Space battles will they be point blank?

[daniel l.]

Most people believe that with our current technology space battles will be a long range exchange of missiles. I personally believe that the eventual advent of FTL will return us to the age of broadsiding. What do you guys think?

[SargeRho]

No, it won't be at point blank range. Unless by point blank range, you mean hundreds or thousands of kilometers. High thrust/High ISP engines, like Orion, or some fancy sort of antimatter/fusion engine might create "strafe" combat, where ships accelerate towards each other, firing bomb-pumped x-ray lasers, casaba howitzers, and railguns at each other. Even with FTL, since dropping out of FTL, where as far as I'm aware, Warp Drives are the only plausible variant, you would suddenly be moving at very high speed relative to your target, so you might come out at point blank range, but you'd not stay there for more than a few seconds.

Edited January 27, 2016 by SargeRho

[Rakaydos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-blank_range

In any kind of orbit, point blank will be quite short, as the bullet will be ina completly different orbit than either the firing or target ship.

For Lasers, on the other hand, Point blank will be lightseconds away, and if the arget has enough DV to maintain evasion, you CAN miss from beyond that range.

[daniel l.]

15 minutes ago, SargeRho said:

No, it won't be at point blank range. Unless by point blank range, you mean hundreds or thousands of kilometers. High thrust/High ISP engines, like Orion, or some fancy sort of antimatter/fusion engine might create "strafe" combat, where ships accelerate towards each other, firing bomb-pumped x-ray lasers, casaba howitzers, and railguns at each other. Even with FTL, since dropping out of FTL, where as far as I'm aware, Warp Drives are the only plausible variant, you would suddenly be moving at very high speed relative to your target, so you might come out at point blank range, but you'd not stay there for more than a few seconds.

Im thinking FTL as in an instantaneous jump from one place to the next, After all point blank might be necessary for kinetics to do any damage since a ship at long range could detect them and jump away before they hit, point blank ensures that every shot fired hits.

[SomeGuy123]

As we don't have any known mechanism for FTL travel, it's pointless to speculate on how a space battle might go.

Now, it is true that from the known weapons that might work for space battle, neutral particle beams would only work "point blank" - and by that I mean a few thousand kilometers.  Particle beams can't be intercepted and armor doesn't stop them very well, so their only drawback is range.  Space battles that cannot resolved at greater distances might devolve to a particle beam beaming contest at "point blank".

[SargeRho]

10 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

Im thinking FTL as in an instantaneous jump from one place to the next, After all point blank might be necessary for kinetics to do any damage since a ship at long range could detect them and jump away before they hit, point blank ensures that every shot fired hits.

That won't happen, sadly. Alcubierre Warp Drives (and derivatives) always conserve your momentum, so you end up going in the same direction with the same speed as you were when you left, so you might end up suddenly moving 50km/s relative to the guy you jumped next to.

[daniel l.]

4 minutes ago, SargeRho said:

That won't happen, sadly. Alcubierre Warp Drives (and derivatives) always conserve your momentum, so you end up going in the same direction with the same speed as you were when you left, so you might end up suddenly moving 50km/s relative to the guy you jumped next to.

Yes but when you exit the warp field you might be right next to the target, With warp drive it will always be possible to evade kinetics at long range, so point blank may be necessary because at point blank every shot will hit.

[HebaruSan]

49 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

the eventual advent of FTL

LOL

 

Space battles will be pretty brief. Assuming it's planet vs planet, the side that attacks first will put something big in low orbit of the enemy planet and blow it up. The other side will then revert to the Victorian age after all their satellites are wrecked and there are no viable launch windows for any retaliation.

[daniel l.]

5 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

LOL

 

Space battles will be pretty brief. Assuming it's planet vs planet, the side that attacks first will put something big in low orbit of the enemy planet and blow it up. The other side will then revert to the Victorian age after all their satellites are wrecked and there are no viable launch windows for any retaliation.

That wouldnt work if there are missile batteries to shoot it down.

And i honestly dont appreciate the lol, If you disagree then disagree but dont mock others opinions. 

Edited January 27, 2016 by daniel l.

[tater]

Point blank in the archaic/modern gun sense doesn't really apply. Still, we're talking about hundreds or thousands of km, not vast distances. A couple thousand km is "point blank" compared to travel distances in space. Modern directed energy weapons looked into for SDI were certainly on the 100km order of magnitude. That's a minimum baseline. Of course at short ranges like that, directed energy weapons cannot possibly ever miss, and that includes missiles as targets as their targets cannot move even 1/2 cross-sectional radius during the time of flight of the weapon (at or near c for directed energy weapons).

[fredinno]

29 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

That wouldnt work if there are missile batteries to shoot it down.

And i honestly dont appreciate the lol, If you disagree then disagree but dont mock others opinions. 

The problem is that suggesting FTL on a nerdy science forums is bound to get you in trouble. FTL is not Hard science.

[HebaruSan]

30 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

That wouldnt work if there are missile batteries to shoot it down.

That's precisely the beauty of that strategy. "Shooting it down" just does the attackers' work for them, that is, it creates a huge debris field around the target planet. The missiles would just add some extra shrapnel and speed up the process.

[Matuchkin]

I think that space bombardment of planets will be the most point-blank that any space "dogfight" can get. I agree with SargeRho and Rakaydos.

[daniel l.]

