Skrim wrote:
Throwing asteroids can be done by strapping some powerful thrusters on to them and remotely aiming them on an impact course with the target planet. It would only be used if you really want genocide and really want to see every last being(not counting microorganisms) on that planet dead.
Good point. I hadn't thought of this. I was thinking the implication was "tractor beams," which are theoretically impossibly at even the most basic levels.
It would of course be simpler to use a massive barrage of thermonukes and mass-drivers to do the same thing, but it is possible. Maybe even better if you've got the asteroids strapped up and ready to rumble before you've completely destroyed the poor planets remaining defenses. That way you could send the signal out to bring in Doomsday as soon as the last defending ship crumbles.
I'd say thermonukes or salted nukes would be a much, much better solution. Not only would you have to find and transport asteroids from immense ranges, but you'd need tons of fuel to get them moving at a decent speed.
As for lasers and other directed energy weapons, they'd not be my choice because of the amount of energy they waste as they descend through the atmosphere. I'd use asteroids for massive carnage, nukes for general-purpose genocide, and Gauss coilguns for selective destruction and terrorizing of the population.
I was thinking about this as I was making that statement. Would lasers really waste all that much energy through an atmosphere? Obviously they'd waste some, as they ionized the air, but how substantial would it be? I know interatmospheric lasers are being/have been developed for precision attacks and missile defense. I would wager that lasers in the MJ range would still do considerably damage from space.
Darlos9D wrote:As I described earlier, some long-range planet-obliterating technology would only really require some 50+ ton of material launched at very high speeds.
The thing about kinetic weaponry is that the energy it takes to launch it is going to be pretty close to the energy it will have when it hits its target. To accelerate large masses to relativistic speeds would take lots and lots of energy. Being that smaller, easier to accelerate (but less damaging) masses could be fired. If you're really looking for the damage, nukes are the way to go. Shouldn't be tough at all to pull off a couple hundred megatons, and a handful of those would be enough to utterly destroy the vast majority of a planet's population.
Last edited by Sponge on Wed Feb 04, 2009 6:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
Acutally, lasers lose power in the atmosphere when they ionize the air, and when they encounter cloud cover, dust and other kinds of crap that floats in the air. So lasers might do immense damage on one target, and almost no damage at all on another target.
Wow, this got pretty intense. I officially came in to late to have much influence, but I will stay this. You guys talk of ranges that would suggest interplanetary standoffs/alien invasions. The kind of space combat I see as much more likely would be in orbit around Earth, as just another theater of war alongside land, air and sea.
I've always had an ongoing mental "toy" of sorts, which is imagining what things would be like if we decided to fight in space, say, tomorrow.
Little mental image for you: What would it be like to fire a regular, boring, .22 rimfire rifle, in space? More interestingly, imagine if the bullet hit a space shuttle. One puncture in the side would really wreck the whole thing.
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Ok, back on the subject of missiles: Suppose that you have decided to use missiles, and you're loading up your ship to try to beat the snot out of your enemy. Where are you gonna put all these missiles? Any reasonably sized ship isn't gonna have very much room for ammunition, next to all the other systems (life support, navigation, sensors, fuel tanks, escape pods, targeting systems, crew quarters, lots of storage space for food and water, airlock, etc.). The alternative would be to build a huge ship, but that would require you to build it in orbit, as it would be impractical to try to get a thing like that off the ground.
Another good point that someone made was recoil. If you're going to fire missiles, you're probably going to have some amount of recoil, unless you actually drop the missiles outside your ship and THEN fire them. Anyway, if you're doing this in planetary orbit, any amount of recoil has the potential to knock you out of orbit. In fact, just being hit by a single bullet in the right spot could send you out of orbit, as Slayer said. Thus, unless you're doing this outside of the solar system, you don't really need to obliterate the enemy ship, you just need to knock it out of orbit. Granted, most ships would anticipate this and have counter thrusters.
Anyway, unless we actually colonize other planets, Earth is the only place we're going to be launching ships from. Therefore, instead of trying to engage enemy ships in Earth orbit, it would be just as easy to shoot them down with ground-based defences, or blast them while they're being built or being launched.
