Space combat

[LtWigglesworth]

I'm not a physicist, but I can't see ramming doing much damage, if any at all. It works in cars, ships and submarines because the resistance stops the vehicle moving back. That doesn't happen in space.

Ramming is going to do extreme amounts of damage, if you can do it, because things will be travelled at extreme speeds.

Things aren't going to bounce cleanly off each other under most circumstances. If the thing is really rigid, maybe, but most of the time, the part at the back will be going forwards very fast when the part at the front hits something and decides it wants to go backwards very fast. All sorts of things are likely to break and tear in the middle.

An airplane has much less resistance behind it due to air than a submarine has, due to water.

But imagine a pair of 747s flying head on into each other as fast as they can. Then increase their speed by 10, 100, 1000 times.

...

On the other hand, by the time you get close enough to ram, the enemy has seen you coming for ages, and if weapons are involved, they'd have been used long before then.

Yes but in space there's nothing at all to stop it moving back. I could see a small amount of surface damage to the hull, but mostly I would think the larger object would just push the smaller one out of the way. Even air resistance is pretty significant.

But by your logic, a kinetic slug would do nothing but move backwards.

If you hit something you lose momentum. so for a 20 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second, hitting a 5 ton starship travelling at 20 kilometers a second it will slow down to a two starhip mess travelling at 12 kilometers a second. But it will give out about 640 GJ of energy. That's the same as a 150 kiloton nuclear warhead. Ramming will do stuff.

Given combat distances of tens of thousands of kilometers, ramming will be roughly as useful as ramming today, which is to say, worse than useless. This is because, while your engines are desperately trying to close with the enemy, all they have to do is loose a couple of rocks, and dodge, leaving you to slam into the rocks at a ridiculous spped, wiping your spacecraft out.

And don't think the other guy gets off. Blood, do you know what physics actually is? Air doesn't prevent bullets from bouncing back; it's a relation ship between angle of impact, strength of material and velocity of impact. A railgun slug travelling at any decent speed will go straight through any reasonable armour. As depressing as it is, most modern combat consists of one-hit kills. therefore, point-defence and such will be more important than armour.

Here:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

It's a good read.

Yeah, I've read it, and I'm fully aware that in tactical terms ramming will be as useful as a chocolate kettle. I was just trying to give blood an appreciation of basic physics regarding collisions at high speed.

 

[Zantos]

I think there'd be a fair amount of focus alongside the missiles and rail guns for small squads to attempt to sabotage the enemy ship from inside, a la Thunderhawk ram. Anyone who played Battlefront 2 knows that grenades in a ships control room are very, very effective.