Pure Newtonian Combat... Surprises

[Guest]

That's why you don't jump in at 3 kilometers. At this distance, the killing happens, if it haven't already. You have no room to maneuver that close. In that case, the side with fastest turning turrets would win. If you can predict which way your target will be when you jump in, you would win. Otherwise, it's only a matter of turret turn time. At that time, the impact area of your cannons becomes almost a point, lasers don't have to worry about diffraction and all sorts of energy weapons would come into play. Nukes are the only useless weapon, because detonating them that close would damage both ships. This isn't combat, this is Russian Roulette. Mutual kill would likely result in most cases.

In short, don't do that. Give yourself some room, come out at the edge of the system and go in from there. If you have two fully armed and armored spaceships at 3km, the result is, more likely than not, a mutual kill. During approach, it's all about increasing the difference so that at the merge, you have the advantage. If neither ship succeeds, it's still Russian Roulette, and it's still, most likely, a mutual kill.

[Spacescifi]

17 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

That's why you don't jump in at 3 kilometers. At this distance, the killing happens, if it haven't already. You have no room to maneuver that close. In that case, the side with fastest turning turrets would win. If you can predict which way your target will be when you jump in, you would win. Otherwise, it's only a matter of turret turn time. At that time, the impact area of your cannons becomes almost a point, lasers don't have to worry about diffraction and all sorts of energy weapons would come into play. Nukes are the only useless weapon, because detonating them that close would damage both ships. This isn't combat, this is Russian Roulette. Mutual kill would likely result in most cases.

In short, don't do that. Give yourself some room, come out at the edge of the system and go in from there. If you have two fully armed and armored spaceships at 3km, the result is, more likely than not, a mutual kill. During approach, it's all about increasing the difference so that at the merge, you have the advantage. If neither ship succeeds, it's still Russian Roulette, and it's still, most likely, a mutual kill.

 

Try telling that to anyone on Babylon 5!

It is just for entertainment though. At least they had newtonian movement.

As for nukes, they are still viable.

Project Orion detonates nukes much closer than 3 Km near the pusher plate.

 

In other words, armored ships could survive. Even better if they do not pressurize much of the ship.

 

A big pressurized station like Babylon 5 would die fast. Only a matter of penetrating it's hull and sending a nuke through.

Pops like a balloon.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi
Pressurize

[Guest]

Project Orion has a big fat pusher plate in the way. Armored ships could survive, but armored ships can tank nukes pretty well, too. Radiators are be the part most vulnerable to a nuclear strike. A big, largely unarmored station would die fast, but lifetime of anything that close, including warships, would be measured in seconds at best, barring them being very, very undergunned for their armor. Hypervelocity projectiles are best stopped by spaced armor, which means you have one layer. A shot punches a small hole in the outer layer, shatters and splashes against the inner one without causing damage. If you can reliably put multiple shots onto a single point (as is the case at 3km), this scheme stops working, and armor gets penetrated rather quickly. At rates of fire needed for space combat, multiple layers don't even delay that by much. Thick plates don't help, either. You get a lot of energy (that is, all of the enemy ship's reactor output) focused on a small area of your hull, which is never good. You're doing the same to the enemy, which, with kinetic weapons, means you're both dead the moment the salvos start hitting.

Babylon 5 still got a lot of things wrong. They were just better than most, which isn't all that hard. Space combat in Babylon 5 wasn't realistic, not by a long shot. 

[Spacescifi]

23 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Project Orion has a big fat pusher plate in the way. Armored ships could survive, but armored ships can tank nukes pretty well, too. Radiators are be the part most vulnerable to a nuclear strike. A big, largely unarmored station would die fast, but lifetime of anything that close, including warships, would be measured in seconds at best, barring them being very, very undergunned for their armor. Hypervelocity projectiles are best stopped by spaced armor, which means you have one layer. A shot punches a small hole in the outer layer, shatters and splashes against the inner one without causing damage. If you can reliably put multiple shots onto a single point (as is the case at 3km), this scheme stops working, and armor gets penetrated rather quickly. At rates of fire needed for space combat, multiple layers don't even delay that by much. Thick plates don't help, either. You get a lot of energy (that is, all of the enemy ship's reactor output) focused on a small area of your hull, which is never good. You're doing the same to the enemy, which, with kinetic weapons, means you're both dead the moment the salvos start hitting.

