So you really need something bigger than a fighter, but smaller than a capital ship. Something like this, perhaps?
True enough, but that doesnt mean the ships are equal.
The fighter only has to move up/down lets say 10 feet to turn a laser/missile hit into a miss. Or perhaps slow down /speed up to get 30 feet forward/backwards to turn a hit into a miss.
That big honking cruiser that is much taller/wider/longer is going to have to accelerate harder in any direction than the little ship to avoid getting hit.
If you assume the same constraints of G limits (with or without fancy extra/magical physics) for both, the big ship is gonna get hit more often/easier. Then again, it would seem reasonable that it could take more/bigger/closer hits than a little fighter.
Wait, for purpose of this thread are we ruling out heavy blackboxing? I ask because I think of the capital battlespaceships under discussion as, you know, starships, with FTL capability. And if so, why balk at a little thing like an onboard inertial-dampening field?
I suppose they don’t have to be starships . . . if we imagine a star system like Firefly/Serenity, where there enough Earthlike planets for interplanetary war to be politically and practically possible.
Not to mention weaponized catnip.
The Wing Commander navigation setup did a decent job of justifying their intentional cloning of WW2 Pacific naval combat. The universe was connected with a dense web of jump points that allowed instant travel between linked points, so any sort of long range detection was ultimately futile, the ships would arrive well before their signatures even at solar system scales. The positions of the jump points were well-known to both sides, but because the web was so interconnected, it was pointless to fortify jump points themselves except at locations of interest, as the fortifications would simply be bypassed otherwise. Large fleet movements could be responded to fairly quickly from any central location on the web. Between the many legs of the jump web to cover and not much force required locally at any given point, you got interdiction of the short lanes between points by very small forces that are either coasting or lying in wait to avoid detection, while also trying to detect similar low-power ships. And so, you wound up with slow-moving small fleets dealing with other slow-moving small fleets with a wide-ranging screen of expendable fighters extending detection range while attempting to counter the enemy scouting.
The space behemoth style of ship didn’t even exist in the Wing Commander setting, as destroying known targets was so easy.
Gordon R. Dickson’s book Dorsai gets into it some: a fleet of large capital ships jumps into the battlespace; if the enemy “agrees” to the battle, they jump into the same proximity. On both sides, the crews are strapped in and wearing spacesuits, because within milliseconds of both sides being there at the same time, their firing computers have unloaded everything they have at each other. A crewman feels the jump, and then if they feel anything at all, they’ve survived the battle. The main character looks up after the jump to find the command centre of his ship open to space.
How would a space ship ever dodge a laser aside from just zigging and zagging at random? It could hardly detect an incoming laser beam, sensor signals take time to travel as well, and light speed is light speed.
As an aside, this problem is one of the interesting challenges of Sword of the Stars: in that game, each race has an FTL drive, but no two are the same. The grand majority have a “free” one, that is to say you point in one direction, engage warp drive and make a beeline for it, only differing in the specifics and speeds.
Not so with the humans, who rely on a fixed spiderweb of “wormholes” between planets to travel, although said travel is much, much faster than anyone else’s (not instantaneous, but a 15 turn trip for one race is a 3 turn jump for humans). They can travel freely too, but in that case they move at sublight speed.
This makes humans at same time very frustrating to fight against (because they can feint your fleets effortlessly, cannot be intercepted en route and can attack in overwhelming numbers without warning), but also somewhat frustrating to fight as, since by the same token you can’t intercept people before they’re on top of your planets, and due to the arbitrary & random way the wormhole web is determined at the start of the game, the trip between A and B might involve an arbitrarily roundabout way so a lot of foresight is required to deploy your defensive assets in such a way that they can cover the whole of your space.
A smart and observant player might just infer what the wormhole web (which only humans can see) looks like and take full advantage of it to determine which human planets are more or less defenceless for a given time frame.
If the enemy planet has no atmosphere, maybe. Though scattering debris in orbit might take out some of the attackers.
Otherwise the attackers have two choices. First, skip through the atmosphere during the attack. Assuming they don’t burn up, it will be a bit hard to target given the turbulence. Non-energy weapons would have to not burn up also, and be able to decelerate fast enough to not skip right out of the atmosphere. Attacking from space has the same problems, except you’re a bit further away and have to shoot through the atmosphere.
But, I do admit it would be easier than attacking a capital ship.
The point is not to dodge a beam of light. The point is to become unpredictable to the enemy’s fire control.
Honorverse makes the point that static defences (planets and space stations) can’t dodge, so they are going to get hit by every missile and graser (direct fire LOS beam weapon) fired at them (and not intercepted). This means your space forts have to be incredibly huge and powerfull, or they are a waste of money and manpower.
