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Aircraft Carriers In Space
An anonymous reader writes "Real-world military conventions have had obvious effects on many sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows. But how does their fictional representation stack up against the evolving rules of high-tech warfare? In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, a naval analyst discusses some of the technological assumptions involved in transposing sea combat to space combat, and his amusement with the trope of 'aircraft carriers in space.' He says, 'Star Wars is probably the worst. There is no explanation for why X-Wings [fighters] do what they do, other than the source material is really Zeroes [Japanese fighter planes] from World War II. Lucas quite consciously copied World War II fighter combat. He basically has said they analyzed World War II movies and gun camera footage and recreated those shots. Battlestar Galactica has other issues. One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?"'"
I always liked how space combat was portrayed in Babylon 5. It mostly adhered to proper physics of spaceflight, and the battles always seemed to be more realistic to me. I know that is subjective, but it seems it was the best of anything on TV or in the theater. Don't even get me started on Star Trek. It makes Star Wars look realistic and that's hard to do.
Can you imagine what those shows would have been like had they tried to apply science as we know it?
If you'd like a try, there is a series of books about "Black Jack" Geary that has FTL combat. It's actually quite a good read from a naval combat in space perspective with light speed weaponry + kinetic weaponry + trying to shoot at things that are moving up to 0.1c and what not. But, if you're not into that kind of thing it's got to be a horrid thing to read.
But they do address the few minutes away FTL issue, but it's because you can only enter/exit a system at certain points so unless you're going to turn around and leave you can't micro jump at them.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
We have to differentiate between "made for the screen" and books: Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars were made to look pretty. Everyone can cite their fave SciFi books, but I'll just go with Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, who eloquently asserted that interstellar war was a complete waste of effort, then goes on to write one book where (wait for it) a bunch of folks decide to wage interstellar war.
Three light minutes is a long way away, and the Cylons weren't infinitely advanced. They were only somewhat more advanced than the humans, who, aside from their jump drives, aren't much more advanced than us. Could you examine 360x180 degrees of sky for a kilometer long object at 54 million miles away within three minutes? I don't think so. Further, there is a reason they kept jumping away. They would make a few quick jumps and the Cylons would need a trillion times as much manpower to find them.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php
Space is 3 dimensional.
Space is FUCKING HUGE!
There is no stealth in space.
There are no quick course changes in space.
Modest props to David Weber, who introduced carriers (for fairly good reasons, mostly having to do with life support and cost) to his Honorverse.
And then, as he spent more time working out the actual dynamics of combat in his universe, rapidly reduced their combat utility, shifted their mission roles, and generally de-emphasized them from their projected value.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
As usual, when it comes to nitpicking science fiction, assumptions as bogus as those in the fiction get applied.
In BSG - for instance - every time we see observation of enemy ship positions, the sensors used (DRADIS) appear to be active sensors, not passive. A cylon basestar jumping 3 light minutes away from Galactica wouldn't observe its presence for six minutes. At least in that show, such vast distances weren't particularly useful.
That's where the inevitable "well, they should've" speculation comes in. Kinetic kill weapons should be used, right? Passive projectiles from far away with massive velocity just smash into where a target is/was/will be. Okay, well, the counter-speculation kicks in with "if anyone used that tactic, it would be SOP to have all ships injecting a random factor into their movement".
Blah, blah, blah. All of this misses the fundamental truth: this is all about entertainment. Accuracy isn't necessarily entertaining, and in the case of space battles, very likely wouldn't be entertaining at all if it were utterly realistic.
"Oh no... he found the
Don't get me started on how transporters are not used properly in Star Trek...
a submarine is a vessel designed to hide under the water, which obscures your vision and forces you to use capricious sensors like sonar. Space, on the other hand, is wide open, and any ship putting out enough heat to keep its crew alive stands out from the background, if you have enough time to look.
In space the issue is not being hidden but being far away. Stuff shows up here at Earth all the time that we weren't expecting, and a whole lot of us have nothing better to do than to watch the skies. Warships would likely be actively trying to hide; they'd actively mask any forward emissions, they'd be painted the truest black that could be had, and that black would also be radar-masking.
in space, you don't need that doorway between the sea and the sky, because your "fighter" is operating in the same medium as the mothership. You don't need a flight deck. You just need a hatch, or maybe just a clamp that attaches the fighter to the hull if you don't mind leaving it outside. You don't need the big engines or the big elevated flight deck. And hence it doesn't make nearly so much sense to put all of your eggs in one basket
It doesn't make sense to keep your X-Wings inside of a carrier because they have their own hyperdrives and shields. But it does make sense to keep TIE fighters inside of one because they don't.
