Real space battles would be more 'Asteroids' than 'Star Wars'

engadget.com ^ | Sep 28 2014 | Jon Fingas

[Talisker]

Real space battles use all of Maxwell’s original equations.

[mikrofon]

“Star Wars IX: Revenge of the Coruscant Group”

[JamesP81]

That makes me sad as the only job for “Captain Virtue and his Foil Spacesuit” will be Intergalatic Janitor...

I feel your pain...when I was a kid, I wanted to be Cpt Kirk when I grew up. Instead, real space ship command will be more like being an accountant.

[Rodamala]

I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.

[Utilizer]

I never really watched much of the new Battlestar Galactica, since it was pretty boring. Some of the space battles I did catch seemed as if the graphic artists and writers at least had some realistic concept of the difficulty of battles in space.

I am not really certain how effective small fighter craft would be in a space battle since the combination of the limitations of speed, inertia, and fuel would pretty much limit any encounters to long periods of coasting at a set speed followed by fractions of a second of actual fighting while passing by and hopefully not colliding with enemy fighters, then turning and braking to see if you had enough atmo and fuel to either engage again or RTS.

Probably most battles would be ship-to-ship.

[Utilizer]

You also have to limit your set speed since there is no atmosphere to provide a constant drag and your velocity would continue to increase as your main engine operated. Keep it running too long and you will run out of air and or fuel before you could brake and return. Unless your speed was already too high and you were then on the long way out and not coming back.

[JamesP81]

Sounds like “Enders Game”

The drone carriers as seen in the movie I think are a pretty good representation of what it's going to look like, though I think IRL we would dispense with the dreadnoughts they had in Ender's Game.

The drones were disposable but effective combat vehicles. Some might be fitted with nukes for surface strikes. The drone itself can also be used as a kinetic energy weapon if it has a long enough run to get enough velocity built up.

[Joe Brower]

Ships will likely use 'smart mines' more than anything.

Planetary attacks will be in the form of mass-drivers.

[GraceG]

[ I’m a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar. ]

Dammit Man.... THE FEELS!!!!!!!

[Utilizer]

Don’t forget about Newton’s Law for projectile weapons, and the fact that there is no atmosphere to propagate explosions so near-misses would be ineffective. Armor would be critical in such an environment.

[Utilizer]

Anyone here watch “The Last Ship”....?

Meh. Thankfully, not a lot of grandstanding, but there was a bit of it which I suppose was felt necessary for a normal commercial production. At least they tried to deal realistically with the difficulties of fuel and provisions for a normal naval vessel with limited onboard resources.

[Army Air Corps]

That stirs some childhood memories.

When do I get a Cosmo Zero?

[Utilizer]

Not electronically or when debris begins coming in planetside.

[JamesP81]

Don’t forget about Newton’s Law for projectile weapons, and the fact that there is no atmosphere to propagate explosions so near-misses would be ineffective. Armor would be critical in such an environment.

I think nukes would probably be largely restricted to planetary bombardment...the aforementioned lack of atmosphere to propagate explosions would probably make them less than ideal against other spacecraft. While a contact detonation would work really well, you might get just as good of a result from a kinetic energy weapon for far less ammunition cost.

If your mass drivers (coil guns, rail guns, etc) can achieve high enough velocity, armor will become irrelevant, but that is technology dependent. If you're throwing projectiles at hypersonic velocities, then armor matters. If you're flinging them along and measurable percentages of light speed, armor is going to be a wasted effort since an impact will be similar to a nuke in effect.

Against lasers, effective armor would have to be something superbly reflective. Mirrors, basically.

[SES1066]

There will be different categories of Space Battles (SB) according to where they take place and you can add “Moon Lander” to “Asteroids” in the example list. In areas well away from gravity wells (Empty SB), you will have relatively straight lines of attack from almost any angle. Any physical weapon can be dodged if it is ballistic or the defender can out-maneuver but at the cost of fuel. However detection would be king but at the cost of counter-detection unless passive. Stealth may make passive detection useless if defender position is already known. Gambit and counter-gambit.

When in range of gravity wells (Gravity SB), orbits become the name of the game. If the defender has to protect a given spot, the attacker has almost unlimited license from multiple directions. “Protecting the Orbitals” is what good military SF writers frequently write about. Would defenses upon Luna protect Earth and what would defenses in the Lagrangian points add or detract?

Passive defenses like nuclear mines would work in one case but unlikely in another. Active maneuvering seeking missiles work in many cases but propulsion is expensive. Energy weapons are mostly in straight lines but do attenuate and can be bent by high gravity fields. As Spock and Kirk surmised against Khan, 2 dimensional thinking would be problematical in space’s 3 dimensions. Add zero-drag to passive projectiles and you have 4 dimension battles! Whole new dimension to “Time-on-Target” warfare.

[Red Badger]

“In space no one can hear you scream................

[Army Air Corps]

The radiation surge and the expanding cloud of fission debris from even a crude A-bomb would still be a pip.

[Utilizer]

I was thinking mostly missiles and torpedoes for ship-to-ship since lasers are pretty limited these days. Orbital platforms are just drifting semi-stationary targets that can be taken out by anything you care to throw at it.

KEWs would be preferred for planets, especially since gravity will be assisting in building up speed before impact.

I think the book series “The Lost Fleet” had a pretty good interpretation of probable space battles.

[gura]

Lots of good reading on this subject here: USS Clueless (space query)

[KarlInOhio]

“In space no one can hear you scream................

"... unless it is the battle cry of a United States Marine"

R. Lee Emery in Space Above and Beyond