Space Warfare - How would the ships be built/designed?

[GeneralVeers]

Actually, a full sky survey would take a couple hours. To a single guy. Using a single telescope and computer. To locate all objects inside the solar that have line of sight to him and his telescope can resolve, and compare with the charts for any abnormal motion.

Not the case. If the above was actually possible, we wouldn't be missing as many near-Earth objects as we do. NASA and its equivalents in other countries are looking for asteroids, because we really would rather spot Dottie before she hits us, and clearly we're not finding them all.

Once again, the simplest way to disprove something is to simply look at what is happening in the real world. The nations of the Earth can't keep a decent eyeball on their own borders, they can't handle their own sky. 100-percent overwatch in outer space is clearly not possible.

But it IS producing a huge fireball leaving the launch tube. Most of the energy spent by the railgun gets wasted as heat!

Which is considerably smaller than the exhaust plume of a missile, and also inside the launching ship, which further masks the launch.

Another thing to consider: a common tactic in submarine warfare, when you fire a torpedo, is to have the torpedo travel with its sonar deactivated for some distance. Then, when it does go active and begin searching for targets, it doesn't give away the location of the launching sub. In fact, if the torpedo is launched from the side and turns on final before homing, it appears to come from a completely different direction than it actually did! Same deal in outer space. If a missile is launched under its own power or via booster, it instantly gives away the launching ship's position.

Are you seriously making the argument that since the speed of light is finite, it's better to go with a slower weapon???

Yup. One that can make course corrections. At long range, a missile will be the best weapon against anything except a space station.

Except that it wasn't.

Except that it was. Germany was economically weaker than its neighbors. Germany made up for that by conquering most of them.

Actually, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mostly irrelevant for Europe. Because the involvement of most European countries was symbolic at best, the wars didn't really affect anything outside political debate.

That's the point. Iraq and Afghanistan had a gigantic effect on Europe within politics. It made Europe's anti-war sentiment stronger, a weakness which is now being exploited by tyrants pretty much planet-wide.

And that has nothing to with my point. The enemy could be the one that discovers any particular tactic first

And when they're not? Germany all over again. Sorry, blitzkrieg, you didn't win the war. Cue the violins.

[Jouni]

That's the point. Iraq and Afghanistan had a gigantic effect on Europe within politics. It made Europe's anti-war sentiment stronger, a weakness which is now being exploited by tyrants pretty much planet-wide.

The political effects were minimal. Both wars were something, where one faraway country decided to invade another. European politicians often debated about them out of principle, if they didn't have anything substantial to talk about, but usually they had real issues to deal with. UK was the main exception, as it always keeps some distance to the rest of Europe.

The (Western) European strategy isn't weakness, it's just a different strategy. It starts from the belief that you can't fix other people's problems by force, and that military interventions often create more problems than they solve. Instead of invading other countries to solve their problems, Western Europe prefers to contain the problems, to learn to live with them, and to wait that people solve their own problems. This strategy has worked remarkably well, as most of Europe has experienced the longest period of peace since humans first arrived there tens of thousands of years ago.

[Heimdall5008]

So, now read the complete thread. Some comments to posts on the last pages:

Mirrors aren't 100% reflective; even dielectric mirrors don't ever quite reach a true 100% - plus they have to be designed for a certain wavelength or it becomes destructive rather than reflective. Thus a pulse laser - rather than the continuous wave laser that most people assume would be weaponized - coupled with the ability to adjust its wavelength even just a little, would quickly make a bunch of highly absorptive black marks on the mirror that would cause it to overheat and melt.

You do not even have to change your wavelength. Because the product of time spectrum and frequency spectrum of a laser pulse is constant. So the shorter a laser pulse, the bigger the frequency range (or the "whiter") it will become. So single frequency/wavelength pulse lasers are imposible. And so also dielectric mirrors will not work for pulse lasers.

Yes and no... you bring up an excellent point, though. There's a couple of issues with laser targeting at extreme ranges - target movement aside:

All are very good points. I also assume that most shots will miss. But it will be more or less like modern warfare. One hit = one kill. At the moment every weapon system has at least another weapon system (or the same) that can one hit kill it.

More or less any weapon -> infantry

RPG / HEAT / other armour piercing weapons -> tanks

AA missile -> aircraft

anti ship missile / torpedo -> ship

...