If your space battle is fought at a distance of light seconds or minutes then you can never know where your target is. Only where they where.
This means evasive maneuvers make sense, CJ Cheryrh’s company wars make a lot of this.
Space stations are not really static, though. Not only do they orbit the planet they’re defending, but even current satellites have emergency boosters to modify their course if need be (such as, for example, when there’s a large bit of space junk on a collision course, if only to avoid creating more orbital junk).
With that in mind, I would on the contrary think that space “forts” would instead be made of hundreds of tiny satellites (just big enough for a targeting computer and a huge fuck-off gun), reading to bob and weave out the way if need be. If one catches a missile, who cares ? There’s still 9999 of them a-shootin’.
These orbits are completely predictable. (The planets themselves are traveling pretty fast, too. Earth is orbitting at nearly 30km/sec.) If you’re attaching “maneuvering jets” powerfull enough to quickly “jink” out of the way of in incomig missile, then now you’ve made a space ship, not a space fort.
How is a thousand discrete objects a (single) “fort”? You’re really making these definitions pretty elastic. 
The Honorverse has things like that, too, defending planets (except they generally pack missiles rather than guns). But they still need hulking big space forts for a variety of reasons, too (drydocks for repairs of ships, places to deploy personnel from, logistics centers, etc.). Plus, missile pods tend to be vulnerable to “proximity kills”, since they can’t pack as much radiation shielding.
Not really. The jet is simply there to slightly modify the sat’s orbit, which since it’s already going pretty fast has a dramatic effect on its trajectory, and of course on whether or not something shot at it will hit. But they can’t leave orbit or anything like that. In my mind, a space ship is something you can also attack with.
Which is why I put it in quotes. I meant “fort” in the sense of fixed defensive position/firebase. Something you have to deal with before you can move in. But yeah, the sat grid would be more like a WWII Line than a lone fort.
The missiles in Honorverse are bomb pumped lasers. The missile detonates a fission/fusion warhead within a 25,000 kilometers of the target, and metal rods and gravitic lenses within the missle casing “focused” a very small portion of the bombs x-ray gamma burst into, in effect, an xray laser. (The rods are consumed within milliseconds.) A defense sat moving a couple hundred miles is not that much of a difference to the missile (which also has a internal seeking capability, as well, later in the series, of ship based course corrections).
The defsats best defense is it’s small size. (And ECM)
Ah. Well, I guess a whole integrated system could be colloquially called “Fortress Earth”, or something. I myself would use the term “defense network” to describe those satellites, but if it’s your novel, you get to call the shots.
If you allow inertial dampening, then there’s STILL no reason your gigantic capital space dreadnoughts can’t be every bit as agile as your space fighters. If your inertial dampening technology allows your fighters to pull 500g without breaking, it should allow your big ships to pull 500g without breaking.
(Unless you’re David Weber, and claim that there are diseconomies of scale when it comes to inertial dampening. Which frankly seems backwards to me – wouldn’t a bigger inertial dampening gizmo be able to neutralize MORE g’s?)
I think that might be a square-cube thing: Honorverse inertial dampeners are strongly dependent on the ship’s wedge (without a wedge up, they can only go up to 30 g or so), which is basically a two-dimensional thing. Double the linear dimension of a ship, and the volume where you need to dampen inertia goes up by a factor of 8, but the size of the wedge to dampen it with only goes up by a factor of 4. There probably are some other economies of scale, but they’re not enough to cancel this effect, just to mitigate it (big ships’ max accelerations don’t fall off as fast as the square-cube effect would imply).
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Agree with this. Note that according to Pournelle the characteristics of the technology - the Alderson Drive and Langston Field - were deliberately set up to allow for something more than the “ships appear, ships fire, ships destroyed” type battle. Niven and Pournelle wanted large battleships (not carriers and fighters) to be required (to mount a Field generator) and for ships to be damaged but survive.
It also had the advantage of making the combat rather like Age of Sail in space as well- they basically jumped in, cruised at 1 g to the battle, then traded punches trying to overload the other’s Field, and/or create enough damage through burn-throughs to destroy the other ship, or cause them to strike.
I have to figure it was pretty deliberate, because a lot of the other naval tradition was 19th century translated into the far future, with actual Mids, young officers (who was the last guy under 35 to command a destroyer in the USN?), Viceroys & colonial officials, etc…
It seemed weird the first time I read Mote, but after reading the Hornblower books and the Aubrey/Maturin books, it made perfect sense.