Big space warships-do they actually make any sense? [Archive]

Oslecamo

2009-01-13, 04:31 PM

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 04:37 PM

Lay waste to a planet might be stretching it. Just how much power can you fit into one ship? Even direct antimatter warheads might be difficult. Hence, you need a whole fleet of fighters, not single ones. And a ship to service them all.

Size constraints mean for devastation purposes, ship might need to be quite big.

I do think warships might not be used much vs each other- carriers and troop transports rather than battleships.

Nerd-o-rama

2009-01-13, 04:44 PM

1-Offense capacity grows faster than defense capacity.I'm not going to call you out-and-out wrong, I'm just going to say that this is 100% contradictory to all common military doctrine. Defense and offense increase in parity with each other as technology develops. Invent swords? Next comes armor. Guns? Bullet-proof vests. Tanks? Helicopters. Guided Missiles? Chaff/Flares/Stealth. That's just how things work.

So how do you cross the big space ocean smart guy?
This is where the motherships come. Big space ships with repair docks, supplies and everything needed to survive in outer space. They have some self defense weapons, but if you need to shoot them, you're doing it wrong. Motherships stay well behind the frontline, hidden behind some planet, sending their fighters and other small vessels to intercept threats and do the dirty job. Man, it's a good thing there's no need for any naval units other than fighters and aircraft carriers. Think of all the money we can save not building screen craft in the future! After all, it's silly not to overspecialize, right?

Thinking about it, I do sort of agree. Even a modern naval engagement wouldn't be big battleships shelling each other; even now, fleets are built around aircraft carriers, because delivering ordnance indirectly by aircraft (force projection) is more effective than firing missiles or shells directly. However, you can't just have carriers and fighter/bombers. There's plenty of niche for craft built around defending the mothership, and for defensive purposes, it's better to put a lot of guns on a big hull than a lot of small hulls with one gun each, since big hulls can take hits better.

Under the modern/mothership paradigm, the primary goal of space warfare will be destruction of the carrier, since that's the enemy's supply lines. Therefore, there's going to be a lot of emphasis on defending your own carrier from enemy fighters. That's where "frigates" and "destroyers" and the like come in - floating gun platforms to intercept enemy attacks.

BRC

2009-01-13, 04:49 PM

Dont forget that commercially, Big ships are better, they have more cargo capacity. Therefore, there will be more civilian facilities tooled to build big ships, when war comes, it's easier to refit civilian facilities.

Telonius

2009-01-13, 04:52 PM

Depending on the technology available, it might make sense for a couple of reasons.

1. Gravity. Big ships mean more mass, more mass means less power spent generating artificial gravity.

2. Phlebotinum takes up a lot of space. You need super-duper interstellar fuel to travel the galaxy. You've got to hold it somehow.

3. Those darn thermal exhaust ports. Motherships are all well and good, but they have to be extremely well-defended. If your fleet is off wreaking havoc on Rigel 7, and the mothership is a light-year away, what's to stop some sneaky rebels from intercepting your communications and dropping out of hyperspace right on top of the mothership? The motherships will have to be able to withstand a sustained assault for at least the time it takes to recall the attack force. This will probably mean that either the mothership itself has to be armored more heavily, or that it has to travel among several other medium-sized warships that are capable of fending off smaller stunt fighters, or both. If the mothership divides its attack capacity (i.e. keeps a bunch of its own smaller fighters in the hangar), then it has to be that much bigger to accommodate the defenses. Otherwise, the Rigel 7 force will be stranded when the rebels knock out the mothership.

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 04:54 PM

Illiterate Scribe

2009-01-13, 04:54 PM

So how do you cross the big space ocean smart guy?

This is where the motherships come. Big space ships with repair docks, supplies and everything needed to survive in outer space. They have some self defense weapons, but if you need to shoot them, you're doing it wrong. Motherships stay well behind the frontline, hidden behind some planet, sending their fighters and other small vessels to intercept threats and do the dirty job.

This is essentially the BSG approach, except that they do go into combat, or at least are prepared to.

The Pegasus is essentially a huge aircraft carrier, with limited repair/construction facilities. All of its fighter can carry nuclear weapons, which are also deliverable by the ship itself.

I'd disagree that you'd be able to hide your carriers like you think you would - you'd end up having to fly your fighters a very long way in order to engage while keeping the hub out of range, which would mean that they'd need a big amount of fuel if they wanted to do much maneuvering en route, or even slow down when you get there. You'd also risk your fighter cover being too far away when you need it to defend yourself.

Oslecamo

2009-01-13, 05:00 PM

I'm not going to call you out-and-out wrong, I'm just going to say that this is 100% contradictory to all common military doctrine. Defense and offense increase in parity with each other as technology develops. Invent swords? Next comes armor. Guns? Bullet-proof vests. Tanks? Helicopters. Guided Missiles? Chaff/Flares/Stealth. That's just how things work.[QUOTE=Nerd-o-rama;5635559]

You've just proved that the best defense it's a good ofense. You don't wait for the tanks to come to you, you send your helicopters to blow them up first. You don't wait for the missiles to impact with you, you shoot down the missiles before that.

So, you're actually suporting my point. Unless you're saying something that can be taken down with a basic rifle(helicopter) yet packs excellent firepower is classified as something more defensive than ofensive, in wich case I'll need to ask you to explain yourself better.

[QUOTE=Nerd-o-rama;5635559]
Man, it's a good thing there's no need for any naval units other than fighters and aircraft carriers. Think of all the money we can save not building screen craft in the future! After all, it's silly not to overspecialize, right?

We're doing that right now. What was the last time you saw a ship to ship battle in large scale? Fighters on the other hand are used left and right, and if you don't have them, you're pretty much screwed. Also, one can have several kinds of fighters with diferent weapons and equipment for diferent situations.

Illiterate Scribe:Well, your targets will normally be planets whose position you can calculate and thus expend minimum fuel to get there. On the other hand, if you're going after an enemy fleet wich is in the middle of nowhere...Well, in that case you just shoot your guided stealth atomic missiles and watch the fireworks.

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 05:06 PM

Innis Cabal

2009-01-13, 05:14 PM

You've just proved that the best defense it's a good ofense. You don't wait for the tanks to come to you, you send your helicopters to blow them up first. You don't wait for the missiles to impact with you, you shoot down the missiles before that.

So, you're actually suporting my point. Unless you're saying something that can be taken down with a basic rifle(helicopter) yet packs excellent firepower is classified as something more defensive than ofensive, in wich case I'll need to ask you to explain yourself better.

You actually missed his point. All of those systems were built to defend against the thing that comes before it. Chaff was created to protect against missles, no offense there. So he's actually countering your point.

Armor was made to protect against weapons that could harm flesh, where is the offensive ability in the armor? None, its strictly to protect against actual weapons. Helicoptors sure....they have offensive abilities, but its really the only example there. I would have used RPG's or Anti-tank rounds as opposed to the helicoptor, but even then, its an offensive defense all around.

Oslecamo

2009-01-13, 05:14 PM

Tanks, Warthogs, etc do use armour. Sometimes the ability to take a few hits and keep going is needed.

Yes, but you don't try to make tanks the size of villages, nor do you try to outfit said tanks with dual oversized cannons in each side.

Innis Cabal:You know what? When the russian captured some RPG deposits from the germans, they imediatily started using them to blow up german defensive fortifications and allow infantry to make their way trough buildings easier. So much for defense

Anti tank rounds similarly also can easily be turned to ofense, when you use them to pierce trough the enemy armored bunkers.

Chaff is the only one wich is indeed defensive, but it's probably also the less effective at it's job, when compared to helicopters, RPGs and anti tank rounds

So, one can see that we're moving towards more and more ofense. Specially when your suposed "armor" is killing the oponent whitout need of other weapons, mind you.

BRC

2009-01-13, 05:14 PM

Storm Bringer

2009-01-13, 05:15 PM

Innis Cabal

2009-01-13, 05:16 PM

Yes, but you don't try to make tanks the size of villages, nor do you try to outfit said tanks with dual oversized cannons in each side.

Because they are impractical and take alot of resources. The same might not be true for large ships that need to cross vast distances.

Nerd-o-rama

2009-01-13, 05:19 PM

I believe I muddled my point with the tanks and helicopters example. My point was that any offense can be trumped by some defense - whenever a weapon is created, someday soon after, a defensive technology is created that will be at least moderately effective against it. That's just how technology works. The only exception that comes to mind is thermonulcear devices, and even then, it's fairly easy to armor a small area against them and their ensuing radioactive fallout - it's just that their area of effect is too big to protect a whole city from them.

And none of the examples I gave for anti-guided-missile tech involved shooting them down, so I don't know what you're talking about there.

And I did edit in an admission that what you're describing sounds an awful lot like modern naval doctrine - force projection emanating from a carrier. However, I believe you ignore large screen ships at the carriers' peril - there's only so much space a fighter screen can cover relative to the ship that launched it.

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 05:21 PM

the "mothership" is more a mobile space station than a fighting ship.

But I do think it misses the point that the ship itself needs to have something or its helpless. Space is 3D- fighter "screens" can be manuevered around.

Carrier fleets never rely on aircraft alone (maybe its subs, maybe its destroyers, but there are always ships protecting them as well as fighters)

KnightDisciple

2009-01-13, 05:22 PM

Yeah. I mean, it's not like we have destroyers to help take care of submarines and small watercraft, or frigates for anti-aircraft/anti-missile duty. Or even a ship or two dedicated to long-range missiles. Not to mention how we won't need dedicated repair/refuel/rearm ships.
After all, that's totally now how we do it now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_battle_group#CSG_composition). /sarcasm
Ok, sorry. But seriously. If the primary ship of such a fleet is a carrier analogue, one of two things will happen. There will be lots of ship types, like we have today. Or it will be a hybrid vessel, as seen in Battlestars or Imperial Star Destroyers.

Edit: Ninja'ed!

BRC

2009-01-13, 05:22 PM

Might Air Warfare be a better analogue to space battles than Sea Warfare?
Perhaps, but not quite, tonnage on planes is limited by the lift that can be produced, if a plane is too heavy, it plummets. On a ship, though Tonnage is still limited, it isn't nearly as limited, a ship's engines only need to move it forward, they don't need to move it fast enough to keep it aloft.

estradling

2009-01-13, 05:26 PM

Big ships with guns...

That is an easy answer. Ask yourself this... What does the big old mothership do if all its fighters are away and finds itself attacked?

Would any general not put guns on such important vessels? T

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 05:26 PM

anything that has to operate in both space and atmosphere (ground attack space fighters) would, I think, tend to be on the fragile side. Fuel and engines and weapons and heat shielding, how much is left over for armour?

Not sure if same would apply to big ships constructed in space.

BRC

2009-01-13, 05:27 PM

Oslecamo

2009-01-13, 05:35 PM

Illiterate Scribe

2009-01-13, 05:35 PM

Illiterate Scribe:Well, your targets will normally be planets whose position you can calculate and thus expend minimum fuel to get there. On the other hand, if you're going after an enemy fleet wich is in the middle of nowhere...Well, in that case you just shoot your guided stealth atomic missiles and watch the fireworks.

What are you guiding them with? It's hard to have both stealth and guided, on account of the enormous great torch/maser/whatever you'll have to shine on something to designate it as the target of your missile. If you're using internal guidance, you'll still have a problem on account of the fact that you'll need to be launching these things at tremendous range.

warty goblin

2009-01-13, 05:35 PM

Ok, one thing I noticed from certain threads is that unlike most sci-fi factors, people actually believe in the near future we'll actually have big space faring warships and massive space battles and the whole idea is very viable and perfectly logic. You can't go wrong with big armor and guns right? Instead, of, let's say, unstable psionic guys and unarmored laser sword waving precons.

Well there are ways to get big things to move through space, and armor and guns exist. Precons and laser swords don't. So yeah...

So I create this thread to discuss the matter. First I'll write down my main compains, then I await your answers and opinions on the subject, to see if it's just my impression or not.

Offense capacity grows faster than defense capacity.
If we take a look at our military story, we see that weapons get stronger faster than armors get ticker.

Millenias ago you had to get there close and personal to destroy something. Then we got the spear. Then the bow. Then siege engines. Gunpowder. Atomic bomb. And you can now kill someone who's on the other side of the planet, unless they digged several hundred meters below an hard rock cover.

Armors, on the other hand... We have developed some nice ceramics and alloys, but they aren't gonna save you from a rocket to the face, or even armor piercing bullets.

This isn't a big suprise, since by Science it's much easier to destroy something than keeping it not altered. When the unstopable force meets the immovable object, the imovable object is the one actually screwed. Even water can grind down the hardest rocks to dust. What to say of our super atomic lasers then?

Thus, it's ridiculous to think that in the distant future, for some bizzarre reasons defense technology sudenly got a jump out of nowhere while offense techonology got stranded. Those giant very expensive warships are gonna sink very fast once they start taking hits, no matter how good are their shields and armor.

There are some major problems with your analysis. For starters I can think of several periods in history where armor technology was sufficiently in advance of weapon technology to make it damn near impossible to kill anything. 14th and 15th century plate armor comes to mind, as do some of the bigger World War II era battleships, which could take obscene amounts of punishment. It took more aircraft to sink Yamato than the Japanese launched against Pearl Harbor. Two battleships and a couple heavy cruisers were unable to actually sink Bismarck, just pound her into a hulk. Tirpitz was just about blown in half and survived. There is definite precedence for ships being durable as all hell.

These are only passive defenses. Active defenses are a very real consideration in space combat, far more even than they are in sea combat. There are limits to what you can do with them, but the bigger the ship, the more active defenses you can put on them. A lot of these, such as space going equivalents to something like the PHALANX Close In Weapons System, double very nicely for shooting at lighter craft.

Big isn't best.
So you may claim, we still need big warships to carry big weapons, right? Wrong. Again, our military deveolpment shows we can pack more punch in smaller weapons as time goes on. A small fighter will be able to pack enough firepower to lay waste to a planet.

Also, being smaller, he will cost less resources, and have an easier time hiding from the enemy, sliping trough defenses, evading attacks and taking covers from asteroids and other stuff.

Big warships hoever will have insane costs, be much easier to spot and to hit and nowhere to hide behind, plus much harder to maneuver.
That depends on the type of weapon you use. Even if you use something like a missile, where you can get reasonable yield from a small launch platform, a bigger ship will be able to throw more bigger missiles than an equivalent tonnage of smaller ships. (This is pretty easy to see- assuming both types use only the bare minimum of hull thickness, the big ship will have more volume to devote to weapons storage and launch capabilities). If you use guns, its even more lopsided, since bigger ships can mount more, bigger guns with many times the firepower.

Also, it's space. There's nowhere to hide. Stealth doesn't work for crap (without doing very unseemly things to some laws of physics). Asteroids are so few and far between designing a warship to make use of them is more or less equivalent to designing a wet-water ship to make use of the strategic cover offered by blue whales. They will see you, no matter your size. Dodging is also right out, any missile will be more maneuverable than a ship is, no matter the size, because it can pull higher accelerations than a ship can without turning its tender, fleshy occupants into red paste, and the very premise of a gun based warship favors larger vessels over smaller to begin with.

Maneuverability is another red herring in space. All that matters is how much force your engine can generate, and how massive you are, since F=ma, a=m/f, and acceleration is what matters in space.

So how do you cross the big space ocean smart guy?
This is where the motherships come. Big space ships with repair docks, supplies and everything needed to survive in outer space. They have some self defense weapons, but if you need to shoot them, you're doing it wrong. Motherships stay well behind the frontline, hidden behind some planet, sending their fighters and other small vessels to intercept threats and do the dirty job[/QUOTE]

Motherships are seldom a desirable military solution, particularly in a region as large and barren as space. If, as you say, large ships will be able to be destroyed by smaller ships with contemptuous ease, there's no reason for me to ever shoot at your smaller ships. I'll just blow some big holes in the mother ship, and be on my merry, leaving all your little fighter craft to die of exposure. If larger ships are reasonably resistant, I'll build a bunch of those, use their durability to avoid taking major losses, blow the crap out of the mothership with my bigger guns, then leave the light craft to die of exposure.

Again, there's no place to hide in space, and camping out next to a planet is stupid. Planets are, if not the most valuable thing in space, the second or third most. Leaving your mothership there just makes it target numero uno on my 'to nuke' list, since that way I eliminate the long term threat of your fighters and gain orbital control of the planet, all in one go.

hamishspence

2009-01-13, 05:35 PM

small fighters, laying waste- maybe they do it from orbit, but sometimes that isn't enough, you have to get up close.

scsimodem

2009-01-13, 05:36 PM

Tanks, Warthogs, etc do use armour. Sometimes the ability to take a few hits and keep going is needed.

generally though, at the aircraft level, the armoured, heavily gunned ones don't turn their guns on each other, but on the ground.

Might Air Warfare be a better analogue to space battles than Sea Warfare?

No, sea warfare really is the better analog. Modern aircraft are small, cramped, and don't carry a whole lot of supplies. Only large super bombers are capable of missions that would be considered 'long range.' The space between stars is vast and these small craft would need fuel, repair, resupply, etc., not to mention the need of the pilot to stop and stretch.

I really don't see how this is going to go. It's impossible to know what the future will hold. It's pretty stupid to think nothing will come along to render the carrier, screen ships, small craft model obsolete (there was a time when men thought blocks of rank and file infantry would be the way to wage war for eternity). I think the best model for space combat, as a function of what we know, is Mass Effect. For those of you unfamiliar with the game and its world, a massive gun was invented that is pretty much a superweapon. It can only be carried by enormous ships called dreadnoughts. They're so important that the galactic council limits the number of dreadnoughts each race is allowed to possess. The dreadnoughts are, of course, heavily armored and have elaborate point defenses. The remainder of any naval force is comprised of ships designed to attack dreadnoughts and ships designed to keep those ships from doing so.

As far as offense always outstripping defense, you're dreaming. It's an endless cycle. In WWI, the tank became the new mounted knight, pouring through enemy lines while bullets bounced off. Since then, it's been a race between anti-tank weapons and tank armor. Our current tank armor is actually capable of withstanding a heavy RPG barrage.

Even your starting point is wrong. Full plate armor was not more effective against the weapons of the day than anything we have today. If anything, full plate is less effective than a tank, since anti-tank weapons are expensive and one-shot. During the time of full plate, many weapons were made specifically to kill people wearing it. Lances, specialized spears, hammers, picks, and even a marvelous German weapon that was a combination of all of the above (they called it the 'guten tag') were all fully capable of punching through plate armor, and before that was chainmail. A good axe could fix that.

Erloas

2009-01-13, 05:47 PM

The question I think would come down to how many little ships are required to take out a carrier. If the weapons vs defense thing gets so out of hand that a relatively small weapon is able to punch through and destroy something very large then there isn't going to be much of a need to build that large of ships. However in most cases the amount of damage a weapon can do is relative to the size of the weapon, and its going to take a very large weapon, or way too many to be practical, small weapons. So larger ships are going to be needed to hold larger weapons to take down the carriers.

The thing about most weapons is that they are built on technology and energies we can control, otherwise we wouldn't be able to use them as a weapon. Nuclear weapons are not the same as nuclear power generators, but its not too far off to the point where what materials are needed to contain and use the nuclear power will also work to defend against the nuclear weapon.
If we get to the point of plasma and energy weapons then we are going to have to have the science in place to control that plasma/energy up to the point where it is released, and if we can control it to the point of focusing it as a weapon then we have some knowledge and practical experience to defend against it.

Meltemi

2009-01-13, 05:47 PM

First, you may actually find the Atomic Rocket (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html) on Project Rho to be of interest. It's a fairly interesting look at building and establishing hard-SF ship designs, and includes a significant section on Space Warfare. The first thing is that we don't know what space warfare will be like, and so we apply paradigms we know, namely naval and aerial combat. Still, there's a bit of this and that, and, well...

RE: Offence versus Defence
It is interesting that you bring up this concept. In general, it does tend to seem to follow this trend, but this isn't necessarily a "smaller is better" view, but rather a pendulum view - offensive advances are countered by defensive advances, which are in turn countered by offensive advances. Whether it's a mace against plate mail or an RPG against an Abrams, comparable damage to the combatants still is, well, similar. Either way, it doesn't really apply to size even if you were completely accurate. For instance, tank development did weed out heavier or super-heavy tank designs initially, but they also weeded out the tankettes or lighter vehicles used for infantry support, and as engine development proceeded, they only got larger. The modern MBT is, in fact, somewhere between the old WW2-era medium/heavy, and a modern M1 Abrams or Leopard 2 are not only heavier than a Tiger I, but only a few metric tonnes lighter than a WW2 Tiger II. All of these, of course, are far larger and more formidable than their rough yes/no/maybe counterparts in earlier pre-motorized fields of battle, namely the heavy knight who rode in armour and broke enemy Flemish militia upon his mighty lance and blade. Or, for something that doesn't draw my humour quite as much, something like the Hussite Warwagons. Navally, you see the age of battleships as past, of course, but a modern cruiser is far larger than its counterpart ship of the line or sail frigate.

The greatest limiters on ship size are going to be the trade-offs between the absolute minimum necessary to survive, both heat, life-support, and the such, and the weapons profile offered. In general, I doubt you'll see oversized behemoths from this side, as you say, but by contrast, I think ships will get larger either way.

RE: Big isn't Best
True, in essence, but smaller isn't better. First, and the most annoying thing: asteroid belts do not work in reality like they do in fiction. Asteroid density in the asteroid belt is orders of magnitude lower than air density at terrestrial sea level, and a lot of it is not much larger than dust. Where's that work I did...ah, here.

To cover all 2D approaches at our own [asteroid] belt's CoM [centre of mass], you need to cover a circumference of 2 632 million kilometres, and it would be very embarrassing to do that and find your enemy just punched a hole at one weak point or worse, decided to ignore your assumption and just went around. As far as combat, it won't be that far different from fighting near a very small Mercury insofar as gravity or target obstruction - most asteroid belts aren't expected to be very dense on average (Ours being less than 1e-14 g/m3, assuming the maximum estimated total mass and counting for volume only the part of the main belt with i≤4 deg. [orbital incidence] - an interesting reference, to think of it, would be scattering ten Jupiters in the same volume, which gives the massive density of 1e-5 g/m3 when compared to the density of terrestrial sea-level air at 1.2 kg/m3). Certainly, asteroids are actually lumped into loose herds rather than an equal distribution, but even these are very loose formations...

You are not going to be dog-fighting through the asteroid belts in any way, shape, or form. The closest place you will find to that sort of activity is the rings of Saturn.

OK, that aside, hiding in space is overrated. Your ship, big or small, is a bright light sitting on a pure black field to any infrared scanner, and by black I mean something like 2 degrees Kelvin worth of background radiation. Sitting behind a rock is all and good, but you're going to have to know where your enemy is to stay behind that rock, and that means poking something out from behind cover - either your own ship's figurative head or a recon drone. Either way, you're pinned down if you're relying on this for your defence. Even worse, with decent light-speed weapons or homing missiles, engagement windows within one or two light-seconds are effectively going to be knife-fights unless you have something like a reactionless drive for good maneuverability (at which point, you start asking why you aren't using that reactionless drive to make relativistic weapons that make the Tsar Bomba look like a pipe bomb). For reference, Earth-Sun is eight light-seconds, and Earth-Moon is less than 0.2 light-seconds. Now, evading an opponent's attacks is not impossible at significant distances, assuming your weapons reach far enough without going acoherent/running-out-of-fuel/drifting-off-track, but these distances will also rely on manoeuvrability. What you need to compare for that is not strength-defence as you did in the first section, but range-manoeuvrability, and unfortunately, range has also tended to outstrip manoeuvrability. A crossbow supersedes a man on a horse, and is itself superseded by an assault rifle. A modern MBT survives hits through its armour. Jets, with the peculiar restriction gravity places, rely on speed, true, but are also armoured against incidental blasts. I think naval vehicles are actually the closest, but these still must deal with the particular concerns of the ocean, namely sinking insofar as surface craft are concerned and simple hull collapse for submarines.

As for fighters, you have a still greater problem. Now, manned or unmanned, why not reduce the size of the thing further and turn it into a missile bus? We'll leave aside manned fighters entirely, since those are an exercise only in lunacy outside of narrative demands. First of all, we'll assume power generation requires a certain arbitrary size to generate usable amounts of power, not a bad assumption barring radical tech advances. Your vehicle must thus be larger than this, in order to power its weapons (or even fit them in). You also will want this vehicle to come back home, which puts additional requirements on it that have nothing to do with surviving combat itself. However, you could shrink your vehicle further, removing the weapons and return-trip fuel to add, if you like, a pure nuclear warhead or a bomb-pumped laser warhead like something out of Teller's dreams or the Honorverse, or simply leave the whole thing as a KK weap, turning the whole thing into a one-way missile. It's single-shot, certainly, but it's far cheaper, lighter, and easier to mass-produce. At these scales, it's likely that a single shot would take out either the parasite craft or the missile, which would seem to make the missile you can spam in greater quantities more effective.

Now, interestingly, the best direct-fire weapons we're looking at for space, at least in the near future, are either beam (laser) or rail/coil (mass driver). Missiles, in their simplest form, are basically self-directed rail/coil fire in that barring Teller's bomb-pumped warheads, they'll still require contact with the enemy hull to cause damage. Lasers are nice in that they hit their targets at the exact same speed information travels at, but depending on power, they're likely to be limited to the single line they fire along. It'll play merry havoc on whatever chambers they burst through, but not nearly as much outside of that limited area. Another nasty kink with the laser is the size of the assembly, focusing a weapon of sufficient power without destroying itself - not an issue for the missile, but certainly if you've mounted it on a ship and want to fire it twice. Rail or coil guns are slower and more easily stopped by armour (we already do this with natural high-speed projectiles in space and on Earth via things like Whipple shields), but are cheaper and a bit more flexible. Aside from the aforementioned missiles, it can permit something like chaff guns for anti-parasite firing (a projectile that detonates after a set time/distance, scattering high-speed shrapnel through local space). They're also nice in that they require less in the way of tech advances, and they have a lot lower thermal exhaust requirements.

Either way, however, what we are likely looking at is an environment where it is next to impossible to hide except for in-close to a planet or other large body, where engagement envelopes are extremely large, and where an attacker has the initiative. A larger craft may take more hits, but it will also survive far more hits, because battle damage is compartmentalized - space, fundamentally, is actually not all that dangerous when compared to submarine or aerial environments. A smaller craft, with fewer compartments, will be more easily destroyed, and evasion is not necessarily a good tactic without some applied tech to take care of inertia - even a small spacecraft is pretty hefty. It does also rely on what weapons are feasible, since a laser is a pretty good way to OHK a small craft.

RE: So how do you cross the big space ocean smart guy?
Assuming the parasite/fighter environment is feasible, I agree entirely. Still, there's no place for your mothership to hide unless you're fighting near a planet, so it'd better be able to defend itself.

General:
What I think space combat will end up being is missile and laser dominated, to be honest. You want to push the engagement envelope as far out as possible and keep your enemy shooting at as many different targets as possible, hence missiles, while lasers are useful directed-fire weapons. For all of this, you require room - room to generate power, room to hold large magazines to supply your weapons, room to cycle all the thermal heat you're generating so it doesn't cook your crew, since radiators big enough to handle this are simply big targets. I don't think parasite craft are feasible, to be honest - they'll dodge the first few shots if they're lucky, but the next dozen inbound are not going to be as easy. Jet fighters and bombers are used, and indeed dominate naval combat because they can outrange battleships. The exact opposite is true in space - a larger craft can mount a larger laser lens/focusing array, giving them a more powerful weapon that can go further without losing coherence. A larger craft can power a larger rail/coil gun with deeper magazines, giving it a greater range. A larger craft can mount larger missiles with bigger fuel tanks to reach further. In short, a larger craft can engage a smaller craft from outside the smaller craft's effective range, and take more hits to boot.

Holy sweet mother of pearl, I missed the entire thread formulating this. Well, I'll read what everyone's posted, too.

Oslecamo

2009-01-13, 06:24 PM

Well there are ways to get big things to move through space, and armor and guns exist. Precons and laser swords don't. So yeah...

There are lasers, and there are all kind of drugs right now. So yeah...

There are some major problems with your analysis. For starters I can think of several periods in history where armor technology was sufficiently in advance of weapon technology to make it damn near impossible to kill anything. 14th and 15th century plate armor comes to mind, as do some of the bigger World War II era battleships, which could take obscene amounts of punishment. It took more aircraft to sink Yamato than the Japanese launched against Pearl Harbor. Two battleships and a couple heavy cruisers were unable to actually sink Bismarck, just pound her into a hulk. Tirpitz was just about blown in half and survived. There is definite precedence for ships being durable as all hell.

The knights in fullplate is very discussable. The english longbowmen did tear them apart, and the crossbow did become illegal for being so effective against it.

As for the battleships, I think the war outcoe speaks for itself. Side wich wasted huge resources in biggest expensive ships=>losers.

Big is best

No it isn't. As I already pointed out, you don't need massive weapons to take down massive targets. Death by a thousand scratches is just as effecient and probably more viable, just like the big carriers were taken down by bombers and the elephants were taken down by spearmen.

Also, it's space. There's nowhere to hide. Stealth doesn't work for crap (without doing very unseemly things to some laws of physics). Asteroids are so few and far between designing a warship to make use of them is more or less equivalent to designing a wet-water ship to make use of the strategic cover offered by blue whales. They will see you, no matter your size.

When I refered stealth I meant mostly anti radar systems, not actually invisbility. Eyesight alone won't do much for you unless you're really close because there's simply too much space, so one must rely in radars, and smaller vessels are that much easier to hide from radars than big ones.

Besides, since there isn't atrictum, fighters don't even need to get close to blow up the enemy vessel, so you'll need a very good eye to distinguish that fighter from the black emptyness of the space before it gets in rage to shoot it's own weapons.

Dodging is also right out, any missile will be more maneuverable than a ship is, no matter the size, because it can pull higher accelerations than a ship can without turning its tender, fleshy occupants into red paste, and the very premise of a gun based warship favors larger vessels over smaller to begin with.

Who said my fighters are carrying pilots at all? I believe automated fighters are the future. Indeed, the pilot and life sustaining systems for him are a big waste of space and limit the fighter's maneuvarabelity. Flesh is weak, replace it with the machine.

Maneuverability is another red herring in space. All that matters is how much force your engine can generate, and how massive you are, since F=ma, a=m/f, and acceleration is what matters in space.

It also matters being able to stop when you want, and the bigger you are, the harder is it to stop

Motherships are seldom a desirable military solution, particularly in a region as large and barren as space. If, as you say, large ships will be able to be destroyed by smaller ships with contemptuous ease, there's no reason for me to ever shoot at your smaller ships. I'll just blow some big holes in the mother ship, and be on my merry, leaving all your little fighter craft to die of exposure.

Except that while your fighters are blowing up holes in my motherships, my fighters are blowing up holes in your mothership/planet. Congratulations, we just anihilated each other. Nobody wins. So you must intercept the other side's fighters, or you lose because you don't have nowhere to return to. The only viable hope of victory is blowing up those fighters before they get in range of your mothership/planet.

Again, there's no place to hide in space, and camping out next to a planet is stupid. Planets are, if not the most valuable thing in space, the second or third most. Leaving your mothership there just makes it target numero uno on my 'to nuke' list, since that way I eliminate the long term threat of your fighters and gain orbital control of the planet, all in one go.

Well, planets still block line of sight, and most kind of scanners/radars, so you can't hit my ship that easily. On the other hand, you are still in empty space, so my scouts spot you first from a long go. So I get first shot, and thus the advantage is mine.

Anyway, thanks everybody for your answers. Whatver may replies may have been, you gave me a lot to think about. Now I must atend to other businesses, so don't expect other replies from me here anytime soon.

Obrysii

2009-01-13, 06:29 PM

snoopy13a

2009-01-13, 06:30 PM

turkishproverb

2009-01-13, 06:42 PM

What did this have to do with the discussion on the feasability of large battle-spaceships versus fighters and motherships?

Furthermore, given that we already possess the technologically to terraform mars, and it is merely the obscene cost stopping us, it still has some degree of relevance.

scsimodem

2009-01-13, 07:10 PM

I don't think we'll have significant space ships period. I don't believe that we'll colonize another world in our solar system, let alone another one. The closest star outside of the sun is 4.7 light years away. That is an incredibly far distance.

So, big space warships don't make any sense as does space warships in general. Likely, our species is stuck on Earth forever.

Sometime between the time I was born and now, I went from having to get information by walking to the library, looking up the subject, and hoping that they both had the appropriate book and that the information was organized well enough for me to find it quickly, and I had to push buttons on a phone tethered to the wall to talk to anybody who wasn't physically present with me. Now, I can retrieve anything from language lessons to music to physics from the other side of the planet via a signal that is bounced into SPACE...from my damn PHONE. Also, the phone is unnecessary, because the exact same technology allows me to talk to people in Paris over the internet, for free. Maps have been rendered obsolete by a network of satellites thousands of miles over our heads. We've gone from 3 channels to 30 to 300 to 3000, also due to that same network of satellites. Computers have gone from clunky and text only to performing all manner of amazing feats...and none of these things are considered to be the least bit out of the ordinary.

Us never traveling the stars pretty much requires that some sort of apocalypse comes first.

Whoracle

2009-01-13, 08:11 PM

[...]As for the battleships, I think the war outcoe speaks for itself. Side wich wasted huge resources in biggest expensive ships=>losers.

Hadn't had enough time to think anything else through, but there is an error in your reasoning, or rather in your perception of cause and effect, right there...

Your reasoning is that the cause for them loosing was the waste of resources, while it has been another attack vector altogether.

Compare it to two space armadas fighting it out with whatever kind of craft they prefer. If side A meanwhile nukes the homeplanet of side B it doesn't matter who wasted more resources.

Llama231

2009-01-13, 08:27 PM

It seems that the only real good reason for huge ships in battle is solely for intimidation.:smallamused:

Meltemi

2009-01-13, 08:35 PM

There are lasers, and there are all kind of drugs right now. So yeah...
Laser swords being the operant modifier.

The knights in fullplate is very discussable. The english longbowmen did tear them apart, and the crossbow did become illegal for being so effective against it.
First, don't look at what made it end. Look at why it began in the first place. Full plate armor developed on a battlefield extremely heavy in swords and polearms, and was perfectly suited as a defencive development in this environment. Second, the effectiveness of both longbows and crossbows in practical battlefield conditions is actually subject to doubt. Even the greatest triumph of the English yeomanry, Agincourt, was a massive confluence of events that conspired against the French, not the least of which was the sheer stupidity of the French knights themselves.