Not the case. If the above was actually possible, we wouldn't be missing as many near-Earth objects as we do. NASA and its equivalents in other countries are looking for asteroids, because we really would rather spot Dottie before she hits us, and clearly we're not finding them all.

Once again, the simplest way to disprove something is to simply look at what is happening in the real world. The nations of the Earth can't keep a decent eyeball on their own borders, they can't handle their own sky. 100-percent overwatch in outer space is clearly not possible.

It is way easier to monitor emptiness 4 Pi around you with unlimited view range, no illumination change, no horizon and no weather, than to monitor a trafficed border with weather, vegetation, horizon, ....

You will not detect everything in space, sure. But you will detect any ship. You may slip a small passive satelite or a "Rod from God" through the detectors, but not much more.

[GeneralVeers]

EDIT: Whoops. Something I got wrong in an earlier post. At 10,000 kilometers' range, it's not 1/30th of a second travel time to hit the target.

It's two to three times as much. Probably more. What I forgot is that the simple act of seeing the target is already 1/30th of a second off, because the light from the target took that long to get to you. If you're using radar, it becomes 1/30th of a second for each radar pulse to travel out to the target, another 1/30th for the radar return to get back to you, then another 1/30th of a second for your shot. Not counting any computer processing time involved.

This adds a new wrinkle to space warfare: at long range, visual target tracking has a distinct advantage over radar.

I now return you to the regularly-scheduled post. [END EDIT]

The political effects were minimal. Both wars were something, where one faraway country decided to invade another. European politicians often debated about them out of principle

European politicians--and citizens outside the political arena--complained very loudly at the United States about its shenanigans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We just plain didn't care. Mostly because we knew Europe wasn't going to do anything more than talk.

The (Western) European strategy isn't weakness, it's just a different strategy. It starts from the belief that you can't fix other people's problems by force

....which is wrong.

and that military interventions often create more problems than they solve.

....which is also wrong.

Instead of invading other countries to solve their problems, Western Europe prefers to contain the problems, to learn to live with them, and to wait that people solve their own problems.

And that's what ISIS and North Korea and Russia and China are counting on. This attitude by Europe (and the United States, which is also mysteriously missing its backbone) is the cause of most of the problems they hope to avoid.

Edited September 19, 2015 by WedgeAntilles

[baggers]

I find politics opinions about actuals war a bit unconfortables to read here.

[GeneralVeers]

And plain old basic "how to fight a war" doesn't make you uncomfortable?? That's kinda twisted.

(guess what--my brain isn't exactly 100% normal either, cuz here I am, in the same thread! lol)

RE-EDIT: Thank you, baggers--you just gave me a brainstorm. One that even ties the off-topic politics crap into this.

You see, if the enemy you're shooting at in a space war is pulling a Europe and is afraid to shoot back--then you don't need any of the fancy weapons we've been discussing in here. Cheesy outdated rusty junk will do it. We're seeing this in the real world right now; North Korea, with its laughably outdated military, has in recent years sunk a couple of South Korean ships, shelled a town, and maimed a couple of South Korean soldiers with land mines.....and gotten away with it.

So, hate to break it to ya, but the politics is actually quite important. If the Terran Union or the United Planets or whoever is afraid to do its job, we're going to be seeing a lot of ships armed with outdated mass cannons, missiles, and poorly-trained crews who only fight because their kids are being held hostage or something.

Edited September 19, 2015 by WedgeAntilles

[cantab]

Of course. Which explains why modern fighter pilots don't bother with evasive action.......

.....errrrrr......wait a minute......

Sorry, bud. No dice. Of course reaction mass is finite. Guess what, evasive action is still a common deal in modern warfare. So it will be in space.

Show me where I said it wouldn't be.

[RainDreamer]

Question kind of related to the topic, but not on the current discussion:

If we launch a kinetic kill vehicle (our favourite tungsen telephone pole, for example) from the moon with a railgun, when it reaches Earth, is the energy it delivers on impact based on the orbital velocity of the moon around earth? Can we ride on stuff zipping around on high speed relative to our target and launch stuff at it for maximum power that way?

[Frozen_Heart]

Of course. Which explains why modern fighter pilots don't bother with evasive action.......

.....errrrrr......wait a minute......

Sorry, bud. No dice. Of course reaction mass is finite. Guess what, evasive action is still a common deal in modern warfare. So it will be in space.

Well evasive action wouldn't work against lasers, apart from maybe going the opposite side of a planet.