If you do a fairly simple extrapolation of current technology, what you end up with is space combat as sort of ponderous ballet with shots fired at long distance at fairly fragile targets where you have to predict where the target is going to be.
If you do a fairly simple extrapolation of current technology then you're probably writing speculative fiction. There's lots of other kinds. He's upset because all science fiction doesn't boringly extrapolate from current technology?
Babylon 5 was closer in that it understood that there is no air in space and you don't bank. But even on that show, the ships would be under thrust, and then they decide to go back the way they come, they would spin around and almost immediately start going in the opposite direction.
Right, because they weren't going as fast relative to their surroundings as they possibly could be, because it would only cause them problems later when they chose to change course. Sometimes they would presumably make trips at high V, but mostly they used hyperspace. The ships you mostly saw make turns were White stars, which are special alien technology doodads, and star furies, which were never really going all that fast to begin with, and which are fighters and thus have very high thrust-to-mass ratios.
one thing that drives me crazy is that on Star Trek, you're either on watch or off duty, when a real naval officer has a whole other job, such as being a department or division head. So he's constantly doing paperwork. Most shows don't get that right at all.
Yes, this is Roddenberry's vision of the future, where we've moved past a military mentality and people who have jobs in what is currently a military context are also permitted to have lives not centered around service.
FP: So a universe of faster-than-light travel favors surprise attacks?
CW: It really, really does. You can go and mug somebody and they never see it coming. Of course, not all faster-than-light drives in fiction work the same way, but the Cylon drives certainly had that attribute.
It also matters whether you have FTL communications, and whether FTL is fold or warp technology.
Most science fiction does not cover the whole model; at best it might cover Fleet Missions and Fleet Design in detail, with most other areas only vaguely defined.
Yes, no shit. Most science fiction is not a war novel. A war is usually a back story for science fiction.
This idea that Captain Kirk leaves on
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's difficult to engage an enemy when they're 50,000km away (and the only part of the "ship" that's visible is small amount of IR from its power source that isn't even pointed in your direction). When the amount of fuel needed to change course is huge: either because of massive vehicles, or high velocities, the whole idea becomes impossible.
At best you might just be able to make some sort of directed energy weapon work effectively (if you can aim to hit an unknown sized target from halfway to the Moon), or possibly some sort of shotgun type projectiles. But at the sort of distances involved, your target for any sort of physical contact weapon would have so much warning that their usefulness would be small.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series does a reasonable treatment of this. All of his battle scenes involve dealing with speed of light restrictions. The characters have FTL drive but it is only useful for travel between stars. Three book series is a good read.
It's tangentially relevant, but this is "news for nerds": there was a contest for building realistic space fighters. The winners were clearly function over form, which was nice to see. (Space Volvos?)
Sure there's stealth in space.
See 'Space is FUCKING HUGE' - being far away is stealthy.
Being in an unexpected location too.
In addition, there is passive stealth.
Point a conical mirror at your opponent (taking care not to get glints from the sun or other local stellar object), and you are basically invisible.
(this is more annoying near planets), disguise.
Then there are active stealth systems, from jamming to cooling the surface of your craft to near absolute zero to avoid IR signatures, decoys, degrading your opponents sensors by various means, in addition to more conventional systems for shortrange combat such as radar absorbant paint.
Note that in space - radar is _short_ range only.
Yes, technically things many millions of miles away have been detected by radar, but if your opponent is using planetary sized objects as ships, you're basically screwed anyway.
RADAR and LIDAR are useful perhaps for point defense type applications, and similar.
RADAR (and LIDAR) can be boosted modestly by increasing the transmit power or recieve sensitivity.
But they rapidly run into the fact that the returned signal decays depending on the fourth power of distance.
So, if you want to take an earth-based radar, and increase the range a hundred times, you need a transmitter a hundred million times more powerful.
a couple things
1 at close ranges you might want to have the pilot actually looking in the direction he is going
2 there were a few times in B5 where they did fly "backwards" (mostly in a "just before firing guns" kind of thing)
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The article falls into the common error of thinking there is no stealth in space. Yes, your ship will radiate heat and propellants, but you do have the choice of direction in which to radiate them. Your space ship's bow could be at ambient temperature and projecting active camouflage starfield while directing all radiation out the back. Because there is no atmosphere and thus no scattering, this ship would not be visible if you are looking at its bow. All the emissions are directed away from you and can not be detected by you. Active camouflage takes care of most starfield occlusion tests, and the sheer size of space makes radar impractical, making the ship almost completely invisible.
