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

engadget.com ^ | Sep 28 2014 | Jon Fingas

[HeadOn]

Sorry for the slow reply... That project was almost 30 years ago! While I was still employed by the Air Force contractor on that base, I helped with the tests of the MX (later, “PeaceKeeper”) missle, and learned a lot of cool stuff, but my career took a decidedly more ordinary turn soon after that.

However, I found that often, “ordinary” pays better than “gee whiz”. :-)

God Bless. Have a great weekend.

[chrisser]

NP on the reply time. Thanks for responding!

[zeugma]

An additional benefit of tossing large rocks down the gravity well is that they do not need to be powered, and would therefore be 'black' objects as far as observation is concerned. They can strike from any direction, including off-ecliptic, and because orbital mechanics are so well understood, could actually be launched towards the intended target from very far away and left to silently approach the target for years if necessary. If I were an alien race that wanted to do in humanity, that's how I'd do it. Take a 20-30km rock, and alter it's trajectory in a manner that will cause it to terminate on Washington, DC. Then they just need to sit back and wait how ever long it takes to connect with the target.

Some, over the years have proposed that alien intelligences that have mastered space travel would be peaceful species, rather than warlike. This particular scenerio is one that tends to lead me to that same conclusion. Early on in a spacegoing species' history there would undoubtedly be a decent interval where something like this would be very easy to set up, and at the same time be pretty damn hard to defend against. Contrary to what some folks think, it's not just the energies associated with space travel that would be dangerous. Physics itself can destroy quite efficiently.

OTOH, even peaceful aliens could be extraordinarly dangerous to humanity. One need look no further than what happened to indigenous populations of Pacific islands to see what contact with 'civilization' tends to do to primitive culture. Kipling wrote about that a bit quite poiniently if I recall correctly.

 

[LonePalm]

A sphere would provide maximum internal volume for minimal exterior surface area.

A tetrahedron would provide maximum external surface area for minimum internal volume.

"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Jewbacca]

Given the goal is the most fuel and the least surface area, sphere strikes me as the obvious.

A curved shape also would help deflect, I would think.

[JamesP81]

Some, over the years have proposed that alien intelligences that have mastered space travel would be peaceful species, rather than warlike.

I actually disagree with this, at least in part.

Any species that masters space travel will also be at the top of its own world's food chain. Gaining the top of the food chain and staying there implies, at minimum, the capability of being violently aggressive, and doing it in an intelligent way.

I read a study not long ago that demonstrated a correlation between aggression and intelligence. The gist of it was that the intelligent tend to also be the predators (not true in all cases, but it was noted as a trend). I can't find that article now, but I'll look again.

I think that it IS unlikely that a species that mastered space travel would be mindlessly aggressive in a blood thirsty sort of way. I think they'd be more "predator aggressive". A cheetah, for example, does not attack every gazelle that walks by...it waits until it sees one it's reasonably sure it can catch and kill, because this increases the cheetah's chance of survival. A predator like a cheetah expends so much energy on the hunt that they have to ensure their effort will yield results.

The key to understanding and relating to such advanced aliens would start with understanding predatory behavior on their own homeworld, and then take such actions as are necessary to not appear to be prey to them.

If we do, as a planet, send off signals they interpret as prey, we're inviting trouble.

[zeugma]

Any species that masters space travel will also be at the top of its own world's food chain. Gaining the top of the food chain and staying there implies, at minimum, the capability of being violently aggressive, and doing it in an intelligent way.

True enough.

We don't know either way. I consider the arguments both for and against as pretty much exactly that, arguments in a void of data. I'm not convinced either way. Personally, I lean towards aliens being more or less like us as far as aggression is concerned.

Regardless of their actual intentions, we should be wary about encounters, and take declarations of peaceful intent with a grain of salt, while keeping in mind the historical consequences of civilizations meeting of vastly different levels of technology.

[SunkenCiv]

extra to APoD.

The Physics of Space Battles

[RansomOttawa]

Probably most battles would be ship-to-ship.

And likely at a considerable distance, since the relative velocity between two approaching spaceships would be on the order of what, tens of thousands of miles per hour? That would make close-quarters combat problematic, to say the least.

I think David Weber's Honor Harrington series gets this pretty well: two hostile spaceships would start throwing everything they have at each other while millions of miles apart. The Horatio Hornblower-style close-in battles you see on film are movie- and audience-friendly, but ignore the realities of a zero-gee vacuum environment.

[colorado tanker]

You mean real military spacecraft in the vacuum of space wouldn’t look and fly like earthbound fighter jets??? Well, I am gobsmacked!

[Utilizer]

And likely at a considerable distance, since the relative velocity between two approaching spaceships would be on the order of what, tens of thousands of miles per hour? That would make close-quarters combat problematic, to say the least.

Indeed. One of the things I dislike in most versions of space battles that you read about or see onscreen, is that no one really seems to comprehend this part. Most space vessels we have to worry about at this point in our physics understanding and general capabilities is that our space vessels will be traveling very fast indeed. Fighter craft individual battles are unlikely for several reasons given the current state of our technologies.

One of the things they miss in the so-called space battles is that the individual craft need strong attitude jets to maneuver in several directions besides the attack vector. Shooting in along a direct path is a sure invitation to become nothing more than a fast-moving debris field in very short order. You need to be able to keep jinking around randomly to minimize the chances of being hit by an energy weapon or kinetic projectile like a bullet.

By the same token, most -strike that; ALL of the missiles we have available at this time would be useless in space unless we were firing on orbital satellites or other of the current small platforms we have in space. Anything that can move, like a manned vehicle, can simply alter its trajectory and the missile would simply sail on by since it can only travel upon the direction it was fired along. The new generation of actual space-capable missiles would also need jets to allow them to maneuver in more than one direction.

Until we develop different methods of traveling in space, these are just a few of the difficulties we will need to address, and there is no guarantee that other spacefaring civilizations will have exactly the same problems we would face if a confrontation happened to occur.