Space Warships.

I know that the whole discussion at this point is rediculous, but for the sake of arguement and of arguement alone, and assuming that it is possible or likely, what would a battle between two spacecraft be like? What weapons would they use? What tactics? Anything that sounds realistic, etc...

 

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For starters, I imagine it would be over rather quickly, victory going to whomever can first aim and make use of some hull-piercing weapon.

 

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I think there is a very old thread on this somewhere. The main consensus was that it would be rather like submarine warfare.

 

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Hehe... yea, I think it was me under and old name that started that like... two years ago. I just wanted to start it up again.

 

Assuming the technology was similar to what we have now, I think it would involve heavy use of unmanned, autonomous fighter drones and nuclear missiles. Spaceships are pretty fragile, so it would probably come down to whoever got the first hit. It’s rather analogous to naval warfare today; modern warships can be very seriously damaged by small missiles, so most of the fighting takes place between carrier-launched aircraft. Why send your huge, expensive warship close enough to the enemy to launch your anti-ship missiles when an aircraft can launch the same weapon? That’s why most surface naval combat has been dominated by carriers since World War II. It would be the same with space ships, I think.

Also in space combat I suspect that acceleration would be very important, and unmanned drones could easily withstand maneuvers that would kill a human pilot/crew.

 

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I have this thought that if we end up with people floating around in some space station on a holiday or the moon becoming some worlds away Banking & Casino hotspot because of the lapse taxation. The Likelihood is that non-lethal, non-projectile weapons would be used, the reason for this is as some of you have mentioned already to try and stop the occurances of getting "hulled", even if just by accident.

Also such non-lethal technologies (that double up well as Comms arrays) can utilise solar panels to generate their power, meaning that it doesn't run out of ammo as long as the equipment is maintained.

I've mentioned something before about the problem with any missiles being used in space, It's not so much the energy released from a bomb that does the damage, it's the sudden pressure changes to the surrounding area. This means that for a missile hit to be effective in space, it needs some gases around the target, namely an atmosphere.

My suggestion was that a target would have to be painted, shot at with a gas canister to generate a surrounding mist and then hit by a missile with a payload.

Admittedly my theory was really meant for Rogue Comets and Asteroids rather than interplanetary wars.

 

Most ships will succumb to micrometeorites faster than having any type of weapons fire.



Pieces of rock and metal frequently collide with Earth's upper atmosphere. Most of these are no bigger than a golf ball but are traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. The atmosphere is very thin at this altitude of 80 to 100 kilometers (50 to 62 miles), however, it creates enough friction to cause these travelers from space to heat up to temperatures that make them burn brightly. These are the fireballs in the sky that are rightly called meteors, although they are often referred to as "shooting stars."

Most meteors burn up completely in the atmosphere and never reach the ground. Those that survive the trip and reach the surface of Earth are called meteorites. While it is generally believed that meteorites are fairly rare, in reality about 30,000 tons of extraterrestrial material are deposited on Earth each year; bits of comets, chunks of asteroids, debris from the formation of our solar system more than four billion years ago. So why aren't meteorites seen more often sitting on the ground? First of all, the largest portion of this material falls into the oceans, and secondly, most of the material that reaches the surface is microscopic, much too small to be noticed. These are the tiny specimens known as micrometeorites. As tons of micrometeorites fall each year, they gently land in our fields, on our homes, and on us.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=3&q=http://www.teachersource.com/micrometeorites.htm&e=747



So if they are hit by these things they will most certainly have "holes" 3weverywhere and many problems to fix or die.

 

Small craft or drones may have the advantage in many cases but large destroyers are essential for anything large scale. They have better range in both movement and weapons... and can outlast a quick blast of orbital speed dust.

Ships would surely be compartmentalized and have waldo-operated remotes for quick repair. The people would be in the deepest core of the ship in a small habitable module while the rest of the ship is airless.

One tactic would be to coat the surface with layers of white ablative or reactive armor. This should offer some protection against both lasers and projectiles. Against lasers you could also roll to keep the beam from falling on a single part of the ship long enough to cut through. Against projectiles, I would suggest changing your speed and direction randomly to simply avoid them. Guided missiles, however, will be your biggest problem because they can adjust to your course changes... and there is no restriction on using nukes in space. I would suggest chaff which has the bonus of acting like a solid wall at high speed.

A spaceship can get up to immense speeds due to lack of friction but it is very hard to change direction once you get going. If you are going at full acceleration for an hour, it will take a full hour just to stop. Turns are going to be just as clumsy because of the size of a ship. Centrifugal force would tear the ends off your ship if you tried to do it too fast.

 

Those guns they mount on ships and fire projectiles really far with magnets. Rail guns? In space you could fire one from forever.