Babylon 5 still got a lot of things wrong. They were just better than most, which isn't all that hard. Space combat in Babylon 5 wasn't realistic, not by a long shot. 

 

I know. It did do a good job of making us care about who won or lost though.

The shadows actions made me hate them so that I was glad when they finally got their comeuppance by getting driven off for once by the younger races they bullied ('guided' according to them) for so long.

All star trek battles I never cared as much.

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UAsk3ay3e98

Edited October 5, 2019 by Spacescifi
Vid

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

All those "1000km" claims are pure BS, which Children of a Dead Earth demonstrates

A new meme is going to born: "This works in Children of Dead Earth".

Obviously, a videogame is a better source than a 1980s book with formulas.

[magnemoe]

4 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

A new meme is going to born: "This works in Children of Dead Earth".

Obviously, a videogame is a better source than a 1980s book with formulas.

Yes, add that much of the stuff is still classified. 
 

[Spacescifi]

5 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, add that much of the stuff is still classified. 
 

 

So we will never truly know how effective any of the designs were until they are built and tested.

Hopefully the time will come when there will be a need for such weaponry. Not for killing each other, but for asteroid mining.

And because there will always be humans like me who love to watch stuff go boom.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

So we will never truly know how effective any of the designs were until they are built and tested.

This is true for anything. Until you go down and put together a prototype, you have no idea how it will really perform, even if it's something simple like a car. Some design issues can be really non-obvious until you actually have a physical object on hand. However, with models like COADE, you can get pretty close to testing out the simplest, most robust technologies.

Classified information is really mostly for nuke-related stuff. For instance, you can't get enough information to properly model a Teller-Ullam multistage nuclear weapon. 

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

A new meme is going to born: "This works in Children of Dead Earth".

Obviously, a videogame is a better source than a 1980s book with formulas.

Actually, it probably is. Given everything, it probably uses some of the same formulas. And then some more, because a 1980s book probably didn't go into the details of practical implementation (authors of the time still tend to skip over most of the things you can't calculate on a piece of paper). Well, this simulators does. The author really has done his job on that one, just check out his blog for some insights. So yeah, "This works in COADE" might well be a pretty good indicator of it working IRL, KSP is an arcade game compared to this. It has some limitations and there are some things it doesn't have (so if it doesn't work in COADE, it might still work IRL), but I replicated the autocannon from BMP-2 and a few other guns almost exactly, so at the very least, conventional gun modeling checks out. You should see its simulation of nuclear reactors, and they seem to check out, too, barring that they use thermocouples and not turbines (a reasonable choice in space). Chemical engines check out with real designs, though you can't replicate anything that has an ablative or radiative nozzle extension, because they're not supported, unfortunately. COADE doesn't have everything, but what it does have, it gets right.

For purposes of writing hard SF, it's certainly sufficient. The result is surprisingly fun, too. There simply isn't a better depiction of near-future space warfare anywhere in media.

Edited October 6, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

So we will never truly know how effective any of the designs were until they are built and tested.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, it probably is. Given everything, it probably uses some of the same formulas.

Strange, but unlike the "exotic (why exotic? all physical principles are well-known since 1960s, are used in other applications) weapons" I'm desperately trying to remember a real-life study on space fighters maneuvering in space around a space carrier protected with thick armor and gun turrets, which are you refering to.

Oh, no, there was the famous cannon on OPS Almaz / Salyut-3,5 and several space missiles for close contact headshots, yes. That's it, X-Wing will be armed with NR-23.
And a proposal of an armored orbital fighter from a well-known developer (feel free to find it yourself, it came together with a telescope project).

So, why use CoDE as an argument when something just works in KSP?

8 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, add that much of the stuff is still classified. 

Space fighters or space dreadnoughts?

Edited October 6, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Guest]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Strange, but unlike the "exotic (why exotic? all physical principles are well-known since 1960s, are used in other applications) weapons" I'm desperately trying to remember a real-life study on space fighters maneuvering in space around a space carrier protected with thick armor and gun turrets, which are you refering to.

No, but you have studies on railguns, coilguns, material penetration, whipple shields, nuclear reactors, lasers, rocket engines, electric motors... COADE's gameplay is entirely emergent. The author did not write it to get a specific (and "fun" by a typical preconception) vision of space warfare to play out. He made it to see what space warfare would look like. You can design your own ships and weapons (and everything else), and just see what wins battles and what loses them. There's nothing stopping you from trying something else, what I said is based entirely on what, out of all possible configuration, seems to work best.

