Thats assuming all space faring types will be hetero, Boyo Jim. 
-XT
I forgot to mention that the first speaker is named Katerina.
I agree that the battles would take place over vast distances (the light seconds mentioned earlier), and there won’t be the laser fights at close quarters that you see in SF movies.
I don’t particularly agree, however, that tracking in space would be “orders of magnitude” harder than finding stuff in the ocean. I suspect finding things at sea is actually harder. Search and rescue operations at sea still tend to be done visually from aircraft, and finding a human with only his head above water clinging to a piece of debris which is also mostly underwater is no small feat when you have aircraft scanning hundreds of square miles of ocean, particularly in heavy seas or in bad light. Space, on the other hand, is spectacularly empty. Unless you were weaving in and out of an asteroid belt, I think a spacecraft-sized object at several thousand kilometres would stick out like dogs’ bollocks to any scanning instruments. At distances ten times greater, it might still be spotted without too much effort.
… It depends on the technology level. I have a hard time seeing the benefit of lasers as weapons in space, for the energy input needed for a truly usefull and destructive laser weapon you could use your own orbital velocity and a railgun to vaporize just about anything. Also, if lasers were used as primary weapons the ‘battles’ really wouldn’t take long, evasive action would be impossible because the first sign you’d get that you’ve been fired on would either be a near miss (unlikely) or hull breach. Battles would be fought either one of two ways, the attack submarine model where stealth and detection are the name of the game or the ship of the line sort where maneuver, tactics, weapon load and damage control rule the roost. I also agree that ‘sheilds’ of the type often seen in movies ect. are highly unlikely, I could however see ablative armor or ‘clouds’ of small drones deployed to intercept enemy fire. They could even be nano scale and flow around in an artificial magnetic field deployed in the immediate area around the ship, programmed to cluster at very high speeds around projected impact areas. If some kind of artificial gravity is involved things get VERY interesting.
UGH, make that " ‘shields’ ", unbelievable…
And what’s the matter with her vagina?
Well, it sure ain’t working for Ivan.
Sam Stone’s idea about knocking out satellites could not only be used to destroy satellites, but also ships. A cloud of ice particles could do great damage to an incoming ship, missile, satellite or space station.
The thing I am most struck by when watching, reading or thinking about Sci-Fi is the economic costs of the wars. Why destroy a ship when you can take it for your own. Unless a cost of a ship becomes cheapish, there is much more benefit in destroying not the ship, but the crew. A well placed microwave burst could kill the crew, take the ship and use it for your own. A missile that infects the crew with bio-weaponry and then decompresses the ship afterward would do the job as well. Nano-bots that kill the crew and take over the computers would be ideal.
Until the costs come way down, a guided rock, cloud of dust or proximity nukes would be the best near-tech way to destroy stuff. In all honesty, I don’t think military actions in space happen for a long time. America/Russia/EU/Japan/China/Australia’s moon base comes under attack from who exactly? And if it was a terrestrial source, do you really want to piss off all of those countries?
In the Honor Harrington series they use ‘bomb pumped x-ray lasers’ fired from attack missiles. This could be a legitimate use for nuclear weapons that allowed you to focus the energy directly at the enemy ships.
I like the idea of rail guns too…I think projectile/kinetic energy weapons would be very useful for these kinds of battles.
-XT
Meanwhile, Ludmilla has quietly floated her way to the American module with Irving, and locked the hatch behind her, leaving Ivan and Katerina to ponder that they have now lost access to the one functioning toilet in 500 thousand kilometres.
What a great thread. I’ve got a couple of disjointed observations for what they’re worth.
This is starting to sound like a return to a 17th and 18th century land and naval warfare tactics where each side maneuvered to gain the best position, withdrawing if possible when the situation was not to their favor. General position of the enemy was largely assumed over long distances and units/ships were required to react very quickly once the enemy was sited nearby. Scouts and outposts often just barely beat the enemy back to the site of attack to warn the defenders.
All of the crew would need to be strapped into some type of chair or other impact-absorbing device. Some how I think the swivel chairs used in all the Star Trek series wouldn’t cut it. Anybody walking the halls during any type of physical impact would likely be killed or severely injured sort of like unrestrained passengers in an auto accident. No navy style repair crews scurrying around during battle.
In order to take advantage of the 3D battles would ships become spherical or geometrically shaped to present a constant number of weapons at the enemy? Or perhaps cigar shaped to deliver a broadside, while presenting a minimal aspect on retreat or when directly approaching a target.
I think the analogy to age of sail type warfare is apt. It would be very much like that I think, with the battles coming down to locating the enemy before they locate you, surprise and maneuver.
I’m not sure you’d need a spherical ship, as its possible to spin or roll a ship to bring other weapons to bear. In the HH series thats exactly what they do in fact…they roll the ships to bring their various broadsides to bear, and reload the off side broadsides.
The shock frames I think hits it on the head…you’d definitely need to be fully strapped down. No running about during battle. Even maneuver could be potentially deadly at high speeds. You’d also need to have your crew suited up in case of a hull breach. Would explosive decompression be survivable though even with suits on??
Great ideas guys. Keep em coming. Maybe I’ll write a book on this! 
-XT
I would think that prior to battle the ship would be depressurized. All crew would be in some type of exposure suit. No sense wasting one of your most valuable commodities when the ship sustains hull damage of some type. I’d think that the exposure suits/shock frames would be combined. Perhaps something similar to a pressurized deep-sea diving suit. Maybe something larger so you could control your battle station within it.
