Pure Newtonian Combat... Surprises

[Spacescifi]

 

Scifi often features war, and to make it entertaining to watch, it is often shown only in a newtonian context.

Babylon 5 does this, as for the sake of the plot, ships leaving hyperspace come out matching the speed and trajectory of whatever they want to pursue.

Otherwise, if real orbital physics were in play, they would fly past targets and spend several minutes retroburning to make a strafing run.

 

I find it interesting that with speed and trajectory equalized at the beginning of a newtonian space battle, the biggest factor is distance.

How close can the battle start? For the sake of discussion, let's go with 100 kilometers (about a third of the way into outer space from earth).

 

With that range, missiles and fighter craft could win the day, since inertia does wonders for newtonian combat.

Akin to modern naval combat, space battleships would not exist. It is quite within human technical ability to make a missile accelerate to orbital velocity within 100 kilometers of vacuum.

At best there would be the space equvalent of air carriers and missile/flack gunships.

 

What do you think? Did my analysis miss anything of this known scifi trope?

 

EDIT: Lasers would not be the weapon of choice at this range, as a really effective one would make a giant, slow target... at relatively close range.

 

EDIT: If you maximized the starting battle distance to a 1000 kilometers, then bigger space warships would have more of a chance. To offload missiles/fighters and make a run for it before their opponents 'cargo' catches up with them.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi
Spelling

[kerbiloid]

The only reaiistic space battle I know was the Martian IPBM counter-attack in Expanse.

It took about five seconds of screen time.

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The only reaiistic space battle I know was the Martian IPBM counter-attack in Expanse.

 

Perhaps. Never saw it as I do not get that channel.

Newtonian combat I also do think is more interesting for a gamer or TV watcher.

As opposed to watching people talk for 45 min while all the action happens in mere seconds.

 

Come to think of it... that was how TNG was. They could have stuck to real orbital mechanics and it would not have changed the series much LOL.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Any fighter will be
either shot down (by gamma-laser, by some kind of shockwave, by a hypervelocity projectile) long before it can approach to the target,
or lost in space when the same happens with the carrier.

Unlike the Earth, the space fighter is a much slower maneuverist than its carrier. And with no armor.

Only multiple-wave mass attack of single-use uncrewed gamma-lasers or at least projectile launching platforms (like in the Expanse), only hardcore.
So, no maneuvers, no retroburns.

The objective is just to make the opponent stop producing moar ships, then deliver dropships to capture what remains.

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

12 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Any fighter will be
either shot down (by gamma-laser, by some kind of shockwave, by a hypervelocity projectile) long before it can approach to the target,
or lost in space when the same happens with the carrier.

Unlike the Earth, the space fighter is a much slower maneuverist than its carrier.

Only multiple-wave mass attack of single-use uncrewed gamma-lasers or at least projectile platforms (like in the Expanse), only hardcore.
So, no maneuvers, no retroburns.

 

100 kilometers is a short distance to cover. We can make orbit fighting gravity in about 8 min.

Fighting gravity is not at issue here, so presumably missiles and fighters could cover the distance even faster.

 

Also lasers are known for being BIG and fragile.  Since missiles are fired in swarms anyway, that could defeat a laser battleship.

 

Laser battleships could win if there were enough, but I think it less cost effective considering the size, energy, and waste heat issues.

An opponent who relied more on missiles I would think would produce them more numerously and cheaper than the big laser battleships.

 

EDIT: Now if we change the starting distance to farther out like a 1000 kilometers... then lasers, being the long range weapon they are, truly show an advantage... until you have to cool them off anyway by halting from firing.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

36 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

100 kilometers is a short distance to cover.

1000 km is a short distance for a laser shot.
So, the fighters add nothing to the carrier defense.

36 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

lasers are known for being BIG and fragile. 

Xray/gamma lasers are known for being D~1m x L~10 m big and expendable.
Or a little bigger hedgehog of them to hit all fighters at once.

And why fragile if their bunch of rods is made of metal, while tanks and propulsion system is at least not more fragile than the fighter's one.
Without meatbags inside they are stronger than the fighters.

36 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Laser battleships could win if there were enough

And a swarm of expendable xray/gamma lasers can be much larger, and hit all fighter carriers at once.

36 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

until you have to cool them off anyway by halting from firing.

They become plasma clouds after single shot, nothing to cool.

It's a nuke and a 0.5 m thick bunch of 10 m long and several millimeters thick metal rods (like fasces) attached to the nuke with one end and pointing at the target with another.
You can have several bunches around a nuke, to hit several targets, or just one, as you wish.
So, a pack of fighters would be shot by one shot.

Actually nobody needs to kill the fighters. The laser will just pierce the carrier in several places.

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

1000 km is a short distance for a laser shot.
So, the fighters add nothing to the carrier defense.

Xray/gamma lasers are known for being D~1m x L~10 m big and expendable.
Or a little bigger hedgehog of them to hit all fighters at once.

