[Killer Whale]

I hate to break it to the whole lot of you, but:

ANY Naval or Aerial parallel with Space will be STUPID

This includes:

• Runways
• Take-offs/Landings
• Fighters!
• Dogfights
• Heavy Armor
• Any unguided weaponry
• Ergo...GUNS
• Stealth

Recommended Reading:

• (Once again) Project Rho
• Attack Vector: Tactical!

(Boardgame with true 3D vector movement. Acceleration/Power ratings are probably only a single magnitude off-scale instead the typical several magnitude "overestimation" in sci-fi.)

• Books by David Weber
  
  • The Apocalypse Troll
  • Honoverse books
  • Starfyre books

The prime reason, why its so, is that in space, big ships aren't any slower than small ones. For a given thrust-to-weight ratio you can build a big or small ship, their acceleration (and there is no such thing as "top speed") will be the same.

You could build a "fighter" - in practice it will be a small ship, with lower endurance on its life-support and engine. Actually if you go that way, a missile is better: no life-support, no squishy meat-bags who will be turned into purrey at a "mere 100-g" acceleration. It will have better acceleration. It will also turn faster (but not change course faster! I'm merely speaking of pivoting), so it could bring its weapons to bear faster.

A bigger ship can mount more point-defense, and stronger (with bigger antennas) radars and lidars. It can also mount more redundant systems (but not 'armor' as we know it!), so it can stay in the fight longer.

The best weapon in space is a big missile - heck, actually a big AI controlled torpedo or ship with an engine of its own - and a nasty nuclear warhead (fusion or even anti-matter in higher tech).

Unlike chemical or kinetic weaponry, a proximity kill (even in space) is very much possible with a nuke. It won't have a shockwave, and will output only minimal EMP (which it will still do, as the matter of the missile will be irradiated and emit strong Electromagnetic Radiation - which is what EMP really is) but sheer radiation pressure will be lethal within a couple of kilometers.

If that's far too close to beat the point-defense, then mount a bomb-pumped X-Ray laser on the missile, and you can a whooping couple of hundred (50-150) km.  effective range.

This will be compounded by the fact, that you can't take armor into space - although in hindsight, you can, it would be just stupid - since armor that stops radiation (which incidentally also happens to be lasers when you speak of the EM variant) or high kinetic impactors takes a lot of mass.

High mass equals low acceleration for a given engine. Which is a very bad thing, since the guy with better acceleration will be able to "sling" his whole missile armament at you while actually staying out of the powered envelope of your own missiles.

Here is a key word: POWERED. Ergo, under controlled flight with propulsion to change course.
There is no such thing as "range" for missiles in space. They can shut off their engine and drift most of the way: there is only such a thing as powered envelope.

Once within a given range, they can go to powered intercept, and here only their acceleration versus your ships acceleration will matter. This range is an almost certain kill-zone (point-defense non-withstanding).
The reason why the missile will always win, is that it will have a lot lower mass, it won't carry life-support, FTL or intricate navigation equipment. It will also win, because its parts won't need the endurance a full blown spaceship needs. It can redline its engine, wear out all its parts and still intercept the spaceship with glee and tolerances to spare.

This is why it becomes a game of delta-v: the imparted impulse your engine impart by burning all your fuel.
In this game, the ship has an advantage - it can't accelerate that fast, but it can gain a higher final velocity; since high acceleration engines also usually have worse specific impulse. So if you start running soon enough, you can outrun the missile since it will burn out before reaching you.

If for some reason you point defense isn't saturated - which is the name of the game in such an engagement. The one mounting a sufficient number of missiles on a sufficient number of ships will saturate the other's defenses with missiles, jamming, decoys and pure and nasty radiation that blinds tracking radars - your next best bet is a light-speed weapon - either a MASER or a LASER.

This could happen if neither side has a numerical advantage. For this kind of fight, a lightsecond (300 km) is the absolute maximum range you can hope for a hit. Effective range is much less, a fraction of that. Highly focused lasers, don't drill but blow. The reason is the following: if a sufficient amount of energy is deposited in a small enough amount of matter it will immediately evaporate - explosively.

Given this, a good anti-laser cover could be porous, so it vents the gases without fragmenting. Mirror coverings won't work, as any mirror has microscopic faults that the laser will get down to and develop into massive ones. Metamaterials (with negative diffraction) may offset a lasers power somewhat.

Deploying gases, of chaff to diffuse the laser won't be viable either as it will scatter too fast to have any effect.

