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?"'"

Comments

Babylon 5

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:Babylon 5

[dkleinsc]

According to J Michael Straczyski, some guys at NASA actually contacted the B5 crew to see about the designs of the Star Fury, because that was the most realistic and maneuverable fighter-sized ship they'd seen in fiction. They also did make use of some interesting concepts, like (a) having semi-realistic tactics in space combat instead of just a free-for-all, (b) factoring in gravity of nearby planets and stars, and (c) making sure portrayed military practices bore some relationship to actual militaries.

Of course, there are some violations of physics in B5 too: Shots make noise in space, and you can hear the engine noise of passing ships.

Re:Babylon 5

[anasciiman]

Since you mentioned B5, it's sad to note that Michael O'Hare (Sinclair/Valen) passed away yesterday at age 60. That makes five dead from that show now. :/

Re:Babylon 5

[robmv]

If I were to design spaceships for the current human capabilities I will add sound simulation to the cockpit, human detection of things in 3D is greatly enhanced by sound, see the advantage of FPS video gamers using 5.1 sound against someone using the plain TV sound

Re:Babylon 5

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And why would they contact them about the "design" when all they had is a 3D model?

I believe that what is meant by that is the configuration of thrusters (giving you good moments of force and forward thrust at the same time for combat maneuvering) and the mass distribution (balancing the moment of inertia among the possible axes of rotation). They probably didn't mean the control chip serial numbers.

Re:Babylon 5

[OzPeter]

Of course, there are some violations of physics in B5 too: Shots make noise in space, and you can hear the engine noise of passing ships.

If you think of the sounds of things in space as being enhanced reality injected into your cabin environment by computers that are trying to map electronic sensors into something that human senses can cope with - then it starts to make some sense.

Re:Babylon 5

[Dewin]

That's part of EVE's lore, actually, from the few months I tried it.

Re:Babylon 5

[peragrin]

The first shown shadow attack in B5 shows spaces battles as they would be.

It is boring visually. Long range laser beams and missile/mines.

the rest were done up close to make things look more visually interesting.

I like B5 and that scene always stuck out.

Re:Babylon 5

[nitehawk214]

According to J Michael Straczyski, some guys at NASA actually contacted the B5 crew to see about the designs of the Star Fury, because that was the most realistic and maneuverable fighter-sized ship they'd seen in fiction. They also did make use of some interesting concepts, like (a) having semi-realistic tactics in space combat instead of just a free-for-all, (b) factoring in gravity of nearby planets and stars, and (c) making sure portrayed military practices bore some relationship to actual militaries.

Of course, there are some violations of physics in B5 too: Shots make noise in space, and you can hear the engine noise of passing ships.

The story goes that he happy handed all the material over, with the only stipulation that if they build something based on B5 designs, they must call it a Starfury.

Re:Babylon 5

[RobertLTux]

the point is that they DID work things out.
a StarFury had a total of eight SETS of thrusters and NASA did the numbers and found out that the base model was actually sound.

im not sure about the atmo winglets in the late model starfuries but the whole thing of the thrusters being mounted to flip the craft about was seen to be sound. also im not sure if the WhiteStars are not more "just make it look cool" but they used AG thrusters anyway.

Re:Babylon 5

[EdIII]

That opens up a whole *new* can of worms.

Since the sound is virtual... then eventually it will be themed, just like we skin and theme everything else to suit personal tastes.

The Death Star super laser would sound differently to different people.

I could see militaries enforcing such themes the same way they do dress codes.

Re:Babylon 5

[fm6]

B5 did make a serious effort to adhere to real world physics. (If only they'd made the same effort with dialog!) That actually bothered a lot of viewers, who didn't understand why spacecraft approached the station stern-first. In a Newtonian universe, a spacecraft has to throw reaction mass forward to decelerate. But most people still think in Aristotelian physics, where a moving object that doesn't get forward force gradually stops moving.

Audience expectation is the big reaason science in movies and TV is so bad. You even see this in ordinary situations. For example, the sound of a gun being fired is always heard before the resulting impact or explosion, even when proectiles are clearly supersonic. And of course that makes for unscientific science fiction. Audiences don't that sound doesn't travel through a vacuum or that light has a finite speed (hence the inability of the Cylons to capitalize on one-way information flow).

OK, modern scientific literacy sucks. But what's frustrating is that it's so poor among people who are serious about consuming and even producing SF. I remember a frustrating conversation I had on a Firefly fan site trying to explain why FTL was needed to travel between star systems in anything less than years. And the people I was trying to explain to weren't stupid; what made it frustrating was their feeling that it would be some kind of moral value to admit that they were ignorant.

