What would actual space warfare be like?

Presume

  1. Mars is habitable and is settled in much the same way as Earth.
  2. Mars and Earth are at war.
  3. Technology similar to our own, at most 1 or 2 decades further.
  4. If you must, presume some relatively cheap way to put materiel and personnel into orbit.
    What would be the more important or interesting aspects of it?

What would that look like, strategically and tactically?

What would electronic warfare be like?

What weapons and platforms would predominate?

How would logistics be handled?

Personnel-wise, how would selection, training and tours be like?

Note: Since I expect that some people will come in with an answer along the lines of: “Lasers, lasers and shit 'cuz they look cool in Star Wars, pew pew pew!” it would be nice if you largely ignored those otherwise the whole thread will degenerate into a Sisyphean attempt to school fools.

Given those stipulations, I can’t see (a.) What the two planets could possibly be at war about, and (b.) How they could conduct a war in any meaningful sense of being able to achieve some position by force.

In space warfare, gravity and orbital mechanics are both your best ally and worst enemy in terms of kinetic energy differential. One of the grave concerns and rarely spoken of vulnerabilities of current surveillance and communications satellite capability is how easily it could be taken out by any agent with orbital launch capability. High precision intercept isn’t required; just creating a debris field in an intercepting orbit is sufficient to take down satellites, and once it starts the phenomenon will just cascade (although not as abruptly as depicted in Gravity).

For interplanetary warfare between competing, space-capable parties, throwing an unavoidably large volume of mass at enemy ships or orbiting facilities–basically, a cloud of small, dense projectiles–would shred any real world structure. Similarly, attacking ground facilities could be done by redirecting modest size asteroids to impact major land masses for or continental shelves to result in catastrophic seismic damage and tsunamis. The capability to redirect moderate sized asteroids–50 to 100 m in diameter–with such precision doesn’t currently exist but could be developed as an extension of basic propulsion technology. If you don’t want to pummel the surface, grinding up a few asteroids and injecting the dust into low, transverse orbits should block solar radiation sufficient to freeze the surface and kill nearly all complex life within a few years, and will eventually just decay and fall into the atmosphere. There is no need for planetary infantry, or antimatter weapons, or massive planet-destroying lasers; it is pretty much trivial to attack a planet or visible spacecraft, and essentially no way to defend it from kinetic energy attacks.

Stranger

The technology level being only slightly more advanced than us makes Lumpy’s question of what they would war about pretty significant; I can’t imagine any plausible reason for two planets to go to war if they’re limited to the technology we currently have or may develop in the next half-century.

But once you have access to space, things like nuclear weapons become a bit redundant; sure, you can fire a nuclear missile at that planet. Or, you can throw a few kinetic impactors at it, and the kinetic impactors are cheaper and there’s nothing about them that can go wrong. More significantly, there’s nothing you can do to hide an incoming ship, so you probably can’t land troops on your enemy’s planet until they lack the response capabilities to shoot them out of the sky. So basically you’re going to want to throw a whole bunch of kinetic impactors at them, coming too fast to stop, and targeted to wipe out every population center, military base, or habitat on the surface of their planet. Oh, and kinetic impactors are easier to hide; once they’ve been accelerated to speed, they can jettison the engines and then they’re simply dark objects zooming through space without being major heat or EM sources; not undetectable by any means, but far less noticeable than anything with an engine or life support or, well, any kind of power.

Basically, unless the other side agrees to let you land on their planet so you can have a nice civilized war, the first, last, and only option seems to be to completely obliterate the other side. Oh, and since they can see your launches long before your attacks get there, you’re also looking at a planetary-scale case of MAD, since they’re going to have several months even at the fastest, to launch their counterattack. Because while both sides can be perfectly aware the other is launching attacks, nobody has any capability of stopping those attacks once they’re launched.

Electronic warfare, it should be noted, would be pretty much totally ineffective. Mars and Earth, at their closest, come about 4 light-minutes apart. Transmitters that can send clear messages back and forth are relatively easy to spot if you’re looking for them, so presuming the governments of the two planets are prohibiting communication because of the state of war, there can be no spies sending information back home. They could be receiving orders from home, but they can’t respond to them without giving away their position and probably compromising themselves. Your only hope on that front is to have spies in place that, once given their orders, will operate fully independently in order to try to sabotage the enemy’s ability to make war. The several light-minute disconnect, along with the side that the planets sometimes go on the other side of the sun from each other, making communication wholly impossible, means there’s no ‘internet’ to connect them together and make hidden cyber-attacks possible like they are in today’s world.

