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

In My Humble Opinion
41

I must respectfully—and I mean respectfully (since I’m an idiot)—call bullshit. An unmaned platform with a phalanx gun system would kill any effective IPBM: nuclear bombs can’t go off accidently—once the system is shredded, the receiving planet will just have some uranium-cleanup problems to deal with. In other words, an IPBM will be giving free weaponized materials to the enemy.

I think the OP must necessarily presuppose ships with effective movements. Otherwise, it is trivially absurd: imagine trying to come up with a hypothetical that imposed the Midway battle on trireme warships!

Fighters wouldn’t have to change orbits any more than the Red Baron had to change orbits. He was at least, if not more, constrained by gravity than a space fighter; the difference is that he had air on his side. I have no idea whether the drag created by the atmosphere would be greater the fuel needed to change direction on a space-fighter; however, it is not obviously true that one fact is true over another. To go in a straight line, the Red Baron needed massive amounts of energy; however, a space fighter can literally coast along. There is no new physics to be dealt with: chaning direction cost the Red Baron a lot of energy, but he could turn some of his forward momentum into the force for changing direction; however, a space fighter wouldn’t need any energy to go straight, and wouldn’t need extra energy to climb since they would be, on net, at gravitational equilibrium (otherwise they would be falling instead of being in orbit).

Faced with, say, a phalanx-type gun, the fighter may get creamed, or it may avoid; what is important is that the phalanx gun generates a shitload of heat, which means that it will be very easy to spot in space. Send a small drone: it gets capped by a bunch of 20mm rounds, but the mass of it keeps toward the gun at lethal speeds and then…then some simple Kamakazi drones should destroy the ship’s guns.

After that, it’s a land war, as shuttles of marines latch on to each battle ship, cut into the hulls, and begin fighting for the $200 trillion machines.

So seriously, either the OP needs a terribly simple answer—shoot a ball bearing at the enemy and he’s dead—or the OP needs a sophisticated level of technology to entertain the question.

Whatever it is, we cannot suppose the simplistic space technology of today as a model for interplanetary war. The Space Shuttle is not a weaponized platform; it cannot serve as model, nor can any simplistic vision of the future.

42

Well, if you’re gonna be able to attach your shuttle to the enemy battleship, you might as well just leave a shaped-charge limpet mine on the hull and mosey away while it does it’s work. Hell, cut through the hull, THEN deposit the explosives inside :smiley: I think if you can get that close, just nailing the ship with missiles would be easier.

:dubious: Obviously, you’ve never watched 007: Moonraker. :stuck_out_tongue:

43

There will, however, be shipping seasons, the periods of closest approach to Earth, during which time/fuel expenditures will be at an optimum.

Many ships will leave/arrive during a fairly limited period of time.

The strategic implications are obvious.

44

Of course any space ship is going to have a lot more delta-v available than any atmospheric craft. And it won’t have to expend energy just to keep moving, as you say. So a “dogfight” where ships zoom around and blast each other in space is certainly physically possible.

But what makes it implausible is that space is much much bigger than the skies over Verdun. And an atmospheric craft like the Red Baron used to pilot is going much much much more slowly than any spaceship and is operating in a much much much smaller environment. Just to leave earth a ship has to be traveling 11 km/sec. So the atmosphere craft seems to maneuvar violently because its ability to change its velocity is large relative to its velocity, even though its absolute ability to change its velocity might be much smaller than a spacecraft. If you’re screaming along at 11 km/sec you can’t do much to change your velocity as a percentage of your total velocity, even with engines on full…whereas an atmospheric fighter craft that rarely goes above 340 m/sec (speed of sound) can accelerate to that velocity, stop, turn around, do the hokey-pokey, then start all over again multiple times on one tank of fuel.

And of course, no object in our solar system is going to be travelling “straight”. Every object is in orbit around the sun, and possibly in orbit around some other body as well. So you can’t just point your nose at Mars and turn the engines on full blast…because you can’t carry enough fuel to blast your engines all the way to Mars, and Mars isn’t going to be in the same place when you get there.

45

Okay, I have to confess that I read the title as “What would a real-life space-car wombat be like?”

This was immediately followed by a JD-from-“Scrubs” moment of head-tilting and the decision was made:
“It’d be way cool.”
:smiley:

46

You could disperse a cloud of wombats that might shield the heat bloom of your engines, for a few seconds maybe. And if you expelled them fast enough on an approach, you’d get the added effect of frozen wombats smashing into the enemy position at thousands of klicks per second, probably hulling the target and killing everyone on the other side.

