Most Realistic space battleships in fiction?

[KSK]

Joe Haldeman's Forever War starships would get my vote, once you get past the plotdrivium powered tachyon drive. They're basically big, squat functional blocks that can accelerate at 30g and reach relativistic velocities (time dilation being a key part of the story). They're only crewed for political reasons, the crew spend the 'battles' zipped up in a ton of anti-G protective gear (which doesn't always work), leaving the actual fighting to the computers. Combat consists of one swift pass at extreme range, unloading whatever drones you have at the enemy and then going nuts with the countermeasures and hoping to goodness that their drones don't hit you. 

Dogfighting in space it is not.

Edited January 9, 2016 by KSK

[Alias72]

8 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

It wouldn't be the end of spaceflight.  You would set up observatories to carefully monitor this complex debris field and find openings.  You'd launch rockets through openings on a direct path to high orbit.  In higher orbits debris would usually be rare or have low relative velocity.

You would use atmospheric drone aircraft instead of spy satellites, ground based towers instead of GPS satellites, and buried fiber optic and cellular networks and communication balloons instead of satcom.  Inconvenient in every respect but not the end of the world.

 

Ever heard of a droplet radiator?  Pretty much negates the heat problem completely.

 

The droplet radiator will not work during a confrontation. It does not function during maneuvering (as you have particles free floating through space) and It involves a delicate frame with emitters and collectors (which can be destroyed). This means you still need to retract the radiator during battle which is the reason their are thermodynamic constraints to engagements. Sure if you could keep your radiators out you wouldn't have a problem but if they are destroyed the ship is dead. It will heat up until it is disabled.

The debris problem is serious however it may be solvable through the use of a laser. By ablating the approaching edge of space debris their orbits can be decayed to the point where they contact the atmosphere and burn up. This isn't to say it would be cheap or easy.

[Heimdall5008]

The most realistic space battles I have read are from the Jumpuniverse series from Mike Moscoe/Sheperd (he's got a pseudonym after his first three books).

Especially the space fights in his first book "The First Casualty" (also first book of the Unity War series) and in his third book of the Kris Longknife series "Invasion" contain extremly detailed space battle. Also the later books of the Kris Longknife series contain good space battle but they get more and more unrealistic with some new technologies that are used...

Fleet action in this books is mostly defined by orbits, available reaction mass, sustainable accelaration and very brief engagements when the ships meet with several km/s dV. Stealth (in classical sense) is impossible and so everybody knows (almost) everything in the whole system. Everybody has to deal with heat dissipation (especially of the laser weapons) and so on...

Does anybody know this series?

[Frozen_Heart]

If you want a realistic military spacecraft, it will be a normal satellite with larger fuel reserves and a rack of missiles. Stick it in polar orbit and cause as much havoc as possible before it is shot down.

[Bill Phil]

13 hours ago, PB666 said:

More nonsense, GEO would be killed, below geo would be killed, You would get to the point you would need a hubble telescope for earth observation and spy satellites. It all would get incredibly expensive fast. 

Imagine it like a domino effect, you blast several major something into a billion pieces, those pieces dont have flat orbits so they start slamming into pieces in higher orbit, they hit the iss, its now in several billion pieces, then you have debris slow climbing to geo, then these pieces are scatterred finally you have junkyard orbit hit eventually some of the stuff will collide with the moon. Since many of our satellites are in inclined orbit the debris field covers all latitudes. 

Instead of these repeatedly pedantic discussions of how to ruin space lets have five active threads going on how to clean the present junk out of space, much more scientific discussion. 

That assumes combat is even in Earth's gravity well. That's not necessarily the case. But it is a possibility. And the goal of fighting is to incapacitate the enemy. Prevent them from fighting. If they can't move and they can't fight, they're pretty much "sunk". Complete destruction of them isn't nevessary. And even if they did result in too much debris in LEO, it's a decade at most before they all burn up. 

It doesn't matter, actually. This domino effect would take decades or centurues to do what you describe.

[AlamoVampire]

Space above and beyonds Saratoga may not be irl feasible even in a century but she's pretty!