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Ask Slashdot: What Would Real Space Combat Look Like?
c0mpliant writes "Two friends and I were up until the wee hours of the morning over the weekend debating what real space combat would look like. I've spent some time looking it up online, and there doesn't seem to be any general consensus. So, I thought I'd ask a community of peers what they think. Given our current technology and potential near-future technology, what would a future space battlefield look like? Would capital ships rule the day? Would there be equivalents of cruisers, fighters and bombers, or would it be a mix of them all?"
Laser Beams.
That's all.
It would be a lot louder than what you see on TV
I want some of it.
The equivalent of a diode, with billions of apps and micro adapters, warp cores, micro-nuclear power generators and packs a punch that would cause more damage than all of this little planet's resources combined.
The war in space will be the smallest race.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
There won't be any space combat, it will be tied into the matrix :)
Lots and lots of space debris.
unmanned drones sniping the shit out of each other over ridiculous distances using lasers and maybe perhaps anti-matter "nukes".
It would be brief, anonymous, and if any of the targets where manned, mercifully swift. It'd make a boring anime.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
My prediction: slow and boring.
What makes you think we are your peers? You Earthlings are pitifully weak, un-evolved, and generally dull-witted ...
I'm pretty sure space combat would consist of humans trying to kill each other in space considering if there are aliens, we are unlikely to ever meet them, and if they make it this far, they aren't going to waste their precious resources trying to kill us.
And as far as mankind on mankind action, I'd guess it would amount to throwing small masses at high velocity at each other (throwing rocks in a glass house).
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I know it wouldn't sound like Doppler shifted engine revs or "pew-pew" lazars.
At least until Lucas digitally re-mastered it...
I suppose missals that could detect the other vessel, and guide themselves there, would make the most sense.
This is like the Big Bang Theory meets the Pineapple Express. My question: when you began consuming the brownies, did you know they had hashish in them?
Lots of good data here, from reality to various levels of sci-fi.: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php
Maybe some green ones, but I think mostly red and blue.
Or, given our current tech, nukes and explosives missiles and small ships? Just going out on a limb there.
Far future? I'll let you know when we invent the tech that lets us easily have space fights.
I always thought the idea of having humans on board a "space battle cruiser" were really weak on imagination. It's very likely space battles would take place with autonomous robots, controlled from a distance, so as not to sacrifice human lives. This, in general, is probably the future of military combat. A million little nano bots would also be much more effective in waging a battle than 1 or 2 giant ships with laser beams (also weak on imagination).
google.slashdot
It wouldn't look anything like in the movies, at all. There is no such technology. A few kinetic kill vehicles to harass the enemy's resources, while the real combat happens below, as always. Besides, it's all about the information nowadays, jam a few transmitters, send out a few viruses, that's it. The hardware-intensive fantasies of the 1960s to 1980s were never anything more than that: delusional fantasies.
Slow news day, eh?
There are two great perils to ship-based weapons that I could foresee, regardless of ship size: heat dissipation and conservation of momentum. Any energy-based weapons would need to dump a tremendous amount of thermal energy off rather short-order, so your ships might have to drag some sort of radiator array behind them, leaving a sweet juicy target.
If you committed to projectile weapons, you would need to have some sort of recoil dampening mechanism/thrust compensator every time you fired the weapon.
So, ideally, you would have semi-autonomous self-propelled munitions that could be dumped, ala chaff or depth charges, and then directed towards their targets at the appropriate time.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
Weapon ranges might be an interesting topic, and so might countermeasures, given the lack of gravity.
Beyond that, assuming the ships can generally move, communicate, and fire weapons I imagine a space battle would probably be very similar to naval warfare. The fact that someone can be 3 miles in any direction vs 3 miles in a compass direction I don’t see as really changing much.
Donaldson tried to tackle this in his Gap series. While no one will get it perfect, he hit on a lot of points (trajectories, small masses at high velocities) that most authors have neglected. Not the best scifi series in the world, but one that didn't get as much respect as it deserved.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
That you and your friends stop playing that video game and have a different hobby.
Given the possibility of rail guns being on these ships - it would most likely be completely infeasible to design a hull that could take those kind of hits and keep it's structural integrity without massively over sizing the ship, thinking conventionally.
So maybe ships designed to allow impacts to pass right through and auto repair damage would actually be the only way to combat this?
Even so - I'd guess whoever fires first wins. (As long as they aim at the habitable section / bridge / engine )
First, actions would take place over distances of 1000's of kilometres. Maneuvering would be slow and expensive in fuel use - as would any change in course or speed. In that respect it would be like a naval action from the days of sail.
However the weapons would be directed energy, rather than projectile and the vessels themselves would be almost impossible to detect - partly because of the distances and partly because of the stealthy designs they would employ. Visual detection methods would be almost obsolete, the only exception being to look out for occultations.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
...Assuming current level of technology. Like "fire a handful of small rocks at the enemy from a torpedo tube" or "launch several unmanned drones on a collision course". Without any kind of energy shielding tech, you either make your ships incredibly fragile, or cost prohibitive to get into space.
One small rock accelerated for a long enough time then steered at a large ship (or moon or planet) would pretty much be the end of it.
Can't really imagine much combat going on when it's a mutually assured destruction scenario any way you look at it.
Most mass entertainment scenarios make sure that the attacking force needs to capture (not destroy) what they are attacking to make sure this doesn't come up.
I suppose lots of tiny enclaves (small hollowed out asteroids) on both sides could duke it out with small ships. Still can't imagine a large enough industrial base to keep things going very long, though. Anything big enough to build ships would just be destoryed.
Pretty good article on this very topic from a few years back: http://josephshoer.com/blog/2009/12/thoughts-on-space-battles/
That said, it's all pretty much guesswork at this point.
For starters ships would look nothing like what you see on sci-fi shows. For example they always put the bridge exposed to the outside with panoramic views. In space that would gain you nothing and be a huge liability. Ships would not have wings and there would be no point in having a ship that was pointy on one end or the other like a sea going one.
The concept of maneuverability in space is completely unrelated to what you would have on the surface. Nothing is gained from having something that is nimble, handling in space is completely unrelated to what you would have from a ship, car or plane on the surface. Form follows function and surface type functions largely are absent in that scenario.
To answer your question you have to look at function. Are you talking about a current theoretical battle between nations in the orbit of our planet or are you talking about deep space? The answers to your questions depend entirely on the scenario and the requirements.
It would be silent.
And based on projections, not actual imagery. Because with vast distances, once you see something, it hasn't been there for a while from your perspective.
My guess is that it will be all about hitting bases, and ignoring spacecrafts.
Just like in sea battles, ships would have to plan way ahead to to their direction, except even more so because there is no water to slow them down.
Since we haven't gotten ray guns working yet, we'd have to use bullets and rockets. Launching anything big enough to do damage to a heavily armored space ship would affect the yaw, pitch and roll of the ship in ways that would make it hard to handle, so we'd want a lot of help from a computer to fire the thrusters to keep the ship on course.
Maintaining even an orbital fleet would probably cost 100 times what it does to float a navy, since you'd have to lift everything first, so not many countries could pull it off.
Well, first come out of your mother's basement and check out what we like to call "daylight". Then go back and roll for damage...
If I had to design a space warship based on modern-day technology, it would probably look probably somewhat similar to a sojuz capsule, except with nuclear missiles instead of solar sails.
The Nuke warheads would be encased in styrofoam or aerogel (to create a nice plasma pressure ball), spiked with depleted uranium or tungsten balls as splinter projectiles.
The whole thing would be painted black, as black as possible, to avoid early detection - because the important thing in a modern space battle is to obscure your precise orbital parameters. The battle itself would probably not look anything like what you know from a scifi movie: Using as many passive sensors (such as telescopes, radar recievers, etc), the first one to notice an approaching foe fires his comple lob of nukes into the approximate orbital plane of the target. He would then eject a couple of realistic-looking inflatable decoys of his own ship, and perform a retrograde burn for rapid re-entry into the atmosphere (since his nukes are spent, what's the use in sticking around?).
The warheads detonate, distributing liquid tungsten at near-relativistic speeds in the vicinity of the target. Most of them won't hit, but some will. No armor possibly protects against them. And if the attacker is very lucky, the other side will not have shot back, or miscalculated his orbital reentry trajectory. That's all.
Notice all of this can easily be done by robots as well. No need to keep humans around.
These lunar tritium freight-shippers will never know what hit them.
Space based rail guns and hitting ground targets are a matter of coaxing the right asteroid to a proper corse to impact a target on a planetary body using a combination of oribital gravity nudges from the gravity of your ship and possibly heating the asteroid/comet at the right locations to vent off material and push the rock to target.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Like every other type of warfare, it depends on the tech available. David Weber's Honor Harrington series has a lot of well-thought-out space combat. Missiles rule the day during one point-in-time but later on miniaturization allows for smaller craft to take down capital ships, allowing for the use of aircraft-carrier style combat.
The main factor will always be: What is the smallest thing we can produce that will carry enough punch to destroy an enemy.
Combat in near-Earth orbit would be nothing like interplanetary combat, and in turn in-stellar combat would be vastly different. The distances, velocities, and the weapons would all differ as land, sea, and air combat do.
One thing I can tell you: no dogfights (a la Star Wars and Battlestar), there's no friction or air in space; accordingly, the maneuvering is as easy as thrust vectoring to turn around. Got a bogey on your tail? Turn around and blast him!
The specifics I would hazard: lasers, lasers everywhere! Ballistic and missile weapons are HEAVY, they have recoil, and are subject to extreme travel times at the distances that one encounters in space. Only the largest (likely space-only) ships would have a prayer of using them effectively.
Only in the craft itself briefly. Sound needs a medium to resonate.
Watch those corners
All our most abundand energy comes from the stars, a good mirror can focus more power than a BIG ass laser.
I foresee colony ships, probes, long range sensor ships, and mirror ships to 'cook' the enemy.
"The Universe" documentary series had an episode on "Space Wars". Pretty interesting actually, and its up on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYvVmPJ-HYE Space dogfights in particular were pretty crazy in that video, it mostly centered around combat that moved so fast only robots would be able to perform these maneuvers.
It would likely resemble the the bong that was being smoked while staying up all night debating what space combat might look like.
Project RHO has a wonderful compilation of information on this topic, the url below is at the introduction. Just mouse over the top right to get the topic list to see the rest. (The site used to be much easier to navigate, but is a bit stranger since they updated it.)
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php
In a combat rich vs poor, the rich always wins.
I imagine it would bear a resemblance to the old sailing ships. Any maneuvering would have to be done before you engaged the opponent, as it takes quite a bit of energy and fuel to maneuver inside of a vacuum. Ships would try to come at their opponent at a T while firing large mass drivers. Although lasers are more effective in space than on land, I don't think they would be nearly as effective as huge chunks of mass. Electronic launch systems would solve many of the problems with recoil. Lasers would only make sense if the fuel required to power them is more mass-efficient than the combination of fuel required to power mass drives plus the mass itself.
Fighters/bombers like we traditionally think of them probably wouldn't be used. Instead, small single-manned ships could be used to stealthily deliver a single-shot payload - they would operate more like mini-subs carrying a single torpedo.
David Weber does a fair job at incorporating physics into his space battles... it's a place to start perhaps.
If I've learned anything from anime, it's that space battles will consist of giant armadas of robots piloted by people who all get slaughtered until a random girl in a giant robot suit with infinite capabilities eventually achieves the self esteem she needs to take the fight straight to the bad guys and wipe them out, escaping at the last possible second.
Shoot antimater through a vacuum.
First normal matter it meets - utterly obliterated
then we have the landmines problem on a bigger scale;
after the war there will be unreacted antimatter floating around
Two ships would face each other, head to head.
The first ship would power the weapons.
The second ship would not, so as not to seem hostile. There's a sense of bravado; manly posturing, but dialogue is the weapon of choice.
The first ship fires a single anti-graviton phase beam.
The second ship explodes because Picard is a pussy.
That's how future space battles are fought.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Mostly SMALL remote control and semi autonomois craft doing things to each other. Since we cannot seem to to get humans out of LEO.
And space opera comes to slashdot.
Silence is a state of mime.
People wouldn't give up a fight unless there was a human cost. So the idea that it would be drones is ridiculous. Why would an institution/government waste time killing drones? That won't end the war. If space-war was only drones, then one enemy would take the fight to the population. Basically the concept of space war is a little ridiculous.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
Right now,space battles would look a bit like cowboy showdowns:
One spy satellite encroaches on the territory of a 2nd spy satellite. First satellite to shoot will probably win, with some unknown chance that they both get destroyed. Person with the most armed satellites probably wins, but there's some room for good tech and smart choice of targets to trump numbers.
No humans die outright, though the resulting destruction of communication and navigation satellites may create secondary casualties. It is unlikely that satellite debris creates any serious issues for those planet-side.
Alternative: One unarmed shuttle rams into another unarmed shuttle. The more massive shuttle will win, or it will be a tie. A small crew will die. Unarmed shuttle could knock space station into a death spiral toward the planet, but then the shuttle crew will probably die and the space station crew might die (if a huge hull breech happens and everyone gets vented to space) or evacuate (in any non-instant-death scenario).
In any situation, there would be a lot of heated political planet-side rhetoric and a massive backlash from every nation on the planet against the initial aggressor. The only way to win, long term, would be to make it look like your opponent shot first.
Newsflash: we don't have combat-ready spaceships. Heck, the US doesn't even have spaceships right now, period. We (any country) don't have the capacity or money to build them. We don't have any way to fly them or arm them effectively. There are no capital ships, or even plans for capital ships. Get off Eve and back to the real world, please.
Asseroids on steroids
I'm going to start from a few first principles here. First - and I don't think this one is seriously open to dispute - (A) space is an exceptionally harsh, unforgiving environment. Failure in any one of these systems: the hull, the carbon dioxide collectors, the heating unit - will render a space vehicle uninhabitable. A failure in either the engines or navigation system will likely lead to a ballistic course to nowhere.
Now, (B) if the history of human space exploration is any indicator, we really don't know how to build fault-tolerant space systems at all. Almost any malfunction tends to produce a catastrophic outcome. Putting principles A and B together, any battle damage of any sort is likely to render the vehicle unsurvivable and kill all the crew.
Now, consider the expense of launching anything of size. Remember, the ISS is the most expensive structure ever built by man. So the idea of putting large, fragile, massively expensive craft (where they can be shot down by space-capable ballistic or nuclear missiles, or damaged with a ground-based lasers) is a total non-starter.
If you want to know what a real war in space looks like with our current level of technology, it's going to involve small, expendable space-based satellites hiding from ground-based things radar and weapons.
And lastly, *any* space combat is going to dramatically increase the amount of space debris in orbit of earth (as China's test a couple years ago did, or the accidental irridium satellite collission did). Just a few incidents could turn dramatically render Earth's near space too dangerous for manned craft for a long time to come.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Debris will be both a weapon and a shield, and combat will devolve into a very tedious, counter-productive affair.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Silence. Occasionally a small flash off in the distance as a projectile smashes into its target. No need for explosives, just high relative velocity and a high mass projectile. Actually, this is probably what a planetary defense network would look like - thousands of massive projectiles in different orbits, with some means of nudging each one to meet an incoming ship approaching from any direction.
No space fleet would ever fly in close formation. You'd probably have 100km spacing between vessels. Evasive action would be a matter of nudging your heading by a tenth of a degree, thus missing pursuers by hundreds of kilometres. Whoever can detect threats first wins, period - and evasion, not confrontation, probably makes the most sense.
Actually, fleets probably don't make sense - easier to see a cluster of ships travelling together than to see ten ships all on wildly different orbits, all arriving at a specific attack point within minutes of each other. Worse, once you deploy your ships you probably won't have enough fuel to react effectively to a change in the tactical situation. Your plan is locked in at launch. God help you if your enemy's intelligence gathering is good.
Human crew would be nearly useless, unless there were resources to be captured from the enemy which required EVA. Shock troops only, no return trip.
All the pew-pew-pew zoomy shit we see in movies with Cylons banking like fighter jets is just not workable. And honestly, the more I think about it, the less defensible a planet seems to be without massive improvement in detection tech and energy weapons. Even fleet warfare is unlikely; two fleets could easily miss each other and pass in the night.
I think the only space warfare we're likely to ever see is between two enemies sharing a planet. Whoever gets the upper hand in orbit wins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleSpace
I think they have it right in Mass Effect. It's going to be really really awful and boring. Gunners are going to be mathematicians, and you can turn into some sort of butcher simply by missing.
Gunnery Chief: [as the character enters the Citadel] This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
It will surely look like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GW3K5_w0-A
This excellent collection of pages on Space Warfare on the Atomic Rocket website goes into exhaustive detail on just that topic:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php
I especially love their section on thermodynamics - it's right on. :)
In the short term there will be no capital ships or space fighters, not with chemical rockets, in the distant future I would recommend reading Larry Niven, specifically Protector or some of his known space books which depict space battles at relativistic speeds, in Footfall he depicts how an Orion type nuclear putt-putt rocket is used in combat near earth. Charles Stross in Singularity Sky also discusses space battles and tactics while trying to stick with (mostly) known physics - none of these more realistic novels depict what you would call capital ships, fighters and cruisers - space is not a 3D version of naval warfare, with projectiles moving at even a small fraction of the speed of light, you get hit you are dead, much of the battle is about not being seen until it is too late.
Go Watch Battlestar Galactica.
The series that aired in 2006 -2008
Everything I know about space combat I learnt from Trek :)
In fiction, you see a few different ideas of what space combat is like, almost always based on some sort of modern-day metaphor. You'll see stuff that's all carriers and small one-man fighters (Star Wars), stuff that's just huge capital ships (Star Trek).
Real-life, I think it would be more like submarine combat, based on a few simple facts:
1) Spaceships are *fragile*. A sub can be taken out by one depth charge a few hundred meters away. You wouldn't even need to be that close to take out the ISS - a fragment the size of a baseball could probably damage it enough to evacuate it. And it would be torpedo-type weaponry - you can't adjust your aim fast enough to trust in a direct hit, so you'd use warheads of some sort set to explode when close enough. Those would either be old-school explosives with fragmentation casing, or nuclear.
2) Space battle would be a long-range, stealth battle. You're dealing, literally, with astronomical distances. Even lasers would take seconds to hours to hit. It's not too hard to hide in space, if you're small and aren't actively making EM noise. I can imagine it would involve a lot of drifting with engines off, a lot of radio silence, and definitely a lot of sneak attacks and ambushes.
Remove ships out of the equation entirely. I don't quite see what they could contribute. They're slow and inefficient, and impossible to give orders in time over large distances.
Relativistic kill vehicles are far more menacing weapons than any ship. It's a reinvention of one of mankind's earliest weapons: The humble rock, thrown at the enemy. But this rock is accelerated very near the speed of light, making it nearly impossible to detect, and completely impossible to stop (if you blow one up, it just increases the destruction). Even a fairly modest RKV can carry the destructive force of a hundreds of atomic bombs and absolutely obliterate it's target.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
guess again
I seem to recall that there was an effort a number of years ago to develop a more or less realistic multiplayer space combat simulator, but I cannot seem to locate it now. What I do recall from reading the site was that actual combat would be inhumanly fast due to stuff moving at relativistic velocities, and would have looooong approach periods to to the size of a star system.
Of course, if you factor in attacks on planetary installations, it becomes rather one-sided, as illustrated by a fair amount of SF treatment of the idea; just mount engines on a bunch of big rocks, accelerate them inward from the outer edges of the star system, and shatter them into fragments a convenient distance from the planet. Nearly impossible to stop, and extremely damaging.
If we survive long enough as a race to have interstellar travel, I predict people living on artificial habitats inside gas giants and/or stars, the location/flight-plan of each a closely guarded secret (and probably communicating/trading only by meeting on neutral ground), since that seems like the only place you could hide. If you're out in the open, any idiot with a grudge can wipe out your civilization.
I am trolling
Given the inherently high velocities of spacecraft, be it in orbit or between bodies, it doesn't take much mass to damage things. Coat a weight in radar-absorbing foam and get it in the way of whatever you're trying to damage. Call it a space-mine. Explode something in their path and call it ack-sierra.