It is one thing to have a gun that works when clamped to a bench. It's another thing to have a combat-capable weapon. In particular, I'm pretty sure SDI weapons were just meant to disable missile electronics, which is a much simpler problem than carving a missile into pieces. Just one particle beam was actually tested in space, and it wasn't a very impressive weapon. 

[kerbiloid]

47 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

I'm pretty sure SDI weapons were just meant to disable missile electronics,

And this means that you aren't familiar with the SDI/antiSDI theme at all.

[Guest]

I was thinking particle beams, specifically. The one I read about (what BEAR was testing) was for electronics. Other weapons I know of were just lasers, railguns and kinetic interceptors. The bomb-pumped laser idea failed, and MIRACL failed to shoot down a satellite the one time it tried (another, laser did hit it, though). 

Given SDI's actual track record, I'd say studies related to it might have been more than a little optimistic.

[kerbiloid]

What common between the IR optical chemical MIRACL and induced coherent Xray radiation in metal rods?

[Guest]

Not much. Starting with the fact that only one of them works. Generating X-rays, in general, is a though problem. Your best bet for that is a FEL, but this approach takes a particle accelerator of nontrivial size. Not only that, it's hard to put it in a turret, unless the whole thing is in a turret, because hard X-ray lenses are finicky things. Besides FELs, there are some ionized plasma devices, but I don't think they scale well to higher energies. Trust me, if there was a compact method capable of generating high intensity X-rays or either kind, it'd be used all over the place (or at least under heavy research), because these things are just too darn useful in science and medicine. 

If you're talking about Project Excalibur, that didn't work. This was a running theme with SDI. They did a lot of nifty basic research, but most of actual devices they turned out were duds. In some distant future, those problems may be overcome, but if we're talking near future SF, I think it's safe to disregard exotics and particle beams altogether. I would even put limits on lasers, COADE allows you to make some very powerful ones, but I don't think manufacturing an ND:YAG laser a hundred meters long, with an aperture of 30 meters (perfect monolithic mirror!), can be reasonably called "near future".

Edited October 8, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

I won't continue this empty "discussion" until you bring a space fighter and a space battleship project(s) more developed than any SDI-related one.

[Nuke]

On 10/5/2019 at 11:15 AM, Spacescifi said:

 

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.

one of the pet peeves i have with a lot of sci-fi is that space battles are often conducted at speeds that are much too slow and at distances that are much too short for space combat. star wars is especially guilty of this, but star trek, stargate, battlestar galactica and even babylon 5 were guilty of it. even today many engagements are done beyond visual range. not to say cqb isnt ever going to happen but the way it is depicted is that all battles are cqb. the expanse (mainly the books) explained it pretty well and depicted battles at all ranges/speeds, though i admit some of the best ones depicted a boarding operation. the reason for that is that the director wanted to show the battle on the screen, put in a shot of both opponents before it goes down and then have all the action happening in subsequent shots. a space battle where all you are doing is watching a single ship doing maneuvers with no threat in sight is not interesting even though it may still be in danger of an incoming missile. i prefer to think tule of cool as a unnecessary shortcut in fiction. if a realistic space battle does not seem interesting its the job of the writer (also the director for tv/movies) to make it interesting. the expanse has shown it can be made interesting even if they dropped the ball on a couple episodes. 

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

one of the pet peeves i have with a lot of sci-fi is that space battles are often conducted at speeds that are much too slow and at distances that are much too short for space combat. star wars is especially guilty of this, but star trek, stargate, battlestar galactica and even babylon 5 were guilty of it. even today many engagements are done beyond visual range. not to say cqb isnt ever going to happen but the way it is depicted is that all battles are cqb. the expanse (mainly the books) explained it pretty well and depicted battles at all ranges/speeds, though i admit some of the best ones depicted a boarding operation. the reason for that is that the director wanted to show the battle on the screen, put in a shot of both opponents before it goes down and then have all the action happening in subsequent shots. a space battle where all you are doing is watching a single ship doing maneuvers with no threat in sight is not interesting even though it may still be in danger of an incoming missile. i prefer to think tule of cool as a unnecessary shortcut in fiction. if a realistic space battle does not seem interesting its the job of the writer (also the director for tv/movies) to make it interesting. the expanse has shown it can be made interesting even if they dropped the ball on a couple episodes. 

