Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame

[KerikBalm]

19 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Miniguns have rates of fire of around 2000 to 6000 rounds per minute. With 6 barrels that brings us to 350 to 1000 revolutions per minute. I'd say that's not nearly enough for barrels to fly apart. They'd flex outwards slightly, but nothing catastrophic. 

As for accuracy drop, you don't need match grade accuracy to hit a person with a minigun at a katana range.

Of course, a katana (or any hand held blade weapon) has any chance of cutting through even a one gun barrel, let alone six. I would be surprised if it would nick the barrel enough to cause any drop in performance.

Yea, the sword wouldn't cut through, for sure.

I'm going to assume the high ROF of 6,000. Lets assume a diameter of 10 centimeters for the gun (seems reasonable to me... for you?)

I'm having a hard time finding dimensions... so I'm just guestimating, knowing that the interior diameter of the barrels is 0.762cm

So lets assume r = 5 cm. Then the circumference is 31.4 cm, so at 1000 RPM, that is 314 m/ minute, or 5.235 m/s

a = v^2 / r    so  a = (5.235)^2/ (0.05) = 548 m/s/s or about 56 G's of acceleration.

I don't know what the tolerances are on these designs, but you have to figure that the barrel is actually pretty heavy. If the barrels start to splay out more but the RPM is maintained, then G forces will increase.

Its not like the 10,000 + G you get out of an ultra-centrifuge in a biology lab, but its significant. It seems plausible to me that it would come apart at high RPM if the front rings were cut off.

[p1t1o]

On 3/16/2018 at 1:44 PM, p1t1o said:

@everyone but particularly @ARS

On barrel length:

There is a maximum speed that you can propel a round via gas pressure. It is limited by the speed of sound in the medium - not in air, but in the combustion gases.

You cant push the round faster than the gases want to expand naturally. 

Note that a pile of 100tons of propellant does not produce a shockwave that goes any faster than that from 100pounds of propellant.

With explosive propellants this tops out around Mach 3-4.

 

To fire projectiles faster you have to use propellants with much higher sound velocity, so you use a "light gas gun" which uses explosive to compress hydrogen, this hydrogen can then be used to propel projectiles up to around Mach 20-25, commonly used in hypervelocity or high pressure physics research.

 

To fire rounds further, you fire a heavier round.

 

So, the gun with a 50-70m barrel that can snipe out to 11km is total BS.

I mean, a 20mm round might be able to travel 11km, but not out of a 50m barrel, and not particularly accurately.

I would imagine that due to, amongst other things, air not being a smooth field (pressure variations, wind, turbulence etc.) that theres an upper limit to accuracy that can be achieved with unguided projectiles. You cant just keep arbitrarily scaling up weapon parameters infinitely.

 

On 3/16/2018 at 4:13 PM, p1t1o said:

Rocket-boosting the projectile is cheating

 

***EDIT***

I looked up some paperwork on this and apparently the early Martlet-2 was not rocket boosted (until Martel 2G1 - pictured above, 2nd from bottom) and achieved the specs you mentioned. I also looked up the propellant used, and it turned out to be fairly standard, mostly nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, basically cordite, similar to most firearms even today.

What I said about mach limits is still definitely true, Im going to have a wee look and see if I cant find out how the HARP gun was able to achieve such high muzzle velocities. Maybe Im off on the range of where the upper limit lies, but I didnt think I could be that far off. 

It did use eye-opening quantities of propellant (650-850lbs), but then the projectile weighed 400lbs. 

I might come back on this.

PS: Since Im very cynical, and since the HARP project was the brainchild of one Gerald Bull, I cant dismiss the possibility that the results were falsified. Part of me is protecting my ego, I know, but there you are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

Though I think the most likely explanation is that the rules can be broken if you use a large excess of energy, or perhaps the pressure was so unusually high in this device, that the local speed of sound was much higher than in conventional firearms.

***********

 

None of these suggestion require a 50-70m long barrel, and sniper-like accuracy at 11km is probably impossible regardless, without active guidance.

 

I did a little reading on this and I think the bottom line is the "limit" is a bit higher than I thought, but only sort of.

Bullet speed is indeed limited by the detonation velocity of the propellant and by the speed of sound in the resultant gases, but these maximum values can be in the Mach 10-20 range.