Beyond that, due to weight/energy densities, conservation of momentum will be important, but spacecraft wouldn't have the ability aircraft have to deflect air via their wings to change the direction of their momentum. There's nothing in space to push against... I don't anticipate it would look like a dogfight at all because of this.
It would probably look most like naval warfare, where the combatants lob missiles and minimally guided shells at each other. Missiles wouldn't change the attacker's momentum, whereas the recoil from shells would.
Manned space battles are not very likely as it costs too much and technologically we are not very close to it being very possible. Throwing projectiles or using a laser and hitting satellites is most likely the most it would be.
Break up enough stuff in low orbit (destroying satellites) and you would have a hard time putting anything else up without it being hit and destroyed by the pieces flying around.
The idea of going between the planets to fight is laughable right now. We have never even been much further than the Moon in a manned vehicle and we can't really even do that now.
You can get a sneak peak today by looking at U.S. drone warfare operations in the skies around the world. Days of remote monitoring from a bunker and then kablamo from nowhere. Coming soon to U.S. skies as well (legislation signed last week).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I believe it will end up being a lot like that described in Niven's "Protector"... you launch your weapons, and, five years later, you look to see if they hit.
That's for interstellar combat. For orbital combat... a lot would depend on the goal. Are you trying to knock out the enemy's satellites? Drop bombs on his population centers? Stop his transport ships from leaving Earth and getting to their destinations?
The easy answer is "drones, drones, and more drones", but this assumes ECCM will equal ECM well enough to make it at least a tossup that you'll get through the other guy's defenses. I'd also make a guess that we'll never get as much damage potential out of a beam weapon as we will out of an explosive, and the simpler the technology, the less things can go wrong. I'm seeing, basically, drones that get as far as they can from the enemy, analyze their motions, and then launch direct-fire weapons based on prediction algorithms as to where the enemy will be when the projectiles get there. I'd also speculate that anything launched, including the drones, would be absolutely blind to any kind of orders to go home, change targets, respond to IFF, etc, because the chances of being fed false data are too great. This would lead, of course, to the launch of basically uncontrolled weapons armed with considerable destructive power, so, if they were hacked pre-launch... oops...
This, in turn, might lead to remote control, where the drones have no "brains" but are piloted by humans. Of course, this opens the same problem -- if the drones are controlled in any way by an outside signal, an enemy can and will find a way to hijack that signal. So, back to self-guided vehicles with no way to turn them off or shut them down. (And even this leads to problems... if there's a "mission complete, go home" algorithm, you run the risk of someone figuring out what the drone needs to "see" to conclude "mission complete" and finding a way to fake it. So, logically, you just have the drone explode when it's done.
If the general area being fought over is well defined, you might have some kind of minefield, using virtually-inert devices that rely on passive sensors to come to life and go 'boom' when something is near, but I've read a lot of people arguing that nothing is inert enough to not be trivially detected far off.
(Of course, I'm not sure there's anything to fight over in space other than to knock out the other guy's satellites, and there won't be anything else up there for a long, long time... so long that making predictions about the kind of tech used is probably impossible. As for the satellites, it's probably much easier to just fire some ground-based or plane-based missiles at them than to try for any kind of "space war".)
Projectile weaponry would be fairly worthless given laser based counter measures that can shot down your projectiles long before they will reach their target. The only way to get them to hit is to overwhelm the defense system, which means huge amounts of resources wasted in trying to hit a target.
So the vast majority of weapon systems will be energy based. Lasers will not be visible until it hits you since it's moving at the speed of light. So in that respect you probably would not even see it until it's hit you. In fact you'll probably wouldn't even know that you are being fired at until something's hit you. Unless your opponents are using some sort of energy-emitting ("active") method of tracking your position, they would fire at you and you'd only know after you've been hit since classical information cannot travel faster than light or the laser itself.
If you have laser energy dissipating shields, then you'd see a blinding light splash across your shield when you get hit.
Now let's consider if you were in a space suit and in space and you're spectating. It's also likely that you wouldn't see much either. Lasers are monochromatic and does not scatter unless interrupted by particles. If vast stretches space, there is actually nothing there. In those regions, you wouldn't see the laser going between the ships. You will see when the laser impacts and does damage or if it is dissipated, but the whole Star Wars thing with the lasers that you can see? You wouldn't see them. If you are in a dust/gas field, then yes, the lasers will get deflected off the particles and you should see the laser. Of course laser based weapons will be less effective as it is hitting a whole bunch of stuff before it finds its way to the target. (You can think of a laser pointer at home. If you have a very clean room, no dust, then the laser point will point at whatever it is you're pointing at and you shouldn't see the beam itself. If you have dust in the room then the laser will illuminate the dust and you can make out the beam).
Continuing down the line of though, you probably wouldn't hear much if you didn't have a radio if you were in a space suit in space. Space is pretty much a vacuum and vacuums don't conduct sound unfortunately. Waves require matter to propagate (light is a special case) and sound is a wave. So without a radio, you get to watch the war in absolute silence (go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, but ignore the orchestral accompaniment). But if you had a radio or was in a space ship, you'd hear explosions from the ship getting pummeled by laser batteries. But of course, if you were unlucky enough to get sucked out of the whole that was punched into your space ship, you'd very quickly be unable to hear anything before you died from suffocation or got incinerated by a second valley from the lasers.
Are we talking USA vs China in space? Or are we talking planet Earth vs ET?
In the fist scenario, (i.e. country vs country all on planet Earth), space combat would simply be small unmanned drones and/or other small craft with maybe 1-5 crew members. There are simply no reasons as of now for anything more than that until we start talking fighting that spans the solar system, and even then, autonomous/semi-autonomous drones would probably be the choice at greater distances.
As for Earth vs ET, it would depend on propulsion technology requirements. If simply defense, same as for country to country, as distances involved would still mean they are the best solution. Things change if we are talking an offensive campaign on unknow types of targets at some general location (i.e. we narrowed down what solar system the attacks are comming from). Obviously drone scouts would help, but for the actual attack, you would probably need some type of human presence to lead the attack as history has proven time and time again that plans do not withstand contact with the enemy.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
all the way along!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Gundam already takes your point into account. M Particles effectively block the long range anonymous forms of attack since it blocks all forms of electromagnetic communication, including laser targeting and gps. M Particles are the deus ex machina of close ranged Gundams.
The attack vehicles would be unmanned drones, small single purpose.
Reconnaissance the same, small single purpose.
but you'd have control centers hidden through out various moons and asteroids to keep communications time/distance to a minimum.
these as well as any defense systems would be manned.
So what you're saying is, Star Trek had it right once again!
Laser Beams.
Won't work; the sharks can't survive in space.
paintball
Would there be equivalents of cruisers, fighters and bombers, or would it be a mix of them all?
I can't decide if that's a pleonasm or a tautology, but don't do either, okay?
I see nuclear weapons and massive EMP bursts. Perhaps multiple sub-munitions in the 1-2kt range, think a cluster bomb/missile with 10-20 individual small warheads spreading to create a nuclear 'wall' immediately after detonation. The EMP dusts the electronics, then the crew either dies of rad poisoning or suffocates.
Not that much to be envious over. Other than the sweet planet earth.... if want some rock just go get your own.
Ideas from the book:
- "rock throwing" (kinetic projectiles)
- nuke missiles
- highly collimated laser beams (only usable at short range)
But, as others already mentioned, space is a vast, vast place. 99% of the time, it would be slow and boring. Most time would be spent on actually getting to the target. Then - launch missiles and in a few seconds - everything is over (one way or another).
For orbital combat...
There would be no orbital combat, as whoever's craft came into sight of the opposition's ground-based lasers would get fried - instantly.
Similarly, there would be no meaningful conflict between a planet-based civilisation and a space-based one. The "spacies" would simply drop rocks on the planet (superiority is being at the top of the gravity well), a la Footfall. The only scenarios that could give rise to a space "war" would be a war of independence: The Moon or Mars vs. Earth (but ref. Footfall), or inter-factional wars for territory between space-based operations.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In a combat Obama vs Ahmadinejad, they will be the winners, the losers will be us, they did kill us.
The next could be a combat of Humans vs Aliens.
The next could be a combat of Humans-Aliens-Androids vs Viriirobots/Virurobots.
JCPM: U.S. & Israel seem to be the only countries on the world where the development of weapons & wars are their 1st priority.
We don't have any kind of "shields" technology, so a laser is a pretty useful weapon in space. You can aim it from a long distance, you can overheat just one spot on a target, and you can reuse the laser once you get it into space. So there is likely a place for lasers in near-future space combat.
And with the kinds of speeds that things travel in space, even small masses can wreak major harm if the vectors are opposed. If you can fling a cloud of ball bearings where a satellite's orbit will take it into collision, you can likely destroy the satellite pretty cheaply. So I'm definitely not ruling out some sort of kinetic weapons.
But the space weapons that are sufficiently non-classified that I have been able to read about them are all missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
I think for the near future, any space combat will be anti-satellite operations. For example, if the USA were fighting a land war, and the enemy could take out the GPS satellites, that would put a crimp in the high-tech armed forces of the USA. (A crimp only. As far as I know, they still train in the use of map and compass, and not all guided weapons are GPS-guided.) So I pretty much figure the first actual space combat might be someone knocking out GPS satellites. (I don't think Iran can do it, but they might try to pay someone else to do it.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Moving around in space is nothing like flying around in the air or scratching around on the surface of the Earth. And in combat, regardless of its form, it's all about movement and positioning. The key always lays there from the most basic form of hand to hand combat to the most advanced stealth jet fighter combat.
If you are serious about getting an Idea about how a space battle would look like, I suggest the following. Get the Orbiter space flight simulator and try it out a little. Figure how you move around in space. Search around a little and do the tutorials.
My guess is that, like most people, you'll get bored after the first 2 days waiting to reach a target... you'll quickly (or rather very slowly and longingly) notice that space travel is slow and complex. When most people think of in-flight combat, they think about dogfight, with quick instant maneuvers to evade immediate danger or quickly engage a target. Space, its another business. Orbits are planned months ahead, years or even decades in advance for some satellite. Even on very short term missions, you do small precise maneuvers that will have noticeable impacts hours or days later.
The most accurate movie depiction of space combat is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey... sort of. There's just no combat, but it wouldn't feel any different.
You would never see it. If you were involved in a fight the speeds involved would be so great the only reasonable method of tracking a fight would be virtual. Unless it was a boarding. In that case, frankly something like outlaw star then at close ranges, with grapplers and assault rams, capable of penetrating hulls. It would be of little value to use lasers within visible spectrum. Missiles would be so fast you wouldn't see them either. Exo atmospheric fighters would find no purposes in wings or other lifting devices, unless being used as radiant heat sinks. I'm pretty sure battles in space will be robotic. Little point in wasting energy on life support, and the resources in making cabins. Yeah, if you were human and had the misfortune of being there, I would say you wouldn't have seen it coming. Targeting probably won't use optics, preferring something capable of covering long, and medium range sensing. Something probably left up to SAR. Sorry to be disappointing you. I'd a imagine, there would be an abstraction interface, completely customizable. Where a computer would assign some representative graphic to everything involved in the battle. I think I would assign HELLO KITTY to represent missiles. :)Of course one would beg the question, why would you be looking forward to it? I suppose, in the future, there will still be people duped into believing that anarchists idealize an impractical theology. Instead choosing the more believable ideologies of narcissism. It's much more efficient to just kill your enemies to take their finite resources for yourself than working together to find better alternatives where everyone gets to be happy.
What makes you think we wont also have Mutually Assured Destruction in space?
Nuclear weapons lanched from the satalite in an attempt to destroy the mission control of various drones in space devistates the earth and ends all armed conflicts for centuries.
Hopefully space wars don't happen.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
... punctuated by moments of sheer terror
It's interesting you posted this. Back in the early 90's when my friend and I were in school we both took a pile of astrophysics courses (thank you The Next Generation for making me a space-whore for life). We created all the basics for a space combat game. Down to stats, movement rates etc... all based on 'real physics'. I completely agree with one of the posters above - it was too boring to ever code as such since it involved horrendous wait times, punctuated by sheer madness over the period of a minute or two, then a lot of death. Jack Campbell has written a FABULOUS set of books (the Lost Fleet), with a serious dose of reality (with the exception of FTL travel). Iirc, he's a former Navy Captain or some-such, so the feeling of combat is very real, more importantly, he's spent some time researching relativistics so there's a lot of that in the novels as well. Well worth the read. Space weapons are largely missiles and particle weapons, both of which we have in today's age - so it's only engines/travel that are slightly futuristic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet
Check out 'A Deepness in the Sky' by V. Vinge for an authentic experience of a real space battle.
Anything in orbit will be pulverized.
I would say that the majority of combat in space would be of the pirates taking hostages variety. Think the coast of Somalia today only in space. Most likely the future will see cruise ships travelling the solar system for the very rich to take extended vacations.Rich toursists equal rich ransoms. There really isn't much habitable real estate to fight over outside Earth itself. The exloitable resources in space such as asteroids and comets are farily common making a war over resources unlikely.
The defenders would have an incentive not to try to destroy an enemy vessel approaching to board unless they can ensure that the trajectory of the enemy would not result in a collision.
Both sides will have an incentive not to damage the hull (other than perhaps cutting a temporary airlock out of the side). The defenders would not want to vent the atmosphere and killing the tourists and the pirates need them alive to collect a ransom. Few weapons allow you to kill the enemy without risking a rupture of the hull. The sword is such a weapon.
^^
I think the idea of space battles being something like submarines is pretty close. All the claims that space battles and ships are pointless when you can just lob stuff at the target and its impossible to stop in space I think is short sighted. If we can achieve any kind of reasonably fast space travel and be able to lob objects big enough to harm a planet or fast enough to not be able to be outmaneuvered by a spaceship you're already assuming energy sources beyond anything we know currently, maybe even physics (FTL?) that we don't have yet. Assuming that, then its reasonable to assume we could also use that energy source to create powerful energy shields (magnetic, gravitational, hot plasma, who knows) to deflect dumb projectiles.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
...remember that the enemy gate is down.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Will scribe "All your bases are belong to us" on your stinking mirrors.
Just read Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Fleet
In realistic space combat Newton and the inertia principles rules.
Look at Babylon 5 to get a glimpse at what realistic space combat is like.
Star Trek, Star Wars and co are jokes compared to B5.
Just imagine the damage we could deal to the aliens if we could convert 10% of the to <your least favorite sect> ! They could end up wasting a good portion of their GGDP on useless pursuits and in-fighting. GP may be on to something there....
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...I can tell you that it will look like a computer screen.
Some sort of situational awareness display, in my case it usually showed a globe centered on Hawaii (Kauai actually) with various tracks being displayed.
On the wall you had video feeds. The target launching (when you see it in person it is loud, and out of sight in about 10 seconds. Neat smoke trail. Loud).
The interceptor launching (about the same).
A video feed from a telescope watching the impact: black.... Somthing happening very fast (about 1 second) and a flash. Bingo.
30 minutes later you get the video from the KV point of view. See above. This is slowed down to show the brass. Kind of neat.
You don't see anything of the engagement: too fast, too far away.
Oh yeah... cruisers: it was usually the USS Lake Erie, once the USS Shiloh.... IIRC. A few destroyers tracked the missile, but they didn't shoot.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
One thing that most of science fiction gets wrong is that spaceships, even small and maneuverable fighters, are not airplanes. They do not contend with air resistance and accordingly do not require a wedge-shaped bow - let alone wings. Spheres or cylinders are more likely for small ships, while larger and slower ships might afford less compact designs that would deal poorly with high acceleration.
The second is manned flight. Hell, we've mapped much of the Solar system and been in orbit around about half(?) of all planets, without going further than the moon, or in fact leaving Earth orbit for very nearly 40 years. Even on Earth, it becomes increasingly more practical to wage war with remote-controlled drones than manned planes. Add the possibility of AI advancing far enough for autonomous drones, and I don't think an organic individual would be within light-hours of the battle.
Which brings us to the third part: Soldiers say that battles consist of long periods of waiting followed by brief bursts of excitement. Space battles would consist of months, possibly years, of unmanned travel and intensive computation, followed by seconds of computers trying to out-maneuver and out-predict each other, followed by hours or days of the leaders waiting for news of the outcome.
..after the battle the battlefield would be a clean up nightmare.
WOOSH!
But this is a good read: "What realistic space combat would be like." http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?t=131056
An invisible cloud of spores on an orbital trajectory that intersects with your planet. Being extremely tiny, the large surface area to mass ratio results in terminal velocities too low to burn up on re-entry. A few months later, your planet's population collapses.
Except for Madagascar :P
There's no major advantage to big spacecraft. You have the extra cost of getting them up there, you have a bigger target, you have less flexibility. And once you do enough damage the whole thing is out of commission.
For the cost of a capital ship you can have several small missile boats. They're more manoeuvrable, able to spread themselves out and taking one out doesn't do any harm to the others.
The Honor Harrington and Star Trek style battles are cool and all, but it's based on ship to ship battles because that's what we know.
If your "base" or "ship" is located it is going to be targeted. Targeted things will die in a swarm of smart munitions that shoot mass and high energy and at the same time do mecho-kamakazi dives.
The way to survive is to not be found. So stand off a long long way. Shed heat out of system, put a cloak on yourself from an insystem perspective. Send in your drones to locate the enemy and destroy them. Do not enter any area unless you are sure it is safe.
At the least you will be blanketed by a massive set of drones to find and destroy any drones near you. And locate and destroy any main/mother ship if it is detected.
Everyone seems to be envisioning a robotic battle.
Although we've made tremendous progress in getting spacecraft and other vehicles to act autonomously, we usually keep them on a pretty tight leash, and have thought out beforehand most of the situations we expect these automonous vehicles to negotiate.
It wouldn't surprise me to find humans still have a place in a hypothetical space battlefield, especially considering each opponent would strive to inject appropriate "fog of war" to confuse the robotic elements.
Either that, or well find a way to manufacture robots that are equivilant and/or superior to humans.
I read the Antares novels by Michael McCollum some time ago. Got a very realistic feel.
EtoS = Earth to Space. Basically destroy an enemy's space-based surveillance, communication and guidance technology as a precursor to actual terrestrial warfare. Imagine if you could knock out the US's military positioning, surveillance and communication satellites. It'd be a juiced version of Pearl Harbor but without the human casualties.
Why use chemical propellants when you can fire a projectile that'll go on indefinitely until it hits something? No need for the expensive engine to be placed on the disposable weapon itself, just inject the initial acceleration at launch. Rather than a mechanical spring mechanism maybe a linear motor type launch could be used, but only if it's going to get sufficient power in at launch. Any thrusting action on the projectile could be limited to maneuvering for targetting purposes.
As for any explosive material on the projectile, that depends on what kind of armor it's up against. It'd be hard to speculate about the weapons without also speculating about what's likely to be developed to defend against them.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
But the concept of war is a little ridiculous in and of itself. Just look at history and all the bizarre and stupid stuff humans have done. We'll almost certainly continue doing bizarre and stupid stuff well into the future, including if we ever manage to populate anywhere other than this planet.
There will be no interstellar space combat. Any race intelligent enough to navigate the vast distances will have long since learned how to manage its own resources effectively. It will also be advanced enough that it would have no need to engage in combat. It would either destroy something or not. There is no try.
The TSA will take away your guns when you board.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I would think that having large ships of the line would be pointless. They make very large, slow targets, regardless of how well armed. Only launch platforms such as aircraft carriers would be worthwhile. Without some sort of shielding, they would be sitting ducks, unable to maneuver away from any attack. For defense in such situations, a cloud of automated drones could be deployed to act as a shield, intercepting inbound projectiles. A dense enough cloud might work for lasers or rail-guns too, though projectiles at rail-gun velocity would likely penetrate a significant number of targets. An effective defense might come in the form of directed EMP (assuming that they attackers aren't shielded against it).
