Poll: Space Combat

[Marter]

I'd use lasers, just because they are so fun.

They also go pew, pew.

What if they made some completely arbitrary sound effect instead?

Then I may have to reconsider my choice. They'd still look cool though.

Aha!

Ok then, just wanted to see why you really picked lasers, thats all.

I must be missing something, as it doesn't seem like a big thing to question.

What're you up to?

Whenever someone says pew pew I get curious.

"Pew Pew" gets you excited?

 

[Blindswordmaster]

The MAC cannons from the Halo novels. These are the future of combat.

 

[LANCE420]

Battlestar Galactica pretty much covered real space combat I think. However, only difference vipers would be automatic, not manned.

 

[Tirak]

Space combat is an impossibility as far as I'm concerned. Oh we'd all love to say it'll be fought with lasers or super high speed missiles, but in reality it won't happen at all.

First problem is sheer speed, by the time you detect your opponent he'll have gone right past you and be long gone, or at least, he would if we're assuming interstellar travel.

Second problem is size. Space is big, space is huge. Space is so impossibly mind bogglingly huge that it is impossible for most people to comprehend just how big it is. You'll never find your opponent, and even if you do, he has that much space to move around you, same problem if you're defending a planet.

Oh, and just so you know, a fully powered weapon strength laser is not going to be affected by any kind of mirror armor, nor is a 90 degree mirror going to result in shooting yourself. The energy transfer from a weapon strength laser is far too great and would more than likely shatter most materials.

EDIT: Oh yeah, point three, the odds of two moving objects traveling at near luminal speeds hitting each other is nearly nil, even if they're trying. Don't believe me? Boot up a flight sim, pick the fastest jet you can, go full speed, and just try and ram another flying jet. Now increase the speed ten thousand fold and and area in which to maneuver by infinity.

 

[Marter]

"Pew Pew" gets you excited?

Curious, not excited. I only get excited if I have a laser gun that makes pew pew sounds!

Why so curious? I still feel like I'm missing something about those words...

 

[SlowShootinPete]

Ramming: well, yes, that's why I suggested an unmanned probe.

Oh.

 

[Marter]

Well, the reasoning. Pew pew is just a sound effect, now an internet meme basically but I wonder how many people pick lasers due to that or due to the fact that they're cool for other reasons.

Oh, okay, guess I'm not missing anything then. Have a good rest of the night/morning, I'm going to go and dream about some space battles and some pewing lasers.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Lasers. They are just too cool to not become a reality.

 

[Kimarous]

I chose the "Other" option. I propose to you... GIANT SPACE TAZERS!!!

No, no. Hear me out. High-speed and retractable grapple cannons fire at the enemy. Upon connecting with the enemy ship, they send a high-energy EMP that devastates the enemy vessel, frying their systems. From there, the attacking ship can board the enemy vessel or, alternatively, hack the enemy's own systems, turning their internal security against them or activating their self-destruct, detaching in time to escape the blast.

 

[Canadian Briton]

I tihnk boarding because space ships are probably too expensive to destroy or leave derelict so that they will usaully be captured.

 

[8bitlove2a03]

I don't see space combat happening for quite some time. We don't have near enough resources here on Earth as is, making expansion into space combat somewhat impractical until we find other planets to rape for resources. Once that happens, I expect we will be looking at missiles and either magnetic accelerator weapons or traditional compressed explosive projectiles (with built in oxidizers) as the primary weapon types. We're no where near kinetic barriers, laser weaponry would be too unwieldy to put on a spacecraft, and boarding tactics would be suicide runs against any ship that you couldn't bring on-board a larger craft.

 

[XMark]

I'd like to think that by the time we have the technology to have thousands of people in space at a time, we would have gotten over our differences and forged a peaceful, united human society.

But I'm an incurable optimist about the future. There's probably still going to be conflict. Maybe not at the scale of a world war but there will always be terrorist groups and rebels (rebel scum!!!)

In the next 100 years we likely won't be getting anywhere near the speed of light, so most of the fighting would be in orbit around Earth and maybe Mars. Unfortunately, the first major conflict in space would be the last for a while because the debris from exploding spaceships and satellites would cause a horrendous space junk problem.

I'll put in another vote for kinetic weapons. No need for any fancy sci-fi energy weapons when you can take a ball of metal and accelerate it to ridiculous speeds without any air resistance to slow it down. Lasers will have some uses, but those will probably be limited.

Boarding might be an option if there's some kind of space station, or possibly a hollowed out asteroid with a mining structure built into it. Something unmovable that you would want to commandeer rather than destroy. I would imagine that the soldiers would have some kind of grabbling mechanism to pull themselves toward the structure. For weapons, they would have standard guns that fire bullets, but specially engineered for usage in a vacuum... I'm thinking compressed oxygen that's injected into the barrel before every shot so the gunpowder combustion can happen.

 

[psivamp]

I chose the "Other" option. I propose to you... GIANT SPACE TAZERS!!!

No, no. Hear me out. High-speed and retractable grapple cannons fire at the enemy. Upon connecting with the enemy ship, they send a high-energy EMP that devastates the enemy vessel, frying their systems. From there, the attacking ship can board the enemy vessel or, alternatively, hack the enemy's own systems, turning their internal security against them or activating their self-destruct, detaching in time to escape the blast.

An EMP isn't something that you transmit down a wire, it's not a simple signal. EMP is a high amplitude white noise burst across a wide band of the EM spectrum. It travels in a wave and due to its intensity induces high voltages in electrically conductive elements it passes through. Current computer technology is semiconductor based and built on the nanometer scale and cannot handle the voltages created - even for the briefest moments that they exist. An EMP will permanently destroy semiconductor transistor-based technology, small capacitors and to a lesser extent has the potential to destroy inductors and transformers. However, in space, an EMP burst would be child's play to defend against as most of the energy will be absorbed by conductive elements in the pressure hull of your vessel acting as a Faraday cage -- assuming a ferrous structure.