15 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

That's precisely the beauty of that strategy. "Shooting it down" just does the attackers' work for them, that is, it creates a huge debris field around the target planet. The missiles would just add some extra shrapnel and speed up the process.

And what about intercepting it before it is in position to do any harm? 

21 minutes ago, fredinno said:

The problem is that suggesting FTL on a nerdy science forums is bound to get you in trouble. FTL is not Hard science.

FTL is a very open topic, It could be warp drive wormholes or jump drives or anything, a good portion of it can be hard science.

[Aethon]

 

The physics of space battles.

http://josephshoer.com/blog/2010/07/projecting-space-battle-physics/

And a related short story.

http://josephshoer.com/blog/2009/12/high-orbit/

Edited January 27, 2016 by Aethon

[HebaruSan]

3 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

And what about intercepting it before it is in position to do any harm? 

Unlikely. Earth already has 300,000+ bits of space debris floating around, and that number can only grow, especially if we're stipulating a future with enough space travel to have space battles. You would first have to notice that a new one had arrived, and then get good telescope images of it and somehow identify that it's a threat in a way the others aren't. Against that challenge, the enemy has the option to intercept a piece of your historical space debris and put the weapon inside it (imagine using a Saturn V upper stage), so it could blend in as perfectly as they want it to.

And keep in mind, before the attack happens, there isn't a war, so you're not going to have your guard up.

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Unlikely. Earth already has 300,000+ bits of space debris floating around, and that number can only grow, especially if we're stipulating a future with enough space travel to have space battles. You would first have to notice that a new one had arrived, and then get good telescope images of it and somehow identify that it's a threat in a way the others aren't. Against that challenge, the enemy has the option to intercept a piece of your historical space debris and put the weapon inside it (imagine using a Saturn V upper stage), so it could blend in as perfectly as they want it to.

And keep in mind, before the attack happens, there isn't a war, so you're not going to have your guard up.

If you assume some sort of FTL who let you come into real space at any place then pop back into warp you also have an invisibility cloak. 
In this setting you could shoot at point blank or as close as you get to target depending on navigation accuracy (you are likely to fly blind in warp) 
Most scifi stories has some restriction to FTL to avoid this setting. 

[DerekL1963]

5 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Unlikely. Earth already has 300,000+ bits of space debris floating around, and that number can only grow, especially if we're stipulating a future with enough space travel to have space battles. You would first have to notice that a new one had arrived, and then get good telescope images of it and somehow identify that it's a threat in a way the others aren't.

If you have enough space travel to have space battles - you're also likely to have space traffic control and people looking for things that are behaving oddly.   (Or, to put it another way, you've made the classic intellectual error of the armchair admiral - you've assigned all the advantages to the side you've chose, and have failed to consider even briefly the likely outcome of the scenario you posit and the behavior of the Other Side.)

[Frozen_Heart]

Ok assuming we have a magic FTL drive that is completely impossible to known science. No space battle will still not be at point blank. A laser weapon can hit a target at lightspeed and you wouldn't know that you'd even been shot at until you've already been hit.

Quote

FTL is a very open topic, It could be warp drive wormholes or jump drives or anything, a good portion of it can be hard science.

No form of FTL is even close to hard science by any stretch of the imagination. People have had to make things like negative mass and energy up just to make it work in theory. It may as well need pixie dust to work.

Edited January 27, 2016 by Frozen_Heart

[kerbiloid]

As any splash of energy will be immediately detected, precisely located and will cause a massive counter-strike, space battles will not be point blank.

They will be onboard melee with kung fu and cutlasses.

[Albert VDS]

Space battles will be pointless.

There is no reason to send up spaceship up into space to attack another spaceship in space.
What would even lead to such a situation?

[Rakaydos]

3 minutes ago, Albert VDS said:

Space battles will be pointless.

There is no reason to send up spaceship up into space to attack another spaceship in space.
What would even lead to such a situation?

Martian sepratists. Its too far to walk.

[Albert VDS]

22 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Martian sepratists. Its too far to walk.

Really? You think it would go like this:

Martians: "We don't want to be controlled by Earth, we have our own planet now!"
Earth: "We will have none of that!"
Martians: "Well what are you going to do about it?"
Earth: "We declare interplanetary war!"
Martians: "Bring it, we'll fight you in Martian orbit!"

Unless we invent an extremely efficient engine, we'll never send a whole army of spaceships to fight anywhere in space.
And if we are smart to invent such an engine then I hope we are smart enough to not wage war.
 

[Rakaydos]

2 minutes ago, Albert VDS said:

Really? You think it would go like this:

Martians: "We don't want to be controlled by Earth, we have our own planet now!"
Earth: "We will have none of that!"
Martians: "Well what are you going to do about it?"
Earth: "We declare interplanetary war!"
Martians: "Bring it, we'll fight you in Martian orbit!"

Unless we invent an extremely efficient engine, we'll never send a whole army of spaceships to fight anywhere in space.
And if we are smart to invent such an engine then I hope we are smart enough to not wage war.
 

I think that, stripping out all the political mess, that's exactly how it would go.

Mars has all the defensive advantages right up until earth controls the martian orbitals.

[Albert VDS]

Earth: "We will get you martians.... as soon as the next transfer window... and 6 months travel time... We'll get you!"

It would require too money and resources to wage a war in space, let alone between planets.