This 50-100 km range will be the "sword" range for ships.

If you want something harder hitting, put some mass into your beam. Particle beams won't have the range of lasers, since they will be only c-fractional (part lightspeed) weapons, but a range of 25-50 km (.5 c) doesn't seem all to far fetched.

This will be the "knife/dagger" range. Getting hit by a particle beam will be really nasty, as the decelerating particles emmit massive doses of radiation, frying electronics (and the crew) as well as explosivly evaporating anything in their path. They will be also armor piercing, since they will go through several meters of matter.

The in-your-face punches of ships will come from kinetic weaponry - these are likely mass drivers or railguns that shoot matter at c-fractional speed, but a lot lower than particle beams (.01 c or the like). Since closing velocity can impart a significant further energy (say a .005 c closure rate between the combatants) to these "bullets" these will be the weapon of choice for suicide charges.
These won't be dumb bullets though - to hit they will need a significant propulsion of their own.

You could also mount such weapons on missiles, and missiles can be fired from such mass drivers.[/list]

Why runways or take-offs are stupid: there is no such thing as 'rest' in space (You are at rest compared to what?!) You will be pulling several g-s and accelerating all the while you deploy your gunboats (okay, fighters!), so they WON'T be stationary targets for the enemy.
Further more there is no stall speed in space, so you can simply match course with your mothership, and a simple waldo can grab you and pull you into the bay - or you can simply drift into the bay with maneuvering thrusters.

Final word:

The reason why sci-fi is full of close-range combats, and dashing 20-something fighter pilots, is that the life-and-death of a nuclear missile is nowhere near as interesting as the life-and-death of a 20-something fighter pilot.

So space battle would it be a whole lot of satellites, planetary or stellar, with solar panels, a tough but not necessarily strong, or armoured, skin, a transmitter (for relay and commands back to a base), and a. missile banks and missile launchers, b. a reactor and a laser gun. More expensive ones could have bigger missile banks and/or bigger missiles or bigger and better lasers. Some could have both. A planetary or large space instillation would be created in space (so it wouldn't be lifted up from a planet) and heavily armed, with long range missiles, lasers, particle lasers, high recharge anti-warhead lasers, and bigger missiles. They would have big gun banks and large 'gunships' about 50-100 m long, or small remotely controlled would be sent to intercept incoming craft. This sort of weaponry is far underpowered compared to freespace warships and fighters, for these are more prepared to taking out lots a small craft, not sure what offensive would be like...


Hmm... this is what i think

Ships would be similar to GTA ships, the fenris is the powerfull ship, the leviathan is a rare, super powerfull ship, and the Orion is the mother-of-all-superhuge-ships!!!
Ergo.
They would have mostly small ships about the size of a modern day space shuttle. They would act as gunships with an assortment of lasers. They  would have tough armour (though not freespacey thick!!), sort of, able to stand a couple of shots, or a drill laser for a few seconds. It would be able able to shut off compartments so would stay in a fight for a while longer (using his theory of littleburn, no flood, long time for crash) and would use high accuracy, high concentration, long ranged lasers as primaries, and secondary would concentrate more on damage. small crew

And larger ships which have heavy armour and more numerous, more powerfull weapons, and be a lot bigger, more of a very large threat to enemies.

And super instillation/destroyer class, which have massive weapons, massive size, and massive armour. bear in mind items do not have to be launched in space, rather, thay can be created in space!!!

[Colonol Dekker]

Well i still want a *struggles to remember the starting fighter from elites name* one of those

[Flaser]

Armor does you little good, as anything that can't maneuver will be easy pickings for missiles or missile based bomb pumped lasers. You can simply accelerate the missiles to ridiculous velocities (c-fractional) and in that case no armor  or point defense in all the heaven's will save your hide.

In case you don't have good enough engines for c-fractional strikes (no 'reactionless drive') then missiles won't be that deadly, but in that case, you're better off mounting more point-defense. This is beacuse since lasers will always hit, and only the high number of missiles and their short intercept window is what allows them to do damage.

With laserheads though, as soon as they are in laser-range, they will detonate....a bomb pump laser could have an even longer effective range than your on-board lasers, since they don't have to deal with heat-management in their suicidal discharge of EM radiation. This means you'd have to paint each-and-every missile even before they're in your (or their) effective range, meaning you'd need to keep them painted long enough to slowly burn through their hide instead instantly vaporizing them....and the clock's ticking, they're coming.