47

It would be all over the moment you…

“Release the Saurdukar!”
Seriously, suppose you bury your base deep inside a big rock, like an asteroid, wouldn’t that be hard to kill?

48

Well, the base itself might be hard to kill. But it would be very difficult to move around…the more mass you’ve got armoring the base the more mass you have to move around.

OK, then such a base will be essentially stationary. The trouble then comes when the outside structures of the base are pulverized. What are the guys inside the base going to be able to do? All their sensors and communication and weapons have to be outside on the surface or they won’t do any good. Smash all the surface stuff and you don’t have a military installation any more but rather a life-raft. I suppose equipment that is normally kept underground can be equiped for rapid deployment to the surface, then yanked back just as quickly as soon as you’ve accomplished your task. Or have lots of spares deep underground and the strategy is to absorb the bombardment and quickly repair your surface structures and use them until the next bombardment.

But the main trouble is that any large installation isn’t moveable, so its location in orbit will be entirely predictable. In other words, a sitting duck. Or turtle, if you will. You might have a protective shell…but if the enemy wants to crack open the shell they just have to hit you with a bigger rock. And there are always bigger rocks out there. Drop an asteroid a mile wide on the Earth and you’re gonna ruin everyone’s geologic era. Drop an asteroid 10 meters wide on an asteroid a mile wide and you’re likely to crack it apart…or at least smear all the carbon-units inside into chunky salsa. The larger the object your base is buried in the safer it is…but the enemy can always just pick a bigger rock to drop on you.

49

This is actually kinda like the Space Fortresses in the Honor Harrington series of books (I keep referencing Honor Harrington, the fact is, it’s the cloest to “Hard sci-fi” that I have outside of Dune, and Dune’s hard science didn’t have anything to do with how they waged wars). Basically, a Space Fort was essentially a man-made moon, bristling with weapons, hangar bays, communications and sensors, and various other facilities. They came in two varieties: Slow and Stationary (for all intents and purposes, they’re all stationairy, but we’ll get to that). They have stronger sheilds than most warships do, but make up for this by being practically immobile. They usually parked them at chokepoints (mostly Wormhole Transit points) where they could use their massive firepower to knock the everloving snot out of an enemy fleet that was ballsy enough to jump in via the wormhole junction, likewise, an enemy fleet would usually be big enough to knock the snot out of the space forts, necessitating the mobile forts, which would slowly move into the positions previously held by the now-destroyed immobile forts, and continue the fight.

Assuming that the enemy doesn’t feel like running through the gauntlet, he’ll arrive by conventional means (spending as long as months in hyperspace, depending on the distances involved), in which case the defenders ideally want to push them up against the space forts (either at the junction point, or near other points of interest, such as large industrial areas or planets) and then catch them in the crossfire. This is basically how a stationary fortification would have to work in a realistic situation. Something that may or may not be capable of defending itself for a short time, supported by a group of warships (or fighters, or autonomous missle drones, whatever) that would either interdict the enemy at a distance, or try to pinch the enemy between the defenders and the fortification.

Otherwise, stationary installations would basically be repair yards and support facilities, depending almost exclusively on the mobile forces to protect them, but providing valuable support to increase the range and capabilities of the forces based there.

50

But in real life there are no such “choke points” to defend. The only equivalent would be planets…if you want to protect Mars you could have an asteroid base orbiting Mars. Except the base can’t really do much to protect Mars, rather it’s the perfect thing to threaten Mars.

Which gets us back to the reason wars are fought. Which gets us back to the question, why are these people in space in the first place? If they’re just scientists and eccentrics out exploring there’s no need to attack them. Or are they producing resources for use back on Earth? Are they some sort of threat to factions on Earth? Or are factions in space attacking each other? Or are the space forces designed to threaten people on Earth…you have your spy satelites and the ability to drop rocks on anywhere you like and are invulnerable to most weapons from Earth.

So we can imagine smashing a Mars base…but what is the imagined purpose of smashing that Mars base? How does it benefit the smashers to smash the Mars base?

51

Because… it’s… fun? :confused:

52

You could defend Mars from an asteroid fortress–after a fashion.

If you assume the objective of an invading force is to occupy Mars to exploit it’s resources, and if the fortress could bombard targets on the planet, you can prevent, or at least delay, occupation.

