So you are asserting that a capital ship is incapable of generating 1g of thrust?
How much thrust can they generate? How big are they? At 30 light seconds, the information available for the targeting computers is already stale (by 30 seconds) and if you were correct, they'll be 30 seconds away from that position when your beam gets back.
I envision the battle playing out with 10,000,000 tiny AI drones in a cloud around the target, using local information to get the last 1km to the target, for pinpoint accuracy at 100Gm distance.
EVE apparently has battles so close you could hit the other ship with a slingshot. Also, the graphics of the battle indicate stationary firing platforms. I would expect that mutual kills would be much more likely at those ranges with such weaponry. At that range, hitting someone with a laser is trivial. From fictonal space battles, the distances are more interplanetary. At those ranges, you can add 1g of acceleration and they'd guess wrong for the next shot. Cut power for a shot, and turn 30 degrees, then accelerate again. A simple zig-zag would allow for great avoidance. Works for ballistics today, you can't lead a zig-zagging target (at least not with accuracy).
As far as absorbing damage, at the range of EVE battles, a naval battleshipmain gun would be useful (roughly the same 30 second lead time I was assuming before, but with light), as the ships appear to fight under a full-stop. A strike by a 15" gun would likely open up a ship like a can opener. The point of impact would shred open, and the force of the 15 psi air inside would blow out the rest of the ship. At least, have the ships pressurized with 5 psi pure O2, but a fire would then be insanely deadly. So, if not that, then 0 psi. But so few mention 100% pressure suits for everyone.
Unless you're capable of generating a lot of thrust, capital ships and cruisers aren't getting out of the way all that quickly.
We call those "space stations".
EVE combat sounds like the equivelent of 1700s wars. Go to an agreed upon place. Line up. Shake hands. Shoot. Any ship capable of reasonable movement would not be armored well enough to withstand much damage. So one hit one kill, like Redcoats, would be about right.
There doesn't seem to be a published number for skill points to skills (probably easy to see in game), but 6 skills and 5 certifications, with skills at 1,2,2,3,5 and 5, would seem (to this outsider) to be about, lets say, 1M skill points. That'd put it at 15 days for skills alone. Add in the certifications (no idea there) and the money to buy the ship (should be gathered without really trying over the weeks to get the skills), and one should be able to get close to a Cheetah in the 14 day trial, for both owning, and able to fly.
I'll have to dig up some of my sci fi library, but there were some that weren't bad to read. Yes, they were time-compressed (hours of battle compressed to a couple pages, as relativistic warheads took minutes to get there, and seeking mines and missiles were used that take hours to get there, many relying on ECM to get close enough, and the ECM were often explosions. Send a missile of your most powerful explosive directly at a ship, when it's at the edge of the enemy's kill range, they'll be looking at it, ready to kill it as it enters the kill zone. Then detonate it. Meanwhile, you sent similar weapons indirectly at it (perhaps sling-shotting around nearby planets for maximum speed towards the target without moving directly at it). When the one they are looking at detonates, the sensors aimed at it will be overloaded, and (at least temporarily) blind. That's when the other missiles enter detection range, making best time to the target. Hours (or days) for one shot (with distraction). It's not boring, it's just time compressed.
Sadly, based on the description of Eve battles on Slashdot, it seems that there are space boardgames from 30+ years ago that are more realistic. Seems Eve compressed the ranges to make the battles more realtime, and less plot in strategy for the next 3 hours, and go back to your cabin while the AI executes it, as many of the books have it. That, and exotic weapons are also in there. Missiles of 1000+ warheads where each warhead is a self-guided AI. Fire it at something, and when countermeasures are taken against it, it spreads into a cloud of warheads. Or antimatter missiles designed to give kills with near misses (destroy the warhead, and a lethal cloud of antimatter is released, blocking return fire, as well as killing your ship if you don't get out of the way.
Yes. That was implied my statement. It doesn't matter where you aim, you are only guessing where you think they might be. So long as they are constantly accelerating, you'll never score a direct hit.
Lasers over a vacuum would be nearly as devastating at 100Gm (roughly 1 Au, or 8 light minutes), presuming a space faring race could keep them focused. So why would anyone without those guns get anywhere near someone with them?
