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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?"
Lots of good data here, from reality to various levels of sci-fi.: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php
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
The fundamental problem with MASERs is the M.
Microwave.
What you need to bear in mind for near-term optical and RF beam weapons is the Airy Disk.
(see wikipedia).
In short - if you have something emitting lots of energy, it's generally a good idea to have it able to hit the enemy, rather than shoot off into a broad cone.
If you want to make a 1m spot on a craft with a beam of light, at 10000km, you need a mirror (about) 12 million wavelengths across.
For microwaves, this is about 120km across.
Generally problematic.
For green light, 25m.
And yes, this means that you need to focus the beam weapon - for the green light case, if you're off by 1000km in range, the spot grows to 3.5m, with a tenth of the energy per unit area.
Instead of melting the mirrored surface, it bounces off.
The maximum transmissible frequency of sound is proportional to how fast stuff is bouncing off other stuff.
Even in a fairly dense cloud, of 1 atom a cubic centimeter, this interaction happens around every billion kilometers, and thousand years.
This means that the highest frequency that can be transmitted over long distances is about one pulse every ten thousand years.
You're not making any sounds.