You sunk my...

[ODST]

If you think about it, there is a niche in "realistic" space combat for fast, up close, bruisers with kinetic weaponry. The time it would take for a guided missile to reach its target would probably be plenty of time for the target to deploy countermeasures or intercept with something to the equivalent of Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) Systems in place on many U.S. warships. I propose three types of ships: Long-Range fire support (the big, slow, missile/torpedo ships), short-ranged, high-speed destroyers mounting heavy kinetic cannons, and carriers (because a human, or maybe even AI in a fighter or bomber is much better at gauging threats and priorities than a missile guidance system)

[Nutcase]

Or you could drop the aircraft carriers in favour of a macross missile massacre battleship.

[D00D!]

Or you could drop the aircraft carriers in favour of a macross missile massacre battleship.

By the time your missiles reach my ship, I would have finished ; downloading porn, boiled my kettle of tea, read up on world events, went online to finish up my homework assignment, pet my cat, played a 1000 round match of pong, pet my cat again, take a bath, take a nap and still make it back to bridge just in time for my on-board AI to finish calculating the necessary evasive/anti-missile defense, hit the enter key to authorize the action and watch as the millions of missiles get blown up light-minutes away from my ship.

Yep, that's space combat for ya, where missiles that don't travel faster than the speed of lights inch across the vast emptiness of space and try to blow up futilely across a distance counted using light as a measuring stick.

Though in all seriousness, most space combat would require FTL particles or take place at extreme short range for conventional warfare to work. I doubt a destroyer could be fast enough to reach engagement range without getting shot to death by the rest of the fleet so more likely than not they have to ambush from behind a planetary body or use some form of stealth technology.

[Nutcase]

The very point of a MMM is to overwelm the defences.

[D00D!]

The very point of a MMM is to overwelm the defences.

Yeah but the missiles take so long to reach a ship that it's the equvilent of shooting at fishes in a barrel. Of course it's still a lot of fishes so I may need to bring extra ammunition .

[AnnihilatorX]

I agree light based weaponry is the way to go because of higher flexibility in ranges. It all comes down to whoever fire the trigger first.

There are limitation for light-minutes and up engagements. The radar is also light based so you probably have old information on position of the enemy, plus the lag in having the laser to fire till the laser arrives.

[EadTaes]

Like stated missiles would take so long that they would be infective.

Conventional chemical propelled projectiles would be viable but only if you get them going at 4 or 5 times the speed of sound. Faster then missiles but still to slow IMO.

Railguns would probably the minimum norm anything slower then them would probably be next to worthless in long range combat. Faster then standard projectiles but might be at the limit of minimum speed needed.

Lazer's no weapon system would be faster then this. Problem is even if you have very powerful lasers a well polished hull or one covered with mirrors would render them infective.

Thus which leads me to believe that space combat will not take part at extreme ranges but rather at medium and in some cases short ranges.

[th15]

Umm, it's pretty damned easy to get missiles moving at speed in space. A modern anti-ship missile hits about mach 4 or so, assuming the engines could work in a vacuum they'd easily hit huge speeds (like mach 200 or so, but the truth is, the mach scale has little meaning in space) before they run out of fuel.

It's just that they're hard to direct at higher speeds (no control surfaces).

[Nutcase]

Well the running out of fuel part isn't a problem: Since there's no friction it would only accelerate.
And the guidance part could be solved with some thrusters on the sides. But that would require adjusting before you ran out of fuel to have any effect on the trajectory.

[Skrim]

In space, there would be somewhat different ship classes:

Dreadnought:

Big effing ship with command & control facilities, lots of defenses, heavy armament for all ranges. Long range and high transit speed, but not much tactical maneuverability(not that it means much). Also, frickin' expensive.

Cruiser:

Smaller, cheaper ship. Everything a dreadnought has(except for the command facilities), but less of it. The fleet mainstay.