However it is a case of severely diminishing returns. It is quite complex because it involves propellant density and overall mass, projectile mass and dimensions, breech and barrel geometry and shaping.

What it boils down to is that the "limit" is Mach 3-4, for a reasonable breech pressure and mass of propellant.

The theoretical absolute-maximum limit is somewhere near the detonation velocity of the propellant.

The theoretical absolute-maximum limit is physically impossible to achieve in practice and it requires an excess of energy to approach it.

 

Kinetic tank cannon achieve velocities in the Mach 5 range using very large propellant/projectile mass ratios by way of a sub-calibre sabot thingy.

The HARP gun achieved Mach 6+ by using an UNHOLY amount of propellant in a similar manner and a very long barrel. 

 

It should be noted that a breech cannot be made infinitely strong by adding more and more material. Beyond a certain point, a high enough pressure will crack the interior walls no matter how thick and strong the casing. And once its cracked, further shots would be....ill advised.

 

"But p1t1o? With a detonation velocity on the order of Mach10+, cant we achieve higher muzzle velocities than merely Mach6?"

Sure, if the barrel is 100% frictionless and the projectile has zero mass. Its also worth remembering that the energy from the propellant combustion has to accelerate not just the mass of the projectile but the mass of the propellant as well. So if you have 3 times the mass of your projectile, of propellant, a full three-quarters of the energy has to go to accelerating the gas rather than your projectile. 

That is one of the things that leads to diminishing returns when it comes to adding more propellant.

 

 

 

So to conclude - 

There is a maximum limit to the speed of conventionally-propelled bullets.

There is also a practical limit, which is a somewhat lower - overcoming this limit requires a large excess of engineering and energy.

You cannot increase the range of a weapon (beyond some modest limit) by increasing barrel length alone - the weapon has to be designed as a complete system, the properties of the breech, barrel, bullet, propellant etc all have to work together to achieve an optimum result. Not to mention that other things that affect how the weapon performs, such as weapon harmonics - how the weapon (especially the barrel) flexes and vibrates on firing.

 

 

Sorry for wall of text, I just wanted to draw a line under all that

 

Edited March 19, 2018 by p1t1o

[ARS]

Ever wondered why the space combat depicted in movies/ sci-fi seems to follow naval battle traditions? Broadside attack, torpedoes, space fighters, escape pods and all other aspect of space opera seems to invoke the feel of that the space = ocean. Well, we get it that sci-fi writer and filmmaker isn't a rocket scientist. But for some reason, when people write about space, they tend to make parallels to the sea, as JFK (himself a former naval officer) did in his "Space is the new ocean" speech. Often, it goes far beyond metaphor.   Sci-fi writers frequently use nautical analogies for pretty much everything in space, and fill in the gaps in their own knowledge about spaceflight with details specific to sea travel. Some of them includes:

1.-Ports: Before the spaceflight, there's an airplane flight, and before that, there's an age of sail. Much of modern space travel is derived from aviation, and much of that is derived from nautical tradition, partially because many of the early aircraft were seaplanes (because there were no runways yet). Many of the job titles associated with flying (Pilot, Stewardess, Purser, The Captain) and much of the other terminology was drawn from direct analogs in the seafaring trade (for instance, the fact that ships are operated from port, airplanes operate out of airport, and space center sometimes called spaceport). So it isn't much a surprise when they reference each other

2.Nautical terms: In English, the very word "astronaut"  ends in "naut". As in "nautical". "Astronaut" quite literally means "star sailor" The same goes for the Soviet and Russian term "cosmonaut" (except that it means, well, "cosmos sailor"). The left and right side of a spacecraft are referred to as "port" and "starboard" respectively, such as during the launch of NASA's Orion spacecraft on 5 December 2014.

3.Navigational Stars: The Apollo astronauts used celestial navigation during their missions, something that sailors have been doing for centuries, and early ballistic missile systems like Snark and Trident also used automated celestial navigation (using cameras fixed on particular stars) to improve their accuracy in the days before GPS and other more modern forms of guidance.