Jamming and any sort of targeting concealment simply doesn’t work, because the enemy’s weapons are kinetic impactors; they have no active guidance, they were set on course for their targets and inertia does the rest. In order to stop them, you’d have to locate each one and knock it sufficiently off course to make it miss your entire planet, which is pretty much impossible, because the attacks don’t have to come directly from the enemy planet, or from a ‘flat’ plane of attack. The impactor could be launched ‘up’ beyond the solar plane and then come ‘down’ at the target planet, or vice versa. Too much space to effectively cover at the range that would be needed in order to knock them off course. By the time they get close enough that detecting and catching them is feasible, you’re left with too little time to catch them and too much of a course adjustment to be made to make them miss.

Alright,

I see that I should amend my OP:

1st amendment: The war occurs in deep space out of range of the home planets
2nd amendment: Choose the level of technology you wish while keeping it plausible and not just a reflection of sci-fi movies.

That’s a lot harder to speculate on, but if we assume a relatively direct extrapolation from current space technology, kinetic impactors are still probably your best bet.

Unless technology goes in an unexpected direction, everything I’m aware of says armor is going to be completely useless. Things moving at orbital velocities and greater will go through the heaviest possible armor easily, while the extra mass simply increases the necessary delta-v to make any maneuvers. I suppose one could try to design the ships to minimize damage; make it so that any particular impact is unlikely to damage critical systems by having them spread out considerably, but even this seems to present no realistic defense. So, most likely we have to assume that ‘defense’ consists of trying as hard as possible not to get hit, and the best defense really is a good offense, because the only thing you can do to not die is make sure the enemy never hits you in the first place.

That turns to weapons. Lasers and such may be a thing; we are developing real lasers that actually work to some degree of effectiveness in an atmosphere. In space, with no intervening air to weaken the beam, a laser is much more effective. But, lasers are actually one of the things we can armor against pretty well; ablative armor that basically vaporizes, forcing the laser to expend its energy trying to burn away the vapor would severely diminish the effectiveness of something like that.

So, the old standby of a kinetic impactor. Here we’ve got a few questions: how maneuverable are these ships? Today, our ships lack the maneuvering capacity to evade an intentional attack. In order to make this anything other than another case of MAD (they shoot each other and kill each other almost simultaneously!) we have to assume propulsion technology has made massive advances; we can carry enough delta-v to do serious maneuvering. The vessels have to be actively scanning for any shots fired and adjust trajectory to avoid them. This, also, means the vessels can’t be manned. A manned ship is limited in its maneuvering by the ability of its passengers to withstand the g-forces involved in the maneuver. In order to maximize maneuvering capability, the ship cannot have the limitation of needing to provide a safe environment for a meatbag.

If you’re firing unguided projectiles, the speed of the projectile versus the enemy’s maneuvering capacity tells you the effective range: once you’re inside the enemy’s ability to detect and maneuver against your projectile, you win. Of course, firing that unguided projectile will affect your own speed and maneuvers due to Newton’s third law of motion. The development of unguided projectile weapons will thus be an exercise in trying to make sure your effective range is greater.

Guided projectiles will be effective from a longer range. Further, they can be released from the launch vessel before they use their own thrust to propel themselves, thus launching them doesn’t affect the maneuvering of the ship doing the launching. In space, a guided missile probably isn’t going to need explosives. We’re already talking about tremendous speed; any collision is going to shred the enemy ship, as noted earlier when talking about armor, so missiles are basically an engine and fuel and maneuvering computer. The objective is merely to smash into the enemy vessel.

Then there’s what Stranger on a Train explained: a cloud of chaff or small objects will shred through anything impacting it at orbital or higher velocities. That means that you may not even have to hit your enemy directly with your missiles. If instead of being nothing more than an engine and fuel, your missiles have a payload of, basically, caltrops, all you need to do is launch a missile roughly ahead of the enemy craft, deploying a debris field large enough that their maneuverability does not allow them to escape from it. They plow into the debris and their craft is shredded.

