Halsfury

No I've never seen that game but thanks for pointing it out. The game seems very realistic in terms of how solar system battles would go, after all the trend in modern warfare favours plenty of collateral damage and the trend seems to be for collateral damage to increase as weapons systems get better. Sending you opponent to the stone age and then invading sounds like it would be the way to go. After all this is how modern battles work, the breakdown is about 80% disrupting supplies, 15% shelling targets, and 5% direct engagements. In war the most important and most overlooked area is merely keeping your troops fed and supplied with bullets, even in a frontline area little really happens unless an assault is underway. Space combat could be more like this, with limited direct attacks and ship to ship battles which often take place on a small scale only by accident and on a larger scale, only when victory is largely assured. Perhaps a space battle would be more like the normandy landing, with troops deploying by drop-ship only once an extensive orbital bombardment has occurred. Also, as to countermeasures, one could imagine that chaff would find extensive use.

Actually I wouldn't discount boarding actions, where the vehicles in question are quite expensive commandeering will always be preferable to outright destruction. Moreover lasers can target with pinpoint accuracy as has already been demonstrated. Therefore the doctrine for space warfare should be to immobilize and critically damage weapons systems. From that point on if it were a manned ship, life support should be targeted, then a team of marines should breach the hull and clear the ship of survivors. After this point the wreck could be either harvested for components or docked with and maneuvered to a friendly space station for a refit so that it too could be used against the enemy. With an unmanned craft however, the procedure would involve the same incapacitation of weapons, then, when manned craft or command stations are cleared out of the area the drone would be commandeered either by directly accessing enemy consoles or through a cyber attack. Moreover should an incapacitated ship be too large to take over in a boarding action, missiles may still be used to simply destroy these vessels so that neither side can have them, Also I disagree about how missiles would work, to my mind, once a ship is incapacitated, the victorious opponent would close in, and if he decides that boarding is too risky or not worth the effort in that particular situation, a typical anti-sat missile would be used to pierce thin hull areas and detonate inside, with the intention of blowing it into fragments. Basically I envision that little armour would be the norm since greater amounts of armour impact delta V. Having a high delta V coupled with high acceleration is necessary for a warship. As the prominence of modern destroyers at sea tell us, speed is the key to successful warfare both offensive and defensive.

I really don't know that much about the possibilities, or what effective range could be with a little R&D but from what I've seen, heard and read I'm certain that space warfare will be like ancient trireme warfare. Ships will attempt to disable one another, but not kill, just like the Greek trireme which was so light that even when holed it wouldn't sink. In ancient times sea battles often involved incapacitating with the ram and killing the crew of the disabled vessel. Then the enemy ship (which is very expensive) would be taken home and refitted and repaired. This is likely the kind of warfare that you'd see in space, at least with human crewed ships. The reason being that intercepting the orbit of another ship isn't really a successful strategy since it will just move away to another orbit, and probably has more delta V than the missile being fired at it. Instead lasers should be used to disable a target, then fighting either to take the enemy ship by storm, or sending in a kill vehicle with an explosive warhead would finish the job. Also at this point drones would be even more effective at zeroing in on point defence systems and life support infrastructure from long range by outflanking and encircling the target thus allowing a boarding party to gain easy access. Any human crew would need to wear spacesuits during the fight even if there were no hull breaches, for survivability reasons. EDIT: basically I may be mistaken but the particle beam design that you linked seems basically like a small nuke inside a container with a special geometry, thus being a shaped charge of sorts

True, but what about particle beams? if we could miniaturize CERN into a star wars style weapon we would get this as the result. http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ Even the atoms in the particle beam would be fast enough to be just as lethal as the relativistic baseball. Also particle beams have proven themselves an effective weapon, in 1974 a Russian scientist accidentally got shot in the head by a particle beam and was nearly killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski Few things can stand up to that kind of power, and Bugorski only survived because it passed straight on through, currently he's the only person to have been shot by a relativistic projectile

