Macross Missile Spam -> The only way to go

[K^2]

Who needs ball bearings? Just throw some kitty litter out the lock and then manoeuvre out of the intercept. As long as the kitty litter hits fast enough, it'll probably do plenty of damage. It'll also do very widespread damage, being composed of many tiny particles.

"Oh, look, that enemy warship that adjusted course to intercept, then changed course again. Hm, we should probably maintain trajectory until the would-be-intercept."

Problem is, anything you do with projectiles gives your enemy a huge amount of time to react. To hit anything in space, we need projectiles that travel at relativistic speeds. And that means beam weapons of some kind. Be it photon, gas/plasma, or even nanoparticle beams. We still have to put all the energy into a tiny amount of mass (potentially zero), and launch it at the enemy at near light speed, so that they can't react.

Place mirrors on missile, watch the enemy panic when their super efficient flack laser does null.

Oh, hey, look at that. X-Ray lasers torch these missiles right through these silly mirrors. What were these guys thinking?

[SomeGuy12]

K^2, are X-rays lasers remotely near practical? I know you can get visible light lasers, they are basically a battle ready technology right now.

[GeneralVeers]

So I've realized something. If space warships are ever built, and they have missiles as a weapon, unlike on Earth, there's no reason you cannot send every single missile you have at the enemy at the same time.

There are plenty of reasons not to do this.

And the proof lies right under your nose. Why don't advanced military forces use "macross missile spam" in the real world? Well, in all truth, we don't even have to know the answer to that. Advanced militaries don't do MMS, so there's probably a good reason, even if we don't know what it is.

Likely it's the fact that a flare or chaff can distract several missiles as easily as one. If starships are armed with any form of defensive flak weapons, a small number of flak bursts could take out a large number of missiles if they're all fired from the same direction (yes, this could be countered by missiles that fly to the side and then attack from the side--but these are more expensive and require more advanced computer technology to build, forcing your enemy to waste resources).

More likely it's this: if one missile would be enough to destroy the target, then there's no reason to do an MMS attack because you could instead fire the extra missiles at extra targets, and take down six enemy ships instead of one.

But most likely it's this: if the target you fire your entire missile loadout at turns out to be the wrong target......well, let's just say you're not getting that promotion. And human beings are quite ingenious at decoy tactics. During World War II, Allied and Axis camouflage teams used elaborate trickery to conceal important airfields, bases, ports, sometimes even entire towns. And we will be seeing decoy tactics in space.

I'm glad to see our last discussion in space warfare enlightened a lot of people on how, given the distances involved, any kind of non-relativistic kinetics is completely outclassed by a decent laser system

Malarkey.

No stealth in space

Also malarkey.

[KerikBalm]

Malarkey.

Also malarkey.

Very eloquent and well reasoned..... o.O

Place mirrors on missile, watch the enemy panic when their super efficient flack laser does null.

You don't understand how mirrors work, and that they will do nothing against an X ray laser.

Soft X ray lasers would need to be focused using grazing incidence mirrors perfectly smooth down to an atom's thickness. Photons at that wavelength will only reflect at very very very shallow angles.

No mirror can possibly deflect the light if it hits perpendicular, or at 45 degrees, or at 20 degrees, or at even 10 degrees...

Hard X rays are even more difficult to focus, and basically impossible to deflect.

Gamma rays... forget about it.

And yes, we do have hard X ray lasers... they are massive buildings... you can turn a linear particle accelerator into a Free Electron Laser, by adding undulators to the end, and these Free Electron Lasers can produce hard X rays.

However, I do buy into Rune's premise that you can win at even greater ranges by damaging more vunerable components (ie sensors) instead of causing catastrophic structural damage.

This only puts the laser weapon system more into the lead.

[RainDreamer]

Unless we have warp drives, I don't think we are going to see direct kinetic weapons.

