How should realistic space combat look like?
slow and uninteresting
>>47134025
Massively long range compared to most sci-fi, minimum mobility beyond intentional velocity alterations, computers are doing the calculations and shooting.
Boring.
>>47134025
If you can see the other ship without assistance, your way too close.
Ships will super rarely battle in open space, most of the fighting would be concentrated around planets.
>>47134025
No humans involved.
Non existent or boarding action focused because any space faring vessel of note will be worth more than the gold space mcguffins it is carrying .
I had a cool idea for man on man combat in space. It's not exactly practical though. I thought that there's no reason for boarders or saboteurs to not carry the most giant preposterous guns while space walking. Just imagine a dude in EVA one-handing a massive multi barrel smart gun. If you're looking for rule of cool.
>>47134162
Even in space, making a massive object turn is hard. The man with the cannon can't aim nearly as well as the man with the rifle because his weapon is cumbersome as all fuck.
On top of that, carting around a cannon would require a lot more thrust to accelerate in the same way, so will be either much bulkier or much "slower".
At extremely long range, fought entirely between AI, and takes hours or days to resolve.
Realistic space combat:
Virtually never occurs, and when it does, nowhere near planets.
Lots of flying around in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly one of two things happen: you are blasted into a billion fragments, or your sensors bleep, at which point you fire kinetic projectiles from thousands of miles away and await hit confirmation.
Since there is really no way to hide your signature in space or out-maneuver tiny projectiles carrying deadly payloads in a big, heavy ship, you get your hit confirmation. Target destroyed.
It's a game of who sees who first, and then it's a foregone conclusion barring HIGHLY cinematic ECM, cloaking, whatever.
Or you can just pretend it's WW2 in space like Star Wars, nobody has missiles, nobody has to worry about heat radiation so they just fly around pew-pewing at each other from a few hundred yards (because Delta-V isn't a thing, reactionless drives, etc.) and sensors are basically "if you can see them, you can shoot them".
>>47134162
Recoil still exists, and would be even worse in low- or zero-g environments. Even just one short burst will send you careening every which way.
>>47134274
You're forgetting active defences and mutual detection scenarios.
The actual outcome would be that either A sees B but not vice versa and A blows their load into B or both A and B see each other and blow their loads.
Then either enough gets through to score a kill on one or both, or all parties that know where the other is run dry and leave. Given the flight times involved, scoring a kill won't even begin to imply safety, since you'll have minutes if not hours worth of guided munitions still inbound.
>>47134274
>>47134398
Another factor is that unless you've the technology to accelerate your projectile to a pretty significant fraction of c, actually hitting the target seems far from guaranteed. If you're firing from the edge of a feasible detection range, then the target would have ample time to make a fairly minute course adjustment that would make the projectile miss entirely. If the target is undergoing semi-random evasive maneuvers, it'll be a motherfucker of a task to score a direct hit.
>>47134516
There's no real point in using unguided projectiles at that sort of range unless bombarding a target with a known path. Anything intended for ship to ship would be guided.
>>47134079
Why? Honestly I don't see why long range would be boring. Maybe it would be a little more like being in defcon-1 waiting for the right moment than pew pew for hours, but hell, read some napoleonic navy fiction: long range was ANYTHING but boring.
>>47134398
In space if A sees B B sees A. Heat radiation is impossible to conceal.
>>47134516
So space combat is an unknown number of hidden trigger-happy spaceships missing each others repeatedly?
That's never going to end...
>>47134649
A may have keener detection systems or better algorithms than B. Alternatively, B may be radiating more. Heat radiation is impossible to conceal, but does diminish in strength with distance. It's easy to conceive of a situation wherein A has a greater detection range or is just generating less heat.
>>47134632
Guided missiles can be hacked and blinded, though.
Shooting long-range missiles filled with flechettes at your opponent while setting active contermeasures and conducting radioelectronic warfare.
Unless your setting have some forcefield stuff this seems quite logical.
>>47134695
I think this is kinda improbable because basically every thinkable weapon system would be waaaaay out of range before stealth could be a concern.
Unless they use goddamn reativistic ballistic shit.
>>47134695
Detection range will be far, far longer then engagement range however.
Range in space is determined by how much your target can alter it's motion between shot and impact.
If the target can't change it's course then the range is effectively unlimited. You can launch days or years away from the target and wait for impact.
If it can evade, however, you need to get ordinance on target fast enough that they can't simply step out of the way. Even directed energy weapons take time to reach a target.
>>47134025
>How should realistic space combat look like?
That depends completely on the level of offensive, defensive and related technology.
If defenses are stronger, knife fights at closer ranges
If weapons are stronger, long range sniping
>>47134025
>How should realistic space combat look like?
It would depend on the tech-
Kill me and be done with it.
>>47134738
>hacked
Not fucking likely.
>blinded
Unless you're able to blind them at a very impressive distance, they'll still spend less time blind than a bullet.
