What would combat in space [I]really[/I] be like?

Factual Questions
1

This talk about the Death Star in another thread got me thinking of how absurd pretty much any sci-fi depiction of space combat I can think of really is. I mean, you watch re-runs of Battlestar Galactica, or go rent Star Wars for the umpteen bazillionth time, and I bet you don’t often think of how crazy the whole concept of these sleek little space fighters swooping around aerial-dog-fight-style really is. I mean, imagine an X-Wing and a TIE Fighter dog-fighting over Dagobah or wherever. Chances are, they’d be filmed swerving and diving and darting about, shooting ray guns at each other, with the curve of the planet below adding a breathtaking backdrop.

Now let’s really think about this. Say Dagobah is the same size as the earth. The orbital velocity of the Space Shuttle is about 18,000 mph. That’s how fast you have to go to keep from spiralling earthward. So, unless Luke and R2D2 want to drop like a rock and burn up in Dagobah’s atomosphere, they’ve got to be moving at around Mach 25 (ok, the speed of sound in space is kinda not a usefull concept, but you know what I mean). Something moving that fast has a lot of inertia. In the movies, Luke can turn that thing on a dime. In reality, for him to reverse direction in a few seconds, moving at that rate, would leave him plastered like jelly all over the inside of the cockpit, he’d be pulling so many gees. Actually, it’s hard for me to see how he maneuvers at all, considering he only seems to have thrusters that point behind the craft. I mean, what’s changing his direction? It’s not like those “wings” on the X-Wing generate any lift in space. I suppose there could be thrust vectoring nozzles or something, but they must be hidden well.

And how about people veering to avoid a laser blast? Uh, it’s light. You’ll see the TIE fighter shooting at you when it hits you because its salvos are moving at the speed of light. You can’t swerve to get out of the way! There’s no way to see it until it hits you! And a bolt of laser energy in space would be invisible if it didn’t hit you. A laser beam is coherent, has virtually no scatter (unless there’s a dusty atomosphere), and thus cannot be detected unless it’s shining right in your face, in which case you’re screwed, because you’ve been hit.

OK, so these are just a tiny fraction of the ridiculous errors sci-fi makes regarding space combat. I’m sure you all can think of many more (which I’d love for you to share). But also in this discussion, I’d like to know:

What would real space combat be like? If in the following centuries we take war to space, what will the space fighter pilot of the future really be dealing with?

2

Wow! That’s puts the kibosh on that! My entire suspension of disbelief is unraveling! Oh why did I open this thread! WHYYY!!!

3

This is another threat that will be moved to GD, or possibly my new DD forum if my proposal to the mods is approved.

This is General Questions. It is for questions that have at least a shred of hope of getting a factual answer. Please take note that Star Wars is a movie, specifially one of fiction. I don’t call it science fiction as it’s really a mix of fantasy, shoot-em-up cowboy westerns and The Battle of Britain.

You made some excellent observations about the maneuvering of TIE and X-wing fighters not following any logical physics. Space battles would be boring if they did. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to watch them bank, dive and swoop like Spitfires, Hurricanes and ME-109s over the white cliffs of dover.

If somehow circumstances came to a “real” space battle like in Moonraker it would be pretty boring too because it would be over too fast. Space suited ninja commandos and combat shuttles would be toast after even minor damage. You woudn’t see anyone coming back in a shot up shuttle as if they were the crew of a bullet riddled B-17 that barely made it back from Berlin. “Hmm, cracked a few heat shield tiles. I guess we’re all fated to burn up on re-entry.”

4

Here in General Questions, we can certainly make some reasonable speculation what actual space combat would be like.

Larry Niven has a space battle in “World of Ptavs” that is interesting to consider. You search the sky for potential enemies, identifying them by their proper motions, and exhaust spectra. You shoot at them. You wait a month. You decide you missed. You try dropping nasty stuff behind you, and then change course to lead the enemy through your debris field. You wait a month. You see one of the enemy wink out of existence violently. You start searching for the rest of them. Your external sensors go blind. You spend a week figuring out how they did that.

You change course radically to avoid the second volley of what you realize they did. You die. Of course, you never find out what killed you.

Now you see why it isn’t used in the movies. Fairly boring, aside from the life and death aspect of the real thing. Dramatically, it works better to watch Cylons fly up and to the right every single time anyone shoots at one.

Tris

5

C.J. Cherryh had some pretty good space combat in one of her novels (can’t remember which one…Cyteen universe…next book…gah). Basically it had ships moving past each other at relativistic velocities and firing missiles and lasers at where the other ship would likely be taking into account it’s turning abilities and the fact that you can’t really know where something 1 light second away moving 45% of the speed of light really is.

Because light speed is finite, space combat might be a game of guess where the target is and hope you hit. That’s assuming we’ll ever be able to make ship capable of traveling fast enough to make what I just said meaningfull. If not space combat will be won by whomever fires first, since dodging lasers and plasma beams at teh velocities available with chemical rockets is impossible.

6

A space-combat simulator. (Not too much available for it yet, though.)

Guns in space?

War in Space?

Hand to hand combat—in a space suit?

Shotguns in space.

