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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
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.
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?
Lots of good data here, from reality to various levels of sci-fi.: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewarintro.php
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
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
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.
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...
And what would these missals contain? A harshly worded message from the Pope? I will grant you, though, that a missal travelling at some fraction of the speed of light would still do quite a bit of damage.
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
There's always the interstellar medium. There's not much of it, but its there. With all the cheesy "turn images and graphs into computer generated sounds" that I've had to suffer thru over the decades, that is one that I've never heard but would enjoy hearing. Sample, Fourier transform, play back at a substantially accelerated speed, all done.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
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.
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
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. :)
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!
I'm pretty sure missals make a "pew pew pew" sound.
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".)
Slow news day, eh?
Yeah, go ahead, just dare them to post yet another raspberry pi article. Remember when we had to sit thru 3 e-ink display astroturfs per week? Ugh. Weird as it is, at least this doesn't get posted on a regular basis... thats why I upvoted it in the firehose.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Laser Beams.
Won't work; the sharks can't survive in space.
paintball
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.
Given an infinite amount of computational power and tech, simply shoot the rail round out of the "sky" with one of your own rounds. CIWS is old/ancient stuff on naval ships, I can't imagine something unimaginably more advanced not being deployed.
That works against long range, because its so easy to lock and and pop them enroute. There will exist a short range where one side's super-CIWS will lose its control loop, then the other side wins. I would imagine that intel info would be very valuable...
Too far away and its too easy to dodge the ship using maneuvering thrusters. A near miss by a millimeter means nothing in a vacuum.
Whichever side has more railgun rounds fired per minute/second, wins, alternately, he who runs out of ammo first, loses, most likely.
Also deployable chaff. Have you ever seen a .45 cal nearly subsonic round after it goes thru a target, it practically looks unfired assuming it hit nothing too hard. Have you ever seen a hypervelocity off the shelf .22 cal round after it hits a blade of grass? No, you haven't because it shatters into dust. Thats at low supersonic range. At mach 25 you hit a piece of mylar chaff and that projectile turns into plasma dust and there's no effect more than 10 feet away. So I expect to see lots of "junk" in space. Maybe even physical shields.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
...remember that the enemy gate is down.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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.
WOOSH!
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.
What does 'whoosh' sound like in space?
I'm surprised no one has brought up submarine warfare for comparison here. When in a sub war, one does not try to destroy their opponent. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And THE enemy is water. Let the enemy in is the name of the game. Same with space. Vacuum is the enemy. Let the enemy into your opponent's ship and then sit back and watch the show. (for as long as it lasts anyway)
Space introduces dynamics as unique as underwater. Craft can be insanely delicate and lack any armor and still be a potent force. Range is dictated by your ability to detect/track your enemy (without becoming a beacon yourself) and to focus laser and other particle weapons at long distance. Stealth is very important.
So I think it's fair to say that any hit with a kinetic or explosive weapon would be fatal. Point-defense against missiles would be mandatory because it would be trivial for even the smallest ship to launch a few dozen little missiles that fan out in a very wide trajectory and track you. Mines would be big - think autonomous boxes that sit quietly playing asteroid until something big that lacks the FOF beacon comes into range.
Due to the extreme decompression risk, crew would probably wear very minimalistic suits that carried very little air and power but could be tethered at their stations, and drop the face shield down in case of breech, to prevent a small breech from voiding the ship. Trying to armor critical areas of the ship would be mostly counter-productive because more mass means less maneuverability. The suits the crew wear may even be similar to flight suits that can help with high-Gs, allowing even greater maneuverability.
I think current sci-fi fighter designs are closer to realistic. Babylon-5's star-furies showed excellent insight, I recommend looking at those for reference. Those also showed how ships need to be able to maneuver in zero-g, featured crew in suits, etc. The only thing not really serious there were the energy "pulse guns". But limited ammunition and fire recoil makes sci-fi space battles a lot less interesting. I think we need to break away from the "pulse gun" concept in sci fi fighters, it's a tired crutch that's unlikely to ever become reality.
