[Aardwolf]

(This can either be in terms of FreeSpace ships, or in general, so I wasn't sure whether to put this in General FreeSpace or General Discussion or Fan Fiction ... etc.)


What would a realistic ship be like?

I designed a ship recently that was meant to be 'realistic'... it was armed with 4 forward-facing turbo-powered energy weapons of some sort, 6 railgun turrets (two barrels each, the barrels being approximately 1 meter wide), and 4 arrays of zero-profile missile launchers. Its engines were in the rear, but were spaced as far as possible to make it as maneuverable as possible... putting all of the engines near the center of the rear section does not make it faster, and if anything reduces the ability to accelerate angularly.





What would a realistic set of weapons for space combat be like?

I think for short to medium range, railguns would be ideal. They fire projectiles that are very hard to intercept or avoid, and release an explosive amount of energy on impact (pretty much as much energy as you put in when firing).

For longer range, missile are ideal. They can track a target, and don't require much energy to fire, so you don't need huge capacitors or anything like you might for the railguns.

For strategic weaponry, I think the best you can do is a nuclear railgun round. Fire it with a railgun so it can't be easily detected/intercepted, and give it a huge payload to send the target and everything nearby to kingdom come.

Nukes also emit tons of x-rays, which could in theory shatter a ship's hull.

Lastly, lasers: they're invisible, as close to instantaneous as you can get without bending space-time (which we don't know how to do), and release about as much energy as you put in.






Now you give some ideas...

Compare to FreeSpace, or not, as you please.
Keep it real.

[Man-Whore]

Interesting topic. 

I personally have always liked FS more than any other space SIM because it does a great job of keeping it real, as you said. Its predictions to me really don't seem so blasphemous in comparison to some other Sci-Fi universes. They seem like real ships with real firepower and very real flaws.

But to answer your topic, I think humans are going to be sticking to projectile weaponry for quite a while still; even, no, especially in space. That is, if, we humans ever stop killing each other. Another great thing about FS: We still ain't perfect.

[Polpolion]

I doubt there would be any  fighters or bombers as we know it. Take a ship maybe 1.5 times the size of the space shuttle today, add some forward facing missile tubes, maybe tomahawks or something a bit smaller. And the missiles would most likely have super long ranges and travel very fast. Like >200 mi ranges and speeds at like mach 5 or something. Just speculation; I pulled those numbers out of my ass.

I'd say there'd be some sort of laser CIWS, because of the speed things travel in space they'd need a beam to take it out. It'd probably require a lot of energy to detonate a missile warhead, so that would prevent it from being a primary weapon. I guess lasers could work as a primary weapon, but you'd need some crazy powerful targeting computer to do it for you to target ships really far away and hold the beam on it for a few seconds.

As for armor, I'm betting that if the ship would be hit with a single missile or maybe two, it would be screwed.



In general, I'm betting it would follow how things are going today with areal combat: Shoot before the enemy is in range. We'd keep getting faster and faster ships, longer range and faster guns. Well, not guns, but missiles. Guns can't accurately shoot that far quickly and railguns are too "accident prone" to be fired successively a lot.

[terran_emperor]

FS should have had more ballistic mass drivers like the Maxim

[Aardwolf]

One thing people don't realize about realistic space stuff... or at least sometimes forget? Objects have only one top speed: the speed of light. Acceleration is not countered or diminished over time except by the 1 hydrogen atom per cubic meter or so.

[IceFire]

Something from the Honor Harington series would be what I envision future space combat to look like roughly.  Ships with arrays of missiles and point defenses launching at each other from maximum range as they close the distance and fly past.  Winner would be decided by whoever came out the other side...kind of like a high speed game of chicken...with missiles.

[NGTM-1R]

If you've been playing Mass Effect and reading the codex entries...(Surprisingly well thought out on these kinds of details, they were.)

The primary limitation on tactics will be the other guy's ability to dodge or shoot down the incoming. Combat may open at extremely long ranges with missile volleys, but we already have the capablity to swat missiles like flies with chemical lasers, so unless you can oversaturate or spoof his antimissile defenses then you will need to get much closer. Even gun projectiles would be vunerable to interception, they're much easier to track in a vacuum and absolute zero environment.

