I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales.
A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Except replace months with years and moments with milliseconds.
I think a real space battle is likely to be too expensive to make a good narrative: in the status quo, major military powers in the United States avoid naval battles because the ships that matter cost billions, they can only afford to field a dozen of them, and they have a huge likelihood of dying to the first hit by a much cheaper missile. In space, the ships will cost tens or hundreds of billions, no nation state will be able to afford a fleet of them, and they will INVARIABLY be lost with all crew the first time they are acted on with hostile intent. The environment itself is plenty capable of killing the best the United States can produce without needing anybody chucking high velocity directed fire their way.
Another consideration this article doesn't seem to touch on: Heat.
Particle-beam weapons especially, but also anything carried by a ship that generates significant energy that isn't thrust, is going to generate a lot of waste heat, due to those blasted laws of thermodynamics. Where does all that heat go?
Yes, space is very, very, cold. But vacuum is about as close as you can get to an ideal thermal insulator, so if you want your imaginary warship to be spamming giant lasers like a Gradius boss, you're going to need some way to rapidly dispose of heat before your entire ship cooks like a P4 with no heat sink.
You could put some water or other substance and have it swimming around the ship and when you use weapons or engines send it through them and fire it out the back of the ship. It's a limited supply, but so is whatever is powering the engines and lasers in the first place.
I'd say a bigger problem would be time to target, in one of two ways:
- light speed; being 0.5 seconds away from the enemy moving at orbital speeds means that even the slightest change in direction would put you quite far from where he thinks you are. I'd guess in-combat ships would continuously change direction by minute amounts.
- old fashioned "see the bullet 1000 km away and dodge it".
This leaves one obvious option: autonomous scatter pack missiles. They would get as close to the target as possible, then split into several parts so as to be harder to pick up by laser or kinetic defenses. Payload could be anything, but i'd guess delayed explosives might do a fair amount of damage.
Don't think of changing direction, think of changing velocity. Space is a Newtonian movement system, so accelerating 20 meters per second in some direction is just as easy at 0 km/sec as it is at 10000 km/sec.
As for missiles, I really don't like the idea. If I were tasked with building a 22-nd century warship, I would put a few hundred automated anti-missile lasers everywhere, which would fry the missiles before any of them get close enough to darken the hull.
we already have militarization of space, plenty of satellites up there, are armed to the teeth. The second they find anything important up there, you'll have space shuttles armed to the teeth.
This is an ugly site, but it goes through a rational, technology based approach to space, and space warfare. I've linked to the space war part specifically, but it's all interesting.
It has lots of fluff from various sci-fi stories as well showing all the schools of thought through sci-fi history. I recommend you waste all day today, and read through it.
frankly I think all the "space battles" will basically just boil down to two space shuttle cargo haulers duking it out to hijack the other guy's shipment
This analysis is grossly naive. It notes the importance of kinetic kill in space battles but ignores utterly that the nature of the battlefield depends greatly on the nature of technology. As increasingly advanced propulsion technology makes feasible the next higher level of closing velocities (from 10-30km/s with chemical propulsion, to 50km/s with Nuclear Thermal Rockets and such-like, to 100km/s, 1000km/s and beyond with Orion, NSWR, fusion, pumped light/mag sails, etc.) the nature of battle changes. This is a far more complex topic than this overly simplistic article could ever hope to cover.
[+] [-] DannoHung|16 years ago|reply
A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Except replace months with years and moments with milliseconds.
[+] [-] patio11|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camccann|16 years ago|reply
Particle-beam weapons especially, but also anything carried by a ship that generates significant energy that isn't thrust, is going to generate a lot of waste heat, due to those blasted laws of thermodynamics. Where does all that heat go?
Yes, space is very, very, cold. But vacuum is about as close as you can get to an ideal thermal insulator, so if you want your imaginary warship to be spamming giant lasers like a Gradius boss, you're going to need some way to rapidly dispose of heat before your entire ship cooks like a P4 with no heat sink.
[+] [-] selven|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radu_floricica|16 years ago|reply
- light speed; being 0.5 seconds away from the enemy moving at orbital speeds means that even the slightest change in direction would put you quite far from where he thinks you are. I'd guess in-combat ships would continuously change direction by minute amounts.
- old fashioned "see the bullet 1000 km away and dodge it".
This leaves one obvious option: autonomous scatter pack missiles. They would get as close to the target as possible, then split into several parts so as to be harder to pick up by laser or kinetic defenses. Payload could be anything, but i'd guess delayed explosives might do a fair amount of damage.
[+] [-] selven|16 years ago|reply
As for missiles, I really don't like the idea. If I were tasked with building a 22-nd century warship, I would put a few hundred automated anti-missile lasers everywhere, which would fry the missiles before any of them get close enough to darken the hull.
[+] [-] hristov|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaksel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cschneid|16 years ago|reply
This is an ugly site, but it goes through a rational, technology based approach to space, and space warfare. I've linked to the space war part specifically, but it's all interesting.
It has lots of fluff from various sci-fi stories as well showing all the schools of thought through sci-fi history. I recommend you waste all day today, and read through it.
[+] [-] mattiss|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaksel|16 years ago|reply
frankly I think all the "space battles" will basically just boil down to two space shuttle cargo haulers duking it out to hijack the other guy's shipment
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|16 years ago|reply