You would be compelled to destroy the fortress, first.

Reminds me a little of feudal Japan–they didn’t want to exterminate the peasants. The peasants were resources to exploit. But you had to control the area, first. And samurai inside the fortress could sally forth & raid. So, you had to destroy the fortress, samurai, & local Lord, first.

But I suspect that terrorism & sabotage, both on the defense & offense, would be the primary weapons.

53

I need to clarify my thinking from a previous post.

When I talk about “limited resources,” I don’t mean limits on the amount of ore, water, electrical generation capacity, etc. I mean money, pure and simple. And time. I mean, these things would be incredibly expensive. Anyone who has played any kind of massive war game (let alone a real war!) knows that it takes time to get the ore shaped into the end product, and it takes a helluvalot of money. It’s fun to speculate about distant worlds and fantasy technology, but let’s face it – it requires one big freakin’ economy to support that. Look what happened to the USSR – the U.S. simply outspent it! Even now our own economy is starting to stagger under the burden of two overseas wars. Slave labore? Well, they have to be fed, and they have to be fed properly so even in you don’t keep them healthy, you have to keep them reproductive so you’ll have more slave laborers. Otherwise, slave labor becomes just another finite resource, eventually exhausted.

Concerning the physics of space travel (I don’t know what else to call it): We can’t just shoot up the moon any time we want to – there are launch windows, there are orbits to calculate, we have to get into the right trajectory. Wouldn’t all of that be true of space travel to and from other planets and systems? I can’t imagine we’d be suddenly beset by et’s (a la “Independence Day”) without some advance warning. We’d know the Zorkians were pissed at us, we’d know where Zork is, and that’d be the direction they’re coming from. I’m no military expert, but I attended a few exercise planning sessions in the service (I was a lowly radio guy, but the Old Man wanted his commo at his fingertips at all time) and one of the things military planners think about the the cost of an approach in fuel, time and lives. Sure, they can come at us from any direction, but what would it cost them to get to a place they could attack from? I’m not saying the cost would be prohibitive, but I think it does reduce the problem to a more manageable size.

Finally, I know space planes have been on the drawing boards for years, but how effective would they be, really, as combat aircraft? They would require massive amounts of fuel (or other energy form) to escape a planet’s gravity, and when coming into an atmosphere from space, they’d have all the re-entry problems of a space shuttle.

Am I taking this whole thread too seriously?

54

…* way* cool. :smiley:

55

Not seriously enough, soldier.

56

I think one place where you could vary alot from the submarine model would be in the laying of traps. A moon or asteroid, or a cheap decoy, studded with some of Sam Stone’s fragmines could make for a very bad day for the curious ship.

I think the stellar structures are awesome ideas that will need a system with a calmer star and more mass than ours has. With only 4-5 rock planets and a bunch of moons to work with, I just can’t see it happening. The best I’ve been able to come up with vis a vis concealment of a star system would be to envelope or otherwise surround it with a singularity, or maybe armor it with a bunch of little ones? But then I break my own rule because it’s not like we’ve got enough mass to build and collapse a star of that size anyway. So it would rely on creating black holes artificially, assuming such a thing can be done at that scale. The idea should work though: from the outside all anyone would see would be a honking big grav well of death, and even if gravity lensing led them to guess it was hollow they’d have a bitch of a time getting inside.

57

It would be like it is here, but in space.

There would be a first-strike. Then the martian colonists would complain to the Federation that the Venetians were targeting civilians. The Venetians would respond by saying that their reports conclusively showed that a planetary attack system was being developed at the target and that the schools were a facade. Of course, all the intel is top secret and can not be presented to the Federation. The Federation would make a move to put forth sanctions against the Martians only to have it vetoed by Uranians, who have no real dog in the fight but like the red potting soil they receive from the Martians. Instead, the Uranians would suggest that the Federation should send in some investigators to confirm the presence of banned inter-planetary weapons. Then several hundred representatives of the Kuiper belt would object, pointing out that the Uranians, Venetians, even the Terrans have inter-planetary weapons. At this point the Venetians would attack again claiming they successfully thwarted an attack that would shake the foundations of the universe and that every system should throw them a big party. Obviously, this goes unheeded so the Venetians start scouting Charon…

58

Hey Greenback. GD is over there points

59

I know but I’m practicing.

60

Planning to try out for the Leagues in the Spring? :smiley: