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

[GeneralVeers]

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

Exactly. Key word being "often".

You didn't use the word "always".

You didn't get the point. It's the superpower itself that thinks that it should set things right.

And others not living within the borders of a superpower. And, very important, this is what I have seen people say, none of this is supposition. People worldwide (NOT living in the U.S.!) are saying the U.S. should be doing more to solve all kinds of problems. The Palestinians are frequently demanding that the U.S. do something to bring Israel to heel. The Burmese have again and again cried out to the U.S. for deliverance from the military junta that turned Burma into Myanmar.

And here's the icing on the cake: half a century ago, the U.S. was isolationist. Then all of Europe started yelling at the U.S. to stop being selfish and help them win World War II. That was Europe, specifically demanding that we meddle in the affairs of other nations. Talk about morality flipping a complete 180, eh?

[Nibb31]

How come the mods haven't shut down your jingoistic rants yet ? Politics are a no-go on this forum.

[GeneralVeers]

Cuz just as with all other wars, politics plays a part in how weapons are designed and used.

EDIT: Uhhhhh....."jingoistic"?? I took special care to explain where I got all my supposedly screwball ideas. Mostly from the best source possible: real-world history.

Edited September 19, 2015 by WedgeAntilles

[Jouni]

And here's the icing on the cake: half a century ago, the U.S. was isolationist. Then all of Europe started yelling at the U.S. to stop being selfish and help them win World War II.

It was more like 40% of Europe that demanded US intervention, if we don't consider the Soviet Union a part of Europe. Another 40% were the guys US forces came to fight, while about 20% of Europe remained neutral.

Things get interesting, when we take the Soviet Union into account. It was already winning the war before US forces saw any real action. Stalin considered the US a temporary ally and a long-term enemy, as he had considered Germany before. He wanted the US to create a diversion in the west to bring the war to a quicker end. The diversion in Africa was too small, and the one in Italy was also too small. Then the diversion in Normandy was more successful than anyone had anticipated, and the Red Army had to push forward to conquer as much territory as possible before encountering other Allied forces.

That was Europe, specifically demanding that we meddle in the affairs of other nations. Talk about morality flipping a complete 180, eh?

You're clearly thinking like a superpower, if you feel that international politics have anything to do with morality. Regional powers are more pragmatic, because the world is a much more dangerous place for them. If Obscuristan invades its neighbor, a regional power doesn't care, unless there are strategic consequences to its own sphere of influence. If Neighboristan threatens the regional power, it's obviously going to seek help anywhere it can get.

This also explains how Germany got some of its allies in WW2. Trapped in the Soviet sphere of influence, Germany was the only power that could help them. The other powers were either too far away or had already become allies with the Soviet Union. From the point of view of these countries, the Axis were either the good guys or the necessary evil in the fight for freedom, while the Allies were the bad guys.

[Nibb31]

EDIT: Uhhhhh....."jingoistic"?? I took special care to explain where I got all my supposedly screwball ideas. Mostly from the best source possible: real-world history.

More like Fox News.

Do we really have to make a list of all modern-era military interventions from superpowers that have made things worse compared to those that made things better (if there are any)?

Edited September 19, 2015 by Nibb31

[GeneralVeers]

More like Fox News.

That's sweet of you. But no, not in this thread. All straight from the history books. It's known fact, for example, that the U.S. was isolationist during the early part of World War II, and that everybody in Europe who was getting beat up by Germany and Italy was yelling and screaming at the U.S. for direct military involvement.

Straight from the history books.

It's known fact that Iron Dome works very well at knocking down incoming rocket fire, yet the opposition continues to fire rockets at it. A clear counterexample to the claim that a countermeasure (such as a point-defense laser) would render particular weapons or tactics (such as missiles) obsolete.

Etcetera, etcetera.

Do we really have to make a list of all modern-era military interventions from superpowers that have made things worse compared to those that made things better (if there are any)?

Actually, no. This kind of politics is, in fact, pointless to this thread. Because we would disagree on whether any given intervention made things worse or better, and unlike the other political points raised in here, this particular one would be entirely subjective.

You're clearly thinking like a superpower

I don't think I've told anybody in here what I was thinking, at any time in this thread. All the political examples I've posted so far are verified examples of what other people actually said.

Edited September 19, 2015 by WedgeAntilles

[Requia]

Concerning relative velocity: relative velocities like that don't exist in the same orbital plane, unless you add that much v. (exception for suborbitals on the same plane, since you do that by not adding v). If you want to get huge relative velocities, you either need to add the speed, or be starting from a way different orbit. A satellite with a BB gun can't do anything to something entering its orbit, but it might be able to waste a polar spy satellite (low odds of a hit, but if you have a thousand aimed shots...)

[adsii1970]

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.

This is where Star Wars might come in as being partly accurate. If you use quasi-sentient robots, and large swarms of them near enemy ships, suuuure, defenses may take out up to two thirds of them, but remember, they would be small, agile, and even using realistic RCS, could probably confuse even the most strong computer controlled defenses. Let's say that a capital ship could carry about 250;out of 250 robots launched by one capital ship, even if only 5% get through, that's still 12 quasi-sentient "agents" doing what they do best - working to destroy the target vessel... I personally believe that such battles would probably be a small group (two to three ships). So, with each ship that contains such robots, the probability of at least one enemy ship being destroyed would be increased.

They would accomplish their mission with the individual equipment each would carry. Their mission would be simple:

• The ability to program using existing knowledge of basic ship components, durability of various ores and construction materials, the ability to scan for airlocks, seams in the hull, existing hull damage, etc. and for it to make the best decision with information available to select its target.
  
• Equip them with the ability to drill into armor and insert and detonate a small anti-matter canister, a small nuclear explosive device, or even just your everyday high energy explosives into the hole it drilled. Such an explosion could breach the hull of the ship with directed explosions at the most; at the least, you've rattled the teeth of every sentient crew member on board.
  

All it would take is ONE such robot getting a sweet spot, like a docking port, a weak spot in point armor defense, or even a fuel line... I think you get the idea. Yes, I am aware it would be using swarm technology, as it is currently being developed by multiple nations right now for battlefield use of drones.

The other way would be entirely electronic. Hacking into a ship's computer and reprogramming it to do things such as shutting down the engines and defensive weapons, atmospheric controls, or if you really wanted to prove a point, reprogram it to crash into other enemy ships, planets, asteroids, or even enter the corona of a star. Again if this cannot be done by radio signal, it could be accomplished by the use of the aforementioned robots.

Edited September 19, 2015 by adsii1970

[Rune]

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.

I'm going to address the only on-topic point you raised, and remind you I did warn you I was going to report you if you kept derailing the thread with forbidden politics. Anyhow, Iron Dome vs Paletinian homemade rockets:

I think the way I presented says it all. Homemade rockets. Stopped with missile interceptors that are several hundred thousand dollars a pop. You can see why continuing to force Israel to spend so much effort for such little gain would make sense. Now, hyper-complicated impossible stealth/interplanetary/railgun-launched missiles vs laser shots: you can should be able to see how the economics kind of favour the laser. Like, every laser shot has no additional mass or cost. Every missile they waste is mass that the other ship had to bring into the battle and won't be available afterwards, no matter the result. The laser still has an effective range several times bigger. BTW, are we discussing missiles vs lasers or railgun rounds vs lasers?