30km is well within conventional weapon range. Sure, it'll take 30-60 seconds to get there, but you could send a bullet there in a reasonable timeframe. If you are using lasers, why would you get close enough for guys with rifles to shoot at you? If you are in a space tech scenario, they could be shooting lots of things, like antimatter bullets, or other explosives and such. I imagine that in a real space battle, the distances would be much greater. Many books with lots of detailed battles have combat at light hours, using planets and such as shields. I've never seen a well-researched fiction with battles so close boarding parties could walk the distance.
I was talking generalities. It would be impossible for space combat to happen at about 30km. That's within kill range of standard unguided ballistics within a gravity well. If combat was really at that range, why isn't everyone armed with 8" battleship guns? That'll rip through an armored building, built with no concern about weight or movement. I can't conceive of a space ship that wouldn't be a kill shot to, unless the ships are all the size of small moons. Even if firing it is a fatal act for the ship using it, a dying shot would take out a single ship of anything up to city size. Things like that would be why in actual combat, I'd expect every compartment to be vacuum. Everyone in spacesuits for battle. Why? A battleship shell striking something the size of a city (imperial super-star destroyer size, maybe up to Death Star size), would send shockwaves through strong enough to open up the whole structure like a can opener, if the inside is 15 psi and the outside is ~0.
I was mainly thinking about future actual space battles, not how EVE emulates a fictional universe.
Earth to sun is 8.something light minutes (we'll call it 16x30 light seconds). So you are off by a factor of 16x4=64. Maybe you should try basic science before you work on astrophysics.
You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.
Nope. You don't need to compress it to get a good explosion. Like you state elsewhere, a poor explosion is very very damaging, as you end up with antimatter bullets. Now, imagine the initial explosion being on the outer hull and most of the antimatter bullets being released within the outer hull of your ship? It might take longer, but no good can come from that.
And no, nuclear bomb fuel slamming into something hard enough will be unlikely to cause critical mass. Uranium isn't sufficiently compressible for that to matter. A paper I read on it indicated that the compression is mainly to extend critical mass, so that it doesn't blow itself apart before it generates enough neutrons to cause fission in a gram or 10.
If you don't have critical mass, you won't get an explosion, no matter how hard you compress it. Also, critical mass will not cause an "explosion" unless it's held together and compressed. Critical mass in a lump will not explode. It'll pull a Chernobyl. That can cause some problems, but not devistating destruction of a space ship when you throw it at them.
Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider.
How do you hit a missile with a laser? I don't think you could do it more than 1000 km away. Unless it was unguided. But, what's the kill range of a missile? I have no idea. And what do you do when all your sensors are trained on the missile 1000 km away when it detonates, burning them out, and the 100 that were 20,000 km behind them will be nearly impossible to find. All guided with an AI that shields sensors before its friend detonates.
Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.
Probably that will be a phase. Maybe what the "poor" navy uses. Bullets are still killers at relativistic speeds. Even if it's more like a particle beam of He2. We might even call them ion cannons, though the "poor" navy will use slower, heavier projectiles, gauss rifles.
Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.
Yeah, and I have millions of neutrinos passing through me today. Maybe there can be a "tune" of antimatter to generate enough neutrinos to harm people within some radius, and given the trouble blocking them now, the idea is some tune that would be hard to block, but still be fatal. Why do you think that's impossible?
Eve has sounded like an interesting game, but it also sounds very hard to get started in. How would one go about making the most of the 14 day trial? What can be accomplished in that time? With the unlimited free (level and feature limited) WoW, you can explore at your leisure.
Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force, and are fragile and heavy. Antimatter missiles are a chunk of antimatter, surounded by matter. You have more antimatter than matter, and you propel yourself by throwing matter at the antimatter (in small amounts, obviously), and focusing the energy out the back. There is no similar function with nukes. And when you get where you are going, you don't even need to detonate, you just crash and go boom. If you burn up all your matter getting to your target, the extra antimatter you have on board will contact the target and cause destruction. Or detonate it early with 1/10th matter left, and 9/10th of the payload will be matter, spewed out at possibly relativistic speeds, hopefully in proximity of a pile of enemy ships, or very close to a capital one.
