Jump Dog Fighting

[linkxsc]

Unless you give the fighters some darned good shields, a auto-targeting laser turrets would make short work of them. Unlike a human gunner, a computer could easily pick out one target at a time and stay focused on it. The U.S. Navy is currently experimenting with this very concept.

It's also questionable at what point it's worth the trouble to launch a swarm of hundred fighter drones, vs launching a swarm of a hundred missiles. The former is probably only more cost effective if they're capable of using massless ammo.

Well forgoing the existence of shields or lasers... (or thin reflective armors) just how long of continuous fire does it take one of your ciws lasers to take down a fighter? Do the lasers have to take some time to cool down between shots? What kind of orbit are you in, did the fighters come from a differing orbit using the planet or a moon as cover from detection? Or did their mothership close in and launch them at relatively close range? After blowing up a few fighters can you still pick the living ones out from the high temp debris? Remember those blobs of metal will still be floating around, not like on earth where they fall down in the water after being shot down.

Also, just how many missiles do you have, how fast can you fire them, what portion of your ships mass is missile compared to a carrier and its fighters? Seems to me the greatest asset in space combat of this type would be to overwhelm to interception defenses of your opponent, maybe your missiles are bright enough to leave their tubes and wait for others to launch before heading to the target enmasse. How good are the missiles at staying apart from eachother so that 1 getting shot at doesnt result in more getting taken down by shrapnel? Also on the argument of cost. Which is more expensive, a handful of fighters with sensors suite, or a bunch of missiles that also need advanced sensors and guidance systems to overcome orbital mechanics, enemy jamming, and ai smart enough to pick out their target among the amalgum of flares, chaffes, debris, and possible other ships?

How capable are these missiles too. We talking thermal seekers, radar guided, maybe magnetomically guided (doubtful). What kind of deltav budget do they have unto themselves? What kind of twr we talking?

[vger]

Well forgoing the existence of shields or lasers... (or thin reflective armors) just how long of continuous fire does it take one of your ciws lasers to take down a fighter? Do the lasers have to take some time to cool down between shots? What kind of orbit are you in, did the fighters come from a differing orbit using the planet or a moon as cover from detection? Or did their mothership close in and launch them at relatively close range? After blowing up a few fighters can you still pick the living ones out from the high temp debris? Remember those blobs of metal will still be floating around, not like on earth where they fall down in the water after being shot down.

Well, CIWS lasers are completely new, but like most tech, will very quickly become more powerful, smaller, and with better heat dispersion. From what I've seen of 'mirror armor,' it's not nearly as effective against lasers as one might think. The armor will still heat up and lose its effectiveness. On the topic of the debris, that's another thing to consider with regard to using missiles. Even if they're destroyed, the shrapnel could still be a serious concern.

What I would do, if I were designing such a system? Long-range deployment. All the missiles loaded into a larger delivery system (this is your 'bomber' if you want to call it as such, only it isn't meant to return home). This missile accelerates towards the target (could be on the other side of Earth, could be in a different orbit). The trajectory is planned out before firing and obviously, different designs are going to be better for different ranges. By the time its within a reasonable intercept range and has done its final burn, it breaks apart. The missiles remain asleep unless one of them is "attacked" after which they begin evasive behaviors. The end result I'm picturing is equivalent to the

.

Hopefully that covers at least somewhat of what you're asking. Tech specs on speculative weapons based on speculative technology isn't exactly a simple process. I'm basing this on the future of what our warfare is currently looking like, and applying it to space combat. The big thing happening now is the "iron dome." Tanks have that and we're building them for nations now. It's not a forcefield, but the end result is similar. The most feasible option for getting around such a problem is to throw more stuff at the target than its countermeasures are able to reasonably deal with.

Of course, if someone figures out how make "iron domes" so effective that they can even knock down ballistic artillery shells, and do it using energy instead of ammo? We might be approaching a new era of "ironsides."

Edited August 3, 2014 by vger

[cpast]

Also, just how many missiles do you have, how fast can you fire them, what portion of your ships mass is missile compared to a carrier and its fighters? Seems to me the greatest asset in space combat of this type would be to overwhelm to interception defenses of your opponent, maybe your missiles are bright enough to leave their tubes and wait for others to launch before heading to the target enmasse.

Overwhelming defenses is something that missiles are FAR better at than any manned craft - missiles have less complex hardware than a fighter (no life support, no controls, no trained pilot), so are generally cheaper (software can be complex, but software cost is fixed, so it doesn't affect the cost to replace fired missiles), and are lighter as well. A ship with a given percentage mass being fighter can carry fewer fighters than a ship with the same mass of missile.

How good are the missiles at staying apart from eachother so that 1 getting shot at doesnt result in more getting taken down by shrapnel?

First, it's not the end of the world if that happens. You can't have all of them getting taken down by shrapnel, but if 3 get taken down, you're still likely better off than if you had lost a single fighter.

Also on the argument of cost. Which is more expensive, a handful of fighters with sensors suite, or a bunch of missiles that also need advanced sensors and guidance systems to overcome orbital mechanics, enemy jamming, and ai smart enough to pick out their target among the amalgum of flares, chaffes, debris, and possible other ships?