>>47134787
>>47134826
Engagement range would be entirely dependent on what the other guy is doing and if they expect to be attacked. If you have a decent prediction of the target's general area a week from now, such as "In orbit around that planet, thanks spies", you can attack at a week's flight time.
Which really raises some interesting questions on how a peace treaty would work in space combat. Would everyone just agree to preemptively forgive any attacks that had already been launched but had yet to arrive?
>>47134925
They could disclose details of already launched attacks, so they could be avoided/shot down
>>47134769
>>47134787
Hard sci-fi weapon systems..
Long ranged missiles.
Kinetic kill. The only thing we have tried so far (anti-satellite missiles do this.) Range is limited by the weapon's fuel, but if it can shut down the engine or has a multi-stage engine it can coast a long time before accelerating again for the attack.
Conventional guns.
At best they can only add a few dozen kilometers per second velocity to a projectile. This means that unless your target can't maneuver their range will be limited to a few thousand kilometers, possibly longer with guided shells (making these a combination of missile). Like other weapons they'd require active cooling.
Electromotive weapons.
Rail guns have the advantage of having no real maximum velocity, only limited by how long you can build it and how much energy you can add. A gun able to accelerate a projectile 50,000 kilometers per second could have quite long range and hit hard enough to defeat any conceivable armor.
Directed Energy Weapons.
Lasers! On the bright side, you've got almost 300,000 kilometers per second of velocity. On the bad side, you need telescopes to focus them and they are really thermally inefficient and hitting things with photons rather then things with a resting mass means they transfer energy less efficiently.
If nothing else, you'd want these for defensive. A laser can damage or destroy guided weapons, or even deflect projectiles by vaporizing a small part of the surface to push them a little to the side.
>>47134925
You'd move military assets in random evasion patterns. Shooting at them at long range would be totally pointless. Shooting at things that can't maneuver would be a dick move, but they might move interceptors between your projectiles and the target.
>>47135068
Random evasion only gets you so far when you're trying to go from point A to point B. Sure, it'll totally fuck up unguided rounds but why the fuck would you even consider using those? All you really need to do is get a guided missile close enough that it can spot the target and the guidance can handle the rest. If you know where they're going, "close enough" can be pretty easy.
Stealth technology should be limited to small fighters.
>>47134025
Like submarine combat, lots of chatter, followed by a bunch of people suddenly exclaiming in shock and horror before the entire crew goes pop.
>>47134025
If it's a modern day to very near future "first space war" scenario, then it should look like old-school submarine vs. submarine combat. Your ship has a fairly small number of massive long-range missiles that you lob at a blips on a sensor screen that may or may not be the enemy while trying your best to minimize your own thermal signature and radar cross section so the enemy doesn't get a firing solution and launch his missiles before yours hit.
A little further in the future, you'll see a clusterfuck blend between modern air and naval combat, where advances in point defenses, maneuverability and electronic warfare capabilities have made the older torpedo duels less practical; you will be detected before your weapons are in range to fire, but detection no longer means certain death. At the same time, getting closer to the enemy becomes possible (at least in a relative sense, on the same side of the planet's orbit). There will be some direct-fire lasers starting to serve as a complement to missiles, as the missiles themselves become smaller and more numerous to overwhelm CIWS.
At the end of this period, the first "capital ships" will enter the scene, mounting nuclear reactors able to power enough lasers to keep the ship more or less safe from incoming missiles and enough ablative ceramic armor to prevent enemy lasers from melting or cutting into the hull. That will bring space combat to a screeching halt, as the dominant offensive weapons of the day cease to be effective, and will either lead to WWI naval battles in space with railgun batteries trying to hit a maneuvering enemy at extreme range, or the introduction of a new and massively powerful weapon like the Casaba howitzer will return things to the first-to-shoot-wins model of combat.
Any development past that is impossible to predict, as it would depend on as-yet uncertain future technologies.
>>47134025
That depends. Are the ships capable of relativistic speeds?
If yes, than it'll resemble a round of jousting, with the ships only having milliseconds to fire at each other before getting out of range.
>>47135092
Because guided weapons are also spacecraft and are easily detected, and you'd need a lot of fuel in one to keep up with even small course adjustments at very long range.
So you'd need a big missile with lots of reaction mass, and it would have to survive whatever weapons they throw at it as they see it slowly come closer. Also, when they detect it they will avoid where it's going to be, meaning it's no longer random evasion, but active, and maximizes the amount of delta v the missile has to spend to catch the target.
>>47135043
>Rail guns have the advantage of having no real maximum velocity, only limited by how long you can build it and how much energy you can add.
They're also limited by the recoil forces that the ship can withstand. At some point too much acceleration would just have the entire weapon tear backwards right through your ship.
>>47135092
Wouldn't the same countermeasures that work against modern missiles also work against space missiles? Jamming, flares, point defenses, or anti missile missiles would be just as effective.