Totally beyond the pale are writers who pretend to have more scientific literacy than they actually have. The writers for the revived Star Trek franchise have always been the worst. People a "planetoid" is just a synonym for "asteroid". Uh, you do know what an asteroid is, right? OK, maybe not.

Re:Babylon 5

[Iamthecheese]

I would read that novel so hard I'd have papercuts on my eyeballs.

Re:Babylon 5

[Gibbs-Duhem]

This is basically the best reason to read the Honor Harrington series of novels. It blows every other science fiction writer away in terms of portraying reasonable space combat.

Rules:
1. Always wear a space suit in combat. Duh.
2. You don't know where your enemy is until c*\Delta x has passed. This is both advantageous and disadvantageous.
3. Surprise! You can only decellerate as fast as you can accelerate! What? You mean I have to spend half of my time rushing at my opponent slowing down?
4. Laser beams hit at the moment you know they've been fired (not that they're used much, lasers are weak).
5. Lots of people die all the time. I think they killed billions of soldiers in a major war.
6. Yes, even your friends and main characters. Stray missiles suck.

It's fantastic.

Re:Babylon 5

[forkazoo]

Patrick Stewart has been draining their life force. That's why he is still exactly as old as he was in the 80's.

Nerds Ruining Entertainment

[OS24Ever]

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.

Re:Nerds Ruining Entertainment

[RobotRunAmok]

The Black Geary Books, as fans often refer to them, are "officially" known as the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell.

The first one is "The Lost Fleet: Dauntless." I believe there is a total of six in the series. He followed that series up with further Black Jack adventures in the now-ongoing series "The Lost Fleet: Beyond The Frontier."

The Amazon Link: http://amzn.to/R2vhfI

The neatest thing I found about the series (other than all the geometry), is that Black Jack -- a war hero revived after 100 years in stasis -- is the reverse-type to the trope of Ancient Badass Warrior Travels to Future and Kicks Soft Pasty-White Butts Living in Luxury Too Long. In Geary's "relative future," he is the Enlightened Man, using sophisticated naval tactics no longer taught at Academy because the peeps of that relative future are so angry and beaten down by a century of war that all they want to do is just ram their ships into the enemy and rip out their opponents' lungs with their teeth.

Shiny!

[neBelcnU]

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.

Re:Shiny!

[X0563511]

Joe Haldeman's Forever War seemed good, too.

Re:Shiny!

[RockDoctor]

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.

To complete the bits you left out, and spoil the story for those who might read it... they decided to wage interstellar ECONOMIC war in combination with political manoeuvring and installed a Quisling government, BEFORE staging what looked like an interstellar war. Which was the point of the story. Once a target planet had an effective guerilla resistance (a.k.a. "insurgent" in modern double-talk), the invasion from a long way away couldn't maintain it's huge expenditure on men, materiel and transport and the invasion failed with an economic collapse in the home country.

Harrison was writing in what - the late 60s or so? So he can't have been referring to this generation's long-distance wars. Perhaps he was referring to some other long-distance war of the 1960s which ended in a damaging defeat for the aggressor nation in the face of a determined guerilla war.

Re:Shiny!

[Areyoukiddingme]

And goddamn depressing, too. You can tell Haldeman learned about war in Viet Nam. It's too damn bad people have already forgotten what was learned. (And really damned irritating that the publicity for David Sherman's novels tries to claim he's the only sci fi author with combat experience, when both Haldeman and Pournelle are still alive, and are considerably better writers.)

Playing with FTL

[tmosley]

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.

Finding out the hard way

[overshoot]

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.

Missing the point to enjoy their their own voices

[PsychoSlashDot]

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.

Smeh.

[drinkypoo]

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

Space is too big for battles

[petes_PoV]

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.

LEGO realistic space fight vehicles

[Mozai]

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?)

Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie

[queazocotal]

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.

Hopelessly outdated concepts

[__aaltlg1547]

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.

Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie

[605dave]

It's not a good site for extrapolating web design theories though.

The very nice book named "Digital Apollo"...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

...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.

Space: Above and Beyond

[Arkan]

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.

Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie

[nedlohs]

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.

Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie

[EdIII]

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.

All covered at that site.

[khasim]

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?

Re:All covered at that site.

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, a large fleet of unmanned ships controlled by only few manned ships which look the same as the unmanned ships would probably be the best strategy. Given that you need many ships, those ships would be made as cheap as possible with the constraint that the manned ships need to be able to support the people on them, and the unmanned ships must at least from the outside be made the same way. In addition you'll have support ships, probably automated and mostly unmanned so they can be both cheaper and even more frequent, because otherwise it will be a better strategy for your enemy to just kill all your support ships and then wait until you run out of food and have to surrender.

There's a solution to that.

[raehl]

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.

Re:A good site for extrapolating from current scie

[EdIII]

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.

Re:Sad

[sFurbo]

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.