As for the battleships, I think the war outcoe speaks for itself. Side wich wasted huge resources in biggest expensive ships=>losers.
Which war? WW1 went to the biggest battleships because aviation was in its infancy, and in WW2, the Japanese were pioneers of naval aviation in many respects, since they had a very vested interest in bypassing the Washington Treaty. They lost because once the Amis got into gear and learned the use of naval aviation, they did not have the industry to match. It was attrition, pure and simple. If the Amis had lost at Midway, lost at the Marshalls, they could simply build another three dozen carriers and come right back, and popular opinion after Pearl Harbour was such that it would even have been encouraged. The Japanese simply could not match that production rate.

However, Midway is a very interesting point, because it illustrates many reasons for the supremacy of naval aviation. The biggest of these is the horizon. A battleship is worthless today because you cannot shoot what you cannot see, but a fighter can extend your sight. There is, obviously, no horizon in space. A battleship near Eris can see a carrier orbiting Mercury, and more importantly, with lasers, diffraction is directly proportional to wavelength and inversely proportional to lens/reflector radius. A larger reflector or lens will reduce diffraction and increase effective range, while also being able to survive a higher wavelength (strictly speaking, intensity, also proportional to wavelength). Because of this, a larger ship has a greater range, absolutely speaking, as well as more power. We aren't talking about an Iowa with cannon against a Zero - we're discussing a man with an assault rifle against a kid with a popgun.

No it isn't. As I already pointed out, you don't need massive weapons to take down massive targets. Death by a thousand scratches is just as effecient and probably more viable, just like the big carriers were taken down by bombers and the elephants were taken down by spearmen.
True, but when your vehicles can be taken down by a single scratch, it's not such a simple thing. It's even worse when the larger ships can mount larger, better-ranged weapons to take down your fighters outside of their own range.

When I refered stealth I meant mostly anti radar systems, not actually invisbility. Eyesight alone won't do much for you unless you're really close because there's simply too much space, so one must rely in radars, and smaller vessels are that much easier to hide from radars than big ones.
Nyet. Nyet. Oh so nyet. Background radiation in space is 2 degrees Kelvin. That is cold, colder than you can drop your hull if you want your ship to function and your crew to survive. The problem is not hiding from radar. The problem is hiding that massive thermal bloom that is an operating power plant. Eyesight is worthless in space for completely different reasons, namely distances. If you're in effective eyesight range, you're past point-blank and into "reach out and knock" range in space terms.

Besides, since there isn't atrictum, fighters don't even need to get close to blow up the enemy vessel, so you'll need a very good eye to distinguish that fighter from the black emptyness of the space before it gets in rage to shoot it's own weapons.
If you cannot shoot down a fighter, you cannot shoot down a missile. In this case, it can be more cost-effective and safer to go with the missile, since you save on the fuel for the return trip.

Who said my fighters are carrying pilots at all? I believe automated fighters are the future. Indeed, the pilot and life sustaining systems for him are a big waste of space and limit the fighter's maneuvarabelity. Flesh is weak, replace it with the machine.
Good. This is very true, and human spacefighter pilots only exist in narratives because of the narrative convention - no one wants to hear the life and times of a missile bus. Except maybe in Galaxy Angel. ^_^

It also matters being able to stop when you want, and the bigger you are, the harder is it to stop
A stopped target in space is just that - a target. In combat, you do not want to stop, plain and simple, especially if your opponent is using light-speed weapons like lasers.

Except that while your fighters are blowing up holes in my motherships, my fighters are blowing up holes in your mothership/planet. Congratulations, we just anihilated each other. Nobody wins. So you must intercept the other side's fighters, or you lose because you don't have nowhere to return to. The only viable hope of victory is blowing up those fighters before they get in range of your mothership/planet.
Depends on your objective. A no-win may actually be very useful to one of the combatants in certain conditions.

Well, planets still block line of sight, and most kind of scanners/radars, so you can't hit my ship that easily. On the other hand, you are still in empty space, so my scouts spot you first from a long go. So I get first shot, and thus the advantage is mine.
You aren't maneuvering that easy without significant phlebotinum. Here's the catch - if you're hiding behind the planet, you can't seen the enemy. You need to have recon elements, drones or the such-like, out to see the enemy, and the enemy can see those and shoot them down. Besides, depending on your enemy's objectives, they could do something really nasty out-system like start lobbing asteroids at you while you're hiding behind your planet. Even if they want the planet intact and livable, as long as you're bunkered down trying to avoid getting hit, they can still dink around as much as they want, split up and circle around to force you to engage a part of their force long enough for the rest to enter engagement as well. Even worse, your fighters still need to cross the empty space between the carrier/planet and the enemy task force. Target practice, especially if they keep the range far enough open that you're at the end of your fighters' effective range. And keep in mind that any shots that miss you are going to hit the planet, which could mean fairly nasty things for anyone still living down there.

Anyway, thanks everybody for your answers. Whatver may replies may have been, you gave me a lot to think about. Now I must atend to other businesses, so don't expect other replies from me here anytime soon.
OK. I recommend you look through my first post as well, since it went up only just before your reply and is a bit more detailed. Thankies. ^_^

It seems that the only real good reason for huge ships in battle is solely for intimidation.:smallamused:
Really? It's always struck me as just the opposite. Stealth in space is impossible. Evasion in space is a fool's errand, at least against effective lasers, which we are rapidly approaching even terrestrially. If you have effective missiles, then you don't need to bother with fighters, which need to be designed to return and will have similar survivability either way. I mean, we're not discussing Death Star scales here.

Philistine

2009-01-13, 09:30 PM

As for the battleships, I think the war outcoe speaks for itself. Side wich wasted huge resources in biggest expensive ships=>losers.

Sorry, but with respect to WW2 at sea, that is simply wrong. Both Axis and Allied nations "wasted huge resources" building and operating battleships. In fact, the Allied navies had more of them. Britain alone had 17 battleships and 3 battlecruisers in service during the war, more than Germany (4 battleships) and Italy (7 battleships) combined - by a comfortable (almost 2:1!) margin. The USN built 10 new-generation "fast battleships" during the war, to add to the 12 WW1-era "standard type" battleships and 4 even older vessels which saw limited wartime duty, against only 12 battleships total for Japan - making this even more of a mismatch. (And this without even counting the USN's two Alaska-class "large cruisers," which truly were a waste of resources - most of the cost of an Iowa-class battleship, but drastically less capability. They were still probably about on par with the German Scharnhorst-class small battleships or the older Japanese Kongo-class hybrid battlecruiser/battleships, though.)

The Allies also built more carriers and aircraft; more cruisers, destroyers, and submarines; huge numbers of specialized amphibious craft, convoy escorts, and cargo shipping... In fact, it's difficult to image an alternate building program for the Axis navies that wouldn't have seen them swarmed under by the gross imbalance in industrial potential, possibly even faster than happened historically.
[/derail]

On topic: it's impossible to say at this point, since we don't know what technologies will be available for power generation, propulsion, offense, and defense. Certainly there are imaginable scenarios which would arrive at a different conclusion than the one in the original post here. For example, a commonly postulated idea is some sort of "shield generator," which renders vessels so equipped highly resistant (or sometimes outright immune) to less-powerful attacks; this alone might suffice to rule out the idea of swarms of smallcraft attempting to inflict the "death of a thousand cuts" on shielded vessels. Or maybe not, but the problem is we don't know.

Dervag

2009-01-13, 09:37 PM

The problem with using only fighters is that they can be defended against. If fighters are the only thing that is used, all defenses will be anti-fighter, until one day somebody gets the brilliant idea to build a destroyer, which everybody, having specialized their ship defenses against fighters, will be unable to defend against.Well... all I'll say is it probably wouldn't be called a destroyer. My reasoning is complicated, but let's just say that the names 'destroyer', 'cruiser', and 'battleship' all have different origins. Nobody decided arbitrarily to call little ships destroyers and so on.

Of course, in a space navy, that might change, but I'd expect people to name categories of spacecraft by what they do, not in honor of ancient wet navy categories that had a whole different job.

Your real point is, I think, good. If there's no common need to design antishipping weapons bigger than "just big enough to take down a little drone fighter," a medium-sized, armored combatant that can survive being zapped with a few megajoules of kinetic energy or laser light will enjoy a major advantage.
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Because they are impractical and take alot of resources. The same might not be true for large ships that need to cross vast distances.This is a crucial point. If spacecraft take a long time to go from one place to another, they need to be autonomous and self-supporting for a long time. They need to be able to make repairs and limp home if something gets broken or blown up. From a logistics standpoint, you want something more like the warships of the Age of Sail, which carried most of their own critical spare parts on board.

The knights in fullplate is very discussable. The english longbowmen did tear them apart, and the crossbow did become illegal for being so effective against it.Umm... no, not really. Crossbows were not consistently outlawed in Europe, and longbowmen were seldom effective at penetrating plate armor directly. Killing the more lightly armored horses, yes. Causing the men to get trapped in mud until someone could wander up and kill them with a sledgehammer, yes. Punching through plate steel like it was cloth, no.

That's a myth.

As for the battleships, I think the war outcoe speaks for itself. Side wich wasted huge resources in biggest expensive ships=>losers.What, the US Navy? Your use of the loaded word "wasted" rings alarm bells in my head. I mean, of course the side that wastes its resources loses. But what is and is not "waste" depends heavily on details.
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No it isn't. As I already pointed out, you don't need massive weapons to take down massive targets. Death by a thousand scratches is just as effecient and probably more viable, just like the big carriers were taken down by bombers and the elephants were taken down by spearmen.The problem is that you need survivable platforms to kill massive targets with light weapons. If you try to put your weapons on fragile platforms, you risk ending up with an "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" scenario. At which point an enemy big and tough enough to survive a few hits gains a big advantage.

When I refered stealth I meant mostly anti radar systems, not actually invisbility. Eyesight alone won't do much for you unless you're really close because there's simply too much space, so one must rely in radars, and smaller vessels are that much easier to hide from radars than big ones.For long range target acquisition in space, infrared is much better than radar. Radar is short ranged when you talk about interplanetary distances, because the intensity of a radar return varies with the fourth power of the distance to the target.

And it's effectively impossible to conceal the infrared signature of a maneuvering target (like a fighter) in space. Even at interplanetary ranges. Anyone with decent computer support will be able to see you coming long before you can lock them up for fire control and confidently expect to hit. Conversely, you will see them coming.

And since a fighter that can be seen can probably be killed with the kind of hyperenergetic weapons used in a space battle, a lot of your fighters don't come back, even from a successful mission. Which is not to say they won't be cost effective, but they're not a God weapon.
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Besides, since there isn't atrictum, fighters don't even need to get close to blow up the enemy vessel, so you'll need a very good eye to distinguish that fighter from the black emptyness of the space before it gets in rage to shoot it's own weapons.S'called a desktop computer. Modern astronomical equipment is up to this task already.

By the way, what the hell is an "atrictum?"

It also matters being able to stop when you want, and the bigger you are, the harder is it to stopYour ability to stop in space is exactly equal to your ability to get moving in the first place, because you use the same engines for both tasks. Since a bigger ship can use bigger engines to throw more exhaust behind it, it's likely to have about the same acceleration as a smaller ship. Unless, of course, we posit a technomagical space drive of some kind.

Yulian

2009-01-13, 09:41 PM

About air-sea comparison: Ah, this is one of the reasons that makes me more suport fighters. In space, you can be attacked from ANY direction. So, maneuvaribility is worth much more. It's not viable to get defensive ships because you would need a lot of them to protect your heavy vessels from all sides,

Not really. You can also defend/shoot back in any direction. There's a reason a lot of hard sci-fi spaceships are spheres or tubes, among other reasons to do with volume and profile.

Also, everyone here is assuming we're looking at just missiles and ray beams. Warty Goblin had it right. It's space, it's huge, there's no real place to hide, and any incoming guided projectile is going to be far more maneuverable than any piloted vessel can possibly be. The speeds you can also get objects up to is insane. Niven's "galaxy grenade" concept is frighteningly simple and could do some stunning damage to any ship's hull.

Weaponizing space away from a planet is actually going to be very, very difficult. Who wants to fight over a patch of (relative) void? The distances involved are also so immense that even intercepting another force will be rather difficult in open space.

If war comes to space, it's likely going to happen around the valuable property, balls of rock and/or gas. Likely we're not going to see a lot of piloted vessels, but swarms of semi-autonomous machines and good, old-fashioned kinetic energy weapons controlled from a somewhat centralized command post, like the way the Predators and Reapers are run outside of Las Vegas, where I live. But if you get far enough away from your drones that signal lag becomes an issue, they're going to need to be smart enough to operate and carry out previously given orders on their own, and adapt if the situation changes.

- Yulian

Meltemi

2009-01-13, 09:53 PM

Well... all I'll say is it probably wouldn't be called a destroyer. My reasoning is complicated, but let's just say that the names 'destroyer', 'cruiser', and 'battleship' all have different origins. Nobody decided arbitrarily to call little ships destroyers and so on.

Of course, in a space navy, that might change, but I'd expect people to name categories of spacecraft by what they do, not in honor of ancient wet navy categories that had a whole different job.

I'm actually not so sure about that. Modern frigates are next to nothing like sail frigates, but the name stuck. I still have no idea why the RN decided to name the little escort ships of today after the heavy independent vessels of old. ^_^

Innis Cabal

2009-01-13, 10:07 PM

We already have semi-autonomous weapons, and they are getting smarter and better at their jobs with minimal human command. So we probably will see some of the like in the way of combat units in space, but there will always be a human element in war while there are still humans around to fill it. Even if there are a ton of tiny drones we field, and large scale space combat is placed near and around planets and other such locals of import, there will still be attacks in transit. No matter the distance, there will always be those that will pray on long ranged distances.

Belial_the_Leveler

2009-01-13, 10:08 PM

Armors, on the other hand... We have developed some nice ceramics and alloys, but they aren't gonna save you from a rocket to the face, or even armor piercing bullets.

Not true. Some tungsten alloys are very hard. Hard enough that armor made out of them stands up against kinetic penetrator weapons (the artillery's version of AP rounds) with barely a scratch. Problem is their cost though. Yeah, one could make a virtually invulnerable tank but with the same money the enemy could make a thousand normal tanks and a guy with a W72 tactical nuke loaded on a portable RPG.

Space, however, changes things. Without an atmosphere, any explosives (such as nuclear weapons) cannot convert thermal enegry to physical force. And once you get heat-reflecting armor, nukes (and most other explosives) are almost useless, used directly. Add in reflective materials and you can kiss many ray-guns goodbye. Make a faraday cage out of your ship and any electromagnetic weapon is also useless.

From there, things get creative. Kinetic penetrator electomagnetic acceleration guns (rail-guns). Gamma-ray cannons (can't be deflected, either kill crew or eventually melt down absorbing armor). Antimatter particle accelerators.

The problem is, any single attack has at least one defence that negates it. So use unconventional and varied attacks.

Mando Knight

2009-01-13, 10:47 PM

Larger space warships would make sense in one way: orbital bombardment and planetary defense. The ability to move an entire battlestation into enemy area and annihilate the enemy's defenses. A large (read: kilometers long, not a couple hectometers) star battlecruiser would be able to carry enough interceptors and point-defense turrets to hamper enemy fighters, as well as enough ordnance to take out planetary resistance.

If shielding devices capable of rendering vehicles immune to Death by a Thousand Cuts are developed, then you'd need a vehicle large enough to carry it, and a vehicle large enough to carry weapons to punch through it.

If such vehicles are constructed by one side, then the opposition has two choices: develop similar vehicles for a stalemate, or develop counter-units, like strike-bombers. However, the large ships have the capability of carrying counter-counter units, like interceptors, and are likely to be escorted by other ships forming the war-fleet.

Example: Star Wars: Empire At War. Star Destroyers are probably the most difficult weapons to destroy, as they have armor and shields that can only be overcome by swarm tactics... which are immediately countered by the TIE swarms. The only way to reliably kill them in the game (without resorting to your station or heroes) is to use the expansion pack's counter-units: the Rebel torpedo cruiser, the B-Wing, and the entire frigate-or-larger series of ships in the Zann Consortium. However, each of these have fairly common counters: the torpedo boat and most of the Zann Consortium units are deadly but fragile (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GlassCannon), with the exemption of the Kedalbe battlecruiser, which is just too expensive to field more of than the Star Destroyer. The B-Wing is more expensive than the more common Y-Wing (which can be swarmed...), but is easy prey for Tartan escorts and concentrated assaults from the TIE Interceptors. The Death Star II and Executor battlefleets are nearly immortal: the former has a OHKO laser about once every half-minute, and the latter has a near-infinite source of long-range weapon fire and TIEs. Thrawn, the Executor, and an Interdictor can lay waste to almost any attacking party... and they can't get away.

Myrmex

2009-01-13, 10:54 PM

Oslecamo-
So you would predict something like an aircraft carrier?

What about tanks? They're heavily armored. It's not like we've given up on armor entirely; soldiers are still given flak jackets and moved around in APCs.

Though, presumably in space, we'll be able to use whatever sort of ridiculous weapons we want to without worry about damaging the piece of land we're fighting over.

Miklus

2009-01-13, 11:28 PM

Texas_Ben

2009-01-13, 11:29 PM

Also, it's space. There's nowhere to hide. Stealth doesn't work for crap (without doing very unseemly things to some laws of physics). Asteroids are so few and far between designing a warship to make use of them is more or less equivalent to designing a wet-water ship to make use of the strategic cover offered by blue whales. They will see you, no matter your size.

You make many good points in your post, but I'm sorry, this is just rediculous. Let's change it to apply to aircraft, to show you how rediculous it is:

Also, it's sky. There's nowhere to hide. Stealth doesn't work for crap (without doing very unseemly things to some laws of physics). Whales are so few and far between designing a warship to make use of them is more or less equivalent to designing a tank to make use of the strategic cover offered by bears. They will see you, no matter your size.

Honestly, I guess the stealth bomber is crap because we can just look at it and see it is there... oh wait...

Myrmex

2009-01-13, 11:33 PM

I've always wondered about how hard it would be to shoot things in space. Is that a rocket coming at us? It's a good thing it was fired from 65,000 miles away, otherwise it might be hard to dodge!

Its seems like everything would have to be dog fights, yet how would you ever close to do damage? Space is huge!

Mando Knight

2009-01-13, 11:46 PM

Maybe modern submarine warfare is the best analogy. There is lots of stealth and lots of trying to figure out where the enemy is. It is a game of cat and mouse. You have to decide if you will use active or passive sensors. You might also send out probes and such.

What submarine warfare?

The F-22 and F-35 are better examples: their advanced materials and radar allow them to remain nearly unseen by the enemy... Well, not unseen, but rather disguised. The radar cross section is severely reduced, but still there... about as much as a flock of birds. Space doesn't have flocks of birds.

How to you hide in plain sight? Radar absorbing paint for staters. The shape of the spaceship is also importaint. No right angles, thank you. You would have to mask you infrared signature too. Maybe you could beam all the waste heat off in one direction rather than all over the place. The spaceship might make a siluette against the background stars...a clocking device of some sort to counter? Masking the gravity from the mass of the ship might be tricky...But might also be hard to spot in the first place.

They (meaning American military aircraft developers) have thought of this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology). The F-117 implements most of this tech... but we don't have gravimetric sensors yet. And this was in the 80s. And the current means of detecting it needs to determine airflow around the vehicle. Space doesn't have airflow. And the F-22 and F-35 are more advanced.

In short, long-range detection has a ways to go... or whoever's on the receiving end of a stealth-cruiser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_ship) warfleet is going to pay.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-13, 11:49 PM

The most likely way war in space would be fought is the way the way plans for nuclear are laid out.

Missile exchanges that would make Macross proud. Heck depending on the development of robotics personnel would be increasingly minimal. Small clusters of missiles platforms would probably be how, with a control capsule maybe depending how far from a celestial body you are. Handle most repair by robots and you'd probably have very minimal personnel. War would be a matter of technology, percentages, placement, and preemptive investment. Be fairly quick as far as actual action goes though, though with more then considerable lag time between firing the missiles and said missiles reaching targets.

You'd only get the sort of stuff we'd see in movies if for some reason independent projectiles proved unfeasible and energy weapons proved only viable at shortish range.

Texas_Ben

2009-01-13, 11:57 PM

Space, however, changes things. Without an atmosphere, any explosives (such as nuclear weapons) cannot convert thermal enegry to physical force.

...

From there, things get creative. Kinetic penetrator electomagnetic acceleration guns (rail-guns). Gamma-ray cannons (can't be deflected, either kill crew or eventually melt down absorbing armor). Antimatter particle accelerators.

You know, it is interesting you should mention that, because I was reading the other day about high-altitude nuclear weapons tests, and apparently although nukes detonated in space wouldn't deliver much in the way of physical force, for some reason nuclear detonations in space emit much much much more radiation than atmospheric detonations, and the reaction lasts longer too, anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes... all told, I estimate that would be a fine method of cooking people in their ships.

Maybe you could beam all the waste heat off in one direction rather than all over the place.
It's hard enough to get rid of waste heat in space as-is. I'm not insulting this idea, I'm just curious as to how you would have it work.

I don't think we'll have significant space ships period. I don't believe that we'll colonize another world in our solar system, let alone another one. The closest star outside of the sun is 4.7 light years away. That is an incredibly far distance.

So, big space warships don't make any sense as does space warships in general. Likely, our species is stuck on Earth forever.
You're a cynical, dull, unimaginative sort of person, aren't you?

The Glyphstone

2009-01-14, 12:01 AM

You make many good points in your post, but I'm sorry, this is just rediculous. Let's change it to apply to aircraft, to show you how rediculous it is:

Also, it's sky. There's nowhere to hide. Stealth doesn't work for crap (without doing very unseemly things to some laws of physics). Whales are so few and far between designing a warship to make use of them is more or less equivalent to designing a tank to make use of the strategic cover offered by bears. They will see you, no matter your size.

Honestly, I guess the stealth bomber is crap because we can just look at it and see it is there... oh wait...

Wait, what? Stealth bombers obviously can't hide from visual sight, they're not supposed to. They make themselves very difficult to impossible to target with weapons that can hurt them. Good luck aiming a SAM by manual control and a pocket calculator.*

*Admitted hyperbole, but the point is that "stealth bombers" aren't designed for literally invisibility, only its electronic equivalent. Plus, it's a funny mental image, like something out of a Far Side cartoon.:smallsmile:

Texas_Ben

2009-01-14, 12:01 AM

I've always wondered about how hard it would be to shoot things in space. Is that a rocket coming at us? It's a good thing it was fired from 65,000 miles away, otherwise it might be hard to dodge!
Well since it's got a big honkin' engine and, compared to a larger ship, not a lot of inertia, as well as not being burdened with soft squishy beings, it might be hard to dodge.

Shooting it down with lasers before it gets to you, however...

Texas_Ben

2009-01-14, 12:03 AM

Wait, what? Stealth bombers obviously can't hide from visual sight, they're not supposed to. They make themselves very difficult to impossible to target with weapons that can hurt them. Good luck aiming a SAM by manual control and a pocket calculator.*

*Admitted hyperbole, but the point is that "stealth bombers" aren't designed for literally invisibility, only its electronic equivalent. Plus, it's a funny mental image, like something out of a Far Side cartoon.:smallsmile:
That was my point. The post I was responding to seemed to think that by "stealth", the GP meant "turning invisible". I was pointing out that that was not the case.

Myrmex

2009-01-14, 12:13 AM

Well since it's got a big honkin' engine and, compared to a larger ship, not a lot of inertia, as well as not being burdened with soft squishy beings, it might be hard to dodge.

Shooting it down with lasers before it gets to you, however...

What sort of neanderthal puts soft, squishy beings on their warships? My main point was that evasive maneuvers- activation of point defense, firing chaff, etc., would be very easy to get ready when you have the sorts of heads up you get in space.

I guess if you were to cloak your missile.

MeklorIlavator

2009-01-14, 12:25 AM

That was my point. The post I was responding to seemed to think that by "stealth", the GP meant "turning invisible". I was pointing out that that was not the case.

You say that, but then you use the same reasoning Warty Goblin used when replying to Miklus, namely to his idea about beaming away waste heat. So, if heat allows one to automatically detect ships 100% off the time, then what use is stealth?

Lagrange

2009-01-14, 12:37 AM

I think one of the issues for people with the shielding is that by definition excess heat in space is anything above the background radiation, so anything above about 3 Kelvin. This is a rather cold temperature for anything to be operating at, and for temperatures above that point cloaking does not work because blackbody radiation is spherically symmetric, it emits in all directions equally and cannot be controlled. This is why stealth will not work in space.

Evasion is impossible from energy weapons like LASERs, because there is no time to detect the laser, since the moment you could see it would be the moment that it hits you. At least until a consistent physical theory that does not require causality is created and allows for information to travel faster than the speed of light over macroscopic distances.

Texas_Ben

2009-01-14, 12:42 AM

You say that, but then you use the same reasoning Warty Goblin used when replying to Miklus, namely to his idea about beaming away waste heat. So, if heat allows one to automatically detect ships 100% off the time, then what use is stealth?

What are you talking about? The only thing I said about heat was I asked him how he would go about beaming it directionally. I didn't respond to any points about heat in any way except with a question.

Nerd-o-rama

2009-01-14, 12:49 AM

Wait, what? Stealth bombers obviously can't hide from visual sight, they're not supposed to. They make themselves very difficult to impossible to target with weapons that can hurt them. Good luck aiming a SAM by manual control and a pocket calculator.*

*Admitted hyperbole, but the point is that "stealth bombers" aren't designed for literally invisibility, only its electronic equivalent. Plus, it's a funny mental image, like something out of a Far Side cartoon.:smallsmile:Stealth so good you have to aim all your weapons by LOS you say...that's one of the viable excuses in sci fi for something as ridiculous as Old School Dogfighting (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OldSchoolDogfighting) in space.

However, following my earlier argument on parity of offense vs. defense, eventually the enemy will find some way around your ECM and peg you with a guided missile from half an AU away. Eventually.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-14, 12:57 AM

Evasion is impossible from energy weapons like LASERs, because there is no time to detect the laser, since the moment you could see it would be the moment that it hits you. At least until a consistent physical theory that does not require causality is created and allows for information to travel faster than the speed of light over macroscopic distances.

Why causality? Time being relative it doesn't matter whether you evade before it gets there since time is passing for you.... Or am I misinterpreting you there or something.

If you had a second observer and translight communication ablities you should be able to dodge a laser over vast distances. Given though that for any reasonable reaction time on a whole ship you'd need to be farther away from you attacker then earth is from the moon. So for practical purpose I'd agree you aren't going to dodge a laser. Not that we ever see a laser in sci-fi to begin with.

Seems to me that some sort of deflective coating would be the way to go though.

Dervag

2009-01-14, 01:11 AM

I think you guys underestimate the importance of stealth. You say it is impossible to hide in space...But the distances are so great that spotting another ship is not trivial. You need radar or similar technology.

Any way you put it, one ship will spot the other first. That ship has a huge advantage. It can choose to engage or flee. It might even get the first shot. If weapons are powerful, it might also be the last shot!Yes.

But the tools for spotting a ship with a reaction engine already exist. We can take stuff that's basically off the shelf technology for astronomers, hook it up to suitable software, and see a rocketship coming from millions of miles away.

At those ranges, you can dodge anything, even lasers, by varying your course enough that your position becomes unpredictable.

No right angles, thank you. You would have to mask you infrared signature too. Maybe you could beam all the waste heat off in one direction rather than all over the place.That, I'm afraid, violates some pretty important laws of thermodynamics. There are better ways that don't, but the catch is that most of them require your ship to be standing still or coasting. Once you fire up the engine, it's impossible to hide at all.

The spaceship might make a siluette against the background stars...a clocking device of some sort to counter? Masking the gravity from the mass of the ship might be tricky...But might also be hard to spot in the first place.Gravity is not the problem. The ship's gravity will be functionally impossible to detect until you're right on top of it. As in, within pistol range. The ship occulting background stars is a problem, but one that's best left ignored.

Remember, you're trying to hide at ranges of many thousands or millions of miles here. The gravity of an object that weighs thousands of tons, and the star(s) blocked by its presence, at those ranges, doesn't matter.

Hiding behind a good size astroid might actually work just fine. It all depends on how good the other ships sensors are in telling what is what.You aren't going to find a good size asteroid. Asteroids in space are many thousands of miles apart, and they move.

I recommend the website "Atomic Rocket" (google the phrase) for more information on this. Without technology indistinguishable from magic, you don't have stealth in space.
______

I think one of the issues for people with the shielding is that by definition excess heat in space is anything above the background radiation, so anything above about 3 Kelvin. This is a rather cold temperature for anything to be operating at, and for temperatures above that point cloaking does not work because blackbody radiation is spherically symmetric, it emits in all directions equally and cannot be controlled. This is why stealth will not work in space.I think there is a way to cut down on your blackbody radiation, but it's not easy. I thought of it myself, so I'm not sure if it works. Basically, you have to rig a spherical shell around your ship in thermal contact with the hull. Once your surface area is large enough, your surface temperature drops off to the point where it can no longer be easily distinguished from background radiation. You've got so much radiator surface that the ship is nigh-invisible.

This is the equivalent of rigging camo netting over your position. It won't work if your ship is accelerating, but it will cut down on thermal signature.
______

Evasion is impossible from energy weapons like LASERs, because there is no time to detect the laser, since the moment you could see it would be the moment that it hits you. At least until a consistent physical theory that does not require causality is created and allows for information to travel faster than the speed of light over macroscopic distances.You can totally evade lasers. You just can't evade lasers on purpose.

If your ship is accelerating and decelerating at a few gravities in random directions all the time, no one is going to be able to line up a laser shot on it except at fairly close range (on the order of a light-second).

Of course, lasers have dispersion even in vacuum, so it would be damned near impossible to make a tactical laser dangerous at light-second combat ranges. This method is more useful against coilgun projectiles, which are slower than lasers

The key is that your evasion does not depend on detecting incoming fire. It depends on the fact that your course is impossible to predict with enough precision to score a hit at long range.

At ranges where the enemy can hit you, you can hit them.

I_Got_This_Name

2009-01-14, 01:13 AM

Why causality? (snip) If you had . . . translight communication ablities

Translight communication violates causality as long as relativity holds true.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-14, 01:31 AM

Translight communication violates causality as long as relativity holds true.

Umm why? I'm at the Moon and fire a laser at a ship around Mars. It takes the laser time to traverse the distance relative to the Moon and Mars. Meanwhile someone picks up the ftl-radio and tells the ship at Mars to move out of the laser's path. Ship at Mars does before the light gets there.

I see no break in causality.

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 02:31 AM

I'd like to mention that, in the first post, you are in fact reccomending less, larger ships, with little to no offense and lots of guns. If those guns happen to be flying around shooting most of the time, it doesn't matter. The fact remains, you don't have to shoot the guns, you just shoot the ship itself and all those little flying guns are useless.

Edit: FTL communications don't break causality, they only break the current laws of physics. Maybe not even that, actually, depending on how exactly they work.

Eerie

2009-01-14, 02:49 AM

Space warfare as a whole doesn`t make any sense. Once you get to space, you can have infinite resources. Nothing to fight for.

I_Got_This_Name

2009-01-14, 02:58 AM

Alright, let me try to explain the physics for why faster-than-light anything doesn't work (this will be long, be warned; I'm bolding the highlights). They're kinda unintuitive; although less so than General relativity (Special relativity doesn't apply perfectly if the observer is accelerating or standing in powerful gravity, but it works for our purposes here).

Essentially, an idealized faster-than-light communicator would transmit a message and have it recieved at some other point simultaneously. Slower communicators (beyond the speed of light) have the same problem, but simultaneity is an important term here.

The problem comes about when you realize that simultaneity is relative. One of Einstein's original thought experiments demonstrates this pretty well:

Suppose you have a train car with two people and a bomb in it. At each end of the car, there's a button. If either button is pressed, the bomb detonates, but if both are pressed simultaneously, it disarms.

One of the two people takes out his camera, sets it on top of the bomb, and sets the self-timer, and they agree to press the buttons when they see the camera flash; because they have idealized reflexes, this is possible for them. They have idealized precise rulers, so the camera bulb is exactly halfway between them.

From the point of view of any object inside the train car (the passengers and the bomb), the camera flashes, produces a sphere of light, and they simultaneously press the buttons as the light reaches them.

If the car is parked in a rail yard and you look in the window, you would see the same thing.

However, if the car is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light (or at all, but it's only noticeable when it's fast), and you look in the window from outside, from your perspective the person in back is advancing toward the sphere, and the person in front is receding from the sphere; in other words, the person in back sees the light first, then the person in front (from your perspective, the relative movement causes the signals running to the bomb to be delayed exactly opposite this, so the bomb doesn't go off).

Essentially, as long as two observers are in motion relative to eachother, they will not agree on whether or not two events are simultaneous.

What this means, then, is that any system that allows you to send information faster than light also allows you to send information back in time by changing your velocity.

-

One way of thinking about this that might help is to visualize a light-cone; visualize space and time as a 4-dimensional mathematical space (if that's too hard, chop off a spacial dimension, giving you two spacial axes and one temporal axis; up and down makes a convenient temporal axis). (Note that time does not behave exactly like a spacial dimension. It behaves enough like one for this analogy to work)

First, pick a point (called an event, because it has a time-coordinate as well as spacial coordinates). We'll call it e. The origin is convenient, and so e's coordinates will all be 0. The origin is convenient for this, but any point will do. Visualize a double-napped cone from it (a pair of cones, connected at the point), with the cone's axis parallel to your temporal axis. The slope of the sides of the cone is c, the speed of light.

The cone leading off in the -t direction leads into the past. Other events in this cone are capable of affecting e (under relativity). The cone in the +t direction leads into the future; e is capable of affecting any event in this cone.

Any event on the axis of the cone (at x=0, y=0, z=0) happens at the same place as e. Any event on the plane t=0 happens simultaneously to e; any event with t>0 happens after e, and any event with t<0 happens before e.

Here's where things get interesting. Relativity of simultaneity states, then, that there can be disagreement as to whether an event lies on the t=0 plane between two observers that are moving relative to eachother.

You can build this into the model if you know that if two objects are moving at constant velocity relative to eachother, there is absolutely nothing that can tell you that one object is at rest and the other in motion; if the two objects are, for instance, crewed spaceships (coasting, for constant velocity), it's often convenient for the crew of each ship to work as though their ship was at rest. An object at rest is not changing it's position; that is, if event e is the object existing at time t=0, and event e' is the object existing at time t=1, then x=x', y=y', and z=z' by the definition of "at rest".

So, then, the two observers moving relative to eachother are working from separate sets of coordinate axes; each one's t-axis follows their course (assuming they continue at constant velocity) perfectly, and their t=k planes are perpendicular to their own t-axes for any value of the constant k. In fact, you can use this to look at time dilation (enough to get the basic idea, but not enough to trust with anything): every object is moving at c along its personal t-axis. If its t-axis is at an angle to yours, it progresses along your t-axis more slowly.

