Obviously hypothetical, but I’m interested in what kind of strategies would be best used for space combat if the technology was kept as plausible as possible. I’m willing to concede the vehicle’s energy source as “impossibilium”: something small and internal, but still exhaustible. Therefor, any weapon system represents a drain on the vehicles resources, as does the addition of any defense systems. I also imagine these vehicles would be only spend their time in zero-g conditions, how they got there is unimportant.
I imagine weapons would concentrate on hull penetration and therefor direct impact weapons would be most effective. However, I suspect this would force both vehicles to engage each other from a great distance so as to increase response time.
I envision crafts capable of maneuvering on any axis. Given the already advanced tracking systems, I imagine the best flight pattern would be short bursts in complete random directions. Advanced tracking systems could completely negate precision aiming, and a shotgun approach would be the only way to hit any target.
Conversely, a vehicle not restrained by gravity could have an absurdly thick hull. Obviously maneuverability would be reduced, but it wouldn’t matter if projectiles were being used.
Simply put, I cannot think of an effective and versatile vehicle designed for space combat. Any thoughts?
I imagine that guided missiles would be more effective than the shotgun approach: the difficulty of hitting even a stationary target with unguided weapons would increase with the square of range, while a guided weapon could continue to re-orient itself to keep on target.
How far into the future? What are the limitations and circumstances? Space combat, like any combat, is going to depend upon the costs and on the problems faced. If it’s in the near-future, with things lofted from the earth, the cost of getting mass into orbit is going to be your biggest hurdle. That means you neither have massive shielding nor large amounts of fuel, and you have relatively light craft with limited maneuverability going after each other. (Look at Larry Niven and ASteve Barnes’ The Descent of Anansi for very near-term space conflict)
Even if we go a little farther into the future, and can mine the moon for materials, we’re still going to be limited in terms of what we can process there. We can get shielding mass and reaction mass, but the energy to push things around (or chemical propellants) are still going to be less easy to come by. I suspect that would be armored ships not maneuvering around a lot.
If you went very far into the future you’d start getting more of what you envision – large, highly maneiverable ships that really can go in 3-D without having to conserve energy. But even then I’ll bet a lot of weaponry would be unexpected stuff. How about a rain of high velocity “bullets” onto your lunar base, or high-velocity pellets released into earth orbit to stymie possible launches, or the Heinlein-suggested dropping of big masses onto your Earth or Lunar base? Why go after ships?
Most combat would be in orbit. You aren’t going to catch ships in transit, it’s just too much to calculate and pull off pinpoint accuracy at relativistic velocities. So it would be when your enemy wants to bombard your planet that it will come into play. It is unlikely that ships will be zipping around, so you’d have massive ships tanking deploying large numbers of disposable satellite gun platforms designed to protect against missiles and to bombard the planet below even if the mother ship is destroyed.
Ships are really hard to find. If they turn off their non-essential equipment and aren’t changing course, you won’t see them until you’re right on top of them.
Ships are hard to maneuver. If you get a good lock on with a guided weapon, you’re almost sure of a hit. Of course, you’ve got to be close enough that they can’t get off a shot before yours connects.
And space is a lot bigger than the oceans, even if you just consider orbits around planets.
It depends enormously on the available technology. The range of conceivable performance stretches from the chemical rockets we have now to reactionless drives capable of thousand-G maneuvers and near-lightspeed terminal velocities. If you allow FTL into the mix, then you have to specify how the hypothetical technology works. Warp drives that travel continuously through real space? Travel through hyperspace, with or without the possibility of interception? “Jump” drives that can bypass sentries and defenses? Fixed routes through natural or artificial wormholes that pin you to given destinations?
Caveat: Star Trek always assumed that – all spaceships in an encounter are, like submarines, in the same plane of orientation. IRL, spaceships have three-dimensional freedom of movement without regard to any “up” or “down.” The only SF fighting-spaceship I’ve seen that accounts for that is the Starfury (I think it was called) from Babylon 5. Somebody must have had a rush of brains to the head and asked, “Say, why does a space fighter have to be designed anything like an airplane?”
It depends on what the objectives of the combat are. Are you trying to interrupt raw material shipments between planets, or bombard surfaces, or take out enemy spy satellites, or what?
In a plausible-technology situation, the velocities won’t be relativistic, and transit is an orbit. Everyone knows what the cheap and easy transfer orbits are, so it’d become a question of how much you’re willing to spend for how much safety, by going off the beaten path.