For offense, I would think a large group of small, heavily armed fighters would be appropriate, armed with energy and projectile weapons. Bombs would be pointless since they rely on gravity and aerodynamics. The most effective attack force would be unmanned vehicles, either robotic, or remotely piloted. The lack of air would not allow for any atmospheric-type maneuvers, so the fighters would likely be flying in nearly straight-line attacks. Maneuvers would require maneuvering thrusters, like those used on the space shuttle for course correction, and would be limited by fuel supply, unless a new fuel source is found (fusion plasma-ejection-based maneuvering jets, anyone?). I would think that the most effective weapons would be laser, rail-gun, shotgun-type projectile, or missiles.
And of course, for any people unlucky enough to be hit, no one will hear you scream.
Given the velocities, that would sum it up -in my estimation.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
IMHO?
The only "realistic" interstellar space vessels that make sense would be captured asteroids utilizing Orion-like propulsion. I haven't looked at the maximum possible mass of an Orion-type spacecraft, but I believe it is substantially above billions of tons if you only have to consider the pusher plate system. Advances in material sciences, and the possibility of "super" systems strengthened utilizing magnetic/electrical charges could dramatically increase this number further, to the point where even the largest of asteroids could potentially be utilized as space craft.
These asteroids would be wired and covered with a variety of useful mounts, including lasers on turrets, a variety of sensors and cameras, railgun-style mass drivers, and a variety of openings protected by plasma windows. On sufficiently large asteroids, these openings could include hangars for auxiliary craft, such as surface to space launchers, and versatile, high-speed drones. Drones could be utilized as scouts, remote sensors, maintenance devices, or perhaps, weapons platforms (suicide or otherwise).
If you needed to militarize such a craft, you wouldn't have to do much. Many of the "tools" on this craft would be versatile enough to be utilized as weapons. A railgun, or sufficiently strong utility laser would be obvious. By virtue of utilizing an asteroid as your "hull", a significant amount of armor is "built in". Turrets/Windows etc. . . could be protected by a variety of means. The above-linked Plasma Window, as well as a variety of Plasma Bubble research suggests to me that the possibilities of creating mixed-phase materials that can be oriented into coherent structures using charges and magnetic fields-- by this I am suggesting a "metal" that retains it shape based on charge passing through, and whose tensile strength is determined by a combination of material properties and energy usage. One can envision clouds of plasma, or even clouds of metals/solids/liquids which could be strengthened utilizing such tools. I would think that these "shield" would not be utilized to protect the entire asteroid, and rather be deployed to protect sensitive portions of the asteroid.
Active countermeasures would be important, as well; railguns/lasers could be utilized to divert the course of incoming projectiles, while electronic countermeasures and radios would be utilized to disrupt/confuse enemy sensors. Boarding "combat" drones could be utilized to attack the propulsion, weapon, and control systems of enemy asteroid-ships; these would probably be launched in swarms, and by railgun.
The "vast" nature of space suggests that there could be two different form of battlegrounds. Interstellar distances are too large to be considered battlegrounds; it only really makes sense to consider solar distances. Inside solar systems, combat between, say, Mars and Earth would be a slow affair; I picture rail guns hurtling projectiles at a significant fraction of light, while defense systems utilizing lasers and smaller projectiles fire back to alter the course of incoming projectiles. At closer scales, combat becomes a more conventional affair, and probably looks like a cross between modern carrier combat and drone warfare.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Any battle around a planet would leave so much debris floating around that it would make entire orbits unsafe. Think about how much trouble was caused when two satellites collided now imagine the remains of a large number of ships or USV (Unmanned Space Vehicles) floating around. One battle could leave earth with no safe place to orbit satellites or a safe trajectory to leave.
That and the best description of space combat I have heard: "Space combat is like hide and go seek in the dark with Flash lights and rocket launchers".
Passive sensors have much farther range than active sensors.
Look here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Star_Trek_text_game.png
Real space combat at its finest.
There's going to be two main methods of ordinance delivery: kinetic kill weapons, and radiation.
Kinetic kill is easy enough to envision, essentially a high tech version of a rifle or cannon. Something with high mass, at high speed with enough inertia and kinetic energy to crumple whatever structure it hits, if it doesn't simply punch clean through, creating all sorts of havoc.
But, there's the other silent killer... radiation. Hard, soft, thermal, etc.
You don't have to kill the vehicle, just who's driving it.
... Moonraker.
The enemies gate is down.
I'm thinking that we'll pack asteroids with nuclear weapons and launch them at the enemy's general direction using rail or coil guns. Proximity fuse senses a ship blows up the nuke, huge debris field. No escape.
Not that interesting. And it would be a bad idea if it's an orbital battle. But I think it's pretty feasible in interplanetary war. The main problem with all space battle is the vast distances to be covered
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Long range missiles would be the main weapons, but kinetic energy weapons would also be used.
Most combat would be very long range.
There might be many kinds of warheads. Some missiles might carry giant shotguns. This would be useful when the velocity differences are quite large so hitting the enemy with a few grams of shot is enough to cause serious damage. In other instances, the warheads would be thermonuclear bombs, possibly with casings designed to enhance the shock wave or pepper enemy positions with shot.
Lasers would be used, mainly to shoot down enemy missiles on approach.
In close combat, you'd need armored and probably powered space suits and the main weapons would be armor-piercing slug shooters, similar to what we use today but with more advanced targeting systems. Few things can pack as much punch in as small a volume as a 9mm shell. But there might also be weapons specialized to disable enemy space suits. It may be easier to jam up an enemy's armor than to penetrate it.
Expect drones, and if they are spread out enough, drones with enough intelligence to do the fighting without human intervention.
Energy weapons might be workable by then. Giga or terawatt lasers might be able to get enough energy on somebody long enough to do some damage.
Missiles, nuclear or chemical, that explode on or near contact, again, self guided, may work. The trouble is if they miss, they won't have enough fuel to hit anything else close by, unless a trajectory is planned for that. And we all know what Sun Tzu says, no plan survives contact with the enemy.
The other weapon choice will be kinetic weapons, which may be not more than railguns throwing whatever mass they can at the enemy. Or as Ian Douglas uses in his Galactic Marine series, sand bags with chemical explosives (you don't want the sand to be melted) are boosted to some fraction of the speed of light and the bomb goes off, spreading the sand, killing your enemy that way.
And I would certainly add Ian Douglas as an author to read about possible space combat.
Bryan
More or less like the situation in the air today. Any air - air action is pretty secondary, and mostly they just unleash hell onto the ground.
With so much of movement through space being dependent on gravitational forces, I'd imagine the FIRST era of space battles being fairly bleek and fatalistic...much like WWI, where waves of men went charging to their death because technology outpaced current warfare tactics. I imagine two sides launching missles at eachother from hundres of thousands of km away, with both sides making no attempt to change their trajectory, praying to the space gods that the other side's weapons failed or were inaccurate.
Lets say you have a ship going from earth to...Jupiter. Your flight course would be a rigid window because other planetary bodies will be pushing and pulling you in different directions.. Altering your ship's course would alter your ability to reach your intended destination. Moving out of the way of a weapon or slowing down might slingshot you out of an orbit, or pull you into another. Such gravitational forces would need serious power to counteract. Would a ship carry enough resources to do this?
I'm thinking of it similar to naval battles where large ships take immense power to change their direction or speed. A large ship can only turn so fast, and even then it's a fairly slow correction. Torpedos fired undetected or from a close enough distance with consideration to target's speed and direction could make maneuvering futile. Space battle could have similar problems to deal with. Can you detect a missle before it hits you? Could you change direction to avoid it without putting your trajectory at risk? Do you have the power and resources to do it at all?
If someone decided to use LASERS PEW PEW!, any space travel would be signing your own death warrant.
Everyone jumps to space opera when the question of space combat comes up. Cruisers. Remotes. Lasers fired from absurd distances. F***ing death stars. Rail guns. Doomsday machines.
Sure they could happen I guess, but the events that would get us there remain bad science fiction. My first thought when I think about space combat though is...
Marines. Hand to hand.
Blowing stuff up is one thing. Capturing cargo ships is where the value lies in space combat. So how do you capture that load of ore/food/gas? Or to the other side, how will you and your crew of 7 stop those 23 hardsuited boarders from taking your ship?
Space combat being fought on any scale in the next 100 years would probably end badly for both sides. If you just start fighting in Earth orbit you're probably going to trigger Kessler Syndrome and destroy all viable orbits. Unless we make some kind of shielding that can work at stopping a flying bolt from wiping out even your most well built craft it probably won't happen after they figure out that the shrapnel from the "loser" killed the "winning". Then if it got real bad people would just start deliberately leaving trash around in hopes that it wiped out any pursuers. Ending in no one being able to safely leave the Earth and no one being able to safely come home.
Space is empty, there is nothing in it to fight for. The "fights" would take place in orbit. Most of them would be raids conducted by swarms of stealth rockets, armed with WMDs, undetectable and too fast to deflect. If energy is plentiful, two planets could simply shoot each other with lasers from the ground, without any need of space vehicles. Manned spacecrafts, if existed, would be used for reconnaisance, and wouldn't risk revealing their position by engaging in combat.
...economic combat. Getting *anything* up in to space is expensive, and whatever the weapon du jour is (nukes, lasers, rail guns), you've got to be able to afford to design, manufacture, and launch the damn thing. Whoever masters the free market best wins.
And if you posit that there is no scarcity, and expense is no object, then frankly, nobody is going to be fighting anyone else - just hop off to some uninhabited portion of the universe, and create your own damn utopia.
At the current level: short and expensive.
I'm sorry. "Real space combat" doesn't mesh with "capital ship". If you want to look at real space combat, look at what's been done with launching missiles at satellites. There's also been some examples of blinding satellites with lasers from ground. THAT is reality for you. If you're looking at near-future scenarios, it'll be the same damn thing, but on mars or the moon. If the target is farther away, it will be a larger and more expensive missile. The target will not have counter-measures. That would be ludicrously expensive with a low chance of effectiveness. The counter-measure equivalent will be a fully armed nation back on Earth that will kick the shit out of anyone that messes with their satellites/probes/colonies. But I imagine that by and far anything that is outside of orbit will be immune to aggression.
If you're looking for space combat in the far future where people hop about the system at FTL speeds, then hell if I know what it'll be like.
I liked this idea from some book:
1.) detect general position of target
2.) fly missiles into "close range" of target (less than a couple of light-seconds, so random evasive maneuvers won't matter)
at this point the relative velocity of missile and target is very high, so instead of trying to hit it directly
3.) detonate nuclear warhead and use it to power a single laser shot aimed at target
Deny space to all by launching 5 billion ball bearings into orbit.
It would be very simple, almost boring, yet terrifying given that there may not be much defense. It would involve railguns and coil guns, just because it could, and would not be hampered by the problems we see here on earth. You would have ultra-high-velocity projectiles in zero gravity. Speeds might not be limited. If you can see it, you can track, and you can send a small projectile to rip a hole through it from a thousand miles away and hit it in under 4 minutes, probably less, at one shot every 6 seconds or so. So small they can't see it coming and such high velocities that even armor plating wouldn't matter. Preprogrammed barrages would provide a spread to ensure a hit (there are only so many directions and speeds the spacecraft can go depending on size and propulsion). Quite the sitting ducks if you ask me. The coil guns would be great for hand-held fighting, though power sources would be a challenge.
I assume the idea is that the enemy population is separated from yours by the void of space so you'd need to cross space to reach them. Obviously the drones are trying to get to the enemy population while the enemy drones will intercept them and go for your population.
Yes, not going to happen any time soon but this is a thought exercise.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There have been so many ways to destroy things in space mentioned (lasers, small masses at high speeds, and guided payloads), and relatively few solutions as to how to counter one, let alone all of them. In my mind, beyond there being no good reason to put real people on the ships, making large capital ships seems like the worst idea out there because of the potential loss of the huge amount of resources/production time you put into making it. Having unmanned vehicles just large enough to propel themselves and fire their weapon would let you have a scaled production model that is effective against larger targets and with any amount of swarm AI probably deadlier that anything of equivalent resource cost.
Actually managing to hit a target with people or resources of any value would be the ultimate goal. This is a lot easier if your swarm can just blanket an area of space in the way sub pickets in WWII did. Your swarm would detect a high value target, and try and coordinate a massed attacked before it reached it's destination. A blockade of such ships would have to be spread fairly far from planets because the technology that would make such things possible would probably be usable against them, and a swarm of smaller vessels vs a planetary defense system would almost certainly favor the planet. However, that just means hiding your swarms behind planets, moons, debris, comets, asteroids, or other features. Sure this means getting back and forth from the moon to Earth, or even Mars would be comparatively safe, but you can very effectively blockade a solar system with comparatively little resource expenditure.
This assumes a level of technology and planning within a few centuries of ours. Most spacefaring alien races will have had thousands or millions of years to prepare for war. Strategies, technologies, weapons and traps would encompass at least entire solar systems. Stars will be bombs and bullets will be smaller than atoms. I recommend reading Anvil of Stars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_of_Stars
I think the books of Alastair Reynolds are quite accurate, describing fleets moving near light speed. In such a case all you really have to do is arrange for some debris in the path of the oncoming fleet (e.g. sand) and that will take it out.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that I've never seen a reasonable treatment of space wars in orbit. No one gets the orbital mechanics correct. There are a lot of counter intuitive things there. For instance, you wouldn't want to shoot a missile directly (line of sight) toward an enemy. If he's in a lower orbit you'd actually fire it backwards from the perspective of your orbit. The missile would lose orbital energy until it reached the target's orbit. Likewise, if he's in a higher orbit you'd fire it forward, in the direction of your orbit. (Thrusting toward or away from the planet you're orbiting serves to make your orbit elliptical, but doesn't raise your orbit) One also needs to be very careful about overtaking your target. There may be tactics like overtaking an enemy by dropping to a lower orbit, then thrusting back to the enemy's orbit. A dogfight would be a very counter-intuitive affair. I wish someone would make a little space sim that had the physics correct, and let players figure out the appropriate tactics.
All that was assuming attacker and target are in parallel orbits (concentric circles). If the're not, say one is in a polar orbit and the other is in an equatorial orbit, there is such a substantial difference in their energies that any collision would be devastating, so again just dumping debris that intersects the orbit of the target would be sufficient to wipe him out.
There are lots of other tricks. The slingshot effect, for instance, is used to hurl probes out to the outer reaches of the solar system. Essentially, the probe steals angular momentum from the planet, boosting its own velocity. The lowest-energy and highest-speed path to reach a given point can often involve such bizarre trajectories. NASA uses big computer programs to find these paths, see the Cassini probe's trajectory for an example. If you have thrusters, you can enhance your slingshot by thrusting at the point of closest approach (the velocity bump you get by thrusting there is more than thrusting at other times).
You might claim all this orbital mechanics junk can be circumvented by using lasers or particle beam weapons. But light feels gravity too, so one has to calculate the effect of bending on the laser's trajectory from planets and other orbital bodies. Another important point is that diffraction from the aperature of the laser's lens is substantial when the target is planetary-distances away. Your nice narrow laser beam will be a harmless diffuse mess by the time it gets to Jupiter.
Finally one should bring up the Lagrange points. These would probably be the ideal place to put weapons platforms, refuelling depots, etc. But there are only a handful of them, and an attacker would know where they are on approach, so would probably send the first volley toward them, before he could resolve any infrastructure there.
All in all, I think orbital wars would involve a lot of calculation, a lot of waiting, a lot of un-spectacular deaths (e.g. no explosions but running into debris instead), and a lot of speculative offense. You want to fire before you can see your enemy, to take advantage of orbital mechanics. Your weapons don't need lots of energy or explosive power, you can just use orbital mechanics to your advantage. But you have to be willing to wait.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I'd say that the best defense is a large cloud of small particles, like BBs. Anything flying through space will be flying pretty quickly. Flying through a field of BBs will effectively destroy anything.
They're cheap, hard to detect, and pretty deadly when you hit one going 15,000 mph.
You can even make lanes, like a big 3d minefield. Good luck trying to discover the path through those.
For offense, fling a couple of million BBs in a given direction. Space is big, things are slow, and you can do math fast enough to figure out the probable intersection points of your BB cloud and your targets. They're so cheap that you don't really need to be accurate. They're small so you can carry billions of them. And in a pinch, you can use them for building materials or something.
Niven and Pournelle wrote one of the best depictions of space combat in "hard" SF in their novel The Gripping Hand. Aside from the ships' shields, most of the rest of the technology obeys known physics, and therefore you have to wait minutes or even hours for your laser shot to arrive at its target (assuming the target hasn't changed course that is) and then an equal amount of time to detect whether your shot hit or missed.
Other notable accounts can be found in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy (e.g., Lady MacBeth's missile combat above the planet Lalonde), and the final combat scene in David Brin's Startide Rising. Both of those are space opera rather than hard SF, but the combat scenes do try to minimize the necessary suspension of disbelief.
Also worth mentioning is many scenes in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series of novels.
All in all, real world space combat is going to be a lot more like submarine warfare than is generally depicted in popular SF TV and movies. Anything analogous to an atmospheric fighter plane will very likely be a robot or waldo rather than a one-seat piloted vessel.
(Got interrupted so posting this a long time after hitting "Reply"... sorry for any redundancies.)
I can see the fnords!
Nuclear exchanges in space will be the only way we will detect other races.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Most likely, it'll start with killing the enemy's GPS and comm satellites to prevent them from supporting ground troops.
It may not even take launches. Much easier and much more useful to break into the satellites' OSes and take them over.
-- hendrik
The only movie/anime/etc that does any kind of decent job of it at all is Starship Operators. Can't find any episodes or etc on youtube. Turn the noise down on this AMV maybe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFVpgCLsiPQ&feature=related . Starship Operators *does* have hyperspace, so that aspect is unrealistic.
No, it's really hard to hide in space. Pretty much the only way to do it is hide behind something else. Anything that isn't at background radiation levels of heat (3 kelvin) will be visible to anybody looking. Anything with enough heat to keep a person alive, have active electronics will glow fairly brightly. Anything putting out enough energy to alter course will glow a thousand times more. Given a wide array of observational sattelites and other sensors that will be up and running for years before any combat, everybody is going to know where everybody else is and where they are going pretty much at all times.
You're assuming that there is nothing else going on in space other than war.
By the time space war becomes possible, that's pretty much not going to be the case.
(Neglecting for the moment the argument that ICBMs are a form of space-based warfare)
In order to be able to 'project force' into space, there has to be an existing space economy to a degree.
This may involve mining, colonies, power generation or habitats, or some combination of these.
Consider the large number of naval blockades in the past that strangled countries economies.
Back ten thousand years, if you isolated most countries totally by sea, essentially nobody would die.
Do it today, and (for example) about a third of the Japanese population would.
We will all live in domed houses and listen to “Mellotron” music. We will eat space pills for meals. The enemy will be green and have a television aerial on their head. They will fly in silver space saucers and rivet covered rocket ships with sparklers for engines. Their overlords will wear red capes and their robot assassins will partially look like dustbins. Their world will be barren and they will be in search for hypnotic slaves. The principal weapon will be the “Ray Gun” which is never completely explained. I hope this clears matters up ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
The key to combat anywhere is stealth and ambushes followed by application of maximum force. In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small. Once you get close to the system, land in the cometary cloud. Spread through the cloud over a couple of centuries. Build fusion drives on every comet you land on. Paint each one a nonreflective black to make them undetectable by any means other than star occlusion. Fire the drives to alter orbits in such a manner as to bring maximum amount of comets impacting each habitable planet at the same time. If the poor shmucks detect anything, it will be very close to impact time and with the number of huge rocks flying at them, a few hundred will get through and turn each planet totally uninhabitable. For best results, follow through with additional bombardment to keep the dust up for a few decades; this should come close to sterilizing the entire surface. When the dust clears, land the colony ship. Repopulate the biosphere with Earth stock. Exterminate anything else. This is the only realistic kind of space combat there's going to be.
Probably a lot like what you see right now. Satellites loaded with nuclear and biological weapons, spy satellites sniffing communications, foreign governments hacking into global positioning satellites, remote controlled robots (UAV) using satellite links, etc. I'd add kinetic weapons, e.g. weapons whose impact is delivered using merely the acceleration forces of reentry.
