If two real-life armies were to design space fighters to use against other space fighters, how would they work? What kind of acceleration and turn ratio could we expect? What kind of weapons would they use? What would the battles be like? Would it be anything like dogfighting in Earth’s atmosphere?
[sub]Why yes, I just got back from Revenge of the Sith. Why do you ask?[/sub]
Lots of drones go kill each other. Many die. The ones with the most drones left declare victory.
For one thing the battles would be silent.
But that would make a very dull movie wouldn’t it ?
I would think high caliber bullets would be cheap, accurate, and really mess up a space craft in a hurry.
Maybe they could coat the hull in kevlar to repell bullets?
Yeah, sounds simple enough for drones to fight our outer space laser gun battles for us. But what happens when the drones get tired of doing all of the dying? What’s going to stop them from turning on us, their masters and creators, those who have given them their very lives?
… which is why we’d use drones and not “droids,” cyborgs, or robots. 
Of course, the problem with drones is that they need to be controlled remotely, which gives us the ol’ speed o’ c bugaboo. Once you get away from terrestrial distance limitations, the speed of your communications with your drones becomes a problem. The moon is a mere 1.2 light seconds from Earth, but even that means nearly a three second round-trip for telemetry and instructions.
The scale also introduces lots of other logistical problems. The lack of air resistance means that you can be rather economical with fuel (once your fighting vehicles are in orbit) – fire your engines directly opposite to the direction you want to go, and then coast! However, if you’re using projectile weapons (like, space-going versions of guns), every shot imparts a different vector to your ship. Unless you’re firing absolutely-directly behind your vessel, it will change the heading, even if only by a minute amount. Fire enough ammunition this way, and it will have an appreciable affect (depending, of course, on the size of your fighting vehicle).
I don’t think it would look anything like Star Wars. If energy weapons (lasers) become practical, maneuverability wont save you. Guided missiles would probably be the weapon of choice. Whoever shoots first, wins. Stealth and decoys would improve survivability, as would passive means of detecting and targeting the enemy. It would be more like submarine to submarine combat. Detect the target, compute a firing solution, and launch a missile.
Way too many imponderables to say definitively. Do they need atmospheric capability? What advantages have been made in propulsion, gravity, and life support? What kind of stealth is available?
I suspect that missiles with a decent AI would almost always be superior to fighter craft in ship-to-ship engagements because you could get higher accelerations and carry a higher payload without having to worry about a life support system. Fighters would be most useful at a far enough range from the mother ship that drones couldn’t be controlled sufficiently fast enough due to light speed restrictions. Which could be anywhere from a few thousand miles to a few AUs, depending on the quality of the AI available and the mission.
First of all, what role do your fighters play? I assume that you’ll have the equivalent of bombers that would be going after the capital ships, and other fighters attempting to keep them out of missile launching radius. You’d probably also have the equivalent of AWACS vessels that would be lighting up the ether trying to locate stealthed fighters.
The only way you’d have actual dogfights is if there were great advances in propulsion technology that would allow the fighters to evade missiles fired at great distances. In today’s technology, I doubt there’s any way that a fighter could carry enough fuel to evade a missile launched. (A space fighter would be much less nimble than an Earth-based fighter because it has to carry oxidizer for the fuel, and life support for the pilot). Even if it could, you could keep lobbing missiles at it until its fuel is exhausted and it’s a sitting duck.
So one possible guess is that future space dogfights would be incredibly boring. You’d sit there drifting in space watching a screen until you saw an enemy fighter. You’d launch missiles and wait. If they hit, you go back to your crossword. If not, rinse and repeat. (I doubt you’d use actual bullets. Even at short range, you have to spray a lot of bullets to bring down a plane. At a few tens or hundreds of miles, you’d have to spray a lot of bullets to fill up the volume significantly.)
The only reason I can think for an actual one-on-one dogfight ala BSG or SW would be if missile defenses were very, very good, either due to stealth, ECM, or powerful anti-missile guns (laser or projectile). In which case, the battles would still be a lot different than in an atmosphere. A ship that’s accelerating would keep increasing its velocity to the point where attempting to turn would require a lengthy burn. A ship could pivot on its axis to shot at a pursuing vessel (using manuvering thrusters), because lack of atmosphere means that you don’t care much about the orientation of your fighter. In any case, I still doubt that you’d ever actually see the other fighter (except for its reaction drive and weapon fire). Probably most conflicts would occur at a significant range and at relatively high closing velocities.