[Scotius]

Gentlemen, behold - a Casaba Howitzer

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php

(scroll down the page for relevant text, please )

A missile, a nuke and a plasma cannon wrapped into one nasty (and surprisingly small) package. One hit from that baby, and you are toast - not literally of course. Good chunk of your ship would be vaporised

Edited September 29, 2015 by Scotius

[Chiboko]

As others have pointed out there is no stealth in space and here's why, with current tech we can spot the emissions from a space shuttle rcs system at a distance greater than the orbit of mars, so good luck hiding your missile launch flares and engine emissions.

[Rune]

Malarkey.

Also malarkey.

Very thought out and compelling response. You literally leave me with no comeback. I guess congratulations are in order on the size of your intellect and the rationality of your arguments?

Rune...not this crap again. No stealth in space, and any competent space warship commander will have dozens of backup sensor systems and will deploy a fleet of drone spacecraft, far from the battle, that all also have sensors. They will, at a minimum, scan 100% of the sky in infrared at least once a minute so you cannot be surprised by anything under thrust. The drone spacecraft sensor net will all relay their data to the mothership, and will also give you views from other angles, so even if someone manages to mask their emissions in a narrow cone, they will be seen still.

It's just not gonna happen. The only "stealth" that is plausible is that if you approach a planet and enter low orbit, someone could launch from the far side and come after you. You wouldn't know about the launch vehicles because you can hide on a planet with the mass of the planet and the planet's atmosphere to act like heat sinks and to scramble IR signals.

Wait, what? I was certainly not arguing for stealth in space! I was arguing that the killing shot doesn't have to destroy the ship, just blind it. Which means that ships won't be destroyed before they are defeated. Obviously both factions can follow the battle very well, right until the point when one loses it's final sensor, and has to either admit defeat or be subsequently destroyed.

Rune. I think you totally misunderstood my post.

[SomeGuy12]

I'm saying, Rune, that sensors have become so light and cheap that there is literally no way to kill all the sensors able to detect the enormous signal of an IR plume from a space warship without blowing up the whole ship. I'm saying it's going to be literally the very last system to fail. Especially since radios are also light and cheap, and a space warship would be receiving a constant telemetry feed from as many as dozens of other small spacecraft, all updating the sensor picture as seen by the space warship's control systems.

And that's today's technology. Totally plausible future nanoscale circuits and sensors could let you literally paint backup sensor systems onto every exterior surface of the ship.

I think the way you take a space warship out of the fight is you kill the power. Specifically, both high velocity kinetic guns and lasers need enormous electricity supplies or they don't work. And the only energy source that makes any sense in an environment where every gram costs you propellant and money is nuclear. You punch a hole in one of the gigantic magnets that are part of a fusion reactor, or put a few holes in the primary loop for a fission reactor. (probably a space warship's fission reactor will only have a single loop)

The warship's lasers and railguns stop firing and the battle is basically over. Batteries and fuel cells and RTGs might keep the sensors, life support, and short range chemical propellant point defense firing, but anything with the range to reach across thousands of kilometers would be down.

So yeah, a space fight could end with a whimper, not a bang. Put a pencil sized hole in each of the enemy warship's nuclear power sources, and it's over. No dramatic explosion, and the disabled warship might appear almost completely undamaged...or not.

[KerikBalm]

Gentlemen, behold - a Casaba Howitzer

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php

(scroll down the page for relevant text, please )

A missile, a nuke and a plasma cannon wrapped into one nasty (and surprisingly small) package. One hit from that baby, and you are toast - not literally of course. Good chunk of your ship would be vaporised

Could be a weapon for two ships both in low orbit, or against targets launching from the surface.... but its range is pathetic compared to what you'd get with a space based soft X ray laser.

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/SoftX.html

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/HardX.html

* I think their hard X ray range estimates are too low, I used their own calculator

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DamageFromLaser.php

and other calculators:

http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/laser.php

... and I got ranges in the dozens of light minutes, not "over a light second"...