Antimatter missiles are still targetable, but the best you can do is destroy it while it's headed to you. Then you have a pile of antimatter fragments headed toward you in a growing cloud. The vacuum of space won't dissipate it much, or slow it down. Best not be where you were when it gets there. The remains of a nuke are relatively inert. Your hull will likely give 100% protection to the remains of a destroyed nuke. Not so much with the antimatter bomb. That, and many stories elucidate on the exotic radiation released by antimatter, and its effects on ships.
Or, more likely, a real war will be 1,000,000 anti-matter powered robots the size of Iron Giant released into a star system, designed to locate life and destroy it, with a 20 year timer to power down all weapons and return home. When we have Iron Giants working, we'll be close to interstellar war. He needed time to heal, but survived a direct nuclear blast.
You can buy game time in ISK that can also be bought with USD (or Euro, I presume). They are saying you could buy $5000 wort of in game time with the value of a Titan.
Why do I need to be able to solve a non-existant problem as a pre-requisite to pointing out that all other solutions are artificially constrained to 2-d answers?
If it were up to me, I'd abolish all lanes and have the flying cars communicate between each other directly to negotiate right of way if a conflict is detected. Come up with simple rules, not far from present airline rules, that would be used for determining who goes where. An organized chaos would work best. If that starts to get overly congested, then I'd separate them out by speed. Why are cars going bumper-to-bumper in air-lanes? Go faster, go up. There's no need to go out of your way to follow roads, if you are in a flying car. There are already well defined rules for aircraft, but they work mainly in low-congestion. Around airports, where congestion happens, a 3-rd party manages congestion.
You can hide from, but you can't out maneuver a laser.
When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. Move one shiplength every 30 seconds, and they'll never hit you, if they are shooting at your current position. What range are you presuming these space battles take place?
I am not the OP, but I found the following:
To fly the Cheetah, Eve Online pilots require training in the following skills; Minmatar Frigate level 5, Covert Ops level 1, Spaceship Command level 3, Electronics Upgrades level 5, Electronics level 2 and Engineering level 2. Eve Online recommends the following skill certifications in order to maximize potential Cheetah fitting options; Core competency, Cloak Operator, Frigate Projectile Turrets and Cartographer.
Having not played Eve, I don't know how long it would take to get the certifications and Electronics Upgrades 5 and Minmatar Frigate level 5 (the 5s sound harder than the 1s, 2s, and 3s).
Would also need 16M Isk. However long that takes.
As you note, it's a small frigate. So even 30-60 days seems like a long time. How long would a new player need to grind for 16M Isk?
That's my experience too. People make fun of WoW, but a first time player could play it and learn passable play without any outside resources. Eve seems impossible to play unless you already know how to play, so you have to work very hard to learn how to play, what to do, and how to progress.
One thing that happened in "old" wars was to flank someone. What would happen if 10% of a force were to form up in a different system and come in behind the enemy, perhaps targeting the repair ships? Or is the chance of spies enough that you couldn't get that big of a force to form up then, and you'd need to have them form up together, then fly away, and come in later from behind in a flanking maneuver? Can you not FTL in a battle? Short jump FTL through the enemy formation to optimal distance behind, come about, and rip apart the healers. Then jump back to "your side" + some to be out of immediate range of the other side, and come about, for a stand-off with healers on the other side gone. Oh, and lay mines behind you so that they can't do the same to you in retaliation.
Go read more sci-fi. More than one series I've read had indicated that nukes are useless. In the time it takes to get there, the other ship has moved. And if you are firing on something more stationary, it'll burn it up with lasers first. Nukes are good only as mines, and for flares (pop a few to detonate just outside range of killing yourself, turning off everything electronic first, and the enemy will blind itself from looking hard at you and staring into the blast). But to actually kill someone in a ship to ship battle, the closest anything comes to that is anti-matter missiles (guided, often with strong AI), which could be argued to be nuke-like enough, but then, often antimatter missiles are often anti-matter fueled, so they detonate at their target, "igniting" unspent fuel.
Much like future warfare is generations, it's hard to imagine the future. Someone from midieval times might question why we don't use metal armor against bullets. We've "evolved" past the point where a person from that era can even understand why we are where we are. Lasers are the only thing that has a chance to hit something at space-battle distances. And even then, you can out maneuver a laser. Though, I just came up with a way to defeat that.