And why fragile if their bunch of rods is made of metal, while tanks and propulsion system is at least not more fragile than the fighter's one.
Without meatbags inside they are stronger than the fighters.

And a swarm of expendable xray/gamma lasers can be much larger, and hit all fighter carriers at once.

They become plasma clouds after shot, nothing to cool.

 

Who said humans would be manning fighters?

In space it would be an extra mass/inertial liabilty for little gain, as a human just issues commands that an AI could do.

X-Ray lasers may or may not be accurate shots due to the explosion *bomb powered lasee), although I will grant you that close range is a huge advantage 

 

Also lasers tend to do pinprick damage.

They do not do the same level of damage that kinetics do. Unless the power is scaled up a lot.

So spaceships could survive a laser strike intact if armored.

A missile swarm strike?

 

Not likely.

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=prlIhY3e04k

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Who said humans would be manning fighters?

In space it would be an extra mass/inertial liabilty for little gain, as a human just issues commands that an AI could do.

The best unmanned fighters are xray/gamma laser kamikazes.

2 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

X-Ray lasers may or may not be accurate shots due to the explosion *bomb powered lasee),

The explosion doesn't affect the accuracy in any degree. On explosion it's a plasma cloud, and all useful events happen long before its atoms can change place.

[Spacescifi]

8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The best unmanned fighters are xray/gamma laser kamikazes.

The explosion doesn't affect the accuracy in any degree. On explosion it's a plasma cloud, and all useful events happen long before its atoms can change place.

 

Has it ever been tested? Or proven to be accurate at shots?

I only express doubt not to win a debate (such are worthless) but only to understand.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Also lasers tend to do pinprick damage.

Xray/gamma laser make a several meters wide hot spot due to the diffraction, evaporate the outer layer and crash the internals of the starship with the explosion.
Like Death Star does. Did it cut Alderaan in halves or burst?

14 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Has it ever been tested?

It was designed in 1980s.

Have space fighters?

14 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Or proven to be accurate at shots?

It's as fast and accurate as any other light beam.

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Xray/gamma laser make a several meters wide hot spot due to the diffraction, evaporate the outer layer and crash the internals of the starship with the explosion. Like Death Star does.

It was designed in 1980s.

Have space fighters?

It's as fast and accurate as any other light beam.

 

Alright. Even so, a  thick armored vessel could take a lot of 'splash' damage from such lasers.

 

Unlike scifi, the smart thing to do is NOT pressurize all of a spaceship, as that makes it harder to go BOOM!

If there must be a human crew in a space battle it would be a small one in an armored, pressurizef small area of the ship in a place you would not suspect.

 

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, Spacescifi said:

a  thick armored vessel could take a lot of 'splash' damage from such lasers.

1. As from any other weapon. And xray/gamma rays are the most efficient way to deliver this energy.
2. Who needs the thick armored vessels when they anyway will be hit by a swarm of drones. Battleships disappeared in 1940s.

No crew, no armor.

[Spacescifi]

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

1. As from any other weapon. And xray/gamma rays are the most efficient way to deliver this energy.
2. Who needs the thick armored vessels when they anyway will be hit by a swarm of drones. Battleships disappeared in 1940s.

No crew, no armor.

 

1. They are efficient, but lower DPS than kinetic missile swarms. Railgun rounds too. Kinetics are more or less solid chunks of potential energy.

2.

Armored vessels are the only way to counter your bomb lasers from destroying my scenario space fleet assets.

Fighters would get wrecked I know. But armored vessels would not. Once the bomb lasers run out the real offensive would begin.

My strategy against bomb pumped lasers would be to put a fleet of armored ships ahead to absorb the splash damage from the lasers, and seemingly counter intuitively, have the missile carriers begind them, and behind them would be the drone fighters with shotgun cannon.

 

I would not even bother sending troop transports until my space fleet was unopposed.

 

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

7 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

They are efficient, but lower DPS than kinetic missile swarms. Railgun rounds too. Kinetics are more or less solid chunks of potential energy.

With several km/s max velocity a cannon kinetic projectile can not be as efficient as a nuke even close.
Because 1 kt = 4.2*10¹² J.
At 2 km/s speed the projectile mass should be 2 000 t.

Also the gunship will be hit from 1000 km by laser beams for ~10 minutes earlier than the projectiles can arrive.

12 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Armored vessels are the only way to counter your bomb lasers from destroying my scenario space fleet assets.

The laserbombs will anyway be destroyed either by their purposed explosion, or by an opponent's shot, or on timeout.
Instead of sending additional 1000 t of metal as hulls, it's much better to send the additional 1000 t of metal as additional lasers.

14 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Fighters would get wrecked I know.

Nobody will touch the fighters. Let'em endlessly drift away when the carrier is hit.
It's not the Earth where they can do something without the mothership.

That's why nobody would make the fighters. They can't protect the carrier from beams, and they can't get to a far target without the carrier.