You could also see people from a long way off in space. Except, if they were too far away, you'd see where they were 10 seconds ago cause of the time it took light to travel there.

I'm thinking nuclear devices used as claymores. Blow a nuke off with heaps of giant ball bearings at one end. A spaceship flying into debris would be as lethal as shooting a projectile into it. In space, couldn't mirrors be used against energy weapons? It's pretty clean in space, and the mirrors could be given a static charge to repel any dust.

Weapons that fire in clouds could be very effective, as they could leave debris everywhere that damaged the enemy ship. Fire dust clouds and stuff at an approaching enemy, or maybe fire a canister out of a rail gun past a fleeing enemy and detonate it. Then the ship would end up flying through a wave of superfast particles, shredding its hull or damaging com equipment.

 

Clockwood,

I think you just made a great argument for projectiles. Imagine throwing out a ton of chaff at a ship that's moving so fast that it can't slow down for an hour. Firing single projectiles wouldn't be very great, but using a hugantic shotgun?

Or what about using some sort of firework technique where you could put clouds of particles all around your opponent to prevent him from moving too fast. Fire an explosive into his area that detonates and leaves a bunch of crap that he wouldn't want to run into at very high speeds. Agile ships would lose their edge in such a cloud, as moving to quickly would damage the hull.

 

Against stationary targets, like space stations or sites on airless bodies like the moon, you could also use the chaff technique as well. Fire it while moving at orbital-type speeds before putting on the brakes and it will hit the target just as fast. Mass destruction with little effort.

Chaff weapons would be the new nukes. They could pollute a region of space for years, making travel through it slow and tedious before it disperses enough. Cleaning it up would be too expensive to be feasable... but the weapons are too useful not to be used.

For planetary bombardment I would do the same thing... only carrying a small asteroid.

 

With a large enough static charge, I bet you could clean up chaff.

 

Which would be both hard and expensive to produce. The area that this crap could fill in just the first few moments of a battle could be immense. You could even make chaff near invisible and that much more dangerous.

I suspect regions of space will have to be quarantined for years after a major battle. They would become the future's sargasso seas, with incoming ships being easily mired in the dust for fear of being torn to shreds. It would be as hard to clean up as radioactive fallout or landmines.

 

I think that nuclear missiles would easily rule over lasers and kinetic gun-type weapons in space combat. They would have a much longer range. It’s hard to keep lasers focused over very long distances, and you can simply maneuver erratically to make yourself a difficult target for kinetic weapons as Clockwood pointed out. You could use all sorts of interesting tactics with missiles in space, like launching them from a very long way off and then shutting down the missile engines for a while as they “coast” toward the target, then reactivate once they get close enough. You could even launch them in different dispersive patterns, so that when they reactivate they come in from all sorts of different angles.

And what better way to launch missiles than with autonomous fighter drones that can do the risky work for you while you sit back in the comfort of your drone-carrier’s control room? Let them risk their necks by going into range of the enemy lasers and railguns

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I don’t think that chaff would be very effective in space, except perhaps for interfering with incoming weapons. It would all drift apart pretty quickly, so I don’t think it could be used as an “area denial” weapon.

 

Dude, static electricity expensive? I can rub a friggin ballon on my head!

Besides, by the time we're in space, do you think we'll still be using fossil fuels for energy? I bet we find something very close to a limitless energy supply– fusion, fission, solar....

 

Yeah, I was wondering about that. A chaff cloud fired at super-orbital speeds would continue moving at super-orbital speeds for a long, long time.

 

You had better have one hell of a lot of electricity. You are going to have to clean a sphere with a diameter equal to that of Texas after a large scale battle. And the particals in this cloud will be moving at orbital speed.

Solar is crap, needing collecters the size of small states themselves to do anything more than power lifesupport and normal ship systems (non-propulsion or weapons). Fission is basically steam power and good luck getting enough of the fuel to do anything on this scale. We don't even know if we can get self perpetuating fusion in something as small as a ship yet or how much hydrogen you would need to carry along.

I am going to hold off on making a prediction on this topic.

Think of it this way: It won't just sit there but it will keep moving as a semi-coherent cloud for a while. It doesn't matter if it is here or five miles down the road. Running into it will still kill you if you hit it before it is dispersed enough.

 

Solar power isn't necessarily crap, it's just no real revolutions have been made in solar technology for decades.

There is however also the usage of Biomass, namely all the waste products from people being used as fuel or just used to get gas for fuel which can be converted into energy.

However I still suggest people don't take war into space.

 

Imagine covering an entire moon in solar panels, or using an entire planet just to mine nuclear materials which are then used for fission power.

All electicity could then be converted into fuel, maybe batteries. Or the electricity could be used to produce hydrogen or oxygen fuel, dissolved from rocks.