Fighters. Not even close - the fighters need just as advanced sensors as the missiles, plus life support and controls, plus a trained pilot (which is expensive). And the number of fighters can't be that small a fraction of the number of missiles you'd need; if a certain number of fighters can overwhelm point defenses, several times that number of missiles could as well. Keep in mind, too, that fighters have to survive through the end of their mission -- a fighter that successfully attacks a target but is destroyed on the way back is a lost fighter. Missile software might cost money, but that cost is irrelevant once the missile goes into production - replacing a missile just requires replacing the hardware of the missile, while replacing a fighter just requires replacing the hardware (plus trained pilot) of the fighter. Even if development costs are lower for the fighter (really, really unlikely), it still works out in favor of the missile when you consider replacement costs (which matter, a lot, in wars), plus replacement time (humans take longer to train than software takes to load onto a missile). Fighters also have the risk of damage (depending on what weapons everyone is using), which then involves repair. Missiles don't need to be repaired after going into combat.

Also, what would these fighters be armed with? Unless you're ramming, you need a separate weapon system, which also drives up the cost of a fighter.

How capable are these missiles too. We talking thermal seekers, radar guided, maybe magnetomically guided (doubtful). What kind of deltav budget do they have unto themselves? What kind of twr we talking?

Specific technology: uncertain, as it's all speculative. Delta-v and TWR are both likely far superior to any fighter - a missile is light, can have much higher propellant mass, and doesn't have to have the delta-V to maneuver, fire, maneuver away (avoiding point defenses all the while) and then return.

Edited August 3, 2014 by cpast

[linkxsc]

Well, CIWS lasers are completely new, but like most tech, will very quickly become more powerful, smaller, and with better heat dispersion. From what I've seen of 'mirror armor,' it's not nearly as effective against lasers as one might think. The armor will still heat up and lose its effectiveness. On the topic of the debris, that's another thing to consider with regard to using missiles. Even if they're destroyed, the shrapnel could still be a serious concern.

Well, who knows, afterall lasers will have become a mainstay, so I'm sure at least some effort has been put into defending against them by this point. And even then, the lasers we've used IRL so far have been targeting relatively slow moving, unarmored drones that didn't try to maneuver. As the target shifts around and you lose focus on a single point, the weapons effectiveness drops off. Also light materials could make up the bulk of the craft with only tidbits of actual armor around the important bits. Missiles could also employ this manner of defense though.

Also things to remember, IRL missiles deal damage using shrapnel against fighters yes they do, however aircraft are pitifully armored currently, relying more on mobility, tactics, and firing first, to avoid taking damage. Only the occasional GA craft like an A-10 has any remarkable armor. In space, a bit more armor could be put on craft because they wouldnt need to deal with staying aloft, and the shrapnel of missiles would become slightly less effective. Also if the missiles were desrtoyed any range away from the target their damage capability would fall to the woes of the "inverse square law" every unit farther from the target they go off, they deal that much less impact. Which since the target would be both shooting back and trying to maneuver to avoid the incoming missiles, could force missiles to have to get just as close as they do now to do any notable damage.

What I would do, if I were designing such a system? Long-range deployment. All the missiles loaded into a larger delivery system (this is your 'bomber' if you want to call it as such, only it isn't meant to return home). This missile accelerates towards the target (could be on the other side of Earth, could be in a different orbit). The trajectory is planned out before firing and obviously, different designs are going to be better for different ranges. By the time its within a reasonable intercept range and has done its final burn, it breaks apart. The missiles remain asleep unless one of them is "attacked" after which they begin evasive behaviors. The end result I'm picturing is equivalent to the Iron Man Jericho missile.

Just a thought though, so its a weapons deployment box (Gundam 0083 comes to mind, amongst every other launcher in armored core). probably has enough fuel to make some orbital maneuvers... so does it have a radar system? Cause remember IRL we have ~3 major missile types:

Thermal homing ie. Aim-9 Sidewinders. Simplest tracking system, also the easiest to beat with flares and infrared laser systems. Require LOS from launcher to target.

Passive radar guided ie Aim-7 Sparrow. Requires something external to illuminate the target with a radar. Usually this is done IRL by the launching fighter, so the missile only requires a detector, and is thus much smaller and cheaper, and more deltaV. These would also require LOS of some sort from either a launching ship or perhaps you're launcher platform, or a fighter. These are currently used lots as fleet defense weapons due to the attacking missiles will always be in sight, and are easily illuminated by the powerful radars at close range to a ship. Odds are, this is what the missiles launched by your munitions box would fire. While the munitions box itself was guided to the target by the type below.

Active radar guided ie. AIM-120 AMRAMM. These... well they take target data gathered from the launching aircraft (or another craft acting almost as a spotter to target) and fire, following an inertial path towards the target, occasionally updating with new info from the launching craft, spotter, or AWACS. Upon reaching a certain range to target, the missile switches on its own short range radar system and guides itself the rest of the way to the target under its own power... THESE would probably be the most likely system used in space combat... assuming that we don't have really good Ewar on both sides that can interfere with their guidance datalinks while approaching the target.

There are also HARMs which seek out active radar sources (although they work quite the same as passive radar homing).

Basically the farther down you go in that list, the more fuel will be needed to offset the weight of the guidance systems and such. Your munitions box is a great plan, and would probably work great, but its counter would be some jamming to its guidance as it approaches, or since its launched at extreme range, I could perhaps deploy a few rockets/expandible decoys to burn to slightly different orbits, and your launcher would probably have to pick 1 to follow. You could just launch more of the munitons boxes, but now we're in a stalemate as-to who runs out of equipment first.

Hopefully that covers at least somewhat of what you're asking. Tech specs on speculative weapons based on speculative technology isn't exactly a simple process. I'm basing this on the future of what our warfare is currently looking like, and applying it to space combat. The big thing happening now is the "iron dome." Tanks have that and we're building them for nations now. It's not a forcefield, but the end result is similar. The most feasible option for getting around such a problem is to throw more stuff at the target than its countermeasures are able to reasonably deal with.