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Modern combat in space would, as far as I can see, be fast, brutal, and mutually destructive. Nothing up there is designed to be hit by anything larger than a speck of dust, and current satellite manoeuvrability is insufficient to adjust orbit enough to dodge attacks aimed at them. All the objects in near orbit are easily visible from the ground, so you're not going to be able to sneak around up there.
After the first couple of shots are fired, there's gonna be so much debris that nothing current's gonna survive there for long. The fact those shots would likely be missiles and possibly nukes would be irrelevant in the long run.
Basically, my view is that intraplanetary space combat is not gonna last long, and would most likely be more a tactical move to remove enemy gps and spy sats as a prelude to an invasion - no point doing it if you're just gonna nuke them anyway (unless US nukes are useless without gps... which I doubt...).
Space combat on the scale usually considered around here involves two or more planets, probably in different star systems, launching warships at each other.
Differences then lie in how each considers the applicable tech level, what technical considerations they make with regards to heat, engine systems, sensors, weapon tech and armour, and their own take on how fast a warship can be manoeuvred compared to how long it takes for incoming weapon systems to hit to give an individual take on feasible combat ranges.
Basically, everyone has their own ideas, some based more on science, others on fiction. Thing is, none of us can guess how long it would take fiction to become science, so it's impossible for us to gauge what's too conservative and what's too imaginative.
As to Magick's point, yeah, basically - but that doesn't stop us throwing ideas around, now does it?
Would anyone object to my creating a "realistic space combat" thread with a clearly defined set of parameters? There are a lot of good points, and a lot of misconceptions floating around, but different people are assuming different conditions. Initially, I think we were leaning toward "far into the future," then we moved to "realistic near future," and now it looks like we're at "lets put something in space tomorrow." It's confusing, and not conducive to discussion. I'd like to respond, but all these varying points of view are tough to keep straight. Any objections?
You have to think what is the biggest advantage carriers have over batleships here on earth. Range. Even with railguns, a battleships range would still fall short of what a carrier can accomplish.
However, Sci-Fi brings with it one interesting change - incredibly fast travel. In order to have space empires one needs to be able to go from planet to planet in a reasonable ammount of time. So that gave birth to various forms of drives - from various jump drives, hyperdrives, warps, whatever. Some are limited to high speen ONLY between systems. others are not.
Which bring an interesting point. If a battleships is able to cross vast distances almost instantaniously, then the carrier loses any and all advantage.
Imagine a battleship just suddenly warping in right next to the carrier! The carrier is a goner.
Also, following same basic laws of phsyics, it turns out that fighters/drones aren't really as effective in space as they would be on Earth.
Basicely it all comes down to what technologies a specific Cfi-Fi setting allows, and then you have to calculate with logical reprocussions of such technology.
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Fighters let you get over the horizon, and they don't have to deal with the friction of the sea limiting their performance. In space there is no sea or horizon. FTL isn't necessary the upset that trope.
Sponge: I wouldn't object to you trying to reframe this discussion.
May I point out that heat signatures will be invisible in space? Heat needs a medium to travel through, so in space, the only thing a hot ship will do is give off a very small amount of particles, which are given off by everything in space. There is no feasible way to detect a heat source in space. Light is your only issue.
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Then an easy way to fix the heat issue on a stealth ship is to add a layer of armor with a vacuum separating it from the rest of the ship. That would dampen the heat signature to the point of background radiation, thus rendering it invisible. Right?
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Infrared radiates through the vacuum, hits the armor causing its particles to move faster (heating it up), that heat conducts through the armor, and is then radiated back into space. Also, slapping armor over your massive engines would leave nowhere for your coolant to go, causing serious overheating problems.
Heat can travel through a vaccum easily. How do you think heat gets from the Sun to the Earth?? What you're thinking of is conduction, Aerth. Heat can move in three ways (we're studying this in science class) conduction, which is where heat moves through matter, convection, which is where fluids move due to density, and radiation, which is where heat is passed in the form of electromagnetic radiation, infrared. Unlike with conduction, empty space seems to be a perfectly good medium for radiation.
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