Star Wars should not be your only source for trying to picture space battles. Expand your horizons a little bit and rent Moonraker for ideas on space marines.
For one thing, the fighters wouldn’t have wings and they wouldn’t bank as they turn. In outer space, with no atmosphere, there’s nothing to bank against.
For another, you wouldn’t see all the fighters in more-or-less the same plane, like they were in Revenge of the Sith. By “same plane”, I mean that the ships were all oriented pretty much the same way, as if they were sitting on a table top, or a three-d chess board.
For another, you’d be able to orient the ship and fire in any direction, regardless of which way your direction of travel is. Ever play the really old Asteroids video game? Get the ship moving left-to-right, then rotate the ship to fire up or down or even backwards. You can’t do that in a airplane, but it’s child’s play in a spaceship. Remember the scene in one of the Star Trek movies wherein Spock tells Kirk that the bad guy has a penchant for two-dimensional thinking? So what do the great three-dimensional thinkers do? Keeping the Enterprise oriented in the same way, they go “down”, as if they were in a submarine. Then when the bad guy’s ship passes, they “surface”, still keeping the same orientation (again, totally like what a submarine does)! How about if, once they’d “submerged”, they had pivoted the ship so that it was pointing 'up", and just shot the underbelly of the bad ship as it passed? Now that would have been using three dimensions effectively.
For another, battles would be slow. Airplane fighters can dodge around and make quick turns and attacks precisely because the atmosphere allows them to bank and change direction without additional fuel expenditure. In space, every change of direction would require an energy expenditure equal to the velocity change. That’s just not going to happen quickly.
I’m not sure how many people know this, but The Six Million Dollar Man is based on a reasonably “hard” science-fiction novel by Martin Caidin titled “Cyborg”, and the reason I bring this up is that Caidin wrote several novels about Steve Austin, the last of which has the rather understated title of “Cyborg IV”. In it, Austin flies a futuristicky (yet not entirely implausible) space-place called the Asp into orbit where he engages in a dogfight with a Soviet craft. The weapons of choice are pretty straightforward, with Caidin dismissing lasers as needing too much power, preferring instead standard guided missiles and a 13mm (.60 cal) machine gun. The fight takes place in the later chapters, though it’s by necessity brief since all that zipping around expends the Asp’s fuel pretty quickly.
For that reason, I expect a space fighter, if there ever were such a thing, would be spherical, with cameras and weapons ports and maneuvering rockets spaced evenly all over its surface; the pilot’s viewscreen would show the image from whichever camera detected an enemy’s presence – that would be computerized. The enemy would always look “straight ahead” from the pilot’s p.o.v.
The Air Force has been studying this for a long time. From the TV show (years ago) that explored the research the most unusual thing was the difficulty of changing orbits. As was pointed out, the only place you are going to find any enemy to shoot at is in orbit around something, so the studies I remember assumed orbiting (even if they were orbiting the sun) vessels. Anyway, making the proper orbit changes to get close to your enemy and in a position to fire your missile/gun was tricky and time consuming. Not hard calculations incidently, I understand most palm pilots are quite capable of doing all the calculations necessary. But you had to do things like slow down to overtake your enemy (drop to a lower orbit, overtake the target, speed up to slow down, etc), and you had to be real careful to not make an orbit change you wouldn’t have enough fuel to get out of. Like one that dipped too low into the atmosphere. Once you discovered and executed the proper orbit changes, the rest was kind of simple.
Here is something I read a while ago by someone who put a lot of thought into this very question. He bases his reasoning on physics and engineering facts that are likely to hold for any conceivable future technology.
I’d suggest reading a bunch of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories, especially the “Man-Kzin Wars” which go into the first violent conflict between humans and aliens. Many of those stories are written about times when human technology is not leaps and bounds ahead of what we can think of now. The biggest thing that humans have in those stories (that we don’t have now) is cheap, reliable fusion power plants (used to power all the spaceships zipping around). The main human weapons are fusion exhaust (the Kzinti speak of “The Human Lesson” which is that an efficient fusion engine is an efficient weapon) and hopped-up communication lasers. In contrast the Kzin are flying about with gravity polarizers that do zero to 0.8c on demand. Beam weapons (lasers) and physical projectiles (missiles and bullets) are their offense.
For a more immediate look at space warfare, “Footfall” by Niven and Jerry Pournelle winds up with a great big honkin’ battle in orbit around the earth. Humanity’s last stand against the alien invaders. Set in modern times, the weapons include missiles and atomic warheads along with a variety of random crap (grapeshot is pretty nasty when dealing with orbital velocities). They go into exactly how it’s done pretty thoroughly. Good stuff.