Other effects come in and mess with lengths to make sure that there's no disagreement over whether one event can cause another, but we're not going to worry about them here except to say that it doesn't matter who's t-axis you use when drawing an event's light cones, provided that the reference frame you're using obeys relativity and doesn't try to move faster than light.

If you have an event e, and an event e' that lies within either light cone of e, then an observer can be assigned a speed so that, from their reference frame, e and e' occur at the same point. This can be done for any e' within either light cone of e.

If you have an event e' that lies outside of the light cones of e, however, the observer cannot be assigned any speed that causes the line ee' to be parallel to the t-axis. However, an observer can be constructed so that their t-axis is perpendicular to the line ee', and so e and e' are simultaneous. This can be done for any e' outside of the light cones of e.

Without a reference frame travelling faster than light, you cannot make an e' that is either a potential cause or potential effect of e simultaneous (doing so would require a t-axis that points outside of any light cones, and is also a causality violation), nor can you make an e' that is in neither occur in the same place (which would also require a t-axis that points outside of light cones). The interesting thing, though, is that any reference frame that travels faster than light must perceive certain causes as simultaneous with their effects, and even certain effects as preceding their causes (draw your light cones with a simple, relativistic t-axis, and then add another reference frame travelling faster than light and check this). This gets problematic when it starts interacting with them.

Suppose you have a device that allows you to cause events outside your light cone. These events could be words appearing on a monitor (communication), or it could be a spaceship appearing where there was nothing (hyperdrive), it actually doesn't matter. The exact speed doesn't matter, either, just that the effect of the device is outside of its future light cone.

We'll look at two reference frames again; you and another ship are travelling at the same velocity, passing another ship travelling at velocity v relative to you; at the moment you pass the other ship (closest approach), you hit the hyperdrive button. We care about your companion's reference frame and the other's.

You are travelling faster than light (by which I mean you arrive at your destination sooner than the light from your departure; this applies even if you "fold space" or pop over to a parallel dimension) in all reference frames (but by how much differs). However, you arrive some time (which may well be 0) after you depart, according to your companion's reference frame. If we imagine that there's another companion ship waiting for you where you arrive, and you have some way of keeping your clocks synchronized and a clock on both ships, then its clock reads some value t' greater than or equal to the t that the other read when you left. Further, if you hop back, the first ship's clock will read t'', and t'-t = t''-t'. This is easiest to imagine if you imagine that your companions are at rest (of course, you can define anything to be at rest); this is exactly intuitive by what it means to travel at a specific speed.

However, the interesting thing is, though, that if the other ship pulls the same stunt as your companion and has another ship waiting with a synched clock, then there's no guarantee that t' will even be greater than t on its clocks; in other words you can arrive simultaneously to or even before you leave. Of course, if you go back, you'll still come back with the same overall difference (I think; regardless you'll still return after you left).

To confirm that you can arrive before you leave, remember the light cones demonstration of simultaneity, above; specifically, that you can define any two events outside of eachother's light cones to be simultaneous by constructing the proper reference frame under relativity; if you go far enough, you can find a reference frame where your ship's computer (truthfully) announces that you have been at your destination for any arbitrary length of time (a second, a minute, a century, a millenium) simultaneously with your departure.

Also, your ship isn't a brick. You can change your velocity, changing your reference frame. If you turn around (through brute force or circling a planet), then you've changed the direction of your t-axis. If you go back now, you can arrive before you left. This is where the really cool violations of causality (starting when you arrive, and ending when you kill your parents before you're born).

A message can do the same thing as a ship; a message could, for example, be dispatched to a remote ship, which then changes its velocity and re-transmits to allow the message to arrive before it was sent.

Wikipedia has a good article on Relativity of Simultaneity that covers most of it; the rest you have to extend.

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 03:12 AM

Alright, let me try to explain the physics (this will be long). They're kinda unintuitive; although less so than General relativity (Special relativity doesn't apply perfectly if the observer is accelerating or standing in powerful gravity, but it works for our purposes here).

Essentially, an idealized faster-than-light communicator would transmit a message and have it recieved at some other point simultaneously. Slower communicators (beyond the speed of light) have the same problem, but simultaneity is an important term here.

The problem comes about when you realize that simultaneity is relative. One of Einstein's original thought experiments demonstrates this pretty well:

Suppose you have a train car with two people and a bomb in it. At each end of the car, there's a button. If either button is pressed, the bomb detonates, but if both are pressed simultaneously, it disarms.

One of the two people takes out his camera, sets it on top of the bomb, and sets the self-timer, and they agree to press the buttons when they see the camera flash; because they have idealized reflexes, this is possible for them. They have idealized precise rulers, so the camera bulb is exactly halfway between them.

From the point of view of any object inside the train car (the passengers and the bomb), the camera flashes, produces a sphere of light, and they simultaneously press the buttons as the light reaches them.

If the car is parked in a rail yard and you look in the window, you would see the same thing.

However, if the car is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light (or at all, but it's only noticeable when it's fast), and you look in the window from outside, from your perspective the person in back is advancing toward the sphere, and the person in front is receding from the sphere; in other words, the person in back sees the light first, then the person in front (from your perspective, the relative movement causes the signals running to the bomb to be delayed exactly opposite this, so the bomb doesn't go off).

Essentially, as long as two observers are in motion relative to eachother, they will not agree on whether or not two events are simultaneous.

What this means, then, is that any system that allows you to sendd information faster than light also allows you to send information back in time by changing your velocity.

-

-snip-

Come now, that's not how this works. The light hits them both at the same time. The whole point of the theory or relativity is that relative speed DOES NOT make a difference. I admit I didn't read past here much, but since it seems you were trying to explain the above in a different way, it didn't seem necessary. If you disagree, I'll give it another glance.

Sending information faster than light doesn't send it back in time, unless it's physically sending it faster than light, which is impossible, so that's not how it's going to do it. We don't know how, but as an example, let's say it sends it to another reality where the speed of light is faster, or doesn't exist, or time works differently. Doesn't matter how, really. Then, it moves to the destination in whatever way, and is sent back to our reality. It disappeared from one place, and then appeared somewhere else. No effect on causality, since it wasn't part of causality when it did the thing causality doesn't like.

I_Got_This_Name

2009-01-14, 04:18 AM

The speed of light is constant in all reference frames: it doesn't matter who you are or what light you're looking at; if you measure its speed accurately, you get c. For this to be true, quite a lot has to give, objective simultaneity being one of them; thus, it does matter what reference frame you're in (how fast you're going) when you're trying to figure out if two events in different places are simultaneous; this is one of the ways in which relativity is counterintuitive. Under no model does your reference frame not matter at all (in Classical Mechanics, your reference frame determines how fast you measure light to be). As long as simultaneity depends on speed, you can use anything that sends information (or objects) faster than light and is not constrained to a specific reference frame to send information (or objects) back in time.

From the point of view of anything in the car, the light hits both ends simultaneously. From a point of view moving relative to the car, it does not. That's what the speed of light being constant means. In more detail:

You have a camera bulb that flashes at point (x,t) = (0,0); the two ends of the car are a distance of L from the camera bulb (so, when the bulb flashes, they're at (-L, 0, and L, 0). We'll define our unit system so that c=1, and give the car a speed v, 0<=v<c

If v=0, the math is simple. The light reaches both ends of the car at time t=L/c. Note that, relative to itself, the car isn't moving, so anything inside the car uses this math.

The math is less simple if v>0. Let's use a time p to indicate when the light hits the back of the train car, and p' to indicate when the light hits the front.

At time p, the back of the train car has advanced a distance of pv (to position pv-L), and the light has spread out a distance of pc. Since we defined the extent of the light to be at the back of the car, we know that pv-L = -pc, and so p = L/(c+v)

At time p', the front of the train car has advanced a distance p'v (to p'v+L), and the light has spread out to a distance of p'c. From the definition of p', we can get a similar equation as above: p'c = p'v + L, which solves to p' = L/(c-v).

We can check our work by noting that, when v=0, p=p'=L/c, as expected. However, a faster car indicates that the back button is hit sooner, and the front button later, to a maximum (at v=c) of the back button being hit at p=L/(2c) and the front button being hit never (the front of the train car keeps a constant distance from the light wavefront, from the perspective of an outside observer. An outside observer would also see time dilation inside the train car, and the time dilation effects would exactly cancel this out so that the pair inside don't have any difference at all.

Avilan the Grey

2009-01-14, 05:10 AM

I am not a highly educated man, but I think almost every analogy is wrong, or right, in this thread.

What I mean is that the "Naval - Fighter Plane" analogies, just like the "Submarine warfare" one are all correct.

If we conclude that we use ships that can go longer than say, Mars, and don't have instant-wormhole-planet-jump power, we will probably see the following ship types:

Big Space Submarines that are outfitted like Sailing Ships (they carry most of their own stuff needed for repairs etc). These can attack and defend in all directions, and can move in all directions (remember the quote from "Khaaaaan!!!", space is 3D).

We will have even bigger "submarines" that are also working as docking stations / aircraft carriers for both small unmanned "Fighter planes", smaller manned spacecraft (shuttles, etc, maybe even the big "subs" above).

(I think we can also safely conclude that the main enemy will, as usual, be other humans, either from rebelling colonies (I am somewhat optimistic that we will at some point colonize Mars) or from other nations on earth. If we ever get true interstellar travel, Space is still big enough that we will most likely not find any other intelligent life, or if we do, that they will be on a different tech level than us. The whole "We are at war with the evil H'riddzz that just happen to be ruthless, disgusting and somehow vulnerable to our guns despite having "oh so different technology" is very unlikely. There is a bigger chance that they are either far more primitive or can destroy us without effort).

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 08:11 AM

-snip-

You're still missing the point. For the outside observer, it still hits both parties at the same time. It seems to contradict itself, but that's the whole point of relativity. The velocity of the objects involved has no effect on the speed of light. Full stop. I don't know what you're trying to get at with all the technobabble, and if you're trying to prove that FTL communication breaks the laws of physics as we know them, then don't bother. I'm not denying that. However, it is entirely possible that either A) there is a way around the laws (such as routing the information through a different universe) or B) the law is outright wrong in certain, likely very rare, circumstances.

At any rate, however, FTL has no effect on causality. (literally, cause and effect) If you went BACK in time with it, then it would, but FTL doesn't have to go back in time.

Lagrange

2009-01-14, 08:33 AM

At any rate, however, FTL has no effect on causality. (literally, cause and effect) If you went BACK in time with it, then it would, but FTL doesn't have to go back in time.

FTL has to go back in time by the simple transformation from spacial to time events. It is related to the light cone and the idea of happening at the same time. If the information is traveling through a different universe, or along a shorter path (like a wormhole) that is different, and for a different universe all bets are off, and for a wormhole...lets just say that the current work on them is not promising to help with the issue. But having FTL will one at least one reference frame be equivalent to time-travel, because a space-like interval will be crossed in a time-like interval.
One solution is to just abandon the idea of casualty, since it is not implicit to the Theories of Relativity. Anyways, relevant equations are the null-geodesic, since that shows the shortest possible path and connects if it is possible to see two events by the light cone. Anything outside of that light cone cannot be see to conserve casualty otherwise there is an observer who sees that time travel happened, because then someone will see the effect before the cause.

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 08:42 AM

Ah, perhaps FTL was the wrong way to phrase it. I was simply talking about communications that arrive sooner than a normal light-speed communication would. It doesn't arrive before it was sent, just sooner. Taking a faster route would be the simplest way. This in and of itself does not break causality.

Still, I'm wondering why you think that physically speeding something to faster than light would break causality rather than relativity. The theory of relativity is based entirely around the fact that light is a speed limit. If it wasn't, the whole thing would work like classical physics, and relativity wouldn't exist. Causality is the theory that everything that happens has a cause before it, and it doesn't matter how long ago that cause was or how far away, just that there is cause and effect. If you sent something back in time so that a cause came after the event, that would break causality, but otherwise FTL doesn't break it.

Lagrange

2009-01-14, 08:55 AM

Still, I'm wondering why you think that physically speeding something to faster than light would break causality rather than relativity. The theory of relativity is based entirely around the fact that light is a speed limit. If it wasn't, the whole thing would work like classical physics, and relativity wouldn't exist. Causality is the theory that everything that happens has a cause before it, and it doesn't matter how long ago that cause was or how far away, just that there is cause and effect. If you sent something back in time so that a cause came after the event, that would break causality, but otherwise FTL doesn't break it.

Actually, relativity does not prevent anything from traveling FTL. It is causality that prevents that. What relativity prevents is a massive particle traveling FTL, it does not prevent an object that always travels FTL from traveling FTL. Of course, there are other issues that relativity have that can also prevent it, but they are not as easy to see.

The idea in relativity is that anything outside of a light cone is 'elsewhere', only events that occurred in the light cone are in the past. Nothing else can effect a system, and the light cone is created following the speed of light as the maximum speed. Only trajectories bound by the light cone are allowed to impact an event, anything else allows for time travel to occur in a different reference frame. Wikipedia actually has a good article on this under Special Relativity if you care to have a better detailed argument, otherwise I will copy text from my physics book on the issue once I get back from class.

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 08:57 AM

At any rate, this is past de-railing the thread, so no more discussion on this here. :smallredface:

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 09:24 AM

Avilan the Grey

2009-01-14, 09:31 AM

Main reason for air warfare correlation is the fact that Land is what matters most- the planet. So it may be neccessary to get down into the atmosphere to get at your target.

Though it is possible that specialization will be more important- when attacked in space- carrier disgorges fleet of pure space fighters, when it wants to attack the ground it sends down huge shuttles, which open to launch bombers protected by fighters.

Is this more likely?
Or would it make more sense to do ships capable of crossing from one medium (high orbit) to the other (atmosphere)?

I can't imagine the biggest ships constantly going in and out of the atmosphere.

It must entirely depend on what you want with said surface? Destroy? Conquer? Subdue?
Having "air-to-surface" attackers etc would make sense if you plan to conquer and hold. Otherwise Space bombardment seems the easy solution (Take off and nuke them from orbit, as Ripley suggested...).

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 09:42 AM

given the extreme rarity of useful real-estate, nuking from orbit would seem a bit wasteful.

That is, after all, one of the big themes of space travel- that planets are rare, rocky planets with water and life rarer yet.

Making use of the soil, local life forms, etc would make much more sense than burning the whole lot off and hoping your terraforming works.

Texas_Ben

2009-01-14, 09:52 AM

given the extreme rarity of useful real-estate, nuking from orbit would seem a bit wasteful.

That is, after all, one of the big themes of space travel- that planets are rare, rocky planets with water and life rarer yet.
Actually it's hard to say just how rare planets really are... Our current methods of detecting extrasolar planets are not all that great, and really can only detect large (think jupiter or bigger) planets relatively close to the sun. Sure, we might pick up a rocky planet every now and again, but that is mostly by chance while we're looking at already-discovered gas giants. Even so, we have discovered quite a few extrasolar planets, so it's not a terrible stretch to say that planets are the norm rather than the exception. Granted, the majority of the ones we know of are extremely close to their (much nastier than ours) respective suns, so your point about *useful* real-estate being rare still holds true.

Is this more likely?
Or would it make more sense to do ships capable of crossing from one medium (high orbit) to the other (atmosphere)?

Any craft capable of operating in both space and atmosphere would prolly be terrible for both... you need to pack on engines and wings for atmospheric flight, which affects storage space and mass, you need to consider aerodynamics, whereas a pure space fighter can be shaped purely functionally, not to mention the shielding you would need for atmospheric entry.

and I imagine that the controls for a space fighter and an atmospheric fighter would be very different... there is a lot more you can do in space than you can do in an atmosphere, and some things you can do in an atmosphere you can't do in space.

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 10:07 AM

Rare in the sense that, like stars, they make up a tiny fraction of the universe by volume.

Given the enormous amounts of energy and resources needed to send a ship out there, preserving the target planet (if you are trying to claim planets) would be important.

the "jack of all trades, master of none" bit is relevant though. the only reason to have aerodynamic space fighters/bombers would be if it was both impossible to get cargo ships all the way to atmosphere, and, the attack could only be conducted from the air, rather than space.

AgentPaper

2009-01-14, 10:11 AM

Any craft capable of operating in both space and atmosphere would prolly be terrible for both... you need to pack on engines and wings for atmospheric flight, which affects storage space and mass, you need to consider aerodynamics, whereas a pure space fighter can be shaped purely functionally, not to mention the shielding you would need for atmospheric entry.

and I imagine that the controls for a space fighter and an atmospheric fighter would be very different... there is a lot more you can do in space than you can do in an atmosphere, and some things you can do in an atmosphere you can't do in space.

That's not really true at all, actually. The ship has to be strong enough to withstand the atmospheric pressure, and be able to generate enough lift to stay in the air, but that's it. Heat shielding is only needed if you drop out of the sky; if you instead use thrusters to come in at a controlled pace, you don't generate any more heat than flying around normally would. And you don't need to be aerodynamic if you have enough thrust, and if you're maneuvering around in space, you've probably got plenty of that. Wings are also unnecessary, just have your rockets point down. Weapons will likely be a bit less effective, but you don't need to shoot as far or as accurately either.

Sure, you'd be more optimal if you were aerodynamic, you could save fuel by having wings generate most of the thrust when moving, and you could move in and out of orbit, and through the atmosphere in general, better if you had heat shielding, but none of those are really needed for you to be an effective atmospheric fighter. Plus, there's no real reason you should even need to enter the atmosphere except to land and refuel, since your weapons should have more than enough range and precision to hit whatever you need to from orbit.

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 10:15 AM

One orbital strike problem is Clouds. Could make things tricky.

Avilan the Grey

2009-01-14, 10:16 AM

Actually it's hard to say just how rare planets really are... Our current methods of detecting extrasolar planets are not all that great, and really can only detect large (think jupiter or bigger) planets relatively close to the sun. Sure, we might pick up a rocky planet every now and again, but that is mostly by chance while we're looking at already-discovered gas giants. Even so, we have discovered quite a few extrasolar planets, so it's not a terrible stretch to say that planets are the norm rather than the exception. Granted, the majority of the ones we know of are extremely close to their (much nastier than ours) respective suns, so your point about *useful* real-estate being rare still holds true.

I don't have the data at hand, but I think that the argument used against those who argue that "earthlike" planets are too rare for life to exist anywhere else, is that with a pessimistic assessment, due to the incredible size of the milky way, and the number of stars, there would be around 20 million planets (or was it 2 million?) that are as good for life or better than earth.

Now if we calculate the odds for the entire universe...

Of course if you are only looking for "life" and not "human life", the number is even greater since scientists have had the good idea to realize that even on earth, there are lifeforms that live in the most inhospitable places, like acid pools, hotlakes, geysers and far far underground, not to mention Antarctica.

As for your other point I agree completely, you would have something that survives both, and not works well in neither enviroment, at least in comparison to the specialized craft. (Space shuttles work, but as figher-bombers they are not too impressive...)

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 10:22 AM

I think the term "gliding like a brick" was used.

maybe the Mothership would have a fleet of Cloudbase type ships,which descend to atmosphere and are used to conduct the air-war.

when I speak of Rare, I don't mean "almost Unique" just- "thin sprinkling, difficult to get to"

Even with, say, a million planets, oxy-nitro atmosphere, could be lived on without suits (pretty optimistic) you might have to go 100 light years to find 1. Thats a long trip.

Avilan the Grey

2009-01-14, 11:14 AM

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 11:24 AM

Even with, say, a million planets, oxy-nitro atmosphere, could be lived on without suits (pretty optimistic) you might have to go 100 light years to find 1. Thats a long trip.
Well either prolonging human life to a couple thousand years (be it genetics, cyber-implants), cryogenics, sending out a self-sustainable ship that will try to keep their passengers and their families safe and cozy until they reach destination or a some machine that will create humans upon their arrival at designated site. Cryogenic and cyber-implants are in my opinion the best way to go. Other way would just cause too much stress on people ("Are we there yet?" , "Where are we anyway?")

I think we can also safely conclude that the main enemy will, as usual, be other humans, either from rebelling colonies (I am somewhat optimistic that we will at some point colonize Mars) or from other nations on earth.
Interesting notion. But who is to say that after 100,000 years and numerous genetic modification you could tell a now-human from a future-variation of human?
For example what if only way to conquer extremely valuable resource located on a massive planet or god forbid near a black hole is to give humans exo-sceletons and superior muscles through genetic engineering.

Lagrange

2009-01-14, 11:25 AM

Even with, say, a million planets, oxy-nitro atmosphere, could be lived on without suits (pretty optimistic) you might have to go 100 light years to find 1. Thats a long trip.

I agree with this sentiment, space is large. Since the closest star is about 4.3 light years away at the moment. But with in 100 lightyears there are only about 7000 stars, and only about 500 are of the same class as the sun.

I would advocate focusing on terraforming technologies as well, since it already takes long enough to travel between the stars that it would probably be good to be able to adjust things like the atmosphere if you are lucky enough to find a planet that in useable, or at the least perfect the bubble cities.

Dervag

2009-01-14, 11:36 AM

Umm why? I'm at the Moon and fire a laser at a ship around Mars. It takes the laser time to traverse the distance relative to the Moon and Mars. Meanwhile someone picks up the ftl-radio and tells the ship at Mars to move out of the laser's path. Ship at Mars does before the light gets there.

I see no break in causality.The problem pops up when you start doing this between two moving platforms.

Because of the way time and space and motion interact, as described in the theory of relativity, two observers may disagree about how far apart two things are, or how much time elapsed between two events, if those observers are moving relative to each other.

As long as everything in the system is moving slower than light, though, at least all observers will agree about which event happened first.

Introduce faster than light movement, and a time difference that seems positive to one observer (A happened before B) can appear negative (B happened before A) to a different observer travelling at a different speed and/or direction.

You can in fact exploit this to send messages into your own past, though it requires the use of a relay. Or you can start a fight in which you get shot with an FTL bullet over something that, from your perspective, you haven't even done yet. Which causes all the standard time travel paradoxes to arise.
_______

Space warfare as a whole doesn`t make any sense. Once you get to space, you can have infinite resources. Nothing to fight for.People are quite capable of finding things to fight about even when infinite resources are available.
_______

(I think we can also safely conclude that the main enemy will, as usual, be other humans, either from rebelling colonies (I am somewhat optimistic that we will at some point colonize Mars) or from other nations on earth. If we ever get true interstellar travel, Space is still big enough that we will most likely not find any other intelligent life, or if we do, that they will be on a different tech level than us. The whole "We are at war with the evil H'riddzz that just happen to be ruthless, disgusting and somehow vulnerable to our guns despite having "oh so different technology" is very unlikely. There is a bigger chance that they are either far more primitive or can destroy us without effort).Seconded. I believe, for a number of reasons, that if we could survey all intelligence in the universe, we would find:

-A lot of beings that are like cavemen compared to us.
-A lot of beings that are like demigods compared to us.

We would find very few civilizations at roughly our own level of development. The ratio of cavemen to demigods depends on a lot of factors (how likely is an advanced civilization to kill itself off?). But that's most of what we're going to find.
______

Ah, perhaps FTL was the wrong way to phrase it. I was simply talking about communications that arrive sooner than a normal light-speed communication would. It doesn't arrive before it was sent, just sooner. Taking a faster route would be the simplest way. This in and of itself does not break causality.It doesn't have to break causality. But it can break causality. Consult any qualified physicist on this question. They can show you the math. Do not take my word for it. Get a second opinion from someone you know to be competent and capable of doing the math on the theory of relativity.

Once an object moving faster than light exists, there will be combinations of events (A and B) where different observers will disagree about which happened first. And that can mean that if I send an FTL message to you, and you send one back to me, we disagree about whose message arrived first.

If I use my FTL Text Messaging to say "Hello," and you respond with "Hi! How are you?"... it's quite possible that your "Hi! How are you?" will arrive on my screen before I hit the Send button to say "Hello" to you.

Meltemi

2009-01-14, 11:37 AM

One orbital strike problem is Clouds. Could make things tricky.
Really? I know certain frequencies are highly affected by atmospheric conditions, but I thought it was already possible to cut through or otherwise discount cloud formations in mil-spec radar.

That's not really true at all, actually. The ship has to be strong enough to withstand the atmospheric pressure, and be able to generate enough lift to stay in the air, but that's it. Heat shielding is only needed if you drop out of the sky; if you instead use thrusters to come in at a controlled pace, you don't generate any more heat than flying around normally would. And you don't need to be aerodynamic if you have enough thrust, and if you're maneuvering around in space, you've probably got plenty of that. Wings are also unnecessary, just have your rockets point down. Weapons will likely be a bit less effective, but you don't need to shoot as far or as accurately either.

Sure, you'd be more optimal if you were aerodynamic, you could save fuel by having wings generate most of the thrust when moving, and you could move in and out of orbit, and through the atmosphere in general, better if you had heat shielding, but none of those are really needed for you to be an effective atmospheric fighter. Plus, there's no real reason you should even need to enter the atmosphere except to land and refuel, since your weapons should have more than enough range and precision to hit whatever you need to from orbit.
The major concerns with this weapons platform that I can think of straight off the bat are that your approach and movement patterns are very restricted since you have to keep your thrust vector pointed up, which will likely also restrict your weapons arcs, especially if you didn't bother with the added complexity of turreted weapons on a craft that should theoretically be able to simply reorient itself on a dime in space to direct its fire. Even what would be minor damage in space could be crippling once you're in an atmosphere, as well, especially if you lose one of the thrusters keeping you up. As you say yourself, though, orbital strikes are far better a solution than sending your space superiority fighters into an atmosphere. Of course, I'm still out on if fighters in space are even at all useful, given the posts I made earlier.

I recommend the website "Atomic Rocket" (google the phrase) for more information on this. Without technology indistinguishable from magic, you don't have stealth in space.
I also linked this in my first post. I'll do it again, though, since it's so useful: here (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html).^_^
Relevant sections:
Common Misconceptions (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3at.html)
Space Fighters (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#fighters)
Stealth in Space (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3w.html#nostealth)

I think there is a way to cut down on your blackbody radiation, but it's not easy. I thought of it myself, so I'm not sure if it works. Basically, you have to rig a spherical shell around your ship in thermal contact with the hull. Once your surface area is large enough, your surface temperature drops off to the point where it can no longer be easily distinguished from background radiation. You've got so much radiator surface that the ship is nigh-invisible.

This is the equivalent of rigging camo netting over your position. It won't work if your ship is accelerating, but it will cut down on thermal signature.
It's actually worth noting, in conjunction with this, that there are certain methods of acceleration that don't rely on massive thermal blooms a la chemical rockets. Many ion thrusters would seem to be, at least by my reading, undetectable unless you're sitting in the wake already. Of course, these have their own problems. They have massive power requirements, which will require a reactor that's generating its own massive amount of heat, and you won't accelerate quickly by any measure, which is a death-sentence in a combat situation. In addition, the size of a body sufficient to radiate at near-background temperatures without heating up due to simple conduction through the superstructure, depending on your ship's operating temperatures, is going to be enough to occult stars at a minimum and possibly even small planetary satellites, thanks to the minor concern that radiation transfer scales by no less than the fourth power. Still, if you're already generating the power and already manage to mask it in this way, ion propulsion might be a good way to ensure stealth. Just hope that no one has off-the-shelf technology from today to handle scanning the sky for the mere four hours it would take to spot your shadow, since it'll take months for you to reach your destination.

EDIT: I was wrong. Even an ion drive can be spotted at about 1 AU. Oops.

For the record, my favourite applied phlebotinum to ensure space stealth and combat tactics that don't depend primarily on thermal endurance is simply dumping the excess heat into some "alterspace" or "hyperspace" where it can't be easily detected using the same tech as FTL. It's a pure handwave, plain and simple, but...

MeklorIlavator

2009-01-14, 11:43 AM

Texas Ben, look at Dervag's post. That's what Warty Goblin was talking about in his post, and what you seemed to both mock and support in your various posts. That is what I was talking about.

Avilan the Grey

2009-01-14, 11:47 AM

Interesting notion. But who is to say that after 100,000 years and numerous genetic modification you could tell a now-human from a future-variation of human?
For example what if only way to conquer extremely valuable resource located on a massive planet or god forbid near a black hole is to give humans exo-sceletons and superior muscles through genetic engineering.

Obviously. We do have the Replicants, the Cylons and others to contest with, right? (Because all human civilizations will inevitably build androids, give them free will, high intelligence and then force them into slavery. And never expect an uprising and a 100000 year war. Duh. :smallbiggrin:)
Seriously, you are right, I can see warrior caste etc.

Miklus

2009-01-14, 11:55 AM

Just to reply to all the stealth-posts...

No matter what, one ship will detect the other first. That ship will have an advantage. It may still be way out of range, but at least it can flee or call some friends. If your ship is stealthier and/or your sensors are better, you will have that advantage.

The idea of beaming the waste heat off in one direction was just one that came to me while I wrote. You need to get rid of the heat, I agree. But you could get rid of it in a controlled fashion. Imagine a screen on one side (say, the front) of the ship. If you could cool that to 3K (with a liquid helium system or somesuch), you could mask the heat signature in that direction. You can not make it completely surround the ship, because heat would build up inside, but you could cover part of the ship. Might work well on missiles, since they have the front towards the enemy...

The cloaking device might have cameras and projectors to project the stars seen on one side of the ship onto the other. It is far out, but not impossible. It does not have to be perfect...just better than a black siluette.

Detecting the gravity from a ship is probably impossible at large ranges, except if some completely new techology is invented.

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 12:28 PM

Obviously. We do have the Replicants, the Cylons and others to contest with, right?
I'm still a firm believer of "Homo homini lupus est". No machine can ever hate a human like a human.

Wasn't there something about increasing your surface in order to decrease your visibility on an infrared sensor?

Hawriel

2009-01-14, 12:40 PM

There is a small, however important, aspect folks here seem to be missing:

Big weapons provoke fear. That's one of the major reasons, in Star Wars, for the creation of Imperial-class Star Destroyers and the main reason for the creation of the Death Star: look up the Tarkin Doctrine on Wookiepedia.

A real world example occurred during the first Iraq war - the U.S. Navy was using the old WW2-era battleships with their 16" guns, doing bombardment of coastal regions - the fear that these massive ships, and their equally massive guns, provoked in the enemy inspired local militias to surrender.

Your totaly wrong. Yes units of the Iraq army may have surrender when a naval bombardment was used. However its not THE reason they surrenderd. Members of the Iraq army surrendered to an unmand, unarmed predator drone, and a news reporter with a cammera. There was a hole lot of internal reasons why the Iraqies surrenderd in droves during the the first Iraq war.

History proves that your idea of big naval guns are scary and make peaple surrender wrong. The Americans did not serrender in the war of 1812 when the British pounded the crap out of Charlston. WW2 is the war peaple think of for naval bonbardments. I cant think of any that caused a surrender. Tunisa, Normandy, Guadacanal, Tarawa, Sicily, Salerno in Italy, Okinawa, Iwo jima, Peleliu. No one surrenderd. Heavy naval support was also used in the Korian war and the Vietnam war. No one surrendered their eather. Armies do not serrender to navies.

The big mistake peaple are making all over these boards is that the OP is asking about a REAL WORLD space navy. All of the arguments for or against on this thread have been using SCIENCE FICTION to prove that a real world space navy would have huge ships. Every one is pulling stuff frpm star wars, star trek, battlestar galactica, and others to prove their point.

The OP indirectly was using ships like a star distroyer as an example of what a real world ship would not be like. I think hes right. To an exctent. I dont think that in the centuries to come that humanity will find it viable to creat a military ship the size and mass of a star distroyer. At least not until planitary invasion becomes nessasary. In that case the troop transports maybe quite large.

To be honoest we cant know what a space military would look like. I dont think that we would have a naval battleship in space. Take a look at what are space craft look like now. Then add a weapon to it. Remember the U.S. space shuttle was that big only because of the cargo bay. The ship most likly will be built around one primary weapon system pluss a defencive system. whether it's an energy, missile or projectile weapons.

The things that will determine the size of a space craft. Crew, and every thing that is used to maintain the life and health of the peaple on board. Propultion and fuel. Weapon systems. The energy system used to power all of it.

The number of crew will not be as large as you think. Alot of the systems will be automated or assisted by a computer. Again look at the shuttle. Yes the shuttle's systems are maintaned by a large opperations crew on the ground. However because a ship that will need to travel large distances it will need to opperate with out a grown based opperations crew. By necessity that will be as stream lined as possible to cut down on crew. Which will let a smaller powerplant be used. A military ship will have more crew than a civilan ship but I dont believe any whare neer what you see in popular science fiction.

Storm Bringer

2009-01-14, 12:44 PM

Heat shielding is only needed if you drop out of the sky; if you instead use thrusters to come in at a controlled pace, you don't generate any more heat than flying around normally would.

you sure about this? I mean, it would require a aweful lot of breaking power to slow down that much, and you'd still have to deal with the fact you were in free-fall in a vacum, which would mean using even more power to control the rate of decent. Plus, it'd be slow as hell, which is not really a good thing if you're trying to enter the atmosphere of a hostile planet (and theirfore range of a gound based SAM systems)

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 01:38 PM

The big mistake peaple are making all over these boards is that the OP is asking about a REAL WORLD space navy. All of the arguments for or against on this thread have been using SCIENCE FICTION to prove that a real world space navy would have huge ships. Every one is pulling stuff frpm star wars, star trek, battlestar galactica, and others to prove their point.
Greater mistake is to treat a problem that BELONGS to SCIENCE FICTION as a one that DOESN'T.
Seriously it is like asking what would be a size of a cavemen submarine?!?
The answer is about the size of a man (since cavemen submarine would probably just be a guy in some suit breathing through a really big pipe). What is their size now? It varies from different uses.

Also OS seem to miss out some important points:
* defensive capabilities developing at a same pace as offensive capabilities in parallel.
* need for medium sized ships to act as fuel buffer
* while bigger ships cost more to make they by default are also a bigger target spreading the damage over the hull (those things could be mitigated by effort)
* bigger means more supplies and more firepower
* Manuverability is overrated. Especially if they have some kind of EMP and/or light speed weaponry
* Detection in space is painfully easy
That being said I don't think Giant Battlecruisers are gonna duke it out. It would be a waste of resources. But a wide array of all-sized ships will most likely be utilized.

The OP indirectly was using ships like a star distroyer as an example of what a real world ship would not be like. I think hes right. To an exctent. I dont think that in the centuries to come that humanity will find it viable to creat a military ship the size and mass of a star distroyer. At least not until planitary invasion becomes nessasary. In that case the troop transports maybe quite large.
Well we all know what star destroyer is like. I mean sure Star Wars nuts do but I don't. I imagine something that is few kilometers in diameter.
But most people here agree - small unmanned fighters FTW. Medium to large sub-carriers and freighters carrying supplies and Motherships serving some super-carriers.