Drone:

Smaller than a cruiser but still large compared to aircraft or shuttles. Short-ranged, semi-autonomous unmanned weaponry bus operating from orbital hangar-stations or carriers. It flies to the target while trying not to get killed, fires everything it has, and returns to refuel/rearm. Has a high fuel-to-volume ratio, light weaponry loads, and thrust vectoring.
The only vessel that can actually maneuver tactically, thanks to it not having a crew.

Carrier:

Ship which hauls drones and dropships around, tries to stay out of direct combat, commands drones, has a lot of point defense.

Dropship:

Well-defended spaceplane designed to land ground forces and pound ground targets. Probably armed with anti-ground Gauss cannons and nuclear missiles, but little space combat ability. Short-ranged, and hauled around on carriers.

There is no stealth in space, so no submarine-like things. Also, there is no low-drag medium like air vs. water, and no horizon, so "drones" and "fighters" are actually more like German Schnellboots from WW2 compared to other WW2 ships, than they are like aircraft.

Long-range weaponry would be torpedoes/missiles(with whatever warhead you'd like) and Gauss guns. Short-ranged weaponry would be lasers and particle beams. Point-defenses would be in the form of small missiles, rapid-fire guns, and lasers. Armor would probably be optimized to shatter kinetic slugs and disperse directed energy, and maybe be capable of slowly repairing itself. Other defenses would include ECM and the like to misguide missiles/torpedoes, and electromagnetic fields to defocus and deflect charged particle beams.

It's just that they're hard to direct at higher speeds (no control surfaces).

Thrust vectoring. It's already used on some missiles like the AIM-9X Sidewinder and the AIM-132 ASRAAM.

It would also be not too difficult for VASIMR or fusion/antimatter powered missiles in a future space sci-fi scenario.

[Nutcase]

Quick question: Wouldn't they just put the command on a carrier?
Drops one huge hull in favour of another, more versatile one and allows them to use all of the resources for the Dreadnoughts on smaller ships that wouldn't have as massive casualties in case of an "acident"(ranges from hostile marines to power source meltdown).

[Exethalion]

I should imagine that if there ever would be space based combat in real life, the major ship roles used would be destroyers and carriers, for the reasons you specified Nutcase. Though to maintain versatility, carriers would be more like current-day Amphibious assault ships, and less like the specialized supercarriers of today.

[Sponge]

I agree light based weaponry is the way to go because of higher flexibility in ranges. It all comes down to whoever fire the trigger first.

There are limitation for light-minutes and up engagements.

Realistically, this is an enormous stretch. You're looking more at limitations starting at one or two light-SECONDS. Even there you're going to get some serious lag. Depending on the size and speed of the enemy vessel, lasers may be entirely ineffective at these ranges. For a laser to really do its damage, it needs to hit the same spot on the enemy ship. Without insane amounts of energy, and depending on armor, you'll probably need your laser to connect with the same location for about a second. Pulsed lasers would likely be a better bet, but they're just as hard to aim. You're moving, your enemy is moving, and you need to hit something a few cm across from several hundred km away.

Like stated missiles would take so long that they would be infective.

In an atmosphere, maybe. However, in space, so long as you have fuel, you're accelerating. My guess is that missiles would be much more effective than even the fastest conventional projectiles.

Conventional chemical propelled projectiles would be viable but only if you get them going at 4 or 5 times the speed of sound. Faster then missiles but still to slow IMO.

Slower than missiles, and probably more prone to problems because you not only have to store ammunition, but also propellant of some sort or another. I think chemically propelled weapons would be best suited for point defense/flak, as they'd be relatively slow moving.

Railguns would probably the minimum norm anything slower then them would probably be next to worthless in long range combat. Faster then standard projectiles but might be at the limit of minimum speed needed.

The US navy has a prototype for a 64MJ railgun that's going to be moving rails at mach 8. I could see railguns being pretty viable run-of-the mill weapons, with missiles serving at longer ranges.

Problem is even if you have very powerful lasers a well polished hull or one covered with mirrors would render them infective.