I remember reading a thread on the same thing on tank-net.org, and the general thoughts were that real space combat would probably:
[ul]
[li]take place over really huge distances with low delta-v[/li][li]take place near planets/moons or whatever other celestial bodies are at hand[/li][li]emphasize stealth and sensors if offensive weaponry has the upper hand.[/li][li]emphasize slugging match combat if defenses have upper hand.[/li][li]tend to utilize missiles and countermeasures instead of direct fire weapons[/li][li]take a LONG time to resolve due to the distances[/li][/ul]
There would be no battle in space. Space is so unbelivably mind bogglingly big that it would be almost impossible to fight in unless you posit some fantastical technologies. The closest analogy we have to space battles are modern submarine battles, only over more than 1,000,000 times more space.
First of all, how are you going to find anybody? Signal strength is inverse cubic proportial to distance and directly proportional to your antenna array. All you have to do is shut off your main engines and you can drop your total signal leakage down to a couple of hundred watts. Which means to anyone further away than parctically touching in space terms, your effectively lost in the noise. Active methods would also be about as useful as they are with submarines. Maybe if you have a planet thats littered with fusion generators, you might be able to muster up enough signal strength to actively search for a ship. Even then, it’s fairly trivial to defeat since you know the position of the searcher so you can just try and absorb everything and then send just the right amount of energy back. ship-on-ship battles are just never going to really happen because a ship can simply stay invisible whenever it wants.
Second of all, you have to look at the time scales. Assuming we don’t develop FTL or inertial gravity, theres a limit to how fast ships can maneouver. Probably about 1.5g sustained and up to around 7 - 10g peak if humans are onboard or up to about 30 - 50g for unmanned. Even at those speeds, it’s still going to take a few months to get from the earth to mars which means space battles are going to be really, really boring. By the time 2 armies have engaged, it’s likely that diplomats have already sorted things out on the ground.
Third, planets are vunerable. Planets are at an inherent disadvantage because they sit at the bottom of a gravity well, anything you shoot at a planet is going to have a huge amount of energy once it reaches the surface of the planet. Theres no real way of getting around this, so any planet can be wiped out by a single ship which is, remember undetectable.
In short, the type of space battle your likely to see is hit and run type raids, not huge armadas lining up in row with lots of dramatic laser fire everywhere.
I see small, tactical nukes on guided missiles. And anti-missile missiles (think Patriot and Phalanx systems).
Why small ones? Because all you need is to hit key, critical areas of a spacecraft: power generation, propulsion, communication, life support, etc., and the more ‘volume of heat’ you pack, the more heat you can burn with.
Based on the physics of space, they’d be slightly less spectacular than they are on Earth (especially with no atmospheric pressure to direct/resist the shock wave), but I see them being used. Even if they render the hull relatively useless due to the leftover ‘fallout’ (does it really ‘fall out’ in space?), one could theoretically plunder the hull for what it’s worth, and leave the enemy adrift and dead in space.
Tripler
“I say we nuke 'em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. . .”
I would expect that the biggest problem is life support to begin with, most airbreathing fighters have an endurance thats limited by fuel only ,and can be extended with aerial refueling. An airforce figher flying a bar cap mission , might stay on station for 2 to 3 hours , while any sort of space vehicle would be on station for days at a time.
Most likely you might see something along the lines of David Webers Lacs , rather than Babylon 5’s starfurys. Combat would be defended stations in a fixed location, and would probably resemble Napoleonic sailing warfare. Mines are cheap , and enemy ships might be worth more to be boarded rather than destroyed outright.
Declan
There’s also nothing strategic about empty ocean, yet the world has seen plenty of naval battles.
First think of a non-combat situation, and more of a disaster situation. The Big Scary Thing is on a collision course with earth, it will strike in 300 days unless we Do Something Now. Run through the scenarios and then replace the Big Scary Thing with The Bad Guys. It also depends on what kind of combat we’re talking about… are we capturing ships, are we securing supply routes, are we occupying space stations? Are we blowing things out of the sky, or trying to drop munitions down the exhaust pipe that the bad guys forgot about?
I imagine it would have a lot of common with the final battle of Star Wars IV (or Star Wars I, depending on the numbering). Maneuver units would leverage planets, moons, or even stars to manipulate the lines of fire. Stealth, intelligence, and electronic warfare would be important. Logistics, particularly propulsion fuel supply, would be very important.
For small precision targets, you might have agile fighter-bombers. They’d have to be deployed from long range, in large numbers, somewhat like a shotgun. In fact it would require strategies where you would use a large launch platform with a large power source to fire them like projecties at the target. The bombers would enable their portable power in the vicinity of the objective for maneuvering purposes, but maneuver would have to be at a minimum. They would have to calculate carefully to have enough fuel to put them on a capture course with a second logistics base, or a planet large enough to slingshot them back to their base of origin. And of course space fighters would have to have a self-destruct mechanism for the ones that don’t have enough remaining fuel to get on a homebound course.
As far as weapons, I think our good old friend the bullet will continue to have a long and illustrious career… perhaps in different shapes, sizes, and with different modifications, but still a variation of the high-speed chunk of dense metal that has wreaked destruction on armies for centuries.
Of all the attempts at simulation out there that I’ve played, I’ve always found the old game Warhead to have scientifically reasonable plausible physics and space battles.
With today’s tech, air-to-air warfare is usually quite boring from a cinematic point-of-view. During the air war over the Bekaa valley in 1982, many Israeli pilots basically told their computers: “See that blip on the radar screen? Make it go away.” And that was it. A lot of Syrian pilots didn’t even know a missile was coming at them.
So no “Star Wars” close-up dogfighting in the future.
I agree that long before an enemy platform could be seen with the naked eye…even as a point of light…either you will have killed it or it will have killed you.
Now, about those fusion rockets from Known Space. The trouble is they won’t work. Sure, it would be great to power your rocket by fusion power. You’d get a much more energetic reaction and a much higher delta-v. The trouble is that you still have to blast reaction mass out the rocket to go anywhere. Even with extremely energetic reactions you can only carry so much reaction mass, which means that your total delta-v is still a fixed quantity. You can’t just turn on your fusion rocket and constant-boost at 1 gee for days, you’ll still run out of fuel.
Oh, and I partially take back my comment about death in microseconds. As I see it, there are three ways to die. In microseconds if something hits you at orbital speeds. In hours when your platform’s life support is destroyed and you’re sitting in a space suit waiting for your oxygen to run out. And…in months, where your ship is pretty much intact, you have plenty of oxygen and power, but you don’t have enough delta-v to make it back to any friendly resupply point.
The other thing about speeds. Even with really powerful fusion rockets your orbital speed (both orbiting around a planet and orbiting around the sun) is very large compared to the amount of delta-v your ship is capable of. You can’t think in terms of turning on your rocket and flying to your destination, you have to think in terms of firing your rocket to alter your orbit so that your new orbit and the orbit of the place you want to go intersect at some time and place in the future. Everything near any planet or sun or moon isn’t going to travel in a straight line, it’s going to travel in conic section…either a hyperbola, an ellipse, or a parabola.
I also don’t see the point of cliché space battles. I think you can forget manned flights – that would be amazingly expensive, plus a huge waste of talent. Capital ships would be the same, except even more expensive and vulnerable.
As with the others, I’d go with missiles. I see everything being missiles and if the target is nice and chunky then they’d be tipped with nuclear warheads.
I imagine the only type of military space craft would be relatively small orbital platforms with large armaments that could play either a defensive or offensive role (lasers could come into play as anti-missiles). If the aliens come down for us then a salvo of warheads will make them think twice. If their defensive capabilities are such that this is pointless then any type of spacecraft we would launch at them would seem equally useless.
If the Martians decide to get uppity then our platforms could launch missiles at theirs and then we could teach them a lesson by starting to target their cities; we could also invade them, although the idea of invading an entire planet seems ludicrous to me unless the target is more of a small colony, in which case I don’t think they’d have a massive defense system or much of a military to begin with.
With current or foreseeable technology, space battles aren’t going to happen. We’re lucky to get out of our own gravity well, much less go galavanting around the solar system. It takes our fastest unmanned and tiny probes years to get to the next planet. Anything massive enough to be useful would take a long long time to get anywhere.
The missile weapons mentioned by JasonFin’s source might be useful if we could get them close enough to another ship to do anything. Reaction-mass is a limiting factor even if you throw them in the right direction to get them started before turning on their motors. If you throw them first, then the ship has to take the reaction to that into account in maneuvering, eating up more of the ship’s fuel to save on missile fuel. I can see missiles being useful mostly for planetary or asteroid-based defense since you don’t have to worry about counter-reactions.
You still need a lot of lead-time and tons of luck to get them in the right place at the right time, and it would be immensely helpful if the missiles were based somewhere where the gravity well was less of a limit than Earth’s; like an asteroid, Earth’s moon, or even Mars. This is why Heinlein was so adamant about getting stuff off of Earth’s surface. Less fighting with gravity means less energy you have to spend getting your stuff moving, and that in turn means that you can get it moving faster and by extension farther from your starting point. It also means you can afford to throw more mass around, which means that your weapons can be more destructive or more numerous than those from inside a bigger gravity well.