By the time you know that they're shooting at you, its already hit.

[baggers]

Well evasive action wouldn't work against lasers, apart from maybe going the opposite side of a planet.

By the time you know that they're shooting at you, its already hit.

Some problems come to my mind about lasers:

Imagine a 1s ligth-speed engagement: from earth to moon orbit or so.

- The laser turret will need an insanely precise turret gear: a laser is not a guided projectile, it's can't correct it's trajectory like a railgun guided missile: At 300.000.000 meters distance, for hitting a 2 meters target, you need a precision of 1/100.000.000 of a degree. Today laser gear is more 1/10.000 of a degree for top of the top. So 30km for a miss. Not impressive at all in space engagements.

- You need to have absolutely perfectly mesured the ennemy speed and trajectory: if the ennemy is traveling relatively at 11.002m/s and you anticipated a 11.000m/s, you miss.

Taking that into account, Laser fall to "close-range" secondary armament, no? ^^

Guideds projectiles rules the (gravity) waves!

[burned from an entire page, sorry]

Edited September 19, 2015 by baggers

[SargeRho]

At that distance, a laser beam will already have dispersed quite a bit, covering a considerable area.

[Jouni]

European politicians--and citizens outside the political arena--complained very loudly at the United States about its shenanigans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First, there are no European citizens. Europe is not a political entity.

Second, Europe was pretty divided as always, because it's composed of over 50 independent states with vastly different goals. Some countries supported the US in the wars, others opposed them, and some countries just ignored them. There were major anti-war demonstrations in some countries, but there are always major demonstrations about something in an area as large and diverse as Europe.

Third, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not major events for Europe in the 2000s. The expansion of EU and NATO, the adoption of Euro, the immigration from east to west, the economic crisis, and the rise of populist parties were the things that shaped the decade for most of Europe. The entire War on Terror was some strange American obsession that didn't have too much impact on Europe, apart from making air travel even more annoying than before.

We just plain didn't care. Mostly because we knew Europe wasn't going to do anything more than talk.

That's just fair. Europe didn't care too much either.

....which is also wrong.

If you look at history, you can see that the results of military interventions have been quite random. The Korean War didn't achieve anything, apart from killing a lot of people. The French/US wars in Vietnam were just a series of failures. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan destroyed the country, while the US-led operations had a somewhat positive effect. The Gulf War was a success, though it was also the initial cause for the contemporary islamic terrorism against the West. The Iraq war was a failure that destabilized the region and gave rise to ISIS. The NATO bombings of Yugoslavia had positive consequences, while it's too early to say anything about the operations in Libya and Syria.

Edit: To bring this branch of discussion back to topic, let's talk about the matter in more general terms. There are two worldviews in play here: that of a superpower and that of a regional power. The worldview has a significant effect on how military forces are organized and used.

For a superpower, the entire world (solar system, galaxy, universe) is its backyard, and it's its duty to set things right there. In doing so, the superpower may occasionally intervene in the matters of a lesser power. For that purpose, it needs offensive military power it can quickly deploy far away from its permanent bases.

A regional power, on the other hand, has a sphere of influence, where it's prepared to act. Things happening clearly outside the sphere of influence are of no real concern to the regional power. A regional power may condemn such events, and it may engage in diplomacy and in trade sanctions, but it doesn't intervene directly in such matters. As a result, the military forces of a regional power have a more defensive role, and they usually operate from permanent bases.

Edited September 19, 2015 by Jouni

[Rune]

Yes and no... you bring up an excellent point, though. There's a couple of issues with laser targeting at extreme ranges - target movement aside:

1) The laser is going to have problems with jitter caused both by vibrations from the vessel's systems as well as from thermal stresses as the ship contracts and expands. In fact all non-missile weapon systems are going to have that problem. I'm pretty sure you can damper most of it, but not all. Thus I would speculate that the maximum effective range of a laser, under combat conditions, would be under 1 million km simply because precision at that range in combat conditions is likely not achievable. An error of 1/1,000,000 mrads at 1 million km means you miss by 10m. In comparison the ALS with its vibration isolated optical bench and beam steering mirrors are only capable of a maximum of about 1/6,000 mrads precision (it may be a little more, it may be much less... the info is classified); for those that think that 1/6,000 mrads precision is meh, consider that current high end stabilized weapon mounts struggle to get better than 1/2 mrads precision. So yeah, lasers are stupid precise compared to anything else. And remember, I'm talking about robust ship mounted weaponized lasers, not fragile high maintenance hyper-accurate low power laboratory lasers on a planet.