True, you could go for the sloped armour deal but why not cover the outside in silvered aluminum as much as possible to deflect and scatter incoming lasers? It wouldn't work all the time, certain things would have to be uncovered by design such as sensors and weapons, and even a shiny surface can absorb energy, but what it would do is prevent all of your enemy's laser's power from taking effect all at once. For instance only IR waves would get through at first then as they heat the metal and deform the surface or blacken it, more energy can be absorbed by the deformed or blackened coating leading to a point where the thin anti laser shield would fail. Sloped armour is only good if an engineer can reasonably say that the attacks will come from a certain direction and plan accordingly. In space this design could only be applied to the front of the ship if you intend that the front face the opponent. If dealing with lasers, one of the best things you could do is cover your ship with retroreflectors thus negating the laser and firing it right back at your opponent's laser, which even might disable or weaken it depending on the design. The best laser design is therefore a mirrored dish which can articulate to deliver all its energy to only at specific predetermined range, yet is at all other points a relatively weak and broad beam that way a retroreflector counter measure wouldn't be effective at reflecting damage and could merely dazzle the attacker.

Agreed, missiles entail throwing away a perfectly good fusion or antimatter drive which sounds like a lot of money wasted and though low risk for collateral damage due to the vastness of space it does sound dangerous, the only way it might work is to program the missile to explode releasing as much bird shot as it can carry over a wide area in space. This makes a hit far more likely, and with bird shot going at 80% of light speed or so each one is probably completely fatal, still you might as well try and hit a dime with a shotgun over 300 yards. - - - Updated - - - With the main gun, bigger is better, but in space, probes have limitations, there will need to be a manned craft within 1 or 2 light seconds of each probe or the probe is not going to have the reaction time to fight. More remote ability is better though I do agree. Usually with the military, a vehicle and the people who operate it are equally expensive (due to training etc.) drones have reduced the cost tenfold or more for aircraft by virtue of not needing to support a pilot. Fighting space drones would be no different. Also they can assist targeting for the mothership and each other and be much smaller, carry no expensive armour and rely on the mothership to deploy them deep into space.

Perhaps a fighting space ship should be like a tank. Having one or two very high yield laser weapons. And other than that being very small, maybe with a crew of 20. The setup should be almost like an observatory, basically a featureless tube with engines on the one end a few crew decks arranged perpendicularly, and finally the weapon and targeting gear at the top. smaller sensors, RCS thrusters and point defence weapons mounts should gird the tube part. The engine should have high enough delta V to thrust continuously to give the impression of gravity in transit and the whole thing should be designed to face it's target frontally like a tank during combat with the front being heavily armoured with ceramic composites and things which won't melt easily under the barrage of laser fire. Basically it should look like an upscaled apollo capsule with an observatory like thing instead of a crew module. The radar telescopic sensors to detect the enemy ship should be scattered around the ship and be very redundant, gear to visually acquire your opponent for precise targeting would be basically a few telescopes which have a link to a fire control computer so it can do trig calculations on the target. Yeah it wouldn't be super awesome or cool looking sadly.