If you're instead asking the entirely hypothetical, what would space warfare would be like if we had an extraterrestrial adversary? I would probably invest in high powered lasers / particle beams and avoid building costly ships that make nice big targets. You could argue the same thing about our current navy, that they invest in big fancy ships that would be useful if we were fighting WWII again. But, scenarios have changed and the navy doesn't want to give up its large battleships and aircraft carriers, even though they know they would stand a chance against smaller, faster, less armored, craft laden with explosives. The term for this is asymmetrical warfare, and I think it probably applies in space warfare even more so. For example, a nation can build a giant UAV fleet, just to see it turned on them by one rogue hacker. That's the fear after Iran acquired one of the U.S.'s stealth UAV, and probably the only reason that we're even escalating sanctions against them suddenly. There is a more immediate fear that they'll develop their own undetectable fleet, which scares Europe and western powers equally. The same kind of fears exist in the space sector right now, China has been testing methods of destroying and interfering with satellites for the war they know might one day come.
You guys are dorks.
Firstly, attack spacecraft would be unmanned. A pilot would not contribute any value to a warcraft in space and keeping him alive would be a drag on the mission. The unmanned craft would also be used as a kamikaze strike weapon, using its last bit of fuel to ram itself into any possible target. More on that later.
Space flight above low earth orbit is basically ballistic. Current spacecraft can't easily change flight direction or speed (until a nuclear powered VASIMR rocket system is actually put into use), so it would be relatively easy to track and determine the flight path of any vehicle in space. Tracking the targets path would allow for ground base rocket attack. The warhead would probably be nuclear to ensure a large blast radius destroyed the target. It's unmanned space war, so why not. To counter this, spacecraft would have reaction control thrusters to change the crafts orientation, and several "one time use" chemical rocket tubes that would allow for several controlled evasive maneuvers or offensive strikes. Chemical rocket course changes would be directly limited to the number of chemical rocket tubes the craft had. Use one, and it's not available again. The only way to cause a spacecraft to make significant and rapid evasive maneuvers would be with chemical rockets tubes. The last rocket tube would be used for a kamikaze attack on any available target.
Knowing where your enemy is going be located at any given time will mean that ground-based or space based high-energy weapons would be used against a target. Why not put a terrawatt laser beam on a target from the comfort of your own country. It's worth a shot. The enemy will try to negate the attack with highly reflective hulls. Reflective and controlled craft rotation would probably defeat ground based energy weapons, but who knows for sure. Range and atmosphere are a factor. A nuclear powered VASIMR rocket with a high energy laser platform would win the war. Until then
If you can't shoot down an enemy craft with a land launched rocket, you can throw crap in the ballistic path of your enemy. It's a good way to throw off their game. Again, tracking the enemy in space might be pretty easy, and moving around randomly in space is hard. I think you'd see net deploying rockets fired into space, lingering in the enemy's flight path until contact. If the enemy slamming into the net didn't destroy it, changing the crafts total mass would confound ground based operations. You can't accurately steer something in space if you don't know how much it weighs. You could also throw a capacitor into the net so that it would "zap" anything that it came into contact with. Adhesives on the net might also interfere with deployable weapons on the platform.
I think a current space war would look like a slow motion rocket war. Pretty quickly, we'd decide that the most effective way to win the space war would be to hit the enemies Command and Control locations on earth.
I thought C.J. Cherryh's "merchanter" novels did a good job of treating this, particularly the first 3 (Heavy Time, Hellburner, and Downbelow Station).
Space combat, to the extent that weapons would need to be brought within relatively short distance to a target and positioned, might be somewhat like combat between the great sailing ships. Instead of the wind, a ship would need to work with -- and against -- gravity. Changing orbits requires a lot of energy to apply well calibrated force in a given direction. This speeds up the ship, slows it down, etc. It takes lots more energy to change an orbit out of the plane of the Solar ecliptic. We typically refer to these energy requirements in terms of "delta-V" which means just what you think it does. Knowing how to wisely spend the energy on board to bring your ship into firing position would be a fine art of combat in space. Skillful energy management means knowing how to navigate by using single and multi-body gravity to your advantage because that can give you essential free delta-V (e.g., like the various "slingshot" maneuvers deep spacecraft now use to get to the outer planets). The Lagrange points around every massive body (there are 5) are points of gravitational equilibrium. Something positioned there doesn't move (much) relative to the nearby mass bodies. L points can also be orbited in various ways. The lowest energy trajectories in the Solar System are between Lagrange points -- but that can take a long time. Fast, more direct routes take much more energy. How long can you accelerate? How long should you coast? Interplanetary navigation is extremely hard and not many people in the world today can do it well. Combat would be a chess game of picking trajectories, changes in orbits, keeping options open as long as possible so not to tip your hand to the enemy, and feints to mislead them about your intentions. Once committed, it is likely that many engagements would be very high speed passes. So fast that human reaction time would be far too slow. That means the ballet of space combat would be worked out well in advance and handled in real-time by computers, along with any contingent actions requiring speed. Another key point is that with the distance between ships in deep space necessarily come light-time delays. Two ships separated by a distance on par with Earth and Jupiter would experience a one-way light time delay of around 9 hours. That means they are seeing what the enemy did 9 hours ago! So predicting an enemy's moves is very important -- and very hard. Firing ballistic kinetic weapons at a distance would be EXTREMELY problematic, although if you could predict where a ship would be a kinetic weapon would do massive damage due to the relative velocity involved. Energy weapons might very well deplete your total energy for maneuvering, so that is another tradeoff to manage. So I agree with other posters -- space combat would be mostly very boring for everyone apart from the planning of the engagement and the actual firing of weapons -- possibly being on the receiving end of weapon effects. Great topic!
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
This isn't a perfect example, but I was always impressed with Mass Effect's take on space combat. It isn't officially "real" since it is technically sci-fi, but it as close to real of sci-fi I have ever seen. The only real "sci-fi" part is energy shields and an element called "Element Zero" or "eezo" that changes the mass of an object based on positive or negatively charged electrical current. Once you allow for that bit of suspension of disbelief, than all of their space combat makes sense from everything else we know about physics in real life.
See http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/Ships_and_Vehicles#Space_Combat:_General_Tactics and the surrounding topics:
Opposing dreadnoughts open with main gun artillery duel at EXTREME ranges of tens of thousands of kilometers. The fleet close, maintaining evasive lateral motion while keeping their bow guns facing the enemy. Fighters are launched and attempt to close to disruptor torpedo range. Cautious admirals weaken the enemy with ranged fire and fighter strikes before committing to close action. Aggressive commanders advance so cruisers and frigates can engage.
At LONG range, the main guns of cruisers become useful. Friendly interceptors engage enemy fighters until the attackers enter the range of ship-based GARDIAN fire. Dreadnoughts fire from the rear, screened by smaller ships. Commanders must decide whether to commit to a general melee or retreat into FTL.
At MEDIUM range, ships can use broadside guns. Fleets intermingle, and it becomes difficult to retreat in order. Ships with damaged kinetic barriers are vulnerable to wolfpack1 frigate flotillas that speed through the battle space.
Only fighters and frigates enter CLOSE "knife fight" ranges of 10 or fewer kilometers. Fighters loose their disruptor torpedoes, bringing down a ship's kinetic barriers and allowing it to be swarmed by frigates. GARDIAN lasers become viable weapons, swatting down fighters and boiling away warship armor.
But it will be bot vs bot. Humans will be obsolete and, if involved, mopped up in the cleanup part of the battle. The bots won't even be built by the humans, they will be designed and manufactured by other bots. The bots can be superior just by being able to survive 300G dodging without becoming a pile of wet goo (unless an inertial compensator is created, but so far that is more fi than sci).
OTOH, the bots may be smart enough to know they are outmatched and just suicide or run and let the other bots destroy the humans. Either way, the humans that winning side wanted dead will be dead. Plus the bots won't have any qualms about genocide, and will just cut down any humans attempting to surrender, so cleanup is nice and complete (unless they're AI powered, in which case anything goes).
My guess would be RPV's and autonomous kill vehicles launching weapons at each other until they are either destroyed or run out of ammunition. Tactics and technology will change dramatically but I think space "fighters" won't be much different than the current Predator drones used in Afghanistan.
Space combat will probably be kinetic missile bombardment at exceptionally long range, while ships continuously manoeuvre to take advantage of the lightspeed delay in signal times to avoid incoming fire. Medium-range fighting might include lasers (particularly x-ray lasers if they can be made feasible) or particle beams out to a few light seconds, but kinetics will still rule. Not really sure if it would make sense to armour space warcraft; at space combat velocities, any kinetic weapon impact would likely mission-kill any target. It's possible I guess to try to armour against beams/lasers, maybe hide the crew module deep inside the fuel or something.
Planetary defense will be tricky, since anything in a predictable orbit is a sitting duck at practically any range, especially the planet itself. Massive orbital swarms of small defensive weapons, maybe? I'd sure hate to be living on a planet in a hot space war. :(
No stealth, no fighter/bombers; both are pretty much unfeasible in space. Stealth just can't meaningfully be done, and fighters are better replaced with missiles or drone missile-buses.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
A scaled up version of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) on the dark side of the moon, superconductive without cooling and free vacuum.
The one on earth will penetrate 45m of copper.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I would think that the first thing that will happen when a war breaks out, is the side with the current space-tech advantage would distribute vast clouds of radio reflective foil into orbit. Tiny bits and pieces of foil that are not particularly threatening to existing assets but will prevent any practical ASAT attacks against satellites because they obscure the legitimate targets with false radar reflections. Then park a few boats full of patriot-like missiles off the west coast of whatever land mass your enemies control to take out any new satellite launches as they are launched.
Watching for clouds of orbital chaff would be your first clue that someone's about to stir up some trouble.
In the event that we have say a large self-sustaining presence on Mars who decides that being ruled by and Earthling 15 light minutes away is intolerable and declares independence, then current or near-future technology isn't going to provide for a means of adequately resupplying an invasion force. With no means to see the war to an end by occupying your enemy's territory, there's no point starting it. Let them be and make some trade agreements so that we can still be friends with the 3-breasted hookers. We can throw nukes or space rocks at each other but that would serve no purpose in the end unless it is a war of annihilation.
The debris fields would further delay humanity's entry into space, perhaps by as much as a century.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A bunch of shuttle bound astronauts, floating in a loose formation towards a bunch of space station bound astronauta, floating to meet the astronauts. Everyone is equipped with lasers and a lonely British secret service agent is saving the world on the station, fighting with the troops of an evil genius trying to create a new world order. The agent is getting some help from a really big man with metallic teeth. That's it.
Given our current technology and potential near-future technology
There wouldn't be any capital ships, cruisers, fighters or bombers. You'd just see some Apollo or Soyuz-like capsules and they'd fire a missile which guides itself to the target. Except, the missile wouldn't look as cool as the air-to-air missile footage you see in Top Gun. You wouldn't even see a fireball when it hits the target, it would just be a kinetic kill vehicle.
Now if you say "500 years in the future" instead of "current technology and near-future", things could get different. Shields and anti-gravity drives make capital ships possible.
You didn't really Google.
If you had, you'd found plenty of sites like this one (use the nav menu in the top-right corner, the navigation on the site is whack), which discuss the topic ad nauseum und link to even more sites that do even more of it.
I doubt there will be anything in the comments to this story that you couldn't find there.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
We're talkin what battles will be like in 100-200 years. Not in 2012 when these things already take months.
Heroic Chinese space jockeys piloting the most advanced Chinese built space fighters duke it out with heroic US space jockeys piloting the most advanced Russian built space fighters.
considering we do not haveany particle energy weapons or lasers that are worth a damn, you would have missiles and projectiles. Missiles being preferred as they can be jettisoned and self propelled and will not affect the trajectory horribly like a projectile weapon will.
For example, the navy's new rail gun, if fired from a ship 10 times the mass of the ISS, it would significantly thrust the ship. Enough to fling people inside against walls.
Now a good defense against high speed missiles would be simply throwing sand out. the missiles would hit the sand and detonate, and any heavy hyper speed projectile would ablate significantly.
This is assuming you can have ANY armor at all. current space tech? hyper speed BB guns would destroy each other easily, or simply send a flack missle to explode into shrapnel in the trajectory of the target and let them get shredded.
basically right now space combat would be over quickly. the first to not dodge a small missle will be dead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No one is asking over what they would fight?
I would understand weapons aimed at a planet but why would you fight directly in space? What is worth protecting *from* there?
One fleet moves to threaten civilians (city, planet, moon, asteroid, space station). Another fleet moves in to defend. Neither fleet needs to be manned. The winning fleet has control over the civilian area.
The idea isn't that civilians won't be threatened, it's that military personnel won't be doing the fighting directly.
Barring a completely different future propulsion system, everything in space is either in orbit, on its way into orbit, or on its way back to Earth. Current space ships have extremely little ability to adjust their trajectory on more than a very occasional basis.
So, for any near-earth combat, one would simply launch a missile from earth or a high altitude aircraft to destroy the target in orbit.
For combat near another celestial body, you would probably just toss some marbles in the other party's orbital path.
If you can get there. If something is in orbit around the moon, the only thing capable of touching it will have to get to the moon first. And that's not an action that happens on a whim.
For any extra-orbital combat, relative speeds and distances between objects are likely so great that there isn't any combat at all.
paintball
Read Alastair Reynolds books and you'll get a pretty well educated guess.
In terms of war, the main location of interest is Earth, so battles would be in earth orbit, not deep space. The other locations of interest are asteroid fields, for mining. Planets are uninhabitable, and the gravity wells surrounding them are too expensive for resource extraction.
Because asteroid fields are large and asteroids are plentiful, battles there would be unlikely - the attacker would need too many weapons to cover the field, and the defender could hide too easily.
Cheap transport to Earth would depend on gravity slingshots and Lagrange points, which move about and change as matter circles the sun. Those would probably not be good locations for battles - even if they were, what would be the point? The resources sent from the asteroids would still have to travel to Earth whoever was winning.
So it would most likely all be battles in Earth orbit. Since sending material up into space is expensive and even then it's going to be low volume, whoever can deploy weapons first should have a strong advantage. Then it's a game of king of the hill.
If a nation controls Earth orbit first, then it can threaten other nations that might want to go into space. Any other nation that tries to build launch capability would be targeted easily and bombed. So having a space battle to wrest control of Earth orbit will be a low success proposition.
I suspect the most likely "space" battles would be terrestrial. If the enemy can invade the king's land/take control of the king's assets, electronically or economically or politically, then they'll get the space weapons for free and become the new king. At that point they can send their own weapons up safely to upgrade or modify the system.
That is why everyone would complain about how boring it is.
I once read a great paper on space combat, one of the biggest problems it said there would be is finding the enemy, think WW2 submarine combat only moreso as the ranges are huge.
Then there is space junk and maneuvering, we must assume some kind of kinetic shielding otherwise a hick with a shotgun and a space suite will be the winner. So with Shielding we are left with mostly beam/partical weapons.
Second would be the SIZE of the wepons, more likely is one super weapon running down the spine of the ship and a few missiles/anti-missile mass drivers. Once you have a spine mounted weapon with range such as a laser you get issues with travel time, you have to estimate where they will be in one or two seconds. If they are trying to close range they are an easy target so ranges will likely be measured in light seconds or minutes.
If there isn't much to slow you down up there why does everything take so long?(like getting to the moon or mars etc.) Are you limited by the speed of the thruster explosion? Or does it just take most of the time getting out of earths pull?
Hello Cruel World
The first thing to do is constrain the question. "What would naval combat look like" would have a very different answer in 500BC than it does today. So let's assume that you mean, in the next few years.
The battlefield has the characteristics that movement is free, but acceleration is generally not; there is a complex set of small accelerations constantly acting on the combatants, and those forces are constantly varying with time; the environmental accelerations get substantially larger as the combatant's proximity to a large body increases, and also substantially larger as the combatant enters any atmosphere (and the closer in, the denser the atmosphere so the larger the acceleration); vision is essentially unimpeded except in the vicinity of relatively large bits of debris (somewhat larger than the combatant vessels); detection is simple because all manned or powered objects will radiate heat, and that cannot be particularly well masked within the laws of thermodynamics and both human and machine endurance. In the near future, we will not have the ability to accelerate for long periods of time or at high rates, except downwards (towards a reasonably close planet or star), because chemical and nuclear rockets have to carry fuel, and other known methods of propulsion (such as solar sails or electric propulsion like ion engines) generate low levels of thrust.
These characteristics favor a few combat methods. Long-range rockets, probably with warheads of some combination of boulders (resistant to weapons trying to destroy them) and pebbles (also resistant to being destroyed, and capable of doing damage over a broader area, but potentially could be armored against), would be the major weapons systems. Most likely, these would involve a short, fast boost followed by a long coast with the booster discarded, followed by last-minute maneuvering to hit the target - all of these characteristics intended to make the weapon less visible, and thus the reaction too late. There are some circumstances where rail guns or even low-recoil gatling-type cannon might be handy, such as in close-in combat around asteroids/planetary rings.
Because ships can be detected a long way off, but maneuver takes a lot of time (because acceleration costs heavily), it's likely that most of the combat will be very slow by modern standards. It might take days for two ships to fight a battle, with long range shots starting the action, followed by closing slowly once the long range ammo was gone, followed by either boarding (think like the boarding pods on B5 that attached to the hull and then burned through) or the aforementioned rail guns or other kinds of small, fast ballistic projectiles. Mines would be immensely popular, because they use almost no power and thus generate almost no heat. If they only transmit, and do not receive, their radio signature would also be quite small, so they would be very difficult to detect, but could still be command as well as proximity detonated. They would probably be nuclear, because that would increase the destructive radius substantially (especially from radiation and EMP effects; blast would be a minor issue unless the mine was right on top of a combatant, because there's no fluid medium to transmit the pressure).
So basically, in the near future, it would likely look a lot like Napoleonic naval combat.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
You by studying the target planet. Find or create a favored group of people. Inculcate them with the idea that they deserve their position by their being a better class of people.
Make them wealthy and assist with their gaining control of the natural resources and financial system as much as is possible with local resources.
Your next step is by loaning the target planet money to purchase off-planet resources, pump up their economy so everyone is relatively satisfied and dependent.
Find someone to blame, crash the economy and step in to gain ownership of as much as possible of what's left.
If war breaks out, or insurrection, you may need to sell weapons to the various sides to regain your investments while wating to gain control.
Raise the prices of what you sell and lower the prices of what you want to buy.
Big Flying Robots with big lasers and wierd haircuts with lots of Romance and drama involved. Also, the average troopers can't make a hit for his life.
My aunt was in Iraq with the army the first time around and had a good story. She described a US armor force who had detected a line of Iraqi tanks and decided to engage them. They took out the first one in the line, then the second one. The Iraqis couldn't see the US tanks, so they had no idea where the fire was coming from and therefore couldn't return fire. After tank 1 and tank 2 blew, the US forces could see the guys scrambling out of tank 3. They gave them a few seconds to get out and get away then blew the tank, and so on down the line.
The lesson is, the force with the better detection/sensors/eyes can engage an enemy before that enemy even knows there is a fight, provided their weapons have sufficient range. A slight edge in information becomes overwhelming superiority.
Applying this to space, if we have two opposing forces, and one has a Hubble telescope level optics capability where the other doesn't, those with the capability will be able to engage in the fight at a much greater distance, and pick off the adversary at will.
Of course they will need an advantage in weapons range, too. In space you can't afford to use up your limited mass to attack, because sooner or later you'll run out, and it will affect your trajectory. It will be all about energy weapons, including lasers. And making those effective at distance is also dependent on your optics.
So, optics for observation and optics for achieving high range with energy weapons leads to force superiority in space.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Its your standard battle field only on a grand scale. Its the "good" guys in one formation, "bad" guys in another formation....fight!
Basically the concept of space war is a little ridiculous.
See if you still feel that way in 25 years when China has a military base on the Moon.
