Space Warships.

Just remember that you are going to have to lug all your equipment around with you and every extra pound means that much higher fuel costs.

 

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As opposed to lugging nukes and heavy shields and drones around?

 

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There's an interesting site dealing with spacecraft design here. Serves as a good starting point.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html

In essence, you will see the enemy coming from a trillion kilometres away, and nuclear missiles will be your primary weapon.

 

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Yeah, but even if you see your opponent from a trillion kilometers away, due to the speed of light, they will no longer be where they are when you see them.

 

On the strategic level, not having a concrete fix on the enemy's position trillions of kilometres away is irrelevant. All you need to know is whether they're headed your way or not. The important thing is that if they are indeed coming to you, you'll be prepared before they arrive.

(Obviously, I simplify things. There is useful information to be gathered from long range, like enemy deployment and the like. The information will be out of date by a few hours or even days depending on the distance, but those are acceptable delays considering the technology involved.)

Once within combat range (a few light seconds or so) you'll know where the enemy is well enough to lob some missiles their way. And of course you don't want to get 'too' close to the enemy (mere fractions of a light second) otherwise you won't have time to shoot down their missiles, and laser knifefights become part of the equation.

 

They'd probably be boxy-shaped things with massive beam- or rain- gun turrets mounted on the side or all abouts the ship. Battles would probably we broadsides, individual ships fighting individual ship. Pure chaos, destruction, explosions.
Just the way I like it...

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Sane tactics would avoid close-in battles as you describe.

In fact, it is doubtful whether one would survive long enough to close the distance needed to mitigate the effects of light-speed lag necessary to make laser knifefights effective.

And even if you did survive, in a knifefight all tactics would go out the window. The major factors being: who shoots first, and who has more ships to sacrifice.

 

Good point. I'm just saying that it it's a possibility, seeing as how space battleships seems to be a callback to the age of sail, tactics used might be similar...if you remember, in the S.W movies, they don't really show the Imperial fleet fighting in unison, during a battle. It's mostly shown as scatter and shoot tactics...at least in the Battle of Endor.

 

That was Star Wars, dude. Science Fantasy. You know, "How to Make Millions at the Box Office", not "How to Conduct an Actual Space Battle."

 

You are never going to see your opponent coming from a trillion kilometers away. Note that astronomers just discovered a new planet that’s about 15 billion kilometers away. And it’s many orders of magnitude larger than any space ship is likely to be.

 

'See' as in infrared, not in what a human would consider the visible part of the spectrum. The IR 'blob' generated by a ship will be hard to miss.

Within the confines of a system (or, since we're discussing realist situation, the Sol system) you will certainly 'see' an enemy coming long before they get to you. Apparently you can detect the shuttle's RCS firing with great clarity from the asteroid belt.

 

At a trillion kilometers away (or heck, even a billion kilometers away) I suspect it will be pretty damn easy to miss.

If you can see the shuttle’s RCS firing from the asteroid belt, I suspect it’s only because they already know exactly where to look.

Once again, I point out that astronomers only recently noticed an entire planet that's only 15 billion kilometers away. So spotting a spaceship from a trillion kilometers away seems very far-fetched to me.

 

For a fascinating discussion about IR and detection, go here .

Included are arguments concerning comphrehensive detection systems (so you don't need to know the position of the object before hand), and the part about detecting the shuttle RCS (post 68 and 69) using current technology.

 

The 2 posts that you referenced here are about whether or not it would be possible to even <i>resolve</i> the space shuttle from such a distance, assuming you knew where to look.

 

Indeed not. But the 60 or so posts prior to the ones I specifically singled out might prove enlightening to you.

 

There's no way we could see something spaceship sized a trillion miles away with anything near our current technology.

 

You could.

Detection in space is very little to do with the physical size of the object (which, together with its albedo would give you IR and visible-spectrum visibility) but with the power of any EM broadcasting (radio-chatter, heat sources like engines etc) - much like noise is the deciding factor in submarine warfare and detection (where the lower the audible noise the less visible the sub, regardless of actual size).

So a vastly large spaceship could be utterly silent on all EM frequencies and be almost undetectable (much like a small planet such as the one just found), but a one-man craft broadcasting loudly (w.r.t. EM) he could be picked quickly.

Also, software would be able to interpret continuous streaming data and quickly identify any "oddly moving" objects - i.e. those that can only be moving under artificial means - not free-floating etc.

However, "space warships" would surely be designed to deflect EM detectors (much like current Stealth technology) - and so would be as invisible/black as the rest of space. It would only be when firing thrusters that were visible to detectors that they would become visible.

 

In space warfare, the distances we're talking about are not like 5-10km. In fact 100km in space is already considered so close it's in fact negligable. The distances we're most likely going to deal with would be tens of thousands of kilometres, maybe even millions. Projectile weapons are pretty much next to useless at these ranges and missiles will take far too long to fly the distance between the targets.

I still think the good old laser beam works the best =)

 

If theyre in orbit, wouldnt the easiest tactic just to be throw some nails in the other ships path? Even water would do the job, I think...

 

Sciforums badly needs a "user's manual." I don't know how to see the post number. - Can you tell how you saw it. Until I learned the time is a nearly useless referrence, I was using it to refer to a specific post. Thanks for any help you can give.