Hi I'm a newcomer to this thread but I'm interested, I really think that the way it will probably work is at long range with little attention to close in combat which will be rendered fairly obsolete by virtue of the distances involved. Also the speeds involved make a crewed vehicle very slow to maneuver. Kinetic weapons, such as ordinary cordite powered shells or smaller flak cannons, or even Railguns will probably be very limited in terms of their viability. This is due to every action having an equal and opposite reaction. If you were to use such a weapon it would have to be a very small percentage of the mass of the whole ship since said ship would have to use engine thrust to re-establish its orbit (or fire a projectile in the direction of the inverse vector which is generally not ideal). Plasma weapons could also count as kinetic, just with far smaller masses but I digress since plasma is probably not a very good weapon choice since it needs an elaborate containment field, plasma is however a very useful byproduct of some types of explosions from a military standpoint. *Don't know why I brought that up maybe Halo? Anyway. The best weapon choices seem to be high energy lasers, which are very safe and cheap from an ordinance point of view, and missiles, since they generate no recoil and are known to be particularly devastating virtually everywhere they are applied, even underwater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval Missiles would be interesting, especially with the futuristic propulsion assigned to them such as an antimatter rocket drive, this would make them unable to rely on light, IR or radar tracking modes since the waves of these would stop making any sense to a missile guidance system. Also by this point, a payload is a worthless addition since the atoms of the missile would fuse with those of the target generating an atomic explosion. Moreover the target vessel would be unable to avoid beyond visual range, because sensors would detect the missile's signature basically at the moment of impact since the missile is moving so fast that the light waves (including radar etc.) which would have warned the targeted ship would be bundled up essentially together with the missile since the missile is moving at only slightly less than the same rate. Also this kind of missile is going to keep on going for ever, and it may, at some point hit something you didn't intend to hit and when it does it will fuse with that thing causing a high yield explosion, so the insurance company at the end of the universe will be thoroughly unhappy with you. But the plus side will be (if you can call it a plus) that you can shell a planet from 1000AU out with devastating consequences and merely wait 6 to 8 days (depending on the rocket's speed) for shell delivery to target, and you will only need maybe 15 of these to un-terraform an earth sized planet (yikes!). Also since it has no effective guidance beyond it's initial launch it's more like a naval artillery shell in its use. So all things considered for ship to ship combat lasers win out for being able to hit pinpoint locations on a ship at high speed in a cost effective manner, and provided the warship can predict it's opponent's orbit, it is able to do so from extreme range such as across 10-20 AU depending on just how futuristic and how large a weapon. This kind of battle would take hours, but it's doable since at theses kinds of ranges you would have to take into account relativity as well as your opponent's speed. I see the possibility for ships to target one another first with passive systems such as a radio-telescope fine tuned to detect ships and then for sighting the target for laser fire 3 telescopes could be used, then finally onboard computers could generate a firing solution for pinpoint accuracy using the 3 telescopes to trigonometrically deduce target location, heading, speed and distance. Then it could determine the time lag from relativity as well as gravitational distortion and aim the laser accordingly. High sub luminal rockets would be less effective due to expense, also they would produce harmful radiation and high speed space junk, yet they would be very useful for planet bombardment. Also depending on how fast they accelerate they could prove worthless in ship to ship combat. Slow hydrogen and oxygen powered missiles could be very useful close in (within a few hundred km) where a laser just wouldn't do. And finally old fashioned bullets and shells could be useful within 20km for things like repelling boarding actions. However they would be few and far between, with lasers point defence is really just a holdover anyway, such antiquated weapons would probably be kept only by merchant ships, where point defence against boarding actions is the main concern.

Yeah I've been messing around with modular missiles and they are sorely lacking, First off my test missile is a truly crude contraption, being basically a T-10 Hammer booster (yeah the biggest A to A missile ever yet created) with 4 fins and a fairing nosecone with a big wad of C4 in it. The missiles don't actually need a radio data receiver, but the guidance system is so horrible, plus the missile sometimes starts controlling the aircraft, so I'm going to see how it works as a Ground to Air missile maybe that will tell me something about how they work! - - - Updated - - - Yeah but PEW is not compatible or I might have downloaded it wrong. do you just drop PEW into the GameData? cause I dropped the parts into the BD armoury file. EDIT: I tried PEW again but it's behaving badly still. I'll have to keep trying to get KSP's parts to turn into a successful A to A missile. I've found that missile making is just about as hard as making the plane. I've been firing them at a subsonic flying wing fighter I made a while back (the Bhlom und Voss P209) Which is successfully evading my very large missile every time. The missile AI is quite stupid about identifying lead and trying to intercept the target (which is surprising considering BD armoury can calculate lead for other projectiles just fine). I've identified that to solve the problem I need to make the missile more maneuverable, but so doing has lead to a lot of flying backwards. In an even more annoying twist it seems totally impossible to use the missile manager in conjunction with a player controlled aircraft, this will usually result in the missile AI taking over the plane's control.