Putting it all together, a space battle between ships at some point in the future when maneuvering capacity has reached the ability to allow either side to have even a chance of ‘winning’ the battle instead of simply obliterating each other, means both sides will fire a massive swarm of missiles and caltrops at each other, whether this be single ships or fleets. Then, both sides will maneuver as best they can to evade the enemy missiles until the missiles run out of delta-v to maneuver with. Also, the more ships and missiles in play, the more difficult the task of plotting a safe trajectory.

The question of jamming or electronic warfare is an interesting one. What does the enemy use to detect your weaponry? Probably a mixture of radar and heat signatures. These could be confused by spraying out a signal specifically meant to bounce off everything in the battlespace in confusing patterns. But, this would degrade your own ability to detect enemy projectiles as well - there’s no way to interfere with the enemy’s detection without also interfering with your own, as far as I can figure.

It thus seems to me that overall military doctrine consists of saturating the battlespace with as much stuff as possible, heading toward your enemy, while avoiding as much of it as possible yourself. Technological development relies on making better computers and sensors, able to track and calculate ever increasing numbers of trajectories and determine how to evade them, as well as whatever improvements in maneuvering can be squeezed out. Also, weapons development largely depends on trying to make your missiles and caltrops less easy to detect, their trajectories harder to plot. And specific tactics would be focused around trying to force your enemy into a location where they’re surrounded by debris and can’t escape.

Every last bit of this will be automated, of course. Assuming humans are involved at all, the human(s) will be on a command ship, and their only real involvement will be to designate whether a target should be destroyed or not, and to give the authorization/order to engage. Once that order has been given, destroying the command ship won’t stop the rest of the ships from executing. And if the automated ships are programmed to immediately attack anything non-allied in the area if their command ship is destroyed, then there’s no point attacking the command ship at all, since all it will do is trigger the rest of the fleet to engage anything it detects. This is probably a good thing for the humans, because the command ships are sitting ducks due to the aforementioned limitation of needing to provide a safe environment for a meatbag. Command ships may well be considered non-targets by treaty, and may be required to themselves be unarmed, since there’s no benefit to taking out an enemy command ship. Tactics are handled by the computers, and if strategy still involves humans, the strategic leaders and generals and admirals don’t need to be putting themselves on the front lines. The command ship contains an officer whose sole function and discretionary ability is to say ‘yup, those are enemies, destroy them’.

OK, I’ll go with the following:

It’s the early 22nd century. Earth has established a space-based infrastructure including lunar mining, orbital fuel depots and rendezvous with earth orbit-crossing asteroids. Several thousand colonists live on Mars and it’s moons. There’s an Aldrin Cycler for journeying between the two planets, and both planets use tethers for velocity change of payloads (though neither yet has a surface to orbit tether).

The Martians decide to start diverting small asteroids to bring them to where it’s closer and easier to mine them. Some of those trajectories involve flybys of Earth, and having near-misses of rocks that would result in gigaton yields if they impacted makes people nervous. Earth demands oversight and veto rights over any attempt to alter an asteroid’s trajectory. Mars basically says no, we’re not going to humbly beg permission from you. Earth decides to send an expeditionary force to blow up a few Martian ships in the asteroid belt, and things get ugly from there.

Both sides know that if they really wanted to they could unleash devastating harm upon the other, so a sort of M.A.D. is in effect. The war takes place in the asteroid belt with both sides establishing bases and attempting to drive the other out. The question then becomes what either side is willing to escalate to. The main alternatives are that either the two sides fight a simmering campaign of sabotage against each other’s assets in the Belt, or else they build nuclear-pulse warships and a truly spectacular and lethal war takes place, ending with one side or the other under a Sword of Damocles.

There was a charming old board wargame called Battlefleet Mars that dealt with an Earth/Mars space war. It had both a strategic display, covering a big hunk of the inner solar system with orbits marked out, and a tactical display, covering a few cubic miles of space, where ships maneuvered and fought with lasers and missiles.

The general idea was that most spaceships are working craft – mining craft and “catapults” which slung huge cargoes into minimum-energy orbits. But a very few craft were designed as warcraft. The Mars independence movement mostly had converted working ships; the Ares Corporation (Mars monopoly on earth) had the few corvettes.

It was a pretty decent game, and allowed suspension of disbelief, if not formal belief.