Its simply a matter of envisioning even bigger focusing arrays, and even higher outputs.

1 light second? why not up the laser output 10 fold... oh look, we're over 3 light seconds... why not another 10 fold, the most powerful laser systems in the world are in the petawatt range after all...

Why not a bigger lens? such a laser is going to be very big any way... why saddle it with a tiny lens?

Take this page:

http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/laser.php

specify the wavelength as 2.0e-10 (the soft vs hard x ray limit)

specify the radius of lens as 30 meters

Now the beam power output... I want a 1 peta watt system (such systems have been built, but not for X ray lasers)... that is 1000 TW.... that is 1,000,000 GW, that is 1,000,000,000 MW... use this number.

Ok... next, to get a 2 gigajoule pulse, from a 1 petawatt laser, its 2/1,000,000 seconds.. 0.000002 seconds

Duty cycle = 1

Armor parameters... I dunno, lets go with aluminum?

For range to target, set it at 150,000,000,000 meters... this is 1 AU, or over 8 light minutes.

Also try 2 AU (16 light minutes, 300,000,000,000)

In particular, note the "Impulse shock" result. Click on it...

"Impulse shock indicates that the armor is vaporized at a rate exceeding the speed of sound, tearing and damaging the surrounding hull. You can pretty much consider the compartment utterly destroyed."

Anyway, for these parameters, one gets impulse shock at 1 au, but not 2 au.

Ok, increase the "lens" radius to 50 meters.... yep... explosive eects on the target at 2 AU now....

What if we used a strained diffaction grating, and hard X rays?

Reduce that wavelength from 2.0e-10 to 1.0e-10...

Oh look, Explosive effects on the target out to 5 AU

Keeping in mind, 2 GJ is easily storable

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php

"For example, a 100,000-ton warship with just 5% of its mass as ultracapacitor banks could store a terajoule, then discharge it at a rate of half a terawatt."

1 terajoule gives us 500 of these laser shots... 250 if we assume a 50% laser efficiency (which IIRC has been achieved with FELs) before the reactor needs to recharge the ultracapacitors.

Ok... maybe a 1 petawatt discharge rate is not reasonable for a soft X ray laser... at least not on a ship (I'm not sure such a high power output would do good things to the firing ship... due to waste heat... that's a lot of energy to dump into the firing ship too... but it is spread out more than it will be at the target)

Lets lower the output to half a terawatt, and increase the total energy to 10 gigajoules, keeping the hard X ray laser and 50m focusing array.

Laser output 500,000 MW

Beam duration: 0.01s

... Well, we don't get explosive effects on the target... but we've still got a beam diameter of only 2 meters at 6 AU, and can drill through the enemy vessel... it will take some time though... and we'll be dumping as much heat into our ship as the enemy ship... ours is just more dispersed... in this case, you wouldn't put such a weapon on a ship, but on a moon or asteroid, that has a massive heat sink, and doesn't need to move.

If you've got a beam diameter of only 2 meters at 6 AU.... you don't need to move your laser... stick one of these on callisto... and earth is always in range (although when jupiter or the sun are in the way, you won't have line of sight)

But you want a mobile ship?

You want a fleet of ships?

Well, good news, lasers are awesome fleet weapons...

http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/Diffraction.html

Scroll down to near the bottom... notice the phased array.

A formation of ships with laser cannons can align and synchronize their firing to form a phased array, 2 ships in a phased array aren't quite as good as a laser that is just twice as powerful with a focusing array with twice the area... but its close...

10 ships firing in a phased array don't just make 10x the light, due to the way diffraction works, they actually will focus the light onto a smaller spot.

More energy yes, but more importantly, the energy is focused better.

A fleet of laser cannon equipped ships could effectively form a huge focusing array, and get obscene laser ranges.