Now that would really require a 2.0 version of the challenge, but I like the idea. That would be even better if we had a BD expansion pack with some proper missiles, like the AIM-54 Phoenix, and the AA-6 "Acrid", with mach 4-6 speed and long range ability. Also all the missiles in BD could use a significant buff in performance. I will consider rules for interceptors, and ground attack but somebody else has to make the ground attacker obstacle course and put it in a save file. I'm thinking of having 6 installations for an attacker to take on to prove combat worthiness Ignore all that, I propose a mini challenge! Create a long range Air to Air missile for your aircraft from scratch (inside KSP), take BD armoury's explosive warhead and the missile guidance system, set the guidance to A to A Use the radar data receiver to keep it in touch with the aircraft as it flies. Good luck!

Second that, Crisk's planes are nice. I suppose that an aircraft under 10 tons which can compete in a dogfight is possible, but unlikely considering all the conflicting requirements of modern warfare. My rules are designed to make a middle of the road kind of fighter, rather than have diverging designs like in the previous iteration of the challenge. That being said there are all kinds of aircraft in use today, with all kinds of different specs.

It is a 60's era interceptor, although you might think that all our modern kevlar and carbon fibre stuff has made planes lighter, in fact, the general trend seems to be increasing engine power, increasing wing loading, and increasing payload. For example the P-51D Mustang weighed 5.4 tons at maximum loading, and the B-25 Mitchell (a medium bomber) weighed only 15 tons. the F-22 Raptor, by contrast, weighs roughly 30 tons with a medium load out, and 38 tons at maximum. So 2 things are evident. Firstly, now you know why a wheels up landing isn't a great option for a modern fighter and why pilots always use the ejection seat when their planes get into trouble. Secondly, it becomes really obvious that the more engine power that can be harnessed, the fatter the aircraft gets, merely because a larger aircraft can store more payload.

Yes engines can have slight overlaps, but just so you know, the F-104 only had 1 engine.

disengage to space? that's why we need the new engine so badly, it's not about thrust limitations it's about when the thrust starts to taper off and in KSP this seems to be near orbital speed. It's good that all the aircraft are fairing well as dogfighters, the Su-27 is a tank, I had the same thing happen to me where I flew head on towards the AI and he started to fire missiles, sure enough they all blew up in the vicinity of the Su-27 but only removed missiles from the wings. I don't know what happened to the F-16 though, it might have just got too much authority for it's own good, it's quite slow however as a single engine fighter it's mean't to be cheap and maybe shouldn't even be in the challenge (I just posted it cause it was cool)

Yeah, I faced off with the hornet in that thing with Goldstein, and one thing the update does not change is weight. It is roughly the "right" weight, but the F-18 packs just as much thrust into a much smaller airframe (really this is completely unrealistic in reality they're both about the same weight) I eventually shot down the hornet but that was largely because the AI is rather dumb, though one time he took an elevon straight off the plane in a gun pass. The one thing I would advise if fighting against it is never to get in front of that 30mm cannon. It's game over if only a few rounds actually hit. @Crisk that's one of the toughest things to do in FAR I'm pretty sure. God she's ugly, but that's all the computing power they could manage in the 80's for determining how low the radar cross section would be. It's really interesting from a design perspective since it's really a physicists "spherical horse" simplification of a low radar observability aircraft which an airframe was then built around.

@HengeProphet In response to the whole thing about stock wings over performing, that actually explains a lot, I found that throughout the development of the Su-27 that there was just too much lift generated from those wings. I like that the asymmetric lift bug has been kicked to the curb, hopefully with less lift the Su-27 will be a better performer and be able to use the front fuel tank without making the plane tail heavy. - - - Updated - - - I don't mind having those mods either, just do as you're doing and bring the mods you want to my attention. I'll probably add the mod unless I see potential for exploiting the rules with one of them - - - Updated - - - Procedural Parts might be a little too far, I want you to have some explosions at least Baha adjustable landing gear has been added but just as "Adjustable Landing Gear"