I still stand by that the best weapon would probably still be a cannon fired at close range, but well I play Gallante. But thanks for actually posing a good argument, I wanna see a follow up. How you fight my decoys that my ship launched? Remember, we're on other sides of the planet from eachother with some satellites that are spotting eachother... to an extent.

Of course, if someone figures out how make "iron domes" so effective that they can even knock down ballistic artillery shells, and do it using energy instead of ammo? We might be approaching a new era of "ironsides."

I do wonder about the ability of a ship to fire through its own energy shields... I mean, if you had to bring them down for a split second to open fire, well that'd be the moment that they strike. Ofcourse shields might not even work so great against heavy kinetic rounds, or might shift their trajectory a bit, but now we're playing world of tanks in space with KV4s and armor angling.

Overwhelming defenses is something that missiles are FAR better at than any manned craft - missiles have less complex hardware than a fighter (no life support, no controls, no trained pilot), so are generally cheaper (software can be complex, but software cost is fixed, so it doesn't affect the cost to replace fired missiles), and are lighter as well. A ship with a given percentage mass being fighter can carry fewer fighters than a ship with the same mass of missile.

First I will state, I never attested that "fighters" were even effective, I just asked how much your missiles would cost compared to a fighter. Nor did I ever state that they would be manned craft. Any socalled fighters that exist would probably be drones controlled either by AI or direct link from a pilot sitting in a cockpit elsewhere (you know, like real drones are). Also its still a moot point, how big are our warships anyways? 1000ton, 10000ton? Hell by my figuring a "space fighter" compared to a "space battleship" would be like PTboats to battleships in WW2. Tiny and hard to spot, loaded with a few hard hitting weapons, and a few small turrets to defend themselves from like sized craft, or missiles.

Also overwhelming defenses is something that only needs to be dealt with on missile type weapons. Thats it, we shoot lots of missiles at ships because lots of missiles will be shot down, and we need enough missiles to score a hit. My fighters would be small craft that sit on the outside of CIWS effective range, plinking away with cannon type weapons while burning periodically to shift their position relative to the target. I say fighters... but these could easily be the size of frigates relative to a socalled "battleship"

Actually fighters would probably be borederline like bits or funnels from Gundam. Computer, RCS Thrusters, Gun, thats it. You can launch them and let them chill out on alternate orbits in amongst debris. Let em sit there for months, just give them a solar panel to keep them online. When you need them, online them and put fire on a target that wasn't expecting them to be there.

Missiles, HA. Does your space society really have the resources to send hundreds of missiles in salvo after salvo at a target with a maybe chance of killing them. Or have some little drones that cost a bit more (actually they're basically a missile with a camera and a gun added to them, not much weight) can be left in space for ages until needed, and when they run out of fuel/ammo can be collected and relaunched without losing the materials used to build them. Remember in space you won't have all the materials in the world. The precious electronics for all these radar systems and guidance systems might not be so expendable as you think. Perhaps these "fighters" might not even have radars of their own, and instead rely on the eyes and communication of several pilots controlling them by camera and remote?

I'll take a dozen space fighters armed with 30mm cannons, and a pair of .50cal mgs for missile interception with a deltaV budget around 5km/s over your salvos of missiles any day.

First, it's not the end of the world if that happens. You can't have all of them getting taken down by shrapnel, but if 3 get taken down, you're still likely better off than if you had lost a single fighter.

Well, 3 missiles exploding spreading shrapnel around... taking out other missiles. Remember the target only needs a handful of good shots to take down a close formation of missiles. You need lots of missiles to overwhelm their defences. Me I like cannons meself, because with a wide enough spread of fire you'd never be able to evade.

Fighters. Not even close - the fighters need just as advanced sensors as the missiles, plus life support and controls, plus a trained pilot (which is expensive). And the number of fighters can't be that small a fraction of the number of missiles you'd need; if a certain number of fighters can overwhelm point defenses, several times that number of missiles could as well. Keep in mind, too, that fighters have to survive through the end of their mission -- a fighter that successfully attacks a target but is destroyed on the way back is a lost fighter. Missile software might cost money, but that cost is irrelevant once the missile goes into production - replacing a missile just requires replacing the hardware of the missile, while replacing a fighter just requires replacing the hardware (plus trained pilot) of the fighter. Even if development costs are lower for the fighter (really, really unlikely), it still works out in favor of the missile when you consider replacement costs (which matter, a lot, in wars), plus replacement time (humans take longer to train than software takes to load onto a missile). Fighters also have the risk of damage (depending on what weapons everyone is using), which then involves repair. Missiles don't need to be repaired after going into combat.

Also, what would these fighters be armed with? Unless you're ramming, you need a separate weapon system, which also drives up the cost of a fighter.

Again, no need for life support or controls. Hell even at that you could have a pilot in a space suit for all his life support, hes planning on getting back to base tonite anyways. But no, probably unmanned. And sensor suite... yeah 1 fighter needs the same sensors as every missile in a salvo (unless you're shooting off with thermal seekers or passive homers but still, radars be expensive. Think of it this way. 1 AMRAMM missile costs over 1.4mil for the most recent versions. An F-16 cost ~20mil in the late 90s, F-18s cost around 40mil now. Going by this your missiles cost ~1/15-1/25 a fighter. Missiles are single use, a fighter might live to fight another day) Even at that... how do you get your missiles into range without wasting too much of their fuel on the approach? vger came up with a decent 1, and armored box with teh missiles in it thats fired to approach the target, and then upon getting in range, or getting fired on to bad, deploys its weapons at the target. Whats your suggestion as to how to do this?