>>47135173
You could build the railgun longer at the same acceleration to get a higher speed, but the length required would go up quadratically with respect to the desired speed (assuming non-relativistic speeds)
>>47135068
Evasion at all, let alone pre-planned random maneuvering as a matter of course would require some sort of utterly fantastical fuel source. Of course you probably need that for space combat as a concept but still. The way we move stuff in space, and are going to be moving them for a very long time is mostly just pointing them in the right direction and letting momentum and gravity take care of the rest. Maneuver changes while in space are comparatively cheap compared to leaving the atmosphere but by that time you've used up most of your fuel.
Even with a space elevator or mining/making fuel in space somehow you're still extremely limited by the rocket equation. If you bring enough fuel to have some left over for maneuvers then that's just more weight you're burning the whole time.
I suspect that from a logistical perspective it might look a lot like WW2 fighters. You'll have an operational range and a tiny amount of emergy fuel if you need to engage or run away. Though at that point it seems pretty straightforward to get a kill. Find a ship in space, keep it busy until it runs out of extra fuel and needs to return to its course, calculate its trajectory, then put a little bit of mass where the ship's going to be in a few months.
>>47134025
Honestly?
It would only occur at really short ranges. Too long, and your opponents will have time to react. What's most likely to happen is that combat will take place around the orbit of planets, where ships slow down for whatever reason and their movements can be easily predicted. And you wouldn't be using AI at all because the cost of building the AI will be greater than the spaceship; it's so much easier to use human beings as crew.
Everything else is just scifi fans wanting "deep space gun battles" that would never work in real life.
>>47135194
Countermeasures are pretty shit, desu senpai.
They've never been put to the test under real naval battle conditions, and simulated scenarios show them performing pretty poorly against modern anti-ship missiles.
>>47135173
That's a very good point. The physical limitations of the ship become a major factor with a very high energy weapon like that.
The other limitation is, of course, that the closer you get to c the more energy you need to add to the velocity of the projectile. It would, even if you had unlimited energy, never reach 300,000 kilometers per second
>>47135259
>Our weapons will evolve
>Our AI will be complex
>Our ships will be fast
But no, defensive countermeasures, engine technology and arrangements, and radiation protection won't change at all.
This is the stupidest fucking argument I've ever heard. Military buffs, /tg/ are not.
>>47134025
Colonial Marines handbook has a pretty good section on this. No dogfighting, you engage targets from a million miles away using gauss rifles to shotgun concrete phones with iron cores across space. Sometimes setting up vast nets of radar-absorbent materials across hundreds of thousands of miles that will shred any ship running into it.
>>47135219
>>47135173
Seems like a spinal mount would be the way to go, to maximize barrel length and use the main engines to counter the recoil.
Of course that makes aiming at closer ranges or while engaging in evasive maneuvers pretty much impossible.
>>47135305
*concrete phone poles
>>47135238
> mining/making fuel in space
This entire thing sort of falls apart once you get the ability to refuel in space, though. The only reason that maneuvering is so expensive nowadays is because we have to carry it up from the ground in the same spaceship. Once the ability to procure fuel in out space is possible that limitation goes away.
>>47135312
Well, in realistic space combat if they get close enough where that is a significant issue, you're fucked anyway, so.
>>47135254
and you basing this on? sure long range involves dodging but you can just fire more missiles and drones capable of there own course correction. Out ranging the other guy is a massive advantage so people are going to try and get it.
as for your points about AI, humans are a huge liability in space, they need food, water, air, and up to years of experience to git gud. There might not be actual AI, but everything that can be done with a computer proably will since computers tend to be faster by orders of magnitude and don't take forever to train up.
>>47135238
>Mobility is expensive.
A good point. Even using liquid hydrogen as reaction mass for a fusion rocket you'd only carry so much delta v.
>Running out leaves you helpless.
Yeah. Time to abandon ship, if you can't surrender or defeat whatever projectiles are likely to be launched.
>Mobility isn't worth it.
You don't have a choice. Either you use delta v to evade or your course is utterly predictable.
>>47134738
>Guided missiles can be hacked
Been snorting that Infinity glue pretty hard lately, eh?
>>47134025
More like submarine warfare than naval engagements.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunintro.php
>>47134025
Depends, we talking hard scifi? cause as others have said, a space ship is worth way more intact than anything its carrying, short of unobtainum, the mcguffiin that plagues many scifisettings. I suspect torpedos with EMP warhaeads designed to self navigate and detonate at distance from target to disable it, probably as a recoverable munition. any kind of breaching warhead is probably a one and done munition, but attaches to the hull of a ship, drill a large hole, then detaches, causing exploive decompression, killing large sections of crew, but maintaining overall ship integrity. Boarding parties with riot shields and low velocity munitions fighting in zero G, decompressed corridors. Normal counter boarding procedures are to have all crew were suits/ go to safe rooms, then vent atmo.
We have no idea what realistic space combat would look like because we currently have no idea what objectives a space battleship would need to achieve.