17 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

But armored vessels would not.

In seconds, after several tens of nuclear-powered laser hits.

18 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

My strategy against bomb pumped lasers would be to put a fleet of armored ships ahead to absorb the splash damage from the lasers

And let them defend from 100 laserbombs per each one made by your opponent instead of the battleships.

Also, the ship turret can not be as efficient as a laserbomb just because it can't burst a nuke on the ship hull.

So, the armored battleships will do like WWII did - sink after an air assault.

[Spacescifi]

32 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

With several km/s max velocity a cannon kinetic projectile can not be as efficient as a nuke even close.
Because 1 kt = 4.2*10¹² J.
At 2 km/s speed the projectile mass should be 2 000 t.

Also the gunship will be hit from 1000 km by laser beams for ~10 minutes earlier than the projectiles can arrive.

The laserbombs will anyway be destroyed either by their purposed explosion, or by an opponent's shot, or on timeout.
Instead of sending additional 1000 t of metal as hulls, it's much better to send the additional 1000 t of metal as additional lasers.

Nobody will touch the fighters. Let'em endlessly drift away when the carrier is hit.
It's not the Earth where they can do something without the mothership.

That's why nobody would make the fighters. They can't protect the carrier from beams, and they can't get to a far target without the carrier.

In seconds, after several tens of nuclear-powered laser hits.

And let them defend from 100 laserbombs per each one made by your opponent instead of the battleships.

Also, the ship turret can not be as efficient as a laserbomb just because it can't burst a nuke on the ship hull.

So, the armored battleships will do like WWII did - sink after an air assault.

 

The spacebattle ships goung up against the swarm of lasbombs would not only have armor, but arms too.

 

Sandcaster shotgun spray is but one of several ways to mitgate the effectiveness of your attacks. The other is chemical missile swarms, fired from behind the battlecruisers from the missile carriers.

Chemical missiles will outnumber your bome lasers since they are cheape/easier to make, so you will either exhaust them all destroying blasting hulks of dead batteships covering for others behind them, or use them up defeating my missiles, or risk allowing my larger, cheaper swarm of chemical missiles hit whatever cruisers that are launching your bomb lasers.

That is the advantage of inertia. A killed ship can still drift and provide some cover for a fleet behind it.

This is not like star wars where the energy DEW's are so powerful syuff is bliwn into dust. Far from it. At best the bomb lasers try to mic damage you could do with kinetics, just not as penetrative.

This battle is essentially the ancient Roman Legion VS a whole army of British longbowmen.

Yes the longboman can take out several Romans at a distance, but once the Romans get witin range to throw their javelins and charge with swords, it will be over.

Heavy armor/weapons vs long range light but massed offense.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

This battle is essentially the ancient Roman Legion VS a whole army of British longbowmen.

It's a battle of Roman Legion against a burst of flechette shells or a field of Claymores but not the Scottish ones.

Of course, they may make colored smokes, and even blare trumpets, this won't change anything.

P.S.
Even for Legio II Augusta Antoninina.

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It's a battle of Roman Legion against a burst of flechette shells or a field of Claymores but not the Scottish ones.

Of course, they may make colored smokes, and even blare trumpets, this won't change anything.

P.S.
Even for Legio II Augusta Antoninina.

 

Okay, so apparently casaba howitzers are really lethal stuff (looked it up on tough scifi).

 

Change of strategy. Unarmored missile cruisers. Fire everything. Just a box with a rocket engine, minimal sensors, and full of small missiles.

 

It really comes down to cost vs effectiveness. While I will lose a LOT of missiiles and missile cruisers, in quantity those missiles could overwhelm the ships launching the casaba howitzers.

So it all comes down to affordability vs effectiveness.

Yes yours are more effective, but if you do not have more than me to balance out my numbers (could easily outnumber your force 2 to one) then winning is not definitely assured.

 

The most effective formation would be to scatter my fleet like a vast swarm, since your casaba howiters could cut a hole through the fleet, but are'nt destroying every single one.

 

It's either MAD or a pyrric victory for either side.

It's a smashing victory if you outnumber my forces so much that I would not try.

 

Quantity vs quality. Quantity is a quality all it's own. The south arguably had better military leaders in the US civil war. What wore them down? Quantity of resources of the north was greater then theirs.

 

EDIT: Ever played a modded chess game with a normal chess army two rows deep vs 4 row deep army of pawns and a king?

Winning is hard agaibst an opponent who knows what they are doing.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

Wrong game. If you want space combat, go take a look at Children of a Dead Earth: 
http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net

Some key things to take away:
1. Economics rule. Getting a performance advantage is one thing, but in practice, a side with more resources to throw at the problem will win. This doesn't have to mean more ships, but might mean one really big ship, which may be more economical. Efficiency is key.
2. Armor works very well, but it has to be designed right. Sloping armor is crucial. Spaced armor is amazing against kinetics, and if the outer layer is heat-resistant, it works against energy weapons as well.
3. Ranges are short. The fiercest combat takes place within 100km. Beyond that, you're just slinging missiles at each other. Combat is really resolved at 10km or less, unless it is very uneven. Missiles can be fired from across the system. 1000km engagement range is for missiles, certain kinds of lasers, and ultra-high speed "sandblaster" railguns, firing rounds as light as one gram, but firing them incredibly fast. Besides missiles, all those are very high tech solutions.
4. Combat is one-dimensional.  Ships close in, then merge. It's a head-on joust, even dodging is limited. 
5. Radiators are vulnerable, but not all that much. Edge-on, they're incredibly hard to hit.
6. Missile dreadnoughts rule the day. Large, armored, with many guns and a missile battery. They are very aerodynamic-looking, because the whole nose has to be highly sloped. Larger ships are more mass-efficient thanks to square-cube law.
7. It often comes down to guns. What makes a good CIWS (low spread, high speed, high rate of fire) also makes a good anti-ship cannon. Cannons firing heavy shells are great at killing the target outright, but are hard to make and will likely get damaged before they can be used, because heavy rounds will fly slowly, and this will decrease their effective range. Faster-flying rounds let you fire at the target for longer, delivering more total energy, which is what decides engagements.
8. Missiles are great, but it's hard to carry a lot of them, and they are easy to shot down. Screening your dreadnought's approach with missiles is a good tactic. If the enemies are shooting at the missiles, they aren't shooting at you. If some of them make it to the end, so much better.
9. Drones (fighters, basically) are missiles with a gun. They are heavier than missiles, so you can carry less, but with a strong cannon firing heavy rounds (speed is not that important, the drone provides that), they can do a lot of damage. Their biggest advantage is strategic - you can recover and reuse most of the drone after it made a pass. Drones can be armored, but they are so small that it is not very efficient.
10. Lasers are good at shooting down missiles and drones. At very close range, they can be a workable backup weapon. They can also burn out turrets, though they have trouble with radiators. 
11. You are limited by energy you can put into your weapons, which is the same as energy generated aboard your ship times your weapon efficiency. Ships and fleets are best compared by total power output, not by numbers, tonnage or size.
12. Where you fight affects how you fight. In a low planetary orbit, speeds will be very high, and combat will be extremely fast. If relative speeds are low, such as in high orbits or around smaller bodies, then the battle will take a lot longer. In high speed combat, it is useful to mount guns that trade speed for rate of fire. In low speed combat, you will close range much slower, so high speed weapons are better, because they will be able to fire at the enemy for much longer.

And yes, it is spectacular. It starts out at 50km, but the reactors run so hot that the ships are visible because of their glowing yellow radiators. They are blazing glowing red or yellow kinetic rounds (you would usually put so much energy through a round that it will heat to incandescence), which looks surprisingly like "lasers" from Star Wars. They try to reduce their opponent's armor and firepower until they pass, at which point they can no longer keep their nose pointed at each other, and then the one with more weapons left wins. Missiles and drones are used in swarms.

Gamma ray lasers, particle beams and other exotic technologies aren't really feasible, BTW. They typically lack the range to compete with kinetics and regular lasers. Casaba Howitzer is just an enhanced nuke, it doesn't have the range to be a primary weapon. It would be mounted on missiles to allow them to strike from a slightly higher distance. 

Edited October 5, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

Agreed with p.4.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Wrong game. If you want space combat, go take a look at Children of a Dead Earth: 
http://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net

Some key things to take away:
1. Economics rule. Getting a performance advantage is one thing, but in practice, a side with more resources to throw at the problem will win. This doesn't have to mean more ships, but might mean one really big ship, which may be more economical. Efficiency is key.
2. Armor works very well, but it has to be designed right. Sloping armor is crucial. Spaced armor is amazing against kinetics, and if the outer layer is heat-resistant, it works against energy weapons as well.
3. Ranges are short. The fiercest combat takes place within 100km. Beyond that, you're just slinging missiles at each other. Combat is really resolved at 10km or less, unless it is very uneven. Missiles can be fired from across the system. 1000km engagement range is for missiles, certain kinds of lasers, and ultra-high speed "sandblaster" railguns, firing rounds as light as one gram, but firing them incredibly fast. Besides missiles, all those are very high tech solutions.
4. Combat is one-dimensional.  Ships close in, then merge. It's a head-on joust, even dodging is limited. 
5. Radiators are vulnerable, but not all that much. Edge-on, they're incredibly hard to hit.
6. Missile dreadnoughts rule the day. Large, armored, with many guns and a missile battery. They are very aerodynamic-looking, because the whole nose has to be highly sloped. Larger ships are more mass-efficient thanks to square-cube law.
7. It often comes down to guns. What makes a good CIWS (low spread, high speed, high rate of fire) also makes a good anti-ship cannon. Cannons firing heavy shells are great at killing the target outright, but are hard to make and will likely get damaged before they can be used, because heavy rounds will fly slowly, and this will decrease their effective range. Faster-flying rounds let you fire at the target for longer, delivering more total energy, which is what decides engagements.
8. Missiles are great, but it's hard to carry a lot of them, and they are easy to shot down. Screening your dreadnought's approach with missiles is a good tactic. If the enemies are shooting at the missiles, they aren't shooting at you. If some of them make it to the end, so much better.
9. Drones (fighters, basically) are missiles with a gun. They are heavier than missiles, so you can carry less, but with a strong cannon firing heavy rounds (speed is not that important, the drone provides that), they can do a lot of damage. Their biggest advantage is strategic - you can recover and reuse most of the drone after it made a pass. Drones can be armored, but they are so small that it is not very efficient.
10. Lasers are good at shooting down missiles and drones. At very close range, they can be a workable backup weapon. They can also burn out turrets, though they have trouble with radiators. 
11. You are limited by energy you can put into your weapons, which is the same as energy generated aboard your ship times your weapon efficiency. Ships and fleets are best compared by total power output, not by numbers, tonnage or size.
12. Where you fight affects how you fight. In a low planetary orbit, speeds will be very high, and combat will be extremely fast. If relative speeds are low, such as in high orbits or around smaller bodies, then the battle will take a lot longer. In high speed combat, it is useful to mount guns that trade speed for rate of fire. In low speed combat, you will close range much slower, so high speed weapons are better, because they will be able to fire at the enemy for much longer.