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.

If stealth in space was a thing, yeah, I reckon you would be right. But against the cold, empty backdrop of space, it's easy to image even the jets of cold gas the thrusters would use (with radar, if nothing else). The best measures of stealth in space are a "not visible from Jupiter" short of thing, but at weapon-relevant ranges, thee won't be effective. Also, Isp, cold gas thrusters get you truly awful mileage for a given mass ratio (<100s).

Still, distributing your sensor capability seems like a sound idea. Even if they don't gain in survivability much (which they should, if only because of collateral damage), you still get a better picture with a net of distributed sensors.

https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=JN.SVRs6xjBTwGHf2GF%2bbteJg&pid=15.1

This is where Star Wars might come in as being partly accurate. If you use quasi-sentient robots, and large swarms of them near enemy ships, suuuure, defenses may take out up to two thirds of them, but remember, they would be small, agile, and even using realistic RCS, could probably confuse even the most strong computer controlled defenses. Let's say that a capital ship could carry about 250;out of 250 robots launched by one capital ship, even if only 5% get through, that's still 12 quasi-sentient "agents" doing what they do best - working to destroy the target vessel... I personally believe that such battles would probably be a small group (two to three ships). So, with each ship that contains such robots, the probability of at least one enemy ship being destroyed would be increased.

They would accomplish their mission with the individual equipment each would carry. Their mission would be simple:

• The ability to program using existing knowledge of basic ship components, durability of various ores and construction materials, the ability to scan for airlocks, seams in the hull, existing hull damage, etc. and for it to make the best decision with information available to select its target.
  
• Equip them with the ability to drill into armor and insert and detonate a small anti-matter canister, a small nuclear explosive device, or even just your everyday high energy explosives into the hole it drilled. Such an explosion could breach the hull of the ship with directed explosions at the most; at the least, you've rattled the teeth of every sentient crew member on board.
  

All it would take is ONE such robot getting a sweet spot, like a docking port, a weak spot in point armor defense, or even a fuel line... I think you get the idea. Yes, I am aware it would be using swarm technology, as it is currently being developed by multiple nations right now for battlefield use of drones.

The other way would be entirely electronic. Hacking into a ship's computer and reprogramming it to do things such as shutting down the engines and defensive weapons, atmospheric controls, or if you really wanted to prove a point, reprogram it to crash into other enemy ships, planets, asteroids, or even enter the corona of a star. Again if this cannot be done by radio signal, it could be accomplished by the use of the aforementioned robots.

Sorry, but no. No freaking way. This is like boarding, and that won't work in space. To perform a rendezvous, you need a cooperative target, else the best you can hope for is to slam into it at a few hundred m/s, if not more km/s, and that is if the target is already defeated, because otherwise it wouldn't have allowed functional enemy drones inside a 1,000km radius around it. I don't think you truly grasp the scale of space combat, the arena is at least a few tens of thousands of kms around the involved ships, up to light-seconds (hundreds of thousands or millions of kms, if you are feeling lazy to do the calculation) at high tech levels.

Now, I think it is about time to say how I actually think warships would be designed, in my humble opinion and all that jazz, and stop with the generalities so you guys can put holes on specific ideas:

First thing is, it really wouldn't be much of a warship, more like a inter-dependent flotilla. The core would be the manned portion, housing a pretty hefty reactor, the most efficient drive you can get your hands on (probably some form of nuclear thermal engine), maybe a railgun (for siege/bombardment operations), and a boopload of C4IR and support equipment. Basically, a glorified tender and C&C ship, plus the legs for the whole thing. The hab(s) would probably be configured so that artificial gravity can be generated when the ship is not under thrust, and it would have a lot of hardpoints to carry fuel tanks and cargo externally. Probably something actually derived from civilian designs, at least at first, since the requirement ain't that different: carry a lot of payload from A to B, A and B being as far away as possible.

That would be a kind of "warship", but the point would be that it should stay away from all fights. Plus, it really carries no ship-to-ship armament and really shouldn't waste mass in armor. Ship to ship "armament" would be entirely drone-based, with laser cannons and their power systems coupled to some drive system... resistojets would work very well, they have nuke-like Isp and they are electric drives that can be put all around the ship, thus giving it the same thrust potential on all axises, and good maneuverability. Those would be the laserstars proper, the drones that actually do battle a few thousand kilometers away form their mothership. They would also form a shield around it, protecting it from all harm and keeping it away form the range of enemy weapons. If a laser cannon is on the order of 10-50mT, these drones will be on the order of 50-100mT, when power systems and engines and reaction mass and such are included (rough order-of-magnitude figure I'm pulling out of informed my ass, this whole thing is very dependent on tech level). Pretty hefty for a drone, but all I can say is they will be as small as they can, while still carrying the biggest laser, with the longest-ranged optics, that side can afford to mass-produce. When those are lost, the battle is lost, so the manned module/mothership would turn tail and run, if it can, or surrender or blow themselves if they dV/ acceleration won't let them evade the surviving enemy combat drones.

Other kinds of drone would be carried, of course. Additional sensor drones come to mind, for example. Mind you, the laserstar drones would have one or two very cool optical telescopes of extreme range to do targeting with (their primary turrets), but you kind of want to keep those busy firing, and/or you don't want to risk them unnecessarily. So, some kind of cheap disposable drone would do, plus you could give it a secondary purpose as ECM platform. Basically, a chemical-powered drone of a couple tons fueled that power its ECM suite with fuel cells, so they are compact and you can carry an order of magnitude more of those than weapons,. They would be more maneuverable, so they can get a bit closer before they are shot down. Plus, they can do spotting over the horizon and serve as communication relays and such. All in all, too useful not to carry at least a few, they can even try to suicide themselves as improvised missiles if the situation calls for it (which I doubt it ever would). Also, for extended deployments, because the rocket equation is kind of a ... hard mistress, shall we say, and battles will waste a lot of propellant 'dodging', miner drones to remass propellant sound pretty useful, if suitable sources are available. I imagine they would be like Kuck Mosquitoes, probably civilian models with a paintjob.

So the big mothership acts as tender and nerve center to get its laserstars into battle. Those constitute its main combat force, and they are themselves supported by smaller drones still that form a durable sensor network. Together, they form a very mobile force that, when trouble arises, can present to the enemy a distributed source of dakka, while putting all the really vulnerable stuff behind layers of defense/offense. And the support equipment in the mothership, plus the modular nature of the system, allows it to fulfill any kind of non-combat missions with a proper loadout, from disaster relief to invasion actions, just by leaving some of its combat drones at home. It also addresses the highly "ablative" nature of space combat where one hit generally equals one kill: Damage is received in the form of destroyed drones until the very last, and destroyed drones can be replaced whole with minimal effort by shipping new ones.

Rune. You could call the motherships "carriers", to continue the trend of "stealing names of previous weapons of war that have nothing to do with the new one, but sound cool".