How would we fight in space?

Learn from the past, and build from it.

Ranchoth
(You ever…get the sinking feeling that we’re all going to end up just talking about fleegix drinking, someday?)

7

Not that I want to be seen as an apologist for Starwars Physics but you’re forgetting relativity here. Don’t forget that the camera is also travelling at about the same speed as everything else. So Luke is not changing his speed by 18,000 mph to reverse, only a few hundred at most - probably less. Yes, he may look like like he’s flying the other way to you, but in reality he’s now flying backwards at say 17,800 mph. Not that it feels that way to him.

What this means is that to do the kind of combat shown in the Starwars films, you have to have almost identical vectors to start with. It’s like the old Napoleonic style naval wars - they mostly fought at ports, river mouths and similar places where the enemy had to be. There were almost no battles in the open sea, because it was too hard to find sombody there.

DancingFool

8

To defend Star Wars physics (only a little, I promise), I have to say that the weapons, despite their appearance of laser-ness, clearly are not simply light. You can SEE the thing travel from one place to another. Heck, that’s slower than a bullet! I’m guessing some sort of plasma bit that travels really slow from your muzzle (hand held or ship mounted) to the target and causes burns when it hits.

OK, back to your “made the Kessel run in X parsecs” discussions. :slight_smile:

Real space combat would be computer-controlled robot ships firing at the projected trajectory of the enemy ship while attempting to randomly vary their own trajectories. Success in combat would come from guessing the randomizing algorithm of the other computer.

9

Consider this: In modern air combat, dogfighting is dead. Fighter planes kill other fighter planes without ever seeing them. And in most air-to-air kills, the loser dies before they even know the other side is there. Victory is more a matter of better sensors and avionics, and logistics and planning. Oh, and unmanned vehicles are increasingly taking over for human pilots.

Space combat will be like this, only more so. I wouldn’t be suprised if battles were decided by swarms of unmanned drones reacting at rates far beyond what a human could manage, over very long ranges, with combat only reaching the human pilots on either side if one side lost badly.

10

Possibly the single biggest question to what would space combat be like is can the shields used in sci-fi movies be a reality. If you can defend against several hits it will be very different from projecting what currently happens in air-to-air warfare: on missile kills you.

11

As I noted in one of those earlier threads, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes depict near-future space war using Space Shuttles in The Descent of Anansi. The limitations of orbital dynamics and the need to match velocities are pretty severe (assuming you want to actively engage your enemy and capture him – it’s easy to just hit something and destroy it.)
Arthur C. Clarke wrtote about interplanetary battles in Earthlight.

As for far-future Star Trek/Star Wars-type battles, look at E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “Lensmen” series. He was depicting deep-space battles back in the 1930s, and he was already using 3-Dimensional thinking (something that Star Trek, although paying lip service to, really never did). See also Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye and its sequel, The Gripping Hand, and Weber’s entire Honor Harrington series. But i suspect that in most of these cases the future technology and limitations were really created in order to allow the kind of combat the authors already had in mind.

12

Go watch Moonraker.

Exactly unlike that.

:smiley:

13

Actually, it really depends largely on the technology involved. There are vastly different but potentially accurate depictions out there, but without knowing how technology will change and advance, its impossible to say.

14

We can’t know what space battles will be like, but we can certainly make some educated guesses.

Over time, the major improvements in near-space technology will be in one area: increased thrust. Increased thrust means increased payloads, or the ability to maneuver a small craft much more rapidly. We will probably see a progression from pure chemical-combustion engines, to hybrid nuclear-chemical, to nuclear-thermal rockets in the next 50 years. The lower limits on the size of the reactor and the shielding requirements for manned craft will dictate the size of the ships.

Offensively, I think we can expect to see small nuclear weapons used alongside kinetic kill vehicles. Directed energy weapons are simply too heavy and fragile at the moment. These weapons will probably not be developed as such, but will be an outgrow of systems designed to defend against random impacts from space objects.

Eventually, propulsion technologies will improve to the point that high accelerations make intersystem combat possible. After a long period of acceleration and maneuvering, fleets will engage each other at velocities in excess of 0.5c with semi-autonomous torpedoes, possibly guided to their targets by one-person ships designed for the purpose. Larger ships would be just as vulnerable to direct hits as smaller craft, but more resistant to near-misses. Large vessels would be able to carry directed-energy weapons for point defense. At these velocities, ship-killing lasers would be pointless - it’s not possible to guess where a distant target will be when the beam reaches it.

This is of course assuming that combat is even possible - given the resources needed to construct such vessels, it’s unlikely that our solar system would support more than two warfaring parties. Combat over interstellar distances isn’t likely, simply because at sublight speeds, the defender would have years to prepare.

Unless we discover some way of traveling faster than light, I don’t think we’ll ever see space “navies” engaged in combat like that depicted in movies and novels. There will probably be combat, but it will be on a small scale, and fought with devices not specifically designed for such operations. There won’t be any armed forces in the traditional sense of a group trained and equipped solely for war - more probably, we’ll have a space “Coast Guard” that is trained for a variety of missions including search and rescue, interdiction, and combat.

15

Space is a very big place. We can expect early space warfare to take place near planets and other inhabited places.

Since space is so large, we would need long-ranged sensors and weapons. If we are willing to admit faster-than-light travel, we would need equally quick weapons and sensors.

Given the vastness of space, energy weapons (‘phasers’) would tend to fan out over huge distances. (Even lasers expand unacceptably over just the distance from Earth to moon.)

Since that is the case, we can turn to missiles. The problem here is that shield technology would be needed to block bits of space dust you would crash into at FTL speeds. This means that such a technology would work against missiles.

(But shields are energy fields, they would work best at close ranges.)

One possibility that is little-discussed is the use of chemical weapons. Such a weapon would be a cloud of some compound designed to overwhelm the shields of a ship and attack the sensors or hull.

Of course, space is a big place, to lay a chemical field to deter travel though a small space (say the Earth to moon again) would weigh thousands if not millions of tons.

16

Somewhere in Sw it says that the fighters have “inertial Dampeners”, so that would prevent luke from becomming a raspberry smear.

IMO, future fighter space pilots won’t really be pilots, they will be programmers there to modify the fighter’s program to adapt to changing circumstances…

17

I’ll shill a friend’s website, which I hope is acceptable. He has written a “space combat in real life” gaming system, which has actually gotten good reviews as being realistic.

Of course, it takes more math than I have, so I’ve not played it myself. But I think the rules may shed some light on this question…?

18

No amount of brow-furrowing could make me understand this post. Here’s what I’m talking about: Luke is flying his X-Wing at 30,000 km/h, or 8333 m/s above Dagobah, which we assume is the speed he must maintain, at minimum, to keep from falling out of orbit, (a la the Space Shuttle at its usual orbital elevation). In swoops Vader, guns blazing. Evasive action! In a turn that would make an F-15 fighter pilot go sweaty and pale just to watch, Luke is now flying the other way. To give a rough idea of what it is Luke is doing, let’s describe the simplest path he can take to turn: Imagine a straight line that curves, tracing out half of a circle, that then straightens out again. Cutting that half-a-circle off of the path he traced, and measuring across it’s diameter, easily gives you the turning radius. At the point in the turn where a line tangent to the circle is perpendicular to his original flight path, Luke is feeling a maximum centripetal force, equivalent to if he were being swung around a fixed point attached to the end of a cable of radius r (his turning radius), like being on some giant amusement park ride. We already know his velocity (which is equivalent to angular velocity of the hypothetical amusement park ride), roughly 8300 m/s. I would say a conservative estimate of his turning radius is 1 km, or a thousand meters. The formula for centripetal force is Fc = mv^2/r, or mass times angular velocity squared over the turning radius, expressed in newtons. Now, if Luke were sitting in the cockpit on terra firma, in 1g of acceleration, the force is butt would feel on the seat would be defined by F = ma, or the mass, in this case, of his torso, times the acceleration of gravity. Say his torso weighs 50 kg. His butt feels a force of 490 newtons.

If Luke banked his X-Wing during the turn, like they do in the movies, jet fighter style, we can safely assume the centripital force he feels is straight down, so we can compare fairly directly what his butt is feeling in this banked turn vs. what it felt on the ground, not moving. The force will be (50kg x (8300m/s)^2)/1000m, or 3,444,500 newtons. In other words, about 7000xg. Your average fighter pilot feels, oh, about one one-thousandth that kind of force in aerial combat, and needs to wear a pressure suit while he’s at it to keep from passing out. If Luke’s head weighs ten pounds on Earth, it would effectively weigh 35 tons while executing such a turn. Even if his turning radius was ten times what I suppose it is, estimating from the maneuvers we see in the movies, he’d still feel a force of 700xg, which would still make him go splat. He would be bloody paste before the X-Wing straightened out. You’d be digging his liquified remains out of every crack and crevice in the cockpit.

19

Bad assumption. In actuality, his turning radius is going to be huge, and his actual direction of motion isn’t going to change by very much. If, for example, the turn takes a second, then he’s going to go approximately 8 kilometers along his path during the turn. And since he’s only going to be changing his direction by a small angle, his turning radius is going to be larger yet.

Also, there’s no such thing as a “minimum speed to stay in orbit”. If you change your speed, either by increasing or decreasing, then you’re just going to go into a different orbit. Now, it may be that your new orbit intersects the surface of the planet you’re orbiting, which will create problems later. But until then, you can still correct your orbit again to put you back to something safe.

And again, all we really care about is relative motions. Suppose we have an astronaut on the Space Shuttle playing with his Star Wars toys. He moves them around in dogfights, and their motion is much the same as if he were playing with them back on Earth, aside from the lack of that pesky gravity. He’s perfectly capable of moving them through all sorts of maneuvers without squishing his arms from the acceleration. But the X-Wing and Tie Fighter toys, like everything else in the Space Shuttle, are actually in orbit. Their motion, given those forces, is no different than it would be if they were outside the Shuttle.

20

This is a rather major element of the space combat scenes in Stephen R. Donaldson’s extremely grim but ultimately satisfying Gap saga. Just in case you’re looking for an example of an author who gets it right (or at least more “right” than average).