Also said above, fighters would probably be loaded with a combo of their own missiles/cannons remember, a 20mm will blow holes the size of your fingers through the top and rear armor of tanks, a 30mm will blow them the size of your fist, god only knows what we're figuring for the armor on our warships here. Are they so weakly armored that regular old missiles work against them... cause well, I want a 30mm if thats the case.

Specific technology: uncertain, as it's all speculative. Delta-v and TWR are both likely far superior to any fighter - a missile is light, can have much higher propellant mass, and doesn't have to have the delta-V to maneuver, fire, maneuver away (avoiding point defenses all the while) and then return.

Aaah, well here we hit the speculation. See, a missile might have higher TWR and more propellent mass. But a fighter might be just large enough to be equipped with a fission/fusion reactor and is able to use a thermal rocket for extremely high ISPs (and perhaps TWRs) that a missile cannot within its small profile. Also, point defences wouldn't jsut be spray and pray. A ship probably wouldn't be taking potshots with its CIWS guns or interceptor missiles at a small craft over 150km away. A minor burn of 5m/s could provide more than enough to evade fire. And just keep burning back and forth every second or so... your fighters not taking shots. Laser point defenses change the game a bit, but now your missiles and fighters would both be heavier with armor now and the lighter missiles will probably suffer more from that than an already somewhat heavy fighter.

[WestAir]

One day iron domes will become effective enough to take out nearly all types of incoming artillery, from personal rounds to artillery to ballistic missiles. To what level it goes is uncertain. If infantry can deploy a robot capable of forming a ballistics shield around said infantry, protecting them from sniper fire, missiles, and rpg's with a miniature iron dome, well that would be a very valuable asset to any military.

Ammunition would become all the more crucial, however, because it would be exclusively relied on for defense and attack.

[Seret]

One day iron domes will become effective enough to take out nearly all types of incoming artillery, from personal rounds to artillery to ballistic missiles.

Unlikely. There's always an evolutionary battle going on between weapons and defences. Every time someone develops a better defence the attack steps up its game. Warheads almost always stay enough of a step ahead for nobody to be safe. It's important for them to be so, because as soon as defence ever outmatches attack you end up in horrific situations like the stalemate on western front in WW1.

[WestAir]

Unlikely. There's always an evolutionary battle going on between weapons and defences. Every time someone develops a better defence the attack steps up its game. Warheads almost always stay enough of a step ahead for nobody to be safe. It's important for them to be so, because as soon as defence ever outmatches attack you end up in horrific situations like the stalemate on western front in WW1.

Computers can experience time a lot slower than we can. If it's possible for computers to adjust the flight paths of "smart bullets", or its possible to adjust the angles of multiple barrels in a timeframe expressed in milliseconds, then it's probably possible to shoot an incoming bullet with another bullet. That's all that's needed to make incoming fire a null threat.

If your M-16 can't hit me because I've got a turret next to me that shoots down all of your bullets, what threat do you pose to me?

[Seret]

That's all that's needed to make incoming fire a null threat.

Sure, if by "all" you mean "one tiny part of"

The kind of system you're talking about needs to go through a cycle something like:

1. Scan
   
2. Categorise threats
   
3. Acquire
   
4. Track
   
5. Engage
   
6. Analyse
   
7. Re-engage
   

Actual fire control of the engagement phase isn't beyond us, as you say. The kind of fire control you're talking about is pretty routine. But that's far from all that's required.

Lets look at some actual real-world systems like you're positing: naval CIWS and tank active defense systems like Arena. Both are quite effective against the threats they were originally developed for. But especially in the case of anti-shipping missiles the threat has adapted. Modern ASMs use a supersonic sea-skimming profile (disrupting 1-3 of the above list) followed by a terminal pop-up maneuver that makes it extremely hard for CIWS to track and engage them. Big chunky guns (which they need to be to have decent range) aren't able to easily track targets moving at supersonic speeds across their field of fire at short ranges, and they have a maximum elevation. Bottom line is that CIWS systems, which are under automatic computer control and quite capable of adjusting fall of shot at millisecond speeds, aren't anywhere near 100% effective. That's why they're used as a last-ditch effort in a multi-layered defence.

On land systems like the Arena are operating in a much more challenging environment. They're fairly effective against the likes of RPGs, but it's highly dubious whether they'd be able to effectively defend against a top attack missile like the Spike or Javelin, or a supersonic weapon like the Starstreak. There are numerous other things missiles could do to render them ineffective, such as offset approaches or terminal pop-ups, simultaneous attacks from two or more directions, etc. There's absolutely no question of any tank fielding any kind of active countermeasure that would be able to stop direct fire from a supersonic KE projectile.

A common problem with active defences is an extremely limited number of engagements. The enemy will always have enough firepower to overwhelm your defensive measures. When I was in the air force one of our standard tactics for strike aircraft attacking ships was to pepper them with unguided rockets fitted with dummy warheads that mimmicked the active radars of ASM missiles. Each aircraft could carry dozens of these, and the ships would have to treat each one like an actual vampire. The ships would waste all their SAMs and CIWS shots on these before the actual attack was pressed home using ASMs. Evolving threats, new tactics, and downright cheating can overcome pretty much any new defensive technology, or at least severely degrade it's effectiveness.