Decisive combat will probably take place at under 100km, perhaps under 50. The weapons of decision will probably be extremely high velocity projectiles or directed energy. Humans tend to think a certain way about ship design, so I personally regard spinal-mount weapons as unlikely, but on a spacecraft they would be viable and have advantages. Ships will be designed to survive damage by their redundancy and compartmentalization, not their armor: at most their design will be meant to deflect projectiles or beams away from the important parts of the ship, not stop them entirely. Because space is in a lot of ways a much more benign environment to machinery, a ship could continue fighting with much more severe damage then one might expect. Absent knocking out something major, like the power source, a ship would be able to continue fighting with large chunks of its hull missing, or while looking like a sieve, because you don't flood and sink in space, and you don't catch fire.

[Nuke]

just point your engine at em (any engine powerful enough to travel any kind of distance in space is also a weapon of mass destruction)

what i would use is a ballistic projectile, which would be aimed with great accuracy, and then detonated some distance before impact. the shrapnel would be the killer. say you put a hole the size of your fist in the side of the shuttle. they would have much better luck sealing that gash than they would a bunch of tiny little holes. it also makes them more likely to do damage. a dumb projectile could be dodged fairly easy if detected.

might also be better to use a gatling gun. something low caliber like 7.62 which fires of small rounds really fast. then again if you can manage it, it might be feasable to put small rocket engines in a large round, to give it some level of trajectory adjustment. armor in space just means it takes longer to get out of the way. sure it would defend against the small shells and shrapnel, but it just means you would suck up more missiles and large shells.

in situations where fuel is a concern, good old fashioned missiles would be the way to go, as you wouldn't need to burn any fuel to compensate for recoil, just release and light. projectile weapons can be made recoilless by spewing equal and opposite force out the tail end (and such weapons are commonly used today).

lasers would work but would be really slow. lasers today must slowly burn through an object. airborne laser must keep its beam on a missile for several seconds to a few minutes, depending on thickness. and it would have to fucus on the same spot. thats where you roll the missile and give it some unscathed hull to burn through on. more powerful lasers might exist to speed up the job some.

its possible for weapons to work in space. the real question is at what kind of distance it would be possible at. i get the feeling that even with very smart weapons, effective combat ranges would be very close possibly even in naked eye visible range.

theres also this
http://www.x-plane.com/SpaceCombat.html

[TrashMan]

While you could use railguns and lasers to shoot at things light-seconds, even light minutes away (heck, you can shoot at Earth from the fringes of the systems, but that's easy since it's a big target with a fixed trajectory), at such distances the accuracy would be beyond abysmal..

even assuming only 1 light second distance, if you're targeting is off by 0,00001°, you're gonna miss your target by a few km. .. and both you and your target are moving at great speeds to boot!

Missiles would be used for long-range combat, but methinks ships would try to come as close as possible, for accuracy

[Admiral_Stones]

Maybe already said but:

a) Missiles are difficult in space, since for them to explode efficiently they need oxygen. I could imagine however that the missiles had a piercing tip to batter through armor and explode in the oxygen-filled interior of the ship. Similar to torpedoes, in fact.

b) Armor. You'd need so high amounts of armor to be really useful that it would make the ship extremely high mass and unmaneuverable. Even modern, armor-clad Main Battle Tanks can be destroyed by a well aimed RPG shot to the bottom.
Also, I guess by the time we fight in space, we would have already found a durable metal yet with similar electric capabilities as copper. Maybe extremely cooled iridium, because iridium AFAIK is the king of durability.

[Titan]

Frankly, to me it makes sense that the smallest ship that still has full combat armament should be just a little smaller then the Fenris... go figure. You would need space for the main reactor, one or two secondary reactors (for engines and weapons) weapon systems, ammunition holds for ballistic armament (which reminds me, has anyone ever made a missile ships that has a magazine?) and things like engines. the engines themselves would probably be about the size of a normal two story house. and then you would need space for the crew, which has by now amounted to a fair size.

