapon. In fact hitting becomes pure luck, its easy to randomize your dodging as a target. The more likely long range use would be you see someone, he doesn't see you, you set up the shot, bam he's dead. Same tactics work potentially for a missile but again it depends on sensor tech.
Dumb kinetic devices have the same problem, except vs an energy weapon its much worse because they're much slower so you have a lot more time to dodge and you might well detect the incoming weapon long before it hits you.
Basically I think the whole thing would be massive amounts of electronic warfare. Both sides would deploy all sorts of decoys, jamming technology, stealth, etc. 99% of battles would amount to one side got the jump on the other and just plain killed them cold. If the enemy tries to defend a fixed location, too bad for him, you don't need to get close at all, just rain bombs on him from a million miles away, nothing he can do about it and sooner or later you get lucky and get a hit or else his perimeter defenses are so good you can't. Then it might devolve down to feints, deception, sabotage, etc.
Anyway straight up pow pow battles with both sides shooting at each other with big firepower seems unlikely. The real thing would be much less romantic and more like 12 years of boredom followed by .396 milliseconds of sheer terror.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
you have to get up there first.... and to get up there - a single slingshoot or styrofoam will be enough to get the vessel blasted...
I figured that space battles would be more like submarine warfare, where most of the time would be spent trying to either find the enemy or attempt to to stay hidden. Of course, once found you can't simply "dive" to get out of the way. Since once found, things would be over pretty quickly. That's why the perfect shape for a spaceship would be a UFO.
Probably the most effective weapon in space would be accelerating a large number of very small particles at very high speed, in a shot gun effect. The shear speed of each particle would compassionate for its small size. Their numbers would make up for problems with precision. The other way around this would be to simply to irradiate the other crew to death, but that would take time. Lasers could be defeated with a reflective surface, so they're out.
I don't think nuclear weapons would be as effective, tactically, unless the delivery device for them can made to be made to be fast, and I mean fast. I'd imagine the other ship would be very interested in blowing up your nukes before they reach them, and since nukes don't detonate if damaged, they'd be pretty safe in doing so. A nuclear weapon power in space would be less than it would be on earth given the lack of atmosphere or anything else to push against. All that energy will travel further given a lack of friction, but to what effect? To make an analogy. A nuke is like the gun powder inside a pipe bomb, while the atmosphere are the nails.
I'm giving up mod privileges in this thread to spread some love for Peter F. Hamilton's books, mentioned in passing by TFA.
From the Night's Dawn trilogy to the Void series (still only two books long, but promising a third), he's got at least eight novels that somehow manage to weave together hard SF with space opera in a way that works. While his writing does have some less desirable aspects (wordy, prosaic, and travelogue-y in places), one thing he does well is invent and describe weapons and combat. From the first marines vs. possessed combat scene in Reality Dysfunction, I was hooked. And he continues to please in this regard.
Also, lots of love, too for Niven and Pournelle in The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, and other novels (Footfall?) for making the most use of real physics to depict space battles that don't resemble pewpewflashgordon WWII dogfighting in space operas of yore.
I can see the fnords!
Could you not make your own cover with static mines or similar, pump out enough interference that its very hard to pinpoint the target?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Everyone seems to be ASSUMING that PEOPLE are fighting something approximately PEOPLE size, mass, and speed. What good are ships, guns, missiles, lasers, etc, against a post singularity quality enemy. With trillions of dust particles all waiting to start disassembling anything without the right security codes, gray goo is about the worst thing a spacecraft can encounter. Properly setup gray goo will use the lasers for power, missiles, bullets, small ships as a starter material to make more gray goo. How can you defend against that? You can get mutual assured destruction, but that is about it. The cost in energy to send anything more then a starwhisp from one solar system to another quickly goes from bad to impractical. Canned humans in space are just NOT practical outside a solar system. A FTL jump drive makes it eaiser, but between gray goo, Stargate's replicators, the Borg, and things like a T1000, humans are just so much dead meat.
The battles do look good on video though....
our President - Obama. Nothing, Other than he has terrorist friends, tax cheat friends, and has no clue as to what he is doing in the white house. Not a damn clue.
Yep, I wrote the wrong name again without even thinking about it. I like both authors, and suck with names, so I get confused. Not that I actually confuse the authors behind the names. Kinda hard to, one is so much darker than the other. "The Gap" is so dark, it's darker than the other Stephen Donaldson series where the anti-hero protagonist raped a girl in like chapter 3. Quite a contrast to Hiro Protagonist. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
...you'll pre-position killer drones - a mine field if you will - beginning at the LaGrange point between Earth and Mars...
The what?
When body A is orbiting body B, there is one Lagrange point (L1) directly between them. Earth is not orbiting Mars, or vice-versa, so there is no Lagrange point between them.
Even if there were, there's no reason for an attacker to go through that point. The efficient orbits don't - the Apollo spacecraft, for example, didn't go through the Earth-Moon L1 point.
Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical
Dammit, how many times to we have to explain that there's no sound in space!?
Your brain is not a computer.
Nukes in space would have one devastating effect: EMP.
Knocking out all, or even most, of a spacecrafts' electrical systems (including: life-support, comm, power, guidance control, nav, etc) would pretty much be a 'checkmate' move.
Depending on advances in technology and physics, mere positioning in a space battle might not be all that decisive in itself. For example, could a ship be armed with a shield that acts as an "always on" wormhole, redirecting all incoming weapons fire to an alternate point in space... such as the interior of the enemy ship itself?
The anime series "Gurren Lagann" used another interesting weapon system in which a form of time travel was applied to warheads, allowing them to make impact with a target randomly at multiple points on the timeline from a few seconds into the past to a few seconds into the future, effectively negating the possibility of blocking the attack.
8==8 Bones 8==8
...While your dad Full Thrusted you.
Takes a scanning microscope to find your penis.
This is all well and fascinating (and it really is, sarcasm aside but still there), but why the focus on war in space? I mean, sure colonization has been done, alot, but so has war in space. What if, instead of worrying about how were going to shoot down other ships, we learned how to bargain, how to trade, how to you know, be space hippies?
Man?
Shoer, from the article, mentions colonizing Mars and then the colonists revolt.
That scenario has already been depicted in the game Terminus, including some realistic newtonian flight physics:
Well, Frontier: Elite had pretty realistic physics too. Navigating (or worse, landing) without the autopilot was insanely hard.
Well, Frontier: Elite had pretty realistic physics too. Navigating (or worse, landing) without the autopilot was insanely hard.
Autopilot? Autopilot!? Frontier threw autopilots at everyone and their dog. Now, in the original Elite, you had to work for your docking computer and spend a few hours cursing, swearing and crashing into space stations.
You're 100% right - and I even knew that.
So I'm try to post - the peanut gallery walks by, asks what I'm doing, we stop, talk about the same scenario with the moon... exact argument ensues and instead of typing "anticipated mid-point" ....
I just appreciate your not flaming me, because my dumb ass deserved it!
The only SF work dealing with Earth-Moon L1 that I've ever read is Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes Encounter with Tiber. If you've read that, then you have some hope that I'm not a total-face-saving liar.
Otherwise, boy - did I fuck up!!
Thanks for saving other readers from me!!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Well in space the range of battles is massively vast. All you need is a weapon with the best range and speed. Considering the distances you need speed as close to C as possible. Focused laser or radiation is probably best. The ship is irrelevant as long as it can detect and destroy from outside the enemies kill space.
Kind of makes me think about digging out various old game designs from the past, lol.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson