Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
No such thing as perfect wide spectrum mirrors. Even with massive heatsinking they'll burn out as soon as anything worth the title of a space combat grade pulse lasers winks at them.
As for capital ships, unlikely, they are too big targets and no amount of armor will really prevent a dedicate enemy from putting peppering them with hyperkinetic pinballs.
Barring exotic supertechs spaceships would probably operate on the basis of being relatively small vessels, axial gunmounts with minimal cross section towards the enemies, very powerfull lateral engines and heavily networked to sensor and targeting grids to allow them to simply strafe to whatever tiny safe zone the sensor grid suggests is availible from that metric fuckton of spacegravel coming your way at 120km/s.
As for lasers, sure, they might work at short distances. but as soon as you can do a random walk flight and escape the beam targeting due to the 0,6second light-lag they too turn rather inefficient.
My vision of space combat is rather few ships, but very nasty and advanced supermunitions to blow the shit out of the enemy staging area/home base, and some additional to clear any ships or large munitions passing in the no-mans-land that is the cold black vacuum.
Every time someone makes that argument I think of stories like The Road Not Taken (summary: aliens show up, detect no FTL drives on earth, conclude we'll be an easy target, land, try to take over using matchlock weapons, get slaughtered, humanity realizes what a bunch of idiots we've been for not figuring out FTL travel on our own, galaxy is fucked....)
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
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.