Space combat

[Froggy Slayer]

Frankly I've always thought Mass Effect had a pretty good grasp of space combat surrounding their universe besides the whole "Reapers can just ram through everything" answer. If you read the codex, you actually learn a whole lot more about the use of bombers, frigates, cruisers, and larger warships like the dreadnoughts. I actually found it pretty enthralling.

Oh yeah, Mass Effect certainly as a good grasp on its own in-setting logic. Heat build-up and dissipation would actually be quite an important thing to consider on realistic starships as well.

However, the Mass Effect universe and space-combat within it, is very much sci-fantasy themed. Ships lob extremely slow (able to be followed by the human eye) projectiles at each other from visual range. It makes for some really great visuals, but it's not really a realistic view of what space-combat might be like in real-life.

Also, if you think about it, Reapers are terrible as warships. They one-shot things, sure... but they only have three guns (the two main guns and then the big fixed-gun they have where their tentacles merge, all of which are basically facing front. They don't even seem to have any sort of point-defense guns, or smaller guns to hit smaller ships. They just kind of... float around, occasionally shooting at ships, which they one-shot, to be fair. Really makes me think that being warships was not their primary role, and that it was something they just adapted their forms to do. The only reason they do as well as they do is because they shrug off anything that hits them.

I will admit that the idea behind the reapers' guns is pretty damn creative though.

To be fair, in the Mass Effect universe there is a fair deal of segregation between the Codex and what we see on screen. The battles that we see have things like slow projectiles and close range fights because that's what we expect. When you read the Codex, you see that they mention that most fights happen at ranges of hundreds of thousands or even millions of kilometers; close range is measured in tens of kilometres. It's obvious that the guys at Bioware have done a lot of research and have invested a lot of time into working out how space warfare could work.

In my opinion, it's more likely that rather than having warships in space, spacecraft, even FTL ones, will simply carry troops and the like to planets.

EDIT: Ooh, also, the thing about Reaper guns only facing front? I don't know how good of a justification this is, but Reapers can turn around far faster than any other ship. In the first game, Joker mentions how Sovereign makes a turn that 'would shear any of our ships in half.'

 

[LtWigglesworth]

snip

I do think that crossing the T will give a momentary advantage. I can imagine that engagement times will be extremely short, and once combat has been entered computer targeting and firing will take over, simply because the time window available is so short.

So to that end, even if you can rotate extremely quickly, the few seconds taken to re-orient yourself will put you at a disadvantage to the other combatant who was already orientated correctly and may already have a kinetic slug on its way to meet you.

 

[rcs619]

Weapon-wise, I imagine that electromagnetic guns, like coilguns or railguns firing the equivalent of canister shot, would be supplemented by missiles. Somehow, I don't imagine nuclear weapons being especially common, simply because the missile would have to get within one kilometre to really do any damage besides radiation damage. Lasers and plasma weapons seem more of the territory of soft SF.

Lasers are really dependent on technology, specifically on how advanced your power technology is. Railguns/coilguns are as well, but they are a bit simpler and have lower requirements in comparison. In theory though, lasers really are a good weapon for space-combat if you can generate the raw power to make one lethal to starships. They will always travel faster than any railgun/coilgun slug and, in theory, could draw power directly from the ship's reactors, negating the need for ammunition.

As for nukes... yeah, traditional nukes are not ideal weapons for space-combat. A missile with a fusion warhead could do a lot of damage, but it would actually require a direct hit, which makes it very vulnerable to point-defense interdiction. Hellbore-type weapons are another matter entirely though. Hellbores actually make nuclear weapons viable in space. The basic idea behind it is that you detonate a nuke, trap the resulting fusion reaction in some form of magnetic field, and then direct it at the enemy... you take all that energy, all that heat and radiation, and you focus it all in the same direction, instead of having it scatter everywhere like normal nukes. There are a lot of different variations though. This type of weapon has popped up in quite a few sci-fi settings.

I know in the Honor Harrington books, the standard anti-ship missile uses a fusion bomb to power a shotgun blast of x-ray lasers that rip the enemy ship to pieces from about 200,000-300,000 kilometers out. That way a direct hit is not required and the enemy point-defense has less time to intercept the missile.

If you haven't read the Honor Harrington books, do so They are a good series and take a more realistic stance on space combat. The first two volumes are actually up, in full, for free on the publisher's site. You can't beat free. http://www.baen.com/library/067157793x/067157793x.htm

Plasma could work, in theory, but its tricky. Well, for space combat plasma really isn't desirable. You could do as much or more damage with kinetic weapons or lasers in a much simpler fashion. For planetary operations, plasma guns could work. I forget where I saw it... but the plasma guns in this one setting were kind of neat. Basically, each blast of plasma was encased in this plastic-like material as it left the weapon. This kept the gasses concentrated and on target, and once contact was made, the plastic stuff ruptures and the plasma is released to burn the ever-loving hell out of the target. If you could make them work, plasma weapons would be great for anti-infantry work, or for light vehicles. Zero penetrating power, but that kinda heat should just melt unarmored and lightly armored stuff.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

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.