So you can see that foolproof active defences don't exist, even before you start trying to extrapolate the tech down to something as incredibly hard to stop as small arms. How would an anti-small arms system even work? How would it tell friendly from enemy fire? How would it stop tiny supersonic projectiles fired from short ranges (infantry combat mostly occurs at <200m, giving you about 0.2s at the outside to classify, acquire, track and engage the threat). How many engagements does this thing pack? To usefully protect a platoon from small arms fire it would have to be able to carry out tens of thousands of engagements.

It's just not realistic. There is no current or near-future tech that looks like offering anywhere near this kind of capability.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Seret

[WestAir]

Seret, your reply was most definitely the most interesting, informative, and well made point I've read today.

+1 to you. You answered every question I had before I asked it and even elaborated the why's. Thanks.

[vger]

Well, who knows, afterall lasers will have become a mainstay, so I'm sure at least some effort has been put into defending against them by this point. And even then, the lasers we've used IRL so far have been targeting relatively slow moving, unarmored drones that didn't try to maneuver. As the target shifts around and you lose focus on a single point, the weapons effectiveness drops off. Also light materials could make up the bulk of the craft with only tidbits of actual armor around the important bits. Missiles could also employ this manner of defense though.

Also things to remember, IRL missiles deal damage using shrapnel against fighters yes they do, however aircraft are pitifully armored currently, relying more on mobility, tactics, and firing first, to avoid taking damage. Only the occasional GA craft like an A-10 has any remarkable armor. In space, a bit more armor could be put on craft because they wouldnt need to deal with staying aloft, and the shrapnel of missiles would become slightly less effective. Also if the missiles were desrtoyed any range away from the target their damage capability would fall to the woes of the "inverse square law" every unit farther from the target they go off, they deal that much less impact. Which since the target would be both shooting back and trying to maneuver to avoid the incoming missiles, could force missiles to have to get just as close as they do now to do any notable damage.

Well, yeah. With conventional space travel, weight is the biggest killer though, making heavily-armored ships a HUGE pain in the butt to construct. The best alternative I can think of to launching it all from a planet is to build a dry-dock near a big iron-rich asteroid, and slap it onto the ship after the hull is already finished. All that extra mass is also going to make your maneuvers ridiculously expensive though.

Hard to say what kind of velocity would be needed to penetrate sufficient armor though. For instance, if the missiles contained diamond fragments, and those fragments were traveling at over 100,000 kps, what kind of a mess would that make? The inbound debris would be a shotgun blast at that point, and CIWS is probably going to be useless. Now it's either up to the armor to soak the damage, or an evasive maneuver. An armor-heavy ship is going to have a heck of a time dodging something coming at it that fast. We're probably getting into paper-rock-scissors territory at this point. Space certainly presents some interesting tactical challenges, the kind I haven't seen since perhaps, submarines vs. destroyers.

Just a thought though, so its a weapons deployment box (Gundam 0083 comes to mind, amongst every other launcher in armored core). probably has enough fuel to make some orbital maneuvers... so does it have a radar system? Cause remember IRL we have ~3 major missile types: Thermal homing ie. Aim-9 Sidewinders. Simplest tracking system, also the easiest to beat with flares and infrared laser systems. Require LOS from launcher to target.

Passive radar guided ie Aim-7 Sparrow. Requires something external to illuminate the target with a radar. Usually this is done IRL by the launching fighter, so the missile only requires a detector, and is thus much smaller and cheaper, and more deltaV. These would also require LOS of some sort from either a launching ship or perhaps you're launcher platform, or a fighter. These are currently used lots as fleet defense weapons due to the attacking missiles will always be in sight, and are easily illuminated by the powerful radars at close range to a ship. Odds are, this is what the missiles launched by your munitions box would fire. While the munitions box itself was guided to the target by the type below.

I still stand by that the best weapon would probably still be a cannon fired at close range, but well I play Gallante. But thanks for actually posing a good argument, I wanna see a follow up. How you fight my decoys that my ship launched? Remember, we're on other sides of the planet from eachother with some satellites that are spotting eachother... to an extent.

Well we're in an era where Playstation 3 chips are being converted to guidance systems... might as well go all out with this. First and foremost, the most advanced instruments will be on the deployment box. On approach, it will gather as much data on the target as it can, and upload it to the missiles, so they have the best possible profile. The missiles themselves? Well heck, when you've got 100 missiles coming from a single shot, why not give them everything? And by that I mean having different sensor packs on different missiles from the same box. They'd be the same in other respects except for what they're scanning. It's a 'swarm' so why not let them communicate with one another via a hive mind? If one sensor type gets fooled, those missiles can rely on the data from others to get a more complete picture. They can still operate independently if they need to in the event of the 'wifi' being jammed. Though personally, were we living in "magic Star Trek land" and have any kind of high-tech sensors we want? I'd probably opt for a "gravity-wave-seeking" missile. The only way for a ship (in the absence of artificial gravity generation) to fool a missile like that, would be to shed a LOT of its mass.

I do wonder about the ability of a ship to fire through its own energy shields... I mean, if you had to bring them down for a split second to open fire, well that'd be the moment that they strike. Ofcourse shields might not even work so great against heavy kinetic rounds, or might shift their trajectory a bit, but now we're playing world of tanks in space with KV4s and armor angling.