Unguided weapons are all but useless. Trying to hit a ship with even a bunch of high-velocity pellets at the distances we’re talking about would be like trying to hit a bird in Africa with a handful of sand. Discounting gravity, by the time it reaches the bird, the bird could have flown several kilometers from where it was when you threw the sand and the grains would have spread so far that your chances of hitting the bird with even a single grain had it stayed in exactly the same spot the whole time are so low that they are probably equivalent to winning the lottery every single time it’s drawn over a period of years.
If we could accelerate mass weapons to a high enough velocity, say a significant fraction of c, they might be more useful. Any hit would be a kill. The problems with that are: 1) Hitting anything. You’ve still got the targeting problem, though it’s much more likely you’ll hit something if your mass is moving that fast. 2) What happens when you miss? What does your relativistic rock hit if it doesn’t hit your target? 3) Getting it up to that velocity is unreasonable with current technology. Particle accelerators use as much power as a decent sized city to get a few particles of mass moving at near-light velocities. Moving a kilogram of mass would be exponentially more demanding and who knows what negative side effects for the Earth would be if we had the capability and were stupid enough to try it on our home rock. I have no idea what that mass moving at, say, 0.7-0.8c would do to the launching facility and the ground underneath the facility, or what effect it would have as it moved through the atmosphere. (Physicists, correct me if I’m wrong that relativistic effects would do some interesting things in a case like this).
We just don’t have powerful enough beam or particle weapons to be worth talking about, though if we did they would be a lot more useful than either mass weapons or missiles. The USS Clueless page covers problems with those much more thoroughly than I could hope to.
Even discounting all of these difficulties, postulating a decent form of propulsion that doesn’t require (literally) tons of reaction mass, that is capable of high delta v maneuvers, sensors that can see things more than a several 100,000 km away with good resolution, smart rugged missiles that can reach a “nearby” target in reasonable time with enough delta v to change course when they get close to the target, and a way to get all of those things at least into orbit or hopefully on a moon base, you’re still going to have battles that take years between shots. It could take a generation before a skirmish was completed.
Like Shalmanese pointed out, planets are very vulnerable. Assuming anyone got even close to Earth, like the distance of Mars’ orbit or so, all they have to do is chuck a sizable rock at us. If they’re being nice, they’ll radio us to let us know what they did, if not then in a couple of years a nice large mass impacts Earth at high velocity. Wave b-bye to 99.9 percent of life on the planet. We might not even see it coming, especially if they throw it at us from “above” or “below” the ecliptic, and we wouldn’t be able to do much about it even if we did see it because moving something big requires a lot better propulsion systems than anything we’ve got or could come up with in less than a year lead-time.
A few science fiction authors I’ve read who deal with some of these issues are:
C.J. Cherryh, even though she has a kind of jump technology for interstellar distances and unrealistically effective drives, writes using real life physics for her battle sequences. She takes into account time dilation at near c velocities, inertia, communication and sensor lag, and acceleration effects on the crew and ship structure.
Joan D. Vinge did some short stories that dealt with similar difficulties. I think they’re collected in the Heaven Chronicles anthology.
While there is extremely advanced tech for propulsion in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series (a gravity field drive that doubles as a kind of shield), he also uses real-world physics. The vast distances that would be present, time lag in sensors and communication, reaction-mass limits on rockets, guidance system problems, and gravity-assist maneuvers are covered.
Clarke and Heinlein stayed mostly in the realm of reality, which is why they don’t deal with any space battles, though they do have stories about dealing with massive rocks on a collision course with our planet.
Forget about looking to fiction to try and find a realistic depiction of space. Fiction, above all, needs to be engaging and a realistic space battle, even if it were possible would simply not make good fiction. Every competant Sci-Fi writer worth his salt quickly realised this fact and either tried to get around it by envisioning new science such as Faster than Light travel and anti-grav or just plain avoided the subject altogether. It’s not a matter of technology or tactics, it’s purely a matter of elementary mathematics.
It’s like trying to figure out whether “The incredible shrinking man” was more realistic than “Honey, I shrunk the kids”. The fact that such a beam is simply not possible under current physics means they are both equally unrealistic.
Shotguns. Kinetic energy would be the big killer, I think. Come at an orbiting vehicle from a different orbit, then throw a cloud of pebbles in front of it. A pebble will go right through a spaceship if it’s going 30,000 mph.
That’s what I think you’d see. Computer-controlled killers that fly in opposing orbits, and use precise timing to fire gravel in front of the approaching vessel or satellite. Space battles would happen at such speeds that the two vehicles would just flash by each other in a bliink.