Interplanetary WAR!

[bighara]

Pardon the dramatic title, but it is germane. I am working on a "hard" sci-fi tabletop RPG (pen & paper). The project is actually one of the things that drew me to KSP! The setting is early 22nd century Earth and solar system. There are no lightsabres, little green men, or warp drives. Mankind has moved out to other planets and moons, as well as the asteroid belt. One of the things I was considering including in the setting is some good old-fashioned war between factions. The question becomes this: in a realistic fictional setting, what are the challenges to something like this? Is it even possible? Mankind has always been his most creative when it came to killing other men, can he rise (or sink) to this challenge?

Imagine that –for whatever reasons– people on Mars were fighting with people in the asteroid belt. How would they go about it? The distances and travel times –while faster than current-day technology– are still daunting. What other issues might bloodthirsty off-worlders face? How would you overcome it while still obeying the laws of physics, etc.?

[vger]

One of the drawbacks with having 'realistic' speculation about a future space war is, it would be INCREDIBLY boring. Modern war is already heading in that direction, with humans becoming more and more reliant on computers and robots (drones). Dogfighting is a thing of the past, and all most pilots usually get to do is fly towards a target, launch a missile (from 100's of miles away) and go home. This kind of thing will only become more common, and possibly even replace infantry some day.

In space, on planets with less gravity and less atmosphere, it's even easier to 'launch missiles' at enemies. If we wanted to take out an asteroid base from Mars, would we even bother launching 'fighters?' Or would it be less trouble to just launch missiles from the surface and let them guide themselves? I'm thinking the latter.

Of course, if you want to toss a little steampunk into it and remove a crucial component of modern society, like for instance, in the 21st century, we ran out of silicon, and the computer age came to a grinding halt. That then leads to a decrease in automation, and even though we have learned far more science, we have to do a lot of the work ourselves (or build retro computers the size of small towns to do the calculations for us).

[Ralathon]

It's going to become a long distance game of hide and seek.

As said above human participation is going to be minimal. If you want to send someone from the asteroid belt to Mars you're going to need a life support system that operates for a few months. That's going to light up the enemy heat detectors like a christmas tree, so your guy will never make it. Not to mention that it is more mass that you need to move around.

It's largely going to be very stealthy rockets that coast until the last few thousand kilometers. If you know where an enemy projectile is you have several weeks to destroy it before it reaches your asteroid home. Just point a powerful microwave laser at it and you neutralize it. To avoid detection you have 2 options: Stealth or speed. If you go fast enough they won't be able to take you down before you hit them, but this requires ridiculous amounts of dV. So stealth is the most cost effective option.

Another option is to use powerful laser arrays to destroy enemy strongholds from interplanetary distances. But you need ridiculous amounts of power for this, so you paint a giant target on yourself when you try to construct or fire one. It is likely the nuclear bomb of interplanetary politics: Very hard to build, but once you have it nobody dares to mess with you.

[bighara]

It's going to become a long distance game of hide and seek.

As said above human participation is going to be minimal. If you want to send someone from the asteroid belt to Mars you're going to need a life support system that operates for a few months. That's going to light up the enemy heat detectors like a christmas tree, so your guy will never make it. Not to mention that it is more mass that you need to move around.

It's largely going to be very stealthy rockets that coast until the last few thousand kilometers. If you know where an enemy projectile is you have several weeks to destroy it before it reaches your asteroid home. Just point a powerful microwave laser at it and you neutralize it. To avoid detection you have 2 options: Stealth or speed. If you go fast enough they won't be able to take you down before you hit them, but this requires ridiculous amounts of dV. So stealth is the most cost effective option.

Another option is to use powerful laser arrays to destroy enemy strongholds from interplanetary distances. But you need ridiculous amounts of power for this, so you paint a giant target on yourself when you try to construct or fire one. It is likely the nuclear bomb of interplanetary politics: Very hard to build, but once you have it nobody dares to mess with you.

These are good points. Me like!

Of course, I should probably clarify I'm not interested so much in the players being "soldiers" in a war (a la Firefly) as the tension that such a conflict creates in the setting. I had thought about the hide and seek idea, too. Also things like sabotage/terrorism might play a role as well. Covert units infiltrating strategically important locations and destroying them from within.

The issue with remote control is the distance. If something is several light-minutes away, but the time the controller can react, it may be too late.

[KerikBalm]

It's going to become a long distance game of hide and seek.

