The movie Star Trek 2 took this into account. The tide was turned in the final space battle when it was realized that the Captain of the enemy ship was only strategizing in 2 dimentions of movement. The battle was won by the Enterprise making use of the 3rd dimention (moving up and down).
…Leaving open for the viewers the question of just how the hell he became Captain of a space warship if he only knew how to employ 2-dimensional ship-to-ship combat tactics. 
Because Star Trek is inordinately stupid. One of the worst Sci Fi canons in all of history.
Yup , there is gonna be no dedicated warship built from the keel up. Its too expensive to just have loitering around, when military applications are better spent on battlestations, moon bases, mine fields and the like.
Your actual space going military vehicle will be a freighter thats built dual purpose, I think the closest class of ships would be an east india man of war. Weapons are most likely going to be guided missiles, active homers and beam riders and mass drivers for realistic near term combat, everything in the arsenal today can be adapted to space with no problems.
All you have to do is pull in all your freighters that are available in orbit and bolt the weaponry on.
Declan
I thought it was because Khan only had land warfare experience. Remember that he wasn’t a starship captain, he just hijacked a ship.
Interesting stuff, thanks. I can’t say I’d tried to do the math, but the part I find most surprising is this:
To summarize he’s saying a room temperature object, with a 1510 m[sup]2[/sup] cross section could be seen from 38.8 * 10[sup]9[/sup] m away.
Call the area A and the distance R. That means he’s saying we can see a room temperature object that only takes up A/ (4 pi R[sup]2[/sup]) = 8.0 * 10[sup]-18[/sup] % of the full sphere of the sky. That’s pretty amazing.
I don’t quite understand his formula, though. If I imagine the submarine was the same temperature we see when measuring empty space (2.7 K), the formula still claims we could see it from 3796 km away. How, if it’s no brighter than the surrounding area? Maybe the formula really means for us to subtract the background temperature from T . . . Not that it makes a difference if T is close to room temperature, but I wonder how automated ships (i.e., not staffed by humans) with much lower temperatures would change things.
I think the cheapest and most realistic space combat would be a regression to the stone age - assuming a small energy source, why bother with building ships? Attach said power plant to an asteroid, or bury it inside. Surround that rocky core with comet ice, too. You have your protective mass/shielding and fuel in one, use smaller asteroids in mass drivers as weapons, and space combat becomes a matter of hurling rocks at each other in a war of attrition - whoever wears down the ice/rock mass of his opponent first, in order to get at the power plant, wins.
Like all warfare it’s going to depend on exactly what the objectives are…and who’s fighting. If we are talking about a purely earth based conflict then it doesn’t make much sense to fight out in space with dedicated warships…after all, all the resources supposedly being gathered out in the solar system would be headed here…so, if you were going to fight, you’d probably fight here. Space would simply be used to drop things on targets here on earth, at the most. Perhaps you’d put in some rudimentary defenses on moon bases or space stations or whatever is out there.
Now, if we are talking about a fight between, say, the earth and some colony in the solar system, then you might get into some kind of dedicated warships…though again, your primary goals would be to target things either in orbit around the respective planets or on the planets themselves…so, your defenses would be designed around preventing someone from essentially dropping big rocks on you. I’m not really sure how you would do this to be honest…if someone wanted to drop something on an enemy planet and they weren’t concerned about being too precise in their attack, I don’t know how you’d stop them. I remember a SciFi book I read years ago that talked about loading shuttles with rocks, powering them down completely after accelerating them up as high as you could and then dropping them into a planets gravity well. Basically even the shuttles that got hit by defenses only broke up…their payloads still impacted the planet.
I’d say if there ever were actual space warships it would be for battles between separate solar systems…and they would probably be fought as far out from the habitable planets as possible since those would be the primary objectives. You wouldn’t want to let an enemy force get too close or they would start dropping ballistic nasties on your head, so you’d need to fight them as far out as you could.
I envision something like from the age of sail, where basically the fleets either act as defensive platforms (anchored to some defensive object like an asteroid or moon) to augment fixed defenses (and that could be moved somewhere else if necessary) at strategic points or orbits, or that the opposing fleets would essentially have to ‘agree’ to battle by changing vectors to bring them in fairly close for a pounding match. Just like in the age of sail, sometimes a fleet commander would be force to battle under unfavorable conditions, and there would be a lot of jockeying for position to get the optimal vector to attack from. There would probably be a lot of attempts at misdirection and stealth as well. And like in the age of sail it would take days or even weeks to maneuver the opposing fleets into position to actually attack, with either opponent perhaps opting out of combat by changing vectors away from the battle. All of this assumes the ships have some kind of continuous operating drive btw…if not then I don’t see how you would ever have space combat.
My guess for weapons would be guided missiles, metal storm type tech for defense and some kind of kinetic ballistic weapon like a rail gun as the equivalent of carronades. I don’t see how manned fighters would be realistic at all, and not sure what benefit even unmanned fighters would be…I think a better bet would be things like cruise missiles with onboard AI to penetrate enemy defenses.
-XT
You’re still thinking in terrestial terms. And on Earth, effectively, all bodies have the “same” temperature.
However, in space the ship has to irradiate its energy outwards. Somewhere. It can’t simply “disappear” it. So, in reality, the ship is far brighter than the surrounding area (maybe in terms of infrared radiation, but that still is detectable).
Automated ships are a different story though. But even they, if they want to move, have to have some kind of energy source. And they’ll have to have some kind of powered up systems. So, they still will stand out from the background (albeit far less than a manned ship)
Ok, I’ll let Star Trek off on a technicality. 
I still see it as Kindergarten for Sci Fi.
It would be dark. Nifty explosions and flames require oxygen to ignite them.