In the near term we can reasonably forecast what type of weapons would be used, rail guns, lasers, and missiles, ect. But in the next 20 years what type of engines are we really considering. I know the OP suggested that one of some unknown type could be developed. But as long as we’re being realistic about the weapons what about the engine. The ship will need something that can both drive it and power the weapons. Rail guns and lasers of any merit will require a fair amount of electrical power. Missiles and rocks not so much. Obviously an atomic power source is required. How do you convert that energy into propulsion in space or electricity for that matter?
I don’t see why stealth is an option when you’ve got infrared detectors. Space is pretty damned close to absolute zero, and any ship is going to be a hell of a lot warmer than that. You would first find all the moving infrared sources, then compare them to known infrared profiles, then anaylze their movements to find the ones exhibiting non-ballistic trajectories. You could maybe take pains to reduce your infrared emissions, but once you light up your drive you’re screwed.
Great thoughts so far…
My thought is that there is no way you’d have people involved at all, except maybe overseeing or controlling the whole thing. Humans would get crushed by the accel/decel/maneuvering and couldn’t cope with the targeting and flying reaction times needed at such speeds. I’m thinking the whole thing would be automated and the winner would be whoever has the most “stuff” to throw at the other.
Also, the kinetic energy weapons would be nearly impenetrable if surrounding a planet. Just have a cloud of marble sized steel, ceramic, or even glass balls in a cloud and no ship, missile, or anything else moving with any kind of velocity could get though. This cloud would also be all but undetectable to the incoming objects.
I wonder if you could pop a nuke or some other high explosive device to clear clouds of fast moving particles from your path…if you saw them of course. You wouldn’t have to destroy the cloud, just disperse it to a new vector after all.
On Sam Stones cloud attack, I was thinking you could pack 1-2kg depleted uranium spheres coated with some very hard high temp coating and placed in a high speed missile that would be detonated directly in the path of an oncoming ship (vectoring the particles in a patern that would anticipate any changes in flight path possible perhaps)…or maybe a shaped charge to ‘throw’ the projectiles off axis (assuming the front of star ships would be armored with some kind of deflector or extra armor plating…which you’d need just to travel at high speeds). A cloud of such particles, slamming in at very high speed would do a hell of a lot of damage.
I wonder if the ships WOULD be automated. Wouldn’t they be vulnerable to jamming if you sent out complete drone fleets? Unless they also had some VERY advanced AI and could be trusted to work autonomously, I think humans (or other beings :)) would still be needed for crews.
-XT
I don’t see how any purely kinetic weapon could be effective at the ranges we’re talking about. Say you fire a million shards at 100,000 mph. If your target is 50,000 miles away, he’ll have 30 minutes to shift his vector by a degree or two, and end up a thousand miles from where you aimed. The only situations I can see these type of weapons woking are either very short range, or complete surprise. And even if tou have the latter, how carefully caqn you actually aim these things? A small imperfection in the bullet or in the railgun will send thngs far off course.
If I were a starship captain, whenever I was in any possible danger, I’d constantly be changing my aceleration or decelleration by spall fractions of G, just to avoid long range sniping based on my projected path. It may make my crew slightly nausious.
Incidentally, I don’t think automated ships will be an option. Either they’re remote control, and thus constantly transmitting information back to base - easy to detect or jam; or else they’re fully robotic, which will make them predictable and inflexable.
The effects of a nuclear weapon detonated in space are much smaller than the effects of the same weapon detonated in the Earth’s atmosphere. In space, the detonation produces a burst of soft x-rays from black-body radiation. That’s about it. Most of the effects that we associate with nuclear weapons are caused by the interaction of the device with the atmosphere. A good description of the process can be found at Effects of Nuclear Explosions. Read section 5.3.1, Fireball Physics.
But we’re talking about small masses traveling at fractions of c. That places it in the range of 186,000 miles per second. And for my sanity I’ll work in metric: 300,000 kmps
Let’s mock up a battle across a sphere with a radius of 500,000 km (30% larger than the Earth/Moon radius). Let each ship mass 100,000 tonnes (25% more than a modern aircraft carrier). Now let’s let them have a speed of 300 kmps (10x that of the Earth’s orbital speed). Each ship can fire a shot that travel at 10% c (30,000 kmps)
The worst case is a shot across the sphere.
The shooting ship fires along the projected path of its target. It will take 33.33 seconds for the first shot to reach the far side. Say the ship slows to 294 kmps by 33.33 seconds. That means it needs to decelerate 180 m/s[sup]2[/sup] or shed 1.7x10[sup]14[/sup] kJ of energy. Now the shot will miss the ship by about 100 km. This is fine so long as no one builds a proximity fuse into the slug.
Rails guns make a lot of sense in this situation and that’s with damn fast ships.
Well, as Grey pointed out we are talking about higher speeds. I was speculating about ships that could go aprox .5c…which would mean weapons systems that could go faster. Even at .1c though we are talking about some pretty fast stuff. Also, I was talking about missile delivered ‘clouds’, which would coast in ballistically and then light off their drive for their terminal approach, detonating at some fixed distance to disperse a ‘cloud’ of projectiles with a pattern calculated to impact on the target. If you fired enough missiles, some would reach attack range (inspite of anti-missile missiles) and you should get some hits.
You are probably right about purely ballistic weapons…they’d either have to fire at high fractions of c or would have to fire in fairly close to be effective. Beam weapons of course would fire at c, but I don’t know what realistic ranges you could actually achieve with, say, a high powered laser.
-XT