The only thing that made sense in Battlestar Galactica was the nuclear missiles. The idea of human-occupied fighters is completely 20th-century. If war is ever conducted in space, it will be all kinetic-kill weapons, nuclear bombs and maybe nuclear mines. It will never make sense to put a human (or a similarly-sized Cylon) on board a fighter with a heavy life support system and limit the acceleration to 9-gravity peaks. Dispense with the biological elements and you'll only be limited by how much thrust the engines can produce. Humans, if present at all, will be aboard missile-laden motherships only, directing the battle strategy which will be carried out by automation.
It's not a good site for extrapolating web design theories though.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
...illustrates how military pilots recruited for the US space program thought they could pilot spacecrafts the same way they did with military airplanes, and utterly failed at it. Some of the fools even insisted initially on having direct mechanical control over the RCS thrusters, the way they did it with P-51 Mustangs, before they had to admit that there are too many DOFs for any sort of manual control, and gave in to feedback control systems providing such things as automatic rotation kill and a vast array of semi-manual modes to alleviate the brain from doing having to do rigid body dynamics calculations. A great read, and a vindication to all the control systems geeks out there. BTW, Armstrong, seeing a he is a hot topic these days, mastered the guidance computer and loved it, as far as I can recall.
Ezekiel 23:20
In BSG - for instance - every time we see observation of enemy ship positions, the sensors used (DRADIS) appear to be active sensors, not passive. A cylon basestar jumping 3 light minutes away from Galactica wouldn't observe its presence for six minutes. At least in that show, such vast distances weren't particularly useful.
Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous. When they start a scan they get an image from millions of miles away in seconds. In BSG they have FTL travel, so FTL "radar" isn't out of the question.
Anyway, the incredulity came with the robot Cylon fighters not being able to hit the side of a barn, despite being designed to be killing machines and having faster ships; while the human piloted fighters could take out Cylons pretty easily. And neither side seemed to have guided missiles. It was a lot more gritty than Star Wars, but not really a lot more logical. (Especially at the fucking stupid end, but that's a longer rant for another time.)
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks war will be fought by humans in planes/spacecraft in the future is deluding themselves. In fact this is going to become a big societal problem going forward. How do you discourage world war 3 when there is almost no risk of your soldiers being hurt in the fighting?
Cost. All wars are resource wars.
We're getting trounced in Afghanistan, not because we're losing people (we lose more people in car wrecks), but because we're spending way too much money on it. That's how we beat the Ruskies. That's likely how the Chinese will beat us.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But I also enjoy reading pure Mathematics texts.
The Black Jack books are the first ones I've ever read since the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series where I felt the need to keep a pen and paper nearby. Half the time it seems that Black Jack wins his engagements because he knows how to use a protractor and his opponents don't...
Before the reboot of Battlestar, there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond.
On all aspect of warfare in a space age, they had a pretty good vision of how everything would be done, from space dogfight between light fighters to land assault and extraction.
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook. Sure you can arrange to dump it facing away from the other guy, but that doesn't work once he has a few observation points. As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly. Decoys don't work since they need to have the same mass as the actual ships/missiles/etc you are trying to hide since otherwise the other guy can tell them apart by how their acceleration is different under the same engine exhaust profiles.
Once you are at a tech level of such long range that you don't have multiple angles on the other guy you have also mapped out every object and hence you see everything new. As soon as something is hotter than it should be - because it's running life support or a computer or it makes a course change that isn't just falling under gravity you know. By the time something is anywhere close to being a threat you have multiple angles on it so the heat is visible.
Passive detection is all you need.
Actual combat ends up being whomever runs out of heat capacity loses. As soon as you need to extend the radiators or cook you have to surrender - or else have said radiators blown off and thus cook.
As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly
Since when is anything in space instant?
Light from the sun takes a full 8 minutes to get to Earth. If I am halfway between the Sun and the Earth than anything that I do will take 4 minutes to reach Earth.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle. However, the information and light is not moving at FTL at all. When you come into a system at FTL and commence your run on the Death Thingie it won't even know you are there for a few minutes, and even then needs to calculate your trajectory to determine you are coming at.
You would need some impressive FTL sensors that gather information at a distance without such limitations before you can start treating space battles as anything close to dog fights around carriers in the ocean where information is being transmitted between units in very small fractions of second instead of minutes.