 

When FTL/hyperdrive is available, then I can understand why battles happen closeup, although the autoshifting of speed and trajectory is a silent technique that should have been made clear.

 

Space battles in scifi are by nature contrived to be entertaining.

Yet if one used a warp/hyperdrive tactically at subwarp speeds, the combat dynamic changes. Sibce warp is only spatial translation without moving.  One could do warp strafing with lasers at sublight speed. Like light second per 30 seconds for large vessels, and  5 seconds per lightsecond for small warp vessels

It may or may not be enough to destroy other vessels, but it could do damage.

So with this, every vessel would not be nearby to attack unless they wanted to be by mutual agreement. Or if a small ship just rammed another at warp.

 

When small warp ships are the fastest thing you have, they become the only effective missile available.

Ramming is back in style. Although admittedly the moment the ships crash they will both drop out of warp at previous speed and trajectory. Which means it could be catastrophic if they were collision course, or it may not do any damage if they were flying away from each other to begin with at orbital speeds.

Lasers would be the one thing that could still hurt at that range.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Nuke said:

one of the pet peeves i have with a lot of sci-fi is that space battles are often conducted at speeds that are much too slow and at distances that are much too short for space combat. star wars is especially guilty of this, but star trek, stargate, battlestar galactica and even babylon 5 were guilty of it. even today many engagements are done beyond visual range. not to say cqb isnt ever going to happen but the way it is depicted is that all battles are cqb. the expanse (mainly the books) explained it pretty well and depicted battles at all ranges/speeds, though i admit some of the best ones depicted a boarding operation. the reason for that is that the director wanted to show the battle on the screen, put in a shot of both opponents before it goes down and then have all the action happening in subsequent shots. a space battle where all you are doing is watching a single ship doing maneuvers with no threat in sight is not interesting even though it may still be in danger of an incoming missile. i prefer to think tule of cool as a unnecessary shortcut in fiction. if a realistic space battle does not seem interesting its the job of the writer (also the director for tv/movies) to make it interesting. the expanse has shown it can be made interesting even if they dropped the ball on a couple episodes. 

What annoys me is that "hard SF" often features battles on distances that are too large. A target "millions of kilometers away" is going to be pretty hard to hit (except with missiles, but that's what CIWS are for). In fact, due to how orbits work, all non-missile battles eventually end in CQB, except those which are decided before that, and you pass a melted or bisected hulk at the merge.

Air combat doesn't occur at that long of a range, either. AMRAAM might have a stated range of 90 miles or so, but good luck hitting (or even targeting) anything that far off. Exact range launch is highly variable, but closer to 20-30 miles, depending on what you're shooting at. It can be as short at 10 miles, if you're on the wrong end of a jammer. Of course, in air combat the "air" part complicates things a lot. Space combat is more of a high velocity joust, or it can be compared to air combat where you have no intention of committing to BFM, so you try to zoom past your opponent and bug out, maybe taking a head-on guns shot in the process.

On 10/8/2019 at 9:25 PM, kerbiloid said:

I won't continue this empty "discussion" until you bring a space fighter and a space battleship project(s) more developed than any SDI-related one.

Almaz (Salyut 3, specifically). It was a space station with a cannon. That was fired. Some say it even hit a target of some sort. That's far closer to reality than anything SDI ever did. An Almaz station is not much of a fighter, but it was a manned, armed orbiting vehicle that both orbited and shot a gun. 

Simple tech is best. We know how to make guns. We know how to make coilguns and lasers. Particle beams, X-ray lasers and other exotics are much less developed. SDI pretty much showed that these technologies, if they are ever viable, have a long way to go, much longer than a simple "throw a piece of metal at your enemy, at high speed" paradigm. 

[Nuke]

14 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

What annoys me is that "hard SF" often features battles on distances that are too large. A target "millions of kilometers away" is going to be pretty hard to hit (except with missiles, but that's what CIWS are for). In fact, due to how orbits work, all non-missile battles eventually end in CQB, except those which are decided before that, and you pass a melted or bisected hulk at the merge.

