Space battles will they be point blank?

[SomeGuy123]

21 hours ago, Albert VDS said:

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.

Like everything, it depends.  It's one thing if the Martians have their own fleet and are a fully independent civilization.

But what if there's an early rebellion, really early.  Mars has just 200 unarmed scientists and 5 years of supplies, and they decided to rebel.  Then you'd only need to send a small force to subdue the scientists and make them get back to doing science (arrest/execute the ringleaders, of course)

So you send a few soldiers on the trip over.  They would just wear ordinary space suits with body armor plates strapped on and have rifles modified to use dry lubricants and handle the heat of firing without cooling air better.  Nothing special or expensive.

[SargeRho]

27 minutes ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Like everything, it depends.  It's one thing if the Martians have their own fleet and are a fully independent civilization.

But what if there's an early rebellion, really early.  Mars has just 200 unarmed scientists and 5 years of supplies, and they decided to rebel.  Then you'd only need to send a small force to subdue the scientists and make them get back to doing science (arrest/execute the ringleaders, of course)

So you send a few soldiers on the trip over.  They would just wear ordinary space suits with body armor plates strapped on and have rifles modified to use dry lubricants and handle the heat of firing without cooling air better.  Nothing special or expensive.

In that kind of situation you'd just stop sending supplies.

[Albert VDS]

57 minutes ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Like everything, it depends.  It's one thing if the Martians have their own fleet and are a fully independent civilization.

But what if there's an early rebellion, really early.  Mars has just 200 unarmed scientists and 5 years of supplies, and they decided to rebel.  Then you'd only need to send a small force to subdue the scientists and make them get back to doing science (arrest/execute the ringleaders, of course)

So you send a few soldiers on the trip over.  They would just wear ordinary space suits with body armor plates strapped on and have rifles modified to use dry lubricants and handle the heat of firing without cooling air better.  Nothing special or expensive.

But that's not a space battle and most likely wont happen, unless the country the scientist work for is actually a dictatorship.
Whens the last time your country sent in fully armored personal to subdue unwilling government employees?

The thing is that you need something in space the have a space battle.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Albert VDS said:

There is how ever logic in what types of army crafts we create.
That's why we have tanks instead of giant mechs.
 

They would both fill the same role, heavy direct firepower while being hard to kill. However the tank is way easier to build and is far more resistant to damage.
An space battle would depend a lot of the technology you have. Long range direct energy is best. 
 

[SomeGuy123]

27 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

They would both fill the same role, heavy direct firepower while being hard to kill. However the tank is way easier to build and is far more resistant to damage.
An space battle would depend a lot of the technology you have. Long range direct energy is best. 
 

Maybe.  One flaw of long range lasers is the mirrors.  

The final step of a laser weapon is a main focusing mirror.  There must be an unobstructed line of sight between the target and the mirror.  The radius of the mirror and the wavelength of light used determines the laser weapon's effective range.  (out of range, the beam is too diffuse to do any damage)

Well, what if the target fires back at the mirror of the laser being fired at it?  Like shooting the gun of a tank with your own gun.  The mirror is such a fragile target you can probably do this using a much smaller laser than the one firing at you.  You need to use a different wavelength than the one the enemy laser mirror is tuned for.  So if they are using "blue" light, you might have to use "red" or "purple" light (dielectric mirrors are very precisely tuned).

They only have to heat the mirror surface enough to burn off the surface layer.  Once they do that, the mirror is useless.

[Albert VDS]

51 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

They would both fill the same role, heavy direct firepower while being hard to kill. However the tank is way easier to build and is far more resistant to damage.
An space battle would depend a lot of the technology you have. Long range direct energy is best. 
 

The point about the mech is that it's a huge target, complex and requires huge amounts of energy.
Also there is no need to build a mech because we have more capable and cost effective vehicle around.
Where as the tank is basically an armored car with a canon mounted on it.

Now think about space, why would you want to put something there to fight something else? There's no reason to defend or attack a place in space because there's enough room and resources to avoid others.
And again it would take huge amount of energy to get to your target, let alone close enough to it.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Albert VDS said:

The point about the mech is that it's a huge target, complex and requires huge amounts of energy.
Also there is no need to build a mech because we have more capable and cost effective vehicle around.
Where as the tank is basically an armored car with a canon mounted on it.

Now think about space, why would you want to put something there to fight something else? There's no reason to defend or attack a place in space because there's enough room and resources to avoid others.
And again it would take huge amount of energy to get to your target, let alone close enough to it.

Current space war concept is about taking out enemy satellites to reduce enemy ability communicate and observe.
You well into the future it might be an good idea to armor and arm military infrastructure in space, making them more expensive to destroy. 
You might even get something like an coast guard, main purpose is rescue and police activity but they would also have some combat ability, this is likely to be short range and not really an warship. Yes this will be in orbit, An invasion of another planet orbit will be very long range fights. Plausible that you just accelerate probes and drop them. 

[-Velocity-]

15 hours ago, Frozen_Heart said:

In which case you can have ftl missiles that instantly hit their target from whatever distance you like....

Are we pretending here a universe with universal simultaneity?  Otherwise... things get extremely nonsensical, like, two observers can't even agree to the same events happening in the universe.

Edited January 29, 2016 by -Velocity-

[fredinno]

On January 28, 2016 at 5:26 PM, StrandedonEarth said:

Which was also turned against the Cylons to save the Colonial's bacon.

The biggest issue in using FTL in battle is how long it takes to to make the jump from the moment the command is given, which can vary depending on if the FTL is "hot" (ready to jump) or needs to be readied. As for the weaponry, lasers are the best bet, and by the time there are space warships the lasers will probably be in the gigawatt or maybe even terawatt class, which should be able to quickly make gaping holes in things. The only defense (aside from reflecting as much as possible) against something you can't see coming is to be constantly jigging.

Kinetic kill is also an option, but instead of single rods or missiles a cloud of ball bearings would be harder to defend against, aside from heavy armor. The worst nightmare of spacefaring nations is someone looping a craft around the moon towards a retrograde orbit at geostationary altitude, then releasing a cloud of ball bearings.. This would wipe out everything in GEO and kick-start a Kessler syndrome at the lower altitudes, basically rendering space inaccessible. 

THough, by then, you'll likely have standard ways of accelerating debris out of orbit, either by a laser pushing it, or otherwise. It would be a lot more temporary than you think.

6 hours ago, -Velocity- said:

Are we pretending here a universe with universal simultaneity?  Otherwise... things get extremely nonsensical, like, two observers can't even agree to the same events happening in the universe.

In current science, FTL is largely impossible because it implies travelling back in time, something impossible except under the multi-verse theory.