The most convincing accounts of space warfare I have come across are in David Weber’s Honorverse series. ‘On Basilisk Station’ is the first book and IMHO quite excellent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse
As noted above, fighting is done at enormous ranges using missiles and lasers.
First of all, there are not defined “space lanes” for interplanetary transit. The planets are all in constant motion at different orbital speeds, and unless some errant projectiles are moving slow enough to be captured in orbit of a body they’re basically going to go off into some broad solar orbit where the likelihood of randomly impacting a spacecraft is no more than the hazard of any other small unseen object moving at solar orbital speeds. Unless the amount of material is equal to that of a large moon, the difference in hazard that it will pose to future spacecraft is negligible until we start filling up the solar system elbow to asshole with habitats and spacecraft, in which case we’d have to find ways to clear out natural hazards anyway.
There are good reasons to try to avoid the militarization of space, and producing random spews of hypervelocity debris is certainly not responsible, but it is just about the least pressing problem of armed combat in space. The greater issue is that it is virtually impossible to protect critical infrastructure from attack, and enough damage from a conflict could have a crippling effect upon the development of space technology and space-based habitation.
Stranger
You have fleets of orion-nuke-pulse spaceships?
Forget about having EMP as effective weapons.
The very means of propulsion guarantees that the ships will be hardened against any such effects.
(you might as well propose using water squirt guns against submarines)
Mixing orion nuclear pulse propulsion (Huge ISP and Thrust, but also requires huge ship mass) and solar sail (absolutely demands low ship mass to sail ratio) is a completely ludicrous concept, on par with providing your nuclear aircraft carrier with a single set of hand oars as auxiliary propulsion.
Then adding hydrogen peroxide-powered missiles is simply a laughing matter. The enemy battleship would have several hundreds of times more delta-v AND superior acceleration than the missiles!
Please align the different technologies of primary drive, secondary drive, and missile propulsion into the same century, and redo from start.
I’d make the two types of ship separate. Low-mass Solar-Sail type craft could be used for carrying instrument packages and sensors out to uninhabited locations in the Solar System, maybe prospecting for resources. The high mass Project Orion ships would carry human crews later, to wherever they are needed.
There could be an intermediate class of ship as well, to carry automated equipment to unmanned locations, maybe preparing the ground for later human bases. Perhaps conflicts would arise when two or more factions send automated craft to the same location, a kind of claim-jumping that humans might want to investigate in person.
Look at it this way : remember how open space battles are all about range? Railgun and coilgun designs have both been demonstrated in labs today with muzzle velocities of over 10 kilometers/second.
From earth orbital velocities, solar system escape velocity is only ~13 kilometers per second.
What I am trying to say is, it’s entirely possible that realistic space kinetic weapons will have muzzle velocities so high that the projectiles escape the solar system, at which point it’s someone else’s problem.
Though it depends on where this space tussle happens. Interestingly, it could be that projectiles from one ship are escaping and the return fire is on an elliptical track that will eventually come back around.
Could be - but… Also consider that if we are looking at 10km/sec velocities, and suggest that (unlike most current movies) the combatants will be several hundred kilometers or more apart - then that implies a travel time in significant fractions of a minute or more. Unless the devices are active guided, trying to hit something with a kinetic weapon is a waste of resources. (Or, as I mentioned, using some form of AI to predict future position for a “jumpy” target doing evasive maneuvers.) But can you really perform evasive action with small atomic bombs? Or, more likely, the fighter craft will need a more flexible and less drastic propulsion.
Remember that the dreadnought arms race pre-WWI turned out to be a dud; the big ships were mostly sitting ducks avoided confrontations. Many of the WWII sea battles involved fighter squadrons between ships that never got within visual range of each other.
That’s likely the pattern. You can’t really hide in space, except to be lost in remote vastness using stealth. Most likely the battles will consist of a few (unmanned?) stealth units trying to sneak up on larger vessels.