Depends on how quickly the shields can go up or down. I don't know if frequency modulation in Star Trek works this way, but this is my guess anyway... it can perhaps be best explained with a simpler system that was designed for a similar purpose. When air combat was first devised, they had a problem with the fixed forward guns chewing up propellers. The initial solution to this was to armor the propellers (yes, to protect them against friendly fire). That is, until someone devised a way to mechanically link the guns to the prop, so that they would only fire when the prop wasn't in its path. I would envision any kind of advanced shield system to be linked to the guns in a similar fashion. This is probably the hardest thing to speculate about, given that I don't think there's ever been a theoretical shield design. That's right up there with "how do lightsabers parry each other?"

Edited August 5, 2014 by vger

[Specialist290]

Just popping in to let you all know that the moderation staff has pruned a few posts along a line of conversation that was both off-topic and veering too far for comfort into prohibited political discussion. Let's try to keep the discussion on the implications of future technology developments and away from ongoing and possibly highly-contentious current events, alright?

[Wanderfound]

Just popping in to let you all know that the moderation staff has pruned a few posts along a line of conversation that was both off-topic and veering too far for comfort into prohibited political discussion. Let's try to keep the discussion on the implications of future technology developments and away from ongoing and possibly highly-contentious current events, alright?

Okeydoke; sorry for that.

[neamerjell]

Nah, don't give up so easily. Read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and zero-g combat maneuvers will make a lot more sense. I even had an idea for a projectile weapon that would work in zero-g:

In a traditional gun, the propellant (usually gunpowder) is contained by the closed breech (the end where the trigger is). All the force of the propellant goes into to forcing the projectile out of the barrel.

What if you had a mostly open breech and double (or more) the propellant? There would need to be some blockage of the breech to provide something for the propellant to push against in order to push the bullet down the barrel, but the open part would allow some propellant to counter act the force of the bullet pushing back on the propellant. The gasses escaping the breech would function like a sort of RCS thruster to hold the gun steady while it fires.

Don't worry, this gun won't blow your head off. This is strictly a vehicle mounted gun.

Edited August 5, 2014 by neamerjell

[Wanderfound]

Nah, don't give up so easily. Read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and zero-g combat maneuvers will make a lot more sense. I even had an idea for a projectile weapon that would work in zero-g:

In a traditional gun, the propellant (usually gunpowder) is contained by the closed breech (the end where the trigger is). All the force of the propellant goes into to forcing the projectile out of the barrel.

What if you had a mostly open breech and double (or more) the propellant? There would need to be some blockage of the breech to provide something for the propellant to push against in order to push the bullet down the barrel, but the open part would allow some propellant to counter act the force of the bullet pushing back on the propellant. The gasses escaping the breech would function like a sort of RCS thruster to hold the gun steady while it fires.

Don't worry, this gun won't blow your head off. This is strictly a vehicle mounted gun.

You've just re-invented the recoilless rifle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoilless_rifle

They have some uses, but they also have plenty of disadvantages.

[Moss]

I think that on a moderately sized fighter the force of a bullet would be negligible, or easily countered with thrusters of some kind.

[78stonewobble]

Well using smaller craft, does have the advantage of adding range, between what you want to defend and what you want to attack.

Ie. your space tanker / gasstation. Don't want that going up against the enemy. So you add distance by adding other things that can attack from futher away. Ie. a carrier... which then becomes rather valuable, so it needs attack craft of it's own to add distance between it and the enemy.

Whether that leads to dogfighting I don't know.

[Mazon Del]

I had a pretty big post a while ago on the topic of the 3 big weapon types (ballistic, missile, directed energy).

In short, unless you can spam out a truly insane amount of bullets, super short range, or have an amazing orbital setup, against a mobile opponent ballistics are generally speaking worthless. The enemy just needs to nudge themselves a little bit in order to dodge, the bullets only have so much dV which will drastically limit the possible orbital scenarios where the bullets can even REACH the target. Against an immobile target (an orbiting station, disabled ship, or 'ground' target) these become useful, but are still limited by the possible orbital scenarios. I would not recommend that ships have more than maybe a single 'cannon' simply because there will be situations (station busting) where it is just cheaper to use the cannon than a missile.

Missiles (fighters and drones basically fall into this category) are much more useful than ballistics because they can change their vector and seek in on a moving target. However missiles have many downsides of their own. First off, they are quite massive and bulky to carry which will make your ship fly like a pig if you try to go to Macross level missile loads. Missiles will have a MUCH lower fuel amount than a ship. So, while the ship will have to burn more fuel to dodge, the missile will run out first. Plus, light lag plays heavily into this in a way that the defender can take advantage of. In an extreme example, if the target starts thrusting up and the missile is a light minute away when it sees this it is going to begin thrusting up to ensure the intercept. Meanwhile, the ship flips over and begins thrusting in the opposite direction. As soon as that light reaches the missile (a minute later) the missile has to undo the thrust it has been undertaking on the assumption for that minute that the target ship has been thrusting. In short, since the ship knows the missile is trying to intercept it, it doesn't have to worry about where the missile is 'trying' to go and thus to predict it. It just needs to spam out thrust in various directions to get the missile to waste fuel. I would recommend that ships have a few missiles because (depending on ship engine technology) forcing the enemy ship to waste fuel is a great and wonderful thing in the long run.