With a fleet of such ships anywhere in the system... nowhere would be safe (unless there is something in the way... like a thick atmosphere, a planet, or a lot of rock)....

and you want to counter such a fleet with stuff traveling along ballistic trajectories that would take years to reach the fleet?

Ummm... no.....

*although this would require ridiculous levels of precision in timing the firing, the formations, the aiming...etc...

The phased array fleet should be feasible for say... UV lasers?

However... then we're back below explosive effects at 1 AU, unless we have truly massive lasers/fleets.

It still beats kinetic weapons though...

Edited September 29, 2015 by KerikBalm

[regex]

So yeah, a space fight could end with a whimper, not a bang. Put a pencil sized hole in each of the enemy warship's nuclear power sources, and it's over. No dramatic explosion, and the disabled warship might appear almost completely undamaged...or not.

You don't even need to do that, just damage, or even threaten, their heat dissipation system. All those energy weapons are building up fantastic amounts of thermal waste and you've got to get rid of it somehow, and you can only devote so much of your mass fraction to heat sinking before your warship becomes useless.

[KerikBalm]

Meanwhile, a massive laser facility sitting on a moon... well that has a massive heat sink... and with the ranges that are conceivable... it doesn't need to move

[Rune]

snip

Whoa there, hold your horses. Lasers are cool, but not that cool. You need the precision to hit where you want at those ranges! Angular precisions for your weapon mounts will impose severe range limitations, I think is was Scoundrel int he other thread that pointed out that today's weapon mounts could hardly hit something at a few thousand kms away with anything smaller than a 100m radius CEP... granted, lasers will be more like telescopes than cannons, but you can't really extrapolate to such stupendous distances. And really, over a light-minute out, who knows where your target is by the time the laser gets there, you have a two minute lag between seeing him and hitting him. You run into hard Einsteinian limits there.

I'm saying, Rune, that sensors have become so light and cheap that there is literally no way to kill all the sensors able to detect the enormous signal of an IR plume from a space warship without blowing up the whole ship. I'm saying it's going to be literally the very last system to fail. Especially since radios are also light and cheap, and a space warship would be receiving a constant telemetry feed from as many as dozens of other small spacecraft, all updating the sensor picture as seen by the space warship's control systems.

And that's today's technology. Totally plausible future nanoscale circuits and sensors could let you literally paint backup sensor systems onto every exterior surface of the ship.

I think the way you take a space warship out of the fight is you kill the power. Specifically, both high velocity kinetic guns and lasers need enormous electricity supplies or they don't work. And the only energy source that makes any sense in an environment where every gram costs you propellant and money is nuclear. You punch a hole in one of the gigantic magnets that are part of a fusion reactor, or put a few holes in the primary loop for a fission reactor. (probably a space warship's fission reactor will only have a single loop)

The warship's lasers and railguns stop firing and the battle is basically over. Batteries and fuel cells and RTGs might keep the sensors, life support, and short range chemical propellant point defense firing, but anything with the range to reach across thousands of kilometers would be down.

So yeah, a space fight could end with a whimper, not a bang. Put a pencil sized hole in each of the enemy warship's nuclear power sources, and it's over. No dramatic explosion, and the disabled warship might appear almost completely undamaged...or not.

Ok, that clarifies your position much better. But let's analyse this thing a bit more.

First, light lag. Barring radical stuff (i.e: old Einstein still rules), that means anything more than a light-minute out is completely out of the picture: the data they send you is at least two minutes old, and who knows where has he moved since then. So, only stuff light-seconds away can offer you clear picture of the battle in real time. Remote satellites can warn someone is coming, and when he'll be there, but they can't help you take him down unless they also join the fight, in other words.

Second, "cheap sensors". First, I'm not even going to touch active radar, because that not only can be defeated both actively and passively, it's like painting a really big target on your sensor system. So I will only analyse passive optical systems. Cheap or not, those things need mirrors to concentrate the radiation, in whatever form it takes, down to where they can resolve fine detail thousands of kms away. That imposes hard physical limits on their size, first of all (interferometry is a thing, yeah, but in the end you still need the same area). And there the issue that something that can burn at thousands of kms a very tiny spot, is a huge flashlight a hundred meters across at a hundred thousand kms. You don't need to get a consistent lock, you don't need a humongous mirror to focus the beam: just shine your laser flashlight at more or less their direction, and eventually every passive uncovered sensor gets blinded when the laser shines over it. Those beam spot can cover the whole surface of your ship, at what may seem a low power for a weapon against a hull, but more than enough to fry any sensor embedded there. Without uncovered, functional, very cold sensors, you can't do the enemy the same favour...

But of course, your main point, distributed sensor networks. That's a good one, really, but just the same, it's just something the enemy can also do: distribute low to high power lasers in the same sphere of engagement (again, a few light-seconds) around the high-value targets, and have the drones fight for sensor dominance until one of the sides is completely blinded. Then the big guns move close to finish the job. I know I often talk about "dashing captains" and "ships", but as I said in the other thread, the fragile humans should be relegated to C4IR positions far form the real action: this thing will be slugged out by "short" range drone weapon platforms, forming a constellation of distributed offensive/sensor capabilities.

Rune. Now this is more interesting than what I thought you were saying.

[Kibble]

What was wrong with the other thread?

Anyway, the Soviets didn't think they would need to "spam" killer satellites (missiles, if you want to use a very un-space-like, misleading term) - they would be (and were) launched one at a time.

[SomeGuy12]

What was wrong with the other thread?

Anyway, the Soviets didn't think they would need to "spam" killer satellites (missiles, if you want to use a very un-space-like, misleading term) - they would be (and were) launched one at a time.

The reason to spam is when you are against a peer warship or some other hard target. Spy satellites don't have point defense or enough fuel for any real evasive maneuvers. This is what I was talking about - against a peer warship, one you aren't sure you are going to beat at all, missile spam makes sense. Might as well go all in. Naturally, this can create mutual kill scenarios, where at the end of the battle, both warships are dead from the huge swarm of missiles.

[regex]

The reason to spam is when you are against a peer warship or some other hard target. Spy satellites don't have point defense or enough fuel for any real evasive maneuvers. This is what I was talking about - against a peer warship, one you aren't sure you are going to beat at all, missile spam makes sense. Might as well go all in. Naturally, this can create mutual kill scenarios, where at the end of the battle, both warships are dead from the huge swarm of missiles.

It makes as much sense as other kinetic-kill weapons inside laser range, especially once you've exhausted your heat sink capacity. Some of those missiles no doubt carry clouds of ~16d nails~ and other assorted fun.

Space warfare is nasty.

[Kibble]

The reason to spam is when you are against a peer warship or some other hard target.

This is making a bad assumption - there really won't be "warships" in space, because the point of a spacecraft having weapons is so that it can disable enemy spacecraft, which is a task that does not mesh well with re-usability. Fighting spacecraft will (mostly) be disposable. Their targets mostly will be spy satellites.

[GeneralVeers]

Very thought out and compelling response. You literally leave me with no comeback. I guess congratulations are in order on the size of your intellect and the rationality of your arguments?

Thank you.

Your claim that the last space war thread "enlightened" a lot of people that laser weapons are the way to go? Not true. That thread died (with a whimper) without that argument ever being resolved. How many words are needed to say something isn't true?

One.

As others have pointed out there is no stealth in space and here's why

Same deal here. That argument was also in that other thread, and that argument also died without ever being resolved.

Most of the things being claimed in here (just like in the last thread....) are entirely theoretical and impossible to test, so you can't call them "fact". Strategy and tactics, on the other hand, is well-grounded in human experience with warfare. An MMS attack is simply the concept of overwhelming enemy defense with sheer numbers, a tactic that's been used in real wars lots of times. And in real wars, "spray-and-pray" is not done with guided munitions.

[wumpus]

This is making a bad assumption - there really won't be "warships" in space, because the point of a spacecraft having weapons is so that it can disable enemy spacecraft, which is a task that does not mesh well with re-usability. Fighting spacecraft will (mostly) be disposable. Their targets mostly will be spy satellites.

The title of this thread is Macross Missile Spam, not Reagan's (and Soviet) "Star Wars" plans, which both fielded anti spy satellite weapons in the 1980s (I think the Chinese got to the party a bit later). Of course, since the Soviets did launch a manned and armed space station Salyut 3, which would also be a target.

Some other thoughts:

Focusing beam weapons: I think it was reasonably clear that beam weapons could be focused well enough for LEO combat. The catch is space is big and LEO is relatively close (~100 miles or so?). Using a anti-satellite "Star Wars" beam at a target orbiting Venus is another thing. Neutron beams are presumably an advantage, but I suspect that peeling off the charged particles will deflect the beam a bit.

Timescale: Space is big. The speed of space warfare is unknown. It will be brutally fast if beam weapons work (at interplanetary distances), and glacially slow if they don't. I think the difference between war and peace will hinge on just how extensive all possible belligerents can cover any contested space with sensors, otherwise there will be a constant effort to sneak weapons in more effective areas.

Sensors: think cubesats (and smaller). Might have active RADAR or might just simulate it by reflecting (and moving a mirror [system] to hide the origin of the beam) a beam from a larger vessel.

Stealth: should not be ignored out of hand. Consider the submariners' trick of turning the sub to point toward (or away from) the active SONAR. Presumably, you would align the ship with the Sun, and have the design reflect a tiny cross section. A trail of reaction mass may give away acceleration, but will still be a tiny signal to locate.

Total Sensor array: Effectively, you would have to track everything in the Solar System above a small rock. Those stealth drones (not sensors, but weapons) listed above will have extremely small cross sections and have a nasty tendency to change course only when either occluded by something big possibly expecting being aligned with the Sun and blinding the sensors. Presumably the sensor array will get built, but the challenge is immense. The sensor arrays won't guarantee peace, just make it possible (gods know how we lived through the cold war - lets just say we might be radioactive now if all generals didn't believe that any missile launch would be detected).

[SomeGuy12]

Wedge, the fact is, some of the posters on this forum know what they are talking about, and the majority don't. So calling an argument "unresolved" when the posters on one side of the argument don't know basic physics or engineering, and the posters on the other side do, is misleading.

I know a lot of both and hold several degrees. Obviously that doesn't mean much unless I'm going to reveal my IRL identity, but from my perspective, the arguments are actually over.

1. I know, from my personal knowledge of physics and engineering, and the arguments given here, that ultimately laser weapons are the only way to go, because there is no way to stop the beams and if at least 2 beam frequencies are in use, no way to reflect them. However, I also know that the enormous pieces of equipment, weighing thousands of tons, needed to generate and focus even soft x-ray beams may mean there is a brief period of time before anyone invests that much money where simpler kinetic weapons may rule the day.

2. I know, again from both personal knowledge and the arguments give, that there is not any stealth in space except around the handful of places in space that give you cover, such as large planets. The rest of the time, it's a wide open battlefield, and range is king.

The more efficient the rocket engine you devise, the bigger the flare of infrared light you must emit in order to use it. This is because kinetic energy of your rocket exhaust stream scales with the square of the exhaust stream velocity. Ergo, if you double ISP, you must quadruple the required energy, and a rocket exhaust stream has low entropy compared to the power source driving it. This means you must have gigantic heat radiators in order to use any kind of high performance rocket. This is why even the mediocre performance space shuttle RCS plumes can be seen from the asteroid belt, and a nuclear thermal rocket would be visible from anywhere in the solar system. And don't even think of cloaking a fusion or antimatter drive, either of which will glow like a star.

You can't get into weapons range of someone if you don't maneuver, and the moment you maneuver, "bloop. contact detected, no IFF, mass estimate is warship class. Shall I arm weapons, commander?"

So from my perspective, the arguments are resolved. I have not seen any arguments from a poster that are supported by actual facts and knowledge to dispute #1 and #2.

Edited September 29, 2015 by SomeGuy12

[GeneralVeers]

Wedge, the fact is, some of the posters on this forum know what they are talking about

Yup. And I'm one of them. My education in physics and engineering and the like is comparable to yours. Yet, on topics such as stealth in space or the utility of laser weapons, I'm on the other side of the argument from you.

Know what I'm terrible at? Know what I don't have a degree in? World history. My least favorite topic in school. 4th grade, college, didn't matter. Yet I still figured out that the Number One rule we humans (should have) learned from world history is that what is true in theory frequently doesn't work in practice. Human beings have tried out all kinds of fancy weapons that sounded great in theory and on the blueprint, which when tested in the field turned out to be abject failures. On the flip side, there are weapons that look incredibly stupid and foolish--but work! Bottom line (and if you actually do have a college education, you should know this already) you cannot prove something as fact unless you test it.

Laser weapons in space? Humans have tested lasers in a point-defense role. That's all. They'll definitely work in space as a point-defense weapon, and that's all we know.

Steath in space? Your example (RCS thrusters from Mars) uses a civilian object that's not trying to hide itself. Modern stealth aircraft (and also the A-10 Thunderbolt, which is obviously not a stealth-class plane!) already use various methods to vastly reduce the infrared signature from the engines. Two of the simplest methods of reducing infrared signature? Fly at lower velocity and bury the engines inside the fuselage so the engine flare can't be seen from any direction except straight to the rear. The A-10 Thunderbolt has its rear control surfaces right around the engine exhausts, blocking your view of the exhaust flares from below and to the sides, making it extremely difficult for a defender on the ground to get a missile lock. Humans already know the basics of stealth in space. We won't know until we test said basics, but enough has already been done with real planes that we can apply the label "reasonable doubt" to your claims. Civilian ships are so easy to spot because nobody cares; military engineers will make a specific effort to prove folks like you wrong, and we have no idea how successful they will be.

Strategy and tactics is something that's already been tested on real-world battlefields. That's how I know missile-spam is a bad tactic.

So from my perspective, the arguments are resolved.

That's just it--your perspective (your opinion, more accurately) is one out of many. You're not the referee and you don't get to make the call.

[KerikBalm]

Whoa there, hold your horses. Lasers are cool, but not that cool. You need the precision to hit where you want at those ranges! Angular precisions for your weapon mounts will impose severe range limitations,

Of course. I'm just talking about the theoretical limits of how far out the laser can be dangerous.

Even if you have a beam that has a 2 meter diameter at 6 au... we don't have any telescope that can resolve a target a 2m at 6 au, let alone aim one.

We also don't have grazing incidence mirrors which lack any imperfections greater than the width of a few atoms...

As I said with the phased array fleet... "although this would require ridiculous levels of precision in timing the firing, the formations, the aiming...etc..."

Certainly, there is no point in using a beam that has a divergence angle that is significantly lower than your maximum precision...

But then again, I'm also talking about massive laser installations, likely using kilometers long particle accelerators for FELs.

I assume that the great size and length will allow for greater precision... similar to how increased sight radius on a firearm helps precision shooting.

And really, over a light-minute out, who knows where your target is by the time the laser gets there, you have a two minute lag between seeing him and hitting him. You run into hard Einsteinian limits there.

Indeed, you will need to "lead" your target... and if your target is a "torchship" with a high Isp drive and high power output, it may prememptively start maneuvering to "dodge" incoming laser shots (it won't see them coming, but it may assume they are coming after detecting an enemy, and make random velocity changes so that its position can't be predicted, and the laser pulses miss).