Edited September 20, 2015 by Rune

[Kibble]

We have rendezvoused and even docked with non-cooperative targets before - remember the heroic cosmonauts who saved Salyut 7?

[baggers]

BTW, are we discussing missiles vs lasers or railgun rounds vs lasers?

For me, it as alway been "railgun guided projectiles".

You can call them "kinetic missiles electro-magneticaly catapulted", maybe.

[Rune]

We have rendezvoused and even docked with non-cooperative targets before - remember the heroic cosmonauts who saved Salyut 7?

Salyut 7 was an inert hulk, not a maneuvering, armed, enemy spaceship. That might be a tad more heroic. As in, posthumous medal for the 'hero'.

For me, it as alway been "railgun guided projectiles".

You can call them "kinetic missiles electro-magneticaly catapulted", maybe.

'K, those are the worst of both worlds. As I've said repeated times, boosting the projectile with a SRB is better by any measure, including EM emissions. Railguns as a launch system impart more stress (mechanical, thermal and elctromagnetic) on the payload, give it less final velocity, and waste more energy to do so, so they emit more. The only advantage of railguns over missiles, cheap repeatability, is lost if the projectile is a complex guided one capable of independent maneuver. Heck, the "projectile capable of independent maneuver" might not be buildable. It is one thing to build a railgun warhead whose electronics survive long enough to twist some control surfaces slightly to follow GPS/inertial guidance (and still some doubt it can be done), and it is another to build a rocket that can withstand tens of thousands of Gs.

Besides, if you are throwing such sophisticated tech at it, I must also point out that if you can do targeting without light-lag (i.e: close enough for your projectiles to acquire the target), you are already in effective range of X-Ray lasers. And, man do X-Ray lasers make for boring spaceship combat... but hey, probably a lower tech level than your incredible railgun projectiles.

Rune. I hope those X-ray lasers remain fictional a long time! They are quite nasty.

[baggers]

'K, those are the worst of both worlds. As I've said repeated times, boosting the projectile with a SRB is better by any measure, including EM emissions. Railguns as a launch system impart more stress (mechanical, thermal and elctromagnetic) on the payload, give it less final velocity, and waste more energy to do so, so they emit more. The only advantage of railguns over missiles, cheap repeatability, is lost if the projectile is a complex guided one capable of independent maneuver. Heck, the "projectile capable of independent maneuver" might not be buildable. It is one thing to build a railgun warhead whose electronics survive long enough to twist some control surfaces slightly to follow GPS/inertial guidance (and still some doubt it can be done), and it is another to build a rocket that can withstand tens of thousands of Gs.

Besides, if you are throwing such sophisticated tech at it, I must also point out that if you can do targeting without light-lag (i.e: close enough for your projectiles to acquire the target), you are already in effective range of X-Ray lasers. And, man do X-Ray lasers make for boring spaceship combat... but hey, probably a lower tech level than your incredible railgun projectiles.

Rune. I hope those X-ray lasers remain fictional a long time! They are quite nasty.

A non-guided projectile main problem is accuracy.

I don't thing a small RCS on the ass of a arrow is "sophisticated tech", way less in any case than a 1/100.000.000 degre laser turret gear. You can't hit anything less than 4 meter large pass 30km with your lasers. Shouldn't you take that into account? ^^

Edited September 20, 2015 by baggers

[Scoundrel]

A non-guided projectile main problem is accuracy.

Actually, it would also be a question of precision.

I have since tentatively come to the conclusion that the kill weapons will only have effective ranges of perhaps a few kilometers, and after poking through Atomic Rockets for validation, I feel comfortable stating why:

Sensor/comms destruction is the only way warships can approach each other without the possibility of MAD. Period. Furthermore, sensor destruction exchange is going to take place at much farther distances because it is far easier to blind than it is to kill... and the whole reason a target has to be permanently neutralized is to ensure that it doesn't return to fighting form and shoot you at some future date. So once they're blinded, finishing them off is mandatory.

Thus the only logical conclusion one can come to is that the most successful strategy will be the one that renders the opponent blind and deaf, so they can't dodge and they have no countermeasures, followed by a mop-up operation.

But what about the mechanisms to achieve that finishing blow? Let's look at the big 3:

Lasers

The problem with using lasers as kill weapons is a combination of thermal efficiency - not really that big a deal since it'll be safe to deploy your radiators - and precision. Precision issues means that hitting the same hole again to burn through the next layer of ablative armour makes burning holes through a warship at long range a difficult proposition, and it is compounded by the compartmental nature of warships. So their engagement ranges are going to be within a few kilometres or so to ensure that the series of pulses doesn't scatter over the hull of the ship, leaving a polka-dot pattern all over the place, while the critical systems and compartments are untouched because the laser didn't burn through all the layers of whipple shields and ablative armour. Since what we want is to be close enough that the dispersion isn't a factor - and that means being closer than we first speculated. Yes, the amount of power is going to be significant... but really, at that point, we're just wandering around the battlefield stabbing wounded knights in the throat with our dagger so does it really matter how long it takes to charge our capacitors or if we deploy radiators?

Railgun/Coilgun

A KE system is also of questionable use at long ranges. Direct hits with KE systems - even against non-maneuvering targets - would limit their ranges to a few km; even "guided" rcs powered shells wouldn't offer much improvement because the amount of fuel to noticeably change course - which it wouldn't be able to do until it was within a few km anyways - would mean that much of that accelerated mass isn't used for the kill since it would be maneuvering at the most expensive point to change dV. More likely a shell (continuous rod blah blah blah) would be fired at a range where sensor resolution and mount precision are good enough that the shell simply has to get within about 40m or so of the target before it explodes, ripping the ship in half or perhaps even just tearing open a big hole through a few sections and disabling a whole bunch of critical systems. So there's a pK A of >0.5... but again, it was fired within km of the target so it doesn't have any advantage over the laser except perhaps in efficiency (DARPA's mortar coilgun has over 20% efficiency), but, again, since we can use our radiators, does it actually matter?

Missile/Drone

This sounds like a great idea: we lob a missile from 100's of km and it has a continuous rod blah blah blah and it homes in on the target and all our problems are solved. But there's an interesting issue with that: missiles/drones take up volume. More volume than a railgun and its shells or a laser. We could keep them outside of the ship before launching, but then they're exposed to laser fire and, well, you've just surrounded yourself with dozens of continuous rod warheads... not exactly the position you want to be when people are zapping each other with long range lasers. So now we have a ship with a larger than necessary hull to protect those missiles (it also just occurred to me that SRBs aside, most missiles would need to be fueled, serviced and tested just before battle if they've travelled many months through space, so externally carried missiles are even less likely), where it would be just as advantageous to carry more fuel and simply close in and laser or KE the buggers to death. Or, more likely, a missile bus would simply hang around at the fringe until the battle was over, and simply get a little closer and lob its missiles at all the helpless ships floating in orbit.

So I therefore submit that, outside of a dedicated support missile bus finishing off the enemy from stand-off distances, there really isn't that much of an advantage or disadvantage to using KE or lasers as finishing weapons. I suspect lasers would be favoured by pure anti-ship doctrines (or those that prefer lasers in general) while KE weapons would be favoured for multi-role vessels where long range bombardment is part of its job description.