As said above human participation is going to be minimal. If you want to send someone from the asteroid belt to Mars you're going to need a life support system that operates for a few months. That's going to light up the enemy heat detectors like a christmas tree, so your guy will never make it. Not to mention that it is more mass that you need to move around.

It's largely going to be very stealthy rockets that coast until the last few thousand kilometers. If you know where an enemy projectile is you have several weeks to destroy it before it reaches your asteroid home. Just point a powerful microwave laser at it and you neutralize it. To avoid detection you have 2 options: Stealth or speed. If you go fast enough they won't be able to take you down before you hit them, but this requires ridiculous amounts of dV. So stealth is the most cost effective option.

Another option is to use powerful laser arrays to destroy enemy strongholds from interplanetary distances. But you need ridiculous amounts of power for this, so you paint a giant target on yourself when you try to construct or fire one. It is likely the nuclear bomb of interplanetary politics: Very hard to build, but once you have it nobody dares to mess with you.

There is no stealth in space.

Blackbody radiation will be a dead give away

[Red Iron Crown]

Wars worked just fine during the Age of Sail, when it took months to travel and communicate between some regions. I don't see the time/distance being an insurmountable obstacle.

(Never thought I'd use the phrase "Wars worked just fine"...)

[Scotius]

Go play Nexus: The Jupiter Accident for PC First couple of missions are set in a world you've just described. Big, clunky warships with chemical engines and rotating centrifuges. Railguns, missiles and relatively low-power lasers as weapons.

And, i guess with multiplayer being developed for KSP, sooner or later we will be able to simulate proper interplanetary wars ourselves I have to say i'm really curious how will it look. And what insane things we will create along the way

[vger]

There is no stealth in space.

Blackbody radiation will be a dead give away

Depends on the size of the projectile, especially if it sleeps like a typical probe during transfer. Finding incoming missiles would probably not be that easy. We have enough trouble finding asteroids capable of wiping Earth, and those asteroids are a lot bigger than a missile is likely to be. At least until we can start scanning with a MUCH higher resolution.

On the other hand, if you know what planet it's coming from, you can just watch it like a hawk and wait for telltale signs of a launch.

[-Velocity-]

Imagine that –for whatever reasons– people on Mars were fighting with people in the asteroid belt. How would they go about it? The distances and travel times –while faster than current-day technology– are still daunting. What other issues might bloodthirsty off-worlders face? How would you overcome it while still obeying the laws of physics, etc.?

What kind of war? Limited? Total war?- are civilians a target? Is Mars terraformed or not? Are the asteroid inhabitants tied to a specific rock or can they easily move? Your question is far too broad to know the answer to.

The total war scenario is perhaps the easiest to answer though. In a total war, the asteroid inhabitants would have an enormous advantage, so big that Mars would be doomed and it would be insane to start a war, especially if Mars is terraformed and the Martian populace is dependent on a stable environment to survive. The asteroid folks could redirect swarms of rocks into Mars collisions. They only have one target to hit, and it's a big one. The asteroidal inhabitants have a huge supply of heavy elements (read "nuclear weapons") too, as they are living on undifferentiated bodies. Meanwhile, the Martians could not easily retaliate against the asteroidal inhabitants, as there would be too many civilian asteroidal targets, and each one would be completely or mostly self-sustaining. The asteriod inhabitants could possibly not even be tied to specific rocks, making them even harder to wipe out. So in a total war of a planet against a large decentralized group of space settlers, the planet would be completely screwed.

[Accelerando]

One of the drawbacks with having 'realistic' speculation about a future space war is, it would be INCREDIBLY boring. Modern war is already heading in that direction, with humans becoming more and more reliant on computers and robots (drones). Dogfighting is a thing of the past, and all most pilots usually get to do is fly towards a target, launch a missile (from 100's of miles away) and go home. This kind of thing will only become more common, and possibly even replace infantry some day.

that's why nobody ever plays modern military flight simulators, and nobody enjoys playing wargames or chess, right?

i've heard this unimaginative garbage rehashed over and over again, and every time, it's just an attempt to shut down argument about the matter. you don't attempt to supply any constructive element, it's just a veneer over "throw away what you're doing and change it to steampunk, this can never be fun"

fact is that yes, interplanetary war will be about rendezvous and return, there's no getting around that, but there's no reason that that can't be interesting, rather you have to size the playing field to fit. turn based combat and RTS are actually pretty great models for spaceship combat of the future, and one of the great examples is Attack Vector: Tactical, which has an interesting way of modeling 3D combat on a 2d hexagrid between torchships. it only models orbital mechanics at the broader level though; actual battles take place in assumed truly zero-G space, so if you thrust in one direction you go straight in that direction each turn thereafter, but it works well enough for what it is. for travel between planets the game uses a ∆V map rendered as a grid, with each tile representing a certain amount of ∆V required to reach that orbit.

if you implement true orbital mechanics combat in your game, Rocketpunk Manifesto has an interesting paper on how space combat might tend to take place most often in gravity wells, and especially between squabbling powers on the surface of a planet, and how as a consequence of combat taking place near planets you might actually end up having a much more fast style of combat, with skirmishes, automated fighters or gunboat-style vessels.