[Aardwolf]

a) Missiles are difficult in space, since for them to explode efficiently they need oxygen. I could imagine however that the missiles had a piercing tip to batter through armor and explode in the oxygen-filled interior of the ship. Similar to torpedoes, in fact.

This is dead wrong. Modern explosives contain all of the oxygen they need to detonate mixed into the explosive.

[Nuke]

im sure nukes can explode without some gaseous medium. you need air to have a blast wave. to compensate for lack of atmosphere put a nuke inside a meter thick lead shell and see it not cause some serious death to the crew of any space ship it may explode near.

[NGTM-1R]

(which reminds me, has anyone ever made a missile ships that has a magazine?)

Dozens before the USN went to VLS launchers almost exculsively. The Mark 13 single-arm launcher was almost ubiquitous prior to the block 2 AEGIS cruisers.

Skin-skin contact detonation would be much simpler and more effective then fragmentation, unless those are really big fragments. It doesn't take much armor at all to stop small objects. The Shuttle has been hit by things like loose bolts before without taking serious damage.

[General Battuta]

In the near future? Extensive use of high-velocity kinetic attacks and shotgun-type weapons. No railguns, because it's doubtful they'll be perfected to a level where they're practical to lift into orbit and power with fuel or solar cells.

Relatively ineffective or simply nonexistent armor -- these ships are going to be built in Earth orbit or launched from the Earth's surface, and armor is heavy. As someone said, compartmentalization is the order of the day.

No human crews.

A focus on destroying not enemy ships but enemy communications and surveillance satellites.

Nukes, though without EMP or blast wave they'll be less effective.

Did I mention the lack of human crews? They'd be remote-operated, or autonomous.

Lastly, fuel limits. Maneuvering and orbital dynamics would be limited by chemical fuels.

Even more speculatively, I think that swarms of tiny satellites might be cheaper and more popular than larger vessels. Why risk something as expensive as a combat Shuttle if you can instead deploy a flock of tiny, stealthy, nuke-bearing nanosats? You could even use Shuttles (or their near-future successors) as carriers.

Oh, and orbital attacks on launch sites. I bet space wars would be very short.

[Aardwolf]

The EMP from a Nuke is not as powerful a force as the X-Rays it emits, which are produced regardless of atmosphere and which could shatter a ship's hull.

[perihelion]

Another problem with lasers most people don't seem to consider is coherence length.  Over distances measured in meters, sure, that laser beam is still just as powerful and "in step" as it was when it was emitted.  However, even with modern state-of-the-art laboratory-only lasers, you would start to get significant destructive interference within a few kilometers.  The problem is that lasers are not mono-frequency discharges like everyone thinks.  If you plotted intensity versus wavelength for a given laser beam, you would get a very sharp gaussian distribution.  The sharper the spike (the closer you get to the mono-frequency ideal), the more energy you are rejecting.  There are ways to make the wavelength distribution more narrow, but there is a price to pay in terms of how much energy is lost to "filtering" for want of a better word.

A true mono-directional mono-frequency beam could theoretically go on forever and never lose coherence, never start to interfere destructively with itself.  But no real beam can accomplish either of those objectives perfectly.  In a beam of light with multiple frequencies, even if all photons start out in step, eventually, they will get further and further out of phase with one another until coherence is completely lost.  The closer you get to the mono-frequency ideal, the more of your input energy you aren't going to get out of the final beam.  So, you are essentially trading off intensity for range or vice versa.  Considering the practically limitless range of kinetic weaponry in space, I doubt that lasers are going to be very practical without enormous (practically limitless) power sources.

[Wanderer]

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html

[General Battuta]

The EMP from a Nuke is not as powerful a force as the X-Rays it emits, which are produced regardless of atmosphere and which could shatter a ship's hull.

I believe you, Aardwolf, but I want a source.

Source?

[Wanderer]

Probably because nukes won't create EMP in vacuum...