The comparison to submarine warfare is apt: it's very much like a very slow and deliberate team video game (a very old school one, though), where the enemy is never real (in the sense of an aerial battle), it's just a number on a computer display or a mark on a sheet of chart paper.
My two entries are:
The Forever War, a mention of the ship's computer playing mathematical games with the enemy's ship's computer (IIRC; at work.)
and
Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy: the description of a battle between a freighter and a raider is probably going to be very true to life. It' all about intense pressure as the enemy closes to weapons range (nondestructive; they're slavers) and the freighter scrambles to target them with a nice big nuke (they not after plunder.)
1. First of all, why? Of what value is there in controlling a particular volume of space? Where are the high value volumes? Do you want to deny them to the enemy or occupy them yourself? There's a lot of nothing out there that there's no particular value in protecting. A lot of current military philosophy revolve around controlling areas, which may be of little value in space.
2. Then the point is to attack space craft. At least for the moment, ridiculously easy to locate and track. Because of the cost of maneuvering, combined with the fact that there's really no place to hide, easy to intercept by a small kinetic weapon, which at high speed could destroy an entire spacecraft. And everything in space is at high speed. You don't have to blow the whole thing up, you just need to damage a critical piece.
3. Area denial would involve large swarms of space junk rendering a volume unusable in any way, at least until the junk goes elsewhere. Also nano space dust designed to attack space lubricants and seals.
4. Heat dissipation is an issue. If you can concentrate heat on an object you can destroy it. Understand, in space, destroy means a minor hull breach or deformation of any critical component, or permanently damaging some electronic component.
5. Beam weapons would focus on one of two things: damaging structural integrity or damaging electronics.
6. Explosives would be totally unnecessary, and too expensive to move around, compared to kinetic weapons. If anything, they would be used to generate a shrapnel cloud for area denial. Really, a very small amount would be required for this.
My only thought was that space combat in Earth orbit with physical weapons/craft would be a terrible idea, no matter what weapons were used. The remaining, kinetic energy filled space debris (used non-energy munitions, shards of spacecraft, a crewman's dead finger, etc.) would turn that area of space into a mess of flying death, one fleck of paint at a time.
Aren't there still pieces of debris from that Chinese anti-satellite test a while back?
The big issue with space combat is that to move you need to spend reaction mass. That means moving around a lot is prohibitive. Further, that same constraint is going to ensure that whatever is fighting is either going to be very light weight or very heavy and completely static.
The best defense since mobility is off the table will likely be stealth. Which means even less moving since thrust can probably be detected and any heat generation will also be detectable. All combatants will have to be thermally neutral and either radar invisible or camouflaged as debre or rock.
As to weapons, the method is less important then the nature of the attack. Because the best defense is stealth it stands to reason that any aggressive action will render the attacker visible and thus very vulnerable. Thus any attack must be instantly lethal so the craft or station can destroy it's enemy before a counter attack. Or in the case of multiple combatants... so it can fire before being destroyed by an enemy ally. There are a couple ways to survive the process of attacking. One might be to fire and then immediately relocate just enough to avoid a counter attack. If you're fairly stealthy to begin with they may only be able to detect you when you fire. A better method might be "throwing" stealthed missiles or disposable drones out of a carrier and then having them launch. The command ship remains stealthed and it's position is not given away by the activity of the drones/missiles.
An incoming missile would be very hard to hide. For one thing, we can assume it has some kind of compact high velocity engine and it's unlikely to be very stealthy since that tends to require mass and caution. There is no meaningful "air" resistance in space, so you could have a big thermal umbrella in front of the missile that obscures a heat trail from a single target if you bare directly on it.
Sensor systems will of course be predominately passive, distributed, networked, and likely will communicate through tight beam laser link. A fleet of ships should share their collective sensor return with every ship and all sensor drones should be added to that picture. As such hiding anything making a lot of heat or emitting radiation should be hard. I'm guessing drone weapons will be highly disposable and likely to not survive more then a couple shots before counter attacked and destroyed. In fact, most of the combat could be drones destroying other drones.
As to the actual weapon employed. I don't think lasers are a good weapon. Going into all the reasons is complicated but there are a lot of problems with them that are just physics. The two weapon ideas I like are some kind of kinetic weapon. Hitting things is a pretty reliable way of breaking them. And it makes Newton happy... so everyone gets an apple. That might mean a rail gun of some kind or a really fast missile. The other idea is some kind of plasma gun. This idea has some merit for a couple reasons. One, it's nearly as fast as a laser, you can't really block or deflect it hte same way you do with a laser. Maybe they could use a big magnetic field to basically create a shield? Anyway, plasma is fast and if you can actually focus it... then you should be able to melt nice little holes in just about anything. Also, it makes a crackerjack engine so you could have your own drive system double as the weapon system. Maybe have the plasma be diffuse when in drive mode and focused into a beam when in weapons mode. Anyway, either way the instant you start firing on the enemy they're going to fire back. So the question is how you survive the mutually assured destruction in that battle. Again, I'm guessing you keep your command ship stealthed and leave the killing and dying for the drones.
A major issue for space combat will be the logistics. Really, this is the biggest problem with space ANYTHING. Just getting things up there is hard and then moving them around is hard and then doing that without being able to resupply them and if anything goes wrong everyone dies.
I'm going to gue
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Technology is going to be the biggest concern. Unless we get much better space launch tech, we won't be able to put much up there and unless we get much better social tech tech, we dare not do it.
At most we might get a couple of drones or a ground based laser shot or two. Otherwise its too much cost for too little gain and unlike say computers, space tech is regressing.
With our current totem pole rockets and their somewhat more advanced sibs, we can't lift much of anything heavy so it would be a fight between glass hammers, you can't hide in space and you have no armor.
On top of that it is highly risky, not only is there little fight over as of yet we risk orbital strikes and/or a Kessler Event with loss of access to space and satellites (i.e a civilization ending move)
Worse much of the more advanced tech we are looking at for propulsion cannot be managed safely by our current social systems. We can't keep fission reactors in advanced countries from overloading or being flooded or deal with the waste. I find it hard to think that we could handle antimatter rockets or nuclear pulse rockets safely any time soon.
Lastly, where is the money going to come from?
Unless we have a real breakthrough we face serious energy and material constraints. These are not going to go away. Heck the advanced civilizations all have population decline, many cannot distribute wealth well enough to sustain their population numbers (i.e unemployment leading to population shrinkage ) Unless some means of changing that occurs, in the time frame we are looking for more advanced technology to come on line, well the human race will be far poorer and very possibly older and less numerous. Well except for place like Sub-Saharan Africa but they aren't to universal running water yet much less rocketry or space war.
Now given some progress in every and the avoidance of a resource war and the avoidance of any nation state war (assuming we still have nation states by than) going nuclear, we could get a scrap in space. Over what I do not know, we really can't get there from here but ignoring that, we might get a scrap. It would probably be a quick drone fight to clear a particularly desirable resource rich area or possibly a coupe of prospectors taking potshots at each other with shotguns or maybe lasers or something.
A bigger war is just unlikely
Some things may be very sneaky too. You don't always want an attack to be obvious that it's an attack.
So you might have some drones that work like sappers. Instead of outright shooting something and exploding a ship you could use limpet mines. Or if a mine is too messy in orbital space, a simple thruster attached where the enemy doesn't want a thruster would do. This would give a nice strategic advantage which could be deployed at a key moment if necessary.
Alternately, you could expose an enemy spacecraft to compounds that would compromise its structrual integrity. Chemicals which are corrosives or amalgam forming compounds with the hull material of the targeted spacecraft. (So you either rust/etch part away or cause severe embrittlement.) It's not going to be much more detectable than a collision with naturally occuring micrometeorites, and may not be noticed as an attack. In the case of a chemical attack, it's likely the heat of the sun would speed things up and once in the sun long enough that's when the damage would occur. They also may achieve results hours or days after hitting, such that the two events may go unconnected. The enemy would only see an unexpected structural failure either occuring due to onboard pressurization, or happening during activation of a thruster or similar control mechanism that produces structrual stress during operation.
At least these are the kinds of space weapons I envision in the near-term, where nobody wants to let anyone else know they're getting the upper hand while space is supposedly not being weaponized.
All military equipment is subject to the laws of economics: each piece of equipment, from guns to tanks to aircraft carriers are subject to tradeoffs between weight, power, size, affordability and lethality--which is why, for example, the U.S. has a variety of different sized ships with different functions, rather than just floating a few thousand general-purpose aircraft-carrier sized ships that do everything.
So when envisioning space war, it's going to be the same sort of tradeoffs dictated by economics and by physics: very large, heavy and well shielded (read: very think bulkheads with lots of iron) ships that serve as carrier vessels and the like, surrounded by a periphery of smaller ships which serve as a sort of "forward guard" to the heavy capital ships, in much the same way that a U.S. aircraft carrier sails with a whole bunch of support ships.
Further, because blowing something up will always be easier than guarding something, the things that will deliver bombs (small airplanes) will always be smaller, lighter and more maneuverable than their (much much much) bigger targets. That's especially true in space, where you don't need to run your thrusters continuously, but can just be carried along by momentum. And because life support is going to be very expensive (since you have to carry everything with you, not just food and power, but air as well), and (assuming there is no artificial gravity) only the large capital ships will be able to spin like a top to simulate gravity, most of the smallest ships will be cheap drones. (In fact, I could envision a world where only the largest capital ships carry people, mostly marines, for when you actually have to put boots on the ground.)
Beyond that, most materiel has developed over the years in response to new defensive or offensive challenges. Star-configuration castles where developed in response to heavier artillery; aircraft carriers developed when timeliness and range prevented putting planes over foreign territory. In space, I would expect a lot of emphasis on electronic and optical surveillance (especially on the forward facing ships in the outer perimeter of the protective zone around a capital ship), along with laser-based inter-ship communications (to reduce the EM footprint), and I would expect a constant rotation of larger "battleship" like ships (smaller and more nimble than the capital ships, mostly rigged with a lot of bombs) to the main capital ship, so that the crew can go back to simulated gravity on a regular basis. I would also expect high-powered lasers, very powerful railguns and other measures to throw fragments into the air in order to protect capital ships against attack.
If I were king of the forrest, here is how space travel vehicles get done. You build a relatively small submarine looking craft and then go find yourself an asteroid. The manmade portion would be mostly engine and that engine would need mass. Essentially you would ideally have a square mile or two square mile volume asteroid with a compartmentalized manufactured space ship buried into the center of it. The ship would "burn" the matter it removed to make room for the ship. You could scale up or down for size according to the purpose of the ship. Obviously the asteroid serves as protection from micrometeroids as well as intentional kinetic weapons. Plenty of room for storage of cargo or supplies or whatever and plenty of fuel. (but if you need more fuel, go find another asteroid and attach it) Battles would need to be energy weapons exclusively except for the most callous of concerns. Kinetic weapons that miss their intended target will eventually hit something. Ideally, you would have energy weapons that had multiple components that all had to focus simultaneously to be effective. However, as long as your have an asteroid to work with, there is no reason that you could not aim a stream of mass in whatever direction you saw fit.
Hopefully by the time we're advanced enough to have the weapons needed to fight a real space war we'll be advanced enough to not do stupid things like fight wars
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
This would probably not be your "primary" weapons because the fact that you'd likely have to maneuver your whole ship to aim the weapon, so might not be as convenient as lasers, etc, but. . .
Presuming that you have some sort of fusion rocket or ion engine, it occurs to me that in a pinch, you have a very high-energy "weapon" you could bring to bear on your enemy's hull (if you are close enough - although the exhaust "tail" from a space ship's engine might be quite long), if you need to?
I hate to just refer to carefully thought out sources from established authors rather than follow suit and post my own less informed guesses, but the best summary is probably "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman.
There's some quote somewhere about how weak generals think of tactics, mediocre generals think of strategy, and great generals think about logistics. What are the implications of time you have to spend to get from point A to point B given the distances involved? What about the relativistic time dilation incurred?
Any true deep space combat would likely be years of boredom, interspersed with microseconds of terror.
"Given our current technology and potential near-future technology, what would a future space battlefield look like?"
Given Current Tech Available:
Machine Guns, Guided Torpedoes w/ HE or Nuclear warheads, primitive rail-guns, primitive heat lasers, ground to low earth orbit booster rockets, small space shuttle, Soyuz capsules, communication satellites, ground observation and control, remote drones, micro-satellites, primitive Project Thor, IIS
Current Space Battle:
The goal would be to control cis-lunar space (between Moon and Earth) and would be the first battlefield of WWIII. (I can't see a scenario where the whole world puts up with someone trying to grab space for themselves.) Mostly orbital combat, with possible sub-orbital pop-up strikes. Booster rockets would launch guided torpedoes with High Explosive fragmentation warheads (steel clouds of death) at enemy targets (likely fragile communications/spy satellites) and disable them without needing a direct hit. The ISS would be turned to swiss cheese. Low Earth Orbit's space junk problem will become exponentially worse. Combat Shuttles could launch, but they would be sub-orbital or perhaps one orbit at most. The counter move to maintain a satellite presence would be to use micro-satellites to replace one large one with many "disposable" ones. All the while a crazy Electronic Counter-Measure war is going on in space to deny communications entirely and would not discriminate between military and consumer channels. Forget calling across an ocean as the world will have to fall back on copper wire or glass fiber. Eventually, it spills-over to Earth conventional war or even Global Thermonuclear War. The winner, if any at all, will be decided on the ground. The space war's most important impact will be that if one side actually does achieve cis-lunar space-superiority, the loser will be somewhat blinded and may be scared enough to start lobbing nuclear weapons around out of fear of the winner's ability to set up a Project Thor and bomb with impunity. I don't see people in space fighting it out in capsules or shuttles as they may not survive launch and re-entry without actually going into a battle.
Near Future Tech:
Machine Guns turrets, Guided Torpedoes w/ HE or Nuclear warheads, primitive rail-guns, primitive heat lasers, ground to low earth orbit booster rockets, small space shuttle, Soyuz capsules, communication satellites, ground observation and control, remote drones, micro-satellites, primitive Project Thor, IIS, Moon Base, Space Station at Lunar L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, Space Marines in primitive Power Armor, Lunar Tanks, fighting robots, Lunar artillery.
Near Future Space Combat:
The goal would be to control Earth Orbit, The Moon, and Lunar L1 through L5 and would be the prelude to Solar War I. Not sure that it will contain Global Thermonuclear War as I assume it will take global cooperation to get this far. Perhaps a limited exchange if it were a few nations making a power grab. Given the issues with radiation and micro-meteorites at the Lagrangian points, the stations would naturally be well shielded against fragmentation warheads. The stations themselves would likely be prized possessions. (if not, they get nuked using large booster delivered warheads from Earth) The Lunar Colonies would also be prized, so I would assume that nuking them would be a last-gasp "FU" from the losing side. There could be small fleets of space shuttle like warships that have machine guns or auto cannons for primary attack with the ability to carry a limited number of small guided torpedoes with frag/HE/nuke warheads. I would imagine that these craft would be well heat shielded for earth re-entry so heat lasers would have little to no effect on them. Battles between fleets would be long looping orbits with combatants sending fire at close approach moments possibly days apart in low earth/lunar orbit and even weeks apart if in high slow transitional orbits. Machine gun turret fire could be used as
Not sure if anyone else has posted this since a 'space combat' thread on Slashdot generates so much traffic it seems as if it should crash the servers (Dude, I heard you liked Slashdot....)
Anyway, it's kind of hard to talk about what 'space combat' will look like since 'space' is simply the theater for the conflict to occur in. Its like asking what 'land combat' looks like. When? 2012? 2025? 1942? 550 A.D.?
You probably need to start of with some assumptions concerning your technology. Lasers are a big one. I am not a laser physicist but as I understand it there's certain maximums of focal range that are related to the size of the lens. As I understand it in order to focus a laser at a spot about half a light second away you would need an absolutely gargantuan lens, one so big as to be impractical for combat. Now maybe I am wrong on this but this is an example as to why using lasers over such long distances might not be as easy as some people think.
Of course that assumes we don't find 'loopholes' around the problem such as somehow creating a synthetic lens through spatial warpage or some other technology. On the other hand if you've got some kind of technology that allows spatial warping then you quite possibly have much more effective weapons than photons.
My guess, in shorthand, is that combat in space will bear a certain resemblance to current combat. I suspect you will see guns for a long time (when jets were first becoming widely used by the military a lot of theorists thought that guns were going to go away because of the ranges and speeds jets would be engaging at. You'll notice they are still there because it turns out that at short ranges a missile often isn't the best option). I suspect you will have lots of your 'cheap' units (infantry, drones, spearmen, etc.) backed up with heavier units (tanks, fighter planes, knights on horseback, etc.) often employed along with small numbers of 'heavy hitters' (bombers, battleships, catapults, etc.).
The exact form these all take will be dependent upon the technology of the day.
Someone has already worked out the details of space combat. Try the Lost Fleet book series by Jack Campbell. They are fantastic.
for wars in space, the universe is big enough for us all, surely?!?
I always liked the way the Honor Harrington series portrayed space combat. Having missiles carry nuclear-powered laser warheads close to the target ship seems like it would make it a lot easier to hit a target, if your warheads had decent targeting. Granted, a lot that's portrayed in the novels is clearly science fiction, with the goal of making it seem more "naval", but still I think the missile + nuclear warhead idea is an interesting solution to the "my target is far away, and I have several seconds lag in my targeting" problem.
Another interesting portrayal of space combat is the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, I seem to recall, but I haven't read it in fifteen or so years.
EMP cannons. Or simple EMP emitters.
Mirrors or plasmas can defeat low power single lasers, if the target knows it's coming. Or the target can keep changing orbit, if the attacker is far enough away to make dodging work. Come to think of it, this can be overcome by focusing hundreds or thousands of optical (green, blue, UV) lasers on one target. Uh oh. Cheap and low power can do the job. X-ray lasers would be best - no shield can stop them, unless you're in an asteroid with a few hundred feet of rock protecting you.
Kinetic weapons moving at miles per second rule here. Return of the cannonball! Imagine buckshot of a pound per shot, fired from electromagnetic guns, moving at hundreds of miles per second, impacting the hulls... shredded wheat.
I doubt that humans would man most weapons. Drone ships would be simpler. smaller, faster, cheaper, and more expendable. Flying EM guns and nuclear powered x-ray cannons, with radar dampening shrouds would prowl the dark, quietly.
Drones don't need big rockets. They can spend years sneaking up on you with ion drives. Decades. Impossible to detect until they open fire.
Ships of the line? For humans, maybe. Command and control can't really be based on a single planet. Speed of light delays... but that can be overcome, can't it...
Some sort of manned assault frigate would be essential if your goal was less than outright annihilation. Send in the commandos, hit the right targets - that takes people and yes, ships of the line.
Americans tend to image every space war as a reenactment of World War II - be honest with yourselves. It won't be like that. It'd be smaller, more deadly, cheaper, easier to do - if a space-based industrial economy were to do it. Earth would be a not-good place to build and maintain space... anything. Space-based economies, in rotating habitats, have it all over plantary military forces - they are on top of the hill already, and they have access to all the power and material they need.
Communications is key to any military mission. Radio is easily detected and can be jammed. I'd say quantum entanglement is the answer here - sort of a QE telegraph. Use enormous, ordered arrays of bits, entangled with corresponding arrays at Command or other ships, and Morse code is reborn. No EM emissions, no jamming possible, no detection possible. If you want sneaky, the ghost of QE comm is just what you need.
Other weapons: throw big rocks at them. Force majeure, the undefendable attack.
Unless people are capable of being long term self sufficient outside the planet the answer to winning any space war is nuking earthly targets.
What if you could design a cushion hull fat enough to absorb the energy of incoming projectiles or smart rocks on a collision course? Maybe some kind of molasses blob designed to transfer kenetic energy at a controlled rate.
You could also shape the hull to have massive surface area and effecient heat transfer layers to mitigate the effects of laser attack.
Given distances time/involved, lack of air, dust, fog and cost of propellent for offensive weapons some sort of phalanx like device might be quite a bit more effective in a space based battle cruiser.
Before there can be a space battle there has to be something in space worth fighting over.
