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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?"
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.
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).
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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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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.
Laser Beams.
That's all.
my mirror shields will take the day
I think this exchange about sums it up. Your great-great-...-great-grandparents could have sat around 150 years ago wondering what air combat would be like. With hindsight we know that the relative strengths of propulsion, maneuvering, aiming, homing, countermeasures, and automation have been constantly changing, with the result that air combat has looked different in each successive war.
There's no reason to think that the qualitative nature of space combat wouldn't change just as drastically as the eternal arms race continued. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not fun to think about or that there's nothing meaningful that can be said. The exercise is to make a few essentially arbitrary assumptions about available tech, and then try to extrapolate consistently to their implications. AKA writing sci-fi, minus the character development. AKA writing sci-fi.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Or ablative shielding, or maybe even spray dust down the anticipated threat axis. If the enemy laser emits visible light and you have an idea of the laser's frequency, maybe coat the dust particles with something of the same color, or spray multi-colored dust if you don't.
> and if they make it this far, they aren't going to waste their precious resources trying to kill us.
Actually, if they make it this far, killing us (if they are inclined to do so) would be a trivial exercise, like shooting fish in a barrel.
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.
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.
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
Better comparison -- Like spraying insecticide on an ant nest.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
Clearly, air combat will be fought with swords attached to the wingtips of your ornitopther because not only are reloading unfeasible mid flight, guns are also too heavy and unfit to hit agile targets such as winged men.
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.
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
So if you're envisioning combat to be far enough away that the light speed delay poses a problem, exactly what weapon are you envisioning that *doesn't* have this problem? If light is too slow.... Plus, if you're that far away, you're not going to be closing in on each other worth a flip. You've got plenty of time for your system to make guesses about how the target is going to move; it'll nail them sooner or later. And if you think running that laser takes a lot of power/fuel/whatever, what do you think rapidly changing the trajectory of an entire spacecraft for days on end (enough to move it out of the path of a laser in under 0.6 seconds) will consume? The reality is that if you're far enough away that light is too slow, then your combat will just be conducted closer.
Sooner or later nuclear weapons or similar would become part of space combat. There's so much empty space, true high population space colonies are so far off, and it's easy enough to set "no nukes near planets" as a MAD boundary, it seems it's going to happen. Aka, even if not a conventional nuclear weapon, with the increasing energy density demands required by space propulsion, you'll at least end up with something similar. They impose interesting constraints on space combat, as they're very different from on the ground. Almost no pressure wave, but the radiation threat is dramatically greater (nothing absorbs it and harder to block it in space)
Combat would presumably be a "you're on your own" thing. Reinforcements would take *way* too long to arrive except perhaps right near a planet or base. Space is just really, really big and most of your time in space, you're drifting or providing a constant accel.
Since all combat seems to be heading this way anyway, one might as well just say: Drones. Due to the light speed delay, they'd have to be much more automated, but again, we're headed that way anyway. Carrying around a person and a life support system is a *huge* mass and complexity penalty.
"Now we're getting to Science -- I love this!" -- Dr. Steven Chu, Energy Secretary confirmation hearings.
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.
Laser Beams.
That's all.
my mirror shields will take the day
Laser shots would be preceded by a barrage of Gummi Bears to stick to your shields and absorb the laser energy. Haribo's stock will soar due to military Gummi Bear purchases and they will become the largest and most wealthy company in the universe. Even larger than MicrAppleSoft who supplies the PADD handhelds for the fleet.
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.
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.
Guns, smart and dumb. Missiles. Bombs, smart and dumb. Maneuvering for position in gravity wells. People will discover that common, everyday tools make great weapons, with the application of imagination.
What will war look like? Just like it has always looked. Messy, confusing, chaotic, adorned with lots of blood and gore.
My question is, why does everyone ignore the guns? Guns will work wonderfully in space. Projectiles won't be deflected by dust, mirrors, or other fancy tricks. Guns have been pretty reliable since they were invented. Guns probably won't last long as a primary weapon, but they will always have a place in combat. Energy weapons won't rule until we've figured out cold fusion. Until then, guns will remain as end-game deciders, if nothing else.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
My question is, why does everyone ignore the guns? Guns will work wonderfully in space.
The main issue with using large guns in space is the recoil. A missile, for example, could be just tossed away from the ship with minimal impulse, and it fires up its own propulsion and goes on its way. Also, you really don't need the massive kinetic impact of a gun in space. Making a little pinhole in the side of a ship with a laser would be pretty effective in space and lasers would offer several other advantages over guns, including less recoil.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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
The "large" in "large guns" was not from my post. I used the word "guns". Unless, and until armored ships appear on the scene, a standard .30 caliber machine gun will be devastating to almost any spaceship. Even more so if the ammo is explosive and/or fragmenting. The ammunition is so cheap that you can spray and pray a large volume of space with the thing, for little cost. The greatest drawback to this approach is, the cost of transporting all that ammo. The problems with recoil are manageable with fire discipline, I would imagine.
Don't get me wrong here - energy weapons will be more and more important, militarily, as technology progresses. I just don't see lasers replacing guns for a long, long time to come. Even then, when the best equipped and best supported navies have cast away their last guns, less wealthy forces will probably create situations where their obsolete weapons can overcome the better equipped "Imperial forces".
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest as much. The US/NATO forces are vastly better equipped than the insurgents, but the US/NATO still suffer casualties. What's that term? "Improvised Explosive Devices".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Fancy name for a camera you have there.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Guns are great as long as you don't take into account one problem that they share with lasers: Heat.
Heat is easy to dissipate on a planet with an atmosphere. Heat sinks, whatever shape they might take, work wonders in an environment where you have a medium to take said heat and move it away. Be it air or even preferably water, any medium will do as long as it somehow moves heat away.
You lack exactly this medium in space. There is no way to dissipate heat but by radiation. Which is surprisingly little.
Your problem is that pretty much anything creates entropy, and hence heat. Propulsion solves this problem by simply tossing the hot stuff out behind. It might work if you somehow manage to transfer the heat from the propellant explosion into the shell, otherwise... well, try to get rid of it.
Lasers actually increase that problem. Since there's nothing you could possibly load with the heat and jettison.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually spraying a fine mist of water over the system is ideal -- the vacuum causes the water to boil away, absorbing 512Kj/Mol of heat away from the system, and the steam boils away into the vacuum. This water vaporization system is exactly how the Apollo astronauts kept cool on the moon.
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