2) Sensor error is another factor that we've overlooked. I don't think there is any military-grade sensor that, outside of laboratory conditions, returns 100% accurate readings, and we've not even bothered with EW and optical countermeasures. Those errors, compounded with the jitter caused by the vessel, will likely create an embarrassing number of misses at extreme ranges. I bet distant orbital path calculations are likely to have multi kilometre-radius errors, making my earlier theoretical area denial tactic even more difficult to implement... unless we're talking kilometres+ wide area denial weapons, in which case YIKES!

If I had to speculate in terms of pK >0.5, I would say that Wedge is right in that we'd see most engagements take place close in; I would speculate that we'd see maximum ranges of about 100,000km (yes, the 1/6,000 mrads means that the ranges would be in low thousands of km, but we're talking way off in the future here where weapon mounts are vastly improved).

So people will see each other long before anyone can do anything effective to each other; and when they start to get close, it will be the ship with the most accurate sensors coupled with the most precise blinding weapon that will win.

+1, totally in agreement, the works. Still, a note on range. Long range for a railgun will be on the order of hundreds of kms, on account of evasive maneuvers alone. For lasers, that range jumps to thousands or tens of thousands of kms. Detection again increases the relevant range to light-seconds or more. Those numbers are the things that really define space war tactics.

Not the case. If the above was actually possible, we wouldn't be missing as many near-Earth objects as we do. NASA and its equivalents in other countries are looking for asteroids, because we really would rather spot Dottie before she hits us, and clearly we're not finding them all.

Once again, the simplest way to disprove something is to simply look at what is happening in the real world. The nations of the Earth can't keep a decent eyeball on their own borders, they can't handle their own sky. 100-percent overwatch in outer space is clearly not possible.

That's a matter of budget. How much did your country spend on looking for that stuff last year? If you are american, the answer is 'a tiny bit'. If you are from anywhere else, the answer is 'nothing at all'. Because the last time n insurance company paid for meteor-related damages was never.

Which is considerably smaller than the exhaust plume of a missile, and also inside the launching ship, which further masks the launch.

Another thing to consider: a common tactic in submarine warfare, when you fire a torpedo, is to have the torpedo travel with its sonar deactivated for some distance. Then, when it does go active and begin searching for targets, it doesn't give away the location of the launching sub. In fact, if the torpedo is launched from the side and turns on final before homing, it appears to come from a completely different direction than it actually did! Same deal in outer space. If a missile is launched under its own power or via booster, it instantly gives away the launching ship's position.

Torpedoes can be tracked by passive sonar, by the sound of their propellers. As soon as one hits the water, any sub in fring range hears it, passively. Much like something fired at any decent speed, be it a missile or a railgun launch: The energies required to achieve the necessary dV's to hit a hostile target in space demand it. The thermal energy discharge of an acceleration only depends on the efficiency of your propulsive method... and railguns are almost as inefficient as lasers.

Yup. One that can make course corrections. At long range, a missile will be the best weapon against anything except a space station.

That is wrong on SO many levels. Missiles allow point defense. They will certainly NOT be the best weapon against anything that can see them coming from light-minutes away, then plan for a long while the best way of defeating them. How long does a missile take to cross 10,000 kms? 100,000? Lasers, on the other hand, can hit anything they can track by definition, so they start being effective as soon as you can lock a target. Battles with decent lasers involvedwill probably be decided long before kinetics can meet in the middle.

WWII stuff

Yeah, as an European, I am getting rather offended by your political comments, yet still I am not violating the rules against political discussion. Please stop derailing the thread, else I WILL report you.

Rune. Damn I have to run. See you later and excuse the typos!

[Frozen_Heart]

Yeah, as an European, I am getting rather offended by your political comments, yet still I am not violating the rules against political discussion. Please stop derailing the thread, else I WILL report you.

^ This. also lets get the thread back on topic. Which is what would a real military spacecraft look like.

Some problems come to my mind about lasers:

Imagine a 1s ligth-speed engagement: from earth to moon orbit or so.