There’s no point in keeping the crew quarters cold- the interior of the ship can be any temperature that’s convenient, provided you have insulation. The amount of infrared the ship emits is based on the production of heat. In silent running mode that would be the body heat of the crew plus any absolutely essential systems. And the maximum absolute detection range isn’t necessarily the same as the range at which you’d spot a ship you didn’t already know was there.
The most important fact about real world rocket ships is that the amount of delta-v they can carry is very very very small compared to the velocities of the planets and moon in our solar system, or even just the speed needed to orbit a planet. And when you expend a lot of that delta-v accelerating in one direction, the ability of your rocket to change that vector will be very small in comparison to the total vector.
Since the ability to change velocity is very small, you can’t think about spacecraft rocketing around the solar system. That’s physically impossible, even with fusion or total conversion rockets. Instead, spacecraft only have the ability to use their rockets to move from one sort of orbit to another. You can go anywhere in the solar system once you’re in Earth orbit, but you can’t go there by pointing your nose at Jupiter and blasting until you get there, nor even by pointing your nose at Jupiter and blasting till you get halfway there and then turning around and slowing down. Those kind of continuous thrust rockets found in Heinlein violate the laws of physics because you just can’t throw fuel out the back of the spacecraft fast enough, and carrying more fuel just makes the problem worse.
And so unless we invent a propulsion system that isn’t a rocket, there will never be any such thing as a space dogfight. Instead spaceships that want to fight will be moving at some velocity relative to each other, and will have only a limited ability to change that relative velocity. A very simple way to kill another ship would be to force it to expend so much delta-v that it can’t possibly match velocity with any friendly base. When the enemy fires at you you can see the shot coming at you and manuevar out of the way, but can you still get to where you need to go afterward? Or will you be headed out to the Oort cloud, to return back to Earth orbit in 300 years?
Could you please rephrase that last sentence? I don’t think I quite understood what you wanted to say there.
However, according to the link Spatial Rift 47 provided (if it is the same one I read a while ago), any spaceship with humans on board would be easy to detect, even in silent mode, because of that infrared radiation. It gets far, far worse when the spaceship is active (propulsion heat, etc.)
This is probably the biggest factor that will define space combat. Everything is about orbits. All combat would need to take place in orbit around a planet or moon as it would be nearly impossible for two ships to intercept each other in transit between two moving planets.
Basically you would have a ship in orbit around a planet or moon. Another attacking ship would position itself so that it would pass close enough to use it’s weapons (probably some combination of energy weapons, rail guns or missiles) and they would start blasting away.
Not sure how armored ships would be. Probably somewhat just because it’s space, but ultimately it would depend on whether speed or toughness was more critical.
I imagine it would be similar to the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi (just without fighters). The big capital ships don’t really meneuver at all. They just sort of float by each other in their orbits.
I think this is about what it would be…though probably not like in Star Wars in the respect that I doubt the fleets would be on converging head on vectors…I can’t see how that would be beneficial to either fleet, unless you just wanted a passing engagement and the get away afterward. After all, you would only have a small envelope in which to engage, and after that it may be months before you could meet again. If you were a weaker fleet you might try this, but I can’t see the other side playing along…and as was pointed out up thread, it’s not like they won’t see each other coming for days or weeks (or months) ahead of time.
I think what would most likely happen is that the fleets would jockey for position, but in the end they would most likely converge on the same vector, which would give them a lot more time to hammer each other. I see such battles as slugfests, where each side tries to pound the other into scrap using missiles at long range and them coming down to some kind of kinetic broadside armaments when they get in close.
Of course, the fact that I’m writing a book about this right now may be influencing my thought processes here. 
-XT
Something that I think also needs to be recognized is that if your enemy doesn’t want to engage, and knows are coming, they pretty much can get away, period. Unless you put yourself between them and something they care about: fuel, home world, mining colony, etc…
What I meant was that you wouldn’t necessarily become alerted to the presence of a ship until it was much closer than the absolute range it could be detected at. At sub-arc second resolution, the sky is BIG, and there’s a lot of stuff out there. Even if you were constantly scanning the sky for targets, you might not notice something that didn’t stand out. Take planet Fomalhaut-b as an example: the faintest of dots at the absolute limit of Hubble’s ability to distinguish from background clutter. Now we know it’s there, sure we can spot it. But it isn’t exactly conspicuous.
Well, it’s not my argument, but from the quoted site:
In other words: This system wouldn’t be very good to detect stars, etc. But it would, very quickly, scan the sky for moving infrared sources that move against the background. Since we are talking about Space Warfare, we can kinda assume that the civilization in question has mapped their surroundings rather thoroughly. So: any fast moving object which has an energy signature that distinguishes it from natural objects will be quickly detected.
The argument supposes, of course, that there is no significant traffic of human-made devices, but even in that case one can suppose that they could be tracked automatically by “traffic controllers” to have early warning systems for all kinds of problems. Which, actually, makes the detection of foreign objects even easier.
Just to reiterate, while all this speculation is nice and all, that’s all it is. What kind of space warfare are we talking about? The only thing plausible at this point is fighting over satellites in the earth’s orbit. Are we talking war versus a splinter space colony on say Mars? We’re sooooo far away from even beginning to think about placing colonies there that its nuts, much less a colony remotely capable of being a threat to the home world. Aliens? Hell if they can get here we may as well sue for peace or kiss our asses goodbye, simply being able to do that would make them vastly our superiors technologically to the point that any resistance would be irrelevant.
Space warfare between combatants not fighting over the Earth’s orbit is so, so, so far in the future that we may as well be Neanderthals arguing over how best to utilize a club. We’ve only reached space on the minimal levels 40some years ago. In deciding how space warfare will occur based on where we are now, one may as well have said that the trireme was the epitome of naval technology, and all conflict will be resolved by ramming and the oar.