The broad mainstream tradition of space SF tradition is to treat planets as analogous to island countries, with their surrounding orbital space as 'offshore waters.' In the more picaresque settings an occasional orbital station around some backward colony planet might become a Free Haven, welcoming all comers with no questions asked and fewer answered. But as a rule, any planet that wants to count for anything controls its own orbital space. Or at least someone does, such as a trade federation.

...

But what if both the attacker and defender are in Earth orbital space to begin with?

...

Imagine a suspicious ship departing a neutral space station.

In a traditional setting, absent magical drives we couldn't do much more than log its orbit. Intercepting and inspecting it would take months. If human inspection is called for you'd need a fairly large ship for long term habitability, and you are committing ship and crew to that one mission for perhaps a year or so. Which means that such missions will be costly, and rare.

Now shift the story into Earth orbital space. Intercept and inspection mission can now be performed in hours to a few days, by a much smaller craft with only short term habitability - which makes such missions far more practical.

For the same reason the 'suspicious spacecraft' itself becomes more plausible. Slipping a covert military craft into the civil traffic flow is cumbersome when civil traffic is months en route. It works a lot better on a time scale of hours to a few days.

...

Here we are fighting at Hollywood range, and with civil and neutral craft nearby, posing rules of engagement decisions not to be entrusted to garden variety robotics. Teleoperation is an uncertain option. Jamming can't be ruled out in these close situations - and when split second decisions matter, a little light lag goes a long ways.

he also wrote about how if your combat does take place on interplanetary scale, attackers coming in from interplanetary trajectory could also deploy fuzed explosives on retrograde orbits into the attacked world's gravity well, sending lots of little projectiles slamming into vessels at higher than prograde velocities. it would be advantageous for both fighting parties to launch retrograde to one another if they can help it. and battleships will probably be more automated than corvettes. corvettes can be like the armored command center, but the machine muscle doesn't need humans to fire its weapons once it has the order.

granted, true orbital combat is virgin territory to games, tabletop or otherwise. you will be blazing new trails

Edited April 4, 2014 by Accelerando

[bighara]

I use Mars and the Belt as examples, but I see your points @Velocity. Because it's for a game, and the point is to make things more interesting, let's assume it's not total war. Mars is a collection of pressurized semi-underground habitations. Terraforming in the early 22nd century is quite crude. There are some efforts to raise the ambient temperature and O2 contents of some atmospheres, but for the most part the only place you can walk outside without at least supplemental oxygen (if not a full vacc suit) is Earth.

If it helps, my guideline thus far has been to look at current technologies and envision advances or refinements, but forgo the idea of any technological breakthroughs. Sorry, no Mr.Fusion to power your ship!

Edited May 27, 2014 by bighara
typo

[-Velocity-]

There is no stealth in space.

Blackbody radiation will be a dead give away

Incorrect. While your science is correct in terms of black bodies, you are forgetting that not everything is a black body. So you are incorrect, because you are thinking far too isotropically. If you know what direction an enemy observer will be observing you from, then you can hide yourself using a thermal shade/panel.

What you do to hide is deploy some large, flat panel on the side of your spacecraft that faces the enemy. The side of the panel facing the enemy is cooled to the temperature of the space background. The other side of the panel is not temperature controlled.

So now, in the direction that the enemy lies, you are the same temperature as the space background, and you are invisible to infrared detection. In other directions, you are whatever temperature to need to be to reach thermal equilibrium, but you don't care, because the enemy isn't there to see you. You could make the panel radar stealthy too, so you couldn't be easily seen with radar, either.

You could deploy multiple panels too, and make yourself stealthy in multiple directions. Heck, it is probably possible to beam all your thermal energy out in one narrow direction, and be stealthy from almost all, or at least most, observation directions.

Edited April 4, 2014 by |Velocity|

[Red Iron Crown]

Incorrect. While your science is correct in terms of black bodies, you are forgetting that not everything is a black body. So you are incorrect, because you are thinking far too isotropically. If you know what direction an enemy observer will be observing you from, then you can hide yourself using a thermal shade/panel.