Remotely hacking an enemy vessel is problematic. Hacking presupposes an in-depth familiarity with the system. This approach also assumes poor system design in that gaining access or control of the system directly coupled to their broadcast and antennae array will link to control systems. Your signal would either need to be broadcast, which requires an exponential increase in signal output strength as range increases, or line-of-sight, which requires fairly accurate tracking.

Battlestar Galactica pretty much covered real space combat I think. However, only difference vipers would be automatic, not manned.

Battlestar Galactica depicted spaceships banking like fighter jets in an atmosphere, although I give them credit for actually putting attitude control nozzles all over their fighters. And if a larger vessel deployed unmanned attack drones, those drones would be perfect targets for some kind of remote hack exploit. Any remotely controlled drone is also susceptible to being jammed, once the drone is closer to your vessel than your attacker it's a simple matter to broadcast white noise on whatever frequency the drones receive their commands on and essentially drown out the pilot's commands.

Edit: Also, for the people who keep trying to invent ways for contemporary ballistic weapons to work in space, modern guns work in space. There was an episode of Mythbusters where they test whether a handgun would fire underwater. The problem encountered there was the increased density of water vs. the atmosphere caused the shell to get jammed on ejection. Gunpowder as mixed today is essentially self-contained and needs no outside combustibles to complete the reaction. Also, without air resistance, wind, gravity or the Coriolis effect guns would seem to work better in the depths of space than on land -- of course, the recoil will cause you to accelerate in the opposite direction, but that's a different problem entirely and easily remedied.

 

[LANCE420]

D

I chose the "Other" option. I propose to you... GIANT SPACE TAZERS!!!

Battlestar Galactica pretty much covered real space combat I think. However, only difference vipers would be automatic, not manned.

Battlestar Galactica depicted spaceships banking like fighter jets in an atmosphere, although I give them credit for actually putting attitude control nozzles all over their fighters. And if a larger vessel deployed unmanned attack drones, those drones would be perfect targets for some kind of remote hack exploit. Any remotely controlled drone is also susceptible to being jammed, once the drone is closer to your vessel than your attacker it's a simple matter to broadcast white noise on whatever frequency the drones receive their commands on and essentially drown out the pilot's commands.

Edit: Also, for the people who keep trying to invent ways for contemporary ballistic weapons to work in space, modern guns work in space. There was an episode of Mythbusters where they test whether a handgun would fire underwater. The problem encountered there was the increased density of water vs. the atmosphere caused the shell to get jammed on ejection. Gunpowder as mixed today is essentially self-contained and needs no outside combustibles to complete the reaction. Also, without air resistance, wind, gravity or the Coriolis effect guns would seem to work better in the depths of space than on land -- of course, the recoil will cause you to accelerate in the opposite direction, but that's a different problem entirely and easily remedied.

Hence, direct Cyber-Warfare comes into play. There are ways around white noise, even with analog radios. Look, If you want the closest thing to observe to space combat, look at naval warfare. During WWII and even now, no-one carries radio jammers. This is because it is better to hear your enemy communicate than it is to keep them from doing so. Getting back to basic military strategy: Lack of communication is a common obstacle, and better tech can't save you from poor intelligence. Also since we are talking DISTANT, DISTANT future here(space combat, our lifetimes, never), these fighters would probably be independently operating artificial intelligences on par with a human in military strategic reasoning. True AI is a much easier concept to conquer than cheap, efficient space travel. Officers and tacticians could program their orders in advance, and there would be no need for advanced communications. These fighters would calculate their own attack path to the objective. Also, humans out of contact of each other, is about as useless robots without communication. Simply put, Think Raiders.

Also, I could buy that the number of thrusters on the vipers could handle most advanced maneuvers in space. Particularly the zero point turns. Of course the skill needed to control all of them would be like having a 10-speed manual on your car, you can't physically, or even mentally, handle the complicated coordination to shift yourself properly, which supports my theory of AI fighters more.

 

[The Bum]

Mister Betterton fire the MAC cannon! Mister Busey prepare the boarding parties!

 

[CouchCommando]

I'm going to go with other, taking the fact that space is a vacume and that gravity, will be practically negated, kinetic weapons lose some of their lustre, and I'm guessing so too would missiles to a point (Depending on the warhead), especially if some kind of mass/force shield were to be viable. Going from what I understand of lasers to be able to do deep down (penetrating) damage they would need some way of removing the heated debri out of the way to continue to cut into the target vessel.
So I would propose 2 forms of attack, a form of close in grappling where a vessel can bring to bear some form of gravitational device (a mass beam if you will)to exert forces on the structure of the enemy vessel, by either enhancing (amplifying) or projecting mass, and by using a series of these devices in concert and anchored to one another securely ,making it possible to exert extreme forces on the target, to either physically crush and implode the vessel, or to tear apart and explode the vessel, or even better to secure the bio life forms on the vessel, and destroy delicate yet crucial parts internally with out damaging the craft structure wise. Another tactic using the same idea but a smaller vessel would be to anchor the smaller vessel in close to the larger opponent vessel and proceed to manouver around the exterior of the victim whilst seeding it with deep penetrating breaching devices. Automated drones with some form of cutting implement ,and mass drive and carrying some high yield ordinance and a armed self destruct trigger.

 

[Warped_Ghost]

Kinetic Weapons
Here is a law of physics for you.
Everything has an equal and opposite reaction.
Meaning if you used Kinetic weapons it would give a whole new meaning to recoil.