Pure Newtonian Combat... Surprises

[Nuke]

2 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

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.

 

 

ever seen zulu dawn?

english with bolt loading rifles vs a very large number of zulu warriors with spears and shields. of course the english lose that fight. historical analysis of the actual battle showed that the new breech loading rifles were actually a major draw back, as they were being fired frequently enough for heat to become an issue. a problem muzzle loaded rifles never had run into due to lower firing rates. the ammunition was also being found to be very low quality (very early cartridge rounds), and the ammo cases were so hard to open they were smashing them with their rifle butts to open them, damaging many rounds, which when combined with the excessive heating of the guns made the spent cartridges very hard to remove from the gun, effectively disabling it. and when faced with an unending assault the limitations of the new weapons were made quite clear. despite hundreds (possibly even thousands) of years of difference in tech level you still end up with the large primitive army the victor. zulu also used a pincer tactic in which they managed to completely surround the british making retreat impossible, while the british were overconfident in their abilities and technology. 

Edited October 12, 2019 by Nuke

[DDE]

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

despite hundreds (possibly even thousands) of years of difference in tech level you still end up with the large primitive army the victor.

I'd argue that superior missile launchers (e.g. muskets) pale in comparison to later advances in mobility and communications. The British advantage was rather slim.

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

ever seen zulu dawn?

Ever read Arthur Clarke's Superiority?

Spoiler

 

On 10/6/2019 at 5:38 AM, magnemoe said:

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

The tech in COADE is basically already obsolete.

9 hours ago, radonek said:

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. 

Actually, you do something slightly different:

FTL is an enormous bag of worms. The smart writer at least keep the lid firmly on, and puts up a guard detail to keep the hard sci-fiers from prying it open.

7 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

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.

You do realize that it would take a star-powered DEW to even come close to a relativistic kinetic, whereas the kinetic energy of a superluminal object should actually be greater than infinity?

The giant DEWs are the cheaper choice in this scenario, and they'll have serious trouble preventing the planet they're on from getting shattered.

On 10/6/2019 at 4:53 AM, Spacescifi said:

Only a matter of penetrating it's hull and sending a nuke through.

Impulsive shock means even a surface blast would lead to very fun consequences.

Edited October 12, 2019 by DDE

[DDE]

On 10/6/2019 at 5:03 AM, Dragon01 said:

If you can reliably put multiple shots onto a single point

Try spinning your armour (or ship). That's a good trick.

8 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

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

Mad Jack wants a word.

[radonek]

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

ever seen zulu dawn?

Now THAT explains why current world is dominated by Aztec empire, Quing dynasty and Zulu kingdom. 

 

35 minutes ago, DDE said:

Actually, you do something slightly different

Nah, such crude RKV's are boooring. Now, imagine very small relativistic mass driver fed with tiny slivers of some dense exotic matter. Something that cuts through stuff, makes nice fireworks on contact with ordinary matter and is unstable enough to be just barely held together during relativistic life time. Bonus points for autocatalytic instead of direct energy effects (yes, I'm still intrigued by idea of strangelet weaponry).

As for name, I'm torn between "star-destroyer-destroyer (man portable)"  and "cheela toothbrush".

[DDE]

1 hour ago, radonek said:

Now THAT explains why current world is dominated by Aztec empire, Quing dynasty and Zulu kingdom. 

Nobody wake Ghandi.

[Guest]

13 hours ago, DDE said:

The tech in COADE is basically already obsolete.

I wouldn't say that. You could argue that about stock weapons (which are decent enough), but COADE, ultimately, gives you the basic principles of railgun, coilgun and laser design to play with. Physical principles do not become obsolete that easily. It'd be like saying chemical propellant guns are obsolete, based on what a musket can do. In a war, would you try to stuff a particle beam on your ship, or make a better railgun? 

Whatever classified stuff they have, it's unlikely to make a frontline weapon. Remember that USN is trying to make railguns to install on its ships, instead of fiddling around with exotics. Granted, atmosphere is a factor in that case (and it tends to cripple DEWs severely), but either way, railguns are a far more mature technology.

13 hours ago, DDE said:

Try spinning your armour (or ship). That's a good trick.

At the timeframes we're talking about, it'd have to be spinning like a top. Otherwise, you can compensate for that quite easily by shifting your aimpoint. Usually, if a ship is spinning that fast, it's because something important blew out.

[Nuke]

21 hours ago, DDE said:

I'd argue that superior missile launchers (e.g. muskets) pale in comparison to later advances in mobility and communications. The British advantage was rather slim.