I assume most conflicts will occur near a planet. One force is stationed in orbit, with support from ground installations, and another force is approaching from deep space. Confrontations in deep space generally won't happen because space is too vast, and it takes too much fuel to deviate off course to intercept an enemy. Even if force 1 is going from A to B, and force 2 is going from B to A, they can't engage each other because they are moving past each other too quickly to lock, and they can't commit fuel to slowing down.
The defender will spot the attacker from a long distance away. The defender's larger sensors will resolve each attacking vessel. On the other hand, the attacker will only see the planet. The outcome of the battle will depend on the goals of the attacker. The attacker can bombard the planet with relativistic kill vehicles fired from a long distance, and the defender can't do much about it. But the attacker can't detect individual defensive satellites until well in range of the defender's detection, so the defender can launch missiles or fire lasers, depending on whether the attacker is maneuvering or not.
If the goal is total annihilation, the attacker will pelt the planet with RKVs until they run out ammo, or until the defender surrenders. Perhaps, the defender has sent out its own fleet to the attacker's planet, and is similarly sieging it with RKVs. We have mutual destruction in this case.
If the goal is more limited, and the attacker isn't willing to indiscriminately bombard the planet, then there is a stalemate. The attacker won't be able to overpower the defensive installations. The attacker could try sending automated drones or missiles at the planet, looking for installations, but the defender could probably shoot them down when they got too close. The attacker might send maneuverable drones equipped with lasers. The defender would counter with maneuverable satellites.
Enough said.
In the past, a combat of prophet vs prophet, to death the loser.
In the future, the Bible says a prophecy that there will be a last combat between the terrorific satanas and Jesuchrist on the hill of Medina during the age of Armageddon, for concluding which kind of empire will be reigned forever, either, the evil empire or the God's kingdom.
JCPM: without Alpha & Omega, it won't be possible.
I think it covered space battles over long distance at light speeds.
I did a lot of research for my own sci-fi novel, and this is what I came up with so far:
Maneuverability: The fancy maneuvers you see in the movies would be absolutely pointless. The smooth loops and curves you see in aerial maneuvers would be impossible in space, both because you need air to push against in order to smoothly change course, and because every course correction has a cost in both the fuel it consumes and the recalculation it requires. Remember, spacecraft don't have engines that are always on, but rather change course (after recalculating) briefly and then coast along to wherever inertia and local gravity take them. "Falling off" of your gravitational current (a.k.a. entering a trajectory that carries you away from your intended destination, such as going against an orbital trajectory and thus being subject to local gravity) could be extremely costly in terms of fuel and time spent recalculating, so it would probably be more ideal to stay on course and slug it out.
Location, location, location: It would be impractical to conduct a battle in most areas in space, as the only way you could encounter another ship is if they are travelling in opposite directions (leaving a window of only a few minutes to attack, and no opportunity to collect any spoils) or have been travelling with you the whole time (and to address the obvious objection, "catching up" to another ship would be highly impractical, as your higher velocity will require a different trajectory to get to the same place), meaning that someone wanting to attack another ship will have to carefully select where to do so. Lagrangian points (wikipedia) and planetary orbits which allow for landing (a.k.a. don't contradict the planet's rotation) would be ideal points to stake a claim, both because other ships will have to come near them and because it's actually possible to stay in roughly the same place near them.
The fastest computer wins: To win a fight in space, you need to be able to hit the other guy while simultaneously either avoiding enemy fire or somehow blocking it. Both the firing solutions (you're dealing with distances which could range into light-seconds, velocities which could result in subtle time dilation, and local gravitational "geography") and any course corrections you make will require careful calculations, and the ship with the fastest computer will probably come out victorious.
The weapons will be very strange to us: the traditional Earth-based point-at-something-and-make-it-die weapons won't exist in space. Remember, I said that a battle could occur at a range of a few light-seconds -- longer than the distance between the earth and the moon. That means that any weapon which throws matter at a target is pretty much useless unless it can manage speeds of .25 C or above, or if you're fighting at point-blank range. Weapons used in an engagement would probably more closely resemble lasers or particle beams, although at closer ranges you could get away with other stuff (for the story I was writing, I described a nuclear blast directed by a parabolic force field, focusing its radiation and particle discharge on a single target). Missiles would have to be fitted with extremely powerful engines and targeting computers, and would probably be impractical. On the nastier side of things, dirty tricks like spreading antimatter particles along a target's expected trajectory or deliberately saturating the area with high-velocity debris would probably even things out nicely, but doing so would render the are you're attacking essentially useless for a few weeks as your trap disperses.
The ships would feel pretty strange, too: On a combat vessel, valuable resources like oxygen and water wouldn't be floating around waiting to be sucked out a microscopic hole or consumed in a fire. Most likely the ships would be pressurized with helium or another stable, easily compressible gas, and the crew would wear oxygen masks outside of the sleeping and
i believe that it would be swift, mostly silent, and altogether b0ring; at least, most research points in that direction. space combat would be carried out largely through autonomous drones, n0 manned aircraft, et cetera, et cetera. however, lasers are another story. if they somehow become a viable weap0n by the time all of this is carried out, i must make several comments: 1. i would pay anything to s33 the first practice in zero g with lasers. thr33 words- idiots in space 2. depending on the range of these lasers and their effectiveness in the vacuum of space, they c0uld be super effective or not very effective at all. i won't even go int0 the ridiculously p0litical aspects of space combat, though i will say that it is 0bvious that any combat in the near future would be betw33n countries of Earth, rather than any alien race clashing with a miraculously united planet. thank y0u for your time. ~spacetimeExecuter
thank you for your time. ~spacetimeExecuter
Aliens should be more intelligent than humans, they won't combat against humans on the Earth because Aliens deciphered Earth's prophecies that warn them the final possible consequences on the Earth as by example:
The humans did fool themselves: they didn't decipher the alien's prophecies.
JCPM: without Alpha & Omega, it won't be possible.
Drones and automated defenses would probably be the first line of battle. If they can do as good or better job as humans without loss of life, why bother with anything else? The US is already doing this in limited amounts today...
In the end wars are about territory and resources, so eventually it will come down to invading and occupying something of value (planet, moon, space station, whatever). Space battles would just be a necessity to get close enough to the real goal to accomplish that.
After a few items are hit, there will be a debris field that will be traveling in multiple orbits, and will do a pretty good imitation of high velocity kinetic projectiles. Then we have to wait until it all de-orbits.
It would be about the height of criminality to blow up a few satellites in Geosynch orbit.
And at the very least make it very difficult to put up new stuff.
I suspect that most space faring countries will be a bit hesitant, given that destroying your enemy is likely to destroy or at least greatly hamper you a little later.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Heat is the biggest problem.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php
What's being ignored here is the most fundamental aspect of space combat which is the objective of space combat. You can not discus the type of weaponry or propulsion methods with out discussing what they would be used for, the objectives they would be trying to achieve.
Space is too big to make most types of combat feasible. If there were a war between two planets then all of the fighting would happen in or near the orbit of the planet. The primary concern of the on planet government would be the defense of the planet and the only feasible way to do this would be to put missile launchers etc in orbit around the planet, as the area that needs to be defended gets larger the further out you go and thus the resources required to keep so many outposts maned would be impossible to maintain. On planet missiles would have to go through earths gravitational pull where it is at it's strongest so it makes the most sense to have all space combat originate from the planets orbit. All ships designed to invade a planet would be designed to wage war against missile launchers and ships in the planets orbit making "space combat" more similar to air combat simply higher up.
The attacking of passenger ships between planets, would ONLY happen once it had nearly reached it destination because it is too difficult to predict it's path through space and would be a waste of resources to send a ship to attack the ship with out any likelihood of actually hitting the ship. Thus ALL combat would be done near planets as there are no objectives in space. There is no reason for any planet to launch a large battle cruiser or space station out side of the planet's orbit.
The most likely scenario for space combat is simply on earth as it is now when missiles could be dropped from space to land targets. All war is designed around control of land resources. An air victory is helpful to gain control of land resources or area and thus space will simply become a continuation of that. However that will all happen in orbit of the planet.
The point is that all these discussions are mostly irrelevant because all space battles will be fought in the orbit of the planet and thus gravity will play a large role. And then there is the issue of falling debris. One of the unrealistic things about space battles in star wars and star trek is that the ships fall once shot, that wouldn't happen in the middle of space, but it would eventually happen in orbit. Obviously I'm not an expert about these things but I think it's important to take into account the OBJECTIVE space combat would be trying to achieve to figure out what it would look like.
"Space" combat will look like combat on earth, with people lasing other counties satellites on day 1, which will be the entirety of the space phase. The rest will use standard current surface tech, because we're too lazy to actually significantly leave the planet.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
...pretty much sums it up.
Remember the old "Star Wars" defense system that Reagan wanted a long long time ago? How could (anyone) dream that such a system could possibly work, given the far far inferior computers and sensors that they had (a typical machine had main memory measured in the MB, and processor speeds in MIPS). Even today, our best systems can only hope to knock down a few, primitive, warheads launched by Iran or N. Korea.
One BIG reason was because there was an invention that, had it been implemented, would've revolutionized space warfare (and ballistic missile defense); it was the nuclear bomb pumped X-Ray laser. Supposedly the (last?) brainchild of Edward (Dr. Strangelove) Teller, it was a completely new idea. It was perhaps the first time anyone figured out a plausible way to harness nuclear reactions (MILLIONS of times more powerful than any chemical reaction) into anything other than an explosion. (Remember that all the other fancy weapons; rockets, lasers, rail guns are probably using some sort of wimpy chemical or solar powered energy source. Even the nuclear powered ones have to store their energy in a battery before use; you'd have to store the energy from a nuclear reactor for YEARS before it would match what this released in literally a micro-second).
How it worked was like this. Take a small (100 kiloton size) nuke which output a lot of its energy as radiation (the exact opposite of the so-called "neutron bomb". Surround it with (many) long rods of a special crystalline material, dozens or more is ok. Then, aim each rod at a (presumably) distant target. Detonate the bomb.
The gamma radiation from the nuke will pump up the atoms in the crystalline material just like as in an ordinary laser the photo flash tubes pumps up the ruby crystal (but millions of times more intensely!). Then, in the nanoseconds before the shockwave arrives, the atoms will "lase" sending out an INCREDIBLY powerful x-ray beam down the axis (better make sure the other end isn't pointed at something you'd like to keep). Anything on the receiving end will receive a punch so powerful as to make any kind of defense or shielding irrelevant.
Accurate aiming, even at very distant targets wasn't going to be a problem because the beam spreads (as a function of the aspect ratio of the section of the rod). So, even if the target is moving, fast or evasively, you're still going to get it in the beam. Of course this spreading reduces the power of the beam but since it is so powerful to begin with, (it was powered by a NUKE) the range was tremendous.
When I first heard of this I dismissed the idea but then I remembered that Dr. Teller was one of the world experts in radiation pressure from nuclear weapons. He came up with the first practical (small enough for an airplane) design for an H-Bomb; by focusing the radiation pressure from a fissile bomb, it could be used to ignite a tritium-deuterium core. So his idea had some legs to it and became one of the primary pieces in Reagan's "Star Wars". As he proposed it, he'd put the X-ray nukes in missiles in submarines. Then, upon detection of launch by the enemy, these things would "pop up" and destroy the oncoming warheads with each blast. This solved two problems; first the U.S. wouldn't have to put any nukes (or any other weapons) in orbit which would violate the 1967 outer space treaty (amazing how Reagan, unlike Bush, respected treaties). Secondly, since each blast could take out dozens if not hundreds of enemy targets, it was an effective defense against MIRV's which (before Reagan negotiated the START treaties) was leading both sides to a very risky "first strike" scenario.
Well, as you know, "Star Wars" was never built, quite possibly because this idea was never practical. However, I never did find out if it was because the physics behind it didn't work out or because (as I said earlier) the computers and sensors of the day were not up to the battle management challenge. Consider playing a real-life real-time 3D missile command with tens of thousands of
Desert Story is regarded as the first space war (because of satellites), and after that, China got on the ball with anti-satellite weaponry to combat this, then the U.S. and China started developing space war tech. The documents on this are always interesting (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission) (Air & Space Power Journal)
Caustic Soda did a whole episode on this:
http://www.causticsodapodcast.com/2010/06/28/space-warfare/
If one of the regular coast to coast AM guests is to be believed (yeah, yeah) You can get a good pair of 3rd Gen. night vision goggles and see space combat going on all the time.
By the time a civilization reaches a stage on which they can build large interplanetary spaceships, they are also smart enough to know ways to profit of peace rather than war. Your question belongs more in a primary school classroom than in the real world.
No lasers, no torpedoes, no explosions. 1 capital "ship" with a "warp engine". The engine would "consume" the space occupied by the enemy, then assemble them as photons and Hydrogen left in the "trail".
The question being asked here in Ask Slashdot is ridiculous IMO, because it's simply too vague and open-ended. For a better answer, we need to know the following:
1) Who are the combatants? Humans vs. aliens, humans vs. humans, aliens vs. aliens?
2) What are the technological levels of the combatants? Present-day tech, FTL & phasers, or somewhere in-between?
3) What are the objectives of the combatants? Taking over Earth, controlling some land on Venus, what?
4) Where is the combat taking place? Here in our solar system, in some other solar system, in interstellar space?
Human vs. human war in space doesn't sound terribly realistic, simply because we're all living here on Earth. Why would we go up into space to fight it out, instead of going directly for each others' home territory here? Maybe if we're fighting some dumb proxy war where we have a "gentlemen's agreement" to limit the combat to space and not invade each others' earth-bound territories, but it still sounds pretty dumb.
Human vs. alien war in space doesn't make any sense unless it's far in the future and humans have star-trek-like technology, and at that point, your imagination's the limit as to what space combat would look like. Go watch any sci-fi movie (or rather, any sci-fi movie made > 10 years ago, since I don't think anyone's made any such movies in many years; the last was probably Star Trek: Nemesis) or read any sci-fi book to see different ideas of what it'd be like. Any of these ideas is probably about as valid as any other.
Human vs. alien war here in the solar system, not too far in the future, wouldn't be much to see; the humans would simply get slaughtered by the far more advanced aliens. But this doesn't really make much sense either because any aliens advanced enough to travel all the way over here (which would require a huge amount of energy) likely wouldn't need anything we have; they can just go get it at some more-convenient star system, or in their own star system, or just synthesize it. I think it's quite likely the only reason any aliens would ever visit us is to actually establish contact, not steal our resources. There's tons of resources right here in our own solar system, waiting to be extracted, if we'd just get off our asses and go get it (after developing some better technology, such as a space elevator). The idea of "unobtainium" like in Avatar is rather silly really.
War isn't that ridiculous in theory; in many cases, different tribes of people are fighting over either land or resources. Land and resources are both limited, and of course some land is much nicer than other land (i.e. south France vs. Sahara desert; one's a nice place to live climatically speaking, the other's almost completely unlivable). When those different tribes don't want to share, conflict happens.
With current technology space combat would look a lot like it did in the 60's. The Russian Salyut 2 was armed with a 23mm Nudelman cannon. They tested it twice, worked great.
Slug-throwers still make sense in space. Most of the weight is in the ammo which could be jettisoned prior to reentry. Bullets still work just fine in space. They'd be noisy (inside the spacecraft if still pressurized) and vibrate a lot but would have MUCH greater range and flat trajectory aside from gravitational influence. Would need to be recoil-less or would need some opposite thrust to compensate. Ground-launched craft would need to be lightly armored if armored at all for reduced launch weight increasing the effectiveness of the good ol' chunk-o-lead.
Lasers, phasers and anti-matter weapons would take too much precious power that's needed for other things with current tech. We have missiles and guns and you can be sure that's what we'd be using. A plasma missile would likely follow shortly after. Would probably need some work over time to find best gun oils for space use, etc....
Think less Star Trek and more a mutant cross between cold-war era Sub warfare at a distance and WW2 dogfighting with no gravity up close. The first "StarFighter" would probably be a Gemini with a pair of belt-fed .50's and MAYBE a couple guided rockets. Would make mince meat out of anything up there with ease. We could cram a pretty sweet targeting system in the space occupied by old-school 50's-era avionics and equipment these days. I could even see waist or turret gunners in anything with a large service module.
If we had something to fight over out there toward the moon and were afraid to lose it, believe me you'd see something like the above fast. Maybe an armed Apollo with a "Assault LEM".
Think a .308 is nasty now? Imagine a handful of .308 tracers with no air resistance flying at your tin can full of hydrazine and oxygen with nowhere to run.
Remember NASA, no life beyound earth. Remember the conservitive party, dumbing down our children, cutting funds for education, and instilling crusader principles to our governments, who believe that there is no reason to see, or learn of the face of god. Remember the people who believe it is better to live in a gravity well, rather then above it. Remember the dark ages are on their way again. The cold of the heart, and the hearth. We are going to become the food of the gods, not the creator of new gods.
The key problem is knowing where to find the enemy. We already have systems to hide our aircraft from radar - and since space is black, it's pretty easy to hide from visible light - almost all of the electromagnetic spectrum can be absorbed or randomly scattered to avoid reflecting any energy whatever back at the onlookers. Space is crazy-big - so unless you have some idea where each other are likely to be - you'll never have a battle of any kind except by the most stupendous coincidence.
Hence, the only battles are going to be around planets and moons and lagrange points and such - where you know the enemy is likely to be because they have to be precisely *there* for some special reason.
So - we must conclude that we have attackers who can't be detected approaching ground-based installations who can't move very fast because they have to be there for some reason. Slinging big rocks at them at ungodly speeds starts too look like an undefeatable plan for the attackers. There isn't really very much that the defenders can do about that - they can't easily see them coming (especially if you surround your rock with a black, radar-absorbing balloon). They couldn't deflect them if they could see them coming - and they can't smash them without turning one big crater into a billion half-inch bullet-holes - either will take out your city/mine/factory/whatever.
Hence we may deduce that the defenders are at such an ungodly disadvantage that they have to leave their planets and live their lives out in randomly selected locations in space. If both sides do that then they are so astronomically unlikely ever to find each other that war will be more or less impossible.
Conclusion: There won't be any space wars. Sorry.
it would look a lot like submarine combat - endless outsmarting and repositioning - and then deploying of autonomous weapons. maybe railguns for direct combat.
Shoot something.
Wait a million years.
You sunk my battle ship.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Seal-healing hulls are already available for fuel tanks that get shot.
in think we mostly agree drones will be common. i see somthing in the vein of a SC2 Carrier. Large hulking capital ship capable of interstellar travel, containing hundreds of unmanned drones.
the drones rely on speed and evasive ability.
the capital ships primary weapons are designed to for limited fire support to deter direct attacks from drones.
If we can hit a moon of Saturn from the Earth, there is no reason we couldn't fire a hail of bullets intended to reach its target 1 month later, when we know it will be sitting there.
What most of the posts I have read are missing is the idea that resources are important. It takes years to get the resources prepared for space vessels, stations, and planetary outposts. Think about the state of technological warfare. It's cheap to run a DDOS attack, but doesn't achieve much. Same thing with physical attacks. You can blow your enemy up really easily, but you don't gain anything besides losing all their resources.
Instead, I expect to see espionage take a huge front seat. Social engineering will be important to the utmost. War has always been fought with information, public support, and money. The future will be no different.
So, playing the game Independence War has shown me that in deep space, your adversary is almost always in a straight line away from you. Why not accelerate away from the bad guy by firing bullets at it nonstop?
but then there's that problem of constantly losing mass.. Something that Spiderman has apparently found a way to get around..
Because of the vast size of space, ship to ship contact will be rare outside of planetary attacks. There will likely be no way of effectively protecting a planet from every angle, so it will probably be pretty well offensively driven at first. Unless faster than light travel is developed though, as distances increase, attacks will be expensive, and since they will be decades out of date by the time they arrive, more likely to fail.
Effective warfare will likely be more trade based. Trade coalitions will enforce a basic set of interstellar laws, or, when there are enough settled planets that trade restrictions are no longer effective, each planet will be functionally independent with no accountability to anyone else. hostility will be prevented simply by the costs associated with engaging in it and the risk of reprisal.