And yes, it is spectacular. It starts out at 50km, but the reactors run so hot that the ships are visible because of their glowing yellow radiators. They are blazing glowing red or yellow kinetic rounds (you would usually put so much energy through a round that it will heat to incandescence), which looks surprisingly like "lasers" from Star Wars. They try to reduce their opponent's armor and firepower until they pass, at which point they can no longer keep their nose pointed at each other, and then the one with more weapons left wins. Missiles and drones are used in swarms.

Gamma ray lasers, particle beams and other exotic technologies aren't really feasible, BTW. They typically lack the range to compete with kinetics and regular lasers. Casaba Howitzer is just an enhanced nuke, it doesn't have the range to be a primary weapon. It would be mounted on missiles to allow them to strike from a slightly higher distance. 

A thorough analysis.

I tend to agree, but we are discussing the popular scifi trope of hyperdriving into a system from lightyears away, with speed and trajectory autoshifted to match the object of interest.

For all intents and purposes, relatively speaking, the fleets are standing still either a 100 kilometers or a thousand kilometers apart. Take your pick, I have discussed the pros and cons of both ranges I believe.

 

In this setting, combat can actually be 3-D, although the only real use would be to target a partbof an enemy vessel that you're nit already facing.

 

At high speed maneuvers would be near useless, and big ships would get murdered unless they were mistly fuel tank anyway. I guess the only real warship in such a setting would be big scifi gun boat, firing off rapid fire flack and shells on each pass.

Missiles would kill everything else.

 

And I do tend to think that larger distances are the only thing that make lasers competitive with missiles

Of course in this classic short rsnge dead stop newonian scifi scenario, lasers do not have the benefit of standoff range to not get attacked by missiles.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Gamma ray lasers, particle beams and other exotic technologies aren't really feasible, BTW.

Projects of 1970s-80s, SDI and its Soviet counterpart. Most of them tested irl.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

6. Missile dreadnoughts rule the day. Large, armored, with many guns and a missile battery. They are very aerodynamic-looking, because the whole nose has to be highly sloped. Larger ships are more mass-efficient thanks to square-cube law.
7. It often comes down to guns. What makes a good CIWS (low spread, high speed, high rate of fire) also makes a good anti-ship cannon. Cannons firing heavy shells are great at killing the target outright, but are hard to make and will likely get damaged before they can be used, because heavy rounds will fly slowly, and this will decrease their effective range. Faster-flying rounds let you fire at the target for longer, delivering more total energy, which is what decides engagements.
8. Missiles are great, but it's hard to carry a lot of them, and they are easy to shot down. Screening your dreadnought's approach with missiles is a good tactic. If the enemies are shooting at the missiles, they aren't shooting at you. If some of them make it to the end, so much better.
9. Drones (fighters, basically) are missiles with a gun. They are heavier than missiles, so you can carry less, but with a strong cannon firing heavy rounds (speed is not that important, the drone provides that), they can do a lot of damage. Their biggest advantage is strategic - you can recover and reuse most of the drone after it made a pass. Drones can be armored, but they are so small that it is not very efficient.

No comments.

P.S.
Just in case. A typical working distance of the 1980s SDI/antiSDI beam weapons ~1000 km.

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

It starts out at 50km

Then it ends at 950.
What "kinetics", what are you talking about?

Edited October 5, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

I tend to agree, but we are discussing the popular scifi trope of hyperdriving into a system from lightyears away, with speed and trajectory autoshifted to match the object of interest.