This isn't true. Mirrors wouldn't reflect high-powered lasers. While lasers would be very effective, they're very energy inefficient.

[Darlos9D]

stealth technology

I'm afraid this is pretty much impossible in space. All space ships would have to have some kind of heat emission system. In the vast tempurature-lessness of space, this would be ridiculously easy to trace even from very long distances. You can't "cloak" these emissions, since any technology used to do so would just generate more heat, bringing us back to the same problem. Of course, you COULD very well just hide behind something, like you suggested.

Realistically, this is an enormous stretch. You're looking more at limitations starting at one or two light-SECONDS. Even there you're going to get some serious lag. Depending on the size and speed of the enemy vessel, lasers may be entirely ineffective at these ranges. For a laser to really do its damage, it needs to hit the same spot on the enemy ship. Without insane amounts of energy, and depending on armor, you'll probably need your laser to connect with the same location for about a second. Pulsed lasers would likely be a better bet, but they're just as hard to aim. You're moving, your enemy is moving, and you need to hit something a few cm across from several hundred km away.

Good point, assuming we're not underestimating the possible output power of a laser, particularly in a future setting with supposedly better energy sources. Even taking that into consideration though, you're probably right.

@Everyone: I'm getting excited about all this talk about super-fast missiles. The only problem is that even at such speeds, they can be intercepted. Unless they hit the speed of light... OR FASTER. FTL MISSILES GO.

... but seriously. I honestly wonder if we could eventually figure out how to launch other things near or at the speed of light. I heard somewhere that the "nuke" of an interstellar civilization would be something more like a gigantic railgun that could just launch a 50-ton hunk of metal at a planet at ridiculous speeds, thereby obliterating said planet worse than if it had been hit by a comet. Or maybe that hunk of metal could have a rocket or something.

Some kind of super-fast projectile, be it self-accelerated or launched at the desired speed to start with, might actually be harder to deal with than we realize. Unless you can totally vaporize it, if you blow it up, the pieces of it are still probably going to maintain some momentum and come at you. Unless you just throw a giant wall of something at it, which is something that you probably couldn't do too often. Meaning you could be overcome by missiles spam, even if you could shoot every single one of them.

Heck, such projectiles could even be designed to break apart and be just as or more dangerous when struck by something.

[Wicky_42]

Problem is even if you have very powerful lasers a well polished hull or one covered with mirrors would render them infective.

This isn't true. Mirrors wouldn't reflect high-powered lasers. While lasers would be very effective, they're very energy inefficient.

Interesting research going on at the moment into materials that can bend light around them, or even straight back at the source could, if the theories hold and the tech developed, create anti-laser armour. At the moment such materials are limited to a quite specific band of the EM spectrum - the first was a material that could bend microwaves around it, rendering it invisible to the spectrum, currently there's work on making it work against visible spectrums.

Then there is the alternate idea of a material that can bend light through 180 degrees - still theoretical atm - I don't think they know how to make the material they envisage, but in a sci-fi setting it's not exactly unimaginable. The advantage is that there's no 'reflection' involved, no energy absorbed - the properties of the material just result in the light completely changing direction.

If this works, then lasers could be rendered useless or at least relegated to secondary weapons, forcing initial damage to be caused by cannon or missile fire to damage the surface enough for the lasers to transfer significant energy to the target - which would go some way to shortening engagement ranges and making smaller fighters and drones more viable (instant hit lasers are imba vs a small ship that intends to use manoeuvrability to survive in combat...).

Also with missiles and railguns - why not combine the two? Launch a smart projectile from a railgun: instant high speeds, less fuel mass needed in the projectile to travel the same distance, giving lighter, more manoeuvrable missiles. Throw in ecm warheads to counter enemy countermeasures and point defences, and add some laser warheads into the mix for added fun that detonates farther out than standard warheads and you have a fast moving, agile, defence-resistant and powerful long ranged weapon system.