What would real-life space war/combat be like?

In My Humble Opinion
21

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I think a typical encounter would go like this - enemy ship approaches from opposite direction, closing at 50,000 miles per hour. It releases a bag of minute pellets, almost like a bag of buckshot. A timer goes off, and blows the bag open and causes the sand cloud to disperse. By the time the other ship gets to it, it’s hundreds of yards wide, but still dense enough that it’s certain to score multiple hits on the enemy ship. A ‘bb’ hitting your ship at 50,000 mph will ruin your day. The size of the shot can be adjusted to account for hte strength of the other ship’s hull, trading off maximum dispersion for greater impact.
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As Stranger on a Train mentioned, you’d also be dead when the other guy’s sack of spare wingnuts caught up with you. If YOU can get out of the way of HIS weapon, HE can probably get out of the way of YOURS. At which point space combat becomes kinda like chess, with you trying to maneuver your enemy into a position where he can’t evade your attack, while still being able to avoid his (or, if your craft being destroyed isn’t an issue, ie: You’re suicidal, the stakes are super-high, or if it’s a remote-controled or autonomous drone with no crew to be concerned about, just maneuver so he can’t get out of the way).

This is basically another situation where stealth would be advantageous to you.

22

I remember a discussion on RASF about this. The problem with the cool moves you see in
Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. is the delta-v (change in velocity and/or direction)-at sufficient
velocity you simply don’t have enough energy to change your momentum/trajectory very
much, yet “speed is life” would probably be as true in space as it has been in our atmosphere
for the last century. So you just have superfast vessels zipping past each other, having
only a brief moment during which they can shoot, and then they are disengaged for about
a week.

Would be interesting to design a fleet/weapons capable of destroying a SW/ST style fleet.
I dunno if anything akin to deflector shields is possible…

23

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Wouldn’t those recoil? You’d want to avoid recoil.
[/QUOTE]
Mount the guns on a platform which has jets time to compensate for the recoil. Or just shoot identical balls in both directions (provided that there’s nothing of interest behind you). You’ll lose momentum, of course, but you can just add additional thrust to compensate, or figure your course to account for the change in momentum. I’m assuming that you have some kind of high thrust (1G+) reaction motor which allows you to get into position in an effecatious manner, rather than slingshotting around in low energy orbits.)

The stealthy opponent definitely has the advantage, to the point that any other engagement is almost a suicide run. Maybe you couple build specialized automatied howitzer platforms that are launched from a missile frigate-type vessel, get into position stealthily (without having to haul along a lifesystem or other niceites), and then start bombardment once it’s in position. Costly, but you don’t need to worry about defending it even if it is detected.

Stranger

24

[QUOTE=Raguleader]
that said, such craft might still be useful if you were attacking a world which, for whatever reason, has markedly inferior (or nonexistent) atmospheric fighters. Still, flattening the airfields from orbit would be a handy thing to do if you knew where they were, and you could probably spot the enemy fighters from space easily enough once they were in the air, allowing you to deploy (or withdraw) your own fighters as needed. (This all runs with the assumption that you’d still be using space fighters, as opposed to remote or autonomous drones).
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In atmosphere I would have a hard time imagining that atmospheric fighters would not mop the floor with their spaceborne cousins unless the space flight was added to an atmospheric deisign. In addition, every atmosphere is different, meaning AF’s built for use on that world will be better suited to operations in that atmosphere.

I could still see space fighters getting some use but more likely they would be drones. A small fighter type craft would be far more fuel efficient and expendable as a patroller as well as less likely to be detected because of their smaller mass, reflective surfaces, and energy output. With their ability to shift delta-v on a dime long ranged weapons would have a bear of a time hitting them effectively unless they were “shotgunning” with clouds of small projectiles. Even then the enemy has to now be prepared to engage an additional threat type. An enemy lacking proper weaponry could easily be taken down by smaller ships while leaving a mother ship safely a couple million km out of harms way.

Upload target to a squadron of drones and let the drones AI deal with the subtleties of the engagement while performing manuvers that would turn human pilots into strawberry jello.

25

[QUOTE=John DiFool]
Would be interesting to design a fleet/weapons capable of destroying a SW/ST style fleet.
I dunno if anything akin to deflector shields is possible…
[/QUOTE]

Some of the battletech novels had some fairly detailed capital ship engagements. Since some of the ships involved displaced hundreds of thousands of tons, typical missles were pretty much irrelevant. For long range work they carried huge heavy duty missles that carried 20-40 tons of conventional explosives. Even against near million ton monsters with meters of armor these things would hit hard enough to make even the big boys take inventory when they got hit. Many of the other weapons are stock scifi lasers, particle weapons, etc they also used alot of rail guns.

Shields do not exist in the battletech universe so its mostly sheer mass and ability to dish out and soak up damage while continuing to function. One tactic if found intrigueing since there is no “up” in space was ships rolling on their axis to bring around fresh gun mounts and armor to bear as they took damage.

26

I don’t believe there would be much in the way of outer space combat until there are pretty well established population and manufacturing facilities out there. It makes very little sense to spend gazillions to launch space warcraft to fight, when they can hit each other’s launch pads/vehicles space systems on earth for much cheaper.

I imagine there would be planet-based and orbital energy weapons, In a big way it is as Bosda says earlier; who first shoots, wins. Or at least has a huge advantage. Energy weapons can be defensive or iffensuve, and if you wipe out the other side beam guns, you could lock them ouy of space, and probably starve out orbital or moon bases.

Once you see a society out in space entirely self-sufficient, or even supplying the earth with a lot of its needs, THEN you’ll see an interesting space war…

150-300 years.

27

You guys would get a huge kick out of this page.

As long as everyone is assuming that everything’s going to be very “one hit, one kill”, I think smaller craft make a lot of sense. Not that they’d be that much harder to hit, but that it’s a heck of a lot less invested effort to build one. If you lose a giant battlecruiser, that’s years of work and billions of dollars lost. But losing a smaller craft (not nessecarily a one-man fighter, but a small crew and craft) isn’t that much of a setback. If it’s only a matter of one or two hits to kill, better to have lots of cheap spacecraft.

28

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Well, how is detection possible in space? You can track an object visually by the light it reflects from the sun or any lights it shows, by radar reflection, by passively detecting radio emissions.

Eliminate those and you eliminate the methods for detecting the object, and therefore conceal the object. Of course, the best method of concealment is to prevent the enemy from ever attempting to track the object in the first place. So you confuse the enemy over whether a particular object is a spy satelite, a communications satelite, an x-ray laser platform, or a chunk of orbiting space junk.
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You forget: vacuum is a damn good insulator.

If you aren’t radiating heat (from power sources, weapons, electronics, the crew, etc), then you are building up heat.

Which will very shortly kill the crew.

Stealth is space has serious limitations.

29

That’s true, but what would stop you from radiating it in a particular direction, away from where you’d expect the baddies to come from?

Combine that with radar absorbent materials, ECM, and stealthy shapes, and you’ll have pretty hard-to-find ships, especially when you consider the volume of space you’d have to search.

I’m with the camp that thinks that space combat would be most similar to submarine combat, although the time scale would be much different.

30

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Stealth is space has serious limitations.
[/QUOTE]

But some great points as well. Once a course is set and the ship has the right velocity, it can power everything down and just drift for as long as necessary. Vacuum would defeat some of our most current methodologies…no one can ping you, and the crew can sing as loud as they want. :slight_smile:

There’s also the idea of a spooled out radiator or energy sump, drifting along behind or on the flank or even in front of the ship at a comparable velocity, shedding waste heat while the real ship moves relatively invisibly. At the expense of stealth, you’d gain a nice decoy that at the very least might give you a chance to return fire after an initial salvo took out the sump.

31

[QUOTE=Grossbottom]

There’s also the idea of a spooled out radiator or energy sump, drifting along behind or on the flank or even in front of the ship at a comparable velocity, shedding waste heat while the real ship moves relatively invisibly. At the expense of stealth, you’d gain a nice decoy that at the very least might give you a chance to return fire after an initial salvo took out the sump.
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Only if you can build your ship in total secrecy. If not, it is useless, as they can correct their aim. :dubious:

And hey–ever hear of a proximity fuse? One nuke, going off near the heat radiator, does the same job.

Heinlein & Asimov would get the giggles, picking your idea apart. :stuck_out_tongue:

32

[QUOTE=Raguleader]
Actually, beam weapons might be, just not the bright pretty ones we see in science fiction. The Air Force is playing around with various types of laser weapons systems, and they might be of some use in space (ie: trying to knock down incoming warheads or burn out any infra-red based targeting systems).
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In 5-10 years we will probably see weaponized lasers in at least the prototype stage.
The thing that movies never get right about space combat is that all objects are generally in orbit around either a planet, moon or sun. This means that you can’t have fighters dodging in and out like WWII Zeros and Mustangs. If I’m at a higher orbit and see you 2 miles below you, I can’t just dive in on you. I have to fire my engines to slow down which will drop me in a lower orbit to match yours. Except now I’m a hundered miles behind you traveling the same speed as you. If I fire a missle at you, it will speed up and climb to a higher orbit, missing you althogether.