Well as the orbits of the seperate planets move the angle of attack becomes different. The calculation to go from Mars to Earth on Feb 12, would be different from the one to go from Mars to Earth on Feb 14th. The likelihood that a ship leaving a couple of days later is going to catch the first ship are infinitesimal. So the transverse velocity of the two ships is going to make it incredibly hard to target one another. We’re talking about ships slingshotting around planets to make the trip from one planet to another. When you are in orbit, yes that is when you can have ships targetting each other. The US and China are in a somewhat quiet arms race around the notion of shooting down satellites as we speak.
In air combat the dogfight is already a thing of the past. Airplanes are simply too fast and the G force is too much for a pilot or an airframe to withstand to come about with guns. The same would be true in the case of space combat. Though it is likely that massive cruisers and battleships could be bombarding each other with railguns and cruise missiles. These ships would do little in the way of maneuvering because a particular orbit is a fragile thing. You move at all and you move into a different orbit. So the ships would probably be designed around taking a massive amount of punishment rather than being designed around maneuverability.
This is why I posited the idea of hulking motherships deploying Satellite gun emplacements into orbit around itself. When I say this I am thinking of a battleship that deploys say 2-500 satellites with banks of cruise missiles. Essentially little more than a cannister with directional thrusters with just enough fuel to maneuver into position to aim, or to propel themselves back to the mother ship if unused. I seriously doubt we’ll be seeing X-Wings vs Tie Fighters anytime soon.
Beam energy weapons are highly likely as a vast source of energy would be the sun, as you could collect solar energy without the insulation from the atmosphere. Most of this energy would be completely lost as capacitors reach their full capacity. In a situation where you are doing battle you could beam solar energy directly through the power grid into the weapons bypassing your main capacitors completely. Of course people can design their armor plating around refractory shielding. In which case you’d want to smash the outer layer with cruise missiles or railguns before relying upon lasers to melt holes in the enemy’s armor. Of course the best anti-energy weapon platform would be some kind of solar panel that can actually absorb the laser energy.
Yes, but if you know that your enemy left Mars on Feb 12, then you can make the same calculation that he did, and (assuming he used the cheapest orbit) know exactly where he’ll be on any given date. You’d have to use more delta-V than he did to intercept him on that orbit, but that might be economical, if your interceptor is just a small missile, while his craft is a big heavy freighter. Or, of course, if you’re just plain richer than he is.
Fascinating. I hadn’t considered how important orbits would be in planning one’s battle. I had always pictured combat as dogfights in open space, but clearly that is an absurd concept.
I’ve heard the idea tossed around of releasing millions of ball bearings into the atmosphere to essentially cage a space bound society. Could one take a similar approach and bombard cost effective orbits with debris? That seems like a low-cost solution to repelling invaders.
I seriously reccomend watching Battlestar Galactica, even if you skip the ‘boring’ plot development, just so you can catch the frakking star fights.
Their model is one of battleships/aircraft carriers duking it out. The humans are on the run and undermanned and outgunned, lacking in resupply, the Cylons seem to always have more ships and weapons.
A typical engagement would consist of the Cylons making a FTL jump in, and launching hordes of fighters for attack - generally to launch missiles in close. The humans launch their own fighters to screen the fleet as everyone spins up the drives and jumps away. The fighters engage in fullscale flipping 3-d combat that follow the laws of inertia. They engage with guns and are full of flipping twisting goodness.
At the same time, the Cylon capital ships launch their own missiles that the fighters and BSG try to shoot down, while the Battlestar is firing time fused shells to create a flak curtain around itself to stop against incoming fighters. Once the fleet is away, the fighters come in and land hot - barely stopping before the ship jumps.
On occasions when the humans are on offense, the battles are similar, though the Battlestar works to close with the enemy and brings huge railguns to bear, and the fighters can launch missiles as well, though nuclear weapons are highly limited for humans (~10 in the whole fleet) due to being on the run.
On the flip side, the Cylons have seemingly endless nukes, and the BSG sustained a direct hit in battle. Damaged the ship severly, but it was still able to finish the fight and limp away for repairs.
If you mean, say, the route from Earth to Mars, that’d be a lot tougher, for a couple of reasons. First, the space between Earth and Mars is a lot bigger than the space in low orbit around the Earth, so you’d need a heck of a lot more ball bearings to fill it sufficiently. Second, the most economical orbit isn’t always the same orbit: The cheapest orbital opportunity for going between Earth and Mars comes up every 2.133 years (that’s why NASA missions to Mars come up about once every couple of years), but it’s a different orbit each time.
Spaceships would be fast (eventually). They’d have to be, because space is big and it would take them forever to get anywhere if they weren’t. I say “eventually” because it would still probably take them a long time to accelerate to top speed. Luckily with no air resistance it shouldn’t be too hard to maintain top speed once you get there.