[GeneralVeers]

If stealth in space was a thing, yeah, I reckon you would be right.

As I've said repeated times, boosting the projectile with a SRB is better by any measure, including EM emissions.

You've said both of these things over and over, and each time, the result has been the same: people have disagreed with you.....over and over. I don't see that changing any time soon.

On stealth in space, I'll throw in something I just thought of: an object's detection signature is based on the surface area facing you, therefore the signal strength is based on the SQUARE of the distance. At twice the distance away, a heat source transmits to you not one-half as much heat--but one-FOURTH. Radar is the same; at twice the distance, the radar echo is one-fourth as strong. Basic physics. Don't take my word for it, look these up. (also holds true for nuclear bombs--if you're twice as far away from the detonation, you get one-fourth the radiation dose, so if you're afraid of a nuclear war, distance from likely targets is your best bet)

Long story short: at increasing range, an object's infrared and radar signature will drop off exponentially; if an object is one kilometer away from you and moves to a thousand kilometers, the signal will be one-millionth as strong. Very quickly, the signal will fade to the point where the hardware just plain can't pick it up. Technology won't carry you very far, either; you'd need four times the scanner resolution to get twice the detection range.

And, on railguns in space, I'll throw in something else which is bleeding obvious and which I really should have thought of sooner. Electromagnetic launchers for missiles and such, have a GIGANTIC advantage over rocket boosters.

They don't explode when the ship takes a hit.

[RainDreamer]

Thus the only logical conclusion one can come to is that the most successful strategy will be the one that renders the opponent blind and deaf, so they can't dodge and they have no countermeasures, followed by a mop-up operation.

Well, that makes sense. Now, say if we are on the reviving end of that, what would be an appropriate exit strategy to avoid the mop-up operation? Our sensors are down, but engines and other systems are still up, which means we can still cover our retreat to friendly territory. Time to have some crew EVA and do visual confirm of current location and calculate escape route?

[Scoundrel]

Well, that makes sense. Now, say if we are on the reviving end of that, what would be an appropriate exit strategy to avoid the mop-up operation? Our sensors are down, but engines and other systems are still up, which means we can still cover our retreat to friendly territory. Time to have some crew EVA and do visual confirm of current location and calculate escape route?

Well, there's a couple of solutions that I could come up with as a writer: the Clarke/Asimov solution would be that the ship's navigator "extends a periscope on the 'leeward' side (basically the side opposite of an attacker) and uses their sextant to navigate"... which might not be practical in actual space combat; the captain instigates a random drunkwalking program and relies on inertial navigation systems to get them back home (if they're an attacker) or to a friendly defensive platform (if they're a defender)... though it too might not be practical as errors build up in the INS, making a burn window or a rendezvous impossible, as well as the orbit dramatically changing from the increase in V due to the drunkwalking and exposing them further to their attackers, or wrecking their chance of escaping orbit. Being blind really does put a ship at a severe disadvantage.

Worse, the attacker sets up a transfer orbit to ensure a close-in encounter that the defender cannot see coming; once within a handful of km the attacker can disable the engines and whatever secondary sensors might be operational - including the crewmember poking their head out an airlock with a radio, a sextant, and eyeballs, mk 1. Boarding actions, aside from dramatic or humanitarian reasons, would be highly unlikely due to the risk of the crippled ship's crew booby-trapping their own ship, or plotting their own boarding counter-attack.

IMHO, the most likely end to the scenario will either be the defender extending their radiators in surrender - I don't necessarily see this working due to the high risk involved with boarding actions, making it more likely that an attacker will just finish the ship off; if the ship is an attacking ship, it will try to flee or regroup with its cohorts; or the crew scuttling/booby-trapping the vessel before abandoning ship in escape pods - the most likely solution that ends well for the defenders . I can't imagine a warship designed for re-entry so I don't really see any other option a defender would have; and an attacker would likely have a pre-programmed exit burn and hope their INS doesn't generate enough errors that their escape window is actually the best way to throw them into solar orbit!

[Heimdall5008]

That would be a kind of "warship", but the point would be that it should stay away from all fights. [...] When those are lost, the battle is lost, so the manned module/mothership would turn tail and run, if it can, or surrender or blow themselves if they dV/ acceleration won't let them evade the surviving enemy combat drones.

In space you cannot really "stay away" or "turn and run". This is the problem with all designs that require a control ship or the missile barge from Scoundrel to stay outside of battle range. All your ships are on some kind of transfer orbit. The only way to stay back would be to be behind. But then the enemy just exactly knows when your ship will be in weapons range. Maybe he just opts to send one of his ships on a high elliptical orbit (long time before the battle), so that it will cath up with your control ship from behind...

The same thing for running. If you are in orbit, you cannot run, you have to leave orbit, wich means exposing your main engine to enemy fire. If you are not in orbit, you will pass through the battle zone and then go whereever your trajectory sends you. And this (basic) trajectory is not only know to you but also to your enemy and this at least hours, more like days or weeks before the engagement.

Long story short: When you are on trajectory for the enemy, your committed. The point of no return is way out and you would have to make this decision long before the battle.

Long story short: at increasing range, an object's infrared and radar signature will drop off exponentially; if an object is one kilometer away from you and moves to a thousand kilometers, the signal will be one-millionth as strong. Very quickly, the signal will fade to the point where the hardware just plain can't pick it up. Technology won't carry you very far, either; you'd need four times the scanner resolution to get twice the detection range.

That's not really correct. You do not need a special resolution to detect a strong enough signal. An easy example from the real world. We (mankind) daily measures the distance of the moon via a laser with help of the 3 retroreflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo missions. They are only some dozen centimeters big. We have no chance to resolve the way bigger lunar rovers or the debris of the landers, bt still we see with little problem the reflected signal.

And in response to your other point: Sure, in the inverse square law is no magic. But your putting up completely made up distances. We know the sensitivity of current telescopes. So you can estimate what they can see. I do not know the sources, but two often referenced examples are the match on the Moon detected from Earth and the RCS of the Space Shuttle detected from Mars. Both distances are way longer than the proposed weapons ranges. So you cares if your cold gas thrusters cannot be detected a few million klicks out, when your weapons range is only 10000 klicks?

Well, that makes sense. Now, say if we are on the reviving end of that, what would be an appropriate exit strategy to avoid the mop-up operation? Our sensors are down, but engines and other systems are still up, which means we can still cover our retreat to friendly territory. Time to have some crew EVA and do visual confirm of current location and calculate escape route?

First I assume, that you will have enough sensors over all your ship and also in reserve behind armor and as service parts in stock that to completly blind you, your ship will be a wreck nonetheless. Those sensors may not be good enough to lock your weapons but they will be good enough to calculate your course. I mean, look what kind of sensors do our probes have today? And they find their targets most of the time fairly well...

On the other hand you will not have to navigate real good to escape (if you can do this). Inertial systems should be way good enough to get you on an escape trajectory the the general direction you want to go. After this you have months of time to repair your sensors and fine tune your course

[Jouni]

Both distances are way longer than the proposed weapons ranges. So you cares if your cold gas thrusters cannot be detected a few million klicks out, when your weapons range is only 10000 klicks?