What I would need to do is fire a missle or other object in such a way that it’s orbit will intersect with your orbit at some point.

Of course the best defensive countermeasure is putting a bunch of ball bearings in orbit.
**Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor ** - Nukes are not very effective weapons in space. At least not for blowing stuff up. Most of the destruction from a nuke on earth comes from the powerful shock wave. No air hense no shock wave in space. Big EMP pulse though, which would wreck any non-hardened electronics.
I don’t see a lot of spacesuit infantry action in the future unless there are significantly large, permenant civilian colonies in places like the Moon, Mars or Earth orbit. What would be the point?

As spacetravel is so expensive, there is no one going to space who isn’t supposed to be there. There is not way to economically mine anything. The only source of conflict I see is countries or terrorists taking out spy or GPS satelites.

33

I have some foggy memories of the Forever War by Heinlein which gelled with my grasp of physics. The method of space combat there was much as has been described by others, in that missiles computers would make some calculations, missiles would be launched, and then you would sit around and find out a few days later, or even worse, know the result and then have to wait a couple of days knowing there is not much you can do. It all centered around your position and velocity, and the fact that velocity is a pretty tricky thing to change quickly, particluarly with the momentums involved.

The starting positions and velocities of the ships was all pretty critical given that you cant change them very easily.

So don’t get spotted and fire something that does not give your position away, your missle may kill him, but if he has time to fire back, he may still kill you.

In traveling around the solar system, there are really not many efficient ways to get from point a to point b. All these satalites have very narrow launch windows in order to be able to get where they need to be. If you want to go from the moon to mars, there are probably not many paths you can take, without expending whopping huge ammounts of energy, thus you don’t have to defend against attacks from all points.
cheers

34

[QUOTE=Grossbottom]
Between humans it obviously wouldn’t matter, but I’m convinced that the only true defense a star system can ever have is to disappear. Quite a blackbox trick, and at the very least you’d have to find a way to monkey with gravity to make it work.
[/QUOTE]
There’s the old idea of surrounding the star with a variant of the Dyson sphere that makes it look like a red giant, so the star system will appear dead.

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
And hey–ever hear of a proximity fuse? One nuke, going off near the heat radiator, does the same job.
[/QUOTE]
Depends how long the connecting line is; nukes are much less effective in space, with nothing to carry a shock wave.

Here’s an idea I like, from a sci-fi novel called The Farside Cannon. Build a large, widely distributed array of thousands of lasers on an airless moon. Hook them together so they will fire at one target. Now, you can simply melt any target over your horizon you can see, even at great distances - even if you can’t instantly destroy them, you can just keep firing and firing, for days if necessary until they overheat and perish. Even if they can dodge, you can just keep correcting your aim, force them to burn fuel until they run out - then cook them.

It’s also hard to destroy. It can shoot down missles or incoming space junk ( up to a point; it had an asteroid dropped on it in the novel ), and even if you hit it with a nuke, it’s widely distributed nature on an airless rock means that you’ll only destroy part of it; there’s no reason it can’t be a hundred miles wide, after all.

35

I think another critical point is that real-life space ships have very very small amounts of delta-v compared to their total velocity. In science fiction space ships zoom around, visit a planet, zoom to the asteroid belt, have a space dogfight, and turn around and head back to earth for breakfast.

In real life you’ll barely have enough delta-v to shift yourself into a higher orbit so you can intersect with Mars sometime next year. Carrying more fuel doesn’t help much, because every gram of fuel you add is another gram of fuel that you have to expend ANOTHER gram of fuel to move around. You go bankrupt pretty quickly that way. And even hyperadvanced propulsion methods don’t give you much better, assuming we still obey the laws of physics.

Even a fusion reaction drive, or a total conversion drive ala Heinlein doesn’t give you huge amounts of delta-v. You’re still stuck throwing reaction mass out the back. The faster you can throw that reaction mass the better, but you still have an absolute limit that depends on how much fuel you can pack into your ship. And has been mentioned before, that amount of delta-v is going to be pretty small compared to orbital speeds. And lets not forget that a ship that carries humans is limited to only a few g’s of acceleration…10 g’s for a minute or two, 2-3 g’s for a week in couches. More than that and your crew winds up dead. See Heinlein’s “Skylift”. You canna change the laws of physics, Captain!

36

I imagine two phases. The first will be in the “near” future, where ball bearings and guided missles would do the trick. Mutual suicides by either waiting to get popped or using all one’s fuel in avoiding projectiles.