Directed Energy weapons get to overcome part of the lightlag problem simply because (with the exception of possible reflections of of space junk) the target has no idea he is being shot at until he is hit. He cannot watch the shot approach, so he cannot predict with certainty which way he needs to dodge. Now one thing that is often overlooked is the real damage of directed energy weapons in space is NOT to cause hull damage like a cannon shell or missile would. The purpose of these weapons is to cause the enemy ship to heat up. Heat dissipation is an extremely critical aspect of space vehicles. If you are generating or receiving more heat than you are losing through your dissipation systems, your crew will eventually boil to death and eventually your systems will begin to experience failures. Laser combat ends up being a fascinating game of 'heat points' and maneuvering. Your own engines and lasers (and other systems0 will be generating heat for your ship. Your heatsinks and dissipators will only have so much capacity before you begin to build up. Obviously a proper ship will be designed with dissipation systems capable of removing its own heat generation (while thrusting and firing) with extra capacity for the occasional laser hit. So, as you attack you gain heat (points) which dissipate over time. As you are shot you gain points. As you dodge you gain points. Your objective is to lose more points than you are gaining while making sure the opponent does the opposite. You only lose points when the enemy beam is not on you, and that is only true when you have dodged succesfully (used your engines). So as you can see, the problem is quite a difficult one. You must keep dodging to not die, using up your fuel throughout the whole combat, because if you stop dodging you will quickly die to heat stroke or component failure. Additional plus for you with DEW is that they will be less bulky and massive than missiles, so that is more mass you can use to devote to heat dissipation systems (even if you don't use lasers, your enemies will).

At the end of the day, your objective in space combat is to make your enemy incapable of performing their mission. This is either by killing the crew, destroying the ship, or making the ship expend enough fuel that it cannot continue its mission. In all three cases, the prime defense involves moving, which expends fuel. In the case of ballistics, generally speaking only a little fuel is needed (your fuel will last more than their ammo supply will). With missiles, you will have to spend more fuel, but you will outlast the enemy missile in most cases. For lasers, once combat has begun, you and your opponent MUST constantly be moving or you will begin heating up. So lasers will cause the greatest fuel expenditure, or the crew/ship will be destroyed.

Now of course from the fuel perspective this goes right out the window with the Q-Drive if it actually works on this scale. But the heat-combat argument still favors lasers.

[linkxsc]

-Snip-

Like other guys said, this results in whats known as a recoilless rifle (and yes, dumbfire cannons in space would probably still be rifled for the gyro-stabilization of the projectile, don't want it to turn off center and smack into the target on the non-armor-piercing side now do we?)

They'd be great for space, perhaps on smaller craft where the turrets sticking out of the side wouldn't be hindered much by the hull of the craft. But you would have some problems.

First and probably the most annoying, would be limited firing arc. See rotating the thing and firing tangent to the hull of your craft would be fine, the turret could almost account for all of its roll effects too. If you were trying to shoot at something above the turret though... that backblast would be going straight into your hull. Might not be too big of a deal for a 2-3in gun. But any larger than this and you might start damaging yourself by doing this. Also you'd have limited arcs wherever the back blast (or forward firing) might hit another turret, or other parts of your ship (might not be able to fire straight ahead for example because behind the turret would be your radar arrays or w/e) Though they would be great, also due to their lack of needing large recoil systems, they cut down on the crafts empty weight a lot. Less stress on the hull also. The ammo may weigh more than a regular shot due to the extra propellent needed to get the same velocities though so another drawback, But considering the weight that some guns can get IRL... Would be great for putting larger caliber weapons on smaller craft

[Seret]

Lol, turrets. It's not a boat. You can just point the whole vehicle at whatever you want to shoot with an unguided weapon. Even if that wasn't possible for whatever reason you'd probably just have numerous tubes ready to fire on a single mount like an Ontos. Carrying multiple tubes would be lighter than carrying an autoloader unless you were trying to pack a huge number of rounds. Much more reliable too.

[Rickenbacker]

Well in the near future I think the most likely space combat that could possibly happen is between 2 vehicles like the X-37. They would try to maneuverer into appropriate orbits to get an intercept which would enable a missile launch. Then the target would have to expend dV to try to avoid it. (would flares and chaff still work in space).

I don't think you'd need flares or chaff. Just moving perpendicular to the missiles flight path should be enough to make it miss, and unless the missile is a sizeable spaceship in itself, it wont' have enough reaction mass to compensate for even a small sideways displacement, if it's carried out when the missile is fairly close. This actually works for today's SAMs as well, but the distances and timings involved are much tighter.

[linkxsc]

Lol, turrets. It's not a boat. You can just point the whole vehicle at whatever you want to shoot with an unguided weapon. Even if that wasn't possible for whatever reason you'd probably just have numerous tubes ready to fire on a single mount like an Ontos. Carrying multiple tubes would be lighter than carrying an autoloader unless you were trying to pack a huge number of rounds. Much more reliable too.

Hmmmm, I'm sure we'd still have turrets, yes you can point the whole ship at the target, but that takes time and RCS fuel. Also you might not want to point yourself directly at the target in the case that you wanted to use your main engines to burn and avoid fire. Also while burnign in a different direction, turrets give you the ability to fire. CIWS would also definitely need turrets because missiles could be programed to arc around and attack your ship from the sides rather than the front.

Although having good forward firepower is never a bad thing, mount it up such that all the recoil would act along the COM axis.

I don't think you'd need flares or chaff. Just moving perpendicular to the missiles flight path should be enough to make it miss, and unless the missile is a sizeable spaceship in itself, it wont' have enough reaction mass to compensate for even a small sideways displacement, if it's carried out when the missile is fairly close. This actually works for today's SAMs as well, but the distances and timings involved are much tighter.

Well remember, your missiles might burn to get a couple 100m/s of closure, then upon getting within a range they burn to speed their approach, and might end up coming close with 1000-2000m/s of deltaV, are you gonna burn all that fuel to outrun the missile? Flares and chaff are probably a fraction the weight of the fuel needed to avoid the missile in that way, and perhaps combined with a much smaller burn, you could do your evasion with a fraction the weight spent.