A lot of this is considering larger ships. Probably the only "big" things will be moon/asteroid bases and the occasional "space dock" carrier-type large ships, I don't think a "capital class" space battleship will be anything short of a nuke-magnet. (again reference several examples in B5, bigger ships generally lost to smaller ones, for good reason)
The other crutch is unlimited energy, particularly in the fighters. Capital ships could have reactors, but at a great weight and size penalty. I think fighters are going to have to rely on smaller consumable fuel. Fuel logistics will be big, considering the difficulty of getting fuel into orbit or acquiring it in space. Other different ways of storing energy will probably be found, such as being able to produce hydrazine from raw elements found in space, with the synthesis (energy input) from solar power.
I could probably muse about this for several more pages but I'll take a break now I think.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Offensive ship minimizes defense area by being needle like with weapons/CIWS launchers at the tip. Nice and long... if you get to flank it, its dead, but point on its indestructible and and dish out amazing damage per exposed frontal area.
Defensive ship tries to minimize its surface area from all directions so its a sphere. You don't gain much by sneak attacks or flanking maneuvers on a sphere. I'd be a smart ass and make it as featureless as possible... Am I gazing into an engine nozzle, a railgun hole, or a nanite dump port? In attack mode you spin with the equator at the enemy and the poles in safe directions, to maximize how often each railgun at the equator can shoot. In deep space if you meet a sphere, they're probably cool, but if they start the "as the world turns" routine, then you'd best get the H outta there.
Maybe that's how star trek always seemed to know if they're friendly aliens or angry aliens. If it looks like a ball, they aren't gonna attack. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at them sideways, they're dead if you want so they'll be friendly at least for awhile. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at the pointy end, its "You have no chance to survive make your time"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yeah, the "silent space combat" meme comes across to me akin to the "there's no ice in Iceland and no green in Greenland" meme -- things people say to try to sound smart that are based on elements of truth but which get taken too far. Sound may not travel through space, but a supersonic-propagaing sphere of compressed gas from high explosive warheads do. A missile slamming into your spaceship sure as heck is going to make some noise (even a laser ripping it up). A shower of debris from exploding craft near you is definitely going to make noise. Etc. And spacecraft are often (at least with current tech) rather noisy places to be to begin with; sound isn't dampened well. So yes, "sound" doesn't travel through space effectively, but that doesn't mean space combat will be quiet.
"Now we're getting to Science -- I love this!" -- Dr. Steven Chu, Energy Secretary confirmation hearings.
The TSA will take away your guns when you board.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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?
Probably not as effective in space. Submarines have to handle tens of atmospheres of pressure differential, spaceships only one -- and that only in crewed areas.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally someone mentioned the debris problem. >200 posts about kinetic weapons and flak shot and nukes and nobody considered the crap that misses is just going to come around in orbit and hit your back. The oft-posted Wikipedia article is on the Kessler syndrome.
I expect actual space combat to be almost entirely electronic warfare. If you can take control of a satellite, you can simply program it to de-orbit itself, possibly onto a target of your choice. The most effective physical ordinance would be a "robotic end-of-life drone" with a de-orbit engine that would simply attach itself to an enemy satellite and make it fall into the atmosphere. There is no way anyone hoping for anything less than Armageddon is going to start firing more conventional weapons than an occasional missile (as the Chinese have).
Of course, the same thing could be said about nuclear weapons on the planet's surface, so there's no telling how far a Cold War-style arms race would go in space. It is simply a logical extension of the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. But again, it's a lot more likely that jamming, espionage and hacking from orbit and the ground will be used to disable a space asset. Of course, you could program a dead-man switch on your missile satellites so they go off when they lose communication, but we learned not do that from Dr. Strangelove.
It probably will be like subs in that victory goes to the sub that makes the detection.
Play Command HQ online
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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