What you do to hide is deploy some large, flat panel on the side of your spacecraft that faces the enemy. The side of the panel facing the enemy is cooled to the temperature of the space background. The other side of the panel is not temperature controlled.

So now, in the direction that the enemy lies, you are the same temperature as the space background, and you are invisible to infrared detection. In other directions, you are whatever temperature to need to be to reach thermal equilibrium, but you don't care, because the enemy isn't there to see you. You could make the panel radar stealthy too, so you couldn't be easily seen with radar, either.

You could deploy multiple panels too, and make yourself stealthy in multiple directions. Heck, it is probably possible to beam all your thermal energy out in one narrow direction, and be stealthy from almost all observation directions.

This page is worth your time to read, I think.

[jwenting]

Your science is correct, but not everything is a black body. So you are incorrect, because you are thinking far too isotropically. If you know what direction an enemy observer will be observing you from, then you can hide yourself using a thermal shade/panel.

no, he's right and your assumption that only black bodies emit blackbody radiation is wrong.

The only way to hide completely in space is to not just emit nothing yourself, but have no mass (which can be detected) and to not block any of the background radiation either.

Good luck.

[vger]

that's why nobody ever plays modern military flight simulators, and nobody enjoys playing wargames or chess, right?

i've heard this unimaginative garbage rehashed over and over again, and every time, it's just an attempt to shut down argument about the matter. you don't attempt to supply any constructive element, it's just "throw away what you're doing and change it to steampunk, this can never be fun"

I wasn't talking about modern warfare. Modern warfare still leaves a lot of room for intense, twitch-based encounters. I was extrapolating the direction that war is taking right now, and tacking a couple of centuries onto it. That's pretty much the definition of speculation. Given that this is the science section of the forums, I can only assume that we're trying to be realistic. And there's usually a very wide divide between what is cool and what is efficient. In our current civilization, where budgets and resources are greatly limited, we tend to lean towards what is efficient. Were that not the case, we would be building a Death Star (or the Enterprise, at least) in orbit right now.

Ground wars though, yeah... if someone stands a chance at landing without getting blown out of the air on the way down, that would probably still be pretty intense.

While on that topic, a little inspirational footage.

At some point when I was heavily into designing sci-fi universes, I drove myself a little batty trying to find a nice balance between realistic space travel and cool-factor. This little vid is pretty much what I was imagining.

Frankly, one of the reasons I'm really excited about the multiplayer KSP update, is someone will no doubt have a server that allows for warfare mods, and then we can try out all of our wild space war concepts in a 'somewhat' realistic environment.

Edited April 4, 2014 by vger

[-Velocity-]

no, he's right and your assumption that only black bodies emit blackbody radiation is wrong.

The only way to hide completely in space is to not just emit nothing yourself, but have no mass (which can be detected) and to not block any of the background radiation either.

Good luck.

Umm... you have no idea what you are talking about. I've actually worked on thermal imaging in real life for the US Army. Only black bodies emit black body radiation by definition. Now, while a lot of things approach black body emission and are effectively black bodies, on a whole, treating an entire spacecraft as a black body is stupid. By cooling some sections of a spacecraft, a spacecraft can anisotropically emit its heat, so that in some directions it looks a lot cooler than its overall average temperature and heat production would otherwise force it to be. That is the whole idea behind the thermal panels idea.

Making your spacecraft the temperature of the background is the best way to hide it in the infrared. If you emit nothing, then you'd be slightly more visible, as you would appear to be a shadow against a brighter background. However, the background is so faint in space that emitting nothing at all (being at absolute zero) would be almost as good as being at like, 4 kelvins. However, being at 0 degrees K is ALOT harder than being at like, 4 degrees K, so your idea to "emit nothing at all" would not ever be done, because it is much harder and actually worse than matching the background apparent temperature.

One problem with hiding in space would be when you occulted a bright star from the point of view of the enemy, but that's where the high velocities and long distances of space come to your advantage. Your spacecraft will be very distant from the enemy, and the chances of blocking a bright point source will be near to nil.

Edited April 4, 2014 by |Velocity|

[Accelerando]

I wasn't talking about modern warfare. Modern warfare still leaves a lot of room for intense, twitch-based encounters. I was extrapolating the direction that war is taking right now, and tacking a couple of centuries onto it. That's pretty much the definition of speculation. Given that this is the science section of the forums, I can only assume that we're trying to be realistic. And there's usually a very wide divide between what is cool and what is efficient. In our current civilization, where budgets and resources are greatly limited, we tend to lean towards what is efficient. Were that not the case, we would be building a Death Star (or the Enterprise, at least) in orbit right now.