Air combat doesn't occur at that long of a range, either. AMRAAM might have a stated range of 90 miles or so, but good luck hitting (or even targeting) anything that far off. Exact range launch is highly variable, but closer to 20-30 miles, depending on what you're shooting at. It can be as short at 10 miles, if you're on the wrong end of a jammer. Of course, in air combat the "air" part complicates things a lot. Space combat is more of a high velocity joust, or it can be compared to air combat where you have no intention of committing to BFM, so you try to zoom past your opponent and bug out, maybe taking a head-on guns shot in the process.

i think its more of a problem with needing to focus on the space battle itself rather than what the crew is doing. i expanse book 6 (or 5, im not sure) had such a joust battle. while visually such a battle would look rather boring, i think the book did things right by focusing on what the crew were doing inside the ship rather than the exterior action. if they use this battle in future seasons of the show they could easily do a few beauty passes as the ships converge, then cut back to the crew planning out their next pass. 

Spoiler

its the battle where fred johnson strokes out and dies. another thing for the director to cut to when you need to fill the gaps between passes. i really look forward to this battle in the show. but we got a couple seasons before that happens. 

 

Edited October 11, 2019 by Nuke

[Nuke]

19 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

When FTL/hyperdrive is available, then I can understand why battles happen closeup, although the autoshifting of speed and trajectory is a silent technique that should have been made clear.

 

Space battles in scifi are by nature contrived to be entertaining.

Yet if one used a warp/hyperdrive tactically at subwarp speeds, the combat dynamic changes. Sibce warp is only spatial translation without moving.  One could do warp strafing with lasers at sublight speed. Like light second per 30 seconds for large vessels, and  5 seconds per lightsecond for small warp vessels

It may or may not be enough to destroy other vessels, but it could do damage.

So with this, every vessel would not be nearby to attack unless they wanted to be by mutual agreement. Or if a small ship just rammed another at warp.

 

When small warp ships are the fastest thing you have, they become the only effective missile available.

Ramming is back in style. Although admittedly the moment the ships crash they will both drop out of warp at previous speed and trajectory. Which means it could be catastrophic if they were collision course, or it may not do any damage if they were flying away from each other to begin with at orbital speeds.

Lasers would be the one thing that could still hurt at that range.

star wars especially feels like all the battles are literally at walking pace. replace star destroyers with wooden sailing ships and it makes sense. though star wars takes a lot of inspiration from old skool swashbucklers and ww2 war films. 

hyperspace ramming for example, you have all these x-wings with hyperdrives, astromech droids, i dont see why the pilots just doing point their ship at the target, program the droid to hit the hyperdrive and punch out. does more damage than an x-wing using its blasters and proton torpedoes. sorry r2d2, you are now a guidance system. that kind of thing would make star wars interesting again. 

 

[Guest]

12 hours ago, Nuke said:

star wars especially feels like all the battles are literally at walking pace. replace star destroyers with wooden sailing ships and it makes sense. though star wars takes a lot of inspiration from old skool swashbucklers and ww2 war films. 

hyperspace ramming for example, you have all these x-wings with hyperdrives, astromech droids, i dont see why the pilots just doing point their ship at the target, program the droid to hit the hyperdrive and punch out. does more damage than an x-wing using its blasters and proton torpedoes. sorry r2d2, you are now a guidance system. that kind of thing would make star wars interesting again. 

I'm not sure if Interdictors are part of the new canon, but if they are, I'd imagine that it'd work exactly once. Besides, hyperdrives in SW are not cheap (remember how hard it was to get parts for one in Ep. I). Not a problem for the Empire, but the Rebels wouldn't be able to just throw those things away. Same reason was given for not seeing more missile combat, despite tech obviously being there, with a droid brain you could probably make some quite impressively performing missiles, if you could afford it. TBH, economics will always have a huge influence on the shape of warfare, much more than what's theoretically possible with available technology. 

But yeah, SW battles are slow even by WWII standards. Going back to Freespace and X-Wing series after KSP, COADE and Falcon BMS made that painfully clear. Likewise, watching Top Gun versus Falcon BMS. Or real fencing and most swashbuckler movies. I think that the real problem the cinema has with combat is that the real thing is usually over really fast. A modern dogfight will be a few minutes at most, if it's a really even match. There's no time for emotions, banter or other drama.

12 hours ago, Nuke said:

i think its more of a problem with needing to focus on the space battle itself rather than what the crew is doing. i expanse book 6 (or 5, im not sure) had such a joust battle. while visually such a battle would look rather boring, i think the book did things right by focusing on what the crew were doing inside the ship rather than the exterior action. if they use this battle in future seasons of the show they could easily do a few beauty passes as the ships converge, then cut back to the crew planning out their next pass. 