Send out 100 probes between you and the other ship. Shoot them with the laser, and have them lense/reflect it to the other ship. So the final aim is close, but the energy generation (the expensive part) is far away. Kill a drone. I'll send out more. That's the level of evolution that we can't even really conceive at this point. Millenia of military advance will make us cavemen. So it's all wrong. The answer is beyond our comprehension. We don't even know what will cost money in the future. Will we be material rich and energy poor, or material limited and unlimited energy?
Ask people to describe a "highway" system if everyone had flying cars, and you'd get something like Jetsons, or even back to the future, where the flying cars all line up in lanes, with little to no vertial separation, except for "overpasses" and other things that are more like layered 2-d than an independent 3-d construct.
We conceive of 3d like radar systems. A top-down view.
People have no skills to do something like "throw a ball through a hoop and have it land on a specific spot". Such things can be trained in, but generally are quite lacking in our 2-d minds.
The act of destroying doesn't transfer wealth. If you buy a box of 100 rounds, did you destroy anything? No? Just transferred wealth? Yes. The same happened in Eve. The building of the ships and work to get the ISK to buy/build them was the transfer of wealth. Firing off 100 rounds at the range "destroys" the wealth. If you didn't fire them, you could sell them. After you fire them, they are worth less. If we call the brass worthless, then you have nothing left after use, and that would be the Eve analogy.
That's been true since as long as anyone can remember (though void for people sufficiently old enough that they only *think* they remember). Mainly since 1960, the first presidential election determined, in a large part, through TV viewing.
The US government may rule that the US government didn't break the law, but that doesn't mean they didn't break the law, specifically the 4th Amendment (which trumps the later laws that "allow" unwarranted searches).
Slashdot Mirror
So you are asserting that a capital ship is incapable of generating 1g of thrust?
How much thrust can they generate? How big are they? At 30 light seconds, the information available for the targeting computers is already stale (by 30 seconds) and if you were correct, they'll be 30 seconds away from that position when your beam gets back.
I envision the battle playing out with 10,000,000 tiny AI drones in a cloud around the target, using local information to get the last 1km to the target, for pinpoint accuracy at 100Gm distance.
As far as absorbing damage, at the range of EVE battles, a naval battleshipmain gun would be useful (roughly the same 30 second lead time I was assuming before, but with light), as the ships appear to fight under a full-stop. A strike by a 15" gun would likely open up a ship like a can opener. The point of impact would shred open, and the force of the 15 psi air inside would blow out the rest of the ship. At least, have the ships pressurized with 5 psi pure O2, but a fire would then be insanely deadly. So, if not that, then 0 psi. But so few mention 100% pressure suits for everyone.
Unless you're capable of generating a lot of thrust, capital ships and cruisers aren't getting out of the way all that quickly.
We call those "space stations".
EVE combat sounds like the equivelent of 1700s wars. Go to an agreed upon place. Line up. Shake hands. Shoot. Any ship capable of reasonable movement would not be armored well enough to withstand much damage. So one hit one kill, like Redcoats, would be about right.
There doesn't seem to be a published number for skill points to skills (probably easy to see in game), but 6 skills and 5 certifications, with skills at 1,2,2,3,5 and 5, would seem (to this outsider) to be about, lets say, 1M skill points. That'd put it at 15 days for skills alone. Add in the certifications (no idea there) and the money to buy the ship (should be gathered without really trying over the weeks to get the skills), and one should be able to get close to a Cheetah in the 14 day trial, for both owning, and able to fly.
I might just give that a try.
I'll have to dig up some of my sci fi library, but there were some that weren't bad to read. Yes, they were time-compressed (hours of battle compressed to a couple pages, as relativistic warheads took minutes to get there, and seeking mines and missiles were used that take hours to get there, many relying on ECM to get close enough, and the ECM were often explosions. Send a missile of your most powerful explosive directly at a ship, when it's at the edge of the enemy's kill range, they'll be looking at it, ready to kill it as it enters the kill zone. Then detonate it. Meanwhile, you sent similar weapons indirectly at it (perhaps sling-shotting around nearby planets for maximum speed towards the target without moving directly at it). When the one they are looking at detonates, the sensors aimed at it will be overloaded, and (at least temporarily) blind. That's when the other missiles enter detection range, making best time to the target. Hours (or days) for one shot (with distraction). It's not boring, it's just time compressed.
Sadly, based on the description of Eve battles on Slashdot, it seems that there are space boardgames from 30+ years ago that are more realistic. Seems Eve compressed the ranges to make the battles more realtime, and less plot in strategy for the next 3 hours, and go back to your cabin while the AI executes it, as many of the books have it. That, and exotic weapons are also in there. Missiles of 1000+ warheads where each warhead is a self-guided AI. Fire it at something, and when countermeasures are taken against it, it spreads into a cloud of warheads. Or antimatter missiles designed to give kills with near misses (destroy the warhead, and a lethal cloud of antimatter is released, blocking return fire, as well as killing your ship if you don't get out of the way.
Yes. That was implied my statement. It doesn't matter where you aim, you are only guessing where you think they might be. So long as they are constantly accelerating, you'll never score a direct hit.
Yes, and if that target makes random maneuvers of one ship width every 30 seconds, you'll still never score more than a glancing blow.
Lasers over a vacuum would be nearly as devastating at 100Gm (roughly 1 Au, or 8 light minutes), presuming a space faring race could keep them focused. So why would anyone without those guns get anywhere near someone with them?
30km is well within conventional weapon range. Sure, it'll take 30-60 seconds to get there, but you could send a bullet there in a reasonable timeframe. If you are using lasers, why would you get close enough for guys with rifles to shoot at you? If you are in a space tech scenario, they could be shooting lots of things, like antimatter bullets, or other explosives and such. I imagine that in a real space battle, the distances would be much greater. Many books with lots of detailed battles have combat at light hours, using planets and such as shields. I've never seen a well-researched fiction with battles so close boarding parties could walk the distance.
I was talking generalities. It would be impossible for space combat to happen at about 30km. That's within kill range of standard unguided ballistics within a gravity well. If combat was really at that range, why isn't everyone armed with 8" battleship guns? That'll rip through an armored building, built with no concern about weight or movement. I can't conceive of a space ship that wouldn't be a kill shot to, unless the ships are all the size of small moons. Even if firing it is a fatal act for the ship using it, a dying shot would take out a single ship of anything up to city size. Things like that would be why in actual combat, I'd expect every compartment to be vacuum. Everyone in spacesuits for battle. Why? A battleship shell striking something the size of a city (imperial super-star destroyer size, maybe up to Death Star size), would send shockwaves through strong enough to open up the whole structure like a can opener, if the inside is 15 psi and the outside is ~0.
I was mainly thinking about future actual space battles, not how EVE emulates a fictional universe.
Earth to sun is 8.something light minutes (we'll call it 16x30 light seconds). So you are off by a factor of 16x4=64. Maybe you should try basic science before you work on astrophysics.
You'll get a little boom and lots of annihilated antimatter flying away. Which admittedly is pretty nasty, but not in the "earth-shattering kaboom" kind of way. If you slam some nuclear bomb fuel into something hard enough it will go kaboom too, by the way.
Nope. You don't need to compress it to get a good explosion. Like you state elsewhere, a poor explosion is very very damaging, as you end up with antimatter bullets. Now, imagine the initial explosion being on the outer hull and most of the antimatter bullets being released within the outer hull of your ship? It might take longer, but no good can come from that.
And no, nuclear bomb fuel slamming into something hard enough will be unlikely to cause critical mass. Uranium isn't sufficiently compressible for that to matter. A paper I read on it indicated that the compression is mainly to extend critical mass, so that it doesn't blow itself apart before it generates enough neutrons to cause fission in a gram or 10.
If you don't have critical mass, you won't get an explosion, no matter how hard you compress it. Also, critical mass will not cause an "explosion" unless it's held together and compressed. Critical mass in a lump will not explode. It'll pull a Chernobyl. That can cause some problems, but not devistating destruction of a space ship when you throw it at them.
Yes, blowing up an antimatter missile means a cloud of antimatter flying around. But assuming you did it in space, with a laser, it's a long way away from you (missiles are pretty trivial to track), you're probably moving pretty fast compared to the missile, and there may be annoying things like gravity to consider.
How do you hit a missile with a laser? I don't think you could do it more than 1000 km away. Unless it was unguided. But, what's the kill range of a missile? I have no idea. And what do you do when all your sensors are trained on the missile 1000 km away when it detonates, burning them out, and the 100 that were 20,000 km behind them will be nearly impossible to find. All guided with an AI that shields sensors before its friend detonates.
Possibly (but still not likely) you might want to shoot inert, undetectable little bits of it at your enemy in the hope that some of them will hit him.
Probably that will be a phase. Maybe what the "poor" navy uses. Bullets are still killers at relativistic speeds. Even if it's more like a particle beam of He2. We might even call them ion cannons, though the "poor" navy will use slower, heavier projectiles, gauss rifles.
Exotic radiation? Gamma rays aren't exotic. You've probably got a couple of matter-antimatter annihilation gamma rays passing through your body right now.
Yeah, and I have millions of neutrinos passing through me today. Maybe there can be a "tune" of antimatter to generate enough neutrinos to harm people within some radius, and given the trouble blocking them now, the idea is some tune that would be hard to block, but still be fatal. Why do you think that's impossible?
Eve has sounded like an interesting game, but it also sounds very hard to get started in. How would one go about making the most of the 14 day trial? What can be accomplished in that time? With the unlimited free (level and feature limited) WoW, you can explore at your leisure.
Nuclear missiles can't use the nuclear reaction as a motive force, and are fragile and heavy. Antimatter missiles are a chunk of antimatter, surounded by matter. You have more antimatter than matter, and you propel yourself by throwing matter at the antimatter (in small amounts, obviously), and focusing the energy out the back. There is no similar function with nukes. And when you get where you are going, you don't even need to detonate, you just crash and go boom. If you burn up all your matter getting to your target, the extra antimatter you have on board will contact the target and cause destruction. Or detonate it early with 1/10th matter left, and 9/10th of the payload will be matter, spewed out at possibly relativistic speeds, hopefully in proximity of a pile of enemy ships, or very close to a capital one.
Antimatter missiles are still targetable, but the best you can do is destroy it while it's headed to you. Then you have a pile of antimatter fragments headed toward you in a growing cloud. The vacuum of space won't dissipate it much, or slow it down. Best not be where you were when it gets there. The remains of a nuke are relatively inert. Your hull will likely give 100% protection to the remains of a destroyed nuke. Not so much with the antimatter bomb. That, and many stories elucidate on the exotic radiation released by antimatter, and its effects on ships.
Or, more likely, a real war will be 1,000,000 anti-matter powered robots the size of Iron Giant released into a star system, designed to locate life and destroy it, with a 20 year timer to power down all weapons and return home. When we have Iron Giants working, we'll be close to interstellar war. He needed time to heal, but survived a direct nuclear blast.
You can buy game time in ISK that can also be bought with USD (or Euro, I presume). They are saying you could buy $5000 wort of in game time with the value of a Titan.
Why do I need to be able to solve a non-existant problem as a pre-requisite to pointing out that all other solutions are artificially constrained to 2-d answers?
If it were up to me, I'd abolish all lanes and have the flying cars communicate between each other directly to negotiate right of way if a conflict is detected. Come up with simple rules, not far from present airline rules, that would be used for determining who goes where. An organized chaos would work best. If that starts to get overly congested, then I'd separate them out by speed. Why are cars going bumper-to-bumper in air-lanes? Go faster, go up. There's no need to go out of your way to follow roads, if you are in a flying car. There are already well defined rules for aircraft, but they work mainly in low-congestion. Around airports, where congestion happens, a 3-rd party manages congestion.
You can hide from, but you can't out maneuver a laser.
When you are 30 light-seconds out, the laser will always be aimed at where you were 30 seconds ago. Move one shiplength every 30 seconds, and they'll never hit you, if they are shooting at your current position. What range are you presuming these space battles take place?
