Wouldn’t combustion not occur as there is a lack of oxygen? So anything propelled by a burning fuel be useless?
If China and American make a moonbase and eventually get into a war, how would they fight?
There’s been a thread or two about this before. Explosives contain their own oxygen, so they’d work. The biggest problem you’d have is dealing with things like recoil. The Soviets even tested an armed Soyuz capsule at one point during the Cold War.
They would play chicken with space shuttles:)
You grab the other guy’s jersey before you start throwing punches. Otherwise you just float away.
I expect there won’t be a lot of insults thrown back and forth.
One of Martin Caidin’s Cyborg novels (the ones that The Six Million Dollar Man were based on) talks about this at length. Its title is, imaginatively enough, Cyborg IV.
Phasers are useful when you can get an accurate lock on your target. When this is not possible (for example, when the enemy is cloaked), photon torpedoes can do a better job due to their explosive spread. They are, however, less useful against rapidly moving targets.
Then there’s the wave-motion gun, but it takes a while to charge up.
How about a railgun?
Anyway, as far as O[sub]2[/sub] is concerned, I would imagine that any sort of weapon system would be capable of supplying it’s own oxygen.
Light sabers would work too, provided the two combatants were tethered together…
Well, if you fired 2 missiles at a time from opposite ends of the sattelite, it would elimnate the recoil problem.
I think the main problem with fighting in space is that people just dont quite understand how BIG it is.
The main problem with fighting in space would be to try and find the opponent.
Missiles don’t have recoil, as long as the exhaust is directed away from the ship doing the firing.
Likewise, Gyrojet handguns have no recoil. The bullet is a tiny self-contained rocket. That’d be useful in space.
I like the idea of a weapon which flies up to the enemy ship, latches onto it, and then just drills a hole through the pressure wall. Or, a shaped charge, radar-guided missile. You can make such things a lot smaller in space when you don’t have to fight an atmosphere and gravity.
You could have a gun that shoots projectiles that have a range of 100 miles and home in by radar once they get close. They can even have video links and all kinds of neat stuff to help the shooter navigate the projectiles or gather intelligence.
what, no coffee cans filled with sand?
Okay, so I decided to stop being lazy and I did a search and found the earlier thread about space combat. It even has all kinds of groovy links.
[nerdly hijack]
Bah! Turbolasers and proton torpedoes can deliver firepower that’s many orders of magnitude stronger!
[/nerdly hijack]
In any case, space warfare would consist of ultra-long-range weaponry, fired at tens of thousands of kilometers distant. Indeed, it seems that a lot of the laser-based weaponry that’s being developed will have its range limited only by line-of-sight… if it’s above the horizon, we’ll be able to hit it.
Centuries from now, we’ll be fighting at several light-seconds - even light-minutes - distant. And then we get Gridfire and blow things away from 2000 lightyears…
Oops, I thought I turned off the nerdly hijack.
Such as pretty much every weapons system currently used anywhere in the world. All guns have oxidants in the gunpowder - they don’t get the oxygen from the surrounding air.
Short-range space combat is going to be increadibly deadly… If you can see it, you can kill it. The side with the most resources and the fastest reflexes and the fastest rate of fire will be the winner. There will be lots of mutual kills, and all other things being equal, the side that fires first will win.
The problem is that at ranges of less than 10,000 meters, you have no time to detect and react to the incoming threat from missiles and projectiles, especially if they’re on a reciprocal or semi-reciprocal orbit.
Longer range combat will still be deadly as hell, but there is more time to detect an incoming threat and take action to defend against it or get the hell out of the way.
Space combat will eat manuevering mass like no one’s business, so you have another factor to consider: An effective, survivable platform will have large amounts of reaction mass, meaning larger tanks, meaning a larger target, and so on.
Best bet, do your space combat with unmanned platforms.
Person-to-person space combat will either be very high lethality, or very low lethality, depending on whether you’re using fragmentation, projectile, and other suit-pennetrating weapons, or using tasers, nets, glue, and other incapacitation weapons.
Orbital platforms are easy meat to other orbital platforms. Ground based platforms are craters. Maneuvering platforms are Gods, for the first hour, after that, they’re navigation hazards. Hidden platforms get one kill each.
Orbital platforms can unload a bucket of bb’s, and deny use of their orbit to everyone. Do it from a polar orbit, with high explosives and stealthed ceramic shrapnel, in truckloads, and you can pretty much end the space race for everyone for a few decades, maybe centuries.
This brings to the fore the obvious space centered parallel to MAD. I put a footlocker full of C4 and a couple of bags of scrap metal in every space platform I send up. I advertise it well. You demonstrate the ability to eliminate my space based systems, I blow them all, from Ground Control. Game Over. No Winner.
Deep space war is a game of patience, and accuracy. I start shooting. I fire all my weapons. I abandon ship. Time passes. Your stuff starts blowing up, all over the place. You start planning your revenge.
Tris
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” ~ Sun-tzu ~
Space combat? Boarding parties. With swords. 
What? Bigger than my back yard?
Anyhow, according to Lucas, we will all be using light swords, much more effective than a gun at 5 paces.
You guys haven’t really mentioned electronic warfare. If we can see it, we can kill it, so war in space might revolve around not being seen. Radar jamming, physical decoys (small objects that appear on radar or whatever else we are using to track targets to be fighting ships) counter jamming, etc.
You’re right, it would be fought by computers. Humans might make operational or tactical decisions, but the actual shooting and exploding would be in the hands of machines.
“Anyhow, according to Lucas, we will all be using light swords, much more effective than a gun at 5 paces.”
Only if you have the ‘1-in10-billion’ ability to move superfast, see the future, and push things around with the power of your mind.