4.Ship/Vessel?: Quite commonly, spacecraft are often called "spaceships", and sometimes just "ships". In many series, a small spacecraft can even be called a "spaceboat" or "boat", and space-based missiles are in some stories also called "torpedoes". Furthermore, the classes of ships in the sci-Fi Fleet are usually analogous to classes of waterborne ships, especially those used during World War II: Cruiser, Battleship, Destroyer, Frigate, etc. Good luck finding a Space Schooner or Space Canoe. Spacecraft even have "lifeboats"—generally called escape pods or something similar—despite the concept being largely impractical in case of realistic space travel. Furthermore, most weapons of space battles are often named like naval ship analogue (Torpedoes, cannons, battery, etc.). And finally, while space fighter is generally an impractical idea in real life, it seems only exist solely to tell the stories of a fighter pilot (Reminiscent of WW2 pilot stories) in space

5.Space islands: In sci-fi, habitable planets are scattered across the universe just like islands in a huge unexplored archipelago. Spaceships in fiction generally need to stock up supplies and energy on board between travels, just like how the ships from the age of sail restock their supplies in the past.

6.Ranks: In fiction, space militaries almost always use naval ranks, as opposed to army ranks or the RAF system, and soldiers stationed in space are usually called "marines", e.g. the "space marines" of Aliens, Doom, Marathon, StarCraft, etc. Starship Troopers did not call its soldiers marines though it could be argued that it established the archetype for later space marine forces. Even in real life, space explorers are called "astronauts" and "cosmonauts".

7. Standard design: In fiction, spaceships have a very noticeable "top" and "bottom". Cockpits, conning-towers, communication dishes, weapons etc. will mostly be on the "top". The underside will be smoother, often punctuated only by a "bomb-bay" style docking hatch. The top is always oriented with regard to a universal definition of "up" that all space-faring polities seemingly accept. This could be justified for vehicles designed for atmospheric flight and landing, but makes no sense for orbit-to-deep-space-only ships. Also, Spaceships have a bridge with a big window in the front that looks out on space and is usually at the front or top of the ship. The decks of the spaceship will be parallel to the direction of flight, just like most tanker/cargo ships

8.Space storms: Sometimes, a spacecraft can be caught in an "ion storm" or the like, which will toss it hither and thither and ultimately run it aground on a strange exotic uncharted planet like how wooden ship in the past being stranded on unknown island due to being hit by a storm. (Ion storms are a real phenomenon, but they don't work like ocean storms; an ion storm is simply an unusually intense burst of solar wind)

9.Fog: In fiction, sometimes nebulas can hide your ship just like how an ocean fog obscure the visibility on the sea (In real life, nebulas are actually too empty to hide the ship. Their particles are spread so far with each other that it doesn't like a fog at all. Their fog-like appearance is simply because of their sheer size)

10.Floating in space: In fiction, hovering things in space have to move up and down slightly, just like how things floats on sea (as in, like 3 kerbals in KSP's title screen, they seem to bob slightly up and down)

11.Asteroid evasion: In fiction, piloting spacecraft between asteroids is often compared to navigating boats and ships across the waters between rocky islands and islets within an archipelago on Earth (In real life, the asteroid belt is very empty actually, so much that if you stand on an asteroid on the densest part of the belt, you won't even notice the nearest asteroid)

In Space Opera, Science Fantasy and Steam Punk Fantasy genres, writers are fond of filling Space with aether streams and solar winds, even magical ships with solar sails that literally "sail" through the void. (Solar winds and sails are an actual thing. Bill Nye, for one, took part in a program that launched a small craft into space that, once up there, used a solar sail (essentially a large mirror made of mylar) to 'catch' the minuscule pressure imparted by reflected sunlight. The Japanese IKAROS space probe is a working example of this. On the other hand, 'solar winds', being streams of charged particles emitted by the sun, cannot be used for 'space sailing'). In those cases, you may find you can even breathe in Space, and if you're lucky you can even ignore the vacuum. Characterization and plot may also come straight out of the archetypes created during the era of wooden ships and iron men as well—including intrepid explorers, lost colonies, an exotic beauty in every port, and space pirates as well as giant spaceborne monsters. To some extent, all of them are justified, not only was space thought to be some kind of fluid until the turn of the 20th century, (The fluid was called "luminiferous aether"; physicists knew they couldn't detect it, but thought that they simply did not have the technical skill to do so at the time. We later discovered that the reason aether couldn't be detected is because it doesn't exist. This wasn't because they were stupid back then and couldn't imagine empty space — it's because they were sure light waves needed something to propagate through, just as sound waves do. As it turns out, they don't, or at least the vacuum, while being a "thing", is not the same kind of "thing" as fluid. Modern physics makes crack fanfic look sane) but seafarers long ago evolved the organizational techniques necessary to safely operate a self-sufficient vessel in a potentially hostile environment for an extended period of time, and it makes more sense to adopt nautical administrative and logistic features (and the terms for them) instead of inventing everything from scratch. As science fiction (and the aviation industry) has matured, space = air has become a complement to space = ocean. Typically, large ships like battleships/ carriers will be based on naval craft, while smaller craft like the space fighter will be treated like aircraft. The two are not mutually exclusive — far from it, since it allows writers to recreate World War II (particularly the Pacific theater, with its pioneering of large-scale naval aviation) in space, which is pretty cool, as it allows using the tactics of the old-school dogfight and having to close to broadside range with capital ship guns. Land transport metaphors tend to fall flat. Elements of road vehicles are generally for comedic effect; if a spacecraft has a manual transmission, it's a sure sign that comedy is a prime consideration. There's also a small but generally serious set of exceptions that imagine space as a railroad instead—ranging from literal portrayals of trains in space to plots that take their inspiration from real-life railroad history or the use of hyperspace "routes". Lots of speculative fiction in all media depict spaceships designed to land on water, since an ocean provides what amounts to an infinite runway with a similarly infinite capacity for absorbing the heat of re-entry.

One could argue, with some success, space = ocean applies if instead one imagines space ships less as "sailing ships" and more as "submarines." Submarines and space craft share similarities, for example, both move in three dimensional space, and prolonged exposure to space (or water...you get it) outside the vessel can be deadly (if the sub is currently at depth) as well as visual displays of the outside environment are less than useless (both space and the briny deep are inky black), it also makes the torpedo analogy works better as well, and finally, NASA named their space shuttles right out of maritime tradition. There's even a test shuttle named Enterprise. There is also the fact that the orbits of most of the planets of the solar System have an inclination of plus-or-minus 3° from a particular plane (the "ecliptic plane"), (With Pluto demoted, Mercury is now the only exception and even its inclination is only 6.3°, although large bodies beyond Pluto and Batygin and Brown's theoretically-possible "Planet Nine" have orbits at very high inclinations (up to 30°) to the ecliptic plane) and that the majority of the star systems within The Milky Way Galaxy spiral arms are within 1° of the plane of the galactic disc, which applies to the arms only, not the bulge or the halo, though said invariable ecliptic plane is not coplanar with the galactic disk.

This tradition has gone on so long that assuming Earth does ever manage create routine space flight (which is unfortunately looking less likely) it is almost certain that this could be carried on in real life. It is a possibility that the Navy might take over space faring expeditions because they already function on a tradition of being out at sea for long stretches of time living off of the resources on the ship, whereas the Air Force eventually has to get their aircrafts back on the ground to refuel. Though in the event of any such space version of the regular military forces, there might be room for joint military task forces or even have the air force adopt naval traditions to avoid having authority stripped from them in outer space.

Edited March 20, 2018 by ARS

[DAL59]

2 hours ago, ARS said:

The decks of the spaceship will be parallel to the direction of flight, just like most tanker/cargo ships

That's something the expanse gets right- decks are perpendicular to acceleration.

[kerbiloid]

Why have a crew on space battleship?

Biogunner can't aim at such velocities and distances.
Bioloader can't load a laser or a railgun.
Biodriver or biopilot can't pilot the ship at such velocities.
Bionavigator with manual tools can nothing.
And so on.

Spoiler

A biocaptain to command, a bioleutenant (because captain needs somebody to give orders and hear "Aye aye, sir!"), a biodoctor to heal them both if required.
That's the trio of brave to fight between the stars.
Other crewmembers should be AI.
Bioadmiral and admirobot would make plans.

 

[DAL59]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Why have a crew on space battleship?

Hacking, emps, electron beams.

Also, speed delay.  You'd want a heavily guarded mothership, with automated carriers and drones.  

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, DAL59 said:

Also, speed delay.  You'd want a heavily guarded mothership, with automated carriers and drones.  

Or just an automated rocket carrier.

[DDE]

On ‎21‎.‎03‎.‎2018 at 1:29 AM, DAL59 said:

Hacking, emps, electron beams.

Still hits the (necessary) man-machine interface, relatively easy to shield against, and just as deadly to humans, respectively.