So much of western sci-fi have pilots of fighters in a style that looks more WW1 than anything else because is good for storytelling. And most "sci-fi" is optimized for that.
Not all of it, you have some anime series where you have something probably more realisitic, like hordes of ships with computers doing the firing, mostly lasers.
Popular science-fiction is sorta "pop culture", and is for the most part very "pulp".
-Woof woof woof!
D00d, you wrote a 2000+ word essay -- on a Slashdot Blog! -- complaining about how the practical applications of Transporter Beams weren't effectively realized on Star Trek (Which is fictional, by the way. FYI)
You're, like, The Uber-Geek. The ur-Nerd.
I got the same weird mixed feelings of respect and mockery reading that essay that is usually reserved for when I see pictures of some Steampunk Cosplay Guy who's built a working jetpack. Over nights and weekends for the past three years.
Well done, Sir! I think...
I think the implication is BSG was that the Colonials had become sloppy and complacent in the decades following the war. They had put so much faith in their defense net system and other networked systems that it never occurred to anyone that these could be compromised. By the time they realized the Cylons had pwned all their systems, their communications systems were completely shut down too. It was only Adama's eccentricity (in not allowing networked systems on Galactica) and dumb luck (The Pegasus being in dry dock for an overhaul, with most of its systems shut down) that saved two Battlestars.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth
The problem is that most people get their "information" from TV shows and movies that have a limited special effects budget. And a need to be exciting enough to keep the audience interested.
Any form of energy that you put out will be detectable by your opponents at ranges that give them minutes or hours or days or years of reaction time. There's no surprise there.
If you attempt to screen your energy output then you need perfect knowledge of the exact location of ALL of the the enemy sensors.
So you send out decoys. But that means that you're really building additional drives exactly like your drive. And the enemy will detect them with minutes or hours or days or years to prepare. So why not just put weapons on them and use them as part of your fleet?
If the ship you are searching for has been in one spot for more than three minutes when you jump in, then it can be seen immediately. More precisely, for whatever time t it has been sitting, it can be seen at distance d = ct, where c is the speed of light, because light from it has filled a sphere that large. Meanwhile the ship that jumped in starts emitting infrared and reflecting starlight to create the lightsphere in which it is visible.
So the cylons could jump to three light minutes out, shoot beam weapons for 2:59 and then jump away before the Colonials even know they've arrived.
So here's another thing: if the dradis works ftl, then there ought to be a way to use that same technology to create a tight, high-powered beam of "dradis radiation" that works at the same speed as dradis. Then the same equation applies but in which c is the speed of dradis.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Irregular movement.
If you FTL into the system three light-minutes away from me, I won't see you until 3 minutes later.
But by the time you get to where I was, I would be 3 minutes away from there.
Of course, you could argue that irregular movement in space is hard, but, well, so are FTLs.
paintball
The decoys aren't for confusing a dumb heat seeking missile, they're for confusing opponents' signals analysis departments, which are full of smart people that can see how much reaction mass an object is putting out at what velocity and how much acceleration is resulting from it, along with lots of other passively observable information.
Not to mention that they'll have telescopes so they can just look at the objects. To go back to your analogy, flares really don't look very much like airplanes.
The bottom line is that decoys probably need to be pretty much the same as actual spacecraft.
Your missiles are the ones that have to identify the real target, the guys on your ship are too far away to do anything. What would you do with the information about which is the real target? Try to shoot it? At a range of lightseconds your lasers will be too diffuse and your kinetics too inaccurate, all you have are projectiles that can adjust their trajectory in mid-flight, i.e. guided missiles (and even then there's the question of how much fuel they'd need to bridge that distance in a useful time).
I guess at that point we have to ask whether a lightsecond is even a possible engagement range or if combat would have to take place at significantly shorter distances if you actually want to HIT something.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle.
BSG suggested that FTL drives needed considerable time to spin up (30+ mins), so their use in battle might similarly be limited depending on how they functionally work. ST:NG had the 'Piccard Maneuver', where short warp drive jumps were made. Numerous SF works have described torpedoes that have warp drives on them to hit an opponent at light speed. (The Berserker series, springs to mind with c+ weaponry).
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You seem to be under the impression that "stealth" means "undetectable".
That's not true. Stealth in the past, in the present, and in the future in a military sense just means being so hard to detect that your opponent hat to spend considerable more resources to detect you than you need to detect him.
Not so obvious. It seems you implied the moment the heat was released from the engine it could be sensed instantly by remote craft. That is the biggest obstacle to space battles, the speed at which information travels.
IMO, it is often overlooked because in conventional battles light and sound is transmitting fast enough that information is only delayed by fractions of second, if that.
Additionally, one might be overlooking the amount of information. Take a fighter jet involved in a dog fight in Earth's atmosphere. It's onboard sensors only have to monitor a small area compared to space. Take a fighter jet orbiting Saturn. How much information does that fighter jet need to process to detect heat patterns around Mercury?
Having information of what happened 10 minutes ago is not all that tactically valuable for immediate offensive maneuvers. You would need to gather a lot of data and predict where that fighter would be in the future and coordinate your weapons to arrive on target.
Most weapons are not FTL either, not that it would matter. Firing instantly where they were is pointless unless you are operating under the believe they are stationary. Something that would seem to be suicidal in my book. Even with near light speed weapons like lasers, fusion beams, whatever, you still need to hit a target most likely in motion, and from predicted targeting data with lag time measured in minutes.
Space battles will truly be an example of where information is power. Strength will mostly likely be measured in stealth and information processing abilities, not firepower.
At a range of lightseconds your lasers will be too diffuse
The diffusion of laser goes down with diameter of main mirror squared (or waist size squared, to be technical). If I am not mistaken (and I might be, please tell me if I am), a 400 nm laser with a 10 m waist will have a width of 14 m at 2.6 light seconds (formula from Wikipedia). It will thus have an effect per area of half of what is has a point blank range, which is far from useless.
There is stealth on Earth. Submarine warfare being the obvious one - and the one which space stealth tended to be based on in fiction (though the rise of stealth planes in the media might have changed that, I really haven't kept up with sci-fi).
But submarine stealth is easily beaten by a network of active and passive sonar stations. In that respect, it's no different than the space stealth scenario we're discussing. If there's sufficient sensing capability there's no stealth, and if there isn't, there is stealth.
But yes I was trying to refer to vaguely realistic scenarios - which is a joke in itself considering the topic.
Well sure, because no military on Earth has any space tech. Except ICBMs, military satellites, the x37b, anti-satellite weapons, etc. It's all near-Earth stuff, of course, but it's not as if the future possibility of military activity deeper in space is all that unrealistic. What's not really known are any of the parameters you need to realistically discuss it. We're discussing this without really knowing anything about ranges, technology levels, propulsion methods, etc., etc., etc.
On earth stealth aircraft work because they reduce the range at which radar can detect them and that is enough to let them path through gaps in what should be overlapping radar coverage (before the range was reduced). And while you could try and build an order or two of magnitude more radar stations it isn't practical.
But for some nations it is practical to build networks that can detect any stealth plane. Activity by stealth planes generally requires careful planning and systematic destruction of radar networks.
Whereas in space there's no atmosphere to hide your heat, and you can't help but produce heat (unless you have no people and no electronics). Which means you can be easily detected by cheap passive detection stations which in the practical case will be scattered about the solar system. Making stealth not a viable option. Assuming there's no magitech (I can imagine if there's a cloaking tech of some sort you might be able to transfer your heat into heat sinks which you then eject with their own cloaking tech - but then why are you not just shooting cloaked projectiles from far away rather than trying to stealth your ship?)
Few things here. First of all, you previously speculated on heat hiding tech that would stream all the heat off in one direction. This is easily within the realm of possibility and some version of it can be implemented with current technology. There's nothing stopping anyone from making a refrigerated shield that pumps heat to a radiator on the opposite side. The big question is how narrow you can make your beam of IR radiation. Depending on that unknown, the network of cheap passive detection stations you need may be relatively small, or unimaginably large. Questions of what the range will be come into it as well. So, we can't really be sure of how easy it will be to detect a stealth spacecraft based on what we know now. Also, as you point out, anything with electronics is going to have a heat signature, so one sides passive detection stations will be detectable by the other sides passive detection stations and each side will presumably seek to destroy the other sides stations.
As far as magical technology for dumping heat goes, it doesn't necessarily need magic. It depends a lot on the time scale you're operating on. You can, for example, have full coverage with a refrigeration shield on the outside of a craft and dump all the heat to a heat sink in the center. The longer you run, the hotter that heat sink will get until it overwhelms the heat pumping technology. In some situations, depending on all kinds of factors we don't know, that may allow militarily useful stealth. Aside from that, you can also sink heat in chemical bonds. This also has limits. It's also conceivable to sink heat in nuclear bonds, say by fusing elements past i