Ah, to summarize, my guess is that space battles would be pretty non cinemagenic. Lots of slow drifting through space punctuated by missile fire and explosions.
If a spacecraft shot bullets, wouldn’t that propel the spacecraft backwards or start it spinning? You’d have to use up fuel to counteract that.
Probably the thing to use would be some sort of missile that gets released, then it fires up and heads off to it’s target. You can use a variety of warheads, too.
I don’t know what kind of a kick a laser powerful enough to inflict damage on a hull would have, if any. I think they’d be on the delicate or vulnerable side - easily reduced to floating junk.
whoops, I see this has been covered! must post faster.
What would it be like? The game Asteriods…with more players.
Slight hijack…
Any SciFi novels taken this aspect? Most everything I’ve read has detection equipment that is far, far ahead of what we have.
They wouldn’t move and fly around like in Star Wars, unless some kind of new nuclear reactor was invented. They would be stuck to fight in their orbits, moving relativley little. It takes a huge amount of energy to change directions and accelerate compared to the amount of fuel that current spaceships carry. Remember the Columbia disaster? Even if they found out about the damaged wing they still didn’t have enough fuel to go into the higher orbit that ISS was in.
The most logical weapon would be a laser. That would also be a problem now because the smallest laser weapon is the size of a jetliner.
There was an IMHO thread not exactly, but very close to this in the past that you might find useful
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=277545&highlight=space+combat
If we’re using the known laws of physics, I’d wager it’d be two big ships far apart, trying to shine flashlights (actually, 1920s-style Death Rays) on each other.
No fancy maneuvers, no visible beam weapons, no backlash from missile/bullet/slugthrower kickback. Turn on your Big-Ass Honkin’ Killa Beam and try to spotlight the other guy before he does the same to you.
Space also allows for true 3D maneuvering, so you’d have to worry about attacks from above and below.
Read **The Mote In God’s Eye ** for an example of “true to physics” space warfare. Well, as true as you can get with SciFi. 
Some interesting concepts there. Another sample to check out would be Babylon 5.
If you think about it, there is no reason to have a true space battle because there is nothing strategic about empty space. A “space blockade” is impossible, save for immediately around the objective. All real space battles should be orbital battles – most often just trying to establish space superiority for the true battle which will take place on the objective itself.
Note also, that unless there is warp technology (which is probably impossible) space battles will probably only take place between forces both based in the same star system. The distances between star systems are so large that an attack fleet would be obsolete by the time it reaches its objective.
Assumption: we follow the known laws of physics. That means no artificial gravity, no anti-gravity, no reactionless drives, no space warps, etc.
That means that ships must maneuvar via rockets, solar sails, or gravitational slingshot. And the most important thing then is not acceleration or turn radius (no such thing as turn radius in interplanetary space), but rather delta-v. That is, the maxiumum amount your ship can change velocity without getting more fuel. For rocket ships, this is a fixed number, known in advance. And since rocket ships must haul around all their rocket fuel with them, this number is generally pretty small since adding more rocket fuel just means that most of your fuel is used up changing the velocity of the fuel itself.
So compared to the orbital speeds, most ships won’t be able to maneuvar much…they can make lots of small velocity changes, but only a few big ones. Use up all or most of your fuel, and suddenly you have no way back home. And sending rescue might be impossible, because the rescue ships are going to have to match your orbit yet still have enough fuel to return to base. Not easy.
As for weapons, missiles, bullets, lasers and particle weapons seem likely. All mostly computerized. Defenses would be AAA missiles like the AEGIS systems in the wet navy, also all mostly computerized, plus random firing of attitude jets to prevent the enemy from easily putting a golden BB in your orbit. Probably combat would be mostly sitting around wondering if your weapons hit the other guy, then death in microseconds if you guess wrong.
Bullets aren’t “repelled” by kevlar. The bullets hit the surface, and the kevlar absorbs the impact. Arrows would penetrate the armor anyway, due to how arrows work, and how kevlar doesn’t, and I think it would not be that hard to design a mechanical, automated bow, or crossbow. We allready have arrow cartriges, (I vaguely recall) for use in crosbows.