Give them a waste of energy as a gift, and they will get your wasted energy for another purposes. And you did waste much of your money and resources.
I think that only suicide U.S. astronaut in the war space is a chimpanzee trained by the U.S. forces for killing everyones that move in the outer space, but the silliest thing is that this chimpanzee wastes all their bullets without counting them for later shots.
As a comedy, WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
JCPM: in outer space, nobody did expect that the lasers will be frozen into lesser levels of their energies, then hitting against a silvered-siliconed penis-body is insensitive.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.100198-Space-Warfare-Almost-Everything-You-Know-Is-Probably-Wrong
Pretty much everything you see in movies is wrong. And in video games. And on TV. And read in books.
how to do this:
Blow up a satellite. The debris field renders any crossing orbit untenable.
Your bird hits a titanium fastener at combined 50,000 MPH and I don't care how big your Whipple shield is.
Plus we've all been stockpiling these munitions in GEO for a number of years now.
Even at the speed of light at long distances there can be an appreciable time lag of a few seconds. This would be enough to miss an erratically manoeuvring drone (and it would be a drone since humans cannot handle large accelerations and need air which is easily lost through holes). There is also the issue of laser diffraction which make long distance lasers unlikely.
The advantage with a missile is that it can have onboard intelligence and so correct for target motion as it gets nearer. So missiles will be an effective long range weapon, but almost certainly nuclear, not antimatter. The biggest issue with this is actually storage rather than production - we can make far more than we can store...although we cannot make much, about enough to warm a cup of tea at CERN.
I saw a movie of a space battle -but forgot the Name. There was a lot of noise, zapping sounds from the Lasers,
booming from torpedoes, crunching sounds from colliding space ships.
Now, how do you think they recorded those sounds in outer space if there was no sound?
Why I believe it will look exactly like this:
http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-M8XxLDd/0/L/i-M8XxLDd-L.jpg
Mines would be big - think autonomous boxes that sit quietly playing asteroid until something big that lacks the FOF beacon comes into range.
Classical mines operate on the principle of detecting without being detected and then exploding at very close range.
Getting a manoeuvring object close enough to the target that exploding would cause any damage is unrealistic in space. Without a medium (air or water) to transmit a shock wave, your bomb must get very very close and space is just too big for this to happen with any plausible mass of mines.
I'm assuming that the target is an actively manoeuvring military vessel. Satellites run into trouble with space debris all the time but that is because the satellites have predictable, over used orbits, no ability to detect foreign objects and very limited ability to manoeuvre.
More realistically, your "mine" would be an automated firing platform. Once the enemy is detected, an active assault (laser or missile) is launched.
Seriously, didn't the Chinese set off some shotgun shells as a satellite killer experiment?
It doesn't take much, if you can put yourself in retrograde orbit, maneuver for near collision and then throw a rock out the window, you'll do pretty well at killing any manmade object in orbit.
http://gizmodo.com/5426453/the-physics-of-space-battles
All your questions answered by an expert.
it will be done via computer viruses. All vehicles that need to communicate will be attackable at light speed by infected communications. All conceivable vehicles will have computer links, not just "radios"... so if you can infiltrate their comms, you win. This is both manned and unmanned vehicles, stealth or hidden or whatever.
>
My X-laser won't even know your mirror is there.
Bullets have a number of problems, including hauling mass into space, and recoil. Recoil is something that is prohibitive and people in this thread aren't thinking about what this means.
Space, to borrow a phrase from HHGTTG, is big. In all likely hood, you will be shooting at things many miles away and traveling at high velocity. While a few 9mm pistol rounds will be quite dangerous to an unarmored space craft, the kick they will deliver will make long distance accuracy challenging. If you go this rout, you will probably have fire a single round, pause and correct the firing solution for the micro torques you have put on your ship, and then fire again. (Guns will probably have to be mounted on an axis that goes through your centroid, to maximize accuracy). It the target corrects course at all, your shots will likely miss.
Missiles would probably be better, since they can track and correct. They could be built to be fairly small, since they don't need massive engines to propel them through thick atmosphere. They could also extend electronic surveillance coverage by broadcasting what they see as they travel to a target. In Space, which we have agreed upon as big, this is an important thing to consider.
Parent post is best suggestion: High energy laser pulses to kill crew outright and leave space ship recoverable. Electromagnetic radiation is fast and accurate, which is important when ships are traveling at thousands of miles per hour.
Most space combat will be like modern air combat or sub warfare - You spend a lot of time and effort to see them before they see you.I could see AWACs space controller sats feeding info to drone carriers manned by humans. Ultimately, a lead sphere will end up being the unsinkable battleship, with a lot of soft dense armor to absorb kinetic rounds, and absorb EM weapons. Probably layers
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
One massively large EMP....
game over. For both sides.
When I was in high school a few friends and I tackled this for a game design. We decides lasers were too impractical for the energy required to do any damage so we went with rail guns and "kinetic rounds" (bolts) as an explosive propellant would send ships flying across the galaxy. Battles took place at a distance and we eliminated the need for fighters with our story line.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
It will consist of a lot of math. A lot of orbit and trajectory calculations, and firing missiles or even just chunks of metal at each other. Kinetic weaponry works pretty well when you think about relative velocities. Think about that scene in the beginning of Pitch Black when the dust particles punched a hole through the ship/captain's cryopod.
Better to be unarmed than to be a soldier.
The humans will be the losers if a space combat occurs.
And i've had a secret that won't say you about the tactics of war because the evilness is haven in a part of some humans.
JCPM: i'm a man of peace and i need a little kingdom of peace that nobody of the weaponed underground empire did give us one.
stealth.
Powered missiles with a substantial cryogenic coolant deployed on the enemy-facing side to make it as cold as background. Time from launch to impact is weeks.
There are rumors that there are already 'barnacle' satellite parasites existing today. That is, small enemy satellites, which, over time (weeks/months) saddle up to somebody else's capital satellite (usually communication/surveillance) and just stick on, and listen in. In the event of hostilities.....
Read the Honor Herrington books. They are basically the Horatio Hornblower books, but in space.
With "fast ships" the time lags experienced by a viewer of a combat means that the combat is over before you can join. So it all will recede back to the age of sail need to know your enemies and guess their tactics. Sure there will be atomic pumped X-Ray lasers but they will need to be detonated from physical missles except in the closest of quarters, and will have issues very like manuvering and fireing cannon.
The oribital mechanics will work very much like issues of wind since chaning direction is incremental when in a stellar orbit. Ships will want the favorible lower-to-the-star orbits so they can sweep out degrees of arc faster, which will be very like having the favorible position "up wind". etc.
The books are quite well written, but there will be a lot of very tense "long" periods of waiting.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
There was a book I read some years ago, perhaps someone can recall it's title. The main character is a computer programmer who is enlisted to revolutionize space combat.
Someone has built a ship that basically has rail-gun-ish cannons down one side and thrusters down the other. The ship is full-to-brimming with cannon balls (innert spherical metal etc). The goal is to synchronize the thrusters and cannon so that the ship can create a "virtual surface" (non-stationary warped palnar segment) of moving balls in space which would be launched into the predicted paths of moving ships. The composite delta-v of the masses and the ships would be terrific, but unlike missles and guided municians, there would be no energy output useful to detect the actual palcement and path of the sheets.
Ship-to-ship kenetic bombardment could actually be pretty-damn effective.
(The plucky resistance couldn't afford to make missles and guided weapons, and even if they could, they didn't have the necessary industrial complex. But they could make these 20lb ballbearings. The programmers challenge was to get all the rail guns to fire in concert with eachother and the thrusters, the original software sucked because if there was a mis-load or jam the entire volley would not fire etc. Good reading. Wish I could remember the title.)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Easy. Elite. Pilots of the ships would be obliged to play classical music while in combat, Night on Bare Mountain for preference.
Space destroys meat. Any space combat is going to be about preserving functionality. The less meat you need to protect the more likely it is you're going to survive.
You'd both compute your fleet's offensive and defensive capabilities and then the offensive and defensive capabilities of the other side and then one side will surrender. Naturally.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I like to think about how space combat would work using only limited adaptation of existing technologies.
Would lasers be feasible? There are laser weapons now, but their energy requirement is prohibitive. There are chemical lasers, but the fuel for these is expensive and volatile, so laser use would most likely be limited at least. The military application of lasers at this point is almost entirely defensive: lasers are used to destroy incoming projectiles.
How about simple kinetic projectiles, like bullets? The main challenge is the vast distances involved in space combat: aim would have to be incredibly precise in order to hit a target at great distance. However, given such precision, dumb mass projectiles would have practically unlimited range without any meaningfully-dense interplanetary gas to slow and alter their motion. Also, the shape of these projectiles need not be aerodynamic to ensure straight flight, so you could engineer your bullet into all sorts of interesting shapes in order to inflict maximum damage on enemy craft.
And what of smart projectiles, like guided missiles? The guidance systems might use IR (honing in on engines, generators, and other hot systems) or radar, like conventional guided missiles. Or, the missiles could be told to go to a specified set of coordinates and simply correct course based on a known network of satellites or some such thing, overcoming the need for incredible precision I mentioned concerning dumb projectiles.
Explosive payloads might be used, but simple kinetic missiles might also be effective enough. Missiles might not need constant thrust, although constant thrust might be nice since the velocity of impact would impart energy... it really depends whether you need to punch through armor or just tear apart a flimsy satellite/spacecraft with shrapnel.
Maneuvering is a bit of a trick, since the established technology of using fins or vanes to change course would not work. You could use little directional thrusters with pressurized gas, but such a complex system might be expensive and unreliable. You could have a single thruster (removed from the center of mass) with two degrees of rotational freedom, although controlling rotational momentum with such a system might take a decent amount of computational power and sensors. If it were me, I would simply include two internal circular masses (perpendicular to one another) and rotate them to adjust the orientation of the missile. The control would be easy (simple PID model would probably do the trick) and the system would be simple and cheap enough to rely on.
What sort of craft would you use? While I agree with many posters that remote-controlled drones would be appealing, I think in certain circumstances line-of sight could be an issue (especially around planetary bodies). Manned craft seem silly, though, because of all the systems required to support human life. Maybe manned command modules could be used to control fleets of robotic craft? The control module could maintain a line-of-sight by maneuvering itself, but keep far enough from the battle to avoid the need for weapons.
Autonomous fleets might be possible in the future, but from what I know that's still a ways from actual deployment in our current terrestrial drone operations.
Clouds of nanite swarms.
But... this probably will not happen. ever. To expensive, to much time , there wont be any 'fast' combat.
If we get to the point where we can garner the energy requires for lasers..then are systems will be able to defeat those system.
We will have AI, which will build to be optimal solutions and a counter solution, ad the AI will be the same everywhere because there is only 1 optimum solution for every encounter type.
Of curse, dynamic changes will happen, but for an AI, the change will be slow and predicted because will will have a lot of time between calculation and real world firing. I mean, milliseconds to maybe 2 seconds.
right now Arial combat will happen in a 100 miles cube. In space, ships will be light minutes away.
The combat on the ground is'r realistic for a space faring races, because we would just drop rocks. very very large rocks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Read Peter F. Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction". It's a cross between SF and Fantasy (so I hope you like fantasy), but on the SF side of things, he get's space combat mostly right.
- Bertus
I think HH had the right idea about space battle.
While the bad guys (defending the dictatorial rule from Earth) in orbit thought "rockets" for space comabt (they had backdoors into the existing rockets' control, so they did not fear them), the revolutionaries (the protagonists) attacked Earth very unconventional: They turned any available piece of iron in the asteroid belt into different-sized balls (just melt them, they'll form into perfect spheres in zero G) and shot them with railguns towards a pre-calculated point where earth would be at the time of arrival. The small iron balls went unnoticed until they just wiped out earths orbital defences.Without making any sound.
Interesting replies, but I don't think space combat would be anything like that. First of all, in the age of interstellar travel I don't think anyone would send human pilots to bash each other skulls in. Autonomic vessels and remotely controlled machines will likely be used. Furthermore, I don't think direct confrontations will be the thing of the day. It is much more efficient to shut down a complex machine than to destroy it - I reckon spaceships will be a lot more susceptible to electronic attacks against its computing and communication systems.
Spaceships will have to be heavily shielded from all types of radiation, so energy beam based weapons will probably be ineffective. Missiles will probably be used, but in open space it is a lot easier to counter them - a guided laser beam for example. My bet would be on a high power cannons, shooting projectiles at incredible speeds, much like firearms today. Considering the nature of space, there could be stationary weapon platforms capable of transmitting incredibly powerful laser beams across the galaxy.
Where would you fight, in space around earth? About what? Laser works really well in space, small projectiles can be devestating in space. You don't want to go through all the trouble for a fight that lasts 10 seconds imho..
When you can accelerate a pack of micrometeorites to a high-enough speed, you don't need to be particularly precise in your aiming; when you're aiming at something travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, you don't need a vast amount of mass. And the aim is to degrade hull integrity, as a starship breaking up from braking stress at speed is such a pretty sight!
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
With the message:
"All your base are belong to us"
Allowing for some form of FTL that has no impact as a strategic weapon is already a total fabrication, so we would have to look at systems where there are more than one habitable planet. Infowar can happen at lightspeed, but I feel that infowar is outside of the scope of 'space battle'.
To me 'space battle' implies the idea that there is territory worth fighting over, in space.
As I see it, the only territory that is worth fighting over is something capable of yielding resources.
So, the most precious resources are found on the inner planets. Rarer still are naturally occurring (cheap) habitable conditions - so space battles are more likely to happen on-planet rather than off-planet, as battles are expensive.
Planetary defence plays a part - so if high atmosphere defence against an invasion fleet counts as a 'space battle' - then you could probably see that.
But the invasion fleet would not be 'manned' - it would contain lightweight payloads to incapacitate the population. So probably some form of biological warfare attack.
Likewise very low mass objects have an advantage in that they don't burn up in atmospheric entry. So some sort of very hardy vacuum-survivable biological agent being dispersed across a planetary atmosphere- or (if there is diplomatic interplanetary travel) a biological 'suitcase bomb'.
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Sounds a lot like a the trilogy of books by Harry Harrison - Homeworld, Wheelworld, Starworld.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
a) manually aiming (as in Star Wars) would be ridiculous, given that computers would be better employed to hit first time every time.
b) you don't want the enemy to blow up, because bits of debris would come flying right back at you. Unless you've a way of deflecting it all.
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferris slug, feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an everest class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3% of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means- Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's first law?
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going til it hits something. That can be a ship. Or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your targets. That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution. That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it". This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung: Sir, yes sir!
Life itself is so ruthlessly contageous, that any earth ship that lands will start a biological war that will either completely take over another planet, or will die very very quickly to a superior life on that other planet, or unfavorable conditions. Even when species are introduced on another continent on earth, this happens. It is as unstoppable as the world's biggest army. Whether we like it or not, we carry thousands of other species with us wherever we go. Add a few additional ones to complete the mix, and the invasion is complete. You only need a small drone for that. There is no need to make a planet uninhabitable. Just terraform it, and there is a big change that all existing life goes extinct soon enough (either that, or we lose, and declare it uninhabitable, and move on).
As for the space warfare - I think it's just a matter of how much "fi" you want to put in the sci-fi. With current technology, we would probably just run out of juice before any real fighting starts. It wouldn't be space warfare... it would be orbital warfare, and space debris is the primary weapon there.
If you reach a point where you can access space on a meaningfull basis, my guess is that you stoped being stupid enough to make war. That is you passed the self destruction barrier. Conversely, if you are still planning war with a slightly higher level of technology than ours, I don't think you have time to deploy to say the nearest solar system without some one destroying the planet you just left....
All you need is a few LEO nukes and you win
Intelligence
- Deploy active/passive sensor net in an area or in an orbital plane. Used for detection and self positioning system. These could be micro satellites (100kg) or larger satellites for more permanent gps like positioning system.
- Deep space communication network. Again, micro satellite network deployed to ensure that comms never originate from high value sources/targets
Defence
- Dodge projectile weapons by having automated, periodic, chaotic adjustments of direction (minor adjustments will be sufficient to avoid most dumb projectile weapons)
- Lasers to protect against inbound missiles
Attack
- Active threat - Missiles with appropriate guidance systems will be best bang for buck. 20% nuclear.
- Passive threat - Mines laid in the same orbital plane with minor adjustments. 5% nuclear.
- Lasers will easily pick of less advanced opponents (take out solar arrays, communication antennas, sensor probes, etc)
Spacecraft Board
- Multi functional docking equipment
- Flexible foam/sealant to protect against unexpected close quarter damage
- Improved visors, etc to prevent death due to a single punch or vehicle manuvuer.
- Quick release/abort mechanisms
- Puncture hull and Inject toxic gas OR waiting for it to bleed oxygen before you repair the hull.
- Projectile weapons for in cabin combat designed not to damage the hull. (Rubber bullets, etc)
- There is a whole other discussion around how you dock and takeover another space craft.....
Transport
- Using traditional thrust mechanisms are most effective for manoeuvres. Most other mechanisms (ion drive, solar sail, etc) will result in easy to hit targets OR lack of thrust.
- All such advanced drives (ion, solar sail, etc) will include normal propellant propulsion for high velocity/reaction manoeuvres
- Deep space combat will be very different to orbital combat due to the gravity well. Noone will want to fight in the gravity well unless you intend ground based assault. This will be based on the cost of escape manoeuvres.
All of this is based on current assumptions:
- No magical/thrust mechanism
- No magical gravity mechanism
With thrust comes
- Increased access to orbit (heavier construction capability)
- Increase capability to create nuclear powered spacecraft (like a nuclear powered submarine/aircraft carrier)
- I would argue that a submarine has a more harsh environment at depth
- Increased manoeuvrability
- Increased armour capability
- Less dependency on solar power (bigger reactor)
Without magical thrust
- poor efficiency of combat in orbital well
- cost constrained for all material
- more fragile craft
- limited number of manoeuvrability based on total volume of fuel before catastrophic failure
With no magical gravity comes
- centrifuge based life support
- High G acceleration on emergency manoeuvres
- poor efficiency of combat in orbital well
With magical gravity comes
- simple craft design
- improved life support systems
To sum it up. Current space warfare will not be glamorous. First strike will kill. There is no reason you could not manufacture something the size of an aircraft carrier except.... for the fact that our manufacturing capability in space, with existing technologies, will not work. On that scale, we are probably closest to manufacturing using 3d printing/resin based asteroid mining than a ground based build and hoist mentality.
Given the scale of space and the ease of refracting light, combat in space will probably resemble long-distance submarine warfare more than anything else. Silent light-refracting source-seeking missiles guided by spherical cameras with intensely high resolution looking for occlusions (i.e., the silhouettes of ships passing in front of the stellar background.) Since it's so easy to coast, and ships would have to be superiorly insulated ANYWAYS, looking for heat signatures would require extremely sensitive instruments... but would probably be viable in tandem with silhouette detectors. All in all, it would likely be a matter of extreme hiding, long distance (many many thousands of miles at the closest probably, and more typically hundreds of thousands.)
Combat in space would be very similar to the geriatric fight scene between Rachel Singer (played by Helen Mirren) and Dieter Vogel (i.e. "The Surgeon of Birkenaufrom) (played by Jesper Christensen) in the 2011 movie "The Debt" -only less exciting.
Has no one here read Peter F. Hamilton? Personally, the Night's Dawn Trilogy is a pretty good indicator of space combat. (Maybe minus the voidhawks.) Fusion powered nuclear missles with multiple warheads along with electronic warfare pods fired over a broad area to disrupt space as much as possible. Although a direct hit would be nice, it's virtually a total defensive fight. Each one trying not to get hit by flooding the area with junk to hide from the guidance systems. The combat would be over in minutes, it wouldn't be one prolonged battle.
(And I would REALLY love to have a Blackhawk, but that's just me.)
Pax Vobiscum
Cruisers and Drones.