Maybe there's no need to maneuver during the last month before the battle. Let's consider the scenario I mentioned earlier in this thread:

1) Mars launches a fleet to Earth. The fleet consists of thousands of disposable small drones. Due to the use of decoys and chaotic thruster firing patterns, Earth can see that an attack is coming, but it doesn't know on which day the fleet will arrive and how large it is.

2) On the way to Earth, the drones are in sleep mode. They use only passive sensors and low-powered electronics. Final course corrections are made using cold gas thrusters well beyond the likely detection range.

3) The fleet passes the Earth from all sides. The battle takes place during the flyby.

4) As the drones approach weapon range, they power up their systems. Some drones carry active sensors, which they use to highlight enemy targets to the drones carrying weapons. This also makes them rather bright targets, helping the armed drones that have not fired yet to remain hidden.

5) The armed drones are just large enough to carry an effective weapon (a laser?). They will keep shooting at the enemies during the flyby.

6) This was just the first wave of the attack. Later waves may be based on something completely different.

This is how I imagine stealth would work in space. The enemy may know that an attack is coming, but they don't know the precise time of the attack or the exact size of the attacking force. Because the exact time is uncertain, enemy ships won't be in optimal positions to fire at the attacker. This may give the attacker numerical superiority at the beginning of the battle, which can be decisive due to Lanchester's square law.

[Rune]

[snip]

Ok, that is a refreshing amount of realism. Let me offer my opinion on your opinions of the big three, plus a general point. The general point first, since it affects all three.

You seem to be supposing a slow rendezvous as the means of engaging in battle, something like a fleet inserting into the orbit of the other one, then hanging around after the fight. In reality, that position makes little strategic sense that I can think of, except defending fixed orbital installations that you can't really defend, since they are fixed. Most of the other scenarios involve an interception at high-ish relative speed, and at km/s speeds and effective ranges of hundreds of kms for "hard kill" measures (blowing stuff up) and up to thousands for "soft kill" ones (blinding the target), ships will only be in the "hard kill" range for a few seconds or minutes at most. Considering the G's we can expect of weapon platforms, they won't really be able to stop and turn around until hours or days have gone by, even if they have the dV to do so (which they could, many drives can give you dV on the order of 50km/s). BUT. During the approach, for the minutes to hours they are in "soft kill" range vying for dominance, they can thrust around to change the distance of their close approach and get a better position and stuff. And against a blind target that you know can't fire, the seconds that you are in kill range are enough: a laser that can burn off a sensor at 1,000 kms can cut a ship in half at less than 100... and if they are worried about closing in they can always tell one of their sensor drones to reduce its closest approach to zero while they burn away to increase it, and trust in good old newton to do the mopping up, no warhead required. Now, on to the big three:

Lasers: As I said, they can be just as spectacular as the best kinetic. The laser that can blind at thousands of kms can drill holes very fast at 100kms, to say nothing of 10. As the beam spot gets smaller and more concentrated, they can start cutting away stuff, or let the mechanical shock of the pulse shockwaves rip apart the target. People are just so used to seeing low-power lasers measured in watts or kW, right next to high power chemical stuff that deliver MW or GW, that they forget that it is all a matter of power levels. Still, that means you have to get close and personal yourself, so you have to be really sure that your target is helpless. In any case, for a given wattage output in your weapons system, a laser can dish out just as much dakka as a railgun during the seconds the other ship is only a few kms away.

Railgun/Coilgun: they let you lob kinetics at significantly different orbits, potentially allowing bombardment of fixed targets from outside effective engagement envelope. The dV has to work and you railgun has to be hellishly precise, tough. That sounds like the kind of overspecialized siege weapon a class of specialized ship would be built around. Call it a bomber if you will. The main selling point is the cheapness of each shot.

Missile/drone: it is much more flexible than a railgun, with a higher dV even restricting yourself to chemical engines, and with the right guidance available more precise than anything at long ranges. The problem is that we already have RAM countermeasures today, and in space they have inherent advantages, so anything that can move slightly out of the way of the debris once it's "killed" and can't home in will be safe. So, siege weaponry against fixed targets again, only this one can be bolted to the exterior of ships to hitch a ride. Likely to be expensive in the long run compared to the alternatives, so it depends on how much bombarding you expect to do.

Well, that makes sense. Now, say if we are on the reviving end of that, what would be an appropriate exit strategy to avoid the mop-up operation? Our sensors are down, but engines and other systems are still up, which means we can still cover our retreat to friendly territory. Time to have some crew EVA and do visual confirm of current location and calculate escape route?

In the kind of high relative speed intercept I described earlier (say, a railgun-equipped fleet is detected moving, and another fleet gets sent to intercept it before it can get to a firing position, for example), the inferior enemy can indeed run away, or at least try to, even when he has been blinded. His acceleration will be comparable to the enemy ships, only he can drop every non-essential piece of equipment and all unused ordnance, maybe even some propellant if he knows he won't need it, so perhaps he can pull a few more m/s² (or mm/s², depending on the prevalent drives). With that knowledge, any of you KSP players should know what he should do to get the closest approach to increase, and give the enemy's weapons the shortest window inside the "kill range" I alluded to earlier: burn in any direction like hell, without caring much which is it as long as it doesn't point at the enemy. It is already on a trajectory that will take it to a close approach, any change in that will make their orbits no longer cross. If you don't believe me, set up a rendezvous on KSP at a few hundred m/s, then start firing in any one direction a few hundred kms before it on RCS: you will ruin it in no time.

Of course the enemy can try an counteract this, since they can see the direction you are running and they can run themselves, but as I said, the fleeing ship can get some advantages in acceleration over a similar ship that wants to fight when they meet. And since they likely already started in trajectories that only made their "kill spheres" brush each other, they might have enough time to get themselves completely free for certain acceleration values and closing speeds (the slower the relative velocity, and the higher the acceleration of the ships, the easier to escape). When they are on the other side of teh encounter, if they are still in one piece, the fleeing ship would stop the random firing of RCS thrusters (if they run in a straight line they would be at the mercy of even pieces of shrapnel) and gun it to a homewards-bound trajectory. Running some really crude back of the envelope calculations, at 1km/s losing speed you could move out of the way if you could do just 1m/s² more than the enemy (~400kms farther at close approach), but at 10km/s you would move just a pathetic 4, so you would likely still be inside the kill sphere of the pursuer.

Of course if the pursuing ship has let loose a few high-G missile interceptors, things look much bleaker for the defeated ship. Come to think of it, that is a perfect argument for missiles: delivering the killing blow to defeated ships, if the closing rate is slow enough for it to make a run for it. Or, alternatively, for the interceptions where relative speed is high enough (>100km/s or something similarly stupid) that your ships only stay a minuscule amount of time in kill range of each other: missiles are not restricted in their wattage output as weapons by things like radiators, you can launch all your compliment at the same time, and if one can home in on the helpless ship without being blinded itself, they all can. But really, those intercept speeds are pretty ridiculous, anyway. The slow motion scenario is much more plausible, even if not very likely to be common either. You don't want to conquer the position your target was in, you want to neutralize it and move on.

So I predict that post-battle debris will not often be recovered form its hyperbolic orbits... I wouldn't expect the future space navies to use many coffins in their space wars, nothing to send home to bury.

Rune. Now if someone could freeze a drive system as a fixed assumption, I could actually bracket those numbers much, much better. I'm always assuming accelerations!

Edited September 20, 2015 by Rune

[Scoundrel]

Ok, that is a refreshing amount of realism.

Thanks. I've been pondering writing a short story based on this thread - in the spirit of Heinlein it is as much political as it is military. And ever since I started work on my first hard sci-fi novel I seem to spend huge amounts of energy to try to get the little details right... but it is an iterative process. Fortunately, as a life-long critical thinker who doesn't take much seriously, it's easy for me to separate my opinion from my ego.

You seem to be supposing a slow rendezvous as the means of engaging in battle, something like a fleet inserting into the orbit of the other one, then hanging around after the fight... And against a blind target that you know can't fire, the seconds that you are in kill range are enough: a laser that can burn off a sensor at 1,000 kms can cut a ship in half at less than 100... and if they are worried about closing in they can always tell one of their sensor drones to reduce its closest approach to zero while they burn away to increase it, and trust in good old newton to do the mopping up, no warhead required.

Actually I abstracted the maneuver portion of the battle to focus on terminal effects of the various systems (like, is there actually a pK A 1.0 weapon?) since the maneuvering aspect is speculative and, therefore, highly situational. Too many what-ifs to come to a definite conclusion IMHO, other than "how close do you have to be to get your optimal pK."

That said, I suspect that the only reason not to send your sensor drones into the enemy path would be one of economics. If the sensor drone can be reused, and a laser system costs you nothing to fire, why waste the drone? Especially if there's the risk of ground-based counterattack (attacker) or another wave of invaders (defender)? The only answers I can think of are 1) dV budget reasons and, 2) convenience.

Note that I've avoided the "deep space intercept" scenario because there's too many variables to claim, one way or another, the likelihood of an intercept.

Lasers<snip>

You are quite right, of course. I should have been a bit clearer in my post: Whipple shields with anti-laser ablation, and the resultant blooming effects, could preclude even close-in pK A of a MJ class laser, requiring multiple pulses over several seconds to burn through the hull and get to the juicy innards. Atomic Rockets has a great discussion about this. It's not about defeating lasers (I don't see a perfect laser defence, personally); it's about reducing the pK of that laser strike in the one to ten second window (supposing their orbits are counter to each other) that they have to the point where the defender can survive and possibly escape. Of course a GJ class laser could vaporize a portion of a ship in spectacular fashion; but if the pulses are spread out over the area of the ship, and subsequent pulses are reduced in effectiveness due to blooming caused by the initial vaporization of the first layer of armour (which, given the effectiveness of lasers, it would behoove a designer to try to mitigate their damage if only for crew survival reasons), it stands to reason that even a laser armed ship would have to be quite close to make whatever armour is there pointless by lasing the exact same spot with multiple pulses for reasons of precision.

Railgun/Coilgun:<snip>

I'm actually less convinced now of the usefulness of KE ordnance as I was yesterday. Experiments in KSP have verified that the V of the shells is enough that you can't really throw a shell into an orbit - you can only fire it so it may intercept an object once or twice, but the shell's orbit will be so eccentric that the likelihood of a transfer intercept, even in a counterorbit, is negligible. In fact I've come to the opinion that KE is only viable as a close-in weapon system (for finishing a ship off using explosive warheads at ranges of a few 10s of km) or as a PD/anti-swarm/anti-missile system. Even my area denial idea doesn't work (confirmed, and ironically for the same reasons as the sand caster not working), and it gets worse because I'd need a huge RG/CG to get significant payloads with enough dV to circularize/match the target's orbit.

Missile/drone:<snip> only this one can be bolted to the exterior of ships to hitch a ride.

Lasers with space torpedoes for the kill. They won't be carried on the exterior because the seeker heads need to be maintenanced regularly (we're talking months of travel just to get to the engagement zone) and they'll need to be fueled prior to combat for safety as well as propellant boil-off reasons. And since they have to maneuver to intercept, solid fuels aren't really an option - a missile that can throw itself into a Hohmann transfer means that it can eventually pK a helpless target; it can also pK a platform; and it can chase a moving target. Now, can you use a mass driver to give it a dV boost? Sure, why not? But it wouldn't be like 10km/s or something stupid. Maybe 1-2km/s tops (100-200g acceleration) which is within the structural capability of current A2A missiles (Box Office 2). Anything more than that and we've since moved into the realm of pure speculation. The thing to keep in mind though is that outside of laboratory conditions, missiles historically have a pK A <0.4 at BVR ranges - they're fired in salvos to bring pK up past 0.5.

You know, I'm starting to wonder what my opinion will be in a few weeks?

[SomeGuy12]

Why not have guided missile kinetic rounds?

Basically, the round would have G-force hardened electronics, similar to the stuff used for guided artillery rounds today.

Railgun/coilguns have a lot more acceleration than modern artillery rounds, fortunately, you don't need any servo motors or guidance fins. Instead, you'd have these type of thrusters.

These are just sticks of solid propellant in metal tubes containing electrodes, with g-force resistant connections to the interior electronics.

The way the rounds would probably work, there would be a photocell sensor facing backwards on the round. The launching ship sends out a coded series of communication laser pulses to each round in flight. The launching ship programs the round just-in-time with a one-time-pad(if you really want to be secure from hacking,you generate the pad using a sensor picking up radiation from a radioactive source in a sealed container right before you fire) as the round is loaded into the chamber, so there would not be any feasible way for the adversaries to send their own commands. The light detecting sensors are on the opposite side from the enemy, so you can't jam them. (the whole shell would probably be studded with light detecting sensors. All of them are looking for update packets. If an update packet passes the one time pad security checks, it gets accepted)

Anyways, these update packets order the shell to make maneuvers to correct for tiny inaccuracies in the launching railgun/coilgun and to correct for any movements made by the victim ship. Solid rocket motors can be hugely powerful if shaped the right way, so you could easily counter several G burns by doing your own "mirror burn".

Rounds leaving a railgun are going to be really hot, glowing in infrared, and will flare like a star when you perform correction burns. So the counter to this type of weapon would be to shine a laser on the incoming round, igniting the solid rocket propellant and sending it tumbling out of control.

Of course, the counter to a laser weapon is to shine a laser of a different frequency on the band gap main mirror of the laser turret. You can probably counter a laser with a much weaker laser than the laser you counter.

Effectively, missiles/kinetic missiles do have a limited range because of the engine in the missile/kinetic missile has a low ISP. In the case of a solid rocket motor boosted railgun round, the ISP is only about 200.

Monster fusion drives of the future could have ISPs from 10k to 300k. So if you fired a missile from too far away, the target ship can dodge instead if it can burn for long enough.