However, I think the #1 issue involved in it are sensors. You can't take sensors for a given. You have to specify how all your sensors work and what they detect. You have to lay out what arcs around the ship they can detect in. There is nothing more important than what you can identify, at what ranges, with what reliability and accuracy. Every other consideration about guided weapons and evasive maneuvers is all has to assume something about what you can and can't see, and when. I say, you shouldn't be liberal with those assumptions. A study of realistic space combat needs to start with space-borne sensors and how they work.
>>47135339
That would help, absolutely. But on additional point I was thinking about it how hard it would be to actually intercept something in flight, at least efficiently. Now, I'm talking about terms on the scale of conflict within one solar system, very very sub-FTL speeds with a fuel with something on the scale of a very very weight efficient rocket fuel. In that case you're using gravity wells to do most of the hard navigation work. As the planets move around it seems to me (certainly not an expert on the matter) that the "routes" between bodies would shift as well. It's entirely possible that to intercept your target you should've started months before they launched, if you're coming from somewhere else in the system.
Now, this does give an advantage to planning missions far enough ahead that you have fuel caches prepared ahead of time. But then if your enemy finds out where those are they have to move. If they move then they probably won't be able to rendezvous. Now we're back to square one with the original ship.
Doing anything but flying in a very straight line from gravity well to gravity well is going to require fictional advances in propulsion and fuel sources.
>>47135432
I kind of covered your last point above. Again I don't know any numbers to back this up but trying to intercept a ship from any direction other than where it's headed seems like it would be fantastically expensive. If you launch from the same origin you're never going to catch up. If you launch from another body it might not even be possible to catch up and if it is you are absolutely not taking an efficient route. I imagine space encounters would be calculated in the fuel it would cost to be able to engage. Nobody's spending X trillion kilotons of fuel to shoot down a ship that cost X billion kilotons of fuel to launch. Or spend Y amount of fuel powering a mass driver to send some slugs in their (eventual) direction.
>>47134738
>hacking missilles
Nice meme
Real space combat would involve lots of MAD all around so cold war tactics may apply and ships edge closer and closer until crewmembers get out and try to board on another.
>>47135522
For a counter boarding procedure that's pretty suicidal unless you have just spare shittons of replacement gas sitting around doing nothing but adding mass.
>>47134025
Pretty boring, all told. Either crazy long range shitshows of waiting and waiting and waiting or space-calculus of trying to hit your target without the recoil sending you into a spinning nightmare.
I think the most accurate in vidya you can get is 'Rogue system'. It's in alpha at the moment, but it really captures the monotony, like that space shuttle piloting game crossed with ELITE.
>>47134925
>In orbit around that planet, thanks spie
that sounds fucking awesome
>spies have reported a MAJOR ENEMY ASSET orbiting the planet
>so you crunch the numbers and lunch your projectiles in a little specter
>weeks go by and the planet is still safe and secured when the asset suddenly gets shredded by high velocity projectiles, lunched by you weeks in advance
>>47134025
Boring.
>>47135676
This is actually a point I didn't think of. Once you're moving any quantity of mass in you can now kill entire continents. Of course, they can totally see it coming and can maybe Bruce Willis their way to survival, but enough space rocks and a planet is 100% toast.
Napoleonic Warfare in Space due Lightspeed lag only showing your last position seconds/minutes before you shot.
>>47134738
>hacked
No.
>blinded
You do recall that the strength of EM waves is decreases exponentially over distance
>>47135614
You have a solid idea, especially for near-term space combat. Atomic powered ships with electric engines however (ion or plasma thrusters) have vastly higher delta v for a given amount of reaction mass and could maneuver far more freely, especially with a warship where the payload is small compared to power and fuel systems.
>>47135727
DID SOMEBODY SAY
NAPOLEONIC WARFARE IN SPACE
https://youtu.be/gW29Ghk8Reo?t=92
>>47135194
>Flares
will need to emit as much radiation as an engine to distract a missile from a maneuvering target.
>Jamming
Remember how the energy of waves propogates. Chances are that you are already dead if a missile is close enough to be blinded.
>Point defenses
The only remotely realistic suggestion.
A space faring gunship would likely have a very small space for the crew with everything automated. In addition it'd be a single long tube with a shield curtain on the front and a hole for the barrel. It'd have a small crew with a maintenance team in case something goes wrong.
There is no reason to have more people beyond who you need to target, fire, and maintain the gun.
Combat would be happening at thousands of km away from each other with the firing of payloads and waiting to see if you hit or not. Then adjusting and firing again.
The ships would be made to have the smallest most defensible profile possible while facing the enemy and be made so that a single ship going down would have minimal losses.
>>47135754
Only if the EM isn't coherent. A laser retains power, but how far away it can focus to a fine point is dependent on the size of the telescope you use to send it off.
Mount solar sails on asteroids, point them in direction of enemy homeworld, search for incoming asteroids.
If I can recommend a show, check out Starship Operators.
It still takes a few liberties, but it does its best to stay as scientifically sound as it can, even to the point of explaining that the sounds of the explosions are edited in for the benefit of the audience watching the recordings of the battles.