This is a good approach, and it also works for modern missile combat. Also note, the rounds will probably be glowing hot, providing a rather spectacular light show for exterior shots. COADE provides just that, except with tracers. You could make some dramatic shots out of that if you wanted, though typically, there's little actual maneuvering going on, just two ships spitting hot metal (or carbon) at each other.

[radonek]

On 10/10/2019 at 9:23 AM, Spacescifi said:

When FTL/hyperdrive is available, then I can understand why battles happen closeup…

Actually, no and this whole discussion does not make sense unless you  people stop mixing up technology levels. Any concievable kind of FTL/warp/whatever operates on wholy different technology AND energy level then propulsion buses seen in COADE . "Warping" to sub-light second distance to slug it out COADE style makes about as much sense as using ICBMs to deliver lance cavalry.

If you possess technology to manipulate space advanced enough for something like "warp", you don't warp in kinetic battleships, laser dreadnaughts or any other precious museum articles. You send in a singularity bombs. 

[Spacescifi]

38 minutes ago, radonek said:

Actually, no and this whole discussion does not make sense unless you  people stop mixing up technology levels. Any concievable kind of FTL/warp/whatever operates on wholy different technology AND energy level then propulsion buses seen in COADE . "Warping" to sub-light second distance to slug it out COADE style makes about as much sense as using ICBMs to deliver lance cavalry.

If you possess technology to manipulate space advanced enough for something like "warp", you don't warp in kinetic battleships, laser dreadnaughts or any other precious museum articles. You send in a singularity bombs. 

 

You have made a valid point. I guess the only downside to such tecnologies is that it kills potential stories.

Just like the gun killed any potential stories of people duking it out with bows and arrows in a western, modern city.

Beyond that, at some point, the tech level extrapolations are only speculation anyway, and it is virtually indistinguishable from fantasy.

Jusy curious, is not a singularity bomb a black hole? How does it work? Because hauling around that kind of mass is greater tech than even theoretical Alcubierre warp drive, since that only requires a mass of a few tons converted into energy. 

 

[radonek]

8 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Jusy curious, is not a singularity bomb a black hole? How does it work?

No idea, really. Lots of possibilities. Could be simple charged singularity used to shred stuff at close range. Or tiny, unguided evaporation bombs. I intentionally avoided "black hole" term since that is used for stellar mass objects, and those would probably be difficult to toss around even for kardashev-high civilizations. Although, who knows? None of this is my point though, I could as well go for RKV's for instance, or invent some other fun stuff ("calyx hollow" comes to mind). In the end, it makes as much sense as medieval knight trying to come up with "realistic" use of nuclear weaponry. Does it need many blacksmiths to forge? Will it be delivered by cavalry or siege machinery? Instead of answering silly questions, point here is that sensible answer, whatever it ends to be, is not going to involve sticking pointed objects into people. Not because of this or that particular technology, but simply  due to energy involved.

[Spacescifi]

2 minutes ago, radonek said:

No idea, really. Lots of possibilities. Could be simple charged singularity used to shred stuff at close range. Or tiny, unguided evaporation bombs. I intentionally avoided "black hole" term since that is used for stellar mass objects, and those would probably be difficult to toss around even for kardashev-high civilizations. Although, who knows? None of this is my point though, I could as well go for RKV's for instance, or invent some other fun stuff ("calyx hollow" comes to mind). In the end, it makes as much sense as medieval knight trying to come up with "realistic" use of nuclear weaponry. Does it need many blacksmiths to forge? Will it be delivered by cavalry or siege machinery? Instead of answering silly questions, point here is that sensible answer, whatever it ends to be, is not going to involve sticking pointed objects into people. Not because of this or that particular technology, but simply  due to energy involved.

 

Well I will put it this way, if FTL/warp starships are on the table, then so would FTL/warp missiles be.

One thing that I am aware of is that DEW's are more energy hogs than kinetics.

And a warp engined kinetic would seem logical enough a choice. Only because it's cheaper than something more exotic.

 

Quantity of inferior weaponry will trump rare high tech weaponry sooner or later.

 

Take one nuke vs several nations of american indians.

If one nuke is all a side had, they would'nt win, since there would be too many of the other side to kill them all.

 

Or take ten guns with limited ammo vs a thousand bows and errors.

Again, quantity tends to beat quality in war... so long one can reach their target to do damage.