- The laser turret will need an insanely precise turret gear: a laser is not a guided projectile, it's can't correct it's trajectory like a railgun guided missile: At 300.000.000 meters distance, for hitting a 2 meters target, you need a precision of 1/100.000.000 of a degree. Today laser gear is more 1/10.000 of a degree for top of the top. So 30km for a miss. Not impressive at all in space engagements.

- You need to have absolutely perfectly mesured the ennemy speed and trajectory: if the ennemy is traveling relatively at 11.002m/s and you anticipated a 11.000m/s, you miss.

Taking that into account, Laser fall to "close-range" secondary armament, no? ^^

Guideds projectiles rules the (gravity) waves!

Guided projectiles are not much use either. A laser CIWS could simply remove them before they hit like the ones being tested on Earth.

This is looking like no weapon would be effective in space. Lasers disperse and lack power, guided missiles can be shot down, guns are far too slow. Somehow I'm not surprised that this is the case though. Space is just so big you can see whatever your opponent is doing to counter long before wither of you is in range.

[shynung]

That is wrong on SO many levels. Missiles allow point defense. They will certainly NOT be the best weapon against anything that can see them coming from light-minutes away, then plan for a long while the best way of defeating them. How long does a missile take to cross 10,000 kms? 100,000? Lasers, on the other hand, can hit anything they can track by definition, so they start being effective as soon as you can lock a target. Battles with decent lasers involvedwill probably be decided long before kinetics can meet in the middle.

Yes, if it's a kinetic/explosive missile, something like the common AIM-120 AMRAAM. A missile designed to operate in space would be constructed more like an ICBM or a cruise missile, in effect being one-shot space drones. The first ones are more likely to be common cargo capsules (Soyuz, Progress) with a laser turret bolted on the nose. Basically, all they do is just fly to optimal laser engagement range, and fire away. Whether they survive or not doesn't really matter, since they're just unmanned cheap cargo capsules anyway.

Edited September 19, 2015 by shynung

[Guest]

I think on the construction part that a cylindrical form would be most fitting. You can rotate it to get small artificial gravity during long time missions, you put engines (big engines, acceleration sounds like a good thing in space battles) on one end, sensors and weapons on the other end, command centre in the middle and you have plenty of surface area on the sides for radiating out the heat your enemy throws on you with his lasers. You could also mount the weapons on the sides and cover the front with a big laser-mirror that you point on your enemy.

About the weaponry I would use some big, accurate lasers for attack and some small, fast moving lasers to defend yourself from missiles and railgun projectiles. But I also think that small drones would make up a very good armament. They would consist only from a (big) battery a strong rigid laser and a strong RCS system. The carrier ship would eject them (with magnetic (or spring ) catapults to avoid infrared signatures) and they would close up with the enemy ship, turn towards it, do evasive maneuvers with the RCS and fire a couple of heavy laser shots. Then they would simply draft away and would be lost for ever. Another method would be a couple of nukes or missiles bolted to the drone, or even a railgun. The main idea is not to carry some big weapons on your ship, but to throw out lots of small weapons that fire by themselves.

But I also have to say that the laser-only warship has one advantage: You don´t need any mass in order to have the weapons running, only energy that you can get with big solar panels (probably you should fold them during battle.

[Jouni]

This is looking like no weapon would be effective in space. Lasers disperse and lack power, guided missiles can be shot down, guns are far too slow. Somehow I'm not surprised that this is the case though. Space is just so big you can see whatever your opponent is doing to counter long before wither of you is in range.

That's because were talking on the qualitative level.

By similar reasoning, no weapon is effective in the real world, because there are always effective countermeasures against it. Only when we get down to the quantitative level and look at the less significant digits of actual weapon systems, we can really say what works and what doesn't.

[Hodo]

An interesting question for me. Most of what I have read about space warfare originates from the Halo books, and they do a fair job of realistically portraying what it would be like. The human ships, at least - they're fairly scientifically possible. Structural strength and compartmentalisation seem to be the key to being strong, while kinetic projectiles and nukes seem to be the best armament, with their own strengths and weaknesses of course. Would this be an accurate representation, or would maneuverable ships who can dodge anything be more feasible?

Basically, I guess what I'm asking is what would be the best design for a ship given what we know about science today.

The first combat space craft will be simple, no-frills, function over form designs. Much like early orbiter designs. As technology improves and the need grows, so will the designs. Look at the leap from WWI in the early 1900s to the planes of WWII in the late 1940s. They went from being simple open cockpit bi-plane designs that were an engine, gun, and pilot, to aluminum and steel, with the ability to push the limits of the speed of sound. Then from the WWII planes to the jets of the Cold War.

You started seeing fighters becoming less about function over form and more about the "look" and still maintaining the function. There is a common saying in the fighter pilot community, "If it looks right, it will fly right."

But I imagine early space combat vehicles looking more like TIE fighters, without the massive panels on the sides. They will be simple pods that can be stowed and recovered easily. Later designs will be more aggressive looking and far more "fighter" like.

[Heimdall5008]

Well evasive action wouldn't work against lasers, apart from maybe going the opposite side of a planet.

By the time you know that they're shooting at you, its already hit.

Yes, you can not actively dodge a laser. But also no jet fighter can dodge an auto cannon. The idea behind dodging is not to evade a bullet/laser that is already underway. The idea is to be in another place when the enemy fires.

In a space battle you will not stay at the same course for any time longer the enemy needs to reload. You will jinx in completely random directions with completely random throttles of your thrusters. So the enemy computer can not calculate your position when the laser (or every other weapon...) would hit. So it goes down to randomly shoot a place in space where the enemy could be.

To continue my space tactics from the last page:

1. One fleet holds the orbit around a planet/moon/whatever and another fleet is on an incoming trajectory. I assume the attacking fleet used external tankers for their injection burn and have more or less full fuel tanks. The attacking force cannot hide their approach (stealth is impossible in space), but they will try to hide their strength. Maybe the first ship will dispose a constant line of countermeasures (flares, chaff, water vapor, EM warfare, ...) to give the rest of the fleet a possibility to hide behind this screen. Or they have a kilometer wide metallic sail in front of them (or bubble around them, when you assume perfect survaillance in every direction) that will hide their numbers and exact positions behind it (really useful, when you have a ship with 10 m diameter and the enemy can only shoot to a kilometer wide target, at least for the first salvos...). Maybe the defending fleet hides behind/in a space station or so.

2. A rather long time before the encounter (but still short compared to the travel time), say some days travel time out, both fleets will start kinetic weapons at the enemy (also it is much easier for the attaching fleet, as they already dive into the gravity well, so they need much less energy). They can range from the dumb tungston rod, to fragmentation munition, to nuclear weapons. The chance to hit something will be small. But it will force the enemy to react (navigate or shoot) which will tell their numbers and force them to use propellant. Or they risk that one unengaged projectile is really a nuclear weapon...

3. The attacking force has to do their insertion burn. Of course they want to do this without showing their enginges in the direction of the enemy. So this will be a critical point in the tactics. Every side will want to enforce a resulting orbit that is good for their side.

4. In orbit at some time (2 times an orbit at anticycloc orbits) they will come into laser weapon range. This is when the real fight starts. No ship will stay on the same trajectory for more than a second and randomly change course and constantly drop countermeasures to not be hit. At the same time the weapons will try to lock on a target that is to slow to evade. As stated it is not easy to aim weapons over such distances at a stationary target, much less on a randomly moving target. So most shoots will miss. So this becomes a fight of attrition. The first side that has not enough reaction mass to dodge will loose (the will also use reaction mass for open cycle cooling as radiatiors are by definition big and hot targets that no side will want to show during combat...).

5. At this point the ship has about 3 possible ways to continue. Surrender, be destroyed or fight/flee with the remaning reaction mass and the real probability that they can never be reached by a tanker before the ship is lost in space.

At really close range also railguns could be a possible weapon. Lasers have to burn trough an ablative armor. A bullet could just punch trough it...

If we launch a kinetic kill vehicle (our favourite tungsen telephone pole, for example) from the moon with a railgun, when it reaches Earth, is the energy it delivers on impact based on the orbital velocity of the moon around earth? Can we ride on stuff zipping around on high speed relative to our target and launch stuff at it for maximum power that way?

Yes and no.

To hit the earth you have to lower the periapsis till it intersects with earth. The easiest way to do this is to fire retrograd. Therfore your tungsten rod will become an object on a highly elliptical orbit. You can use the Vis-viva equation to calculate its speed a periapsis. With e = 1/2*m*v^2 you can easily get an idea of the delivered energy (ignoring the atmosphere).

- - - Updated - - -

Later designs will be more aggressive looking and far more "fighter" like.

Why?