Given the cost of building and supplying spacecraft, and how sensitive they are to damage, the ships would be no larger or smaller than cruisers. Bigger is only a waste of ship and resources, given the amount of firepower we could pack into a cruiser. and fighters would not be able to pack enough firepower for the resources that go into maintaining the ship and crew.
The Drones would be deployable satelites that would orbit to the other side of whatever, and attack, then return to the cruiser.
Electronic warfare would be the most common weapon. Destroying the communications, navigation, and computers of an enemy space craft / probe.
Other weapons would include missiles, which can be fired without any significant counter motion on the craft launching it. Mostly I expect energy weapons would be used. A stellar cannon, which either concentrates light from the sun on a target from multiple mirrors, or collects solar energy and releases it all at once through some sort of Phaser.
I'm betting on "Babylon 5". But without the Jumpgates and aliens.
not sure if this was posted before but this website tries to show how a scientifically accurate spaceship would work, with calculations. It also includes space warfare http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/crossindex.php
Wouldnt concussive shock from nearby weapons fire cause all of gas in a pressurized environment to vibrate? So couldn't you still miss with relatively dumb ordanance and still make everyone turn into meat jelly?
Hosts of semi- or completely autonomous drones, dumped into systems from hi-speed attacking craft approaching at a significant fraction of C.
Very small, so that the energy they put out is low. Expendable, large numbers of vehicles. Some would act on attack missions (as their dropoff craft would have been detected) but most would sit gathering intel for a long (ie hundreds of hours) span to squirt to stealthed transmission drones out in the Oort cloud.
This intel would supplement long term observations, meaning that for ballistic targets - planets, orbital stations, etc - would be easy targets for attack by high-c mostly-dumb strikes from far outside the system, conceivably even ly away. So the idea of anything bigger being safe is absolutely farcical. In fact it's the converse.
So you end up with mutually-assured destruction, with the person shooting first having a huge advantage. Thus any civilization cognizant of this threat would have failsafe autonomous systems that were assembled (they hope) with enough circumspection and subtlety that they evaded original detection, and thus would survive the first-strike enough to make a retributive strike of their own.
The only way to avoid this would be to attack someone before they even know you exist or are at a tech level where they could effectively reply - a rather brutal level of pragmatic elimination of potential competition one can only hope is beneath a society that's achieved interstellar technology.
And that's the scary bit...when a strategic defense relies on a hope presuming the psychology of an utterly unknown and unknowable foe.
Like our world during the cold war and today, this annihilatory threat would (one hopes) preclude "massive existential space war" ala space operas, meaning that conflict could only ever happen by less-capable proxies, raiding, etc.
-Styopa
"Given our current technology and potential near-future technology, what would a future space battlefield look like?"
Not very interesting. It'd be a few sat's with nukes or other orbital based weaponry.. some taking on each other, and some ground-based anti-sat weapons... alot of disruption of space-based communications systems.
The problem with a 'space battlefield' is you need to be sufficiently spread out to have a middle to meet in with a 'fleet'. Mars.. perhaps.. but not the moon.. to easy to just direct fire weapons to/from the moon.. and it'll be probably 100+ years, sadly, before we have a large enough perm. settlement on Mars that they would have to worry about independence, and thus, the need for a space war.
I think realistically the only war that will happen in space in the near Human Future would be if some people get into a scuffle on the ISS.. :[
As for general 'future' sci-fi wars, I really like the Honor Harrington version of things.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Steve Jackson Game's system GURPS, released quite a few books around this topic:
http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/spaceships/
There is a very interesting discussion of realistic space combat from a board game called Attack Vector Tactical.
http://www.adastragames.com/products/adastra/av.html
The tutorial gets into a lot of what is going on and the energy levels required to achieve them.
http://www.adastragames.com/downloads/AVT_Tutorial.pdf
The biggest problem with really engaging in space combat is the energy required and the distances involved. Some of Larry Niven's Man Kzin wars stories (mostly written by other people) get into this a bit. Ships crank up to near C, accelerate a bunch of rocks to hit planets and zip through. You can't see them coming very well and you can't stop the rocks.
David Weber is the most entertaining writer to read. He follows good physics, but the energy output of any of his warships is so unrealistically high a single missile from the smallest Frigate is probably enough to destroy a planet. Seriously, excelerate a ton of mass to .5 C and hit something with it. I don't recall exactly, but missiles in the Honorverse can get pretty darn close to the speed of light. The other problem he has is convincing me that with all this stuff moving this fast that anybody can hit anything. But hey, I've read every book, loved each and everyone and am eagerly awaiting the next one due in March. (and if you search the attack vector tactical web site, they also have a game based on his universe and the AVT movement system)
Lots of slow, tactful maneuvering and maybe an occasional kill shot.
Who own the Moon, they will throw every lunar rocks on the Moon onto the space in direction into the Earth, and when they reach the Earth, the humans (almost civilian) and living beings will be attacked by these lunar asteroids.
JCPM: the rules are very strict, so that peace is more prioritary than any war or force-based attack that use also the outer space.
Other the space ships, is assume the combat would be something similar to whats described in the book, "Ender's game", where the use of tow lines, lasers, and what not (been a long time since I've really read the book) all come into play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game
Drones. And hackers hacking into each others drones. And why has hardly anybody mentioned electronic warfare? Why destroy an expensive drone when you can disable it's electronics and render it useless or confiscate it?
It would be like Babylon 5 or S:AAB. Hurrah!
Imagine this:
1. a bunch of stationary satellites/vehicles with rockets, laser, whatever. Cause aggressive maneuvering in space hasn't been done yet, so the Math/control systems aren't there yet, nor the MechEng problem is beyond the scope of current tech.
2. a bunch of guys in a room somewhere in Vegas, with 60" LCDs hooked upto a bunch of computers and joysticks, cozy armchairs, and NOC-style environment... operating the space vehicles virtually. Oh and a big radar dish in the backyard and FOXNews playing on the background TV.
THAT is what space combat will be like. Stop listening to those creative Hollywood types.
First, projectile weapons will not be practical except to cause a craft to move and either collide due to pilot overreaction or expend all their RCS propellant. For this reason formation flying is a bad idea. Likewise, guided missiles will be less practical because a skilled pilot can make the missile expend it's limited propellant. Area effect weapons similar to flack may be used to good effect, but would render the area impassable due to debris, which would form an expanding cloud of area denial. The best course of action is a high power laser to knock out specific systems, then capture both the ship and crew wholesale.
I imagine space combat would be similar to submarine warfare: dedicated weapon platforms roaming about in a delicate ballet of ambush and guerrila tactics.
Without the benefit of reflected light, most objects would be virtually invisible; thus illumination discipline would be necessary to reduce visibility as much as possible while manuevering in the shadows of nearby objects (e.g. planets, moons, asteroids, etc.). While these platforms would probably use radar, the immense distances of space would make radar an unreliable targeting method.
Even if an enemy is detected within a relatively short distance, the three-dimensional nature of space travel, coupled with the limited range of weapons as we understand them today, almost guarantees that either the target won't be anywhere near the position at which they were detected by the time the ordinance gets there or the ordinance will run out of fuel before it reaches the target.
The weapons themselves present their own problems. Effective laser weapons would have massive power requirements that would be impractical in a space-borne theatre of combat. Mass drivers would also be hampered by power requirements, not to mention the ballistic nature of the projectile. If the projectile wasn't knocked off course by stray space junk or other forces, it would be fairly easy to avoid unless the combatants were extremely close to each other. "Oh no! There's a 50 ton projectile heading our way, Captain!" "Estimated time to impact?" "Um...30 minutes, sir." "Hmmm...give me a 2 second thruster burn on a perpendicular vector to the projectile path. In the meantime, I'm going down to the galley for a sandwich. You have the conn."
Guided weaponry could address the issue of trajectory limitations, but again we run afoul of energy requirements. Guided missiles and other smart weapons would need to carry a ridiculous amount of fuel to cover the typical distances one would encounter in space combat.
Therefore, in order for space combat to be even remotely practical, it would require that combatants constantly play a complicated game of long-distance hide-and-seek until they are basically on top of each other, at which point the victor would almost invariably be the one who shoots first - hence the similarity to submarine combat.
If you go to space, you have a goal, be it exploration or exploitation, or something.
Given that getting stuff up there is really hard and expensive, I predict that any space ware will not be controlled or conceived from 'mission control', but by those few, slightly mad, individuals who are out there. And they will probably be either over resources (you mean those guys over in moon base 3 have CHOCOLATE?!? Lets go git em!) Or boredom (think collage pranks gone mad)
So 'war' in space will be small scale, localised, and fought with improvised weapons.
And since life in space is so fragile, there could well be a very advanced honour system, like the knights of old, that there is a fair fight, but there are things you never do. Like vent air into space. Everyone needs that.
Another thing is physic laws as we understand them now apply or can we just come up with whatever. Say in the near future a country on Earth let call it the Commonwealth of Bank of America (Founded 2025) goes to war with a rogue space station orbiting our solar system between Earth and Venus that one thing travel time and communication are relatively manageable Except in the case of a weird exotic orbit off course. But what if that space station instead is orbiting Saturn or worse the outer edge of the solar system beyond Pluto at this point hostility is almost impossible because you got years for coolers head to prevail. Excluding Alien invasion or the discovery of FTL technology it more than likely that any war in space would be fought between two Earth country in low and high earth orbit maybe also on the Moon provided somebody find Oil, Gold or Diamond on that dead rock!
Combat fought between ships at extreme distances firing extreme delta-V nuclear-armed missiles at each other. The missiles would be multipurpose which would allow the wizzo to decide on their function either pre- or post-flight. The resulting configurations of these weapons would be anything from directed-energy blasts powered by the missile's nuclear weapon, to saturation area-effect weapons, and including the same sort of weapons but held in defensive postures, waiting for enemy ordinance.
You have to answer a few questions when it comes to "real" space combat. Do the ships have shields a la Star Trek, or are they just armored, pressurized hulls? If you assume shields, you have an integral arms race between the amount of power a ship can pump into it's shielding versus the amount of power an enemy can pump into it's own directed energy weapons. The gamers would want a balance, forcing the captain to choose between an offensive and defensive posture, but that probably doesn't reflect the real world.
Aside from all of this is the fact that unless you're talking about a species civil war, "real" space combat is very likely to be extremely one-sided as one space-faring race is almost guaranteed to be more advanced.
Space war would probably involve less bang and more planning.
If you had a problem with an other planet/colony/civilization you would start your attack well before the shooting starts.
Maybe you would introduce some sort of nanite or pathogen that activates on command. Then, when your negotiations go to hell you send the signal and, poof, the guys who would have pushed the buttons just fall over.
IIRC Dr. Travis Taylor, John Ringo and others held a symposium on this. Additionally over eleven years of debate on how space combat would work has been done at Baen's Bar in the Honor Harrington forum of David Weber. An incredibly short synopsis would be: the guy with the most bullets shot fastest wins.John Ringo goes into detail in the Troy Rising series.
Free Electron Lasers
Space combat: Unmanned drones operated by wire & local 'smarts'. Principal weapon: (relativistic) sand.
lost fleet series has some really cool space combat. Like the idea of putting ball bearings in the path of an enemy ship. Traveling at .01 light the bearings rip it apart. Also mention how easy it is for a ship traveling at .01 light to just launch a rock at planets or orbital stations and there is almost nothing that can defend against them.
Ronald D. Moore's "new" Battlestar Galactica depicted it very well, I think. "Kinetic weapons" i.e. machine guns firing what looked to me like 20mm explosive rounds and missiles, both conventional and nuclear ruled the day. Small craft movements were more realistic too. A Viper is essentially a one-man rocket that wouldn't bank and turn like an airplane. It would go in a straight line, then use RCS systems to pivot in any direction to bring its guns to bear on any target in a 360 degree sphere. Pilots would have to wear full-body pressure suits and sealed helmets to survive an ejection in case their ship suffered too much damage. Like Ron Moore said, "No ray guns, no bumpy-headed aliens, no psychic powers. Just regular people with real guns on an aircraft carrier in space."
I guess that principle goes back to the Pleistocene.
If we are talking in the context of a future that features FTL, wouldn't the simple fact OF FTL make space battles obsolete? If you get my logic, that is...
And if there weren't FTL, wouldn't that make space battles nearly impossible, aside from planetary/orbital fights?
To all the drone theorists, have you read any Fred Saberhagen?
sine puella vita suget
It would be stupoid to have bombers. When you release the bombs, where are they gong to go ?
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Anymore than there is aerial or ground or sea combat.
There would be different types of combat depending upon the actual locations, the goals of the parties, the weapons available, the tactics used etc. etc.
Space combat could include; edge of atmosphere individual & group actions, automated systems, short, medium long and ultra-long range actions, combinations & far more.
Ultimately, just as every where else, what matters is achieving the objective (in modern war the objective seems to be to generate income for political cronies--an ancient tradition.)
The most effective weapon is that which achieves the goal based upon whatever criteria are being evaluated.
For instance, take Iraq I.
A major problem with that invasion was that the top brass didn't inform their subordinates about the nature of the 'victory' required. Their subordinates, lacking contrary orders, assumed that their objective was to capture as much territory in as short a time as possible. Of course, most military objectives have a number of criteria to meet, and this one required the occupying forces to take the ground rapidly enough to 'almost' stop the Iraqi elite from withdrawing across the border--given cause to follow them.
By taking everything tool fast, this objective became impossible (politically.)
If resource utilization is of vital importance, a single, well-placed agent is worth millions of troops & their equipment, taking a fleet w/o firming a shot is far more efficient than pummeling it to bits.
Until cost per kg to orbit drops drastically, or we fabricate ships on lower gravity objects, spacecraft are likely to remain fairly fragile--like aircraft.
This fragility, the fragility of control system, life-support and lack of protection by distance (projectiles don't lose energy over distance in vacuum,) means that weapons can be fairly small and low-energy and be effective.
The fact that in space, "what goes around comes around" means that attacks using projectiles, or which result in large numbers of fragments are nearly as dangerous to the attacker as the prey.
Energy weapons (collimated EMF) are relatively weak weapons, which gain effectiveness in vacuum--but it becomes very important to know what else is in alignment in case you miss--and they also have much longer range in vacuum.
Maneuvering becomes more difficult too--an error of a few Kgs of thrust can put you thousands or millions of Km off course. Navigational errors, whether due to pilot error or enemy interference, can have the same effects.
Unless you're very close to a large gravity field, large shattering explosions are best avoided. An ideal attack would be to cause failure of life/support and control systems...leaving the ship intact for reclamation.
For close infighting of individuals, pointy & edged weapons are advantageous, though they will require changes to be useful in zero-g. Ship to ship actions would seem to benefit from grappling systems designed to both catch the other ship and knock out control/nav systems.
Most actions are more likely to be taken by automated or tele-operated systems--simply because it greatly improves logistics. Such actions are likely to target CCC rather than more substantial facilities--if only because it's a softer target which is likely not as valuable captured intact.
Of course, ground-based targets are the hardest to defend, and the easiest to attack and present the least risk to the attacker--nearly anything hitting at 25,000mph will do great damage to whatever it hits--and since it really matters very little what such an object is made of, ammunition becomes very cheap, Likewise, it is much more difficult and expensive to assault an orbital target from the ground.
"Real" space combat in physical terms, is likely to be very limited, very automated, and more likely to be used as we use nuclear weapons--as a bargaining point. Used more often to take control of facilities than to destroy them.
I would hope that,
Niven/Pournelle's FOOTFALL tried to imagine combat in orbit. Would also have made a hell of a movie, especially that launch scene in Bellingham.
the first should be: what do real women look like? you guys need to venture out
What is combat? A certain kind of confrontation that intends to bring about unambiguous results. Out of the different ways conflict is expressed, in space, combat is unnecessary. To be clear, space is the environment between large masses and without gravity. It is almost entirely without assymmetry, terrain, obstacles, and resources. Information and communications are the resource, line of advance and retreat. Tactics are common here with many near mass environments, but strategy is different. Humans cannot survive here, and the success of any remote deep space mission is largely proportional in the long run to robotic autonomy and the quality of subordinate decision making, policy and plan.
I invite those interested to review the materials collected under invalidentry at jonathanleonard.com
The best articles I have seen on the subject were written by Steven Den Beste of the pioneering USS Clueless back in 2004:
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/04/SpaceNavies2.shtml
-Pete E
the human species has made so much of a jackass of itself on Earth, we really need to think seriously about how we can be just as psychotic and violent in space !
A fleet somewhere with minimalistic spy drones to find the enemy... And when the enemy is found then launch a big attack with railguns that launches radar-invisible projectiles, preferably from another smaller craft that is always on the move to avoid detection or being able to trace it back to the fleet of the attacker..
Also, it would probably be a race of who would have the best sensors since space is quite large..
As long as you can remain undetected and keep attacking the opponent you will win..... A few Kg in a high a velocity will cause havoc for the opponent..
'current and near-future technology' translates as:
all the rockets, nukes, lasers, and manned habitats we have now, plus lasers that actually work, ramjets, scramjets, and spaceplanes.
which means that the only thing in space worth fighting over will be various satellites that provide communications and intelligence for earth-based battles. Plus maybe 3 astronauts who are doing pure scientific research on a space station, and who honestly, we can afford to lose if we're in the middle of an actual war.
Space battles will be really boring. Ground based radar and telescopes identify everything in orbit that isn't ours. We shoot lasers at it. If it doesn't turn into a cloud of debris or become a clearly fried piece of electronics, we launch a scramjet missile at it. The scramjet accelerates up to mach 30 as it leaves the atmosphere, on a parabolic intercept course to the sattelite. it uses small rockets to adjust final course, and releases your warhead of choice. The sattelite is shredded, and the scramjet falls back to earth in a few hours: it was never in stable orbit.
meanwhile, the enemy is sniping your satellites just as efficiently. Eventually, everyone gets frustrated with the entire exercise, and just launches terrain-following missiles directly at the enemies ground-control station and ground-to-orbit laser/rocket batteries.
Nuclear weapons will not be used in high earth orbit, since they aren't needed there, and the EMP is a nightmare. They might be used in upper earth atmosphere to EMP an enemy nations, or against hardened ground targets, like laser silos.
Next war, someone tries putting a space laser on a moving airplane, to avoid the nukes. The war lasts 50% longer while we try to find the enemies laser-plane, but it all looks the same.
For everyone who has stated ships would be "stealthy", stop smoking that stuff. Any ship would stand out against the cold backdrop of space, and every use of thrusters, weapons or any power systems at all would make the ship a bright, hot flare against this backdrop. Even small thrusters (like the ones used to orient the Space Shuttle once in orbit) would be visible from the distance of the Earth to the Asteroid belt.
Combat wold be predicted on how much delta V ships have, how fast they can accelerate (which is a measure of thrust; usually the inverse of delta V except for nuclear pulse drives), and power conversion technology.
High delta V ships will accelerate slowly but can gain great speed over time. High thrust ships can make massive changes in vector, but run out of fuel quickly (will have short range, or coast most of the way). High efficiency energy conversion equals beam weapons, while low energy efficiency equals missiles (carrying around a heavy powerplant and radiators for a limited number of laser shots makes no sense).
Nuclear pulse drive is the only way currently known to have both high thrust/high ISP propulsion, but since the energy for the thrust is in the form of pre packaged nuclear pulse units (AKA bombs), the ship itself may well be a missile carrier.
Lasers and beam weapons generate too much heat to be useful in space given our technology. An interesting discussion of this topic a few year back came up with the following: When the space shuttle launches and reaches orbit the bay doors must open so the ship can begin to dissipate heat. That high in the atmosphere heat is dumped by radiation not by conduction. If the doors can not open the shuttle would need to immediately land. So in space proper the heat from laser weapons would prohibit their use. As such the most practical weapon for future combat would be a missle as the ships would probably start too far apart for direct projectile weapons. Finding a ship in space would only require having a heat vision system. It would be very hard to sneak up on someone, more a matter of them not looking for another ship. Heat seeking missles would be a default choice. Possibly this could be like old sub warfare, shoot a torpodo/missle then try to go silent/cold to throw off the enemy shots. Deploying some noise makers/heat decoys.