Ever read Arthur Clarke's Superiority?

its an interesting analogy because spacescifi's scenario of a high tech but outnumbered number of invaders vs a large number of primitives. its an interesting first contact scenario. aliens (at a tech level about what you see in the expanse), put together an interstellar expedition (say a generation ship like the nauvoo) to a planet they believe harbors life. this might be a few hundred light years out. lets assume they detect life, but no technological signatures like radio emissions. if the target planet is earth today, they would have likely detected a pre-industrial earth with no signs of intelligent life. thus they may have deemed whatever weapons systems they have to be more than adequate to deal with whatever threats they faced. for argument lets say their ship goes 1c, though 0.1c might be more realistic. as they close in on earth it becomes evident that there have been some advancement, however turning around may not be feasible at this point. say they arrive in about our current time. they have one ship, are few number, with limited weapons, limited resources, and no capacity for mass production. orbital bombardment is probably not the answer because they were looking for a habitable planet to begin with. so they opt for a foothold on the ground and set up an outpost. humans would be able to wage an expensive but effective offensive to oust the aliens from their planet. 

also adding superiority to my read list that im never going to finish. 

19 hours ago, radonek said:

Now THAT explains why current world is dominated by Aztec empire, Quing dynasty and Zulu kingdom. 

winning a single battle is not the same as winning a war. in the long term and on an equal footing the more advanced empire usually wins. its possible to have a technological advantage but not a numbers advantage. 

Edited October 13, 2019 by Nuke

[radonek]

12 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

It'd be like saying chemical propellant guns are obsolete, based on what a musket can do.

If you really want go forward with this analogy, say that wooden shields and spears are obsolete and you are still not even close to level of technological division. COADE is base on sound physical principles, but if you arrive at so called battlefield via warpdrive as OP would have it, those principles are deep down the drain. 

 

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

as they close in on earth it becomes evident that there have been some advancement, however turning around may not be feasible at this point. say they arrive in about our current time. they have one ship, are few number, with limited weapons, limited resources, and no capacity for mass production. orbital bombardment is probably not the answer because they were looking for a habitable planet to begin with. so they opt for a foothold on the ground and set up an outpost. humans would be able to wage an expensive but effective offensive to oust the aliens from their planet

That is nice and reasonable scenario… if you assume usual  "rubberhead chauvinism"  - aliens are biologically compatibile, have similar technology and so on. I do not. In my book, if those aliens really wanted to wage unplanned war for the planet (which is itself a dubious proposition), they opt for a few strategically placed nanodetonators to rebuild surface conditions to suit their needs, introduction of incompatibile biosphere designed to drive out native species followed by bioengeneering atmospheric conditions closer to requirements. All they need is a genebank with sythetizers, some modifications to a maintenance swarm and perhaps some well aimed asteroids to add missing elements where applicable. They might not even see it as an aggresion, just some terrain improvements for Roadside Picnic.

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, radonek said:

If you really want go forward with this analogy, say that wooden shields and spears are obsolete and you are still not even close to level of technological division. COADE is base on sound physical principles, but if you arrive at so called battlefield via warpdrive as OP would have it, those principles are deep down the drain. 

 

That is nice and reasonable scenario… if you assume usual  "rubberhead chauvinism"  - aliens are biologically compatibile, have similar technology and so on. I do not. In my book, if those aliens really wanted to wage unplanned war for the planet (which is itself a dubious proposition), they opt for a few strategically placed nanodetonators to rebuild surface conditions to suit their needs, introduction of incompatibile biosphere designed to drive out native species followed by bioengeneering atmospheric conditions closer to requirements. All they need is a genebank with sythetizers, some modifications to a maintenance swarm and perhaps some well aimed asteroids to add missing elements where applicable. They might not even see it as an aggresion, just some terrain improvements for Roadside Picnic.

it does make some assumptions about relative age of civilizations in close proximity, and those arent the only ones. good scifi is built on assumptions.

but its unrealistic that you would be able to make assumptions about how an alien biology works, at least not without collecting biological samples, which puts you in danger of being detected. genetic engineering is hard enough when you know how the biology works. our civilization would be writing papers on it for decades before they could apply that knowledge. even if you are working from your own biological stock, you couldn't know how your biology and their biology would interact. you would have to prove any bioweapon it in the lab before deployment, and thus require samples.

if you have grey goop at your disposal then the premise of colonizing an existing biosphere would become rather dubious as you could just harvest the outer solar system and set up a space colony. why waste energy crawling down the solar gravity well for a few small rocky planets when you can build everything you need from the ground up?

beyond pure technological progression its hard to predict how a species will advance over time. seems natural evolution stalls out when selection pressure is removed. further advancement would require active modification to all or part of the species through technological or biological means. a species might resist this change for cultural reasons. im assuming a species is still primarily a product of natural evolution and be no more or less capable than we are. an augmented species might have little use for an existing biosphere. 

[DDE]

20 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Remember that USN is trying to make railguns to install on its ships, instead of fiddling around with exotics.

Counterexample: they're also trying to put a free electron laser on a ship, while we're stuck with arclight-pump solid-medium ones. Hell, they've already put a diode-based one on the USS Ponce.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Counterexample: they're also trying to put a free electron laser on a ship, while we're stuck with arclight-pump solid-medium ones. Hell, they've already put a diode-based one on the USS Ponce.

Arclight-pump has the advantage of being relatively easy to model. Data on how the FELs and diodes would scale up to MW or GW levels is scarce, and equations for them are noticeably more complex. I admit, it's an interesting question of how such system would change the battlefield, but on the other hand, temperature constraints might make simpler tech advantageous. Diode lasers in particular have issues with high heat, and I'm not sure how lightweight FELs can be made, seeing as the thing is basically requires a particle accelerator to work. I would still except railguns to arrive sooner than FELs.

Because of heat rejection issues, space combat favors the system which can run hottest. Hot weapon=hot radiator=small radiator. As a rule, radiator mass dwarfs the mass of the weapon system itself, the only exception being, again, missiles. It gets to the point that sacrificing some energy efficiency for higher operating temperature is a good approach to making combat lasers. Heat pumps don't seem to be a good bargain, thermodynamically, so you may have an easier time building a solid-medium laser than trying to fiddle around with semiconductors. 

[kerbiloid]

A perfect spacefighter.

Spoiler

(And same effective)

[wumpus]

On 10/11/2019 at 7:48 PM, Spacescifi said:

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

 While Mad Jack didn't make his men fight with longbows and broadsword, Ben Franklin was pretty serious about outfitting troops with longbows during the [US] Revolution.  I'd assume that issuing half the redcoats large shields (one holds the shield, the other fires a musket.  Both hide behind the shield) would simply crush any archery troops.  Of course, that meant they would have to carry the shields around while fighting the standard musket troops just in case they met archers.  Probably the real reason it didn't fly was the difficulty in training longbow troops (which was just as much a problem in the hundred years war, except they didn't have muskets so the longbowmen were trained).

On 10/11/2019 at 9:05 PM, Spacescifi said:

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.

Both Cortés and Pizarro won under those conditions.  Granted, they had steel armor to keep the arrows off.

On 10/11/2019 at 11:09 PM, Nuke said:

ever seen zulu dawn?

english with bolt loading rifles vs a very large number of zulu warriors with spears and shields. of course the english lose that fight. historical analysis of the actual battle showed that the new breech loading rifles were actually a major draw back, as they were being fired frequently enough for heat to become an issue. a problem muzzle loaded rifles never had run into due to lower firing rates. the ammunition was also being found to be very low quality (very early cartridge rounds), and the ammo cases were so hard to open they were smashing them with their rifle butts to open them, damaging many rounds, which when combined with the excessive heating of the guns made the spent cartridges very hard to remove from the gun, effectively disabling it. and when faced with an unending assault the limitations of the new weapons were made quite clear. despite hundreds (possibly even thousands) of years of difference in tech level you still end up with the large primitive army the victor. zulu also used a pincer tactic in which they managed to completely surround the british making retreat impossible, while the british were overconfident in their abilities and technology. 

I've heard that Little Big Horn was fought before the US Army had entirely converted to brass cased ammunition and that the earlier ammunition tended to jam a lot.  Not that Lakota tactics didn't help a lot as well.  The Zulu case is pretty weird: the primary reason you want a breachloader is to avoid enemy fire (you can lie on the ground and reload.  With a muzzle-loader you have to stand there as an easy target), while this really isn't nearly the advantage against Zulu weapons.  If you bring a musket to a Zulu war, you better do it more like a conquistador (be ready to use earlier weapons as well) as the Zulu is going to go from outside of musket range (>>100 yards) to spear & shield range before you can reload (not true of muzzle loading rifles, but you have to be a good shot to make that second or more shot count).

On 10/13/2019 at 1:33 AM, Nuke said:

winning a single battle is not the same as winning a war. in the long term and on an equal footing the more advanced empire usually wins. its possible to have a technological advantage but not a numbers advantage. 

The Zulu lost an entire generation in that one battle (the army was *all* male teenage Zulus, so losing a significant fraction of the army was the same as losing that fraction of a generation).  Nevermind King Pyrrhus's lament that "another such victory and we are ruined", that one victory "broke their heart" and essentially lost the war.  Victorian England barely noticed the loss (and PR mostly concentrated on Rorke's Drift).

[Guest]

9 hours ago, wumpus said:

Probably the real reason it didn't fly was the difficulty in training longbow troops (which was just as much a problem in the hundred years war, except they didn't have muskets so the longbowmen were trained).

This was the only reason firearms were better than bow and arrow early on. It was only with the invention of the musket that they gained superior penetrating power, and they lost to longbows on rate of fire until repeaters were perfected. Contrary to popular belief, guns made neither bows nor knights obsolete (they did replace crossbows). Rather, they made it easier to train a large army, meaning that both knights and archers found themselves severely outnumbered. While foot archers didn't survive that, mounted ones very much did, and were part of Eastern-style armies for quite a long time (knights didn't disappear overnight, either, and would usually flatten gunners not protected by pikemen). Cavalry units, being smaller and better trained, could afford to keep the bow, although that required the culture to have had horse archers in first place. 

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

(And same effective)

I prefer this:

Much more effective. Though Almaz wasn't bad, either.