The second phase: when my genetic engineers design the super-duper-über-stealth-potato, it’s going right up your space tail pipe, matey, and then you’ll be fecked!

37

[QUOTE=NaturalBlondChap]
I have some foggy memories of the Forever War by Heinlein which gelled with my grasp of physics.
[/QUOTE]

That was by Haldeman.

38

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
In real life you’ll barely have enough delta-v to shift yourself into a higher orbit so you can intersect with Mars sometime next year. Carrying more fuel doesn’t help much, because every gram of fuel you add is another gram of fuel that you have to expend ANOTHER gram of fuel to move around. You go bankrupt pretty quickly that way. And even hyperadvanced propulsion methods don’t give you much better, assuming we still obey the laws of physics.

Even a fusion reaction drive, or a total conversion drive ala Heinlein doesn’t give you huge amounts of delta-v. You’re still stuck throwing reaction mass out the back. The faster you can throw that reaction mass the better, but you still have an absolute limit that depends on how much fuel you can pack into your ship.
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That’s an excellent point. The essential measure of propulsion efficiency is specific impulse (I[sub]sp[/sub]), which is basically the capacity for change in momentum per unit mass. Basically, the higher velocity the propellent upon exit, the faster and more efficient the engine. A chemical rocket is doing very, very good to get in the 500 second range, and then only for a few hundred seconds before the propellent is used up. Advanced electric proplusion engines like the ion proplusion, Hall-effect thruster, or magnetic pulsejet can get into the low thousands of seconds of I[sub]sp[/sub] owing to to their high exhaust velocity and are superior in vacuum because they apply their reactions directly to the accelerating coils rather than via pressure against an exhaust nozzle, but have high voltage requirements and low total thrust, typically providing not more than about 0.1-0.2 m/s[sup]2[/sup] of acceleration. An Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion could easily get into the I[sub]sp[/sub]=4000-5000 second range with accelerations on the order of 1G even with a large, heavily armored vessel, but sustained propulsion would be expensive (requiring enriched uranium bomblets manufactured to extremely high tolerances) and would most certainly not be stealthy. Some kind of sustained fusion pinch drive could conceivably get into the I[sub]sp[/sub]=10-20 kilosecond range, albeit without stealth. A toroidal/tokamak fusion reactor, used to generate massive magnetic fields to power magnetoelectrodynamic motor (using readily available ferrous elements as a stealthy, low-temperature, high thrust propellent) might be able to get in that range or higher, depending on how compact the drive is, but the magnetic fields would be huge; you’d have to put your lifesystem far forward or outboard of the drive, and the control systems would have to be shielded or optical.

The other way to go is silent and deadly; a platform given a precise initial velocity or using lightweight mirrors to accelerate gently but steadily, moving for months or years to get into position for a strike. It becomes more of a chessmaster’s midgame than a naval engagement, and seems unlikely (to me, anyway) on the basis of competing for resources or territory, as events could change more rapidly than you could plan and launch attacks.

Perhaps, to extend the submarine analgy someone brought up, you could just have a fleet of vessels, painted black and directing waste heat out of the plane of the ecliptic (so as to minimize signature), on deployment for months or years of a time, ready to move into position and attack when ordered. You’d need a massive fleet of vessesl to cover even a small percentage of the Solar System, of course, and which do nothing else, like the SSBM fleets of the US, UK, and USSR. Very expensive and not too useful, except as a strategic, ideologically-based conflict.

Stranger

39

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
That was by Haldeman.
[/QUOTE]

see I told you it was a foggy memory
Thanks for the correction, must go and read it agian one day.

40

I think such combat would pause space combat till the war is over. Once space stations and ships are destroyed, we would be just tradimg IPBM’s (Inter Plantetary Balistic Missles) between earth, mars and whatever, till one side wins and sends colony ships to reoccupy the now dead, or almost dead world.

Also remember that there will not be ‘shipping lanes’ as we think of them, as the planets are in motion and when a ship travels between them they are very unlikely to see another ship as the next ship will be using a totally different route. It would take a trememdous amount of ‘fuel’ to be able to actually ‘drive’ a ship to it to destroy one in route, and even more fuel to change course to actually get somewhere once that mission is complete.

Now a blockade could work if a space colony is dependant on mother earth for suppiles and you can prevent the mother country from launching the supplies needed, but that would be a surrender of the colony.

Also Re: energy weapons, I think microwaves (actually masers) could be pretty effective in taking out electronics of a space station, though shielding is possible.