Interesting. It seems to me that combat with near-future spaceships would be a pretty terrible idea. With limited Δv, there’s not going to be a lot of orbital maneuvering. My WAG is that it’ll come down to detection: if you can spot a ship or missile on an intercept course early enough, you can dodge it without spending much Δv. But if you don’t detect it in time, you’re screwed, because a missile could have way more Δv for terminal guidance than you can ever use to evade it.
What kind of Δv budgets do the ships in that game have?
True. And look at the greatest Star Trek movie ever, 1951’s Captain Horatio Hornblower. While the battles in the movie are portrayed accurately for combat, they aren’t for time. The interveining hour or so while the ship turns around, gets rerigged, and lines up for another pass, are completely removed for the sake of a decent movie. Still the result is that the combat ends up looking exactly like Star Trek.
This was how combat was depicted in the SF comic book “Albedo.” Two ships rush toward each other at high speed, jinking madly to prevent their exact position being predicted. They eject swarms of “autonomous combat vehicles” – combat drones. The drones have weapons, but the drones also have enough mass to mess up the other guy’s ship if they collide.
The actual combat is over in less than a second, all by computer. You blink…and then thank God you’re still alive.
The light novel series & anime Starship Operators put some thought into space battles. The setting has jump tech and ansibles, but seems largely to have physics as we know it otherwise.