Fair enough but often 200kts is the approach speed, what I said was an oversimplification. Anyway the point is that the SR-71 lands at 150m/s so you should be able to land as a fighter at considerably lesser speeds

My fault for releasing the pacifists version. Here 'tis in a suitably more destructive form. http://www./download/5856fhx9j6fb1z6/FAR_BD_Su-27_Flanker.craft If it looks like this then your in business It's super-manoeuvrable! so set the steer limiter to 0.5 when making it AI controlled, takeoff speed should be around 110m/s for drones as well. EDIT: Ah an unforeseen design error has been caught! I changed the link as a result - - - Updated - - - I've never messed around with Tweakscale, just so long as engines are not tweaked. I wish you would add an air brake, considering just how massive these fighters are. I used should with purpose, these craft have to land at less than 150m/s in order to be considered and that's a fairly high speed. to put that in perspective the takeoff and landing speed for the SR-71 was 170m/s and most jets land at around 200knots or about 100m/s in real life. So basically should means this might help satisfy the whole not blowing up on landing part of the challenge.

Is the Su-27 not armed? I rarely check that I uploaded the right file, maybe it's not the finished product whoops. I always intend that the craft be fun for a person to fly. No I didn't expect the AI to be too successful with a super manoeuvrable fighter

I know it works just fine, I still have my version and it's still working perfectly Have you checked out the Su-27? I know it has some issues with the spine of the fuselage absorbing the shock of landing, but that has never produced a crash, it just looks funny.

Noted. As to the whole targeting pod thing, it's about having an adequate setup for ground missions. the ECM pod provides survivability, while the ground missiles are part of the targeting pod's function. Really it's for ground attack missions only. The rule doesn't mean that you have to have A to G missiles and an ECM pod and a targeting pod all the time, it only means that if you have an anti ground capability you must carry all 3 parts to be considered successful in having an anti ground capability. Also try thinner wing sections and anhedral, maybe that will help solve some problems. my edition of Crisk's Rafale has not suffered in the slightest and it has B9p wings, so maybe you have too much stability.

What mod are you using for wings? B9 works virtually unchanged from before, I'm sure it's just a software trick, where is the CoM in relation to the CoP?

Because modern fighters have to be heavy to carry all the necessary gear. No modern fighter is less than 10 tons on takeoff so putting in this limit will prevent people trying to shoehorn a turbojet onto a 5 ton aircraft with 6 missiles just barely crammed on. Also all things considered the basic jet wasn't ever intended to be a fighter jet engine, so it's been removed from the challenge. Also the new rules don't change the old ones it just means that no more results can be added to the legacy scoreboard

Proudly presenting, the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, this is also a demonstrator for the challenge as a whole, since we're moving to new rules hopefully this will get more people to create new designs. Range requirements will be reduced to reflect Kerbin's small size and the immense fuel draw of Kerbal engines (until we get the new engines) A side by side comparison: The Rudders are disproportionate, but KSP players don't have to worry about having low radar cross sections The Su-27 comes packed with air superiority weapons and importantly has a 30mm cannon which does not impact flight characteristics at all. In fact my version has been built always with the 30mm in mind. Also the protrusion behind the twin engines serves an important purpose, since countermeasures are deployed from here. This is really confusing to missiles I've found, the placement in relation to the engines allows flares and chaff to create more convincing distractions for missiles. This saves weight since an ECM pod is unnecessary, a quick roll and a few flares later and the once threatening missiles will peel off. here at long last is the craft file, this was much harder than the F-16 to make and near impossible with FAR Goldstein http://www./download/56979ugyvp571x5/FAR_Su-27_Flanker.craft - - - Updated - - - Should have downloaded that before releasing a brand new fighter, it's already out of date lol EDIT: turns out it wasn't a huge update after all, probably only to do with the AI and parts balance

Oh it's a net gain, on the new Su-27 the CoM looks literally 10 cm away from the CoP and it flies perfectly.