For all intents and purposes, relatively speaking, the fleets are standing still either a 100 kilometers or a thousand kilometers apart. Take your pick, I have discussed the pros and cons of both ranges I believe.

Autoshift or not, you are still in orbit. When you start in a matched orbit at long range, you need to start closing with the enemy. Ships can turn much faster than they can move across the sky, so no matter what happens, they will end up pointed at each other. It would only matter with multiple battlegroups engaging at the same time, where you can force the enemy to target one or the other, but you could set it up with orbital mechanics, too.

48 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

At high speed maneuvers would be near useless, and big ships would get murdered unless they were mistly fuel tank anyway. I guess the only real warship in such a setting would be big scifi gun boat, firing off rapid fire flack and shells on each pass.

Missiles would kill everything else.

Armor. Maneuvers are near-useless, though at extreme ranges it is good to keep moving (see below), just to get out of the path of enemy rounds. As the time to target decreases, you stop dodging and face the enemy with your thickly armored, sloped nosecone. This allows you to deflect shots while allowing all your weapons to shoot. Big ships can have a lot of armor, because volume grows more slowly than area does. Now, this isn't really true in warship design, because you want to keep the frontal area small (a smaller target is harder to hit), so in practice you want to only increase length, and then armor area increases almost linearly with volume. 

52 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

And I do tend to think that larger distances are the only thing that make lasers competitive with missiles

Of course in this classic short rsnge dead stop newonian scifi scenario, lasers do not have the benefit of standoff range to not get attacked by missiles.

Actually, really large distances favor missiles. This is the only weapon you can shoot across a planetary system, and only useful for that or as a distraction. Lasers compete with railguns, and here range does favor them, because they have no accuracy issues at long ranges, just diffraction. A missile with a pointed nose may be quite resistant to a laser attack, though. 

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Just in case. A typical working distance of the 1980s SDI/antiSDI beam weapons ~1000 km.

Then it ends at 950.
What "kinetics", what are you talking about?

No, it isn't. Question: how well can you point a spacecraft at an incoming warhead? All those "1000km" claims are pure BS, which Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates, by actually calculating such minor-looking things such as turret pointing error, or pointing inaccuracy for whole ships. Experiment, or even a good simulation, trumps theory at all times. SDI weapons were tested, but none of them shot down any actual missiles at 1000km, and in practical use, they wouldn't be able to do that. It was theorized that maybe, they could. Lasers can hit at that range, but they are severely limited by diffraction. A 100MW laser with a 40cm aperture will, at range, have intensity of 146kW per square meter. This may sound like a lot, but it isn't, you're not going to do any significant damage with that to a ship or missile armored against it. It can be improved by making a larger aperture, but in practice, in order for the laser to be any good at 1000km you end up with gigantic lenses, and it's still not very effective (though at half that distance, it does burn some impressive holes). 

Kinetics are railguns, for most part. Coilguns are slow-ish, short ranged, but hard hitting weapons. Space combat starts at 50km, because forces acting on weapons are huge. One minute of arc at 1000km equals 100 meters. Now, consider how hard it is to achieve sub-mil accuracy in a gun. Then, consider what happens if you try to do the same with a gun that has megawatts of power going through it, trying to rip it apart. If you spray a 100m radius circle with slugs, it won't do you any good, because few of your shots will be hitting. Not only that, a shot fired at 20km/s (pretty typical for these weapons), it will take 500 seconds to fly 1000km. So, you're shooting at a circle several times the area of your target, centered around the area your target was in about 9 minutes ago. Time to target is actually more important for increasing range than accuracy, provided you have a high rate of fire.

Space combat goes, depending on power levels involved, from 200-300km to the merge, at which point ships may pass within a kilometer of each other, depending on tactical decisions. 50km is, roughly, the distance at which they actually start hitting each other with anything besides lasers. It may be more, it may be less, depending on weapons involved, but kills are rare outside 50km. I have designed a railgun which sort of works at 1000km. It consumes 1GW, is over 30 meters long, fires rounds that weigh a one gram, and I'm not sure that models COADE uses work well for such extreme devices. It is a great weapon, but actually building something like that would be incredibly hard.

If you don't believe, buy COADE and find out yourself. It's pretty cheap on a sale. 

[magnemoe]

29 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Autoshift or not, you are still in orbit. When you start in a matched orbit at long range, you need to start closing with the enemy. Ships can turn much faster than they can move across the sky, so no matter what happens, they will end up pointed at each other. It would only matter with multiple battlegroups engaging at the same time, where you can force the enemy to target one or the other, but you could set it up with orbital mechanics, too.

Armor. Maneuvers are near-useless, though at extreme ranges it is good to keep moving (see below), just to get out of the path of enemy rounds. As the time to target decreases, you stop dodging and face the enemy with your thickly armored, sloped nosecone. This allows you to deflect shots while allowing all your weapons to shoot. Big ships can have a lot of armor, because volume grows more slowly than area does. Now, this isn't really true in warship design, because you want to keep the frontal area small (a smaller target is harder to hit), so in practice you want to only increase length, and then armor area increases almost linearly with volume. 