In the end, it will be a race between your heat-dissipation ability and the the heat generated by your PD that determines how much you can mount. Any 'excess' weight that doesn't seriously impede your mission profile could go to armoring critical parts of the ship.

That same weight will have to be divided between heatsinks that store, and radiators that dissipate heat (it could be, that during battle you'd only accumulate heat and you'd have to disengage to cool off). Propellant will also come out of this balance, and determines how long you can stay in the engagement or how fast you can accelerate - in the end, you propellant could be the best armor you have - several meters of fuel tanks filled with inert gas or liquid.

You have to strike a balance, and the given technology will likely give a minimum size for a ship. Smaller ships in a battle-net could have a similar PD effectiveness to a big one, and by sharing date could even form a virtual very big radar array. Even better, by losing a single ship you'd only loose a fraction of your capabilities while a big ship would loose more.

However there's also a counter argument, that a big ship would survive damage, that would outright kill a smaller one. So once again another balancing act.

Finally there are mothership designs, but while these produce superior combatants these also inevitably draw some doctrinal and tactical constraints:

• The mothership can't enter combat, so you have a vulnerable asset that you need to protect, hence you're committed to denying the enemy a portion of space no matter what.
• 'Attack craft' (figthers, gunboats etc.) have a more limited endurance than full blown spaceships, so delaying tactics can work against you, moreover the sorting/servicing of the attack craft by the mothership introduces another logistical nightmare into battle - one that could go wrong or could be exploited by the enemy.

As it is, high maneuverability would be only good for missile based engagements so ironically big ships are less likely to mount armor.
Attack craft could either choose to mount armor (since they don't need FTL, nav or durable life-support) and still have acceleration similar to a bigship. The armor would serve them well in a laser-fight, but only in a laser-fight, so they'd likely be dedicated laser platforms.
....or they could do away with armor, and be the ultimate 'space superiority' fighter, a sort of space version of the Zero. These wouldn't stand the laser as good as the armored gunboats so they'd likely be used only with missile load-outs. These missile attack craft could practically ferry missiles from from the mothership or their base into attack range, and would be very hard to intercept since, they stay just long enough to launch the missiles, and afterwards they are even faster while escaping since the missiles no longer weigh them down.

[Colonol Dekker]

No longer "mass" them down you mean :s in a real life mothership scenario one good torpedo/missile strike into the hangar would be my first strategic goal

[General Battuta]

Flaser, you make a lot of definite statements, but I'm not sure we can be confident enough to back them up.

I note that you haven't talked about relativistic kill vehicles (c-fractional missiles are kind of similar) or kinetic scatter weapons. You love your bomb-pumped lasers, but why not fill the warheads with shrapnel and detonate them in the flight path of a moving ship?

[Colonol Dekker]

Lo and behold. We've made it to one of my favourites good old trusty flak! This would be one of the most effective weapons against exo atmospherics, failing some wonderful all encompassing mega shield. If the scale of warhead and delivery system is balanced enough to get it to it's target that would be one hell of a pube in the milkshake© for an officer commanding.   

[Flaser]

Flaser, you make a lot of definite statements, but I'm not sure we can be confident enough to back them up.

I note that you haven't talked about relativistic kill vehicles (c-fractional missiles are kind of similar) or kinetic scatter weapons. You love your bomb-pumped lasers, but why not fill the warheads with shrapnel and detonate them in the flight path of a moving ship?

I make a definite statement in favor of lasers since they have an insane range - in thousands of kilometers (or even hundreds of kilometers in case beam scattering is that bad). I even made a gross error earlier (mere tens to hundred kilometers) in favour of missiles. Having read up on them I had to change my opinion (which it still is since I merely cite sources and don't list hard data).

You next best bet is a nuke which can do a proximity kill from a single kilometer distance.

Any kinetic weapon will need to achieve direct contact with the target - something that can't be done even in aerial combat today, where maneuvering is a lot easier since you have a medium to act against that facilitates sharp turns.

In space you can't even hide, so anything launched by you will be assuredly detected by the enemy - and they will act to counter it. Even a mild 0.01 g burn could put them outside the envelope of an unguided kinetic killer since there are at least hundreds of kilometers between ships.

Before I alredy mentioned c-fractional strikes as a valid method: shorter ranged particle beams and even shorter ranged rail and coil guns. The reason these are shorter ranged, is that they can only be a fraction as accurate as lasers with their c-fractional speed.

If you have a guided c-fractional weapon like the missiles in Honoverse, that's an entirely different game.
But to accelerate that much mass to that speed will likely take a reactionless drive, as doing it with any conventional means is likely prohibitively energy demanding.

