How would a space battle happen?

In My Humble Opinion
1

No idea if this is the right forum for this…I almost never come here to IMHO. I’ve looked around at some of the other threads in here and figured, what the hell? If this bombs big time I’ll tuck tail and stay in GD or CS from now on. :slight_smile:

Ok, so here’s the question: Are space battles possible at all, and if so, what tactics and strategies would be effective/possible? What weapons would be effective (missile, projectile, kinetic, energy)? How would the fleets or individual ships actually meet up to HAVE a battle? What would be the goals of a space battle in, say, a solar system, both from the attacker’s perspective and the defenders? Would a space battle be the optimal way to defend or attack a solar system/planet, assuming interstellar (or even interplanetary) war is possible?

Ok, some limits. Let’s stick to real physics and try to stay within the realm of possibility for future technology. Examples: I think a continuous drive is possible (i.e. a drive system that enables continuous and long term thrust) for instance, so that would be something I could use in my theoretical space ships. I think that its possible that such a drive system could have a maximum speed of, say, .5c. I DON’T think things like inertia compensators are possible, so you’d need care in acceleration (positive and negative), and especially changing direction (unless you wanted your crews to resemble red goo)…

So, how would ships come to battle? What kinds of weapons would be possible and effective? What tactics and strategies would be used for defense and attack? What kinds of goals would be possible for attackers and defenders? Project into the future as much as you like, but try and keep it ‘real’ and focused on real physics and whats actually within the realm of possibility, not fantasy.

If this is the wrong forum for this I’d appreciate it being shifted to the correct one. I’m really interested in some good solid responses if possible.

-XT

2

Interesting OP. I wish I had something constructive, but since I’m niether a scientist or engineer, I’ll only be able to throw up a few WAG’s.

First without a lot of tech development I don’t think there are going to be any space battles. The exeptions are things that are already being tested, like using satellites to knock out enemy missiles or to destroy enemy satellites.

I think realistically, most space battles will be fought by unmanned ships, possibly launched from manned transports.

If the colonies of Mars ever revolted against their Terran Overlords, probably what you would see are terran troopships coming to restore order/the criminal occupation. The martians would launch unmanned interceptors to destroy the ships, while the terrans would counter with some sort of counter measures, such as drone fighters, or high velocity projectiles, or electronic countermeasures. If the Terrans got close enough to Mars, I imagine the result would be a hybrid of an amphibious and an airborne invasion.

Interstellar conflict seems so unlikely unless we can get around “c” that I can’t think of what it would be like.

3

I’d say, very rarely. You see, in space, there’s not much territory worth defending. If you deploy resources to defend, say, a lunar outpost, the opposing force can just swing around and hit Earth from the other side. Therefore, you’d want to deploy defenses only on mission-critial assets.

Furthermore, you’d want to avoid planetside bases. Planets are predictable: You can strap an asteroid to the front of your ship, acellerate up to a ridiculus speed, and let it go. Far safer to have your bases of operation random-walking in deep space somewhere.

What kind of sensors are we looking at? Using what we can extrapolate with today’s technology, it will be damn hard to see vessels moving in at .5c and then cutting all engines and remotely detectable power sources and lobbing rocks at you. In all likelyhood, spaceships would be moving randomly as much as possible, to avoid random death asteroids from the other side.

4

Space battles wouldn’t look as they do in Star Wars or Star Trek… well, with a few exceptions. Battle in space would take place over VERY large distances, especially if the two sides are using energy weapons. We’re talking light-seconds… 300,000 kilometers.

At those distances, the most important factor probably won’t be the individual weapons involved. It’ll be like submarine warfare… ANY direct hit will probably kill you, so the only way to defend yourself would probably be with electronic counter-measures… scrambling your sensor profile, jamming, that sort of thing. Then you get counter-counter-measures, and so on.

