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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.
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,
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
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.
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
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.