I will grant you, that you could multiply the range of a rail or coil gun, by giving it some rudimentary seeking ability through some trick of controlling the projectile, but even then their effective range would be a fraction of lasers.

@Colonel: flak would only work against hapless fixed orbit targets, where your delivery mechanism can easily deposit the nasty into their path.

Any viable space platform would simply change course, and avoid the flak by a margin of hundreds of kilometers at least.

Finally a little math: if you scatter N-number of pellets (flak) in space, the number of pellets for any given unit of space will be (N*(pellet's facing surface in meters))/(4*R^2*pi) where R-is the distance from the explosion, and (4*R^2*pi) is the surface of an sphere with R-radius. If you use a meter long big pellets (quite unlikely, but for this thought experiment will do) for a mere kilometer this result in a staggering N*1/1256000. Ergo even for a thousand pellets there would be a whole kilometer between the pellets if you assume constant distribution.

If you use smaller pallets, the number will increase, but then you could use more pellets for the same mass.

A shaped charge could give you another boost, since it would blast most pellets into a small section of the sphere, let's say in a 1-degree arc (quite unlikely, but we're having fun). This means, that we need to cut a circular section out of the sphere to get the new surface value. That's quite complicated, but if we take the circle we cut the sphere with as an approximate result our error wouldn't be that big, and the surface of this circle will be actually smaller than the cut section of the sphere, so it would result in even greater pellet concentration.

So for 1-degree arc and 1 kilometer distance this area would be:
2*r^2*pi, where r-is the smallest side of a 0,5-degree Pythagorean triangle (note-once again I approximated).
r = sin(0,5 degree --we need radian)*1000 = 8.73
A = 2*8.73^2*3.14 = 478,61 m^2

So above eqution would look like:

N*(facing surface area)/479. No longer "so" bad. With a mere 500 pellets with 1-meter length, we can assure that for every meter of the impact area there will be a pellet. (We didn't take further spread from internal collisions in the mass of pellets into account).

Now let's take a distance of a 10 kilometers:
r=87.3
A=2*87.3^2*3.14=47861^2

N*(facing surface area)/47861. Umm...quite bad. Wow! A hundred fold increase. Now there is a single pellet for every hundred meters if we used 500 hundred pellets. Unless you're flying a leviathan, you're likely to be able to maneuver your ship into a hundred-meter-by-hundred-meter window.
At the distance of 20 kilometers there would be a single pellet for every four-hundred meters.

So to be effective, the kinetic flak weapon has to be awfully close to its target before exploding.
I will grant you, that this could be an alternative to a nuclear warhead on a missile - which also has a comparable 1 km proximity kill ability (for a megaton warhead).

The likely value would be even less, since internal collisions will scatter the pellets a lot more, and you can't build a shaped charge that would put all of the pellets into a 1-degree arc. So likely the result is hundreds of meters.

Compare this to the hundreds of kilometers (at least) of a laserhead, or the sure kill (by radiating the crew) of a nuke from the same distance.

[Polpolion]

How far into the future are we thinking about here? Like ~2350s only RL, not FS, or more of 2050, moon settling kinda stuff?

[TrashMan]

I see no problem with runways..a visual aid for pilots (space is dark), extra volume to put stuff in or extra armor.

[Flaser]

I see no problem with runways..a visual aid for pilots (space is dark), extra volume to put stuff in or extra armor.

Any ship worth its salt will have a competent radar and/or lidar array. Even more likely some sort of short range radio guidance system (like ILS today) would be used. Actually eyeballing any whatsoever approach is unlikely - you will need a computer to hold your hand all the way since you will be doing orbit adjustments all the time. Humans are incapable of doing that on their own (unless you're a Abh with a spacial sensor ).

You will also need a sophisticated nav system that automatically tracks a number of stellar features (stars, a planet, the horizon whatever is handy and 'relatively' fixed) to get your bearing. Now comes the hard part: estimating your position. Today we need the help of our entire observation network on the ground to assist in this. In space you will need to make your own range and range-rate measurements. How do you measure how far you're from the sun? How about a planet? You radar signal may not return from the surface, the planet could be outside your radar range, you may not now the size or mass of the planet etc. etc.

It's far more complicated then you're led to believe in any game. When I took a course in space engineering I was amazed how intricate this whole thing is.

[General Battuta]

Hmm, Flaser, your arguments are compelling and I'm impressed by the inclusion of some supporting math.

I'm convinced.