The sad truth is that we have no way to guess what would happen. It’s like asking Napoleon Bonaparte to imagine tank warfare. He could have made a few interesting guesses…

This scenario was partially explored in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In his scenario, the human colonists living on Mars were under pressure from Earth to allow immigration to alleviate the overpopulation on Earth, even though it’s clear that wasn’t a practical solution, while the colonists were limited by how many people the partially terraformed Mars could support. It was exacerbated by the fact that the Martians had developed techniques for extending the human lifespan into centuries.

Anyway, in one memorable attack,

a Mars space elevator made of carbon nanofibers is severed, and most of it falls to the surface of Mars. It’s tall enough that it wraps around the whole planet once or twice, and there’s some lovingly detailed research that went into describing how the carbon would be transformed into exotic forms of diamond by the heat of air friction and whatnot.

I’ve actually been building a computer simulation of this kind of thing in my spare time. Just like you can’t solve a complex enough differential equation by hand (past a certain complexity there are no known analytical methods), you can’t really factor in the various complex factors on paper either.

The factors : Both sides have engines. They might be NERVA nuclear engines (I assume these at the low end for deep space : 1000 ISP, hydrogen slush tanks), nuclear electric with some kind of heated gas energy generation (sterling engine, nuclear pile, low power : mass ratio), nuclear electric with aneutronic fusion, open exhaust fusion at the very highest end.

Obviously, open exhaust fusion that gives significant thrust is at the bleeding edge of plausibility - I think it’s physically possible but the engineering difficulties would be immense. In brief, it’s aneutronic fusion (so helium-3 or proton-boron), big honking magnets and electrically charged plates are arranged just so so that all the products of the reaction are bent back into the reacting plasma. A narrow stream of plasma is allowed to escape out the exhaust. Temperatures and pressures are comparable to the core of a star. Since none of the products of the reaction touches and most of the light is reflected off the engine apparatus, in theory this star hot plasma torch could actually be of significant magnitude relative to the mass of the engine and attached spacecraft, giving you science fiction levels of thrust.

Science fiction levels of thrust means 1/100 of a G or so continuously at an ISP of 300k or so, and less ISP for a lot more thrust. It wouldn’t exceed a G or to though even in a case where you’re dumping propellant into the expanding plasma in the engine bell, cooling it and increasing the mass of the exhaust. So you could have crew, though the life support and radiation shielding would really weigh things down unless the space warship were gigantic. The waste heat that does impinge on the engine comes out big heat radiators.

For weaponry, you have your choice : lasers or kinetic driven projectiles with guidance systems. Some online calculators, assuming reasonably sized laser focusing mirrors (1-10 meters or so), limit laser range to a few thousand kilometers. Beyond that point, the beam is too diffuse, and yo could have thin ceramic or carbon alloy plates as the “armor” on the ship (the carbon alloy would melt at 7000K or so) with coolant channels under it to carry the heat away.

Currently, I suspect that, depending on the closing velocity between the 2 warships, both lasers and railgun/coilgun driven kinetic weapons would have their place. You can probably only practically launch a slug at the enemy warship with a velocity relative to your warship of 10-20 kilometers/second. (every time you double the speed, the gun you carry has to increase in size 4 times) Modern railguns have trouble exceeding 6k/second because the armature starts to vaporize to plasma, creating a short circuit.

While with lasers, if you can focus on the enemy warship, you can’t miss. (not at these ranges)

Then, there are all these complex interactions. Fire a railgun slug at the enemy warship at 20 kilometers/second, range 2000 kilometers, and it will take 100 seconds to arrive. Enemy warship zaps it with a laser, burning out the thrusters on the railgun slug (it would have solid fuel maneuvering thrusters to correct it’s course so it can mirror the victim ship’s maneuvers after slug launch). Enemy warship adjusts it’s maneuver, injecting hydrogen into the plasma stream to get a full 1/10 G of thrust! That means it will be 5 kilometers from the assumed future position of the enemy warship when the slug arrives. Even if the slug has a shattering charge to turn it into a cloud of shrapnel, 5 kilometers is a massive radius of a circle to spread the fragments around.

Another complicating factor is laser turrets themselves are extremely vulnerable to fire. High end laser mirrors are this precision tuned dielectric bandgap, where the reflectivity is better than 99.9%, but only at the exact frequency of light the laser is tuned for. So if the opposing warship has lasers tuned for a different frequency of light, it can shine it on the enemy ship’s laser turrets, vaporizing the thin surface layer and ruining it. But you could possibly have armored shutters across your lasers, advanced technology might allow you to repair this slight damage mid battle, etc etc.

So you end up with quite a few possibilities if the 2 warships are evenly matched in technology and mass and the closing velocity is reasonable. Maybe neither party will even fire their weapons and come to an agreement instead…

Surprisingly, conventional nukes aren’t that effective in space except at near-impact range. In a vacuum they simply produce a pulse of x-ray radiation that rapidly diminishes via the square/cube law. Which led someone to the concept called Casaba-Howitzer: take the pulse unit from a nuclear-pulse space battleship and narrow the jet it produces even further. This can be used to propel a projectile to many tens of kilometers per second, followed immediately by a jet of hot plasma.

Jesus… I bet that thing would be hell on ICBM silos or other buried structures.

Mnemnosyne,

“Unless technology goes in an unexpected direction, everything I’m aware of says armor is going to be completely useless.”
When it comes to passive armor, that’s quite likely. It’s already the case for most platforms in the navy and airforce. Reactive armor, lasers, KE, missiles and EW would seem to be the main forms of defense.

“The question of jamming or electronic warfare is an interesting one. What does the enemy use to detect your weaponry? Probably a mixture of radar and heat signatures. These could be confused by spraying out a signal specifically meant to bounce off everything in the battlespace in confusing patterns. But, this would degrade your own ability to detect enemy projectiles as well - there’s no way to interfere with the enemy’s detection without also interfering with your own, as far as I can figure.”

Spoofing can be accomplished by sending a signal similar to the jammee’s signal in a way that confuses the jammee’s radar as to your angle, range or velocity. This can create false targets or just make it difficult to tell where you are and how fast you’re going.

Decoys can be used which are designed to have similar or more attractive signature to radar or IR detection.

This here: Detection - Atomic Rockets says:
“The Space Shuttle’s much weaker main engines could be detected past the orbit of Pluto. The Space Shuttle’s manoeuvering thrusters could be seen as far as the asteroid belt. And even a puny ship using ion drive to thrust at a measly 1/1000 of a g could be spotted at one astronomical unit.”

Unfortunately, the author then goes on to talk about stealth like it’s an on/off thing rather than about reducing the detection probability and detection range.

Looks like detection could occur in the range of millions to billions of kilometers. At those distance, even lasers would take time and might simply become too diffuse. There might be enough time to maneuver. Missiles would have the advantage of being able to reorient.

A compromise might be possible with a halo of drones surrounding your “live” vessel. The drones could be as simple as big chunks of rock with engines on them, and they could serve as both offense and defense–they can be deployed as impactors or reserved as interceptors. Used as interceptors, their job is to ram incoming impactors and deflect them away from the command ship. It might also be possible to deploy them tightly enough to serve as a screen against chaff.

Obviously, you could only practically convoy with so many drones, so they’re a limited resource.

Reactive armor may help a little, but I don’t think it would do much. Of course, that’s the trouble with this kind of speculation (especially by people who aren’t experts in the first place). Trying to use lasers to defend would be equally pointless; I don’t know how much energy would be required to vaporize an oncoming projectile before it hits the vessel, but I am reasonably certain it is a lot of energy, and if you have lasers with that kind of output, it seems feasible to target the enemy craft directly with them.

Admittedly, I don’t know that much about radar jamming; I figured it would have to be done by sending out lots of confusing signals that would bounce off the missiles and caltrops in a complex and difficult to predict pattern, in order to confuse the enemy radar, but that would also confuse yours. If there’s a better way to confuse the enemy radar without hurting your own ability to detect things, then yeah; this might be one of the most important avenues of research and technological advancement in such a situation.

As far as detection and distance, yeah. You’re not going to hide in space. Overall, you have to assume the fight takes place because both sides chose to fight, because with even the best attempts to hide your position, I don’t think it would be feasible to come within effective weapons range without being detected. If you’re detected, your target could, if they do not want a fight, simply flee, and unless you have a considerable advantage in thrust, you won’t catch up with them.

The stealth and detection issue is critical when it comes to missiles in combat range. That’s why I said weapons development probably depends on making your missiles and caltrops harder to detect. They’re never going to be invisible or anything, of course, but all you need is for the enemy to be slightly incorrect about their position, trajectory, or speed, and their odds of hitting go waaay up.