It then becomes a contest of who exhausts their heat sink/propellent first.

Against an enemy with kinetic weapons... it can leisurely sit there, destroy everything in sight while still 1 light minute out, and then make a maneuver to avoid the incoming projectiles/missiles (assuming it has more dV than the missiles, assuming its got a reactor that is too big to put in a missile... anti matter fueled missiles would be another thing... although such weapons could rapidly accelerate to a significant portion of the speed of light)

[SomeGuy12]

Yup. And I'm one of them. My education in physics and engineering and the like is comparable to yours. Yet, on topics such as stealth in space or the utility of laser weapons, I'm on the other side of the argument from you.

That's just it--your perspective (your opinion, more accurately) is one out of many. You're not the referee and you don't get to make the call.

Do you understand the concept of "an object hotter than the background glows in infrared". "Most of space is empty of all objects, glowing or otherwise". "A rocket exhaust stream is a stream of high velocity particles going the same direction." This is less entropy than the chaotic sea of high energy particles you get when you combust 2 chemicals, fuse or fission some atoms, or react matter and antimatter. Therefore, the entropy has to be rejected in the form of waste heat. Space has no particles to shed waste heat onto, so it must be radiated, as convection/conduction do not work. You have to radiate to a significant portion of the sky, or you are also creating an impedance in your heat rejection system by trying to radiate energy in a low entropy form.

This is the reason. The RCS nozzles on the shuttle will glow. Any kind of higher energy system will glow much more brightly. No amount of technical trickery can obscure this, you might as well say "and then we invent anti gravity" as an explanation for why you think there will be stealth in space. You merely need several observer stations with IR detectors and the ability to sweep the entire sky. The reason you need several is that yes, someone could perform maneuvers if they knew where the observer was and were precisely in line with the sun. Similarly, it's vaguely possible to hide with a cooled front plate, if you aim it right at the target you are trying to sneak up on, so you need observers located at other angles to spot this trick.

Your post indicates that you don't in fact have any such education, or you forgot what you allegedly know. So yeah, my call is correct. I believe that any tautology - a series of objectively correct statements linked by inescapable, correct logic - must be correct. So does every other objective/rational thinker on the planet. I just gave you a tautology above, and the tautology is self -verifying. Unless the statements I made above are not fundamental physics, or there is a weak link in the reasoning, it's correct, and it doesn't matter if everyone else on the planet has an opinion that disagrees...it is still correct.

Edited September 30, 2015 by SomeGuy12

[mardlamock]

How accurately can a spacecraft hold its attitude? Wouldnt that also affect the range of a laser weapon due to the aiming being off?

Lets assume the maximum error in aim is of around 4 meters. Current space telescopes can hold an attitude with 0.007 arsecs of accuracy, that gives us that the maximum engagement distance is of 83000 kilometers. Lets also say that the approach speed is of 6 kilometers per second, which is sort of reasonable considering the distance between colonies and the orbital mechanics associated (say a moon colony vs GEO colony). That gives us an engagement time of almost 4 hours, that doesnt seem too long actually. What do you guys think?

[SomeGuy12]

You can set the beam to wide angle and gradually narrow it. (adjustable elements in the telescope). This lets you calibrate for conditions, as you can empirically discover the correct set of mirror settings this way. You could do the calibration much faster by using several laser frequencies and several sets of mirrors and adjusting each mirror asymmetrically.

This will stop systematic errors that are constant during the calibration period. Once you are zeroed in and have a narrow patch of laser light impinging on the enemy hull, burning a hole or just warming the surface, you can correct for small attitude errors by adjusting as the beam tracks due to attitude error.

Still, yeah, in some cases, I think the beam would kind of wobble over the enemy spacecraft, semi-randomly damaging different parts of it. Especially if your spacecraft is taking hits, causing outgassing and flexing as the whole structure bends back and forth chaotically.