For instance, if you weigh your kinetic round down with 50% solid rocket fuel (does it really matter if you hit a target with tungsten or solid rocket propellant if the impact velocity is 10-20 km/second?), your shell has a dV of 1359 m/second. So if the ship you fired at tries to dodge, and uses a gas injection aneutronic fusion engine (apparently, this is not fantasy and such a thing is actually possible! If it is possible to contain plasma hot enough for aneutronic fusion with a reasonably light apparatus, the engine would look like a power reactor except with a tiny flaw in the containment that would let a stream of high velocity plasma jet out (but not a big enough hole to stop the reaction) . You would inject hydrogen into this stream somehow in order to get an "afterburner" that would boost thrust at the expense of ISP) that can do 1/10 of a G, then in 1359 seconds the victim ship has dodged.

If the kinetic rounds have a closing velocity of 10 kilometers/second, the max range is 13,000 kilometers. 26,000 if you can launch at 20 kps. The trouble with boosting the launch velocity is that every time you double it, the massive bank of capacitors driving the railgun, or big honking stack of magnets driving the coilgun has to quadruple in mass. So there's diminishing returns.

Why would you bother with kinetics if you can use lasers instead? One reason is bang/buck. If you can only fit, say, 100 metric tons of weapons into the payload section of your warship, you might be able to do a heck of a lot more damage with kinetic weapons weighing the same amount as lasers. You also have a lot more range - with 5 meter or so laser mirrors, you only have a "beam range" of about 1000-2000 kilometers. You could open up with kinetic missiles at vast distances, at least against targets who don't have the dV to run or point defense. You'd carry counter-laser-lasers, these would be small, lower power solid state lasers designed to marr the mirror surfaces of the enemy ship's laser turrets. They would double as point defense.

One final note : I don't see blinding as an effective strategy. The reason is that over the years, electronics and sensors have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. I think it's a reasonable expectation that by the time we have the technology for space warships (if we ever build them), we'd be able to stud their surfaces with distributed sensors and electronics. That is, rather than use lenses, the hull itself would have a thin surface layer with regions of it that are sensitive to light and sensitive to infrared. So the (backup) sensors would be printed onto the hull itself, with the electronics that can integrate all this incoming light into a coherent image (similar to a lightfield camera)

These sensors would probably be sensitive enough to spot enemy warships with active engines (from the massive flares of light their engines give off) and the stars, enough that you could at least keep shooting and/or get home if you survive the engagement.

Not that anyone would plan to return home. Why carry enough fuel to get home? A more realistic space warship would probably be intended to be disposable. It would either use autonomous systems or some kind of AI instead of a crew. An AI could just get itself home by beaming it's "mind-state" file off the wreckage of the ship, and streaming that state file during a battle. (so the AIs never "die" and learn from their experiences when they are defeated)

Edited September 21, 2015 by SomeGuy12

[GeneralVeers]

I think the way I presented says it all. Homemade rockets.

Irrelevant, as usual. Whether homemade or built by Russia or whoever else, doesn't matter. Any unguided projectile meets the same fate against Iron Dome; the system has a 90% intercept rate. And, as usual, you missed my point. The system is near-foolproof, but rockets still get fired in-theater. Because sometimes the point of firing rockets in that particular theater is not to actually hit things; it's to force a civil "head to the bomb shelter" alert and scare people.

We're going to see that in space warfare as well. Merely firing weapons at something, even if there's zero chance of penetrating the shields/defense grid/atmosphere, forces a defensive response that takes enemy attention and resources away from the front line. It makes the enemy troops and commanding officers turn in that direction and go "hey, what the hell's going on over there???" Which means they're not seeing the Star Destroyer heading towards a key starbase from a different direction. This is a tactic that has already seen common use in past wars. Fear is just as important as ammunition.

Stopped with missile interceptors that are several hundred thousand dollars a pop. You can see why continuing to force Israel to spend so much effort for such little gain would make sense.

Of course. And, much more importantly, I see why continuing to spend money on those several-hundred-thousand-dollars-a-pop interceptors makes even more sense: because it's either spend the money on the interceptors, or let rockets land on cities and kill people.

Now, hyper-complicated impossible stealth/interplanetary/railgun-launched missiles vs laser shots: you can should be able to see how the economics kind of favour the laser.

Not at all. Present-day military-grade lasers take a few seconds to burn through the metal shell of, say, a missile or a plane. Whereas a single hit by a missile or railgun round could blast a ship to pieces instantly. Even allowing for technological advances that will produce more powerful lasers, missiles and kinetic weapons will always be able to deliver much greater amounts of damage in a given time. There's no way a laser is ever going to come close to the damage output of a nuclear missile. Yes, missiles and railguns are more expensive, and can be shot down. But they also deliver pain much faster. The existence of chaff and flares on fighter planes has not rendered guided missiles obsolete.

That's not really correct. You do not need a special resolution to detect a strong enough signal.

Operative word being "strong enough". My point is that at increasing distance, the signal gets weaker. You do need special resolution to detect a weak signal.

An easy example from the real world. We (mankind) daily measures the distance of the moon via a laser with help of the 3 retroreflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo missions. They are only some dozen centimeters big. We have no chance to resolve the way bigger lunar rovers or the debris of the landers, bt still we see with little problem the reflected signal.

And in response to your other point: Sure, in the inverse square law is no magic. But your putting up completely made up distances. We know the sensitivity of current telescopes. So you can estimate what they can see. I do not know the sources, but two often referenced examples are the match on the Moon detected from Earth and the RCS of the Space Shuttle detected from Mars. Both distances are way longer than the proposed weapons ranges.

And, as usual, something very important gets left out. Generic snarky comment about not being surprised....

In all of your easy examples, you left out the same thing: we know where to look. We know where the reflectors on the Moon are; we know where a space shuttle is when it's orbiting; we know where Mars is. We know where to point our telescopes.

In warfare, you don't know where to look. In fact, any commander with half a brain will make a specific effort to come at you from a direction you weren't expecting (commanders that don't have half a brain are not commanders for very long). So you've got a telescope/scanner that can see a space shuttle from Mars. How wide is the scanner's field of view when spotting said shuttle from Mars? Extremely narrow. Now, if you can build a few hundred thousand more of those telescopes/scanners to scan the entire sky all at the same time? Uhhhhh.....yeah.....even if you could, there wouldn't be any room on the bloody spaceship to fit them all unless the ship was the size of New York city.

Bottom line: any system that can scan the entire sky at once must always do so at the price of decreased resolution, therefore decreased scanner range.

[Scoundrel]

Why not have guided missile kinetic rounds?

You left out the terminal phase guidance mode where the missile's sensors take over from the ship's sensors because the missile is closer to the target and can resolve errors better.

Seriously though, a KE missile requires a direct hit; current seekers have a P_hit of less than 0.16 (AIM-9M/X, AMRAAM), which is why they rely on proximity fusing and fragmentation warheads to do the work.

If the kinetic rounds have a closing velocity of 10 kilometers/second, the max range is 13,000 kilometers.

Sadly, no. If the precision of your KE weapon mount is 0.0005 mrads (state-of-the-art stabilized weapon mounts struggle to make 0.5 mrads precision, so your weapon mount is 1,000x more precise than anything projected to be in service within the next 40 years), your 80% dispersion diameter is going to be 65m - that's an area of 3,318m² - and if we assume a 20m diameter target (not unreasonable), it will have an area of 314m², and if your KE shell is 1m in diameter, you can see the chances of you getting a direct hit are well under 1%. Note that I have included glancing shots in the solution, so the likelihood has been inflated, and that I've ignored a whole host of other factors that would reduce the ranges by a few orders of magnitude.

Why would you bother with kinetics if you can use lasers instead? One reason is bang/buck.

A laser system is actually going to be lighter - though possibly more expensive, but in the overall cost of the vessel, it's probably a small fraction of the cost - as it won't have those dense KE projectiles to haul around with it. In reality, the actual reason to use kinetics is for its ridiculously high P_k compared to directed energy weapons, where a handful of shots will guarantee the permanent neutralization of the enemy.

One final note : I don't see blinding as an effective strategy... I think it's a reasonable expectation that by the time we have the technology for space warships (if we ever build them), we'd be able to stud their surfaces with distributed sensors and electronics... These sensors would probably be sensitive enough to spot enemy warships with active engines (from the massive flares of light their engines give off) and the stars, enough that you could at least keep shooting and/or get home if you survive the engagement.

Heheheh. Of course they'd be imbedded into the hull. And of course they'd be sensitive enough to detect objects at vast distances. In fact, it's that sensitivity that makes them vulnerable to blinding. A laser would be like a spotlight as bright as the sun shining directly in your face in the dark; sure, you know you're lit up, but good luck pinpointing where that light is. Because if you can't pinpoint that light source - which is only a couple meters across at its source - then you're blind and won't see all those missiles and KE rounds coming your way. What about your sensor drones or comms from your squadron-mates? I'd kick it up a notch with multi-band phased array lasers and I'll jam your comms and datalinks too - though I'm probably equally as isolated, as you're likely doing that to me with your own!

Reminds me of that movie with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor where one is blind and the other is deaf.

A more realistic space warship would probably be intended to be disposable.

A warship would be the opposite of disposable because it would have a mission beyond the immediate conflict: defend the planet or seize control of the battlespace around one. In fact its mission parameters would be fluid, possibly dictated by the political situation or diplomatic needs. It could shift from an attack mission to a humanitarian mission to a planetary bombardment mission. And why would it be disposable when one considers the expensive AI and other ship systems? Reusability means economic advantage.

Also the environment! Keep space green!

That said, you made some interesting points!

The system is near-foolproof, but rockets still get fired in-theater. Because sometimes the point of firing rockets in that particular theater is not to actually hit things; it's to force a civil "head to the bomb shelter" alert and scare people... Fear is just as important as ammunition.

You sort of have a point, but I think both your rationalization and your example is kind of weak: you're comparing asymmetrical terror warfare intended to force a government to enact policy change to a battle tactic that, I believe, you are equating to a flanking maneuver. In space. Because AWACS and battlespace awareness are something that militaries despise and only perform because civilian committees make them.

You would have been more accurate to compare it to orbital bombardment from an attacking ship/fleet for the purposes of forcing the planet's leaders to capitulate to the invader's demands. The orbital strikes could possibly be rendered ineffective through various planetary defences, but as you pointed out, terrorizing the citizens and getting them to demand that their leaders capitulate could be as effective as actually striking strategic locations.

Operative word being "strong enough". My point is that at increasing distance, the signal gets weaker. You do need special resolution to detect a weak signal.

I believe the term you guys are looking for is called gain. Also, when you guys are talking about heat/IR (and any other kind of radiation), remember that its detection range is based on source vs. background (it's called contrast ratio, or, for those who are sciencey: signal vs. noise!). The higher the contrast ratio, the farther the radiation can be detected.

In warfare, you don't know where to look... Bottom line: any system that can scan the entire sky at once must always do so at the price of decreased resolution, therefore decreased scanner range.

Heh, snarkyness aside (and is it really necessary in a friendly discussion?), I think you bring up a good point about one of the things we don't talk about: and that's situational awareness.

If we look at it from a strategic point of view, we're going to know where the enemy is coming from because diplomatic efforts to resolve whatever incident sparked the conflict have failed. If we're Terrans and we've annoyed the Venutians, then we know roughly their likely path to Earth, and know to train every sensor we have on their planet to look for a launch. If we suspect the Jovians are in cahoots too, then we know to spend some time looking towards Jupiter and its moons as well.

Now, I think we Terrans would be lucky to detect a launch from a planet or moon, especially if they wait until their own planet occludes the launch. We also would be kind of lucky to detect a Jovian fleet prior to the asteroid belt if they use Jupiter to slingshot; they're busy still cooling their engines and their reactors are running at 5 or 10% power, but have dumped enough heat that they don't stand out too much against the planet behind them. Realistic? Dunno, but I'm just throwing it out there for the sake of argument.

So it looks like Earth is doomed because the fleets have been launched and the Earth is unaware! But wait, the Venutians are detected midway to Earth - the Sun was helping hide them; and the Jovians are picked up as they near Mars' orbital path because there's nothing behind them to hide their existence! Does that mean the attack is thwarted?

Not really. It just means that space battles will be much more like the fleet actions during the Age of Sail that they will Star Wars or submarine warfare. Surprise will less likely involve maneuvers as it will discovering what weapon philosophy particular space naval architects settled on.

Now will we see the invaders from Beta Reticulai 7 before they arrive to conquer us and corrupt our bodily fluids!? I can't say, but I think we should make it our top priority!!!

[GeneralVeers]

You sort of have a point, but I think both your rationalization and your example is kind of weak: you're comparing asymmetrical terror warfare intended to force a government to enact policy change to a battle tactic that, I believe, you are equating to a flanking maneuver.

It wasn't a comparison. It was an example of one weapon being useful against another even though the former has no chance of actually getting past the latter.

There's been a lot of talk in here about this or that weapon being rendered useless/obsolete/too expensive, for whatever reason. I say that we will continue to see "outdated" weapons in future theaters of war, space included, for various reasons.

And what's the best way to illustrate that outdated weapons will continue to be used? With examples from the real world.

Heh, snarkyness aside (and is it really necessary in a friendly discussion?)

No, but I throw some in now and then.

If we look at it from a strategic point of view, we're going to know where the enemy is coming from because diplomatic efforts to resolve whatever incident sparked the conflict have failed. If we're Terrans and we've annoyed the Venutians, then we know roughly their likely path to Earth, and know to train every sensor we have on their planet to look for a launch. If we suspect the Jovians are in cahoots too, then we know to spend some time looking towards Jupiter and its moons as well.

And we get into the usual battlefield-intel conundrums the human race has already experienced in past wars. What if the Veenies built a starbase somewhere besides Venus orbit five years ago, when we weren't looking?

The thing is, when the first Space War actually happens, both sides (or all three sides or whichever) will have thought over the above problem--that it's a lot easier to spot your military assets when the enemy knows what planet you're coming from. If there's one thing humans are good at, it's adapting. The military minds on all sides will be looking for ways to solve the above problem, looking for ways to hide spacegoing military assets--and their solutions will probably surprise us. Hell, what if you simply thermally insulate your ships and paint them black?

(seriously, why bother with a fancy cloaking device when you can simply use black paint??)