In the atmosphere you need an aerodynamic form to fly. In space you have no aerodynamic reasons to build a "jet figther". The most efficient forms for space craft a a sphere (e.g. Borg sphere) as it has the best ration between surface and volume of any body and a cylinder (because you can use it easier than the complete round form of a sphere). And you want to have round shapes at least for the pressurised crew parts, because it is so much easier to have when you have no sharp edges.

I think the basic space war ship (or any bigger spaceship) will look like a submarine for the crew space and completely "random" extensions for the non pressurrized parts.

[Kibble]

And plain old basic "how to fight a war" doesn't make you uncomfortable?? That's kinda twisted.

I always found this topic interesting because I love real spaceflight, and fighting in space is the same thing but with some urgency behind it!

[Rakaydos]

With laserblinding being the primary shortrange tactic and directed energy warheads on any kinetic attack (so they can engage from the edge of energy range), I feel that low thermal signature sensor drones will have a place. Launched with a cold gas air cannon to get it clear of enemy laserblind, side nearest to the enemy actively cooled to match stellar backround and made of radar absorbing materials, it floats around on cold gas rcs until the active cooling component cant keep up with thermal buildup, observing and sending observations to blinded ships.

[GeneralVeers]

I always found this topic interesting because I love real spaceflight, and fighting in space is the same thing but with some urgency behind it!

It's still a thread about how to kill people, Kibble. There's plenty of threads on this site about space flight, without the parts about blowing things up and dropping kinetic projectiles on planets. Yet here you are......

(and here I am) :)

That's just fair. Europe didn't care too much either.

Based on all the protests (yes, in Europe) I was reading about in the news back then, I know that's not true.

If you look at history, you can see that the results of military interventions have been quite random.

Exactly. Which is completely different from "military interventions never work". Of course, if military interventions never worked, there would be no point in having this thread......

Yeah, as an European, I am getting rather offended by your political comments

I, on the other hand, don't worry about yours, or anyone else's. They're interesting and brain-exercising, and their off-topicness doesn't bother me.

For a superpower, the entire world (solar system, galaxy, universe) is its backyard, and it's its duty to set things right there.

Don't bother going there. Yeah, the Superpower SHOULD set things right (well, in your opinion perhaps--mine is rather more complicated), but whether they WILL is an entirely different matter. Suffice it to say that right now, the UN is completely not doing what it was supposed to be doing from the day it was founded. Recent real-world history clearly proves that most of the time, The Superpowers would refuse to intervene in a space war it wasn't directly involved in, whether by way of apathy, or moral dilemmas, or plain old basic cowardice. So the above would have zero influence on the design of warships. Whether the ships are used at all? Yes. How they're designed? No.

[Kibble]

It's still a thread about how to kill people, Kibble.

Not how to kill people! O_O How to disable spacecraft!

Edit, besides all the wierd side discussion about World War 2 and terrorism and crud.

[GeneralVeers]

Oh, it gets better, Kibble. I just had more brainstorm!

Israel. Iron Dome vs. rockets. (yup! more fun with politics!)

There's been a whole lotta talk in here about weapons vs. countermeasures. Lots of stuff about lasers making missiles obsolete (hi, Rune!). Well, Iron Dome is the perfect example of all that being wrong. Iron Dome works. Excellently. Yet the insurgents still fire rockets at Israel with some regularity.

The point isn't always to actually hit anything. When a rocket gets fired at Israel, the defenders still have to call an alert--just in case. The rocket is still a weapon of fear, whether or not it ever makes it to the target. Bottom line? We're gonna see that in space wars. Unfortunate but true.

[Jouni]

Based on all the protests (yes, in Europe) I was reading about in the news back then, I know that's not true.

Perhaps you should have tried living in Europe instead, and having friends who were involved in the (rather short-lived) anti-war movement. News reports are always biased towards the topics their audience wants to hear.

Exactly. Which is completely different from "military interventions never work". Of course, if military interventions never worked, there would be no point in having this thread......

What I wrote was "military interventions often create more problems than they solve".

Don't bother going there. Yeah, the Superpower SHOULD set things right (well, in your opinion perhaps--mine is rather more complicated), but whether they WILL is an entirely different matter.

You didn't get the point. It's the superpower itself that thinks that it should set things right. The urge the meddle in the affairs of others is in the very nature of being a superpower. A regional power, on the other hand, doesn't really care what happens in some distant country. It's just trying to keep its own neighborhood nice and clean.