[p1t1o]

Ideally, space warcraft would not require human crew because of huge physical limitations. For one thing, you'd have to install a bunch of toilets, which are not particularly useful in battle and weigh a lot.

Reaction times are not really relevant because humans would always be operating in conjunction with computers. Even a 20th-century era "Phalanx" CIWS is not "manually" operated.

There are two reasons to have human crew - 

 

Accountability - Who is responsible for waging the war? Who makes the decisions? Obviously, there does not need to be a general on every space fighter, but there needs to be a human in the loop somewhere, otherwise who is fighting this war?

You can keep the humans off-ship, but then there are time-lag issues. 

You can program a computer to make these decisions for you but someone has to "pre-make" those decisions when doing the programming, and there are many cases where you'd want the programmer to have much more up-to-date information. Essentially, you may want computer operators on-site, with access to sensor telemetry and without any lag between input and action.

Even an AI has to be tasked, and there are advantages to having the person giving the orders nearby.

 

Because you need them - maybe in the future we will have access to AI that can reliably be left in charge of waging a battle without supervision, but that is a tall order, and until then, a human brain is the best AI ("I"?) we've got.

 

Oh sure, you can extrapolate infinitely into the future and say "Space wars dont need humans because computers are faster and make better decisions"

And one could easily say "Space warships will be obsolete because by the time we can build good ones, we will be able to shoot them down from surface installations"

In other words, extrapolating that far into the future, you can justify almost anything.

But the reasons for "Why would we need human crew of any kind?" and "Why wouldn't we need a human crew of any kind?" will always be valid.

 

It may easily be the case that in the far future, a whole fleet can be commanded by one on-site human.

And it is also the case that at some point in the infinite future, entirely automatic wars will be fought with barely a human noticing.

 

But I think we can say for certain that fleets of huge space battleships each with a crew of thousands, is unlikely to ever occur.

[DDE]

31 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Accountability - Who is responsible for waging the war? Who makes the decisions? Obviously, there does not need to be a general on every space fighter, but there needs to be a human in the loop somewhere, otherwise who is fighting this war?

I suspect that human-free, autonomous decision-making for weapon use is going to be resolved by the time deep-space warfare becomes relevant. Perhaps the humans of tomorrow would prefer that the decision to go to war is made by machines - the desire to offload responsibility to a (seemingly) benevolent tyrant is nigh-universal.

[p1t1o]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

I suspect that human-free, autonomous decision-making for weapon use is going to be resolved by the time deep-space warfare becomes relevant. Perhaps the humans of tomorrow would prefer that the decision to go to war is made by machines - the desire to offload responsibility to a (seemingly) benevolent tyrant is nigh-universal.

I think its too far of an extrapolation. Especially if you compare the recent trend - in the past robotic servants were all the rage, all you need do is check out all of those charming "predictions" of what the future would be like from 50-100 years ago. But now, people loathe the idea of computers controlling autonomous weapons, so there has been a negative trend.

Sure in the future, it might reverse, but it is equally reasonable to assume that with the exponentially increasing complexity of machines, that people balk even more about them controlling aspects of their lives.

One could say that war fought by machines is preferable because fewer lives are lost...until a machine goes wrong and we try and figure out who to blame.

Because in the end, even in the far future, we are still human. And if we arent, then all predictions go out the window anyway.

So I just tried to present good reasons why, and good reasons why not, how the future reacts is anyones guess. IMO.

 

Just after WW2, there were many people of authority who assumed that manned air combat was a thing of the past, as they had just started to invent missiles. It was assumed that all air combat would be via missile from then on, and look what happened.

 

We could easily have fully autonomous combat drones today, the only reason we have human drone pilots is accountability (and because the distance is still short enough to keep remote control feasible).

Having said that, there is early work being done on naval drones that would have more autonomy than the UCAVs we are used to, even drone submarines which by necessity would need to have a lot of autonomy as the communication links would be very poor.

Modern missiles could be thought of as fully autonomous combat drones with the power to make lethal decisions (some, for example, can visually search for programmed targets and call off an attack if none are found. Some can even attack as a coordinated "swarm"), but I think they are sufficiently different as any discussion of them would muddy the waters.

Edited March 22, 2018 by p1t1o

[DAL59]

Well, we could make the remote control argument for modern ships too.   

[p1t1o]

A *semi*-autonomous car with a *human driver* in it, killed a pedestrian in a collision recently, and the moral debate is already hotting up.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

you'd have to install a bunch of toilets, which are not particularly useful in battle

Depends on impact speed.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Accountability - Who is responsible for waging the war?

Who lost.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Who makes the decisions?

Good ones - General/Admiral at HQ.
False ones - MIA leutenant.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

You can keep the humans off-ship, but then there are time-lag issues. 

When a space fleet arrives to the battlefieldspace, it is familiar for enemy down to most negligible details.
Because it took several months to arrive, under all enemy telescopes.
Then 5 minutes of automatic battle.
Then the opponents start building new fleets.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Oh sure, you can extrapolate infinitely into the future and say "Space wars dont need humans because computers are faster and make better decisions"

And because all possible decisions and plans already have been simulated a month before the opponent arrival.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

And one could easily say "Space warships will be obsolete because by the time we can build good ones, we will be able to shoot them down from surface installations"

And because you have to return them for relod and repair.
While you can just send a bunch of single-use modules. Anyway they will be damaged and most probably stay there.

4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

And it is also the case that at some point in the infinite future, entirely automatic wars will be fought with barely a human noticing.

In simulations. Why spend money and build Death Stars.

[DAL59]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Then 5 minutes of automatic battle.

Spaceships are expensive.  You'd probably want to capture ships, not destroy them.  

[kerbiloid]

20 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Spaceships are expensive.  You'd probably want to capture ships, not destroy them.

Any friendly ship will be damaged and require repair.
Any grapple needs a lot of delta-V, and the prize ship will be damaged and need repair, too.
So, the expensive spaceships would be unhumanned and expendable.

P.S.
A brain of a bee _{(maybe literally, extracted from a bee and attached to the computer)} can pilot the ship. It can perform a simple evasive action and make a suicide bite.

Edited March 22, 2018 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

@kerbiloid

lol excellent points, here are some off-the-cuff responses:

 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

In simulations. Why spend money and build Death Stars.

Because someone with a deathstar can win any simulation.

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

And because all possible decisions and plans already have been simulated a month before the opponent arrival.

You've never heard "No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy" before?

Besides, if both sides have done this, neither side has.

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Who lost.

You know, what I was actually thinking about was friendly fire. Even if you win, who do you hang out to dry for that drone that glassed the colony on Rigel 7?

***

41 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Spaceships are expensive.  You'd probably want to capture ships, not destroy them.  

Reasonable point, but I cant think of anything more dangerous than being a marine tasked with this. No thank you sir.

***

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

So, the expensive spaceships would be unhumanned and expendable.

Essentially long-range missiles?

So would it follow then, that rather than resembling naval combat (which is already regarded as unlikely), a space war might resemble (tactically and strategically) more like the general nuclear exchange that was so feared during the cold war?

Rather than warships manouvering for position, you have planets "manouvering" for industrial and technological capacity to nuke the other guy, the war being largely fought theoretically, before a "spasm" exchange settles the outcome:

"That guy built more silos, so we will build an anti-silo weapon, except espionage leaked the plans and the enemy sees themselves as largely resistant to any military response so they take the opportunity to attack. Little do they know that you have a second delivery system which has taken the long way around to sneak through a gap in sensor coverage caused by mechanical failure, discovered by your operatives, ."

 

Its not quite the right comparison, but that cant help but remind me of Season 1 Episode 1 of the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

***

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

P.S.
A brain of a bee _{(maybe literally, extracted from a bee and attached to the computer)} can pilot the ship. It can perform a simple evasive action and make a suicide bite.

LOVE this idea.

But if I got wind of it, I'd install the brain of a bee-eater bird into my ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee-eater

Edited March 22, 2018 by p1t1o

[DAL59]

58 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

So would it follow then, that rather than resembling naval combat (which is already regarded as unlikely), a space war might resemble (tactically and strategically) more like the general nuclear exchange that was so feared during the cold war?

 

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

So would it follow then, that rather than resembling naval combat (which is already regarded as unlikely), a space war might resemble (tactically and strategically) more like the general nuclear exchange that was so feared during the cold war?

You might want to seize control of a planet, not destroy it.

[p1t1o]

57 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

You might want to seize control of a planet, not destroy it.

Well I may have been assuming counter-force strikes, but for some targets we can use tailored bioagents instead of nukes, no problemo.

Edited March 22, 2018 by p1t1o

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

You've never heard "No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy" before?