I am not the OP, but I found the following:
To fly the Cheetah, Eve Online pilots require training in the following skills; Minmatar Frigate level 5, Covert Ops level 1, Spaceship Command level 3, Electronics Upgrades level 5, Electronics level 2 and Engineering level 2. Eve Online recommends the following skill certifications in order to maximize potential Cheetah fitting options; Core competency, Cloak Operator, Frigate Projectile Turrets and Cartographer.
Having not played Eve, I don't know how long it would take to get the certifications and Electronics Upgrades 5 and Minmatar Frigate level 5 (the 5s sound harder than the 1s, 2s, and 3s).
Would also need 16M Isk. However long that takes.
As you note, it's a small frigate. So even 30-60 days seems like a long time. How long would a new player need to grind for 16M Isk?
That's my experience too. People make fun of WoW, but a first time player could play it and learn passable play without any outside resources. Eve seems impossible to play unless you already know how to play, so you have to work very hard to learn how to play, what to do, and how to progress.
One thing that happened in "old" wars was to flank someone. What would happen if 10% of a force were to form up in a different system and come in behind the enemy, perhaps targeting the repair ships? Or is the chance of spies enough that you couldn't get that big of a force to form up then, and you'd need to have them form up together, then fly away, and come in later from behind in a flanking maneuver? Can you not FTL in a battle? Short jump FTL through the enemy formation to optimal distance behind, come about, and rip apart the healers. Then jump back to "your side" + some to be out of immediate range of the other side, and come about, for a stand-off with healers on the other side gone. Oh, and lay mines behind you so that they can't do the same to you in retaliation.
Go read more sci-fi. More than one series I've read had indicated that nukes are useless. In the time it takes to get there, the other ship has moved. And if you are firing on something more stationary, it'll burn it up with lasers first. Nukes are good only as mines, and for flares (pop a few to detonate just outside range of killing yourself, turning off everything electronic first, and the enemy will blind itself from looking hard at you and staring into the blast). But to actually kill someone in a ship to ship battle, the closest anything comes to that is anti-matter missiles (guided, often with strong AI), which could be argued to be nuke-like enough, but then, often antimatter missiles are often anti-matter fueled, so they detonate at their target, "igniting" unspent fuel.
Much like future warfare is generations, it's hard to imagine the future. Someone from midieval times might question why we don't use metal armor against bullets. We've "evolved" past the point where a person from that era can even understand why we are where we are. Lasers are the only thing that has a chance to hit something at space-battle distances. And even then, you can out maneuver a laser. Though, I just came up with a way to defeat that.
Send out 100 probes between you and the other ship. Shoot them with the laser, and have them lense/reflect it to the other ship. So the final aim is close, but the energy generation (the expensive part) is far away. Kill a drone. I'll send out more. That's the level of evolution that we can't even really conceive at this point. Millenia of military advance will make us cavemen. So it's all wrong. The answer is beyond our comprehension. We don't even know what will cost money in the future. Will we be material rich and energy poor, or material limited and unlimited energy?
Ask people to describe a "highway" system if everyone had flying cars, and you'd get something like Jetsons, or even back to the future, where the flying cars all line up in lanes, with little to no vertial separation, except for "overpasses" and other things that are more like layered 2-d than an independent 3-d construct.
We conceive of 3d like radar systems. A top-down view.
People have no skills to do something like "throw a ball through a hoop and have it land on a specific spot". Such things can be trained in, but generally are quite lacking in our 2-d minds.
So you never paid real money for game time?
The act of destroying doesn't transfer wealth. If you buy a box of 100 rounds, did you destroy anything? No? Just transferred wealth? Yes. The same happened in Eve. The building of the ships and work to get the ISK to buy/build them was the transfer of wealth. Firing off 100 rounds at the range "destroys" the wealth. If you didn't fire them, you could sell them. After you fire them, they are worth less. If we call the brass worthless, then you have nothing left after use, and that would be the Eve analogy.
That's been true since as long as anyone can remember (though void for people sufficiently old enough that they only *think* they remember). Mainly since 1960, the first presidential election determined, in a large part, through TV viewing.
Which government did he aid?
The US government may rule that the US government didn't break the law, but that doesn't mean they didn't break the law, specifically the 4th Amendment (which trumps the later laws that "allow" unwarranted searches).