I doubt starfighters would realistically be used, though I CAN picture two individual ships using a large number of automated drones… dump out a swarm to fulfill three roles: Interception, ECM/ECCM, and attack… probably mounting a nuke-powered X-ray burst laser on each one.

5

I’ve written a bunch of space battles in my (soon to be marketed) novel, and here is what I came up with. I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

First, technology. The technology is beyond ours, and they have energy weapons and shields. The shields are for drama, I’m not sure I really believe in them, but lots of stuff (like reasonably rapid travel) doesn’t work without them.

I have engines that go maybe 20, 30 G, but are not space drives. No banking, all maneuvering is according to the laws of physics.

Most of the battles take place in the context of a galactic civilization that has arisen after a nasty race wiped out planets 100K years before. They are basically practicing for another such race, with live ammo. The war doesn’t affect any planets or trade. So the reason for the battles is a war game, but with real casualties.

All battles begin with both sides decelerating and matching velocities. In that way maneuvering is possible. If you don’t, the battle is very short, as both sides flash past each other. After that, it is an attempt tp get a local advantage, usually by defeating a ship or set of ships in detail. I was able to use Nelson’s tactics from the Battle of Trafalgar in one situation, with a slight adaptation.

One thing I do not use - fighters. Even with a space drive, no piloted craft could outmaneuver computer aimed guns, and no fighter could have shields strong enough to resist a weapon powered by the energy source of a capital ship. So my fights look more like Trek fights than Star Wars fights. Aiming laser cannon by hand is as dumb as swordfights on starships.

6

I think the biggest issue to address would be locating and identifying your enemy.

Its the sheer vastness of the war theatre that would defeat anything we have at the moment.

Take a look at the problems we have locating earth bound asteroids, these lumps dont transmit anything, and we dont have anything yet that is capable of illuminating them in a targeting sense.

At best we could maybe target known bases, the use of incoming asteroids would be a good strategy except for one detail, they will do the same to you, and there is just no chance that you will take out all the enemy as they will certainly have other bases unknown to you, just as you would have for them.

If you do transmit any signal, along the lines of radar or something as yet not discovered, the power required is likely to be immense, given that we are working with a total all round system of detection, rather than the half hemisphere we use on earth, also on earth, the distance we need to detect is miniscule comapred to the distance we’d need to detect in space, so the power is going to be many orders of magnitude larger.
This would light yourself up like a christmas tree, you’d have to try hide near some natural source of radiation, such as a star and that would almost certainly interfere with your own detectors.

It is hard to see what would be to argue about, since space is so large and thus resources are scarcely likely to run out, basically you could avoid each other.

The scale is such that you’d probably be better off trying to imagine how to fight a transatlantic naval war with one rowing boat on each side.

7

Read Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes’s The Descent of Anansi about a near-future space battle involving, essentially, space shuttles. It describes how thye battle comes about and how it’s conducted.
As for future battles, it all depends upon the technology and its limitations. There are lots of examples – Niven and Pournelle’s Th Mote in God’s Eye, Weber’s entire “Honor Harrington” series (He obviously constructed his spaceships so he could have Horatio Hornblower-style space battles with them), Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight, etc. One interesting take is E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, in which he points out (correctly, I think) that space battles would take full advantage of the 3-D nature of the “battlefield”, so he envisioned conical attack formations and the like.

8

Great responses so far! Exactly what I’m looking for.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while actually, trying to think through in my mind HOW two fleets of space ships, or even individual ships could fight it out realistically.

I think both fleets would have to WANT to give battle for it to work. Even with continuous drive ships you’d still need to match velocity/vector and orbital plane…something that would be easy to avoid if you really wanted too. So, say two fleets DID want to offer battle against each other…how would they do it? Long range: I think that realistically they’d use mostly missiles. They could be launched in stealth mode and coast ballistic ally until they reach some pre-determined range and then light off their drives to come in at very high speeds. Space craft would not be able to maneuver (due to the people on board) like a missile, so they would have to rely on EMC and maybe anti-missile defenses close in. Medium/Close range: Projectile weapons using stealth shells would be nearly impossible to detect/counter on ballistic courses. Perhaps some kind of beam weapons like high energy lasers and such, though I’m unsure if reflective surfaces could perhaps deflect this. Finally, I think boarding shuttles would be VERY useful for combat on board the ships themselves. I am thinking of this along the lines of the age of sail…or maybe even earlier.