Unless both fleets make all shots two weeks before the first contact, because who didn't — just got hit with full ammo onboard.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Even if you win, who do you hang out to dry for that drone that glassed the colony on Rigel 7?

A random guy declared guilty, who is hated/despised by majority of his crew.
Or a random guy hated by the former Rigel 7's owners, who was definitely a Fomalhautian saboteur.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Essentially long-range missiles?

A single-use wireframe ship carrying a dozen of self-propelled bee-brained gamma-lasers with multiple individually aiming barrels on a single nuke charge.
Tens of them.
Several months of accelerating flight, calculations and simulations of different cases of future battle with similar enemy fleet moving from the opposite direction.
They would launch most of their gamma-lasers in weeks before the fire contact. No braking.

Once the gamma-laser vanguards of both fleets meet, they aim the barrels, distributing them optimally. And detonate their charges making a short mass shot.
Most of gamma-lasers and ships are destroyed or damaged in a minute. Nobody brakes.

The defender side has no remaining lasers, as the earlier they launch all of them - the more agressor crafts will be taken out.

The agressor side launches the rest of gamma-lasers, and the bees focus all rays on the mission objective (say, Death Star).
Empty carrier wireframe ships don't brake or return, but self-destroy themselves.

Both sides build new fleets to repeat.

No crews involved.

2 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I'd install the brain of a bee-eater bird into my ships.

Overcomplicated. A bee will just bite it with a gamma-laser.
So, it will anyway turn into a battle of bees.

P.S.
Bees are liking swarms. So, a swarm of gamma-lasers, performing simple evasive actions, making one suicidal bite, and leaving the place to die alone is how they imagine the life at all.

Edited March 22, 2018 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Unless both fleets make all shots two weeks before the first contact, because who didn't — just got hit with full ammo onboard.

How curious...what you just described was a very prominent concept during the Cold War, "Use 'em or Lose 'em."

 

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Overcomplicated. A bee will just bite it by launching a gamma-laser.

So, it will anyway turn into a battle of bees.

Ha! No conflict was ever won by the phrase "...will just..."

You are assuming you can train bees to use a beam weapon?

Well, you probably can, when I worked at Rentokill briefly, the state-of-the-art method of detecting bedbugs was trained wasps.

Anyhoo, you just described a conflict almost completely dominated by arms-race dynamics, another common Cold War concept.

Im beginning to think I have a valid theory

 

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

A random guy declared guilty, who is hated/despised by majority of his crew.
Or a random guy hated by the former Rigel 7's owners, who was definitely a Fomalhautian saboteur.

To be honest, whilst this might have happened in various real scenarios, and you may be able to get away with it a few times in the heat of war, this is not exactly a tenable policy on which to build a fighting force. It demonstrates something that might prevent entirely, the rise of automated combat.

 

 

Edited March 22, 2018 by p1t1o

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

Ha! No conflict was ever won by the phrase "...will just..."

No past conflict was lasting several seconds.

The assault fleet needs months to reach the target.
So, no suddenness, no reticence, no hidden reserves. Every square meter of hull will be studied by the enemy for several months.
When the fleet arrives, all defense systems will be rearranged optimally to kill as many invader ships as possible.

So, the only way to make some result is to speed the fleet as much as possible to minimize the fire contact duration.

So, no braking. Acceleration and only acceleration.

The fire contact will last for seconds. Five seconds after the battle begins, almost all ships will be unavoidably destroyed.
Making from both sides two waves of the swarm, in, say, 100000 km from each other, we get several minutes of battle:

• 5 s of nuclear/laser hell (1st wave),
• two minutes of waiting,
• 5 s of fire more (2nd wave).

No crew can do anything in 5 seconds.

When all lasers are spent, the remaining ships aim at target, get close, run reactors supercritical, and collide with it as thousands tons of radioactive scrap at, say, 1000 km/s speed.

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

You are assuming you can train bees to use a beam weapon?

Bees think that they use thorns.
Bees think that Death Star is a bear.

Cold or not, but the enemies are separated by AUs of distance.

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

To be honest, whilst this might have happened in various real scenarios, and you may be able to get away with it a few times in the heat of war, this is not exactly a tenable policy on which to build a fighting force.

When peace.