Also usually when avoiding SAMs, they either burn away and run the missile out of fuel (which since SAMs also need match altitude, is doable if they were kinda far away from the launcher. Otherwise they turn hard hoping to get outside of the missiles detection angle/pop chaffs/flares. Usually missiles are flying significantly faster then the target aircraft so they do have a lot of ability to overshoot, but they also don't have the ability to throttle their motors, all of them being solid rocket motors. A missile in space would probably have a throttleable motor/vectoring engine, and probably its own RCS packed into a tiny package, and likely cost several times what an atmospheric missile would (another part of the whole, we might not just sling salvos of hundreds of missiles back and forth, probably more dumbfire rockets to fool/waste CIWS mixed in with actual attacking missiles)

[Seret]

Hmmmm, I'm sure we'd still have turrets, yes you can point the whole ship at the target, but that takes time and RCS fuel.

This is the vehicles primary mission, spending time and fuel on it isn't a problem. If the vehicle doesn't have sufficient time and resources to engage a target somebody is doing something wrong. Remember that firing the weapon will use up a sizeable percentage of your ammunition, so you're that much closer to being a useless floating lump anyway. The only actual armed spacecraft ever flown aimed it's gun by pointing the spacecraft, and none of the concepts for combat spacecraft have ever had turrets. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking like sci-fi, where space combat is simply WWII-era naval and aerial combat transplanted into space. Actual space combat will be nothing like naval combat, and may not even by much like aerial combat.

[Rickenbacker]

Well remember, your missiles might burn to get a couple 100m/s of closure, then upon getting within a range they burn to speed their approach, and might end up coming close with 1000-2000m/s of deltaV, are you gonna burn all that fuel to outrun the missile? Flares and chaff are probably a fraction the weight of the fuel needed to avoid the missile in that way, and perhaps combined with a much smaller burn, you could do your evasion with a fraction the weight spent.

Also usually when avoiding SAMs, they either burn away and run the missile out of fuel (which since SAMs also need match altitude, is doable if they were kinda far away from the launcher. Otherwise they turn hard hoping to get outside of the missiles detection angle/pop chaffs/flares. Usually missiles are flying significantly faster then the target aircraft so they do have a lot of ability to overshoot, but they also don't have the ability to throttle their motors, all of them being solid rocket motors. A missile in space would probably have a throttleable motor/vectoring engine, and probably its own RCS packed into a tiny package, and likely cost several times what an atmospheric missile would (another part of the whole, we might not just sling salvos of hundreds of missiles back and forth, probably more dumbfire rockets to fool/waste CIWS mixed in with actual attacking missiles)

You wouldn't try to outrun the missile, just move sideways. A missile coming at you with a few thousand m/s relative velocity would have a very hard time compensating for even the slightest sideways movement of the target.

[Seret]

You wouldn't try to outrun the missile, just move sideways. A missile coming at you with a few thousand m/s relative velocity would have a very hard time compensating for even the slightest sideways movement of the target.

Depends. If you're near the outside of the envelope for that weapon then you've got a decent chance of outrunning it. Otherwise the standard tactic is to get it on your beam. That's less effective against modern missiles than it used to be though. It's hard to say how manoeuvrable a missile would be in space, because no one's ever built one.

[linkxsc]

This is the vehicles primary mission, spending time and fuel on it isn't a problem. If the vehicle doesn't have sufficient time and resources to engage a target somebody is doing something wrong. Remember that firing the weapon will use up a sizeable percentage of your ammunition, so you're that much closer to being a useless floating lump anyway. The only actual armed spacecraft ever flown aimed it's gun by pointing the spacecraft, and none of the concepts for combat spacecraft have ever had turrets. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking like sci-fi, where space combat is simply WWII-era naval and aerial combat transplanted into space. Actual space combat will be nothing like naval combat, and may not even by much like aerial combat.

You completely skimmed over the, "keeping yourself ready to burn evasion" part. I highly doubt these warships would be able to flip themselves to the side with their RCS in a second or 2, they'd probably be only able to rotate in the tens of degrees a second (and remember it would have to accelerate to that turn and decelerate that turn too, this wouldn't be immediate performance). Also just because your ship is built for combat, if doesn't mean you're completely ignoring the fuel gauge, because that is literally your lifeline. High ISP, thermal engines or other technologies might make that fuel gauge go down slower, but still pretty fast. Most fights would probably be while ships are shifting orbits across eachother and they pass within enough range of eachother to fire though, then after 1-2 minutes of engagement, and several more of evading the missiles that are still floating around, then their "retreat" would just be drifting along their orbit away, out of range. Most fights that happen would probably fight and maneuver until all their fuel was burned to a "quick orbit back to base +match orbit when we get there" ideal of what we now call bingo fuel on fightercraft.

Also just because any of the real world concepts that you have found, doesn't mean thats how it would turn out. Quick glance though google nets me several goofy hand drawn sketches that showed up in magazines in the 60s, most of them not being more than a dozen meters long, and on the scale of a possible spacewar would be like the merrimack and monitor compared to a ticonderoga (I make that specific comparison due to the Ticonderoga's basis as a missile cruiser, not a gunboat.) Also many of them don't seem to include any ideas of proper armor design. At least for a craft that should be taking fire, the front would be brought into a point or a chisel, so your armor would be pre-angled to oncoming fire, Weapon barrels could be built inside of the angled part perhaps with a little armored cover that moves out of the way when you go to shoot.