>>47135836
Neat, but anybody capable of spaceflight would just deflect them in the months or years between alteration of their course and impact.
>>47134025
Well lets see. First off it depends on energy shields being a thing or not. If you want hard science, then the best you'll get a plasma shield which doesn't stop laser beams, but will repel shit like gauss rounds if they're high enough power.
Armor however, would be literally useless in a fight as a single gauss round can punch through 30ft of steel with ease. Not to mention that lasers can also. Only time armor is useful is when the armor has a really small slope, which is almost impossible to use in 3D combat. So basically your ships will end up being made of the armor equivalent of cardboard with highly reflective coatings, with lots of gauss weapons for flak and point defense lasers for anti-missile/drone defense. The main weapons will obviously be laser weapons.
So how it will work is that the fight will probably take place at Light seconds to a light minute of range with both ships firing swarms of missiles and drones at the start. Then they'll fire their lasers with the goal of taking out the plasma shielding before the gauss flak and missile barrage along with the drones reach the ship. The reason you want to be light seconds to minutes away is so you can dodge the incoming laser fire which requires sustained focus to hit the target. Now the exact range is dependent on how good the targeting computers are, but you'll never get within 1000km or less of distance because that's the equivalent to a knife fight.
It's a matter out dodging them while you still can hit them.
>>47134516
Sounds like a bullet hell type vidya
>Japan has been training their population for this their whole lives
>>47135522
>I suspect torpedos with EMP warheads
>outside of the van Allen belt
Yeah, don't expect much out of these. Sure, you can wrap a bomb in piezo-electric material, but at the same time, electronics can be shielded, and when you're looking ta a metal-hulled spacecraft, they largely are just by virtue of that alone.
>>47135614
>Doing anything but flying in a very straight line from gravity well to gravity well is going to require fictional advances in propulsion and fuel sources.
Even going in something vaguely resembling straight line is far future SciFi. As it is, moving around in the solar system is all about orbits. You start at a planet, that orbits the sun. You go into orbit around it. Then you go into orbit around the sun, and finally (months, years, decades later) intercept the other planet to go into orbit around that.
Why use EMP when you can bring Neutron Bombs? Highly radiative that hurts the tribulation and damages the systems (yes, radiation can kill a computer). Much more expensive and significantly more difficult to shield than mere EMP.
>>47135923
You might try to make it a bullet hell, but then you realise that you're going to need a large moon's worth of matter to cover a decent amount of space without leaving kilometres of gap between the shots.
>>47135963
I meant straight line relative to the ship itself. As in not much in the way of (powered) turns or lateral movement. I'd hoped the rest of my comments made that more clear.
>>47135963
>Doing anything but flying in a very straight line from gravity well to gravity well is going to require fictional advances in propulsion and fuel sources.
>Even going in something vaguely resembling straight line is far future SciFi. As it is, moving around in the solar system is all about orbits.
Even Apollo 11 didn't use a minimal energy transfer orbit. Once you get powerful reactors in space there's very little reason to use minimal energy transfer orbits.
It's not trivial, but even current projects like ion engines and VSIMR can offer enough efficiency to allow for maneuvering in our solar system.
>>47136012
If you're trying to capture the ship somewhat intact, then making it lethally radioactive probably isn't a good thing.
And if not an equal mass of plain old shrapnel bomb might have a better kill radius.
>>47134285
Then you don't need thrusters
>>47136012
Because you'd have an easier time killing a ship by hitting it with high energy plasma from the bomb itself.
Another option is using the bomb to power a single-use laser. A bomb-pumped laser can be incredibly powerful and used at a distance from the target to avoid short ranged point defenses.
>>47136012
>Neutron Bombs
Neutron bombs are stupidly easy to protect against. All you need to do is line your ship with a material with a high Fast neutron cross section. I'd recommend Boron.
>>47136066
Ion engines are probably good enough for the minor course corrections needed to dodge at relativistic distances
How would you make space-combat fun for the players?
If you're favoring more towards realism doesn't that bring the fun factor down? You'll get responses like "Just let the AI do it lol" for this.
>>47136183
That shit is so stupidly bad it's not even funny. Plasma based particle accelerators can fit on a table so they don't need to be hundreds of feet long. Neutron beams are so stupidly hard to make it's miracle we can get them working at all.
>Radiation spitting drive
Yeah this was written by people who use technobabble to explain shit.
>>47136291
Fun in games is all about making interesting choices. Let them pick when to use limited munitions and reaction mass, and how to make best use of their ship's advantages while minimizing it's weaknesses.
>>47135431
There's a reason why cruise missiles aren't mounted on ICBMs and drones are still controlled by real pilots. Extrapolating from Watson and RTSs and saying we'll have AI being all our starships is completely illogical and unrealistic. Humans will want to go to space, and you'll need humans to perform all sorts of maintenance, adapt to changing situations, and gain experience to develop better spaceships.