I don’t think ‘shield’ would be possible at all, but certainly I don’t think one hit one kill would be likely either. Ships would be armored similarly to modern warships…maybe even heavier. They would have multiple airtight compartments and redundant systems so that any hit (that doesn’t hit the ammo/fuel bunkers) wouldn’t take the ship out. Simple military principals.

Why fight in space? Well, you’d be fighting for the major resources in a system…mostly the habitable planets and minerals and other resources. You wouldn’t want an enemy fleet to get close enough to your populated planets/colonies…say to drop rocks on them, or launch missiles, etc. So, you’d almost need to meet them as far out as you can. Attackers would need to close in on such targets TOO get into range to drop rocks etc.

I see attackers main strategy getting into such a position to cripple the defenders and enable them to launch an invasion to take those targets away…or completely destroy them (though I doubt this…THAT would be the whole point, taking habitable planets and such).

Fighters: Definitely I see these as viable. They would be similar to the missiles in fact, drone launched from carriers by perhaps controlled like our current generation of unmanned recon craft…but armed obviously. They could be armed with missiles and projectile weapons, and perhaps even armed with bombs so that after making their attack pass they simply crash into the enemy ships…after all, once they are passed (though would necessarily have more velocity than the ships they are attacking), they would just drift off into space otherwise…it would be way too much work to kill velocity, turn around and come back (even assuming they would have power for such things…which I doubt).

Distances: Definitely a problem. You would have to stage your defensive fleets in bases as far out as you could. You’d have to send out a lot of probes and scouts to give them the most time to react they could get. And if we assume there is no light speed or warp/wormhole insta travel you SHOULD get plenty of advanced warning I’d think…anything massive enough to threaten a system would be big enough to detect relatively far out. The attackers of course would need to bring everything with them. I would envision a huge ‘station’ with the attack craft perhaps tied together via static lines. They would probably need to have some kind of hibernation capabilities to put the majority of the crew to sleep and just have a rotating maintenance crew.

Thread is going great! Thanks everyone. Guess I picked the right forum for this. :slight_smile:

-XT

9

Finding something on the surface of the sea is no small feat.
Two weeks ago in Greece, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter malfunctioned and crashed into the water. The rescue team (consisting of several helicopters and boats) managed to locate the crash site after searching for more than 3 hours.

Finding something in outer space is many orders of magnitude more difficult.

10

One thing I was just thinking of was the Pacific Theater in WW2. Most if not all the major battles took place around islands of interest: Hawaii, Midway, the Solomons, the Philippines etc. Even the submarine campaigns in both oceans took place largely along known shipping routes.

Since space is many many many orders of magnitude more vast and empty than the Pacific I’d expect that this would be even more true. You would either send a fleet after the enemy world, or wait for them to come to you.

Say two rival political entities are struggling for control of an asteroid. Probably they would send unmanned AI controled fleets to secure the asteroid. The one that got there first would set up defensive positions and wait, using long range sensors to detect the approach of the other fleet. But there would be no percentage in trying to find an enemy fleet somewhere in the vastness of space.

If you were defending a planet you’d probably want your defenses close enough to the planet that they wouldn’t be spread to thin but far enough away that the enemy couldn’t saturate your planet with Nukes.

11

  1. All battles will take place near planets or space bases. The atacking vessels will have one purpose - getting close enough to a space station in order to fire lasers (pretty far); getting close enough to a planet to launch nukes or kinetic energy weapons (a bit closer - you can expect most of your launches to be intercepted, but if one nuke out of 100 gets through that’s usually enough.); or close enough to launch landing forces (very damn close - unless you’re willing to sacrifice a lot of troops). Battles may be raids, detroying something or landing someone and leaving, or they could be “orbital supremacy” battles, trying to control the entire space around a planet.

  2. Ranges will be, as noted, immense. Most planets and stations will have automated “listening posts” satellites orbiting them at a great distance to detect incoming enemoes. The battles themselves will depend on technology. Lasers tend to dissipate at very long ranges, so they may not be totally effective at detection range. The main weapon will be then guided missiles, which makes point defence - shooting them out of the sky - the name of the game. If lasers can shoot at long ranges, but not necessarily do much damage, combat will involve long stretches of time with ships trying to poke through each other’s defences, taking out their sensors and defensive batteries, closing distances until they can succesfully launch missiles. While no armor can stop a nuke, armor may have a place in stopping long-range lasers, In that case, it would be like 18th-century warhips at 300,000 kilometers, blasting away at each other’s defenses until one side breaks.

  3. If, OTOH, lasers are effective over great distances, you’ll have something like submarine warfare. Ships will do as much “coasting” as possible - burning their engines at full blast outside of detection range, then shutting then down so they can get as close as possible without radiating any ebergy. Ships will be painted black and covered with a stealth-enhancing coating. Detection will be difficult; perhaps one way will be to have automatic visual sensors surrounding the ship, looking to see if anything passes in front of a star.

12

Well the most obvious problem would be that it would take a lot of very powerful sensors and radars to find another ship, which would make your ship that much easier to find.
The second thing is that space is not like the Pacific Ocean. There’s that little issue of gravity. Ships would have to move in oribts, even between planets. That means if you knew your enemies destination and origin, you had a pretty good idea of which route he would be taking. Of course, you would then have to pick an orbit that intercepted his.
Other than the usual nikes, rail guns, and energy weapons, you could have some low-tech options as well. Ball bearings hitting your ship at orbital speeds could do quite a number on it.

13

The obvious ‘space battles’ that are likely in the future are anti-satellite operations. Small rockets targeting satellites and exploding in proximity.

A big weapon in space is kinetic energy. Orbital velocities are immense, and even tiny particles can do tremendous damage. So expect to see more ‘mine laying’ type attacks - plot the orbit of the enemy, and fire up a rocket essentially full of pebbles, and detonate it in its path, creating a large debris cloud that the satellite will have to fly through.

Also, consider that reaction mass is very limited on space ships, so an effective attack could simply be something that causes them to use up their reaction mass avoiding attacks. Once the reaction mass is gone, the satellite can no longer be manoevered, and is essentially useless.

In general, for orbital attacks I think it would be less likely that the attacker would ‘chase’ his opponent in the same orbit. More likely, the attacker would be thrown up in front and throw obstacles to be hit. Imagine launcher a killer rocket in the same orbit but opposite direction (it takes another 7000 mph of speed to do that on Earth). Killer closes on victim, then a small charge goes off and fires a shotgun blast of particles in its path. Or maybe a huge ‘net’ is unfurled to increase the probability of hitting the satellite. The ‘net’ wouldn’t be a net designed to capture it, but just some very strong material that, if it hits the satellite, would damage or destroy it.

Here’s an interesting scenario - there is a ‘critical mass’ of debris in orbit which, if we reach it, will cause a chain reaction of collisions that could detroy all of our satellites. The scenario looks like this: A sattellite gets hit by debris, and breaks apart, adding to the debris cloud. This increases the probability that more satellites get hit, and as they do, the probability continues to increase. Raise the probability to some high initial value, and a cascade starts.

14

Oh, I was going to say that this could be a mode of attack by a poorer nation that wants to negate the satellite advantage of a richer one. Take, say, Iran. Let’s say it has the technology to get a rocket into orbital space, but it doesn’t have the technology or money to create a large array of useful satellites. So, it launches rocket after rocket filled with 'shrapnel and detonates them in orbit, creating large debris clouds, kicking off the chain reaction mentioned and wiping out the entire LEO satellite fleet. Realistically, they might focus on just one orbit - say, the orbit that the GPS constellation is in.

I don’t know how many rockets it would take, and how much mass of debris. It might not be feasible.

15

Great thoughts on this guys. :slight_smile: I especially like the idea of detonating rockets filled with small particles to intersect the most probable orbital path of an oncoming fleet. I think that would be pretty effective at the velocities we are talking about, even with armor plating (obviously if ‘shields’ were possible it would negate this).

This thread really give one the idea of just how difficult it would be to have war on interstellar (or even inter-solar system) scales. I think primarily IF interstellar war was tried it would mostly be composed of fleets to get the ground troops and other atmospheric assets in place so that the fight would happen at the point of decision…on planets, or other essential resources areas.

Thanks everyone for the thoughts…keep em coming.

-XT

16

Just remember - if you control near orbit, you control the planet. Read Footfall by Niven and Pournelle to get an impression on how true that is.

The pebble idea sounds good, BTW. But how usefull will it be at the distances mentioned? If it possible to aim an unguided kinetic weapon at a moving target some 300,000 mile away?

The character of warfare is always determined by technology. The age of the mounted knight died with the pike and the musket; WW1 looked the way it did because nobody could figure out how to counter the machine gun; today’s air-power supremacy will probably end as soon as someone invents an effective laser system. Thusm the nature of space combat will be determined by the strength and weaknesses of the following technologies, which we have no way of predicting:

  1. Speed and energy of a ship’s thrusters.

  2. Range and power of lasers.

  3. Armor, shields and countermeasures.

  4. Stealth technology.

  5. Effectiveness of sensors

  6. Speek, accuracy and vulnerability of missiles (nuclear warhead technology ensures that strength is not a factor; unless someone invents REAL powerful shields, it’s one-shot, one kill).

Technology does not progress at an even pace, and we have no idea what we’ll be good at at a given point in the fulure. Perhaps chemistry will advance to a dgree where we can make excellent armor, while physics reaches a wall when it comes to lasers. Perhaps we’ll invent a super-efficient reaction drive, but stealth technology will be ineffective - in which case we may even see SW style fighters, which are no more than small flying cannons. Stealth trumps sensors, you’ve got submarines. Sensors trump stealth, you’ve got ships of the line. It’s all a matter of mix-and-match, setting everything to the latest killer app.

17

The Russians once put a 20mm cannon on one of their Salyut spacestations.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/spaceguns/

18

Off the top of my head I am not sure why any other weapon than a nuclear warhead – or hydrogen bomb warhead come to that - would really need to be “invented”. If the engines on the delivery “missiles” could be souped up enough to make the weapon viable in a space battle – it seems like almost no other weapon would be as effective.

Perhaps an energy weapon of some kind would work, more theoretical shots at targets – however nothing really beats the surety of destroying your opponent or the need to deliver the weapon close but not exactly on target as does our friend the Atom.

I guess the possibility exists that spaceships with .5c drive and an interplanetary traveling civilization would be able to do the ABM (Reagan) Star Wars thing and stop incoming missiles : so good counter measures and/or many, many super fast missiles would be needed … I guess that is my take on weapons but maybe I am stuck in the 21st century !

19

Its a good point about the nukes…but I’m not sure what effects nukes would have in space. If the ships were shielded, wouldn’t it just push them around, unless it were a close hit? What would the EMP effects be to both fleets? Besides, what about the Convention between the Great Houses (obscure Dune reference)??? :slight_smile:

-XT

20

You folks are WAY off. I can imagine numerous space battles taking place in the next century.

“Ivan, you sonofabitch, keep your hands off Ludmilla!”

“But she has the only functioning vagina within a half million kilometers.”

Battle with butter knives and pliers ensues.