 

[LtWigglesworth]

Plasma could work, in theory, but its tricky. Well, for space combat plasma really isn't desirable. You could do as much or more damage with kinetic weapons or lasers in a much simpler fashion. For planetary operations, plasma guns could work. I forget where I saw it... but the plasma guns in this one setting were kind of neat. Basically, each blast of plasma was encased in this plastic-like material as it left the weapon. This kept the gasses concentrated and on target, and once contact was made, the plastic stuff ruptures and the plasma is released to burn the ever-loving hell out of the target. If you could make them work, plasma weapons would be great for anti-infantry work, or for light vehicles. Zero penetrating power, but that kinda heat should just melt unarmored and lightly armored stuff.

Plasma wont work because it's basically a hot gas, and will try to reach the same pressure as the surrounds, i.e. 0 Pa. So all your ball of plasma will do is diffuse out before it can hit anything. And encasing it will require some for of container that can handle plasma temperatures. Which will be large and heavy. So you might as well use a kinetic slug and ignore plasma.

 

[Thaluikhain]

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.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

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.

 

[Andrew_C]

Just accelerate a few micrometeorites up to near-relativistic speed, slam them into your enemies planets & watch them (the planets, that is) disintegrate.

 

[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.

 

[Thaluikhain]

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.

The momentum of the two objects is going to be significant.

Also, NASA has already done this, they wanted to look inside a comet, so they blew a big chunk out of one by flying something into one at high speed.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html

So, it would appear to work.

For that matter, the moon is covered in craters. So is Phobos, which is a moon of Mars and is tiny.

...

IIRC, some astrologer tried to sue NASA over this, cause they were mucking up the heavens or something.

 

[rcs619]

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.

I don't think you're taking the insane speeds of spaceflight and space combat into account. This isn't like two cars bumping into each other. If you fire a railgun slug at a starship at 40% the speed of light (~120,000km/s ) it isn't going to bounce off. It is going to impact, transfer an absolutely insane amount of kinetic energy onto a single point, and absolutely shred whatever it touches. That's partly why kinetic weapons are so ideal for vacuum combat. With no friction or air resistance, you can accelerate them to however fast your technology allows, and when you start flinging objects, even relatively small objects, at a percentage of light-speed, there's just no amount of armor that is going to let you shrug of a hit. It's going to pierce, rip a chunk out of your ship and kill some of your crew (and that's assuming you have advanced enough shields/armor to absorb enough of the impact to avoid having your ship outright destroyed by it).

In low-speed collisions, yes, things bounce off of each other (think two cars sliding into each other on an icy road). But you're talking about things moving at a fraction of light-speed. I mean, they estimated that the comet that killed the dinosaurs was only moving at 30 km/s when it hit (granted, it was a few kilometers wide). You see tiny, fast-moving objects doing massive damage to larger ones all the time in nature. A railgun slug hitting a starship is no different than an asteroid striking a planet in anything besides scale. It's gonna wreck stuff

 

[Leemaster777]

Clearly, the future of space combat is Grappler Ships.


I eagerly await the day we discover hot alien catgirls.

 

[Disaster Button]

Whilst I'm not sure how space combat would be exactly, I imagine that it would have some kind of policy, or would be designed, to avoid shots missing and then continuing until they strike some planet somewhere. So maybe guided weapons.

And since I mentioned Battlestar Galactica, that remake show actually handles space combat pretty realistically for the most part.

I just don't get one thing throught the entire series.
If the raptors could carry enough nuclear missiles to blow the whole cylon colony apart, why weren't they employed against the dozens of base stars they encountered?

Captcha: chicken soup. Yep i may need one, bowel infection is killing me.

Probably because they only had a limited number of nukes. But since everyone saw the assault on the Colony as the last mission due to the damage to Galatica, they decided "frak it" and strapped every last nuke they had to the raptors since they wouldn't need them again.

 

[Admiral Stukov]

Babylon 5. That is all.

Also, are there any works of science fiction which cover space combat "realistically"?

Again, Babylon 5, at least all the human tech. The show's writers cooperated with actual scientists to get it as believable as possible.
The Omega Destroyer, one of the coolest ships ever.

Spoiler: Starfury fighter, spoilered for huge image

 

[Da Orky Man]

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.

 

[smartalec]

The setup in Iain Banks' Culture novels: space combat is handled at vast distances, computed by AI, and over in a second or less, with almost no human input.

 

[uttaku]

surely you could manage space stealth ships if you used drones instead of manned craft?
This would eliminate the 296k that the ships would otherwise be giving off and assuming you know the location of the enemy station/planet/death star you could launch them with an initially powerful thrust and then coast on the momentum. Any residual heat/slight heat given off from processes/very minor manovering would be dealt with via a half decent heat sink.

As i see it the main issue with stealth in space is that its only going to work up till the very 1st shot, after wwhich the heat given off from the laser/propellent/rocket engine would give you away, and given the large distances that space combat would occur at te enemy will have time to fire back, probably ensuring the destrcution of both sides.

Therefore I would argue that the most viable tactic would be to locate the enemies core worlds and just launch massive waves of drones/nukes/asteriods at them in the hope of overwhelming their defences and destroying their main base of operations.
Going further down this route an effectinve deterent to enemy actions would be to let it be know that you have deposited around the area numerous caches of automated stealth drones that would activate at random intervals if your home worlds where destroyed...