To be honoest we cant know what a space military would look like.
This is the smartest thing you have said.
Until you continued talking.

Then add a weapon to it. Remember the U.S. space shuttle was that big only because of the cargo bay. The ship most likly will be built around one primary weapon system pluss a defencive system. whether it's an energy, missile or projectile weapons.
Says you. Most imagine shuttles that go on earth reload and fly off into battle again but do we really need to make them land on earth? No. If I remember correctly all those three rockets and shuttles own supplies are used to lift in into space. And it doesn't have any fuel to return home (only to steer)
While our space-fighters need to consume that much fuel to get in and out of atmosphere there won't be much space fighting around. So I doubt this would be a spacefighter of the future.

I personally believe there is an easier way to do this. We grow our ships. Send hundreds of them to space as merely bottles and we feed them on (space)junk until they are big enough to be boarded (a la Farscape and others). Sure its slimey and gross but you could save a lot on computers, lifesupport... **** your ship could also be a moving blasting construction yard a true mother ship (think baby-ships ;) ).
Also it would have to be a bio-mechanoid or you would have to rely on some other form of control rather than computers.

You'll probably be like HA HA HAha!!! That is science-fiction realm. Guess what. Having a strong military space-battles IS science fiction. Anything we have today loaded with laser an' tazer would fail horribly. It would be cost infective, fragile, useless piece of junk no matter how small or big it would be.
I don't expect to see space fighting to happen within next 400 years. And for me anything >100 years is SF realm.

But heck I'm just a person with an opinion just like anyone else.

Dervag

2009-01-14, 02:04 PM

It's actually worth noting, in conjunction with this, that there are certain methods of acceleration that don't rely on massive thermal blooms a la chemical rockets...

In addition, the size of a body sufficient to radiate at near-background temperatures without heating up due to simple conduction through the superstructure, depending on your ship's operating temperatures, is going to be enough to occult stars at a minimum and possibly even small planetary satellites, thanks to the minor concern that radiation transfer scales by no less than the fourth power.I was too lazy to do the math, but I *think* this could work for camouflage at long range if and only if the ship powers itself down as far as possible. I don't think there's any way to use anything but a technomagical drive to accelerate while the camo screen is out.

The ranges in question would be interplanetary, but at least it should keep you from being easily visible to an observer who is out past the orbit of Pluto.

The camo netting trick has two real problems from my perspective. One is absorption of sunlight. A large radiator surface absorbs a lot of sunlight, and unless you're very far from the sun, that will keep you from cooling down to cosmic background temperatures by itself. To avoid that you'd have to make the surface of the camo netting reflective... which tends to defeat the purpose.

The other problem is that the camo netting presents a large radar target.

The best I could think of would be to use reflective sheets in a simple polyhedral shape. That way, reflected sunlight and radar pulses all go off in a small number of directions, and unless the enemy just happens to be in the right place, they won't be able to intercept those reflections.
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No matter what, one ship will detect the other first. That ship will have an advantage. It may still be way out of range, but at least it can flee or call some friends. If your ship is stealthier and/or your sensors are better, you will have that advantage.It is one hell of a lot simpler to build better sensors that double your detection range than it is to build better stealth techniques in space that halve the enemy's detection range. So the advantage in this competition really goes to the side with the best sensors, because the available stealth techniques aren't good enough to defeat even basic sensors.

The idea of beaming the waste heat off in one direction was just one that came to me while I wrote. You need to get rid of the heat, I agree. But you could get rid of it in a controlled fashion. Imagine a screen on one side (say, the front) of the ship. If you could cool that to 3K (with a liquid helium system or somesuch), you could mask the heat signature in that direction. You can not make it completely surround the ship, because heat would build up inside, but you could cover part of the ship. Might work well on missiles, since they have the front towards the enemy...The problem is that keeping the refrigerator running will require power, which heats the ship further. Also, it means that your ship has trouble radiating away heat, which means it gets hotter inside the ship.

Trust me on this one; directing away the heat radiated through blackbody radiation from a heated object isn't a very practical solution to the problem.

The cloaking device might have cameras and projectors to project the stars seen on one side of the ship onto the other. It is far out, but not impossible. It does not have to be perfect...just better than a black siluette.The catch is that this really isn't much of a threat. You're far more worried about your thermal signature than you are about blocking stars. And the projectors you design may be more trouble than they're worth by emitting in frequency bands the star doesn't.

Erloas

2009-01-14, 02:52 PM

Part of the problem with the question is what exactly do you define as "big" for a space warship? Is big the size of cargo jet rather then a fighter jet, is big the size of a ocean going battleship, or an ocean going super-tanker, or are you talking the size of small towns, states, or small planetoids?

I would say that with the proper advancement in propulsion technology we would be looking at something the size of small towns for the largest carriers and include just about everything down to todays jetfighter types. Of course the biggest issue in how small they can practically be is also related to propulsion and how small it can be made in practical terms. I would imagine that any technology that might be possible that we can think of now would probably require ships about the size of cargo jets (in general size, of course wings wouldn't be needed) to have enough room for a complex and probably rather dangerous engine type that will need a fair amount of containment, and then room for all the sorts of equipement that will be required for fairly long trips and the equipement necessary to wage war.

The carriers in this case I wouldn't see as much more then somewhat mobile space stations and hardly classified as a ship at all, though it all depends on how you want to define ship and space station that is somewhat movable.

The problem with fleets entirely comprised of small ships is simply that the effective range is generally too short to be of any real use in any sort of space conflicts that happen outside of our own solar system. And anything longer range then that would have to be handled by getting some large carrier types of ships to the system itself and they would have to be very large to house the fleet of small ships. Then you run into the whole situation we have in naval warfare where you need a whole range of sizes of ships designed for specific tasks to cover many different tasks in combat.

warty goblin

2009-01-14, 03:17 PM

Geez, I spend one evening working and hanging with the girlfriend, and look what happens...

Rather than try to aggregate ten zillion quotes, I'm going to instead write up what I'd expect space combat to look like, with a bare minimum of physics-violating.

My overall prediction is that, assuming it occurs at all, it would look something like WWI naval warfare. Here's why.

1) Horizon. For all practical purposes there isn't one. Active sensors (radar, lidar, etc) don't work at extreme ranges since their return varies as the inverse quartic of distance. Passives however go as the inverse square of distance, making them much more attractive for long range detection. Unlike in any form of earth warfare however there's nothing to hide behind or, with very rare exceptions, block or absorb blackbody radiation. Hence anybody with the brains of an eggplant and a decent sensor suite will see anything long before they get into combat ranges.

2) Maneuverability. One of the most compelling reasons to be maneuverable on earth is to get into a better position. The key here is that 'better position' is pretty much defined by terrain. In space there isn't any terrain (or rather terrain is so rare it would be foolish to count on it), so all positions are, in some sense, equal. There remains other reasons to maneuver, such as 'crossing an enemy's T' or something like that. But since an enemy will be seen long before they hit combat ranges, there will be plenty of time to do this, if its possible at all. In addition these are ships, which are going places, and returning to course in space takes a lot of energy- to be specific the amount of energy you spent deviating from it to begin with. This means that moving around unnecessarily is expensive.Dodging weapons fire is possible, but personally I'd think active defenses would be a much more profitable use of volume for the most part.

3) Weapons. Lasers are fun, but have heat problems. Ditto most projectile weapons. Missiles are also a good time, but are much easier to counter than lasers or projectiles, since they tend to throw of whacking great particle trails from their engines, which makes them easy to see and hence shoot. Honestly this is pretty dependent on the available technology. Pretty much inevitably however a larger ship will be able to mount more powerful weapons with longer kill ranges than a smaller ship. Hence a larger ship has a pretty good chance of being able to disable a smaller vessel with pretty much no risk.

4) Defenses. These are much easier to forecast. Given advances in active defenses, I'd predict a lot of these. Even projectile weapons could in theory be targeted and killed, although this is much harder than a missile, since the projectile will be both smaller, and not dependent on a warhead to do damage- warheads can be rendered inoperable or else prematurely detonated. Lasers however can't be stopped (easily), so I'm still a fan of armor. If nothing else you want enough so that it takes a reasonably powerful projectile to damage your ship, otherwise somebody's gonna get clever and design a high velocity shotgun and blow your ship full of very small holes.

So what does this boil down to? You see the enemy coming, blaze away with all you've got while trying to avoid being shot to bits until one side or the other is beaten to a pulp. There's not much reason to move around, once combat is joined there's little hope of escaping it short of beating your opponent into a hulk or rapidly expanding cloud of plasma. Either way, you want to avoid being disabled or destroyed quickly, and the only ways I can see to do this involve more armor and defenses, both of which demand a larger frame to mount them on. Thus a larger vessel will be both more durable, and capable of engaging enemy vessels at greater range. At some point however one hits the point of diminishing returns. Where this happens is pretty technology specific, but swarms of extremely small vessels do not strike me as particularly likely.

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 03:19 PM

lasers at very long range have one obvious problem- they spread out. One fired at the moon, say, has an area of multiple square kilometres. And there's no way to narrow it.

BRC

2009-01-14, 03:25 PM

lasers at very long range have one obvious problem- they spread out. One fired at the moon, say, has an area of multiple square kilometres. And there's no way to narrow it.
Okay, so considering the ranges that space combat will likely take place at, if lasers can be weaponized, their main use will be point-defense.

hamishspence

2009-01-14, 03:30 PM

maybe we sould cover the weapon types, plausibility in future, etc.

Guns/Accelerators- Advantage- Lethal at all ranges. Disadvantage- not always accurate, no self-guidance, time delay.

Lasers- advantage- speed, accuracy- disadvantage- reducing damage at range.

Missiles- advantage- self guiding Disadavantage- electronic countermeasures.

Oslecamo

2009-01-14, 03:45 PM

warty goblin: Well, you forget two main points that render your vision unlikely in my opinion:

1-There's no such thing as "maximum range". There's no air atrict, so projectiles can travel to one point of the galaxy to the other as much as the laws of physics care. So, when a fleet is spoted, you start firing your railguns like mad, and keep firing untill you see them explode. This may not be very viable with ships with limited ammo, but planetary defenses probably can afford the "more dakka" principle. Specially when you insist so much that dodging is for fools, so you get hit head on by a shower of hard particles wich deliver you a dead of a thousand scratches. And since they're going to lose their heat to the space pretty fast and they don't have any electronics to emmit radiations they're pretty much undetectable, so so much for shooting them down before they hit you.

2-Targeting. Even with super advanced computers you'll have problems targeting something that's a zillion quilometers away whitout self guided missiles. Thus size is a disadvantage here. You have moar armor, but you're that much easier to hit, and you're back at stack zero. Except you spent a hell lot of resources geting that big hull.

Thus, smaller ships can engage big ships at big ranges just fine, but the smaller ships are harder to shot back at. And also harder to spot. It doesn't matter if there's nowhere to hide behind, it's still harder to spot a smallplanet(fighter wich doesn't emmit that much energy) than a shining star(big ship with big blazing guns).

pendell

2009-01-14, 04:17 PM

I can think of a couple reasons to argue for big ships:

1) Logistics. If interstellar travel takes months or years, duration starts becoming an issue.
Bigger ships simply have a great deal more storage capacity than little ships.

2) Power. If your weaponry is in any way dependent on generated energy, a big ship can house a much, much bigger power plant than a small one can.

3) Point defense. The reason aircraft were so successful in WWII was because they were extremely fast relative to surface ships, which had laughably inaccurate anti-air weapons.

The situation has changed in the past 50 years. A KIROV-class CGN or a TICONDORAGA-class CG is armed with seeking missiles backed by powerful radars and has computer-controlled defenses. While it's still possible to kill one from the air, they are a much, much harder target than a WWII-era ship.

Now imagine a universe in which such a ship is armed, not with guided missiles, but with light-speed, line-of-sight weapons that are computer aimed and controlled. And also recall there is no such thing as stealth.

It would be very, very hard to break through such defenses. It's a big ship, remember? That means it can pack on a lot of defenses on top of its big power plant.

I will not argue armor, because I know of no metal that can stop a nuclear fireball. The defense of such a vehicle -- near-term -- would likely be done with point defenses and area defenses preventing the weapon from getting close enough to hit in the first place.

So if *I* were designing an interstellar warship, this is what I would design:

1) Massive storage bays for storing fuel, weapons, people.
2) Autonomous drones for area defense and for combat operations it isn't feasible to move the big ship to. These would probably be kamikaze ships. Possibly human-crewed lesser command ships to provide local command and control, so that they aren't dependent on a long line-of-sight lag to talk to the main ship, if necessary.
3) Point defenses such as lasers or particle weapons to deal with missile, drone threats.
4) refueling vessels to 'scoop' hydrogen out of gas giants. I'm assuming hydrogen can be used for fusion.
5) A big, big linear accelerator. Got a target to big for the drones? Go to the nearest asteroid belt or gas giant ring, grab a suitable rock, accelerate it at the target. If the rock is n't big enough, get a bigger one. Or throw more of the same.

Planetary conquest is on the same principle. Signal to the surface to surrender or be bombarded. Then drop Dinosaur killer asteroids until the planet either surrenders or is uninhabitable. After surrender, garrison with infantry fire teams which have a jillion iron bars in orbit that can be brought down on any point on the planet's surface with GPS-like precision. Will need to leave a GPS satellite network for said navigation. Also communications. Also need something to transport troops around and to shoot down aircraft -- line-of-sight lasers?

What to fight over in space when resources are infinite? Simple. Ideology. Religion. Politics. There's always going to be a Cause motivating people to build a Workers Paradise or Declare The War Of All Peoples Against All Kings or Make The World Safe For Democracy or Proclaim The Word Of Zuul or whatever. Never fails. Every 400 years or so some egghead writes a book, then half the world pays for it at the hands of the other half that didn't get the joke.

Also revenge. There are blood feuds in lots of places that have been going on for generations. There have even been situations when people of one culture have destroyed economic tools left by another, even though it impoverished them, so great was their hatred of the first culture.

And there's simple ambition as well. Alexander the Great and Ghenghis Khan were not motivated so much by resources to conquer as it was a simple desire to be First, to be greater and better than anyone else. A variant on the reason people climb mountains. Just as some are compelled to climb five mile high peaks with oxygen just so they can leave a statue saying they were there, so some people are driven by the desire to put up big statues of themselves in all corners of the world. Some to whom the lamentations of their enemy's women is the only happiness in the world.

As long as there are humans, there will be war. If there are humans in space, there will be war in space, even if we can do nothing more than pull the tubes out of each other's space suits.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2009-01-14, 04:31 PM

One last thing.

Has anyone read The Battle of Sauron (http://www.amazon.com/War-World-Battle-Sauron/dp/0937912042/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231968607&sr=8-1)? It features two deep-space engagements (battle of Tanith, battle of Sauron) and one invasion from space (conquest of Haven by the Talon-class heavy cruiser FOMORIA ). It is a compilation of previous stories and about 30% new material. Well worth a read.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Erloas

2009-01-14, 04:43 PM

2-Targeting. Even with super advanced computers you'll have problems targeting something that's a zillion quilometers away whitout self guided missiles. Thus size is a disadvantage here. You have moar armor, but you're that much easier to hit, and you're back at stack zero. Except you spent a hell lot of resources geting that big hull.

Thus, smaller ships can engage big ships at big ranges just fine, but the smaller ships are harder to shot back at. And also harder to spot. It doesn't matter if there's nowhere to hide behind, it's still harder to spot a smallplanet(fighter wich doesn't emmit that much energy) than a shining star(big ship with big blazing guns).
The problem with projectile based weapons is that armor really is pretty good at stopping them. Especially when you get into space where the weight of your armor is no longer a large factor. Also while you might not be able to detect to shoot down projectiles, if they are at all magnetic they can be pushed or pulled away by a very strong magnetic field. Having some magnetic probe infront of your approaching fleet could easily pull the bullets off target before they get there, it doesn't even have to pull much, even changing the vector by a few inches over a miles distance is more then enough if you are shooting from that far away. Even if they aren't magnetic, so long as they will take a charge (and almost any material will) they can be bombarded with polarized particles and then moved with the magnetic field. Its not even all that "futurific" because we have a lot of technologies all over right now that rely on those principles of operation. It can't work as a defense right now because our ranges aren't long enough, but right now our protectile ranges are generally in the 100s of yards ranged rather then 100s of thousands of miles.

Any sort of energy based field infront of the fleet could also likely vaporize any smaller projectiles including missiles.

If that is the case then you need weapons with enough mass so that their trajectory can't be changed as easily and/or still have enough mass after going through the energy fields to still be dangerous.

If you are talking about engaging outside of effective targetting range with something like a guided missile that means the missile needs to aquire its target a considerable time after it is launched, once it enters a reasonable targetting range, which gives defenders plenty of chances to fool it with decoys or other sorts of defenses.

As it is current space ships are already being hit all the time with small very fast moving particales and they seem to handle it fine without anything really approaching armor. So your projectile based guns are going to have to be fairly large. Any large gun is going to have to have a fair amount of weight behind it because of inertia. If you shoot a very large caliber gun in space its going to push you back as well, and unless the relative size of your shots is small compared to your ship or you are going to be loosing a lot of your projectile energy to the ship instead of the projectile. So that kind of makes the large gun on a small ship thing impractical. And as I mentioned before, I don't think small projectiles are going to be a huge threat. Much the way an M-16 is of no threat to a tank or even a medium grade APC.

Surfing HalfOrc

2009-01-14, 04:56 PM

While almost everyone here has focused on "Bigger is Better," I wonder if the opposite might be a good idea...

I read the book, "The Diamond Age," in which nanotechnology used super small bots vs other bots. They had the advantage of being very cheap, and capable of gumming up "bigger" things through sheer numbers. While big ships have their places, maybe some thought needs to be given to the microscopic wars as well. Or, simply tens of thousands of cheap, expendable drones, either computer controlled or remotely controlled.

Space does present some major problems from a tactical point of view. It's Big and Open. Seriously, there is nothing to hide behind. But what are your goals? Engage the Enemy "Out There?" Where? What makes this bit of space more tactically important that that piece? Orbiting platforms could provide a LOT of protection from invaders.

What always suprised me in BSG was than none of the planets seemed to have planetary defences, in either version. Back in the 1980s there was very little thought to computer networks. The Cylons just offered peace, put their ships into a cloud, and beat the holy hell out of the Battlestars. In the new one, they infiltrated the military networks, and shut them down seconds before their attack. Either attack should have been watched for. If your enemy has a potential hiding area nearby, it's safe to assume that they are indeed hiding there. If networks can be hacked, they will be! (This from a guy who had to fight off the trojan left on the Goblinscomic.com website just two weeks ago!) Neither attack was so perfect that it couldn't be forseen, but that happens often enough in the "Real World" than sometimes people get caught flatfooted.

The final thing to think about is "Who is your enemy?" We spent years and megabucks preparing to fight the Soviets in a ground and sea war, only to see the Soviet Union go belly up. But we never prepared for a bunch of terrorists to say, "Hey, what if instead of taking a plane and demanding whatever for the hostages, we use the planes AS weapons?" But that was also a tradeoff for the terrorists, since now hijackings are effectivly over. People won't wait for outside rescue, animal/pack mentality will rise up, and the passengers will rip the terrorists from limb to limb.

Storm Bringer

2009-01-14, 05:59 PM

warty goblin: Well, you forget two main points that render your vision unlikely in my opinion:

1-There's no such thing as "maximum range". There's no air atrict, so projectiles can travel to one point of the galaxy to the other as much as the laws of physics care. So, when a fleet is spoted, you start firing your railguns like mad, and keep firing untill you see them explode. This may not be very viable with ships with limited ammo, but planetary defenses probably can afford the "more dakka" principle. Specially when you insist so much that dodging is for fools, so you get hit head on by a shower of hard particles wich deliver you a dead of a thousand scratches. And since they're going to lose their heat to the space pretty fast and they don't have any electronics to emmit radiations they're pretty much undetectable, so so much for shooting them down before they hit you..

thier may be no such thing as maxium range, but thier is such a thing as maximum effective range. After all, your firing railgun slugs, which can only travel so fast. All a fleet has to do is play about with it's trajectory slightly and the raik slugs will just miss. If your shooting at a target at, say, a light minute distance, then the best your targeting data can be is 60 seconds behind what he's actaully doing. If you fire on the predictions of where he'll be, even with a light speed weapon system, you're trying to guess where he will be 120 seconds on form the latest data you've got on him.

even with faster than light sensors, it doesn't pan out. the travel time at those sort of ranges would be imense, meaning the ship just has to keep altering put a little corse change in every so often and it's safe as house agianst long range rail fire. You'd have to wait until the range dropped to the point where the travel times were low enough he couldn't dodge effectivly.

And no way have your rail defenses got enough rounds to try a 'wall of lead' approach. Enguagements at that sort of range would have to be conducted with guided weapons, which opens up all the options we have for stopping guided weapons today.

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 06:14 PM

1-There's no such thing as "maximum range". There's no air atrict, so projectiles can travel to one point of the galaxy to the other as much as the laws of physics care. So, when a fleet is spoted, you start firing your railguns like mad, and keep firing untill you see them explode. This may not be very viable with ships with limited ammo, but planetary defenses probably can afford the "more dakka" principle. Specially when you insist so much that dodging is for fools, so you get hit head on by a shower of hard particles wich deliver you a dead of a thousand scratches. And since they're going to lose their heat to the space pretty fast and they don't have any electronics to emmit radiations they're pretty much undetectable, so so much for shooting them down before they hit you.
Yes there is. It is the fuel limit of the missile. Once missile is out of fuel it cannot steer and will crash into first thing in its path. Even rebalancing weight will require some energy to be expended. So there is a maximum range. It is just really, really big.

2-Targeting. Even with super advanced computers you'll have problems targeting something that's a zillion quilometers away whitout self guided missiles. Thus size is a disadvantage here. You have moar armor, but you're that much easier to hit, and you're back at stack zero. Except you spent a hell lot of resources geting that big hull.

Thus, smaller ships can engage big ships at big ranges just fine, but the smaller ships are harder to shot back at. And also harder to spot. It doesn't matter if there's nowhere to hide behind, it's still harder to spot a smallplanet(fighter wich doesn't emmit that much energy) than a shining star(big ship with big blazing guns).
While this it is true that bigger ships means easier to hit there is also more places to hit on. If we assume that armor is homogeneous if you you hit thousand different spots your shots and damage will be spread against greater surface achieving nearly same thing.

Also smaller ship = less fuel, less armor, less ammo. Now Giant ship has the upper hand.

Personally I think you don't realize the basics. Ships effectiveness/cost ratio doesn't depend solely on size it depends on existing technologies and materials available (and which all lie in domain of SF).
Here is a thought imagine a giant ship with Super-Generator can create an EMP puls that can disables smaller targets in a medium sized radius around them? Small ships would then be useless and military would switch to medium sized to big sized ships capable of enduring the EMP. And what if they use some sort of cage to protect themselves from EMP blast? Then small fighters would dominate. Really it is like a perpetual game of Paper-Rock-Scissor rather than fixed in stone.
Or what if the material used to produce big ships is cheaper than material used to produce small ships.

Dervag

2009-01-14, 06:32 PM

Guns/Accelerators- Advantage- Lethal at all ranges. Disadvantage- not always accurate, no self-guidance, time delay.A large-caliber accelerator cannonball can carry a guidance package for steering, but its ability to make mid-course corrections will be relatively minor. Also, if you want to do that, it's got to be a big damned accelerator, capable of launching a projectile the size of a garbage can or something at speeds high enough to cover interplanetary distances.

In this case, the line between gun and missile tube blurs- the weapon system is either a cannon firing guided projectiles, or a missile launcher that gives the missiles an extremely high initial speed.

That might be another reason why a big ship might be desirable. Smaller ships won't be able to fire guided hypervelocity projectiles, and must instead rely on missiles. But missiles are far more visible than hypervelocity projectiles, because they have to use their thrusters for high-energy acceleration as well as for steering.
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Missiles- advantage- self guiding Disadavantage- electronic countermeasures.Also, disadvantage- point defense. Missiles can be seen coming at great distances. And unless you use either bomb-pumped X-ray laser systems or very shrapnel warheads, missiles have to come into the effective range of shipboard tactical lasers.
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warty goblin: Well, you forget two main points that render your vision unlikely in my opinion:

1-There's no such thing as "maximum range". There's no air atrict, so projectiles can travel to one point of the galaxy to the other as much as the laws of physics care. So, when a fleet is spoted, you start firing your railguns like mad, and keep firing untill you see them explode.[quote]On the contrary, there is such a thing as maximum range. Or rather, there is maximum effective range.

In space, I can dodge in any direction I please by accelerating. If your shot takes, say, ten minutes to reach me, then I can be far away from your original aiming point before you hit me unless my engines are truly anemic. If I dodge and make minor course changes at random intervals, it will not be possible to hit me at all until I get close enough that the time-of-flight for one of your shots is roughly equal to the time it takes for my ship to travel its own length.

The way to counter this is with guided projectiles, but guided projectiles are a lot easier to see coming. Those can be nailed with point defense lasers at closer range.
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Lasers travel very fast, so over their effective range they are nigh-impossible to dodge without a technomagic drive. At some point the beam disperses too much for them to reliably damage a target, of course.

For gun/accelerators, this is the determining factor on their ability to destroy a target. Attempting to throw a saturation bombardment at the enemy ship in the hope of scoring lucky hits at extreme range is a viable tactic, but it will not be especially effective. And for a planetary defense platform, it is offset by the disadvantage that the defense platform can't dodge as easily as the attacking ships.

The effective range is longer for faster projectiles. Which, interestingly, means that longer, more powerful coilguns have longer effective range. And since more powerful coilguns require a bigger ship...
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[quote]2-Targeting. Even with super advanced computers you'll have problems targeting something that's a zillion quilometers away whitout self guided missiles. Thus size is a disadvantage here. You have moar armor, but you're that much easier to hit, and you're back at stack zero. Except you spent a hell lot of resources geting that big hull.Solution: build long, linear ships with spinal mounted weapons and put powerful thrusters on the flanks. The ship can dodge side to side very effectively, making it a difficult target. And the cross-section it presents to enemy fire is relatively low. Plus you can put thick armor on the bow, thick enough to withstand nuclear blasts, and shelter a very large mass behind it.

Yes, these ships can be outflanked. But on the scale of effective combat range, outflanking a target using reaction drives is not easy or fast, and the enemy has plenty of time to shoot at you or rotate. The only way to outflank anyone in space is to hit them from both sides at once, and that requires very tight synchonization.
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Thus, smaller ships can engage big ships at big ranges just fine, but the smaller ships are harder to shot back at. And also harder to spot. It doesn't matter if there's nowhere to hide behind, it's still harder to spot a smallplanet(fighter wich doesn't emmit that much energy) than a shining star(big ship with big blazing guns).A fighter that is maneuvering will emit enough energy to be easily seen at interplanetary distances. At those ranges, nobody can fight effectively, barring technomagic weapons.
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I will not argue armor, because I know of no metal that can stop a nuclear fireball.Oh, you can do it. You just need to use a LOT of steel. Think about nuclear pulse propulsion and you'll see what I mean. A warship powered by nuclear pulse drive (unlikely as that may be) would be effectively invulnerable to attacks coming at its rear, because its rear was explicitly designed to survive repeated nuclear explosions at close range.
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2) Autonomous drones for area defense and for combat operations it isn't feasible to move the big ship to. These would probably be kamikaze ships. Possibly human-crewed lesser command ships to provide local command and control, so that they aren't dependent on a long line-of-sight lag to talk to the main ship, if necessary.I would make the drones recoverable because they're likely to be expensive, myself. But that's a detail.

5) A big, big linear accelerator. Got a target to big for the drones? Go to the nearest asteroid belt or gas giant ring, grab a suitable rock, accelerate it at the target. If the rock is n't big enough, get a bigger one. Or throw more of the same.Nonono. Your linear accelerator fires solid projectiles of (relatively) low size and mass. Like cannonballs. You can keep those aboard ships. If you want to throw a space rock at a target, you have to send a crew out to install rocket engines on board.

Your ship isn't going to be big enough to accelerate a large space rock to the kind of speeds we're talking about, unless it's the size of the Death Star or something.
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The problem with projectile based weapons is that armor really is pretty good at stopping them.Not at the speeds we're talking about. A solid projectile traveling at 10 km/second carries as much kinetic energy as (roughly) 10 times its mass in TNT. At 100 km/second, 1000 times its mass in TNT. And that doesn't even get us up to 0.001c.

There comes a point at which getting shot with a kinetic penetrator in space is indistinguishable from getting hit by a cruise missile or (in extreme cases) getting nuked.
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Also while you might not be able to detect to shoot down projectiles, if they are at all magnetic they can be pushed or pulled away by a very strong magnetic field. Having some magnetic probe infront of your approaching fleet could easily pull the bullets off target before they get there, it doesn't even have to pull much, even changing the vector by a few inches over a miles distance is more then enough if you are shooting from that far away.Not going to work. First of all, you can't put your probe that far in front of the fleet or it becomes a target in its own right. Second of all, this defense cannot be reoriented to deal with a threat in a different direction- at least, not fast enough to do much good. Third of all, you can't really generate a magnetic field strong enough to cause useful deflections from a range of kilometers.

To bend the projectile trajectory far enough to save your ship, you need to get very close, in space terms. And to do it from a long way out. You'd pretty much have to know where the projectile was so you could fly over to it and intercept it with your magnet. I don't think it would work at all except by really extreme luck. You'd probably be better off just firing guided missiles to get into head-on collisions with the projectiles.
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If you are talking about engaging outside of effective targetting range with something like a guided missile that means the missile needs to aquire its target a considerable time after it is launched, once it enters a reasonable targetting range, which gives defenders plenty of chances to fool it with decoys or other sorts of defenses.The effective range of weapons in space isn't limited by your ability to see the enemy. It's limited by their ability to dodge out of the way of your shot before it reaches them, even if they can't see it coming.

Guided missiles are much less vulnerable to this problem. Of course, they're also very easy targets for close-in defenses.
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If you shoot a very large caliber gun in space its going to push you back as well, and unless the relative size of your shots is small compared to your ship or you are going to be loosing a lot of your projectile energy to the ship instead of the projectile.Only if the projectile is of mass comparable to that of the ship, which is very hard to believe. As long as the ship is, say, 1000 to 10000 times more massive than an individual bullet it fires, you lose very little energy to the recoil.
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I read the book, "The Diamond Age," in which nanotechnology used super small bots vs other bots. They had the advantage of being very cheap, and capable of gumming up "bigger" things through sheer numbers. While big ships have their places, maybe some thought needs to be given to the microscopic wars as well. Or, simply tens of thousands of cheap, expendable drones, either computer controlled or remotely controlled.The problem is that in this case, the only way the drones can be at all effective is by ramming at interplanetary speeds. Which can work, but it means you lose a lot of them to close-in defenses.

What always suprised me in BSG was than none of the planets seemed to have planetary defences, in either version. Back in the 1980s there was very little thought to computer networks.Computer networks are tricky, because they don't have to be designed to accept stuff remotely. The Internet is just about the most horrible design concept imaginable from a security standpoint. The computer system of a military space station doesn't have to be such a mess.
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Here is a thought imagine a giant ship with Super-Generator can create an EMP puls that can disables smaller targets in a medium sized radius around them? Small ships would then be useless and military would switch to medium sized to big sized ships capable of enduring the EMP. And what if they use some sort of cage to protect themselves from EMP blast?The hull of a spacecraft is a Faraday cage, for all practical purposes.

Texas_Ben

2009-01-14, 07:15 PM

if you instead use thrusters to come in at a controlled pace, you don't generate any more heat than flying around normally would. And you don't need to be aerodynamic if you have enough thrust, and if you're maneuvering around in space, you've probably got plenty of that. Wings are also unnecessary, just have your rockets point down.

All that only works if your fuel tank is obscenely enourmous.

And since they're going to lose their heat to the space pretty fast and they don't have any electronics to emmit radiations they're pretty much undetectable, so so much for shooting them down before they hit you.
Actually you lost heat very slowly in space, because there is nothing to conduct the heat away from you, you only lose heat through radiation, which is pretty slow.

Erloas

2009-01-14, 07:39 PM

Only if the projectile is of mass comparable to that of the ship, which is very hard to believe. As long as the ship is, say, 1000 to 10000 times more massive than an individual bullet it fires, you lose very little energy to the recoil.

...

Not at the speeds we're talking about. A solid projectile traveling at 10 km/second carries as much kinetic energy as (roughly) 10 times its mass in TNT. At 100 km/second, 1000 times its mass in TNT. And that doesn't even get us up to 0.001c.

There comes a point at which getting shot with a kinetic penetrator in space is indistinguishable from getting hit by a cruise missile or (in extreme cases) getting nuked.

It is entirely depends on what sort of sizes we are talking about. Which has never been made clear on what "big space warships" really means. If the "small" we are talking about is something like a predator drone (being an unmanned craft as some people have mentioned) then "big" could be the same size as a normal ocean going battleship. If you are looking at something relatively small like that then the size of the projectiles can't be very big.

However if you mean "small" like todays ocean going battleships and "big" as a small planitoid or dimentions at least ranging in KMs then things change.

One thing to keep in mind about ALL projectile based weapons is that based on simple physics that all of the power the projectile is going to have is pushed back equally on what is firing it. It is the entire principle behind the thrusters we now use. If the projectile has its own propulsion system then it can continue to accelerate, however if all of the energy it is given to move forward comes from the ship then it will push back an equal amount. There is no way around that. In space it can hold the speed you give it very easily but it isn't going to be gaining any speed and if its not gaining any speed its not gaining any energy, and the amount of energy it hits the target with will be directly related to the amount of energy it is shot out with.

Given in normal weapons now that is the case, but that is also why a hand held gun is set at a fairly small caliber. The big advantage you have is that at least when you are shooting it you have control of what the energy that is created does and you can to some extent vent it away, but only in so far as you don't reduce the force used to shoot it forward. Its why you don't see those huge guns on an airplane even if the plane is more then capable of carrying the weight of the gun, its just too much energy to handle when you don't have a "ground" to push against. You can see the massive amount of recoil on a tank firing even when the shell isn't even 1000th the weight (shell being probably 3-10 pounds maybe, the tank probably being 10-15 tons).

Not going to work. First of all, you can't put your probe that far in front of the fleet or it becomes a target in its own right. Second of all, this defense cannot be reoriented to deal with a threat in a different direction- at least, not fast enough to do much good. Third of all, you can't really generate a magnetic field strong enough to cause useful deflections from a range of kilometers.

To bend the projectile trajectory far enough to save your ship, you need to get very close, in space terms. And to do it from a long way out. You'd pretty much have to know where the projectile was so you could fly over to it and intercept it with your magnet. I don't think it would work at all except by really extreme luck. You'd probably be better off just firing guided missiles to get into head-on collisions with the projectiles.
It probably wouldn't work in an offensive operation where you are heading into an area, but I would imagine it would work in a defensive one where you have a chance to set up the array of probes before the enemy gets in. It also again depends on the sort of ranges you are talking about. Some people seem to think "long range" is 100-1000KM, and other people seem to think long range is from earth to Mars. In the former case I agree completely, but in the later case, the distances traveled are so great that even a very minor deflection is enough to change the course of the object to where its going to miss even a big ship (again depending on what you want to call big).

It of course would be completely impractical depending on which set of possibilities you are going with. I think it would work in a situation like some people think where a bunch of smaller ships shot a huge amount of smaller projectile weapons at targets across solar systems.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-14, 07:44 PM

The idea of beaming the waste heat off in one direction was just one that came to me while I wrote. You need to get rid of the heat, I agree. But you could get rid of it in a controlled fashion. Imagine a screen on one side (say, the front) of the ship. If you could cool that to 3K (with a liquid helium system or somesuch), you could mask the heat signature in that direction. You can not make it completely surround the ship, because heat would build up inside, but you could cover part of the ship. Might work well on missiles, since they have the front towards the enemy...

The issue with this idea is it assumes a single point of observation. It would be very easy to set up a satellite observer net on a large scale and have said net radio back detections. You'd need something like directional "laser cooling" with a very small cone of projection over a vast distance to make an effective system. Which honestly doesn't sound feasible to me.

So we need either a heatless drive system and otherwise fairly cold ship.... or introduce some made up physics to deal with the heat.

The_JJ

2009-01-14, 07:51 PM

Personally I think you don't realize the basics. Ships effectiveness/cost ratio doesn't depend solely on size it depends on existing technologies and materials available (and which all lie in domain of SF).
Here is a thought imagine a giant ship with Super-Generator can create an EMP puls that can disables smaller targets in a medium sized radius around them? Small ships would then be useless and military would switch to medium sized to big sized ships capable of enduring the EMP. And what if they use some sort of cage to protect themselves from EMP blast? Then small fighters would dominate. Really it is like a perpetual game of Paper-Rock-Scissor rather than fixed in stone.
Or what if the material used to produce big ships is cheaper than material used to produce small ships.

I've been holding off and have finally seen the internet come up with something smart. This is the nail/head moment. More or less, everybodies throwing around wild assumptions about technological advances for their points of view. (The first being viable space travel). The point is, the smart plans all revolve around the tech levels and paramaters of the setting! Now stop argueing, there is no right answer, and if you want a right answer, write a book that has a setting that favors your opinion. :smallbiggrin:

*cue lynching from both parties*

Canadian

2009-01-14, 07:54 PM

The death star was pretty awesome and it was huge. All they have to do is seal up the laundry vent and that thing is invincible.

nothingclever

2009-01-14, 07:56 PM

I had a good point written up but then I needed to restart my computer. Oh well.

It's easy to find counterpoints to the original post.

Just because we can eventually miniaturize things doesn't mean we won't be using the bigger versions of them in the meantime. A great example is computers. They used to be huge and now they've become smaller and smaller. People used large computers in businesses and other important matters and didn't just wait for small ones to be made. They were worth using despite their size. The same can happen in war.

What if amazingly good energy shields and engines are made that can only be fit on a huge ship? You might be able to miniaturize everything later but in the meantime you have to either use the best new stuff in its large form or wait for it to be miniaturized while using old technology. What if the new technology is more cost effective to be used when it's in its initial development stages? Suppose a force field generator is made that is so powerful the big ship it's installed on can take out so many small ones that it more than pays for itself.

What if building big ships is just cheaper/faster/easier than building many small ones? One big high tech engine might be cheaper to make than several miniaturized ones.

What if as I mentioned before there's a huge leap in tech and instead of the huge ships being just more cost effective they are almost unbeatable against small ships because their defense systems are so good that nothing the small ships fire can even dent/reach the big ship?

What about the fact that big ships might be like movable fortresses? They might be so durable and have so much storage space that they can survive sudden bombing strikes while all the little ships around them would get torn apart and then afterwards their crews could repair them with replacement parts and material while also being able to resupply the small ones.

What if besides large new defensive inventions huge engines and long range weapons are made that require a huge ship? A huge ship might be able to get to places way faster than any small ones and shoot at much longer ranges making it possible for them to destroy all the other enemy ships before the small ones can reach them. There might be almost no point to small ships if once one big ship beats the other big enemy ship the smaller ones on losing side can only retreat or be sniped. Maybe battles between large ships will start at such great distances that the smaller ships they carry will never be able to reach each other or larger ships to any damage. Maybe ships just never get close to each other in fights. The "mother ships" might be so powerful that once one beats the other the loss is so great for the other side that the tiny ships have no reason to stay and fight.

What if we keep coming up with new huge inventions at such a fast rate that there's no point to miniaturizing things past a certain extent because by the time we can make a certain type of engine super small we already have a better new prototype that works very differently?

Oslecamo

2009-01-14, 08:13 PM

Innis Cabal

2009-01-14, 08:15 PM

If we are using the tech we have today all four pages here are...well....useless. We can't even make small scale viable pro-longed space ships. So....why are we holding this debate?

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 08:19 PM

The hull of a spacecraft is a Faraday cage, for all practical purposes.
Ok replace EMP pulse with Generic-Spheric-Destruct-o-Pulse (like high power X ray blast or some other deadly form of energy) or pluck a few holes before applying EMP.. My point still stands.

Though lasers travel fast ships could use some form substance that would further disperse and/or weaken the laser ray.

I've been holding off and have finally seen the internet come up with something smart. This is the nail/head moment. More or less, everybodies throwing around wild assumptions about technological advances for their points of view. (The first being viable space travel). The point is, the smart plans all revolve around the tech levels and paramaters of the setting! Now stop argueing, there is no right answer, and if you want a right answer, write a book that has a setting that favors your opinion. :smallbiggrin:

*cue lynching from both parties*
*clap clap clap clap*
I said that 2 pages ago.

So stop with the "ifs". I'm trying to work here based on the technology we have right now, so shield generators, random technology X and other stuff that only exists in books right now is out of the matter.

After all, I could counter all your argument simply saying that small stuff will be much easier and cheaper to build and there'll be new technologies that deal that much damage to the target the bigger it is, ect, ect.
Compare your questions to these:
- What kind of submarine would cavemen make? Small or big?
- Can a plane heavier than air fly?

I'm not saying these questions are wrong. They are absurd.

In the heat of debate I said that cavemen would make small submarines lack resources and skills and would thus build small. But that isn't the point. Their submarines would be nothing like today's submarines (same like tribal boats are nothing compared to todays aircraft carriers)
Second question is a bit tricky but falls into same category. Asking a well informed man in 1690 1900 and 2000 would give different answers.

Asking us a question that belongs to SF to solve in using today's technology is like asking cavemen to construct you a nuclear submarine. Unless you are in Imagination or Shroom land it ain't gonna happen.

Without some space-renewable fuel supply or ways to gather high amounts of energy in little space not even space drones would be viable choice.
If you are working on some retro-today-SF just take your premise and appropriate technology to make it viable. There is a reason SF isn't same as what we have today.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-14, 08:27 PM

If we are using the tech we have today all four pages here are...well....useless. We can't even make small scale viable pro-longed space ships. So....why are we holding this debate?

Important word here I think is small scale. With modern tech a large scale vechicle would make more sense to bring people anywhere. An O'Neill cylinder sort of generation ship is currently the most viable interstellar transport.

In system space colonies of similar design and interplanetary colonization is even more viable.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-14, 08:34 PM

I'm just saying, if we are arguing that we are using present day tech then his question and really this thread isn't really relevent...as we can't even make -large- scale transport like what he was discussing.

If we really want to take a look at it....look at the navy. Do they have large ships? Yes, we do, I for one have seen them up close. We use them outside of war, I for one have seen these up close and personal living at one of the largest fresh water lakes and a rather large shipping hub. I see them everyday I look outside, huge tankers. They are by far better to use then say.....50 small ships. If we took this to space....I for one would but protection on them as the Age of Space would probably be just like the Age of Sail, and pirates would be rife early on, preying on the larger slow ships that are away for years at a time between here and Mars.

So a large combat worthy hips could also be carrying large cargo, probably equiped with its own small scout ships. We need big ships, and they are usually better for alot of the reasons presented.

Belphegor

2009-01-14, 08:52 PM

Important word here I think is small scale. With modern tech a large scale vechicle would make more sense to bring people anywhere. An O'Neill cylinder sort of generation ship is currently the most viable interstellar transport.
In the ancient times flapping around with giant wings attached to your shoulder was considered a best (at that time) form of flying...
Analogy is much better than expected. You ship up people on a Cylinder to merry space :D They'll probably laugh some time once they get the joke. By the time they reach Alpha Centauri they will be 1230 years old :D not to mention dead.

UltraDude

2009-01-14, 09:03 PM

Hm. So offensive measures seem limited. Lasers? Only work over the space of possibly less than an AU without obscene amounts of power. Missiles? CIWS shoots them down easily. Kinetic weapons? Er... you pretty much twitch and they're thrown off target.

I'm thinking that we need to figure out the optimal distance for different kinds of weapons. Guided weapons in particular tend to be both slower and more visible than other kinds, so there is a maximum effective range for all weapons, based on effectiveness of point defense systems, mobility for dodging kinetic weapons, and power pumped into energy weapons compared to defensive measures.

Canadian

2009-01-14, 09:14 PM

What if it had no weapons? It was just like a giant bowling ball in space. It would just ram into everything like a rouge planet.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-14, 09:16 PM

In the ancient times flapping around with giant wings attached to your shoulder was considered a best (at that time) form of flying...
Analogy is much better than expected. You ship up people on a Cylinder to merry space :D They'll probably laugh some time once they get the joke. By the time they reach Alpha Centauri they will be 1230 years old :D not to mention dead.

:smallconfused: Apparently the "generation ship" part was lost on you, as that was much the reason for the particular type of craft too. And Alpha Centauri doesn't look like a promising location to begin with, albeit reachable even within a lifetime with something like an ion engine burning for a very extended period.

UltraDude

2009-01-14, 10:26 PM

What if it had no weapons? It was just like a giant bowling ball in space. It would just ram into everything like a rouge planet.

Giant red space bowling balls?!? Terrifying!

KnightDisciple

2009-01-15, 01:21 AM

I've seen "giant fireballs from nukes" mentioned a couple of times.
Here's a question: with no atmosphere, how much of a boom will a nuke make? It'll pump out plenty of rads, electromagnetic energy, and similar. But actual explosive force? I'm honestly asking this, because I don't know offhand.
If there's very little "boom", you're left with rads. Which seems less effective, since spaceships need rad sheilding anyways, what with no atmosphere for filtering it out. Plus, if it's thick enough, that'll stop it anyways. Maybe sandwich some lead in there...

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 01:22 AM

Not all that big, but the EMP will be a problem.

Dervag

2009-01-15, 01:43 AM

Its why you don't see those huge guns on an airplane even if the plane is more then capable of carrying the weight of the gun, its just too much energy to handle when you don't have a "ground" to push against. You can see the massive amount of recoil on a tank firing even when the shell isn't even 1000th the weight (shell being probably 3-10 pounds maybe, the tank probably being 10-15 tons).Modern tanks weigh much more than that, more like 50-75 tons. But that's an irrelevant detail.

The thing is, relative to the velocity of the shell, the tank hardly moves at all. Its recoil is enough to send it bouncing a little, and if it didn't have an awesome recoil absorption system it might roll backwards a bit. But the tank is so much more massive than the shells it fires that it doesn't move much when it fires.

A spacecraft would have something like that going on. At interplanetary speeds, you would have to fire a truly unreasonable mass of cannonballs in order to make a major change to your ship's velocity. It's a problem, but not a major one. The recoil of the guns is a known factor, and it's one you can even intentionally factor into your ship's course changes.

It also again depends on the sort of ranges you are talking about. Some people seem to think "long range" is 100-1000KM, and other people seem to think long range is from earth to Mars.Earth to Mars is short detection range for maneuvering ships, but impossibly long range for unguided weapons. Any target capable of maneuvering will be able to dodge long before your shot reaches it.

To make matters worse, at that range the limits on optical technology make it hard to resolve an object as "small" as a mile-long battleship. If the mile-long battleship is blurred into a ten-mile fuzzy blob, then even if you have a perfectly accurate gun your odds of hitting anything go down dramatically.
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The death star was pretty awesome and it was huge. All they have to do is seal up the laundry vent and that thing is invincible.The question is whether we could actually build something like that. It's so big, you almost have to be running a galactic empire to pull together enough metal to assemble it in the first place.

Also, the Death Star has the large disadvantage that it can only be in one place. The only reason it's a threat is because it can blow up planets- it's not necessarily true that any spacecraft that size could blow up planets, either.

Otherwise, enemies would just try to avoid the Death Star and strike at its supply bases and the key worlds of its builder.

The Empire can get away with it because they do have a planetcrushing super beam weapon to put in it (its output per shot is roughly equal to the total energy generated by the Sun in a week). And because they have no strong enemies who would be able to send their fleet to attack targets the Death Star was out of position to defend.

had to be that big, and once they were resigned to building something a hundred miles wide, they might as well make it heavily armored and bristling with guns so that nobody could take out their superlaser cannon]
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Hm. So offensive measures seem limited. Lasers? Only work over the space of possibly less than an AU without obscene amounts of power.Much less than an AU, actually. Fire a laser at the moon and it's several kilometers across when it gets there. And you do need an obscene amount of power to fire a laser beam that will be intense enough to wreck ships and cover that much area.

And the moon is only about 1% of an AU away...

Missiles? CIWS shoots them down easily. Kinetic weapons? Er... you pretty much twitch and they're thrown off target.My best guess is fragmentation missiles. The missile accelerates to kinetic-kill speeds, then a small explosive warhead goes off. This happens far from the target ship (far enough that lasers and such are still unreliable kill weapons), but close enough that a good chunk of the resulting cone of shrapnel from the missile explosion will strike the ship.

The problem is that you're essentially hitting the ship with numerous small kinetic weapons, and a well armored ship will be nigh-immune to that.

X-ray laser warheads are another option, but those are untested.

I'm thinking that we need to figure out the optimal distance for different kinds of weapons. Guided weapons in particular tend to be both slower and more visible than other kinds, so there is a maximum effective range for all weapons, based on effectiveness of point defense systems, mobility for dodging kinetic weapons, and power pumped into energy weapons compared to defensive measures.Oh yeah. Of course, the optimal distances depend on a lot of parameters. The most important one is the acceleration ships can pull, the speed of kinetic projectiles, and the acceleration of missiles.
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What if it had no weapons? It was just like a giant bowling ball in space. It would just ram into everything like a rouge planet.It'd get dinged up pretty fast, and it would be hard to keep enemies from frantically dodging out of the way.

Ramming a massive object like another ship when it's moving at thousands of meters per second relative to you is... painful. Like getting hit with a nuclear bomb. Possibly worse.

Gavin Sage

2009-01-15, 02:06 AM

had to be that big, and once they were resigned to building something a hundred miles wide, they might as well make it heavily armored and bristling with guns so that nobody could take out their superlaser cannon]

Actually in various parts of the EU the planetary scale of the Death Star was as much a reflection of the Tarkin Doctrine as nessecity. Other Superlaser platforms were built on smaller scales. The Eclipse-class Star Destroyers for example were similar in scale to the Executor and had a lower power weapon mounted like the Wave Motion Cannon. The Death Star Prototype had only an exposed skeletal frame from missing most of the mass the Death Star would have had.

And most hilariously the Darksaber project where years later an extremely rich Hutt got a hold of the original designer on the Death Star. Bevel Lemesk proceded to design a stripped down version that was the main weapon, manuvering thrusters, and a hyperdrive. This one didn't work because the Hut was too busy cutting corners and skimping on production value.

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 06:05 AM

:smallconfused: Apparently the "generation ship" part was lost on you, as that was much the reason for the particular type of craft too. And Alpha Centauri doesn't look like a promising location to begin with, albeit reachable even within a lifetime with something like an ion engine burning for a very extended period.
Not really. I know of generation ships. They are easiest things to make (bunch of humans procreating on a flying ship). But since we use current knowledge only I don't think that it would be a viable choice (not sure if the hydroponics are all that stable in a low grav enviroment). Maybe in couple of years but definitely not today...
Plus generation ships have a nice tendency to put human psyche to ultimate strain so it actually might have been more merciful to kill them instead of putting them on life-time voyage.

13_CBS

2009-01-15, 06:50 AM

Question: how viable are magnetic weapons in space? I don't know the first thing about magnets/magnetic physics, so bear with me here.

1) In the Halo series, the alien Covenant race apparently uses plasma as ship-to-ship weapons (though one should keep in mind that in Halo, "ship-to-ship combat" = ships so close to each other that they can easily see one another out the viewports). The plasma is fired from cannons and is concentrated by either magnetic beams or by a magnetic sheath until the plasma reaches its target.

How viable is this? What sort of energy source would be necessary to heat a mass to the point where it becomes a super-heated gas capable of melting battleship armor like it was butter? Is it physically possible to contain plasma-like energy in a "sheath"?

2) Common wisdom dictates that electronics + magnets = bad. Assuming that electronics work the same way they do in the future as they do today, it seems reasonable to use a powerful directed magnetic field to disrupt (perhaps permanently) the electronics of enemy spacecraft.

Again, how viable is this? What sort of energy source would be necessary to generate magnetic fields powerful enough to screw around with enemy spacecraft tens of thousands of kilometers away? Is it possible to direct a magnetic field at a specific object, or is that just sci-fi nonsense? Do magnetic fields even mess around with electronics anymore?

AgentPaper

2009-01-15, 07:08 AM

dralasite

2009-01-15, 09:10 AM

What if it had no weapons? It was just like a giant bowling ball in space. It would just ram into everything like a rouge planet.

If we imagine that the hull is a General Product one and totally invulnerable, then the machinery inside will suffer a whole load from the impact anyway. The squishy human piloting it will be reduced to fine paste, even with massive protections.
Most importantly, to be efficient on impact, the ramship will have to be massive. Sadly, the more massive it will be, the less maneuverable it will become and the easier it will be to dodge.
Also, by the time the ramship manages to get into impact range, it will have been crippled by any lighter ship using ranged weapons...

Much less than an AU, actually. Fire a laser at the moon and it's several kilometers across when it gets there. And you do need an obscene amount of power to fire a laser beam that will be intense enough to wreck ships and cover that much area.

And the moon is only about 1% of an AU away...
Laser beams to the moon diverge wildly only because they have to go throught the Earth's atmosphere. If you fired a laser, even a small one, from the surface of the moon, you would be able to hit an asteroid on the other side of the solar system with very few dispersion. If you fired a laser outisde of a solar system, there would be even less stellar dust and atoms and less gravitic deviation.

My best guess is fragmentation missiles. The missile accelerates to kinetic-kill speeds, then a small explosive warhead goes off. This happens far from the target ship (far enough that lasers and such are still unreliable kill weapons), but close enough that a good chunk of the resulting cone of shrapnel from the missile explosion will strike the ship.

The problem is that you're essentially hitting the ship with numerous small kinetic weapons, and a well armored ship will be nigh-immune to that.

X-ray laser warheads are another option, but those are untested.

Oh yeah. Of course, the optimal distances depend on a lot of parameters. The most important one is the acceleration ships can pull, the speed of kinetic projectiles, and the acceleration of missiles.

A spaceship can only bring so many missiles. Once it used all of them, it's defenseless. Since spaceship can't be heavily armored (unless you want to be nearly unable to maneuver), then shrapnel would be very efficient. OTOH, shrapnels from your own missiles might become hazards to your own ship.
Missiles have also the disavantages of being vulnerable to countermeasures (laser firing on the missile for example)

Lasers would have many advantages:
- if you have enough power to move a spaceship, then you have enough to fire a laser at another spaceship.
- you can't dodge a laser
- you can't run out of laser (if you are out of power, then you are dead anyway)
- you can't even know from where a laser is fired (a missiles can detected as soon as it is fired and you will know where he came from, you will know that you are under laser fire only because there are holes forming on your hull. You will need specialised sensors all other your outer hull just to detect being fired upon!)
- you can fire laser from really far away
- if you are not too far away, you can even aim for specific weak points on the hull or even sweep across the hull

Of course it will depend heavily on the technology and kind of spaceship: mobile spaceships can't be easily armored and will be vulnerable to laser fire but dodge impact weapons. Big, heavily armored space stations will withstand laser fire but will be sitting ducks to impact or nuclear weapons...

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 09:15 AM

From what I heard Faradey Cage beats fast phase changing electric fields but sucks against slow changing magnetic fields.

And if ships are made of metal they act as Faraday's cages so they would be shielded against electric disturbances. However is wave-length of disturbances is lesser than the tiniest hole within the cage it will pass through.

Also you could probably use some kind of high energy radiation. Gamma rays or microwaves are the first thing that cross my mind...

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 09:40 AM

If we really want to take a look at it....look at the navy. Do they have large ships? Yes, we do, I for one have seen them up close. We use them outside of war, I for one have seen these up close and personal living at one of the largest fresh water lakes and a rather large shipping hub. I see them everyday I look outside, huge tankers. They are by far better to use then say.....50 small ships. If we took this to space....I for one would but protection on them as the Age of Space would probably be just like the Age of Sail, and pirates would be rife early on, preying on the larger slow ships that are away for years at a time between here and Mars.

I look at our current ships, and I see giant petroil transports being captured by personal boats.

I look at our current wars, and I see giant ships siting by the sidelines doing nothing but providing a plataform while fighters, automated missiles and drones do all the dirty job of actually destroying your enemy, backed up by lots of small cheap infantry.

I'm talking about actual combat here, not commerce. Of course you'll need big space ships to carry stuff, but if you're going to fight, would you rather have a few big ships or several small fighters?

pendell

2009-01-15, 10:05 AM

Here's an off the wall question: What about boarding?

At first glance, that sounds silly, but it's not really. Boarding is what you do when you can't do anything else.

After all, if today the International Space Station was to be taken over by terrorists, what would we do about it? We could put an explosive warhead on the tip of a Delta booster rocket and blow the thing up, of course, adding an impressive collection of space debris to already crowded orbital space. But if we'd want it back intact, we'd have to send up a space shuttle or a Soyuz capsule filled with a crew of thugs. Since AR-15s and MP-5s aren't terribly useful in zero-g (unless you want to use them as propulsion) and grenades might open the hull, they'd have to go up armed with wrenches, knives, brass knuckles, and anything else that's handy. An old-school boarding action, of the type seen at Salamis.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

KnightDisciple

2009-01-15, 10:21 AM

Manga Shoggoth

2009-01-15, 10:33 AM

If we imagine that the hull is a General Product one and totally invulnerable, then the machinery inside will suffer a whole load from the impact anyway. The squishy human piloting it will be reduced to fine paste, even with massive protections....

If we can assume a GP#1 hull then we can assume a Slaver Stasis field as well. That solves the impact problems (provided you get the Puppeteers to do the design...) See Ringworld.

Most importantly, to be efficient on impact, the ramship will have to be massive. Sadly, the more massive it will be, the less maneuverable it will become and the easier it will be to dodge.

Not entirely true. It can be light but moving very fast (since p = m * v). Mind you, at high speeds it will be equally unmanoverable.

Laser beams to the moon diverge wildly only because they have to go throught the Earth's atmosphere.
If you fired a laser, even a small one, from the surface of the moon, you would be able to hit an asteroid on the other side of the solar system with very few dispersion. If you fired a laser outisde of a solar system, there would be even less stellar dust and atoms and less gravitic deviation.

Not true. The beam divergance is related to the optics in the laser chamber (If I recall correctly it is related to chamber length, aperture and frequency). The longer (and narrower) the laser chamber, the less the beam will diverge. Mind you, that's only because the photons that are more divergant are being absorbed within the chamber.

You only need a slight angle of divergance to have a huge effect at range.

Atmospheric lensing and irregularities in the upper atmosphere (plus absorbtion) probably doesn't help, but it will have a minor effect on the beam.

It's nice to dust off the degree every so often...

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 10:43 AM

Canadian

2009-01-15, 10:53 AM

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 11:11 AM

Why does my bowling ball ship even need a pilot? Why does it need a hull? Can't I just find a super huge planet and put an awesome thruster on it and some kind of mechanical robot controls under the surface?

Wouldn't my planet just get bigger every time it hits something? I could drive it around the universe like a Katamari making it bigger every day.
And my living ships could each others carcasses to obtain nutrients :DD

Not gonna work. Know why? It's idiotic.
First we have only thrusters that could move earth about 0.000001nm.
Secondly without some super-duper gravitonic reduction device you would probably halt after hitting few targets since you can't make perpetum mobile.

Tell me when you run really fast and hit a big object such as a car (in a way that wont get you killed) on a frozen road (no friction and negligible air friction) do you and the car continue at same or greater speed than you had previous? Answer is no. You always move slower. The slowing only depends on the mass of the car in question.

The law of conservation of linear momentum is a fundamental law of nature, and it states that the total momentum of a closed system of objects (which has no interactions with external agents) is constant. One of the consequences of this is that the center of mass of any system of objects will always continue with the same velocity unless acted on by a force from outside the system.
Since your machine is i a finite one it can only create finite momentum p = m1*v1;
When you hit something that is stationary v=0 and mass m2 meaning its momentum is 0. In case of a perfect non-elastic collision your new momentum pnew=p2+p1.
And since p2=0 pnew=p1 or to put it a bit different

vnew*(m1+m2)=v1*m1;
vnew=v1*m1/(m1+m2);
vnew < v1 for m2 >0

only way to gain ever increasing momentum is to hit a planet or asteroid that moves in a way that is collinear to yours which would be hard to achieve not to mention I didn't put gravity and angular moment for simplification sake. Your speed will constantly decrease as you hit more and more targets.

But what if I turn on the engines again you say will that make it faster again?
It would move faster but due to conservation of force the force you can apply is now stretch over greater mass.
Fold=Fnew=const;
Fold=a1*m1;
Fnew = anew*(m1+m2);

a1*m1=anew*(m1+m2);
anew=a1*m1/(m1+m2);
anew < a1 for m2 >0

So no. Your plan doesn't work. You are an idiot. Because this ain't frigin Katamari dynasty these are Newtons laws!

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 11:13 AM

You have any idea the absurd amount of energy that would be needed to get a planet off it's normal orbit, and then the energy to maneuver it to your targets?

Also, you're then just begging to be bombarded and those super expensive thrusters destroyed.

pendell

2009-01-15, 11:23 AM

Replace Oxygen with Paralyzing gas.

examination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISS_configuration_jun-2008_en.svg) reveals that the environmental systems are internal to the service module, with the crew. You'll have to get inside to subdue the crew and replace the atmosphere. So we're back to the same problem.

Okay, let's say you pull up next to it in the shuttle. You drill your way in and pump in gas.
Let's say you do this with a mechanical arm.

You get up into space and there's a man in a pressure suit holding a wrench. He's using magnetic boots to anchor himself. He smashes your mechanical arm with the wrench.

So you send out an astronaut to do the job.

Still anchored, he uses the wrench or a pugil stick to knock your astronaut into a new orbit, where he/she drifts helplessly around the earth until rescued or orbital decay.

But let's say you do succeed in by-passing the guard (which will require combat skillz of some kind), drilling into the station, and pumping in gas (which will be a lethal nerve gas -- there isn't such a thing as 'knockout gas' in the real world).

The terrorist crew, already in their pressure suits. Put on their helmets. Now what?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

estradling

2009-01-15, 11:26 AM

I have to join with the others who say that this is an exercise that can't be proven.

The OP wants it limited to Real world tech and space battles. Two things that have never yet mixed.

The first question is who is doing the fighting? Two earth based nations? That really the only 'real' world option that can work. And in those cases yeah your ships and fighters are going to be small rockets, missiles, and satellites. At best you are going to be dealing with space stations in orbit. Your biggest problems for this fight is going to be the effect of earth. (Gravity Well and Atmosphere). All your massive stuff will be planetary based.

Until you get people living out their lives on places other then Earth, you really stuck with Earth based fighting. You have to 'assume' technical advances or aliens to get viable colony elsewhere. (We might have alot of the pieces right now but still very big limits against us having a Lunar or Martian colony. The best we got is the International space station and no one is raising a family there).

Really once we are beyond the Moon any fighting is going to be months if not years getting ships, drones, etc simply into effective range. (at current tech levels). And as people have pointed out that means months or years to set up counter measures. That that level your not playing a game of space battle, your playing a high stake game of space chess. Your action months and years before hand are what decides if you win or not.

Now every Sci Fiction setting that has the "Big ship with guns" that the OP is against. Also has greater the "current or reasonably expected" tech. Their ships are faster, weapons and defenses are stronger, and so the Big ship with guns make more sense.

So my answer to the OP is that based off current tech Big ship with guns fighting in space don't make allot of sense, because fighting in space for anything other then a 'worldly' concern makes no sense. However by the time we have 'someone' out there to fight and the ability to make a good fight of it our tech will have needed to advance to a point were we can't truly predict it now if a big ship with guns is a good idea.

Britter

2009-01-15, 11:29 AM

I look at our current ships, and I see giant petroil transports being captured by personal boats.

I look at our current wars, and I see giant ships siting by the sidelines doing nothing but providing a plataform while fighters, automated missiles and drones do all the dirty job of actually destroying your enemy, backed up by lots of small cheap infantry.

I'm talking about actual combat here, not commerce. Of course you'll need big space ships to carry stuff, but if you're going to fight, would you rather have a few big ships or several small fighters?

Depends on what I am going to fight.

Weapon systems and platforms are not developed in a vacuum. They are developed out of a combination of available technology, perceptions of the type of threat that needs to be dealt with, and actual expirience dealing with that threat. Another major issue is logistics; you can have the best weapon system to face a threat ever developed, but if you can't get it to the theater of conflict, it is simply a waste of taxpayer dollars.

The current conflicts that are ongoing in the world today reflect the fact that the methods, tactics and material that would be effective at, for example, conducting a major mechanized infantry action against Soviet tanks in Europe, are piss poor at dealing with small, cell based insurgent groups that can disperse into the populace between strikes. So, the tools of war have changed to adapt to the threat (unmanned drones, small units, precision bombing, not to mention the various intelligence and propaganda methods currently in play).

If a major world power was to suddenly strike out across international borders with a mechanized infantry force supported by tactical air strikes, the current crop of tools and tactics might not be capable of effectively responding. Military doctrine would have to adjust to match the threat, which would require a paradigm shift in training, logistics, and eventually technology. In the early stages of such a conflict, however, we would be limited by the training and tools that were availible when it all began. Expirence would allow us to adapt to the threat, causing a new operational and logistical doctrine to come about to counter the threat.

How does this all relate to the topic? Simply put, you will want the right tool for the job. I find that the Honorverse does a fairly good job of replicating this idea. You don't send a ship of the wall, with overwhelming firepower but piss poor acceleration, to pursue low-mass high acceleration pirate ships. Despite the fact that in a stand-up fight the smaller vessel would be wiped out, given the distances and speeds involved, it would be possible for the pirate to strike and disable/destroy a merchant ship, then rabbit out of the effective range of the larger, slower ship. To combat a fast threat, you use a fast counter-measure, like a cruiser or battlecruiser.

Now, of course, the Honorverse is a sci-fi setting, and does assume certain things in the fiction that define the operational reality of the stories military conflict. But it also contains numerous examples of a new technology being introduced that violates or changes the current tactical environment and requires a change of tactics. Some things work, some things don't. Real life would be similar.

Today's navy is a very good model, in my opinion, for how a space fleet would operate. You would have large ships with minimal offensive armaments but heavy amounts of defensive armaments. These ships would transport smaller ships, filling different specialized roles: search and rescue, electronic warfare, fighter interdiction, close-air/space support etc. Essentially, the large ship is a weapons platform, increasing the effective range of the smaller ones

These carriers would be accompanied by a screen of smaller ships designed to increase the defensive and offensive capability of the carrier, similar to destroyers or missle cruisers. There would be ships that have a greater operational range and sustainability that would run ahead of the fleet, providing intelligence and scouting out enemy positions. Instead of relying on stealth, these would be vessells that were fast, popping into a system, scanning emissions and comm chatter, maybe eventually staying on the edges of the system and avoidng detection via as-yet-undeveloped stealth systems. If detected, they run, using superior acceleration to evade the enemy.

If you want your force to have the ability to remain on station for extended amounts of time, you will need tenders that carry fuel, armaments, supplies etc that will hang back out of combat range. These tenders will need escorts, so that they don't get pulped by enemy raiders, and will therefore be escorted by light ships.

Now, if someone came up with a military doctrine that invalidated this concept, you would have to adapt or die. As an example, the missle cruiser has more offensive capability in a modern naval ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore battle then the old WW2 era battleships, as noble as they may have been. Thats why the battleships are all retired; they were to expensive and required more manpower, but didn't have a proportiante higher level of effectiveness. You will also note that a variety of small naval vessels from a variety of world navies are currently interdicting piracy, with some sucsess. They are the correct tool for the job.

The tools of war will adapt to deliver force to the enemy, and impede the ability of the enemy to deliver force to friendly assests. Saying that there will be a single effective method for developing an effective space combat vehicle seems to be a flawed goal, at least until we can define the parameters of the engagement: distance, effective ranges of weaponry, speed, durability, logistics, tactical goals, rules of engagement, etc. Lots of variables. Thats why the modern wet navies of the world have a lot of different ships. Use the right tool for the job.

Renegade Paladin

2009-01-15, 11:39 AM

it is true that the straight battleship tended to be not all that good- cruisers, destroyers, etc were much more common and much more helpful.

Question is, are hybrid battleship/carriers highly implausible, or not?

(I.E. Imperial Star Destroyers )
not really.

the short answer is that either Big Guns or Small Craft are going to be it's primary weapon, and space devoted to the other system is space being used sub-optimumly. Either your combat prowess is derived form the size of your main guns, in which case you'd want to assign most of your spare tonnage to those guns, OR your prowess comes form your strike craft, in which case thier's no need for anything heavier than point defense guns.
The first thing of note here is that Imperial Star Destroyers serve in the destroyer role, not the battleship role. Not only is it right there in the name, but that's what we see them actually do: Interdiction duties and escort screening. Imperial warships meant for ship to ship combat, i.e. the Allegiance class heavy destroyer, have minimal docking facilities. (Here's an image of one's ventral side. (http://fractalsponge.net/asd/41_2.jpg)) Recall the first time we see one. It's chasing down and capturing a corvette. It's kind of hard to do that sort of capture without docking facilities and a hangar bay. ISDs are as multirole as they are because they're meant to suppress inferior forces, not to mention frequently operate on their own, including having to provide their own ground support. (They also carry a significant troop complement, assault vehicles, and even prefab bases.)

Secondly, historically cruisers and destroyers were more common because they were cheaper and easier to build, not to mention because of the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty, which put hard caps on the number of battleships the signatories (which included all the major world powers) could build and on the tonnage and armament of those ships. Before the advent of the aircraft carrier, battleships ruled the seas. Lighter warships had a hard time even seriously threatening a battleship, much less sinking one. Which, I might add, was the point of the Washington treaty in the first place.

Canadian

2009-01-15, 11:48 AM

Who says planet bowling ball has a normal orbit? I just have to find a planet that is already "rouge" and moving through systems - or one in an unstable system that can be thrown out of orbit easily.

My thruster power would come from harnessing the power of the molten core of planet bowling ball and enriching the core with a super fuel. Tunneling machines would dig channels to the surface where mechanical thrust volcano's would provide the thrust in any direction.

When a volcano is damaged my underground bots just repair the hole and the thruster from beneath.

Plus my planet wouldn't slow down even a bit if it started off hitting smaller objects. If you need any proof you can stand in front of my car while I ram into you. I can also accelerate my planet by sling shot maneuvers past other planets with a strong gravitational fields.

An object does not have to travel in the same direction to add mass to the thing that hits it. Look at the front of a dirty car. Rocks, mud, dead bugs, homeless people... They all add to the mass of the car no matter what direction they were traveling in when they got hit.

All the space dust and little planets and comets would just add to the mass of planet bowling ball. It's not much more far fetched than a 20 mile long space fortress that transforms into a robot.

Planet bowling ball crushes your weak argument with awesomeness!

:smallsmile:

13_CBS

2009-01-15, 11:57 AM

For the first one, yes, it's very possible. This is in fact the only way of containing the energies for fusion, and we're already doing this right now, in a couple experimental labs. They take more energy than they put out, for now, but they could probably be re-engineered as weapons if needed. Whether this would be more effective than most alternatives, on the other hand...

Ok, got it. Now, is it possible to move the contained fusion energies around by directing the magnetic fields? For example, move the energy towards an enemy ship.

For the second, not sure that would work, because even if you get a good magnetic field going, it's not hard to shield your electronics against these things. You could get through this with a significantly powerful enough field, but it's less likely to be worth it at that point.

Is it possible to direct magnetic fields into a beam/ray-like shape? Or do magnetic fields exist only in planar fields?

pendell

2009-01-15, 12:02 PM

nothingclever

2009-01-15, 12:23 PM

Because we already have atomic bombs. And we already small planes able to nuke cities out of the map. We also have developed small space craft wich can be fitted with said weapons.

We don't, however, have shield generators, or city sized space stations.

So stop with the "ifs". I'm trying to work here based on the technology we have right now, so shield generators, random technology X and other stuff that only exists in books right now is out of the matter.

After all, I could counter all your argument simply saying that small stuff will be much easier and cheaper to build and there'll be new technologies that deal that much damage to the target the bigger it is, ect, ect.

Making something big may be as hard as making something small. Humanity started building small houses and small villages, not scryscrappers out of nowhere.
Why should anyone discuss anything with you then? You're talking about space battle in the FUTURE but I can't mention possible problems that people in space battles might have to deal with in the FUTURE?

Good game, buddy. I shouldn't have to point out specifically why that doesn't make sense.

Your skyscrapers argument makes me want to pull a Picard Maneuver:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v345/nothingclever/facepalm-1.jpg

Constructing buildings is different from constructing battleships. Your comparison just sucks too. It's not an insult it's a fact. People didn't start building skyscrapers because they didn't need them. The world wasn't crowded enough to need such things. There was no such thing as a housing tax either. You didn't have to pay more money if your house took up more space than another one. Obviously the first house(s) will be small because they don't need to be large.

Future inventions may automatically start out huge because if they were any smaller they just wouldn't work. But oh wait I can't talk about the future even though this thread is supposed to be about the future.

I can only talk about current naval/air technology. Why are we talking about space battles at all then? Our technology still isn't at the level where we can have space battles the way you're describing them.

We don't know anything about how battles will actually be fought in space according to you because a space battle has never happened. According to you, "lol books don't count"
"other stuff that only exists in books right now is out of the matter."

Good game sir. I've not only countered your arguments I've countered your reason for even making this thread.

Oh wait though, there's still more I can say. Your second last point sounds terrible to me too. You arbitrarily say future technology might all be really small and cheap. Guess what buddy? We know for a fact that a lot of new technologies are large to start. In this case they are even more likely to be large. Why? Because we'll probably end up combining many different "small" technologies to create new very complex big inventions. Many small devices are used to create nuclear reactors and large engines on battleships. Many devices that start out small in the beginning are made much larger for practical use.

Heck your first point basically just says "because things are this way now they must always be. I win. The end." So why did you start the thread? You say small ships can basically do everything needed now and yet there are still huge ones fighting each other. GG, again.

Dervag

2009-01-15, 12:46 PM

Actually in various parts of the EU the planetary scale of the Death Star was as much a reflection of the Tarkin Doctrine as nessecity. Other Superlaser platforms were built on smaller scales. The Eclipse-class Star Destroyers for example were similar in scale to the Executor and had a lower power weapon mounted like the Wave Motion Cannon. The Death Star Prototype had only an exposed skeletal frame from missing most of the mass the Death Star would have had.

And most hilariously the Darksaber project where years later an extremely rich Hutt got a hold of the original designer on the Death Star. Bevel Lemesk proceded to design a stripped down version that was the main weapon, manuvering thrusters, and a hyperdrive. This one didn't work because the Hut was too busy cutting corners and skimping on production value.I knew. Expanded Universe aside, the Death Star superlaser had to be put on a big gun platform. A smaller version could be put on a smaller platform, of course, but a smaller version couldn't blow up planets. So if you want to blow up planets with a Star Wars superlaser cannon, you have to build it big, because planetcrushing beam weapons are big.

My entire point was that once the Imperials were committed to building something that big in the first place, they might as well make it heavily protected. Trying to build a planetcrushing weapon in the "Darksaber" style has a lot of drawbacks. Sure, it can destroy a planet, but it's vulnerable to counterattacks. Some vengeful system defense force pilot with blood in his eye and a couple of torpedoes can blow it to bits.

Whereas the Death Star was, by design, almost immune to counterattacks. It would never have been possible to kill that beast if the guys doing the killing didn't have complete blueprints of the battle station. And those plans were not common knowledge. Even then, it was very difficult to actually get a torpedo into the exhaust port.

But the Death Star's size was only a good idea because it was necessary. Without that size, it would not have been possible to give the Death Star the kind of weapon that was its original purpose for existing.
________

Question: how viable are magnetic weapons in space? I don't know the first thing about magnets/magnetic physics, so bear with me here.

1) In the Halo series, the alien Covenant race apparently uses plasma as ship-to-ship weapons (though one should keep in mind that in Halo, "ship-to-ship combat" = ships so close to each other that they can easily see one another out the viewports). The plasma is fired from cannons and is concentrated by either magnetic beams or by a magnetic sheath until the plasma reaches its target.

How viable is this? What sort of energy source would be necessary to heat a mass to the point where it becomes a super-heated gas capable of melting battleship armor like it was butter? Is it physically possible to contain plasma-like energy in a "sheath"?Based on known physics, plasma cannons aren't a smart way to bet. A plasma bolt is effectively a charged particle beam, and charged particle beams disperse. If you could keep the beam concentrated tightly, you could generate enough energy to deliver a very nasty punch.

The problem is containment. Fusion power designs keep the plasma contained inside a large piece of heavy machinery. The trouble is keeping it contained outside the machinery. Maxwell's laws (which have served us very well in describing every magnetic phenomenon ever seen by man) don't give us a way to construct a magnetic "beam" or "pocket" that could hold together a plasma when it's miles from the source.

Incidentally, at point blank range you don't really need a containment field, in which case plasma weapons look considerably more appealing. If you can generate a high energy, high flux proton beam and fire it into a ship's hull, you could ruin their whole day, what with the X-rays given off due to braking radiation when those protons slam to a halt after penetrating into their hull armor.
________

2) Common wisdom dictates that electronics + magnets = bad. Assuming that electronics work the same way they do in the future as they do today, it seems reasonable to use a powerful directed magnetic field to disrupt (perhaps permanently) the electronics of enemy spacecraft.

Again, how viable is this?Exactly as viable as the plasma cannon. No more, no less. In fact, the same technology that let you build working plasma cannons would also let you build working "magnet rays." They wouldn't be all that effective against a metal hulled ship, though, because magnetic fields have trouble penetrating a solid sheet of metal. You just get eddy currents zipping around the hull. That can fry sensors or other exposed electronics if the field is intense enough, but it won't have much effect on the inside of the hull.
_________

Either or both of those technologies would require some way of generating magnetic fields other than by using an arrangement of electrical currents. Therefore, we cannot confidently expect such a technology to exist. But it's certainly something we can imagine and describe. It's not totally unreasonable.
_________

Laser beams to the moon diverge wildly only because they have to go throught the Earth's atmosphere. If you fired a laser, even a small one, from the surface of the moon, you would be able to hit an asteroid on the other side of the solar system with very few dispersion. If you fired a laser outisde of a solar system, there would be even less stellar dust and atoms and less gravitic deviation.Citation requested.

Gravitic deviation, I know isn't the problem. I'm pretty sure the Earth's atmosphere isn't either. I thought I understood laser beam behavior pretty well, being in pursuit of a graduate degree in physics. I'm willing to believe I've made a mistake, but I'd very much like to see some proof from someone I know knows their stuff.

A spaceship can only bring so many missiles. Once it used all of them, it's defenseless. Since spaceship can't be heavily armored (unless you want to be nearly unable to maneuver), then shrapnel would be very efficient. OTOH, shrapnels from your own missiles might become hazards to your own ship.
Missiles have also the disavantages of being vulnerable to countermeasures (laser firing on the missile for example)Mentioned that.

Lasers would have many advantages:
- if you have enough power to move a spaceship, then you have enough to fire a laser at another spaceship.But you don't necessarily have enough power to burn holes in them, except at what amounts to knife range in space terms. At ranges where lasers will reliably burn holes in even a lightly armored spacecraft, kinetic weapons practically can't miss.

Lasers are not immune to the inverse square law.

- you can't dodge a laserWell, you can, but only at interplanetary ranges or using ships that can make a course change equal to their own length in a small fraction of a second.

- you can't even know from where a laser is fired (a missiles can detected as soon as it is fired and you will know where he came from, you will know that you are under laser fire only because there are holes forming on your hull. You will need specialised sensors all other your outer hull just to detect being fired upon!)Since we've already established that there is no effective stealth in space, it doesn't really matter whether you can tell where the laser beam is coming from. You can see everything that's in effective laser range in the first place. Heck, effective laser range is shorter than radar range, let alone passive infrared range.

- if you are not too far away, you can even aim for specific weak points on the hull or even sweep across the hullFor weapon applications you don't use a continuous wave laser, you use a pulsed laser. This makes it impossible to cut a ship deeply by sweeping the beam across the hull.

Also, at even short range (hundreds of kilometers) the motion of the target (which is not entirely under your control or predictable) makes precision targeting difficult. At longer ranges, the target ship isn't visible as an extended object- it's just a dot. So even if you do have a laser, all you can really do is fire it at the dot of infrared light on the sensor screen and hope for the best.
________

Also you could probably use some kind of high energy radiation. Gamma rays or microwaves are the first thing that cross my mind...Microwaves are exactly the kind of thing the ship's metallic hull will tend to shield it against. Gamma rays are very deadly as a weapon, but also very hard to generate.

After all, if today the International Space Station was to be taken over by terrorists, what would we do about it? We could put an explosive warhead on the tip of a Delta booster rocket and blow the thing up, of course, adding an impressive collection of space debris to already crowded orbital space. But if we'd want it back intact, we'd have to send up a space shuttle or a Soyuz capsule filled with a crew of thugs. Since AR-15s and MP-5s aren't terribly useful in zero-g (unless you want to use them as propulsion) and grenades might open the hull, they'd have to go up armed with wrenches, knives, brass knuckles, and anything else that's handy. An old-school boarding action, of the type seen at Salamis.As long as nobody was stupid enough to fire long, wildly uncontrolled bursts, guns would be manageable in microgravity. The amount of recoil isn't enough to move you very fast, and in an indoor environment it's not difficult to find points to brace yourself on while firing.

Of course, the station hull would look like Swiss cheese afterward.

If anything, hand to hand combat in microgravity would be harder than firefights. Bullets carry a lot of energy but relatively little momentum, so firing a single bullet doesn't give you much of a push. Attacking someone with a wrench, let alone brass knuckles, would give you much more of a push. You'd be a lot more likely to wind up knocking yourself away by mistake, and it would be very difficult to land solid hits against an opponent that was trying to defend themself.
_______

Why does my bowling ball ship even need a pilot? Why does it need a hull? Can't I just find a super huge planet and put an awesome thruster on it and some kind of mechanical robot controls under the surface?If you have a thruster that awesome, fine. You've got a big ship. But the surface of the planet is a hull for our purposes, and it's going to get the hell beaten out of it.

Engines for a planet are... it's honestly impossible for me to imagine building such a thing. You'd need technology indistinguishable from magic. If you have technology indistinguishable from magic, it'll still be tricky to hit anything with its own engine, because it's not going to want to cross your path.

Wouldn't my planet just get bigger every time it hits something? I could drive it around the universe like a Katamari making it bigger every day.

A ship might be able to dodge my bowling ball but no planet would be able to. The ships would run out of supplies after every planet in the universe was crushed by my bowling ball.Thing is, a planet-on-planet collision will hurt you as much as it hurts the other planet. As in "destroy all life on both and fling a large fraction of the mass into space."

Think about a head-on collision between a moving car and a parked car. It doesn't really matter which of them was moving- they both get the crud hammered out of them.

Once it is started on a path with the thrusters there is nothing that could actually slow it down to a stop. All I would need is some directional thrusters and I could use the gravity field of other planets to steer the ball.

Strike!You'd have to use your own engine to make any major course changes to yourself. The gravity of other planets would be problematic as a steering system, because your planet has as much gravity as they do. The result would be chaotic, and probably destabilizing for the planet you tried to do a bank-shot around.

This would be a weapon of unimaginable power, but it would be very difficult to control or to use effectively.
_______

So you send out an astronaut to do the job.

Still anchored, he uses the wrench or a pugil stick to knock your astronaut into a new orbit, where he/she drifts helplessly around the earth until rescued or orbital decay.Not helplessly. Modern space suits have small handheld thrusters. They're not very powerful, but they're powerful enough to get you back to your airlock after someone knocks you off the ship with a wrench.

Or you can send an astronaut with a .22 caliber pistol. Guns do work in space. They're a bit problematic, but they work.

But let's say you do succeed in by-passing the guard (which will require combat skillz of some kind), drilling into the station, and pumping in gas (which will be a lethal nerve gas -- there isn't such a thing as 'knockout gas' in the real world).

The terrorist crew, already in their pressure suits. Put on their helmets. Now what?Wait for them to run out of air in their suits. A persistent nerve agent will be just as lethal six hours from now.

There are solutions other than sending five Spec Ops troops with crowbars into the airlock.
________

The first thing of note here is that Imperial Star Destroyers serve in the destroyer role, not the battleship role.I would say that ISDs are used in the cruiser role- long distance operations and independent command.

They have enough firepower to match or overwhelm all but the most powerful ships. Back in the day, when there were battleships, individual destroyers generally didn't have that. They operated in squadrons and were usually tightly attached to a larger task force. Whereas an ISD may appear almost anywhere, as part of a larger task force or independently.
________

Who says planet bowling ball has a normal orbit? I just have to find a planet that is already "rouge" and moving through systems - or one in an unstable system that can be thrown out of orbit easily.We don't have much reason to expect rogue planets to exist

My thruster power would come from harnessing the power of the molten core of planet bowling ball and enriching the core with a super fuel. Tunneling machines would dig channels to the surface where mechanical thrust volcano's would provide the thrust in any direction.

When a volcano is damaged my underground bots just repair the hole and the thruster from beneath.Volcanoes do not pack enough power to throw planets around like tennis balls; if they did then any volcanic eruption would be the end of life on Earth. Heating up the planetary core (not sure where you'd get enough fuel to heat a ball of rock and metal thousands of miles wide) will melt the planet before it makes the volcanoes that powerful.

No, what you need is an inertialess drive. For reference, see the Lensman series by Dr. Edward Elmer Smith, founding father of the space opera genre. He does have mobile planets in his setting, and in-setting they're quite plausible. But only because he has an inertialess drive to power them with.

Also, his mobile planets have guns.

And they aren't even the most dangerous thing in the setting. Doc Smith sees your mobile planet, and raises you a mobile black hole! Well, sort of black hole like thing.

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 12:49 PM

examination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISS_configuration_jun-2008_en.svg) reveals that the environmental systems are internal to the service module, with the crew. You'll have to get inside to subdue the crew and replace the atmosphere. So we're back to the same problem.
I'm not sure whether or not if such scenario is plausible. How many terrorist would you need to capture ISS? Five? Six? Seven? But I'll indulge your whim.
If I was a government planner for a contingency in such situation I would happen I would presume:
1. Crew is as good as dead.
1a. If crew has means of communication without the terrorist knowing their aid will be enlisted.
2. Their objective is to either destroy the ISS or use its research or communication in some manner
3. All our personnel has military and space training and is willing to kill any target we deem necessary. Preferably their level of fighting capabilities should be higher than the terrorist.
4. Our personnel will be scaled according to number of terrorist if possible.

Step 1 - Disable all thrusters. Aborted if determined that ISS is on crash course with earth.
Step 2 - Destroy all means of communication unless 1a uses or is in complete control of it.
Step 3 - Disable life support and electricity
Step 3a - Employ fast acting nerve gas.
Step 3b - Wait for terrorist to give up.
Step 4 - Use radiation or some other means that kills humans without damaging the equipment.
Step 5 - Take ISS apart compartments by compartment
Step 6 - Destroy ISS

Everything else is purely sitational and should be taken by commander in charge of this mission. Further more Steps 1, 2, 3 should be simultaneously achieved.

The terrorist crew, already in their pressure suits. Put on their helmets. Now what?

Respectfully,

Brian P.
Step 3b - Wait for terrorist to give up.

Canadian

2009-01-15, 01:33 PM

A planet on planet collision might destroy both planets but it would be unpopulated bowling ball planet vs populated planet = Evil genius creator of planet bowling ball wins. Besides I'd build up the mass of bowling ball to such a size it would dwarf any planet. Like a human makes and ant look small.

With my super fuel powering the thrust volcano I'm sure I'd get some good propulsion without melting the whole planet. There'd be some super science to take care of that. Sure it would disrupt every system it passed through. That's the whole point of planet bowling ball. Massive destruction and chaos.

Yeah the "hull of the planet" mostly water and dirt would get hit. Who care's? There's nothing on the surface of my planet anyway. So what if you moved some dirt around? I'd fill the oceans and all the dirt with special chemicals that resist various forms of attack. It would be special "armored" dirt and water. Perhaps the water is full of particles that help block or absorb lasers. I put a billions of gallons of liquid lead into the water to block radiation. The atmosphere is poison gas to kill anyone who lands on it. The surface temperature is either freezing or on fire. The rock is reflective so it deflects beam weapons. The whole planet is always cloudy so you can't see anything.

I think the best thing about planet bowling ball is that it would be a slow juggernaut of destruction gradually crossing the universe over several million years destroying all enemies and objects in the way and getting more powerful with each victory. It's legend would progress across systems just ahead of the wave of destruction.

I could get systems in the way to pay me to redirect it towards other systems and away from theirs. It does not have to directly attack all planets. It just has to strike terror into the hearts of all creatures and they'll negotiate a surrender.

Even a near miss by bowling ball on a populated would would destroy their planet. It could rip away their atmosphere and send their moons out of orbit. I don't have to make it hit the planets. Even a graze would be enough for total destruction.

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 01:47 PM

I think the best thing about planet bowling ball is that it would be a slow juggernaut of destruction gradually crossing the universe over several million years destroying all enemies and objects in the way and getting more powerful with each victory. It's legend would progress across systems just ahead of the wave of destruction.

And then people copy your systems and start puting motors on their own planets, and simply dodge your giant bowling ball.

Plus they can simply send a strike team, get hold of the control rooms, and put your bowling ball in direct crash with the nearest sun/black hole.

nothingclever

2009-01-15, 01:48 PM

I support the thinking of this bowling ball guy. I feel his idea has more merit than discussing a future situation that has never happened before that we aren't actually allowed to speculate on. I only ask that he correctly spells "rogue" instead of saying "rouge" which means red in French.

Dervag

2009-01-15, 01:53 PM

I'm not sure where Canadian would get the materials to build up a planet to dramatically increased size. There isn't that much rock in our solar system, and I don't see where he'd expect to find it in other systems, either.

So I still say that for badass mobile war planets, you use an inertialess drive and planet-scale power plants to drive planet-scale beam weapons and defensive shields.

Ramming is suboptimal. Zapping is better.

And that's just about your ultimate weapon there, except for sunbeams.

13_CBS

2009-01-15, 02:10 PM

To have a planet that's so big that it makes ants out of other rocky planets, wouldn't you have to have enough solid mass to equal or rival the size of Jupiter? Which is...pretty ridiculous?

Edit: Ok, IF you were to have a solid mass of rock/metal the size of Jupiter, would anything wonky happen to it due to its own great mass?

pendell

2009-01-15, 02:20 PM

Wait for them to run out of air in their suits. A persistent nerve agent will be just as lethal six hours from now.

In fact, the wiki article I cited states that the ISS contains backup oxygen bottles. Presumably for a loss-of-atmosphere emergency very similar to the artificial one introduced by poison gas.

Of course you can probably introduce a nerve agent that will outlast whatever oxygen supplies the crew has. Then you get to clean it up afterwards.

There are solutions other than sending five Spec Ops troops with crowbars into the airlock.

True, but none that solve the problem as neatly and tidily. Assuming you want the station back at all. You could just blow it up.

I'm not sure whether or not if such scenario is plausible.

Not really. There's no real reason to capture the ISS since there's nothing of value on board. Presumably this would be like some of the airplane hijacks of the 1970s, when hostages were taken in order to grandstand for propaganda purposes. See: Munich Olympics.

Getting up there is the largest challenge. You'd either need to infiltrate (the Swedish Payload specialist turns out to be a Johnny Taliban style turncoat) or get a friendly nation to donate a lift vehicle. The second is better, because you'd also want a way back down.

How many terrorist would you need to capture ISS? Five? Six? Seven? But I'll indulge your whim.

How many terrorist does it take to hijack an airliner? It has hundreds of passengers, but that's not an issue if the terrorists are armed and know what's going on.

The ISS has a crew of six. One man, suitable prepared and aided by surprise, could kill everybody on the station. But if the goal is hostages, you'll need more. If one has a suitable lift vehicle, I would say a crew of about 6. 6 prepared and rehearsed members of a combat team should be successful against disorganized resistance which is unarmed and organized for science, not war.

1. Crew is as good as dead.

In which case, you can wait for the terrorists to leave (if they have a way down), or accept their surrender in exchange for a lift back. Or just blow up the station, but I presume you'd rather have it back intact. It's taken decades to build the one we have.

1a. If crew has means of communication without the terrorist knowing their aid will be enlisted.

Suspect the crew will be duct taped to the walls and immobile. Wouldn't count on any resistance.

2. Their objective is to either destroy the ISS or use its research or communication in some manner

If destruction is all that is desired, all you need is to smuggle up a bomb -- say, in the oxygen supplies. Oxygen has a tendency to combust readily, anyway. It's a much easier prospect. There's no reason to send up humans if destruction is desired -- only for capture.

I can't think of any communication the ISS provides that could not be provided by satellites -- if you can launch a human crew into orbit to capture the ISS, presumably you can launch your own comm sat much more easily.

The ISS, not belonging to a nation, is unlikely to be the site of military research of any value. If there is, it's probably much easier to intercept its communications and steal the research that way rather than mount a capture attempt.

3. All our personnel has military and space training and is willing to kill any target we deem necessary. Preferably their level of fighting capabilities should be higher than the terrorist.

Military personnel with combat training have been on hijacked aircraft before. As a rule, they have not been able to prevent a well-planned hijacking. Organization, surprise, speed and weapons win every time.

4. Our personnel will be scaled according to number of terrorist if possible.

Realistically, I suspect the best solution would be to have one or two personnel onboard dual-trained as a sky marshal and prepared to act as a 'reception committee' for any arriving vehicles. It works with airliners. How many sky marshals does it take to prevent a hijacking? Not many per aircraft, I'm thinking.

Step 1 - Disable all thrusters. Aborted if determined that ISS is on crash course with earth.

Unlikely to have much impact in a time frame of days. If all that was wanted was to *destroy* the station, the first thing anyone would realize was when, say, a Progress freighter was diverted to ram the station.

Step 2 - Destroy all means of communication unless 1a uses or is in complete control of it.

Assumes remote control that the bad guys cannot disable first. Unlikely you would be able to get them *all*.

Step 3 - Disable life support and electricity
Step 3a - Employ fast acting nerve gas.

Already discussed.

Step 3b - Wait for terrorist to give up.

An extremely reasonable answer, assuming A) the terrorists don't have their own way back and B) this isn't a one-way mission. But if they're stupid enough to go up without having made those provisions this really is the best answer.

Step 4 - Use radiation or some other means that kills humans without damaging the equipment.

What about the hostages aboard?

Besides, I can round up 5 men and women who know what knives are for and put them on a shuttle a lot more quickly than I can develop specialized equipment to project said radiation. Also, I strongly doubt there's magical radiation that can be guaranteed not to harm *any* equipment while killing all the people aboard quickly enough that they can't do anything about it. Finally, there are such things as cosmic rays and van allen belts. IIRC, space vehicles and installations deal with radiation as a normal hazard of operations. Therefore, I doubt radiation is going to be an easy answer.

Step 5 - Take ISS apart compartments by compartment

And the people inside are just going to sit there and let you do it?

Step 6 - Destroy ISS

Agreed. This has always been an option, and was mentioned in my original post. The reason for the HRT team is not because you want to destroy the station -- you just need to put a bomb on the end of a booster, or even just ram an unmanned Progress freighter into it -- it's because you want to recapture it. Not only for the humanitarian purpose of the lives on board, not only for the propaganda purpose of showing that no one can get away with this sort of thing, but the simple economic reason of not wanting to throw away an asset that took ten years and millions of dollars to build. Yeah, you could just blow it up, write it off as a loss, and start building again. But most beancounters, given the choice of recovering the investment, would prefer to recapture it if possible.

The broader point I was trying to make -- is that it's not unreasonable , in the near future, for combat in space to be hand-to-hand between men in space suits. For the simple reason that manned space assets, such as space stations and (possibly later) lunar colonies, are expensive and difficult if not impossible to replace. It therefore makes sense to attempt to capture them if possible rather than out-and-out destroy them. Also, if your target is a manned permanent installation, there has never been a weapons system that beats the simple human being for intelligence, adaptability, and bloody-mindedness. Specialized equipment may be decades or centuries away. But the human being is available now.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

nothingclever

2009-01-15, 02:21 PM

How about a generic giant spaceship that eats planets, pieces of planets or asteroids for fuel, has a giant colony inside and is being perpetually expanded with the resources it gets that are basically welded on? Oh and it's still shaped like a giant ball and rams into things. lol

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 02:21 PM

There'd be no real way to control it for one. Creating a planet that big with a completly solid mass would leave no area for a command station. The gravity field alone it would create would be the more destructive part of it.

But there comes the problem. How could you construct it without dying? You couldn't. You'd need machines that would be able to withstand untold ammounts of pressure and force.

Isolder74

2009-01-15, 02:22 PM

Like I said, there will be several kind of fighters, each with it's diferent strengths and weakness, so you won't be able to simply mass anti fighter towers, because there won't be generic fighters to counter.

About the mothership defense:
With all due respect, if you're stupid enough to send ALL your fighters attack the enemy and don't leave some for contigency, you deserve to lose.

Then the commander of the US Forces at Midway was stupid. He sent all his fighters to strike at the Japanese fleet. Oh, wait he won.

If your primary strike weapons is the fighters you carry sometimes you can't afford to reserve some fighters to cover yourself. This is why a;; warships have point defense systems. This is why you can't have a carrier without dozens of screening vessels to protect it.

No matter how many fighters the mothership can carry it can't rely on them for it's own defense as this weakens it's own striking power. Either you have the option of using all your fighters in a strike or the defense fighters are waisted space. They only come into play if the ship is attacked.

Having a group of screening vessels gives you the option of time available to rearm fighter preparing to launch a strike to be used to defend. If the mothership is attacking the planet that is very similar to a carrier attacking a fortified island. In a way that is an unsinkable air craft carrier and unless you can ensure that your own fighters out range theirs you have to be prepared to fend those fighters off. As long as you are sending strike forces against the planet that planet will have time to work out where your ship is and mount a counter attack. You can't move the carrier much after the launch because your returning fighters need to know where they can find it.

Maelstrom

2009-01-15, 03:59 PM

For reference, Earth-Sun is eight light-seconds, and Earth-Moon is less than 0.2 light-seconds.

Just wanted to point out that the earth-sun distance is just over 8 light minutes.

1 AU = 149,597,870.691 kilometers / 299792.458 km per second (speed of light) = 499.004 seconds (or 8.31 minutes...)

Earth-moon is 1.2 seconds (on average).

Very interesting thread...long, but en"light"ening read.

nothingclever

2009-01-15, 04:35 PM

Canadian

2009-01-15, 05:00 PM

Dervag

2009-01-15, 05:16 PM

In fact, the wiki article I cited states that the ISS contains backup oxygen bottles. Presumably for a loss-of-atmosphere emergency very similar to the artificial one introduced by poison gas.

Of course you can probably introduce a nerve agent that will outlast whatever oxygen supplies the crew has. Then you get to clean it up afterwards.A cleanup problem is better than a terrorist problem.

Realistically, I suspect the best solution would be to have one or two personnel onboard dual-trained as a sky marshal and prepared to act as a 'reception committee' for any arriving vehicles. It works with airliners. How many sky marshals does it take to prevent a hijacking? Not many per aircraft, I'm thinking.Thing is, it's expensive to put someone in space, and very difficult to train people to operate effectively in space. The machinery is controlled from specific locations on the ground that are at least moderately secured. Everyone who goes up to the station is thoroughly vetted during the preparation process.

The International Space Station is just about the last place a terrorist group would attack unless they were very rich and very bored, and had a very specific space-type agenda.

And if you need to send up combat astronauts, it's still smarter to use guns.

For the simple reason that manned space assets, such as space stations and (possibly later) lunar colonies, are expensive and difficult if not impossible to replace. It therefore makes sense to attempt to capture them if possible rather than out-and-out destroy them.But the same token makes hand to hand combat in a manned space asset monstrously unlikely, because they're so hard to get to and the means of doing so are controlled by national governments. Space pirates (or their terrorist cousins) can't function unless the means of access to space are widely available for people who aren't government agents.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 05:22 PM

Thats some....well its not all that logical

"Comets and astriods work so why can't we scale it up by a thousand"

The fact is, creating something so big would be a trial of not only cost and materials, but logistics.

If it rotates, that means it will generate its own gravity. How can you keep that thing rotating when its so much larger then your own home planet? How can you survive the extreme pressure it would exert on everything on its surface due to its insane gravity? Its a fact our planets rotation is slowing, slowly sure but its still rotating less then it was. Your planet will suffer from that.

If its just some giant space rock...why not just make them smaller and shoot ateroids at your foe? Why build something so big?

Such a "ship" would be...well even inside the realm of sci-fi....unrealistic and a waste of practical resources. It takes alot less then a hurtling space boulder to destroy a planet when you have concentrated plasma weapons and missles. Whats the point in destroying a planet really? Destroying the life on it and using the planet for yourself would be a better use of resources.

Dervag

2009-01-15, 05:24 PM

What about movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon? In those movies the planet killers are comets about the size of Texas and they are large enough to wipe out the earth.We've never seen a comet the size of Texas. We can hypothesize that they might exist, but we're talking about imaginable stuff, not "pulled from the headlines" stuff.

Also, if you ram a comet the size of Texas into a planet you hurt the comet more than you hurt the planet. Sort of like getting into a head-on collision with a Mack truck. The truck will be damaged, but the car will be a pancake.

It is really so impossible to imagine an even larger object traveling through space at incredible speed on a collision course with another populated world? If it can happen randomly it could be engineered. Chunks of rock hit the earth all the time. How big was the one that killed the dinosaurs?About six miles wide. Compared to six thousand. And it's one of the largest 'wandering' objects known to exist in the history of the solar system, except at the very beginning.

The way planets seem to form makes it much more likely that they will occupy stable circular orbits than that they will occupy elliptical orbits that have them hurtling through the inner solar system at great speeds. Having a planet randomly flying through interstellar space is still less likely.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that I can't imagine where you'd find a "rogue planet," how it would have come to be hurtling between stars, how you'd catch up with it, or how you'd steer it. You need loads and loads of technomagic, and it sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Which is why I think that a planet with an inertialess drive and beam weapons is so much cooler.

I strongly recommend the Lensman series to you; it sounds like it would be right up your alley. And Doc Smith was an engineer, so while his technological ideas were very far out, they are developed well and consistently. Which is a plus.

Since it has popped up in sci-fi before I don't think it's too far fetched that you could have a planet that is somehow guided into position so it will hit something.

I think the bowling ball planet is no more implausible that any other future sci-fi uber space ship.That depends on how "uber" uber is.

Planets with engines aren't more implausible than the Death Star, because any civilization that can control the amount of power it takes to disintegrate a planet can control the amount of power it takes to move one. But planets with engines are more implausible than, say, a space battleship a mile long that's powered by rocket engines. We can build things a mile long. We can build rocket engines big enough to move such an object. We could solve those problems pretty easily, right now.

Planets with engines are a whole different ball game.
________

Thats some....well its not all that logical

"Comets and astriods work so why can't we scale it up by a thousand"

The fact is, creating something so big would be a trial of not only cost and materials, but logistics.Innis, for the record...

This is how someone like Warty Goblin feels talking about bioships or "pure energy" ships.

estradling

2009-01-15, 05:27 PM

I think the bowling ball planet is no more implausible that any other future sci-fi uber space ship.

Its not... The counter to if that would be effective (which is what was being asked) can only be answered with hard real world fact as we know them or with more imagnary supertech.

For example you use your imagination to bowling ball planet using super tech. Then I say I pull in the doomsday machine from the old star trek which eat planets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Thus your planet weapon ineffective to my doomsday machine. Then you escalate, causing me to escalate and we end up shouting out the other person is is completely unreasonable in what they claim for there imaginary weapons. WHen the only limit is the imagination itself

Given that its not hard to see why people like to use hard science... because it is a baseline.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 05:47 PM

Innis, for the record...

This is how someone like Warty Goblin feels talking about bioships or "pure energy" ships.

For the record, I used Sci-Fi, and not real world to call it a little silly. Bit of a difference. And I to find Pure Energy ships to be a little...out of left field for our species. But thats another thread :smallwink:

Canadian

2009-01-15, 05:49 PM

If the doomsday machine was a ship than I'd say it's fair game for the thread.

I'm not saying that a mobile planet should "win" the discussion. I'd just like it to be included in the discussion. Bio ships are being included and they don't even exist.

Planets exist. So do wandering comets and asteroids. It may be possible for a very large object to be moving through space towards earth right now.

At least a few of the basic ingredients for the planet ship exist. There's nothing to support the bio ship. I mean if someone wants to say my bowling ball planet would get owned by the hentai tentacles of doom on their bioship that's cool.

I'd just like to get the planet ship past the "talk to the hand" stage.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 05:57 PM

The above has no baring on the actual thread. We're discussiong large warships against small, not organic v. metal.

Such a large ship would be a huge target, and any armada would attack it with more conventional weapons. If those didn't work, they'd move their people. You may destroy the planet but you've not really done anything other then force them to move.

So, in the end, all the planets further away would have to do is construct a way to stop it after survivors told them about the doom ship. Worse comes to worst, they go Eldar and live in flying ships of their own. Now your super weapon is completly and utterly beaten, and you've lost time, money and resources a conventional weapon could have used. You also have a ton of other space faring people who are mad at you, and that you can't track comming to make you pay for your insane bid at universal terror.

Uberbig=/=win button.

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 05:58 PM

The question in this thread is so easy to answer. Big ships will be used in special combat situations and when advancements in technology require large amounts of space to put in a ship but are still worth using. The big advanced ships may inevitably be miniaturized over time but they'll still start out big meaning yes, big ships make sense. Until you can miniaturize something that is really useful you'll need a bigger ship. There will also obviously be more than one generation of large inventions and therefore more than one generation of large ships.

And who says that the new technologies will be big?

The first boats to cross the water were actually pretty small, and needed centuries of engineering to get big destroyers.

The first gunpowder weapons we designed were also small. It took lots of development to develop large caliber cannons wich actually could bring fortresses crashing down.

The first objects we sent into space also were pretty small. The first astronauts barely had any space to move inside their tiny shuttles.

During all of history there are a lot of things that are really usefull, but if you can't fit them inside something easily portable, then nobody's gonna bother to build a giant transport so you can go around dancing with it. If anything, they'll deconstruct it and rebuild it on the needed spot as necessary, like military hospitals, tents, fortifications, heavy artillery, ect, ect.

Lagrange

2009-01-15, 06:27 PM

The current ideas on traveling in space all require large spaces. Nuclear Pulse projection needs a large space to avoid killing the passengers, light sails are HUGE but also need a small cabin space, so it is a small ship with a giant engine, and Nuclear Fusion reactors, a good initial choice to at least power the internal parts of the ship are rather large devices. These are the kinds of technologies needed to move through space to begin with, at least interstellar space. Over time they can probably be scaled down, but they are starting out rather large.

warty goblin

2009-01-15, 06:43 PM

And who says that the new technologies will be big?

The first boats to cross the water were actually pretty small, and needed centuries of engineering to get big destroyers.

The first gunpowder weapons we designed were also small. It took lots of development to develop large caliber cannons wich actually could bring fortresses crashing down.

The first objects we sent into space also were pretty small. The first astronauts barely had any space to move inside their tiny shuttles.

During all of history there are a lot of things that are really usefull, but if you can't fit them inside something easily portable, then nobody's gonna bother to build a giant transport so you can go around dancing with it. If anything, they'll deconstruct it and rebuild it on the needed spot as necessary, like military hospitals, tents, fortifications, heavy artillery, ect, ect.

But yet it was the large ships that really changed the shape and course of warfare, triremes, ships of the line, ironclads, Dreadnaught, the aircraft carrier and so forth.

A logistical issue with your model of space warfare. Let's assume that your mothership launched fighters are firing some sort of missile- nukes, conventional weapons, whatever. So you've got all your repair and supply junk stowed on the mothership, that's fine. It also needs engines, sensors, some armament, and so on.

The fighters also need engines, sensors and armament. The missiles need engines and sensors. Right there you have three sets of engines, three sensor suites, and two sets of missile tubes to get your missile to target. You also need enough fuel to launch the fighter, deliver payload, and return- which comes to about four times the fuel needed to reach your closing velocity.

Now take a ship the same size as the mothership, but with no launch capacities. Turn the hangers into magazines, the control towers into fire control, the launch bays into missile tubes, the service stations into damage control, and so on. I argue that logistically this ship is in every way superior to the mothership in terms of both force projection and economy of materiel. Here's why:

1) To deliver a missile to target, it needs the missile, only the missile, and nothing but the missile. The mothership needs a fighter, which burns more fuel, and moves around a lot of non-payload mass. My ship doesn't have to do that. If the target is farther away, it just needs to fire a bigger missile, for which it has plenty of room.

2) It has higher combat endurance. So the mothership launches fighters on something. In order to target another enemy, those fighters have to complete their mission, return to the mothership, dock, refuel and rearm and launch again. All the missile dreadnaught needs to do is to fire another batch of missiles.

3) It requires fewer parts. No fighters means no need to carry fighter engines, fighter landing gear and so on. All of the space the mothership uses for this can be devoted to other, more useful things, such as missiles, armor, and so forth. This simplifies logistics, and simpler logistics is always a very good thing.

4) It has a better chance of overcoming the enemy's defenses. Suppose that the mothership needs to fire sixteen missiles at something, and each of its fighters can carry four of them. That means that it needs to launch four fighters. Until missile seperation, that means that the enemy can concentrate all of its fire on four targets. The missile dreadnaught meanwhile fires sixteen missiles- requiring the enemy to try to counter sixteen seperate targets. Now granted after missile seperation from the fighters, the enemy has just as many targets to worry about, but any single hit before that time is as good as four hits on my missile swarm. Bottom line, the dreadnaught will saturate point defense much more readily than the mothership.

4) Do not mention aircraft carriers. Airforce/Marine Aviation have nothing to do with space combat. In the aircraft carrier's case fighters result in significant gains- namely more maneuverability and much extended range. I fail to see why any of this is true in space. It would be more like an aircraft carrier that launched torpedo boats instead of airplanes, an idea of almost supreme idiocy. Just slap some torpedo tubes on a smaller ship-say a destroyer, and you get something much more interesting.

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 06:48 PM

And who says that the new technologies will be big?
And who is to say they will start small, huh?
What you present is a logical fallacy. You imply that a certain new technologies start big and by name some of them creating fake induction. That is preposterous. It is like implying some catholic priest are pedophiles and naming few.
Sure those ARE but not all and not the one we question IS.

The first boats to cross the water were actually pretty small, and needed centuries of engineering to get big destroyers.

The first gunpowder weapons we designed were also small. It took lots of development to develop large caliber cannons wich actually could bring fortresses crashing down.
Computers started big and were scaled to smaller sizes.

But this will further enforce your imaginery point that all ships will be small, tiny and live in the fairy mothership...

estradling

2009-01-15, 06:50 PM

I'd just like to get the planet ship past the "talk to the hand" stage.

It can be... However you have to provide the details for it to be discussed. Volcanoes (which was shot down) and 'superfuel.' Is all that you have given. How fast can it go, how quickly can in maneuver, how long does the fuel last? Those are blanks that you've left to us. Supertech that can get the planet going faster then light and change course on a dime is wildly different then supertech that can pull it out of orbit and set it on a collision course that happens 50 years later. The different levels of supertech help judge how likely it can be defended against and thus how like it might be to happen

Without those details then everyone else gets to fill in as they see fit, and they do so in a manner that supports what they want. Not what you want :)

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 07:35 PM

And who is to say they will start small, huh?
What you present is a logical fallacy. You imply that a certain new technologies start big and by name some of them creating fake induction. That is preposterous. It is like implying some catholic priest are pedophiles and naming few.
Sure those ARE but not all and not the one we question IS.

And what you present here is simply blatant lying, since I never said the bolded part. So if anyone's comiting a fallacy here is you, since it's your argument from your imagination in the first place.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-15, 07:40 PM

Thats what the word imply means. You never did say those words, but by the tone you've made it clear that you think that small tech is better, and that we will be using it in the future because of its just better.

Or am I wrong in assuming that...since that seems to be the whole point of this thread.

Not that I don't agree that we have been making things smaller, but large tech is still around....and still viable.

Oslecamo

2009-01-15, 08:11 PM

Thats what the word imply means. You never did say those words, but by the tone you've made it clear that you think that small tech is better, and that we will be using it in the future because of its just better.

I didn't said small tech is better for everything. I've been talking about fighters all the time, and a fighter by itself is pretty big.

My grudge is with the mentality that people will strive to keep making bigger and bigger ships mainly because they think "Big is best".

So, to clear up those points:
1- Somewhere in the future, we finally develope a viabler basic space ship for long travels.
2-Conflict breacks out(it always does), and space ships must be used to battle.
3-Then the question arises, "Do we work to make these battle ships bigger or smaller? Or do they keep roughly the same size".
4-I say we work to do them smaller for several reasons. Most people here however seem to think bigger BIGGER untill we reach the above giant bowling balls of doom.

But I never said to use small technology just because it's better. I presented several reasons to why I think it's better. Feel free to counter those specific reasons, but please don't go around claiming that I said "Lolz my micro tech pwns your big ships you noobz", because that's simply not true.

People said the first computers started big. Yes they did. But they still fitted in a house. Wich is roughly the same size of a fighter. So they actually started small in this conversation's scale.

Also, in case I still wasn't clear enough, I'm talking about frontline space ships for combat, not troops transports or science vessels or not anything whose work is not to shoot other things down from space.

Mainly because it bugs me to no end when in the movies we just see both giant space ships flying at each other while shooting their lasers to the point you can actually physicially board the other ship, and all sides are fighting to get the biggest ship possible, be it the death Star ot the Death Cube or the sacred giant mecha.

Talwar

2009-01-15, 10:27 PM

Big thread. Lots to absorb.

I think that the trend starts out smaller rather than larger, because:

-For the foreseeable future, everything originates at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Each kilo of payload requires many kilos of fuel to get out of the gravity well, and each of those kilos requires some additional fuel as well. While we rely on chemical propulsion, the trend will be for the smallest craft that can do the job.

-Even in the absence of AI, computers can be programmed to perform tasks, or the vehicle can be remotely controlled where the communication lag is not excessive. There will be significant weight savings if crew can be omitted, so they will be wherever possible.

-That being the case, there's no real need for the craft to come back, which reduces fuel and survivability requirements - and thus armor requirements - and drives the size down further.

So, just as in the Steve Jackson game "Orbit War", we'll probably find that most fighting in the Earth/Orbit/~Moon region is done by missiles and armed drones. As we expand into the solar system, there'll be little reason for this to change:

-A smarter computer or AI can operate autonomously outside effective two-way communication range

-Energy costs to other gravity wells are still high and favor low-mass, expendable craft

-Keeping crews alive for the duration of the trip is complex and costs a lot of mass

-It'll be "the way things are done", unlikely to change in the absence of some astonishing technological breakthrough.

After that, it all depends on what the breakthrough changes.

Belphegor

2009-01-15, 10:32 PM

Originally Posted by Belphegor
And who is to say they will start small, huh?
What you present is a logical fallacy. You imply that a certain new technologies start big and by name some of them creating fake induction. That is preposterous. It is like implying some catholic priest are pedophiles and naming few

And who says that the new technologies will be big?

The first objects we sent into space also were pretty small. The first astronauts barely had any space to move inside their tiny shuttles.

During all of history there
Sure those ARE but not all and not the one we question IS.

And what you present here is simply blatant lying, since I never said the bolded part. So if anyone's comiting a fallacy here is you, since it's your argument from your imagination in the first place.
To sublimate what you said.
First things could start small.
A is small.
B is small.
C is small.
This implies (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/imply?r=75)a (faulty) logical induction (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/induction?r=75).

And even if didn't meant it and was right. What does it have with your point? Wasn't the whole point of your story that fighters will always be small?

People said the first computers started big. Yes they did. But they still fitted in a house. Wich is roughly the same size of a fighter. So they actually started small in this conversation's scale.
I call bullcrap.
You never defined what was a big ship or even a small ship and now small ship is the size of house which is magically the small size for computers and airplanes. Pull your story straight. There were big. Not as in Giant big but still in terms of computation power per cubic meter they got insanely efficient. What you would once need a room full of comp you now need a wrist watch.

My grudge is with the mentality that people will strive to keep making bigger and bigger ships mainly because they think "Big is best".

So, to clear up those points:
1- Somewhere in the future, we finally develope a viabler basic space ship for long travels.
2-Conflict breacks out(it always does), and space ships must be used to battle.
3-Then the question arises, "Do we work to make these battle ships bigger or smaller? Or do they keep roughly the same size".
4-I say we work to do them smaller for several reasons. Most people here however seem to think bigger BIGGER untill we reach the above giant bowling balls of doom.

Also, in case I still wasn't clear enough, I'm talking about frontline space ships for combat, not troops transports or science vessels or not anything whose work is not to shoot other things down from space.
And we told you 100 times. It depends on current technology/materials/meta-game/cost-to-efficiency ratio/logistic viability and god who knows what. And it cannot be achieved with todays tech...
And without knowing what variables will be it is just a guessing game of "what-if" where all explanations are equally valid (unless they are blatantly moronic).
Ok lets play your game
1.,2.,3. are valid
4. We make them affordable and cost effective. That doesn't mean big or small. It just means that. For example I think it will be like this -
Stage ships. They start out big but once a section of fuel and ammo is used it is discarded make each next iteration faster and less equipped.

-For the foreseeable future, everything originates at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Each kilo of payload requires many kilos of fuel to get out of the gravity well, and each of those kilos requires some additional fuel as well. While we rely on chemical propulsion, the trend will be for the smallest craft that can do the job.
Debatable. What about Solar wind powered sails?? Some form of energy that exists within the vacuum (that is theorized but not used)? What if we broadcast electricity and control signals needed for Ion thrusters?

Energy costs to other gravity wells are still high and favor low-mass, expendable craft

Not really since even those low mass stuff need fuel so they will most likely come in stages. Of which some will be quite big.

Mainly because it bugs me to no end when in the movies we just see both giant space ships flying at each other while shooting their lasers to the point you can actually physicially board the other ship, and all sides are fighting to get the biggest ship possible, be it the death Star ot the Death Cube or the sacred giant mecha.
THIS IS WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT?!?
Man. Go visit tv-tropes site and lookup Cool Factor.
The reason they do that is because anything too real would be boring.
Imagine how would it look if there were two tiny red dots with Death star in backdrop. Firing their laser sending their unmanned drones at each other (very interesting).
Imagine how the dramatic dialog would be
"Sir unhuman drones #321-500 fired"
"God bless you boys. *Salute"
"Sir lifeless drones #322-453 destroyed. Rest disabled..."
"*Unemotional voice* Ok send out another batch. God bless you boys. *Salute* "
*Crew attempt to screams as their eyes pop out due to decompression.*
*Credit roll*

Audience doesn't care about strategy or survivability it cares to get some kicks. So if that means making ship battles look like it is a battle of two medieval ships than so be it.
In fact I remember when one ship hid itself on a planet. And the commander importantly complained: "Shush so they can't hear us!"
If only he had know that space is sound proof...

Dervag

2009-01-15, 11:40 PM

Its not... The counter to if that would be effective (which is what was being asked) can only be answered with hard real world fact as we know them or with more imagnary supertech.

For example you use your imagination to bowling ball planet using super tech. Then I say I pull in the doomsday machine from the old star trek which eat planets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Thus your planet weapon ineffective to my doomsday machine. Then you escalate, causing me to escalate and we end up shouting out the other person is is completely unreasonable in what they claim for there imaginary weapons. WHen the only limit is the imagination itself Which is more or less what happened to Doc Smith's Lensman series.

I kid you not, it's a delightful read for the science fiction fan. Not least because in a real sense it's where it all began.
______

I'd just like to get the planet ship past the "talk to the hand" stage.Well, I'm talking to you.

What I'd say is, for the planet ship to work:

-You need an engine that can plausibly make major changes to the speed of a planet-sized mass. Supercharged volcanoes aren't going to cut it, not by any normal definition of the word "volcano." You're better off coming up with some kind of engine that works by a principle other than throwing rocket exhaust backward to push itself forward.

-Ramming at the speeds of an object that can fly between stars is so destructive that it's as bad for you as it is for the target. Thus, it probably makes sense to arm your planet with other kinds of weapons, and threaten to bombard planets until their surface is covered with craters and trinitite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite). It's much safer for the guy who owns the mobile planet.

dralasite

2009-01-16, 05:23 AM

What about movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon? In those movies the planet killers are comets about the size of Texas and they are large enough to wipe out the earth.

They also theorize that if they fire on the comet it will just break into chunks and destroy the earth anyway. A pretty unstoppable weapon.

It is really so impossible to imagine an even larger object traveling through space at incredible speed on a collision course with another populated world? If it can happen randomly it could be engineered. Chunks of rock hit the earth all the time. How big was the one that killed the dinosaurs?

Since it has popped up in sci-fi before I don't think it's too far fetched that you could have a planet that is somehow guided into position so it will hit something.

I think the bowling ball planet is no more implausible that any other future sci-fi uber space ship.

The problem with the bowling ball planet is that it's not efficient compared to the technologies necessary for it's existence:
- if they use some kind of reaction-jet to propell the planet (super-volcano or equivalent) then no need to ram anything, just "fire" the propeller toward the target which will be incinerated AND knocked off-orbit.
- if it uses some kind of force field to displace the "planet", no need to ram either: just take a big chunk of random rock and propell it at nearly the speed of light, the resulting explosion will disintegrate the target

None of these demand a gigantic planet, just use a big ship or an hollowed-out asteroid, it will be enough.

dralasite

2009-01-16, 05:46 AM

Not true. The beam divergance is related to the optics in the laser chamber (If I recall correctly it is related to chamber length, aperture and frequency). The longer (and narrower) the laser chamber, the less the beam will diverge. Mind you, that's only because the photons that are more divergant are being absorbed within the chamber.

You only need a slight angle of divergance to have a huge effect at range.

Atmospheric lensing and irregularities in the upper atmosphere (plus absorbtion) probably doesn't help, but it will have a minor effect on the beam.

It's nice to dust off the degree every so often...
You are assuming that laser won't evolve as much as missiles: the US has been testing missiles designed to hit incoming nuclear missiles and they have incredible problems. How would a missile hit a faster and more distant target (one who could also have some countermeasures).
If future missiles evolve enough to hit quite reliably a spaceship, then we can assume that optic will have evolved as well. In fact, for missiles to be able to hit anything, optics will HAVE to be much better than now.

The fact remains:
- lasers will always move at the speed of light, be invisible and will certainly be efficient in the range necessary to detect a target. The disadvantage is that, contrary to missiles, they can't correct their course, which would a liability if spaceship fights occur really far away.
- missiles can never be as fast as lasers, they will be visible (more or less), they can correct their course and will be limited in numbers obviously

Or course we can also have killer drones (coming close to a target and shooting lasers at them while dodging).

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 07:03 AM

I call bullcrap.
You never defined what was a big ship or even a small ship and now small ship is the size of house which is magically the small size for computers and airplanes. Pull your story straight.

Well what size were you thinking? I didn't call them fighters just because I like the word. I called them fighter ships because I pictured them being the same size as real world fighter planes. If you were unclear on the size, you should have asked, not go around calling logical errors on things that aren't defined at all, wich is ilogical on itself.

Belphegor

2009-01-16, 09:03 AM

Well what size were you thinking? I didn't call them fighters just because I like the word. I called them fighter ships because I pictured them being the same size as real world fighter planes. If you were unclear on the size, you should have asked, not go around calling logical errors on things that aren't defined at all, which is illogical on itself.
I called logical error on something else. And even if it were a size of a fighter plane the first real computers were still bigger.

Point is when you call some technology that "started big and ended small" you should be placing a point of reference inside the technology discussed not to some arbitrary size of a completely-off or loosely related technology because it tells us nothing of the development of the technology discussed.

For example nano-technology would by your definition be a "small that got small" technology compared to a real-life plane. Still that tells nothing of that technology. Nano-technology could have gotten smaller or bigger or stayed the same size but since you are comparing it to a technology completely unrelated to it it will always be small.

If for example I stated that all things start small and my small fighter was a size of a moon than all technology ever made would be small comparable to my moon-sized small fighter.See?
Technology advancement should not be relative to some other arbitrary and more-less unrelated technology it should be relative to a technology that is very closely and very firmly related to one discussed.

If computers are a reflection of things look at them this way - they started big but are now both smaller or larger depending on their use. You've got military using small portable computers for communication in conjunction with bigger computers for more precise calculations.
Sure they are getting smaller because more rawpower/space is always good. But once we reach the magical rawpower/space ceiling only way to increase rawpower would be to increase space needed. Same goes for any technology really.

After all things stated I would like to reiterate my point stage ships could beat both small and big ships if necessary being able to arbitrarily change their size in accordance with battle requirements.

This being said I retire from this debate. I think it has reached a point at which all it can turn is a flame/hate fest. To which I will no longer contribute.

estradling

2009-01-16, 10:09 AM

Which is more or less what happened to Doc Smith's Lensman series.

I kid you not, it's a delightful read for the science fiction fan. Not least because in a real sense it's where it all began.

I have read them, like them too. Where you the one that say that the Negaspheres (or whatever it was he called them) where blackholes? Because from the descriptions he gave of it in action I would say it was more like anti-matter. Once you get past the handwaved supertech (and the 50 take on the future) I find that is descriptions of his weapons and ship hold together as good as any other sci fi setting does.

Britter

2009-01-16, 10:10 AM

Look, if we are going to use real-world combat aircraft as a point of reference for the definition of small, that only supports the larger ship theory. Allow me to explain.

The first combat aircraft were little more then a wood-and-wire frame covered by cloth with engines smaller then those in some modern automobiles and a pair of medium-caliber mechine guns. As the power plants, weapons, avionics, and sundry other technologies evolved, the airframes got bigger. Compare, for example, a Sopwith Camel WW1 fighter with a modern fighter jet of your choice. They needed to be bigger because, despite the fact that pound for pound they were more efficent, there ARE hard limits to how small you can make some things, like for example engines.

So, if you are arguing that in the inital stages of military space flight, combat craft will be more like the Space Shuttle with a laser and a missle bay, as opposed to straping engines to the USS Missouri and launching her into space as our new inter-stellar jugernaught, then sure, I agree. However, as the technology improves, certain things will miniaturize but certain other things will infact GET BIGGER.

It is a series of trade-offs. You determine what you want your spacecraft to be able to do. You then determine what is availible to you to build your craft, and make choices that give you the closest approximation of the operational capabilites you want.

I feel like this "they will always be smaller" argument in favor the the swarm model is not really taking into consideration the logistics of actual engineering. Please note, that I am a total layman when it comes to the hard science here, but I have more then a passing interest in military history and equipment. Somethings do get smaller and more efficent. Standard issue military rifles of today are lighter and have higher rates of fire and larger magazine capacity then rifles of the WW2 era, and electronics and computers are much smaller then they were even 20 years ago. Tanks, on the other hand, tended to get bigger. A Sherman tank is much smaller then an M1 Abrams, for example (30 some tons for the Sherman, compared to 60 some tons for the Abrams). The Abrams is also faster, better armored, better armed, and capable of doing things that a Sherman simply could never do. Why? The tech got better, and the designers used the best tech they could to put the most capabilites they could into the most efficent platform they could. That platform needed to be bigger to accommodate the bigger engines and bigger guns that more advanced technology allowed them to build.

The other flaw with the idea of a totally disposable drone fighter fleet is the fact that while there may not be a cost in manpower if they are destroyed, there is still a cost in dollars/yen/rupes/etc. No government is going to spend it's entire defense budget on a fleet of disposable fighting vehicles. (Please note that I don't believe anyone has suggested that the entirety of a space combat force be comprised of unmanned drones. I have however heard a lot of comments that seem to indicate that completely sacrifce-able ships are a good thing) For example, a Global Hawk unmanned drone costs something like 120 million dollars to produce, versus a Tomahawk cruise missle, which is about $600,000. So for the cost of one disposable fighter you could build what, about 24 or so missles. It makes more logisitcal sense, as was pointed out earlier, to invest in a mobile weapons platform with the armor to take a pounding and the throw-weight to put a lot of rounds on target; in comparison, a disposable fighter force will cost more, not be reusable if they are too delicate, and might not be able to match the throw-weight of the larger ship, since bigger guns/missle/etc tend to require bigger weapons platforms.

Texas_Ben

2009-01-16, 01:32 PM

People said the first computers started big. Yes they did. But they still fitted in a house. Wich is roughly the same size of a fighter. So they actually started small in this conversation's scale.

I read this and was flabbergasted. I didn't even know where to begin. Fortunately others dealt with it so I don't have to. You should be ashamed.

-For the foreseeable future, everything originates at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Each kilo of payload requires many kilos of fuel to get out of the gravity well, and each of those kilos requires some additional fuel as well. While we rely on chemical propulsion, the trend will be for the smallest craft that can do the job.

Which is why, presumably, space combat won't happen until we have the capability to construct things in space. Because, as you pointed out, launching is a hassle.

The fact remains:
- lasers will always move at the speed of light, be invisible and will certainly be efficient in the range necessary to detect a target. The disadvantage is that, contrary to missiles, they can't correct their course, which would a liability if spaceship fights occur really far away.
- missiles can never be as fast as lasers, they will be visible (more or less), they can correct their course and will be limited in numbers obviously

If you're fighting at ranges at which lasers being unable to change course matters, your missile is taking a few days (probably longer) to arrive on target, and your lasers are so dispersed as to be rendered harmless.

Dervag

2009-01-16, 02:52 PM

I have read them, like them too. Where you the one that say that the Negaspheres (or whatever it was he called them) where blackholes? Because from the descriptions he gave of it in action I would say it was more like anti-matter.The problem is that antimatter doesn't have a negative mass and isn't absolute nothingness.

Neither black holes nor antimatter works like a Lensman-style negasphere, but for a modern audience describing it as a black hole works better. Most people understand a black hole as an all-devouring pit of empty, while thinking of antimatter is a sort of very very high explosive. Since a negasphere acts more like an all-devouring pit of empty than it does like an explosive...

Once you get past the handwaved supertech (and the 50 take on the future) I find that is descriptions of his weapons and ship hold together as good as any other sci fi setting does.Well, it's internally consistent, I'll say that. Some science fiction uses externally consistent weapons and ship technology, stuff that we're reasonably confident we can build, but that's unusual outside the "hard" genre.

Nitpick: It's a 30s take on the future. Doc Smith plotted most of this stuff out before the Second World War.

estradling

2009-01-16, 03:25 PM

The problem is that antimatter doesn't have a negative mass and isn't absolute nothingness.

Neither does a black hole :)

It does get smaller the more it consumes. (anti-matter being used up vs a black hole getting bigger the more mass it eats)

It does react the exact opposite as normal matter in the tractor and pressor beams. (Matter with the opposite 'charge' vs a whole lot of really dense matter)

It does release 'hard radiation' ie energy as it works

Neither black holes nor antimatter works like a Lensman-style negasphere, but for a modern audience describing it as a black hole works better.

True with the first and I disagree second. The only thing it doesn't really do as I'd expect anti-matter to do is the big kalboomy explosions. He had plenty of those. He had it be a more controlled release. Kind of like the Enterprise does with its Warp drive.

The way it was used was the way I'd see a blackhole being used as well though. (A black sphere of death closing in on you and you couldn't stop it just get out of the way)

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 03:42 PM

Blackholes release a fair amount of energy as they do their work.

How antimatter reacts to a tractor or pressor beam depends on the beam works in the first place. I think it would work the same way, since antimatter still responds to electromagnetic fields, and gravity the same way that matter does, it just has a different change so the antiparticle of a charged particle would react the opposite way as the particle, but matter tends to be neutral so I do not know why antimatter would react differently if it did react differently.

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 03:42 PM

The way it was used was the way I'd see a blackhole being used as well though. (A black sphere of death closing in on you and you couldn't stop it just get out of the way)

If you can make it move, then you can make it stop. Also, some could say that a weapon that keeps destroying indiscremenetely after being fired isn't very viable, unless you plan to destroy everything and everyone.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 03:49 PM

Some people do plan on destroying everything.

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 03:53 PM

Some people do plan on destroying everything.

Luckily it's a very self-defeating path, since it means the "everything" will gank up on you.

estradling

2009-01-16, 03:59 PM

If you can make it move, then you can make it stop.

Yes you should be able to and the people who used it did... But that does not mean that the poor war group that you first spring it on by surprise will be able to. (Which is what happen in the book. In time the enemy figured but not in quick for that first group)

Also, some could say that a weapon that keeps destroying indiscremenetely after being fired isn't very viable, unless you plan to destroy everything and everyone.

Right and that is what happens with blackholes (as far as we know) They can't be destroy. So I would imagine that in some Supertech setting some line or point would be made that they could. That never happen in the Lensman setting. It just got smaller and smaller as it worked, until it was gone

Blackholes release a fair amount of energy as they do their work.

From matter that comes close but doesn't quiet pass the into the black hole or from matter as it is begin pulled in. But once pass there is nothing.

How antimatter reacts to a tractor or pressor beam depends on the beam works in the first place. I think it would work the same way, since antimatter still responds to electromagnetic fields, and gravity the same way that matter does, it just has a different change so the antiparticle of a charged particle would react the opposite way as the particle, but matter tends to be neutral so I do not know why antimatter would react differently if it did react differently.

Agreed... But then neither would Blackholes be reacting opposite. Just it is a 'fact' of this setting that a Negasphere does. So between the two I'd feel that matter that is opposite of normal matter is a closer match then just really dense matter

Erloas

2009-01-16, 08:53 PM

The problem with the bowling ball planet idea is that you've gone way too big for practicallity. If your goal is to render a planet of your choice unihabited you can accomplish the same task with a much smaller weapon. Using a planet much larger then earth to destroy other planets is much like using a nuclear weapon to kill your neighboor. Its a lot of extra damage that is entirely wasted on the task at hand and much harder to do then something more practical.

We have the techonology to move fairly large balls of mass in space, given most of them at this point are impractical and untested, but its not really that out of the question. The trick is not in doing all the work yourself, you find a few sutiable pieces of ammunition and you get it moving in the right direction and let the gravity of the sun do all the work and all you really need to do is add a little power now and again to keep it on the course you want it on. If you think there is a reasonable chance of "them" being able to stop a single shot then get several of them started. Then all you have to do is defend the balls of rock as they close in. The thing about stopping them though is that it takes a whole lot more energy to stop them once they've had a few years of gravitational acceleration acting on them then the energy you had to use to get them started in the first place.
Sure, its not an entirely fast effect, it might take a decade or two between when you start to impact, but it will get done. It also takes a whole lot of astro mathamatics, but the calculations themselves should be trival compared to the task of getting a ship out in space with the abilities to do anything of the sort in the first place.

Alex Knight

2009-01-16, 09:13 PM

Ok, here goes. I'm going to refrain from any mention of specific sci-fi or real-life technology.

Firstly, barring some kind of handwaving sci-fi propulsion system, the big ship will be able to go just as fast, or faster than the smaller ship.

Why, you ask?

Simple. Both the big and small ships are traveling in the same medium. This is where the aircraft/surface ship analogy falls completely apart. There's no magic size limit that causes a ship to react differently to space compared to a smaller vessel. Further, since both the big ship and the small ship will be using the same engine technology, the same percentage of the ship will be occupied by the engine system.

And that's the key thing. Percentages. Let's say that a ship needs to devote 50% of its tonnage to propulsion, 20% to life support and crew support, and another 20% to structure/armor. That leaves 10% of the ship for weapons. (please note, these percentages are WAGs, but the basic principle remains intact).

Now, let's say that our small ship is...100 tons (about the size of the Shuttle), and our large ship is...let's say 10,000 tons. That gives the small ship 10 tons for weapons, and the large ship gets 1,000 tons.

Sadly for the small ship, he doesn't have any weapons that the large ship can't have..and have more of.

Therefore, barring sci-fi wierdness, larger ships are more tactically viable than small ones.

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 09:13 PM

The problem with the bowling ball planet idea is that you've gone way too big for practicallity. If your goal is to render a planet of your choice unihabited you can accomplish the same task with a much smaller weapon. Using a planet much larger then earth to destroy other planets is much like using a nuclear weapon to kill your neighboor. Its a lot of extra damage that is entirely wasted on the task at hand and much harder to do then something more practical.

Sooo, sudenly one can get too big? One moment people are claiming how the biggest space ships will easily dominate the battlefield simply because they're bigger and for that they're automatically better, but someone sugests using something the size of a planet and they're sudenly being ridiculous.

Why not turning the rocky dead planets into mobile space fortresses then? You save up the money for the hull big time, you can fit the biggest baddest weapons people were claiming were so imba, you join the uber defenses that were also being thrown left and right, and you still have space left for whatever else you want.

EDIT:

Alex Knight: You're forgeting something. The bigger you are, the more percentage you need to dedicate to the structure, or your ship will tear itself up when you start the engines. never noticed how planets are spherical but smaller asteroids have much more bizzarre shapes?

Also, it's kinda irrelvant to have 100 times more weapons than the little guy if the little guy still needs a single well placed shot to bring you down.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 09:22 PM

Planet bowling ball was never envisioned to be practical. In a big vs. small ship discussion I was just going for the biggest category of ship possible. The largest thing ever discovered except mobile.

I like a lot of things that are not practical. Plus practicality has very little to do with a lot of things people design. Monster trucks are fun. So are Ferraris. Not all that practical. A Rolex tells time and just happens to be covered in gold and diamonds. The Hummer is cool. Spinning rims look awesome. Does anyone really lust after a Toyota Camry?

When it comes to destruction… Honestly… Who wants a small explosion? I want the biggest weapons and destruction possible. Who cares if it is excessive? Excess is what makes awesome battles possible!

Lots of impractical ships and weapons have been designed over the ages. The future will be no different.

Every form of fiction has some kind of uber destructive weapon. In D&D its the Terrasque. There's something about a singularly powerful thing on the battlefield that's both awesome and terrifying. Sure you could send a vast number of other monsters but sending one giant one is more fun.

The "Super Weapon" is a concept that has been tried time and again in warfare. Siege engines, greek fire, napalm, mustard gas, the german railway gun, the battleship, aircraft carrier, nuclear submarine, ICBM.

The latest odd attempt was the Iraqi "supergun" during the first gulf war.

One nuke may have exactly the same firepower as an entire army of men. Yet the nuke is so much more terrifying.

The "killer planet" is just my interpretation of the space ship super weapon. A weapon of terror. A weapon that causes massive worry and inconvenience to the enemy.

If planet bowling ball causes people to flee their home worlds – even if bowling ball never hits a singe ship – it has accomplished its goal.

The mere existence of a super weapon is enough to secure the interests of a nation. Just look at nukes. Never been fired since 1945.

The problem people seem to have with planet bowling ball is that it's too big. I still say I could find a wandering planet and just dig a command centre into the molten core. Add thrusters powered by the core of my planet + a super fuel (antimatter or whatever you guys can agree on) and shoot it out of a thruster the size of Europe. Not an “accidental” earth type volcano but a man made volcano / thruster powered by the planetary core.

So I'll change planet bowling balls size to "Exactly (to the inch) the largest size that a ship or asteroid or planetary object can possibly be and still be mobile within whatever rules of whatever you all want to decide." Plus it’s made out of whatever alloy or whatever that you guys say.

End product: IT IS THE LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNIVERSE.

Still shaped like a bowling ball and still looks like a planet. Still no crew on board and no traditional weapons. Just the ram or swoop past / near miss attack. And designed to be as impervious to attack as possible.

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 09:38 PM

Planet bowling ball was never envisioned to be practical. In a big vs. small ship discussion I was just going for the biggest category of ship possible. The largest thing ever discovered except mobile.

Perhaps you missed the part where I wanted to discuss things from a pratical viewpoint and not a coolness factor viewpoint, but whatever, thread is already hopelessly derailed for too long.

The mere existence of a super weapon is enough to secure the interests of a nation. Just look at nukes. Never been fired since 1945.

No, it's actually enough to make all other countries start an arms race to get said weapons, create a global climate of fear and paranoia and waste a lot of resources as you try to have more super weapons than the guys on the other side of the world.

If you create a planet destroying super weapon, then everybody will copy yours try to build their own, and you end up forced to spend hordes of resources to try to convice the other guys to abandon their planet destroying weapons, only to see everyone and their mother get more planet destroying weapons, creating a climate of tension where the slightest mistake means all civilization disapears in a puff of smoke.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 09:41 PM

Nukes have existed since 1945 yet only a handful of nations have them. Some nations only have one or two.

So what if people copy your super weapon. The key is to invent the super weapon and make it first and make more of them than anyone else.

Planet bowling ball is the head start in the arms race that people would have to catch up to. In a sense if everyone HAS to copy you then you control the future of arms production. You set the pace and the universe follows. You're already won.

Alex Knight

2009-01-16, 09:46 PM

Sooo, sudenly one can get too big? One moment

EDIT:

Alex Knight: You're forgeting something. The bigger you are, the more percentage you need to dedicate to the structure, or your ship will tear itself up when you start the engines. never noticed how planets are spherical but smaller asteroids have much more bizzarre shapes?

And what's preventing me from building the larger ship as a sphere instead of a "bizarre shape"?

Also, it's kinda irrelvant to have 100 times more weapons than the little guy if the little guy still needs a single well placed shot to bring you down.

First, with the larger percentage devoted to armor on the larger ship, it has a better chance of surviving the "single well placed shot". Secondly, the big ship could kill 100 of your small ships, but you could only kill one of his. :smallsmile:

Canadian

2009-01-16, 09:51 PM

All weapons cause an arms race among nations. Not just super weapons. Every year simple rifle technology marches forward. Even the humble knife is improved every few years.

Oslecamo

2009-01-16, 09:51 PM

Nukes have existed since 1945 yet only a handful of nations have them. Some nations only have one or two.

It's more than enough. How many enemies do you need with the capacity to destroy your main base in the blink of an eye untill you start to get worried?

So what if people copy your super weapon. The key is to invent the super weapon and make it first and make more of them than anyone else.

Planet bowling ball is the head start in the arms race that people would have to catch up to. In a sense if everyone HAS to copy you then you control the future of arms production. You set the pace and the universe follows. You're already won.

Heer, how can this be considered as "Winning"? You're the one who's burning resources doing the research and testing, and then your enemies just snatch the plans and copy your super weapons, but they didn't have to spend resources developing and testing. Copying already existing technology is much easier than developing it from scratch. You have slighlty better weapons, but at the cost of needing to finance a super expensive military reaseach division.

Look at the germans vs russians. Germans develop long range rockets and all kind of exotic weapons. Russians keep spamming tanks and simply overrun them, then take all those plans and scientists for long range rockets and make stuff that can go in space thanks to them.

EDIT:

Alex Knight:Since your ship probably costed 100 times as much since it carries 100 times as much ammo and weapons, well, guess it's only fair.

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 09:52 PM

There is still a large difference between a large ship, and one that would threaten a planet in just shear mass. For instance the largest nuclear bomb was about 50 megatones, but the largest volcano was about one hundred thousand times more powerful, with the largest impact about 2 million times more powerful than our largest bomb. If you look at this in terms of delta T (kinetic energy) it would be equivalent of increasing the orbital speed of the Earth by about .4 meters per second. This is a very small change, about one part in about then thousand.

Actually making it large enough to be a bowling ball means that it would be even more massive than the earth, and the energy needed to move it would probably reach the point where you could almost vaporize a planet anyways. Personally, if you are going to invest so much energy production into moving a planet I think it would be better to just go the route of the Death Star and just vaporize the planet. That would also help with the leaving aspect, and you would not have to worry about damage to the ship as it hits a planet. It would probably still have to be about the same size to get enough energy, and it might as well be a ball but I think this would be a better use of the energy.

As for building the most...I would like to remind people that the Soviets built more nuclear warheads, and had larger ones during the Cold War...but did they win the war?

Beyond just building more 'super weapons' you also need to have one of the strongest economies to make your country (probably star system when it gets to this point anyways) able to actually be able to support itself while making weapons, not just making the most weapons.

I know it has been said before in history, but the real winner of the war are the ones who make the most profit. Economy will always be important, even more so when you are talking about the amount of materials needed to construct any hypothetical fleet.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 09:55 PM

World war 2 was Germany vs the planet. I think the Germans did very well because they made super weapons.

If you're thinking they would have won the war if they made the exact same cheap tanks as the Russians you're wrong. They would have lost no matter what.

The vast majority of weapons in use today by modern armies have their roots in german world war 2 design. Super weapons of the past - Like the tank with the first ever sloped armor and long barreled gun - are the conventional weapons of today.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 09:57 PM

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 10:00 PM

Canadian, and I would argue that an entire planet functions as a ship, but it is a naturally created one, so that would be my hypothetical largest ship. It could be the largest man made ship, but not the largest ship that I can imagine.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:01 PM

Also, it's kinda irrelvant to have 100 times more weapons than the little guy if the little guy still needs a single well placed shot to bring you down.

But who says that all it takes is one shot? The big ship can mount more armour, have more redundancy, more compartments and so in. In short, it is far better at dealing with damage.

Anyway, no matter what size they start out with, I don't think ships will grow smaller.
Let's say that I make a 1000ton spaceship. The engines takes up 200 ton. I then develop an engine half the size of the old one, but with the same output. This releases 100 tons. Now, I can either leave those 100 tons out and get a ship that accelerates slightly faster and have a slightly longer range, or I can strap on another engine and get a ship with the same capabilities as the old one, but with the ability to accelerate far faster in a pinch, or I can use those spare 100 tons on fuel tanks or weapons or armour or a combination of the above. To me, any of the later options seems more attractive than the first.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:01 PM

Lagrange - I'll take it. Whatever is largest that everyone can agree is capable of existing. That's my ship. As bowling ball like as it can possibly be without being impossible.

Belphegor

2009-01-16, 10:10 PM

I promised I wouldn't but your idiotizm hurts my soul.

World war 2 was Germany vs the planet. I think the Germans did very well because they made super weapons.

If you're thinking they would have won the war if they made the exact same cheap tanks as the Russians you're wrong. They would have lost no matter what.

The vast majority of weapons in use today by modern armies have their roots in german world war 2 design. Super weapons of the past - Like the tank with the first ever sloped armor and long barreled gun - are the conventional weapons of today.
Also puppies.
http://www.hot-screensaver.com/wp-myimages/adorable-puppies.jpg

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:12 PM

I thought planet bowling ball was a pretty economical idea. You don't really have to build very much. You don't need to make or design a hull. You just land on the planet. The crust of the planet will probably contain all the metals and chemicals needed to build any equipment. You can tap into the molten core and run geothermal reactors to provide all your energy.

Since the crew is robotic you don't need food or air. The core of the earth is 2,900 km below the surface. The core itself is 1,250 km thick. I might even find a planet that is thicker. My robots deep in the crust would be safe from any kind of attack. A weapon would have to be able to penetrate thousands of km of rock to hit one of my bots. If that happens the remaining bots build a new bot. Any holes in the planet can be sealed with fresh magma from the core.

The only thing I need to build is the propulsion system. That's it. No food, weapons, surface cities. Just a propulsion system. It does not even need to go fast. Just the fact that it moves towards your planet makes it a threat.

The only thing that seems to bug people is the size of the planetary body that I do this to. I'm sure there's a certain size at which this becomes possible in a Science Fiction situation.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:13 PM

Puppies are nice. :smallsmile:

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 10:16 PM

Oh course I think a great failure for a ship would be just being too close to a Gamma Ray Burst from a Hypernovae, as that releases about 1/10 the total mass-energy of the sun in a brief moment. But nothing could withstand that can of radiation, so it would not make a different the size.

Besides that, the larger the ship the easier it would be to give it artificial gravity, because it has more mass, and would be able to spin at a slower speed if aiming for centripetal gravity. Of course this would be aimed at more of the long range spacecraft, so gravity would be a much more minor concern for short range spacecraft, but what really is the point of a short ranged spacecraft?

Since battles will probably take place near a planet, as that would be the resource to fight over, large craft will have the advantage in terms of getting there. But smaller crafts will still be needed for more of the docking, and getting onto the larger craft. I think the defenders have a large advantage at this stage because they will have more energy resources to draw on (think something like a Dyson sphere, even on a much smaller level).

I could not help but think, "Commander, that planet will impact with us in 10,000 years what should we do?"

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:18 PM

If your ship has no human crew why do you even need gravity?

Britter

2009-01-16, 10:20 PM

Sooo, sudenly one can get too big? One moment people are claiming how the biggest space ships will easily dominate the battlefield simply because they're bigger and for that they're automatically better, but someone sugests using something the size of a planet and they're sudenly being ridiculous.

I just wanted to focus on this for a moment. I don't think that those of us arguing against small ships being the solution are saying that bigger is automatically better. I think we are saying that without some definition of scale, and capabilities, that this is a discussion that can only boil down to opinion. In order to give some context,people have provided examples of physics, logistics, and real world technology that allow us to frame the discussion of the evolution of combat vehicles, and flesh out these ideas a little more.

When I am drawing on real world examples of war machines becoming larger as technology improves, I am not saying that big is better. I am saying that an efficient weapons system is one that uses the best tech available to do the job. Some tech gets bigger as it improves, other tech gets smaller. That's just the way it is. Again, to reference ships, aircraft carriers have gotten bigger since they were introduced in WW2. Battleships, on the other hand, have died out and been replaced by smaller, easier to produce, better armed missile cruisers. So technological evolution can be inclusive. Vehicles can either get bigger or smaller, depending on whether the capabilities of the vehicle justify the change in size.

Regarding the statement about how a ship that was 100 times larger would also be more expensive: If my 100 times more expensive vessel can achieve a kill ratio that is significantly higher then your cheaper vehicles, then my expense is justified. If I can not achieve a significant kill ratio, then my resources are wasted. So, If I pay 100 times as much per ship as you, but I can achieve a 200 to 1 kill ratio against your swarm, I have built a machine that is more effective and will win more fights. 2 of my vessels will be able to stop 400 of yours, for half the cost of your fleet. On the other hand, if my expensive ship can only achieve a 10 to one kill ratio, you will overwhelm me with your swarm. A mere 40 of your cheap disposable fighter could eliminate my two ship group. You will have killed me using a mere fraction of what it cost for me to build my fleet.

Size and capability are not inherently linked.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:21 PM

Technically no, but it's far easier to design tools and workshops etc. if there's gravity. (Soldering in free-fall can be truly problematic.)

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:25 PM

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 10:26 PM

Granted I am more of a pacifist and do not like the idea of war... but I do not see the point of fighting without having people around. Sure, fighting with robots would be great but why would they be fighting? Assuming that the speed of light cannot be broken in a meaningful way the only reason having a planet would be useful would be if you were actually with the ship doing the taken. Even close star systems are a couple of light years apart, so even the message that you won would take a couple of years to learn. And even more to get back (say on average at least 10 years.) 10 years would be a rather long time to relay on robots designed for combat to subdue a population and keep them ready for control, and gives them a long time to fight back. Even if the minor fighting is done by bots, you still need to have humans relatively close, otherwise I do not see the point of fighting.
But, as I said, this is from the perspective that wars are only fought for a reason, and I could be wrong. It really depends on the person, some leaders like senseless violence, and I hope that they remain out of meaningful political power as it will probably take a united world (in some form, at least united in scientific and engineering funding to even open up the possibility of getting interstellar spaceships)

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:29 PM

I don't think dollar cost has much to do with the design of super weapons. The stealth bomber costs over 1 billion dollars and all it really does is drop bombs. The same bombs any cheaper plane could drop. That still didn't stop it from being built.

Not quite.
True, the bombs could be dropped by any other plane, but any other plane couldn't get to the target. The B2 was designed to drop bombs deep inside the USSR. Performing the same task with conventional bombers would take a truly atrocious amount of planes and they'd incur massive losses.
Maybe not 1billion dollars worth, but the political fallout from loosing all those crewmembers would be enough to justify the stealtbomber.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:33 PM

Planet bowling ball is not concerned with occupation. It passes through a system and destroys all enemies. It absorbs as much from the debris as it can and continues to move on.

Occupation is costly and messy. Besides the bowling ball only need new material to continue. Humans are not needed. Total destruction is much cleaner. My robots have time. They will just continue to upgrade themselves as my ship travels. Communication with the bowling ball is unimportant. As long as it continues to exist and destroy that is all that is required.

When the ship is the only thing left victory will be achieved.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:34 PM

Thiel - What political fallout? It's world war three. Nuclear fallout is the only fallout worth worrying about.

Britter

2009-01-16, 10:44 PM

Cost certainly does matter with "super weapons". Cost matters with everything. Wars aren't won or lost with the tactics and the strategies, they are won or lost based on logistics, available resources, and the ability to get those resources to where you need them.

Does the cost justify the performance of the equipment? In the case of the B2, as was already pointed out, if you can get one long range bomber into another country's airspace, and destroy a city, or a major military base, you have achieved a solid kill ratio. If that bomber is then able to get out of enemy airspace due to it's capabilities, you have a reusable weapon that can destroy another valuable target. If you lose your bomber, sure it is worth 1 billion dollars; if that is all it costs you to eliminate 100s of billions of dollars of enemy resources, the trade off is worth it.

If, on the other hand, the bombs being dropped costs 1 billion dollars, I doubt that anyone would be interested in manufacturing them, because there you have a device that is not necessarily cost effective.

I don't want to Godwin the thread, but to put it simply, if you look at WW2, Allied victory came about because they were able to deny the enemy manufacturing capability and oil supplies. They had the ability to convert more of their economic might into force, which they used to eliminate their enemy's ability to convert economic might into force. Many german weapons were more advance, and they had some real cutting edge combined-force methods that were devastatingly effective, until they were denied resources to continue to build and operate the weapons they had

To tie this in to the thread, if the small-ship swarm is more logistically effective for it's defined role, then it is the better choice. If the large ship model is more logistically effective for it's role, it is the better choice. For the role in question. I can see smaller ships as having a role in system defense and planetary operations, because they won't have the legs to go very far and the more mass you devote to fuel the less you can devote ot weapons. If they have a base of operations that is very close, then the small ship makes sense. On the other hand, if you need to operate independently from any other forces for a year or more at a time, then you will need a ship large enough to accommodate the logistical needs of the deployment.

There are just too many variables in this problem of large v. small to discuss it intelligently. We are all making assumptions in our posts, and rarely are any two people assuming the same things as a given.

Still, it has been interesting.

estradling

2009-01-16, 10:44 PM

Lagrange - Like I said in my post I'm making...

The LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNIVERSE.

Just apply whatever rules are in your head and make it the largest. That's all I want. I'll settle for largest thing you'll allow.

If you're going to handwave the tech needed to control and move it then I'd say go for the super massive blackhole thats being found in the center of every galaxy. As long as you can remain in control of it there is very little that can stop you. And your destructive ways just make you bigger.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:46 PM

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:47 PM

Planet bowling ball is not concerned with occupation.
It is however, concerned with maintaining itself.

Thiel - What political fallout? It's world war three. Nuclear fallout is the only fallout worth worrying about.

It was designed during the last stages of the cold war, when the US and the USSR was technically at peace.
At the time, the US didn't have a way to make precision strikes deep inside the USSR. As far as I'm aware, the only plane they had at the time that could make the run unassisted was the B-52, but they didn't have anywhere near the amount necessary to get past the air defences. The newspapers would be quick to drag out WWII references if the air force started to build them in any meaningful amount.
Besides, at fifty million a piece they'd only be able to build 20-25 units before the B2 became cheaper.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-16, 10:49 PM

They're brain damaged then? That would be the first place to look for someone using a super weapon like that. Good luck controling a black hole though.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:51 PM

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:53 PM

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:56 PM

Britter - If the Germans started off world war 2 with a few nukes it would not matter if anyone tried to deny them fuel or anything else. They just developed the wrong super weapons. Instead of making flying wings and tiger tanks and railway guns they could have made v-2 rockets and tipped them with nuclear warheads.

You know the american space program is founded on captured nazi technology.

And Nazi rocket technology is build on the works of Konstantin Tsiolikovski and Robert Goddard.

And besides, given the type of nukes they were working on, I highly doubt they'd been able to win with them.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 10:58 PM

Ask the people of Hiroshima how effective the first nukes were. Oh wait you can't. They were vaporized.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 10:58 PM

Britter - Cost does not matter because you will never know the cost effectiveness until AFTER the war. That's why they always build the best thing even if it is incredibly expensive. You can't do the cost effect study unless you win the war. Better to pay now and live to calculate another day.
Not if building the best will cripple your economy. (Hence why Denmark wont build anything larger than a frigate for the foreseeable future.)

Canadian

2009-01-16, 11:00 PM

A crippled economy means nothing if you destroy your enemy. You'll have all of eternity to rebuild your economy in peace.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 11:03 PM

Ask the people of Hiroshima how effective the first nukes were. Oh wait you can't. They were vaporized.

The Diebner Bomb wouldn't have been anywhere near as destructive as the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

A crippled economy means nothing if you destroy your enemy. You'll have all of eternity to rebuild your economy in peace.
But what if you don't? A single superbomb is unlikely to destroy your enemy completely. And since your economy is shot, you wont be able to fend of his response.

Canadian

2009-01-16, 11:06 PM

Who's to say they wouldn't have made another type of bomb if they devoted all their efforts to it. Sure the attack might fail. But it could also win. The whole point of creating a weapon is to use it.

You don't buy condoms unless you plan on getting some?

Right?

Thiel

2009-01-16, 11:12 PM

If the weapon in question is so expensive that developing and building even one of the damn things will ruin your economy, then you won't have the money to build anything else. And by the time using it becomes a reasonable option, your oponent will have spread out his command structure as much as he can and build in as much redundancy as possible in order to reduce your weapons impact on his ability to respond. So not only have you ruined yoursellf, you've also indirectly made your oppinent even harder to overcome.

Britter

2009-01-16, 11:15 PM

Canadian,

Look, no offense, but having nukes at the beginning of WW2 is as much sci-fi as your giant roving planet of doom. And both are equally cool premises for a great adventure yarn.

You will note that once many countries had nukes, World Wars stopped breaking out, for the very reasons you mentioned. But that didn't stop violence and isolated conflicts. Without defining the operational requirements you want for your military vehicles, you can't discuss what is best for a given situation. In the current environment, the B2 is useless. It doesn't do a damn thing to stop IEDs and terrorist cells. So it IS wasted money in THIS tactical environment. As a first strike weapon against a nuclear armed Russia, it was invaluable. Times and wars change though.

And yeah, I know that the space program was almost entirely based on German advances. Advances that they couldn't follow up on because they lacked the economic clout to do anything with them.

As far as destroying your own economy to win at all costs, with the idea that you will rebuild in peacetime, please actually look at real world examples of that. Africa for example is full of failed nation-states that have been spending on war for many years, in some cases decades, and those states have not only not won the wars, they are disintegrating into non-functional entities.

The US economy could be argued to have been at it's best during the final years of WW2 and the decade or so that followed. Had Germany or Japan had the ability to continue to crank up their economy the war would have been different. But that capability was denied to them, due to industrial, monetary and logistical superiority of the US economy.

As far as not being able to determine effectiveness of a weapons platform before the end of a given conflict, I call bullcrap on that. Again, look at WW2 and the evolution of weaponry during just that conflict. Stuff that didn't work well was replaced or modified. Look at the current situation in Iraq, where new armor and weapons tech, as well as surveillance and intelligence gathering stuff is being rolled out every year. A strong economy can adapt to changes in the theater of operation by putting out better equipment in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

Edit: Regarding cost effect studies not occurring till after the war. Talk to someone in military supply or inventory control if you really believe that. The government contracts out to the lowest bidder on so many things it is actually a little scary. They won't spend the most money they can, they will spend the most money they have too.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 11:20 PM

And yeah, I know that the space program was almost entirely based on German advances. Advances that they couldn't follow up on because they lacked the economic clout to do anything with them.

It should be note, however, that Von Brauns original ideas were bat**** insane. Check out the designs he drew up for a space station during the war.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-16, 11:22 PM

Or the vertical acension ship that he built. And the american government built and tried to test.

I don't have a flying saucer. Do you?

Thiel

2009-01-16, 11:24 PM

Or the vertical acension ship that he built. And the american government built and tried to test.

I don't have a flying saucer. Do you?

Not that I know of. :smallbiggrin:

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 11:26 PM

Nukes are also a rather different kind of technology than the rest. It took a different kind of person to built, and the people at the Los Alamos project were not...normal. Many of them were scientists more than engineers while the German technology cited so far is more of an engineering feat than a scientific feat. Before the nuke could be built the theoretical work had to be done.

Innis Cabal

2009-01-16, 11:28 PM

Well darn. Cause they looked really awsome.

Actually, if anyones played spore and used the flying saucer base they have to the max of its paramiters....it looked like that.

For those of you not palying the home version. It looked like as massive bell with four large metal rods bent along its frame. Mat black.

The scary thing is the device made by modern science can in fact hover off the ground a good 10 to 20 inchs. We're getting closer.

Thiel

2009-01-16, 11:49 PM

Lagrange

2009-01-16, 11:54 PM

Well, they knew what would happen, it was the how that was the problem.

They knew that energy would be released but what would be needed to create the uncontrolled reaction?

What was the neutron cross-section? The average neutron travel speed? Number of neutron emitted per reaction? What level of purity was needed to maximize yield? Just knowing that a nuclear reaction happens is not near enough information to actually go and build one.

Of course now it is rather easy to build (at least design) a nuclear fission bomb, getting the Uranium is now the hard part and purifying it. But at the beginning until they carried out the calculations they did not even know what size to build the masses for the gun method, no even considering the implosion Plutonium bomb. So there were some scientific issues that needed to be worked out, but yes, I will admit that they did know the large picture of what would happen.

Dervag

2009-01-17, 02:28 AM

Wall of text follows, divided up by topic.

On the original topic:

Sooo, sudenly one can get too big? One moment people are claiming how the biggest space ships will easily dominate the battlefield simply because they're bigger and for that they're automatically better, but someone sugests using something the size of a planet and they're sudenly being ridiculous.

Why not turning the rocky dead planets into mobile space fortresses then? You save up the money for the hull big time, you can fit the biggest baddest weapons people were claiming were so imba, you join the uber defenses that were also being thrown left and right, and you still have space left for whatever else you want.Because we can't build engines powerful enough to move planets. This is not a difficult gap to understand. Bigger ships can have equal acceleration to smaller ships only as long as we can keep scaling up the engine to match the size of the ship. Past that point, the big ship becomes less and less mobile. Make it the size of a planet and it becomes totally immobile.

And what's preventing me from building the larger ship as a sphere instead of a "bizarre shape"?Actually, you still have a problem. Engines powerful enough to move a planet by throwing rocket exhaust out the back would crush their way right through the planet and out the other side. This is a structural problem. At some point, the force of your engines on the back end of the ship is so great that the back end of the ship has to be a solid steel beam, or it'll get crumpled up and you lose the ship. At that point, there's no room for guns or anything.

However, that point is NOT reached until the ship is on the multi-kilometer scale.

But who says that all it takes is one shot [to kill any spaceship, regardless of size]?Oslecamo does, that's who.

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On the theory of total war:

A crippled economy means nothing if you destroy your enemy. You'll have all of eternity to rebuild your economy in peace.Horsefeathers.

A crippled economy with no enemies is worse than a working economy with enemies that have agreed to let you live in peace. The second way, you have people to trade with- it's hard to rebuild an economy with no trade. And crippled economies often don't grow back on their own, even in peacetime. By crippling your economy to do just that much more damage to an enemy, you may have doomed your grandchildren to poverty, disease, and hunger. Not a good tradeoff.

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On omnicidal mania and ramming planets:

Planet bowling ball is not concerned with occupation. It passes through a system and destroys all enemies. It absorbs as much from the debris as it can and continues to move on.

Occupation is costly and messy. Besides the bowling ball only need new material to continue. Humans are not needed. Total destruction is much cleaner. My robots have time. They will just continue to upgrade themselves as my ship travels. Communication with the bowling ball is unimportant. As long as it continues to exist and destroy that is all that is required.

When the ship is the only thing left victory will be achieved.So... this is an engine of destruction without a purpose except destruction. With the aim of achieving the "clean" state of murdering everything and destroying everywhere anything could live.

That is very different from any weapon that has ever existed. The only person who would really want a weapon like that is an omnicidal maniac. I don't think an omnicidal maniac could lead an organization efficiently enough to build such a weapon, even if the technology existed. Moreover, if the technology to move planets exists, the technology to destroy planets exists. Which means that anyone out there who doesn't hate the universe and want it to die will build bowling ball planets of their own and take out the one in the hands of the omnicidal maniac at the first opportunity.

Some people do plan on destroying everything.Usually people like that are so psychotic that their plans break down when they operate on a large scale. Someone who hates everyone enough to want to destroy the universe probably won't make a very good project manager.

I thought planet bowling ball was a pretty economical idea. You don't really have to build very much. You don't need to make or design a hull. You just land on the planet. The crust of the planet will probably contain all the metals and chemicals needed to build any equipment. You can tap into the molten core and run geothermal reactors to provide all your energy.Do the math. Geothermal power doesn't give you the kind of energy you need to throw a planet around like a bowling ball. You need a technomagic drive to move planets. Rockets just aren't going to cut it.

Again, you aren't the first person to think of a mobile planet. Though you may be the first to think you can move a planet with souped-up versions of its own volcanoes.

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On Nazi superweapons and their weaknesses:

Britter - If the Germans started off world war 2 with a few nukes it would not matter if anyone tried to deny them fuel or anything else. They just developed the wrong super weapons. Instead of making flying wings and tiger tanks and railway guns they could have made v-2 rockets and tipped them with nuclear warheads.By the time the Germans could have gotten a working nuclear program, their enemies would have had the same. Indeed, the American nuclear program started precisely because most of the world's most talented physicists didn't want the Nazis getting a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

Nuclear missiles aren't superior enough to nuclear bombers to make a power with a bunch of German-designed A9 or A10 ballistic missiles able to dictate terms to a power with a bunch of American-designed B-29s.
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You know the american space program is founded on captured nazi technology.The Germans were no more than five years ahead of the rest of the world at the end of the war. Capturing Wernher von Braun was convenient, but the brunt of the American space effort was borne by non-Nazi engineers and scientists. There just weren't that many captured Germans, and they didn't have that much more information to work with than everyone else.

Were they ahead? Yes. But not by so much that the rest of the world was like monkeys compared to them or anything.

That's a problem with superscience and superweapons. No one has a monopoly on brains. So if you can build a superweapon, I can build it too, and probably will not long after you do. Especially if the first thing you do with your superweapon is start killing as many people as you can.
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World war 2 was Germany vs the planet. I think the Germans did very well because they made super weapons.

If you're thinking they would have won the war if they made the exact same cheap tanks as the Russians you're wrong. They would have lost no matter what.If you look carefully at the weapons involved, German tanks were about equal to Russian tanks in terms of armor and guns. For instance, it was the Russians who introduced sloped armor, not the Germans. Indeed, when the German tanks went into Russia at first, they were outgunned by the Russians, not the other way around.

The Germans did not win by having super-science weapons that were huge and expensive compared to those of their enemies. When they won, they won by fighting smart, by using the same technologies as everyone else better. At the end of the war they managed to develop some superweapons that scared the hell out of their enemies, but the time and energy it took to develop and produce them made them a waste of time.

See "Superiority" by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke for reference.

=========

Miscellaneous:

Neither does a black hole :)

It does get smaller the more it consumes. (anti-matter being used up vs a black hole getting bigger the more mass it eats)But the Patrol creates its negaspheres by throwing matter into them! [Gray Lensman, chapter 10]

It does react the exact opposite as normal matter in the tractor and pressor beams. (Matter with the opposite 'charge' vs a whole lot of really dense matter)

It does release 'hard radiation' ie energy as it worksThe problem is that tractors and pressors clearly aren't electrical in nature; if they were they wouldn't work on neutrally charged objects like ships. Antimatter doesn't have negative mass. Of course, black holes don't either.

The problem is that the properties of whatever the hell negaspheres are made of just doesn't correspond to either antimatter (which is what Smith was thinking of) or black holes (which Smith knew about, but didn't invoke in the Lensman setting). However, it shares at least some properties with both. Like a black hole, it gravitates toward a target mass (or forces the mass to fall towards it, same effect in the end). Like antimatter, it supposedly interacts with matter to mutual annihilation.
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I promised I wouldn't but your idiotizm hurts my soul.Belphegor, would it kill you to not actively insult people? Whether they're right or wrong, it's damned obnoxious to call them idiots.

Philistine

2009-01-17, 03:12 AM

The bigger you are, the more percentage you need to dedicate to the structure, or your ship will tear itself up when you start the engines.
This is exactly backwards. Look at long-range aircraft, for example. Long-range aircraft tend to be large aircraft, because a large aircraft can devote a greater proportion of its mass to carrying fuel. And that's because they can get away with spending less weight, proportionally, on maintaining structural integrity.

{Scrubbed}. Here you start a thread devoted to the science-fictional topic of discussing the characteristics of space warships, then claim that any technological advance that doesn't already exist in hardware is off-limits for discussion. (Of course, since we don't actually have any space warships, that should render the entire topic out-of-bounds according to those guidelines.) You follow that tour-de-force with a whole slew of claims about history and technology, every single one of which has been flatly wrong. At this point, in fact, I rather hope you are doing it on purpose. The alternative is too sad to contemplate.

Nerd-o-rama

2009-01-17, 03:43 AM

The black hole is cool as long as you can control the black hole from somewhere perfectly safe. Like your living room on the other end of the galaxy. Nobody suspecting that you're sitting there eating pizza and destroying planets at your whim.You mean potato chips.

Yeah, I liked this thread, but it's really hard to keep up with fast arguments like this when I'm only online a couple hours a day, and apparently not at the same time as everyone else.

AgentPaper

2009-01-17, 03:51 AM

This is exactly backwards. Look at long-range aircraft, for example. Long-range aircraft tend to be large aircraft, because a large aircraft can devote a greater proportion of its mass to carrying fuel. And that's because they can get away with spending less weight, proportionally, on maintaining structural integrity.

Completely false. The reason long-range aircraft are so large is that the bigger a plane is, the slower it needs to go to stay in the air. It's simply more efficient. Slower means they need less engines, less fuel intake, more room for fuel, more room for payload, etc. Fighters are small because 1: it's easier to make a small thing go faster, and 2: it's harder to hit a small thing with weapons.

Also, I think we're going to see large and small ships because they represent two different theories of defense. One is being hard to hit, so smaller is better and faster is better. The other is being hard to kill, so bigger is better and you may as well be slow so you can have more armor and weapons. As well, there could well be the third theory of defense, which is to kill them before they kill you - the glass cannon. For this you want supreme sensors, decent speed, and overwhelming long-range firepower. A mid-size ship is probably best here, since you can fit all the firepower you need to kill large ships with on it, and have enough room for engines and sensors - basically all you need. You could make it bigger, but that would be overkill. You could make it smaller, but then you might not have enough firepower. So, you see big, effing-tough ships, small, effing-hard-to-hit ships, and medium-sized, huge-effing-gun ships. You could focus on one type, but the enemy won't, and now you have to prepare 3 different types of weapons to fight him, and he only has to focus on weapons to kill the one type of weapon you have.

Also, there ARE size limits, even in space. For small ships it's weaponry. Sure, you could field a ship the size of a cat, with guns the size of a pencil, and you could field a billion of them, but when you start getting smaller, eventually you'll have literally no effect at all on enemy armor. Your weapons have to be at least powerful enough to penetrate the enemy's armor, and that requires a certain size, and a certain size ship to move it around. This might be the size of a modern aircraft, or it could be the size of a small moon, depending on what new defensive technologies we get.

For large ships, it's engines. All engines, no matter what type, do one thing-push stuff back so you go forward. As you get bigger, the laws of geometry start to work against you. Bigger things have less surface area and more volume. more volume means more mass, so you have less and less space on the outside of your ship to put engines in. You can only make engines so large before they start to loose efficiency. You could make a moon-sized engine for your planet-sized ship, but it's not going to have nearly the relative output that a more normal-sized version of that engine.

So, you build the engine as big as you can without it getting TOO big, and then you put as many of those on your ship as you can. Since your big ship has less surface area and more mass, you need more engines and have less room to put them in. Engines need to be on the surface of the ship because they have to push that matter backwards, and they can't do that if there's ship in the way.

Now sure, you could design your hull in a shape that has more surface area, but then you're a bigger target, and less durable. You could also, say, have huge holes in the ship that allow deeper engines to vent their mass through, but then you're wasting space, and really, REALLY asking for someone to shoot their gun down there. Basically, your engines become a huge blindspot, with holes in your armor that lead to the very core of your ship. None of this is good.

So, you design your ship so it's big enough to take advantage of it's size, but not so large that the engines start to take up more space than you can allocate to them.