If a computer can hit the target at extreme distance and speed, and if the mass you are throwing at him has a very high velocity, he may have little chance to maneuver. A hydrogen bomb in a vehicle that can track and align itself at the target sounds like a good deal to me.
Will there be flying cars yet? I mean, we’ve been waiting a long time…
Damn right!
We need to complain to Elon Musk.
nm
Thought I’d do another drive by link from Because Science that also delves into what the OP is asking wrt realistic space combat, called The Truth about Space War! I like this one as it goes into one of the issues you rarely see in these discussions, namely the heat issue. Anyway, thought I’d link to it as I saw it pop up on my new videos listing for channels I follow and thought it might be interesting.
Trotting out Atomic Rockets again, but they have an extensive area on radiators.
If you accelerate at 1G for 60 seconds you can be 17km from where you started.
The foolishness in a space war would be letting the enemy get within a few hundred km of you; much like modern US carrier groups enforce an air exclusion zone on maneuvers. A surprise attack works once. Then you start putting pickets out to stop anything far far away, where a one-man (or unmanned) picket would be expendable enough to allow for inspection before the vehicle got within range. If it tried to fire something from that far away, the picket would be right beside it and attack, and the craft would be far enough away to take evasive maneuvers.
Then it’s a war of range and endurance. a cruise missile can go hundreds of miles, but is slow. An Exocet had a hundred-mile range; a Sidewinder, a few miles. I assume space missiles would be analogous. The bigger they are, the harder to adapt to a moving target, and the more target they present in return; smaller means less fuel and smaller payload; and the longer the target vessel has to get out of the way or launch countermeasures.
The reason ground-to-air or air-to-air missiles on Earth have range limits is because when the run out of fuel they fall to the ground or ocean. In space, range is not the absolute limitation; it is ability to change course and speed (delta-V), and how close it can get before the target detects it and either deploys some kind of countermeasures or manuevers from it. Any actively thrusting missile will be almost instantly detectable because of the thermal signature of the plume.
Small kinetic penetrators, on the other hand, would have virtually no signature and if fired in a wide enough pattern could strike and damage a vessel regardless of any practical attempt to evade. A 5 cm tungsten or depleted uranium sabot moving at tens of kilometers per second would punch through any conceivable spacecraft material, and if fired on a grid spacing of, say, 2 meters, would essentially shred the target beyond any defense or repair. Of course, an opponent would be able to respond in kind, so winning that kind of a battle would be an exercise in guile rather than any kind of 20th century dogfight or age of sail broadside exchange.
Combat in space is not going to be like air combat or maritime battles or anything else we have previous experience with, and trying to reference tactics and strategies from those fields is going to give very wrong predictions.
Stranger
I would think that the thing to do would be to approach the enemy unseen.
We are discussing space ships and acceleration that we don’t have, so stealth technology is just as unknown.
But this is the problem - size and range and maneuverability are related. a 5cm sabot of tungsten - presumably this is the length and it’s, say, 38-calibre. What would that weigh? a few pounds, say a kilogram? A grid spacing of 2m covering 500mx500m is 250^2 or 62,500 sabots… plus launch facility; how many 62 tonne ordnances can one fighter carry and still be maneuverable - and the target need only move 500m to escape it while several hundred kilometers away; and something that tiny would not really maneuver. (I’m guessing when were talking 62 tonnes per shot, it’s a lot cheaper to use steel.)
Earth missiles fail because they run out of fuel and fall to earth; space missiles fail because they run out maneuvering fuel trying to follow the target’s evasion tactics. Either way, size and maneuverability are related. Similarly, carrying too much ordnance limits the attackers maneuver speed. These fundamentals work anywhere - earth, sea, sky or space.
My guess is that the standard defensive posture would be to have a forward picket - the attacker must show his intentions before getting close enough to the bulk of the enemy fleet. Stealth payloads will be a key technology and surprise is the essence.
However, once it descends into an outright shooting war, the element of surprise is lost. Pearl harbor worked… But as Daffy Duck said, “It’s a great trick, I can only do it once.”