As for long-range, >more missiles just means more mass. Those missiles all need their own fuel mass as will any drones you use, and if they're fire and forget drones then why bother with drones and not just use more missiles?
Space combat won't take place at incredibly distant ranges because that's not where battles are fought. Battles are fought over strategic locations, i.e. planets and in planetary orbits, since deep space has nothing anybody wants. The first thing that's going to happen is someone is going to build a weapons satellite, and spaceships will be made to counter the advantage of that satellite, and orbital battlefields will be the norm, not battles in the void between worlds. With that in mind, most armaments will focus less on range and more on firepower and battlefield endurance. Starships will probably be a mix of carriers carrying shorter-range orbital fighters and frigates, or large interplanetary warships designed to survive and breakthrough orbital defenses.
>>47134274
>Kinetic Projectiles
Nope. Laser weapons are the way of the future. Nothing can compare to a weapon that can hit the target at literally the same time the target sees it.
>>47135305
>>47135327
Did they ever give reasons for not using lasers instead? Might have less impact, but lasers in space are quite accurate and it doesn't get any faster than light speed. Hard to dodge that.
>>47135298
The assumption that countermeasures will magically become relatively more effective than missile guidance systems due to the passage of time is even more wrong.
They're literally the same technologies, which is why countermeasures are much more effective against older weapons than more modern ones. The same technologies that allow you to produce effective countermeasures allow you to produce more countermeasure-resistant guidance systems.
Countermeasures are, and will always be only as effective as the degree of electronics superiority you have over the enemy.
>>47136512
What is it lightspeed limit, for detection and reaching the target, and thermal shields?
>>47136555
My guess as an engineer is that when it was written, they were told that lasers are terrible inefficient for power conversion. Which is still sorta true today. Lasers also lose accuracy with distance, where a tungsten slug will keep going once thrown out.
I'd still take the lasers if I had excess power generation.
>>47135798
I love dvorak. Shit is dope.
>>47134025
Seduction, followed by carefully applied velcro sex strips being worn on relevent parts of people's bodies.
>>47137045
LoGH's entire soundtrack was brilliant direction.
In the movie, Ravel's bolero builds up until all the sound effects fade and you're left with the action timed to the tempo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Duu1ZKtJDsw
>>47136916
That and they're repelling eachother constantly, electrons and all.Your engagement range is key.
Just throwing in my 2cents, but I feel like attacking ships to destroy them won't be an actual thing that happens. The majority of space combat will be about EMPs to disable ships, and then sending out boarding parties to capture said ships.
Think about it, a spaceship is a massive investment. Why destroy a perfectly good one when you can disable and capture it?
>>47134025
It shouldn't. By the time species is able to cross the space freely, it should have already renounced the notion of "competition" - and thus combat - since the alternative is perishing in wars.
>>47137124
For the same reasons Battleships shoot exploding shells at each other and planes drop bombs instead of paratroopers on other ships, because it's too risky to do otherwise.
>>47136555
the thing with using any sort of slug or physical bullet in space is you can do funky bank shots around planets, or leave them in an orbit behind you as you leave and they'll smack into anyone who comes by, possibly years or even centuries later.
Note for instance that the reason why the ISS cupola has cover hatches is because there's literaly human feaces in low earth orbit from the 60s that would slowly build up over the windows and make them no longer transparent - it's a serious problem in LEO for solar powered satellites, because their solar panels slowly become encrusted with literal shit and lose their effectiveness.
Now imagine a giant toilet gun, accelerating those feaces up to 5000 km/s and using them to slice through the bow of your enemies' ships.
Lasers are for environmentalists, clean freaks and pussies.
>>47137073
I read that in Zapp Brannigan's voice.
Unlike marine navies, speed is not a significant factor in space warship design. Since speed is not a significant factor and stealth impossible, there are no fast ships nor subs, and ships designed to go against them (destroyers). The only differences between two classes warships would be size (expensive juggernaut vs cheap swarms), and weaponry.
I have a feeling that even shooting down a ship in orbit would be a terrible idea even if its bombing the shit out of you.
I mean, you shoot it down, then what? It crashes on you, then its whateverium reactor goes critical, then you get blown up too... And then the planet is probably blown up as well.
>>47137386
Speed would still be a factor in dealing with response times. If someone across the system is about to bombard a planet, wouldn't you want to get there sooner rather than later?
>>47137495
it doesn't really matter
>>47137399
Depends on how big the ship is really. Obviously the giant 20km+ long ships are gonna ruin a planet's surface when they come down, but the smaller vessels around the size of current NASA shuttles and up can be blown apart with no problem. If you hit em hard enough they'd just break apart and then burn up in re-entry.
If you had a battery firing on the larger ships to break them apart you might be able to spread the remains of a ship out enough to burn most of it up and minimize damage to the planet but that would require a dedicated crew and every gun firing on one ship is a gun NOT firing on the other ships, if there are any.
Hell, if you just blow enough holes in a ship that's in a natural, non-assisted orbit you could kill the crew and leave the ship floating where it is. It'd just become a satellite at that point.
>>47137386
thus space warefare basically resembles tank warfare at distances where light lag becomes a problem.
And as we saw in ww2, the fool who builds a Tiger rather than a bazillion T-36s loses, so battles will be two swarms of a million little ships all firing at each other on monday, the rounds all either hitting or missin on friday and another volley happening again on saturday until one or the other side runs out of ammo or ships.
>>47137591
In that case, the goal would be to disable weapons without destroying the ship, right?
Would whomever is trying to take the planet have some sort of self-destruct system in place to ensure the surface isn't fucked if the ship gets shot down?
>>47137399
Ships don't magically de-orbit themselves because they got a bunch of holes punched in them.
>>47134025
As soon as someone pisses you off (probably as soon as you even become aware of someone else) you fire shotgun blasts of metal basketballs at their planets at half the speed of light. It'll take a while to get there, but there won't be anything left when it does and there isn't jack shit they can do about it.
>>47137267
>the thing with using any sort of slug or physical bullet in space is you can do funky bank shots around planets, or leave them in an orbit behind you as you leave and they'll smack into anyone who comes by, possibly years or even centuries later.
That being said, you can actually dodge kinetic shots, your only defense against lasers isyour hull, or maybe reflective chaff to break up the beam.
I guess you could develop stealth rail rounds. That could be another "battlefield" strategy. Set yourself in a position of greater background radiation to have a better chance of detecting incoming projectiles.
>>47137736
>In that case, the goal would be to disable weapons without destroying the ship, right?
Disable the weapons, the crew or the ship depending on if it has a sustainable orbit or not. If the attacking vessel just doesn't give a fuck about the surface they could easily just drive the ship into the surface if they realize they're losing.
I imagine something a bit like Dune would take place where ground battles actually do happen in planet conquests for the sheer sake of not wanting to destroy the planet from both sides of the fight. Obviously that avenue is just out the window if the attacking party doesn't give a fuck, though.
Ships may not even need to invade a planet, either. It'd be much easier to send a few soldiers into the planet as tourists or some such and have them kill off the population with terrorist tactics like dirty bombs or propaganda inciting a revolution.
>>47137868
You could also weaponize natural satellites or asteroid fields if your planet is relatively close to them. It'd be easy to program a few hidden guns or explosives on asteroids to fire/explode on a ship that gets too close and doesn't have the proper IFF clearance. If you're worried about tourists getting blown to hell you could put official checkpoints beyond them that non-combatant ships must go through and pass clearance for a guest pass through the field.
Hell, whole populations of an independent populace could live in an asteroid field if they had a reliable way to build habitable zones and sustain them, possibly through trading mined resources from the asteroids to nearby planets for oxygen, food and other sundries.
Acceleration will be limited between 1g tops, because humans suck. 1 g at about a light second is good enough anyway. By the time the enemy sees that you are moving (a full second after the fact), you are already moving up/down/left/right at 10 m/s and off target. Once he fires his laser again, you are already moving in another direction.
What's /tg/'s opinion on space combat in Forever War?
Seems pretty close to what a lot of anons describe when they go realistic.
>>47138043
Pretty depressing. You get all dressed up to fight space bugs, it takes decades/centuries of cryostasis to get anywhere, and by the time you get backhumanity has been replaced anyways
>>47136293
>Neutron beams
Aren't really a thing. We interact with particles electromagnetically, and neurons don't play that way. That's pure fantasy.
>>47137386
>Speed is irrelevant
Nope, well, not really.
The range someone can shoot you depends on how much you can move before it hits. To simplify, imagine shooting at people with bullets that go about 20 miles an hour and glow brightly.
You can just step out of the way, right? Unless he's close enough, he can't hit you by aiming where you will be when the bullet gets there because you can just move.
If you can move faster he needs to get closer, or get faster bullets.
>>47137267
>possibly years or even centuries late
The prospect of an enormous slug moving at insane speeds missing its mark then obliterating a far away planet millions of years later makes me wet.
>>47137868
You can dodge lasers too. Space is REALLY big, and 299 thousand KPS isn't really that fast. More, you can also do things when a laser hits you like slowly turn so they can't focus all the laser on one point and melt though.
>>47138488
How do you know the laser is coming?
>>47137267
For retards more like. If you can get a ship from one system to another you can take all the people out of it and just drive it into the planet instead, rendering it uninhabitable forever.
It's so easy for you to do, and so easy for anyone else to do, and so absolutely bad for you if someone did it to you first, that it would be criminally stupid not to glass every inhabited planet you see, as soon as you see it.
What odds are acceptable when your entire species is at stake? None, so it doesn't matter how friendly the Puppy Hug-Conglomerate is, you waste those fucks without a second thought.
>>47138529
You can see the enemy coming from significantly beyond their weapons range. You don't necessarily know when they've begun trying to to engage you with lasers, but if you have even cursory knowledge of their capabilities you would begin evading as soon as you enter their engagement envelope.
>>47138529
1: Are you in a fight? If Yes, go to 2
2: Dose the other guy have a telescope?
3: Start laser evasive action.
More seriously, you'd have to keep a laser focused on a target long enough to cut armor.
The problem is focusing a weapon laser across long range is hard and lasers are thermally inefficient. They are great defensive tools, but shooting something with refractory armor would be very hard. Just making it rotate at one radii per minute would make the challenge of focusing the laser on a single point long enough to defeat armor very hard.
If the other guy hits you with a half ounce of copper at .08c in that time, you are going to have a Bad Time.
>>47134649
Because the more advanced a fight gets the more it goes "I want to be AWAY from the actual fight and I want to do as LESS work as possible".
As such a space battle would be 90% automatized and 10% camera surveillance and small inputs here and there. That's why all sci-fi shit is nonsensical crap like nearly cqc shooting and all that shit.
>>47138574
>
For retards more like. If you can get a ship from one system to another you can take all the people out of it and just drive it into the planet instead, rendering it uninhabitable forever.
Anyone worth shooting will destroy your massive projectile short of impact. Or put a rock in front of it to intercept it.
>>47138655
At relativistic velocity even if you can get a bead on it and shoot it you're just making more of them.
The spaceship thing was just an example of how easy it would be. The real shit would be flinging a shotgun blast of metal basketballs at half the speed of light.
>>47138791
Clearly you should be using dodge balls rather than basketballs, seeing as space combat tends to boil down to "Dodge ball, for keeps."
>>47138791
At relativistic velocity you are using years or centuries to accelerate and investing trillions of dollars.
Halfway though your grand project you are beaten to death with a claw hammer by someone who invested their time and resources more wisely.
>>47138445
Speed is irrelevant because all that matters is acceleration and delta-v. At constant acceleration and unlimited fuel, any ships would eventually reach lightspeed. The only limit to speed is fuel.
Delta-v is determined by the specific impulse of the ship's engine and the percentage of the ship's mass that is fuel. Bigger or smaller ship offer no difference here: it's a matter of ratio. Small ships are not faster than large ships.
Acceleration (rate of change of velocity of an object.) is determined by the total engine thrust and the total mass of the ship. There's probably also a lower limit for how small can a ship be before it's to small for a nuclear reactor.
Acceleration has a hard limit: The human body. Humans can't handle anything beyond 9g for short times, if they are really well trained. Most people would pass out at 5g. There's no way to solve that without artificial gravity and other space magic or genetic/cybernetic engineering. Given the distances and lightspeed lag, going beyond 1 or 3 g is irrelevant so long you are beyond 1 light second away anyway.
>>47138043
It's a cool book, and given the time it was written in, the focus on infantry skirmishes makes sense. Doesn't strike me as particularly realistic though. What do you get out of sending a few platoons of grunts across the cosmos just to play IT AINT ME while marching around an alium rice paddy?
I thought that the weird paradoxes surrounding FTL ships was interesting (damaged ships returning from battle before they left, etc).
>>47138940
What?
>>47134632
What about anti-missle systems? I image they would give off enough heat or something to be easily detected and at the range these battle are assumed to happen at it seems possible there would be enough to time for a computer to track and hit at least some shots.
>>47134025
There won't be any. The civilization that destroys all the others first is the only one that survives.
>>47138940
How did he get to me?
This is also why I said preemptive. As in, as soon as you see a civilization that might be spacefaring, pull the trigger. It's too late.
Most warships are going to be:
-90% propellant and a reactor-
-the radiators (huge and vulnerable) and the heatsink for laser batteries/reactors.
-1 or 2 laser batteries + missiles-
-1 tiny capsule, compared to the rest of the ship, for the crew.
>>47139429
And they will destroy other space faring civilizations without space combat occurring, apparently.
>>47139502
Someboy's read The Killing Star I see.
IIRC, the aggressor species had listening stations scattered about to spot any civilization that sparked up an antimatter drive. Instead of welcoming them into the galactic confederacy ala star trek, they lobbed an RKV at earth with a small mopup fleet a few light hours behind to make sure no remote colonies survived.
What a spooky, underrated book...
>>47139690
Well, we're talking about RKVs here. "combat" is generally a two sided affair.
Holy fuck, it's "how should whatever look" or "what should whatever look like". Don't mix them together. Why is this grammatic error so fucking common now days? Fucking die.
>>47134025
Probably pretty close to "soft" sci-fi, to be honest.
What you have to realize is that space combat isn't going to happen any time soon. Naval battles tends to be conducted to secure trade routes or in connection with an invasion. You're not going to get space combat until there are off-world colonies and/or interplanetary trade routes so valuable that controlling them is worth more than the cost of building a fleet of space warships. Which means probably centuries in the future, and certainly after the problem of the high cost of getting things into orbit has been solved.
There is no scenario in which you'll see something that looks like a couple ISS modules with a few Sidewinder missiles strapped to the side trying to blow up another similarly primitive ship in the 2050s.