Spaceships would be large. I imagine most of that mass would just be the fuel it would take to get them going so fast. Actually, you could jettison the fuel tanks you used to get up to speed, but you’d need additional fuel if you wanted to be able to change your trajectory at some point, unless you’re just limiting yourself to following a more or less predetermined orbit around some planet or star.
Spaceships wouldn’t be able to change direction very quickly. There are various reasons for this. If you have a big ship with lots of fuel, that large mass would make it hard to turn quickly. If you ditched the fuel after you got up to speed, then you’d have a hard time changing your flight plan at a moments notice – you’d probably be relying on flying past large planets and such and using gravity to turn you around.
You might think “Well, I could use the large high-speed spaceships to cover the interstellar distances, and then have them release smaller, slower-moving but more maneuverable spaceships for close combat. Space fighters, if you will. But even small ships wouldn’t be nearly as easy to maneuver as airplanes. Planes have an atmosphere to push against, so they can turn just by tilting the wings to one side. Spaceships would have to burn a lot of fuel to make a quick turn, and the more fuel they have to carry the harder it becomes to turn them quickly, due to the increased mass. Spaceships would have a hard time finding each other
Basically your only option for detection is using electromagnetic radiation (radar, light, etc.) There’s no sound in space, and the ships would still presumably be far too small for their gravity to be easily detectable. Presumably they’d be designed to emit and reflect as little EM radiation as possible. Also note that the intensity of omni-directional radiation will decrease the further you go from the source, making it harder to detect things over large distances. And keep in mind that the enemy ship can approach from any direction and cover large straight-line distances very quickly. So I think that thewalrus is right that you might not be able to see an attacker until he’s right on top of you. And by the time you do, he’d have already fired the shot to take you out. I’m skeptical that even a “heavily armored” ship” could withstand a large nuclear explosion. And they could use nukes without the same fear of enviromental consequences we’d have inside the Earth’s atmosphere. Plus, the more heavily armored you make your ship, the more fuel you have to burn to get it up to speed, and the harder it is to maneuver.
Whoever attacks first wins Given the difficulty in avoiding attacks, I’d think in general it’d be whoever finds the other spaceship and fires their weapons first would be the winner. There’s a risk that your enemy sees you attacking and fires a counterstrike, taking you out as well. But unless you just happened to find each other at almost the same time, I’d think they wouldn’t know you were there until they saw your missile approaching. At that point, they can extrapolate from the missiles trajectory to a line of possible positions from which it could have been fired, but you won’t be on that line anymore and without your enemy knowing how long ago the missile was fired or from how far away, they still might have some trouble locating you before they’re destroyed.
In many cases, though, neither spaceship ever finds the other, particularly in the depths of space, and they just fly on by. I think mswas is right that much of the conflict probably happens when one side sends their spaceships to attack on of the other side’s planets.
In terms of spaceships vs. planet, the key to the planet’s survival is to detect and destroy the attacking spaceships as quickly as possible, before they have a chance to thoroughly bombard your planet. You’d also want to try to shoot down any projectiles they did launch. Perhaps the planet would basically surround itself with a wall of small satellites to try to detect attacking ships and allow them to be shot down before they get too close to the planet. Of course, it would take a huge number of satellites to surround a planet at a fairly large distance out. But the satellites could be fairly small – they don’t need a ton of fuel since they don’t need to achieve high speeds like the interstellar spaceships do. If it comes down to the planet’s satellite defenses being mostly shot down, but the invading force also being taken out, that’s a win for the planet, since they can probably rebuild their defenses quicker than the enemy can build and deploy another invasion fleet across interstellar distance. (I’m assuming if the enemy already had more spaceships waiting to send, they would have used them already and overwhelmed the planets’ defenses.)
I should add that I’m assuming we’re talking one planetary system at war with another, not, say, Earth vs. a colonized Mars or something.
This is why I thought of the multiple satellite cloud system. If you are the first to fire you are in the clear, if you are not, well then at least your satellites reap vengeance for you.
Particle beams, ion cannons, rail guns and phasers.
Honestly, keeping things as plausible as possible as they are now technologically is ASAT type weapons or shotgun satellites. We’re barely putting things into low earth orbit or sending them to photograph planets in our own solar system.
Are we talking anti-satellite technology before the nukes hit currently or something far, far, far in the future?
If we’re talking distant future, all rules are off and I’ll lay cash on Star Fleet Battles being how it will happen just because I’ll be long dead before you could collect - I mean it’s a future so far away that you can’t reasonably predict how it will happen. It’d be like deciding how naval battles will happen forever based on the Battle of Salamis or the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. Technology constantly changes, and I can’t see there being a single constant way of doing things if we ever get to the point of fighting in space. The question is just too speculative to make a solid answer.