Ground wars though, yeah... if someone stands a chance at landing without getting blown out of the air on the way down, that would probably still be pretty intense.

While on that topic, a little inspirational footage.

At some point when I was heavily into designing sci-fi universes, I drove myself a little batty trying to find a nice balance between realistic space travel and cool-factor. This little vid is pretty much what I was imagining.

truth, efficiency often takes away the cool swords and shields and replaces them with silent death. i think that doesn't have to be uncool though. there's that assumption that there has to be a "balance" as though all combat technological and philosophical progress has to play out on this nice curve that everyone set out for you already. why can't explosions be "realistic" like what rocketpunk manifesto was talking about with orbital combat between powers that don't control the entire planet-space? on the other hand why does every space battle have to have hollywood explosions, as opposed to focusing on the hunt, or the intrigue, like playing as a thief/rogue type or admiral instead of as a pure fighter?

it's always a lose lose game when realistic space combat has to fulfill the pretty lights quota and has to shy away from things that arent "pure combat", because this always ends up being about how to shoehorn space into these niches that were already filled by naval combat and aerial combat and when they succeed at neither because space is neither of those things, people throw their hands up and feel like they failed. i guess i feel you there, kind of

sweet vid, beeteedubya

Edited April 4, 2014 by Accelerando

[vger]

truth, efficiency often takes away the cool swords and shields and replaces them with silent death. i think that doesn't have to be uncool though. there's that assumption that there has to be a "balance" as though all combat technological and philosophical progress has to play out on this nice curve that everyone set out for you already. why can't explosions be "realistic" like what rocketpunk manifesto was talking about with orbital combat between powers that don't control the entire planet-space? on the other hand why does every space battle have to have hollywood explosions, as opposed to focusing on the hunt, or the intrigue, like playing as a thief/rogue type or admiral instead of as a pure fighter?

Heh, you just reminded me of "The Enemy Below," and the Star Trek TOS episode "Balance of Terror," which was all about that kind of combat. It wasn't about the explosions and the death, it was a game of chess or poker between two well-seasoned commanders. And I agree that wonderful stories can be made about this sort of thing, but its a sad sign of the times that we live in, that such stories will very rarely gain much appeal. Instant-gratification is at an all-time high, and it shows in every aspect of our society, including entertainment. Not long ago in our society, one could expect to wait possibly months to receive a reply to a letter. Then came telephones, and then internet. We once could waste days trying to get a modem to connect to a local system, and now we flip out if it takes more than ten seconds for an app to update. People expect the same thing when they jump into a space war.

[bighara]

I have a few ideas for ship to ship combat ("Fighting off space-pirates") that would keep the combat somewhat abstract (avoid excessive book-keeping). I am also assuming when ship's are relatively close to one another that things like hacking computer systems will come into play. I am really liking some of the concepts and ideas being mentioned and presented here. I appreciate everyone's input.

[Scotius]

I have no idea how war in space will look - but i can guarantee it will look completely different from what we have now. Just look at history of Earth-bound warfare. Two hundreds years ago there were lines of brightly clad guys standing still, and firing salvos at another line of guys standing 150 meters in front of them. There were muzzle loaded cannons behind them, firing explosive shells at about 800 meters. And cavalry squadrons charging at the enemy with lances and sabers in hand. Orders were given by trumpet and drum signals, and telescope was only kind of long-range detection device. Pluck a Napoleonic Era soldier from the timestream, and drop him in the middle of modern battlefield, and he would be convinced it's the end of the world. He would have no concept of jet planes, helicopters, tanks, guided missiles, laser range-finders or infrared, because his only reference frame would be hot air baloons, steam engines and crude black powder rockets.

[Accelerando]

Heh, you just reminded me of "The Enemy Below," and the Star Trek TOS episode "Balance of Terror," which was all about that kind of combat. It wasn't about the explosions and the death, it was a game of chess or poker between two well-seasoned commanders. And I agree that wonderful stories can be made about this sort of thing, but its a sad sign of the times that we live in, that such stories will very rarely gain much appeal. Instant-gratification is at an all-time high, and it shows in every aspect of our society, including entertainment. Not long ago in our society, one could expect to wait possibly months to receive a reply to a letter. Then came telephones, and then internet. We once could waste days trying to get a modem to connect to a local system, and now we flip out if it takes more than ten seconds for an app to update. People expect the same thing when they jump into a space war.

truth, and combat will still be a deliberated affair even though with timewarp you can compress aeons to minutes, aye. though, the civilization games and stuff like simcity show there's still a pretty big niche for delayed gratification gaming IMO. heck i think gaming's actually turning the tide against instant gratification a bit with games like Minecraft gaining huge following and profit - building massive things that take hours to construct, whether by bolt and pick or by pure creative blocklaying. but indeed, minecraft style gaming is also blessed with an intuitive interface, so there's still instant gratification on some level

and i wasn't constructive at all in my first remark to you, sorry

[vger]

truth, and combat will still be a deliberated affair even though with timewarp you can compress aeons to minutes, aye. though, the civilization games and stuff like simcity show there's still a pretty big niche for delayed gratification gaming IMO. heck i think gaming's actually turning the tide against instant gratification a bit with games like Minecraft gaining huge following and profit - building massive things that take hours to construct, whether by bolt and pick or by pure creative blocklaying. but indeed, minecraft style gaming is also blessed with an intuitive interface, so there's still instant gratification on some level

and i wasn't constructive at all in my first remark to you, sorry

No problem, that was mild compared to a lot of irate comments I've had in the past. I have a bit of a jaded outlook on 'complex' gaming too though, perhaps in the wrong direction. I was playing Star Wars Galaxies when it first launched, when it had much more of a sim-feel to it. And then I saw a lot of its complexities stripped away in an attempt to gain customers by giving it more of a wide appeal. Though I guess I should probably take the fact that those changes only hurt the subscription numbers, as a sign that there IS a market for such games. For whatever reason though, the folks who make the decisions, want everything to be fast and furious (no pun intended). Niche marketing is a very rare thing. But I admit, it seems to have been able to thrive a little bit more in the video game industry than it has in film/television - KSP being a prime example.

[Rakaydos]

If stealth is nonexistant and targets defenceless, it becomes very easy to predict how any given fight will turn out.

Therefore, a superior force simply needs to show up and demand surrender. Space warfare would become formalized, a code of honor reinforced by practical matters of non-total war and stretched by the long wait times transfer orbits require.

For the vs scenerion, though, I prefer Jovian system vs Asteroids. Jovians have jupiter-diving hydrogen collecters to fuel bulky fusion plants, while the asteroids have ready access to plentiful fissionables. and heavy metals.

[peadar1987]

I think in the OP's scenario, with Martian civilisation in small communities under pressure domes, the most tension you'd have to deal with is special forces coming in via dropship to kick your ass. You wouldn't have the capacity to mass-produce weapons, especially not weapons capable of striking another planet. If it's tension you're looking for, you want a reason why the colonists are worried about being Spetsnazed, or else hit by an orbital bombardment weapon.

[KASASpace]

Interesting Note:

When two planes are dogfighting in the atmosphere, they are in orbits.

These are constantly changing, but always have a periapsis below sea level.

Now, some people say space combat isn't exactly feasible, saying that the vessels are moving at thousands of miles per hour.

But that's relative to the given body (Mars, Earth, Sun, etc.)

So, space combat is feasible, and space dogfighting, while no where near atmo dogfighting, is also feasible.

Space intercepting might be tough, especially when the enemy is in an extremely eccentric orbit.

Here's a hypothetical situation:

Say you had a space station resupply depot in orbit over Earth.

Now, the enemy has torpedo craft that are on eccentric orbits, and will intercept with the station.

They will be moving faster (assuming interception near periapsis) and will have a velocity boost on the torpedoes.

This velocity boost will be devastating if they hit their mark.

That was a hypothetical "strike" mission.

Now, for a space dogfight:

A small ship with guns (2 12.7mm), and gyros to stabilize from recoil (albeit not perfect gyros, it will be about as big as an Apollo spacecraft) is in orbit.

An enemy ship with guns (2 12.7mm), but no gyros, relying on RCS only is in an interception orbit that is not very eccentric (too small a target).

The enemy ship aligns orbits, and speeds up relative velocity to the target.

Your ship accelerates away in that direction.

If the enemy ship gains on you, then you have a big problem. It throttles down when close enough to match acceleration and fires on your ship.

If the enemy ship can't accelerate as fast as you, then you can turn around, burn a little bit retrograde, and fire.

Now, this is all hypothetical.

A proper understanding of orbital mechanics will allow for whoever can use them to their advantage to "win" the dogfight.