Edited March 22, 2018 by kerbiloid

[KerikBalm]

On 3/22/2018 at 5:54 PM, p1t1o said:

A *semi*-autonomous car with a *human driver* in it, killed a pedestrian in a collision recently, and the moral debate is already hotting up.

Which, IMO is ridiculous. From the video, the pedestrian was clearly at fault.

On 3/22/2018 at 4:55 PM, DAL59 said:

Well, we could make the remote control argument for modern ships too.   

They are being automated to the extent that they can be to reduce the crew size. Unlike in space though, their engines need to operate for long durations, and the crew is mainly there for maintenance.

If future space combat even has "ships", instead of interplanetary ballistic missiles, its likely to be a few command ships that hang back, and autonomous craft acting on orders from the command ships. Even if the AI are better tacticians and strategists, when it comes to negotiations and politics, I'm sure the humans will still be involved - those holding the power are generally hungry for it and won't give it up for a machine. They'll happily replace their legions and underlings with machines though.

Someone needs to be there to be able to negotiate an armistice, or direct the AI to do things that will achieve political goals/affect the willingness to negotiate or make concessions. Speed of light concerns (particularly if the war is interstellar, not just interplanetary) basically require a local intelligence, and I don't think that would be left entirely up to a machine.

[Gargamel]

On 3/1/2018 at 12:07 PM, phantom000 said:

In Stargate: SG-1 they talk about 'mining' neutronium. I would love to know how you 'mine' neutronium considering it is literally the hardest substance possible, i.e. that the laws of physics say it is impossible to have anything harder.

IIRC, and sorry to bump an old topic, they never mentioned what exactly the neutronium was made from.   It wasn't neccesarily from the same material as a neutron star.  But even if it was super hard, super dense material, it wouldn't take much for the writers to say the crystalline structure of the neutronium caused it to form into small nodules in the veins it is found in.  A simple pickaxe is all that is required to break it loose from the surrounding material, making removal and refining a much easier process.   Think quartz gravel suspended in sedimentary mud, the pebbles can break off easily enough. 

-------

Watched Moon the other day.  Fun flick the lack of lunar gravity irked me.  They only hinted at it during the EVA shots, as if the lower gravity only occurs outside the base.  Even then, the harvesters seemed to be chucking rocks out the tail end under 1g loads.   

Edited March 27, 2018 by Gargamel

[magnemoe]

On 22.3.2018 at 3:18 PM, p1t1o said:

I think its too far of an extrapolation. Especially if you compare the recent trend - in the past robotic servants were all the rage, all you need do is check out all of those charming "predictions" of what the future would be like from 50-100 years ago. But now, people loathe the idea of computers controlling autonomous weapons, so there has been a negative trend.

Sure in the future, it might reverse, but it is equally reasonable to assume that with the exponentially increasing complexity of machines, that people balk even more about them controlling aspects of their lives.

One could say that war fought by machines is preferable because fewer lives are lost...until a machine goes wrong and we try and figure out who to blame.

Because in the end, even in the far future, we are still human. And if we arent, then all predictions go out the window anyway.

So I just tried to present good reasons why, and good reasons why not, how the future reacts is anyones guess. IMO.

 

Just after WW2, there were many people of authority who assumed that manned air combat was a thing of the past, as they had just started to invent missiles. It was assumed that all air combat would be via missile from then on, and look what happened.

 

We could easily have fully autonomous combat drones today, the only reason we have human drone pilots is accountability (and because the distance is still short enough to keep remote control feasible).

Having said that, there is early work being done on naval drones that would have more autonomy than the UCAVs we are used to, even drone submarines which by necessity would need to have a lot of autonomy as the communication links would be very poor.

Modern missiles could be thought of as fully autonomous combat drones with the power to make lethal decisions (some, for example, can visually search for programmed targets and call off an attack if none are found. Some can even attack as a coordinated "swarm"), but I think they are sufficiently different as any discussion of them would muddy the waters.

Plenty of fully autonomous weapons, anything heat seeking including cameras or using an internal radar or sonar for targeting. 
Many close in weapon systems are autonomous then active.
You solve this by either making the weapon smarter or not firing it. Say one friend is in an dogfight with an enemy, you can not fire an heat seeking missile to help that is unless you have a good friend foe identificator you trust. You will typically also set up limits there the weapon can hunt. 

This is nothing new, you can not use artillery to close to friendly forces, one of the major benefit of gps guided shells is that you can reduce this safety margin.