Yeah. This too, your missiles are a defensive system as much as they’re offensive. I suppose the question is what percentage of your payload you want to devote to defensive tasks vs. offensive tasks, and what the maximum effectiveness is. There’s probably a relatively optimal answer, once you have the exact specifications of your own missiles and the enemy’s.

I’m going to disagree with your conclusions from that reference.

If we assume in fact one could detect SSME sized engines at Pluto-sized ranges, that’s a comment about signal strength versus noise. It’s not a comment about search space or scan rate.

I’m thinking that a sensor that sensitive is going to have a very narrow field of view; like a fraction of an arc minute square. To scan the complete sphere of possible directions somebody could be approaching from will take 10s or 100s of thousands of discrete snapshots. If each look takes 1 second to accumulate enough energy on the sensor, it’ll take anywhere between 6 and 24 *hours *just to scan the sphere around you once.

Yes, you can have more than one sensor to divide the workload. But it’s still a big problem. You’re not going to have a sensor system which is both fast, sensitive, and wide angle. Pick 2. Tech marches on but so does your enemy’s. Your better sensors will be looking for harder-to-find targets.

Disregard the above. Shoulda read more before yabbering. Oh well.

Here’s one possibility for the tactical experience:

Assumptions [these are all predictions or guesses]:
Spacecraft are very detectable when they are making large course alterations (e.g. launch and breaking orbit), but are hard to detect unless you have a decent sensor pointed straight at them. Over long distances it is easy to know the approximate location of ships, but not to pinpoint them for aiming weapons or timing engagements.

Spacecraft are glass cannons. Their ability to dish out damage far exceeds their ability to take damage.

Active defense is going to be great against missiles, almost useless against small fast projectiles. Dodging is going to be easy against small fast projectiles except at very close ranges, not very effective against missiles.

The strategic goals of space combat are to interdict interplanetary transport, and take over the orbital “high ground”.

One side will be more focused on transport and blockade, the other on interception.

My conclusion:

Small interceptor craft, launched on long, carefully planned trajectories, using decoy emissions at launch to make the exact trajectory a bit uncertain to observers. They engage at very close range using “grapeshot” - a narrow cone of small projectiles.

Larger craft, either the transports themselves or their escorts, using planetary support and their own sensors to precisely locate the interceptors and snipe them outside of the effective range of interceptor grapeshot. The large craft can make small changes in course frequently, making sniping by the interceptors useless. The interceptors can’t adjust course without being easier to locate, so will make sparing corrections to intercept their targets, but won’t do much dodging.

An arms race between missiles and point defence, based on the missile “detonating” with a grapeshot blast. The more accurately the missile can aim the blast, the further away it can be (therefore the more accurately the point defence needs to locate the missile). Missiles will be used by both small interceptors and larger craft, but will be released quite a while before they activate. One interceptor with missiles could become multiple incoming attackers. A defending larger craft could put out a screen of missiles into the path of interceptors.

Both sides will experiment with convoy versus single-ship transport, and “lone raider” versus swarms of interceptors. Convoys will work better, forcing the raiders to attack in swarms. This will then lead to the side running the convoys pre-emptively targeting the swarms with interceptor destroyers. These attacks don’t need to succeed, just to force the interceptors to change course or expend their missiles.

Eventually, one or both sides will try out the idea of interceptor carriers, only to find that historical analogy only takes you so far and no further. Since spaceships effectively have unlimited range, the carriers have no tactical value, and make very expensive targets.

Some interesting facts about space travel. Including the fact that there is no such thing as “stealth” in space:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth

Your ship will always be detectable because there is no way to hide its energy emissions, regardless how faint, against the background of space.

So basically a scenario where terrorists or Mars separatists or whoever take over some permanent installation in space like a asteroid mining colony or large space station.

The facility could be equipped with weapons like rail guns or lasers (the invisible practical kind found IRL, not Star Wars turbolasers) to deny approaching ships access by punching holes in them.

I imagine to counter this, you would need some sort of “assault ship” that could somehow disable those weapons, dock with the station and deploy a force of special operations soldiers to fight mostly within the space station.

Your yabbering on Xnautics and EW is always worth reading.

What did you read that makes your previous comment less pertinent?

I do agree that scanning all 129 600 degrees is going to be demanding and will involve trade-offs.
What weapons and platforms do you think will predominate?