Actually, really large distances favor missiles. This is the only weapon you can shoot across a planetary system, and only useful for that or as a distraction. Lasers compete with railguns, and here range does favor them, because they have no accuracy issues at long ranges, just diffraction. A missile with a pointed nose may be quite resistant to a laser attack, though. 

No, it isn't. Question: how well can you point a spacecraft at an incoming warhead? All those "1000km" claims are pure BS, which Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates, by actually calculating such minor-looking things such as turret pointing error, or pointing inaccuracy for whole ships. Experiment, or even a good simulation, trumps theory at all times. SDI weapons were tested, but none of them shot down any actual missiles at 1000km, and in practical use, they wouldn't be able to do that. It was theorized that maybe, they could. Lasers can hit at that range, but they are severely limited by diffraction. A 100MW laser with a 40cm aperture will, at range, have intensity of 146kW per square meter. This may sound like a lot, but it isn't, you're not going to do any significant damage with that to a ship or missile armored against it. It can be improved by making a larger aperture, but in practice, in order for the laser to be any good at 1000km you end up with gigantic lenses, and it's still not very effective (though at half that distance, it does burn some impressive holes). 

Kinetics are railguns, for most part. Coilguns are slow-ish, short ranged, but hard hitting weapons. Space combat starts at 50km, because forces acting on weapons are huge. One minute of arc at 1000km equals 100 meters. Now, consider how hard it is to achieve sub-mil accuracy in a gun. Then, consider what happens if you try to do the same with a gun that has megawatts of power going through it, trying to rip it apart. If you spray a 100m radius circle with slugs, it won't do you any good, because few of your shots will be hitting. Not only that, a shot fired at 20km/s (pretty typical for these weapons), it will take 500 seconds to fly 1000km. So, you're shooting at a circle several times the area of your target, centered around the area your target was in about 9 minutes ago. Time to target is actually more important for increasing range than accuracy, provided you have a high rate of fire.

Space combat goes, depending on power levels involved, from 200-300km to the merge, at which point ships may pass within a kilometer of each other, depending on tactical decisions. 50km is, roughly, the distance at which they actually start hitting each other with anything besides lasers. It may be more, it may be less, depending on weapons involved, but kills are rare outside 50km. I have designed a railgun which sort of works at 1000km. It consumes 1GW, is over 30 meters long, fires rounds that weigh a one gram, and I'm not sure that models COADE uses work well for such extreme devices. It is a great weapon, but actually building something like that would be incredibly hard.

If you don't believe, buy COADE and find out yourself. It's pretty cheap on a sale. 

Agree, very long range favor missiles as missiles as interplanetary range, this however gives days warning. 
I disagree a bit with long range accuracy, you can point an mirror very accurate. One tricks is to use targeting lasers with more spread to get an accurate aim. 

Still against an long range missile barrage you could send out interceptors. Yes space fighters but an manned version would be more like an modern missile torpedo boat than an fighter jet because mission duration. 
Its rolle is to launch counter missiles against the incoming swarm, these will be small systems, from cube sats up to anti tank rockets. 
They don't need speed as the enemy come in fast, they will either fold out screens or eject sand to increase their footprint. 

Stealth is useless in space if you talk about warships not missiles on an freefall trajectory and the interceptors is easier to stealth as small and low energy. 
 

[Guest]

38 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Agree, very long range favor missiles as missiles as interplanetary range, this however gives days warning. 
I disagree a bit with long range accuracy, you can point an mirror very accurate. One tricks is to use targeting lasers with more spread to get an accurate aim.

Beyond some point, you can only point a mirror as well as the ship it's mounted on. A manned warship simply has too much going on for that. Turrets help, but for truly accurate pointing, you need a free-flying platform like HST. Skylab had a solar observation telescope for a reason - it didn't need to be pointed that precisely. A nuclear reactor, with all those turbopumps keeping the coolant flowing, would have a similar effect.

Targeting lasers only allow you to measure the precise location of your target. Useful, but it won't correct for imperfections in turret mounting or random jiggling of the ship.

Quote

Still against an long range missile barrage you could send out interceptors. Yes space fighters but an manned version would be more like an modern missile torpedo boat than an fighter jet because mission duration. 
Its rolle is to launch counter missiles against the incoming swarm, these will be small systems, from cube sats up to anti tank rockets. 
They don't need speed as the enemy come in fast, they will either fold out screens or eject sand to increase their footprint. 

Ejecting a cloud of sand is not as effective as you might think. For one, well-designed missiles can usually survive a hit or two (I often see small railgun projectiles glance off missile nosecones). For two, any cloud of sand will get very diffuse, very quickly. It doesn't really take a lot of time, either. Missiles are best countered with other missiles. You also wouldn't need a missile boat, any old warship. Traits that make a good missile in space also make a good interceptor, especially against interplanetary missiles, which will inevitably be huge, probably resembling fully armored warships more than missiles. TBH, it's probably better to send a warship loaded with non-interplanetary missiles than to fool around with those, unless you're sure you can't take the planet, anyway, and just want to wreck it.

Quote

Stealth is useless in space if you talk about warships not missiles on an freefall trajectory and the interceptors is easier to stealth as small and low energy. 

Stealth in space is hard in general, but deception is less so. An incoming missile, incoming warship or incoming freighter could look very similar from the distance, especially if common parts are in use, and they are roughly similar size. TBH, in this case, it doesn't matter, anyway. Even if you detect the interceptors, you can either dodge or ignore them and hope they miss or otherwise fail. If you dodge, you need more dV than they have, or they will have achieved their mission by either causing your salvo to run out of dV and harmlessly fly off into the void, or by simply hitting it. Typically, an interceptor can afford more dV than a missile, which has already spent a lot accelerating towards the target, and is also pushing a large warhead. Missiles hardly dominate, in the end.

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Autoshift or not, you are still in orbit. When you start in a matched orbit at long range, you need to start closing with the enemy. Ships can turn much faster than they can move across the sky, so no matter what happens, they will end up pointed at each other. It would only matter with multiple battlegroups engaging at the same time, where you can force the enemy to target one or the other, but you could set it up with orbital mechanics, too.

Armor. Maneuvers are near-useless, though at extreme ranges it is good to keep moving (see below), just to get out of the path of enemy rounds. As the time to target decreases, you stop dodging and face the enemy with your thickly armored, sloped nosecone. This allows you to deflect shots while allowing all your weapons to shoot. Big ships can have a lot of armor, because volume grows more slowly than area does. Now, this isn't really true in warship design, because you want to keep the frontal area small (a smaller target is harder to hit), so in practice you want to only increase length, and then armor area increases almost linearly with volume. 

Actually, really large distances favor missiles. This is the only weapon you can shoot across a planetary system, and only useful for that or as a distraction. Lasers compete with railguns, and here range does favor them, because they have no accuracy issues at long ranges, just diffraction. A missile with a pointed nose may be quite resistant to a laser attack, though. 

No, it isn't. Question: how well can you point a spacecraft at an incoming warhead? All those "1000km" claims are pure BS, which Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates, by actually calculating such minor-looking things such as turret pointing error, or pointing inaccuracy for whole ships. Experiment, or even a good simulation, trumps theory at all times. SDI weapons were tested, but none of them shot down any actual missiles at 1000km, and in practical use, they wouldn't be able to do that. It was theorized that maybe, they could. Lasers can hit at that range, but they are severely limited by diffraction. A 100MW laser with a 40cm aperture will, at range, have intensity of 146kW per square meter. This may sound like a lot, but it isn't, you're not going to do any significant damage with that to a ship or missile armored against it. It can be improved by making a larger aperture, but in practice, in order for the laser to be any good at 1000km you end up with gigantic lenses, and it's still not very effective (though at half that distance, it does burn some impressive holes). 

Kinetics are railguns, for most part. Coilguns are slow-ish, short ranged, but hard hitting weapons. Space combat starts at 50km, because forces acting on weapons are huge. One minute of arc at 1000km equals 100 meters. Now, consider how hard it is to achieve sub-mil accuracy in a gun. Then, consider what happens if you try to do the same with a gun that has megawatts of power going through it, trying to rip it apart. If you spray a 100m radius circle with slugs, it won't do you any good, because few of your shots will be hitting. Not only that, a shot fired at 20km/s (pretty typical for these weapons), it will take 500 seconds to fly 1000km. So, you're shooting at a circle several times the area of your target, centered around the area your target was in about 9 minutes ago. Time to target is actually more important for increasing range than accuracy, provided you have a high rate of fire.

Space combat goes, depending on power levels involved, from 200-300km to the merge, at which point ships may pass within a kilometer of each other, depending on tactical decisions. 50km is, roughly, the distance at which they actually start hitting each other with anything besides lasers. It may be more, it may be less, depending on weapons involved, but kills are rare outside 50km. I have designed a railgun which sort of works at 1000km. It consumes 1GW, is over 30 meters long, fires rounds that weigh a one gram, and I'm not sure that models COADE uses work well for such extreme devices. It is a great weapon, but actually building something like that would be incredibly hard.

If you don't believe, buy COADE and find out yourself. It's pretty cheap on a sale. 

 

I was being generous with autoshifting at 1000 or even 100 kilometers.

Babylon 5 has ships autoshifting out of hyperspace at 3 kilometers or closer.

 

At that range, missiles can cross it in mere seconds. Which means big bulky ships would get slammed with lots of nukes/missiles.

 

Spacestations would likely get wrecked. The only way maneuvering will save a ship here is via counter fire and also missiles targeting other craft while it flies away with a big fuel tank.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi