Space Warships.

but wouldnt ships have to be large and bulky? otherwise it is whoever hits first wins like described earlier. if a ship was made to be large enough it could support any amount of resources or personel, there isnt any nescesary limiting capacity. of course this would be in the extreme future when humanity inhabits other planets, a ship i described would need immense resources and extreme amounts of labor. mabey warring countrys would pool all resources and labor into one ship rather than many. afterall wouldnt you rather build one impenatrable castle then multiple weaker towers?

 

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A Death Star!

 

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Not necessarily. I would think that a huge swarm of small warships (destroyers?) much faster, more manuverable and more destructive that a 'death star' kind of ship. They're easier to repair and refit too. What happens when your 'death star' is out of ammunition or needs repairs or sabotaged from the inside??

 

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would it matter how fast or manuverable a smaller ship was if it was peirced by an energy weapon? no

also a deathstar is unable to move isnt it?

as to the repair question it would have to be sent supplies which by this time would be no problem at all, if they could ever make such a ship i would imagine we would have conquered space entry.

 

The smaller ship, with superior acceleration, although perhaps not superior delta-v, will be able to choose the range of the engagement.

If we go with purely laser knifefights, then the smaller ships have the advantage. They can hit the bigger ship before the bigger ship can hit the smaller ships.

You'll lose a few of the small ships, but they're much easier to replace, repair, upgrade, etc.. Overall, a much more tactically and strategically flexible option.

Of course, if you subscribe to the line of thought that nuclear missiles will be the primary striking arm of a warship, then it is definately not worth loading on the armor. Although a large ship would have the advantage of having a greater magazine size (and so greater survivability, since it can carry more counter-missiles.)

Even then, if you can stuff in more launchers on an equivilent mass of smaller vessels, the smaller vessels come out on top... again.

 

Manuvering will be next to iumpossible. Ships of any size will be in a situation where it will take hours, if not days or longer, just to come to a full stop. You won't be able to dodge any beams or guided projectiles sent your way. You will either have to soak the damage, kill the enemy before he brings his full armament to bear, or intercept incoming weapons with chaff bombs, point defense guns, or something of the sort.

I suspect battles will require closing in on your opponent to within a few thousand miles in order to do anything more than the opening skirmishes. Further out than that, beams disperse into harmlessness, missiles are too easily shot down, and it is unlikely that projectiles will hit at all.

Small craft are too easily destroyed by point defense weapons, chaff bombs, and ordinary weapons. There is just no concievable way for them to carry enough armor to be able to last the first minute of a fight without cover... though perhaps they could use larger allied ships as shields to keep them alive. Even worse, small craft would not be able to move faster than big ones. Having little volume, they would have little fuel and would need to piggyback on their larger cousins. Even if they had the energy, they couldn't accelerate much faster than 1G without turning the pilot into jelly. Nowhere near fast enough to keep out of a PD weapon's target.

I think things may be going back to a larger scale version of old-time naval warfare.

 

yup yup thats what i meant

 

I agree with Clockwood on his last point, as well as his point about having to close in on your target. I think everyone here has the tendency to assume that just because space is a big place, that the range of battles will increase significantly. Sure the tactics will adapt to fit the environment, but they first have to conform with the weapons you have on hand. If you can only reliably hit something that is several hundred or thousand kilometers away, then battles will be fought at that distance. The two parties won't say to themselves "Hey, our weapons don't work well in the large distances of space, so I guess we won't be able to fight", they will say "Well, even though space is big, we can't really take advantage of the distances, so we will still have to fight at close range". Plus, the materials you guys are talking about are outdated. Sure some of them would have to be used because they are the best materials in space, but we won't be making warships in space out of steel and titanium, we will be making them out of amorphous metals. We won't be using really slow-speed chemically propelled projectiles, we will be using Railguns and Coilguns to fire large projectiles at extreme velocities. Our targetting systems will be way better than they are now, so we will be able to hit things with the projectile weapons because we will be able to calculate where the ship is going to be and approximately when, especially given that it is very difficult to change direction in space.

Also, on a side note, I am a little surprised at how long this thread has lasted. Very interesting.

 

we'll assume that the pilots in a ship with great acceleration capability are suspended in a liquid or a gel when in engagements, such as to be able to withstand excessive gee forces for long periods if neccesary.

there are really two ends of the spectrum in warfare, and no I'm not a military guy so please don't take this for gospel. There's large, oppresive, sieging, highly overt units that smash whatever they can fire upon, and there are the small, swift, covert, light-hitting but accurate units. One slams a target to death by brute force, the other by small piercings in just the right spots. If you had a super-massive battleship, not only would it have a size that would make firing projectiles at it (which could be launched with devastating force by relatively small railguns or one-time-use launching platforms) relatively easy, but because it couldn't mount much of an engine due to a higher mass-surface area ratio (meaning it's harder to keep the ship cool), it wouldn't be able to dodge them very well either. In fact, if the battleship were firing guns at full blast, and a battleship like that would have the largest guns one could build for it (otherwise it's rather pointless), you would probably not bother turning the engines on because its radiator panels are already glowing red hot from the waste heat of the weapons. It'd basically be a ship with a non-combat maneuvering system, a battlestation with a rocket mounted on it. It'd have to be able to absorb massive damage from both lasers (or if it's mirrored, some other EM weapon, like maser or gamma laser), and very high velocity projectile slugs. Not only that, it's captain better hope that something doesn't smash it's radiator panels/surfaces, otherwise the ship would be severely hindered in the ammount of weapons fire it could deliver. It would not be wise to have an extremely large ship designed for full-on engagements, maybe as a defensive position, or an orbit-to-surface bombardment vessel, but not open combat.

However, a smaller ship, with much smaller components yet larger surface area, could not only maneuver very easily, making electromagnetic beams (laser, maser, gamma laser, etc.) it's only real weakness, as it could easliy change it's course to avoid projectiles. a small ship would have proportionally larger everything: engines, weapons, heat-dumping systems, life support (for a smaller crew), in exchange for what would ammount to shorter operational duration. That is assuming it uses reasonable ammounts of propellent (not a very good ion drive or anything that sips propellent) and doesn't make room for a closed ecosystem life support, although that would make a very cool exploration ship. It would have sensors that, being not extremely large today, will probably be smaller in size, so it would have scanning abilities not to the specs a massive ship could handle, but good enough for weapons fire on a slow-moving battleship while it is well outside of that ship's projectile targeting abilites and perhaps even the laser/maser targeting systems (constant random thrusting, keeps them guessing). Of course if the smaller ship took a hit from a massive gun, it'd be toast, but it could lower it's chances of getting hit significantly.

It could mount railguns that deliver projectiles equiped to preform nuclear blasts, EMP pinches, any number of damaging effects for a given situation. A small ship could be small enough to fit into a "cloaking" system, which I mean by cloaking as "hiding", within a cloud of fine particles that surrounds the ship and scatter it's infared and radio signature, making targeting even more of a guess job. of course the smaller ship couldn't see the battleship, but it could still predict it's position and fire at that. it could even target key points on the victim ship to hit them where it hurts (radiators, sensor nodes, maneuvering thrusters, etc.)

have a swarm of small ships against a supermassive ship, and a few small ships would probably be blown to dust, but in the end they could overwelm a large ship and disable it, possibly maintaining it's integrity enough (by concentrating only it's weaker spots) to be able to capture it and salvage it, or use it as a base to be stationed elsewhere. that and take all the propellent and material goods they can get their hands on.

i think high acceleration and smaller size favor a large, cumbersome ship with heavy firepower, at least in conventional head-to-head combat, but i could be wrong.

 

I like this idea:

it would take a lot of energy though. I think the best way would probably be a combination of missiles, lasers, and projectiles. I would also put my money on small maneuverable ships over large armored ones.

p.s. perhaps a bee-hive type thing. have the main supply/base ship at the center and have many smaller ships at the Periphery.

 

Smaller ships can have a major superiorty in numbers. A single laser burst may be easily destroy one, but there would be thousands and one loss would not affect the fleet much.

 

you mention heavy firepower of large ships but forgot the almost limitless amounts of area inside a large ship that could be used to house nuclear reactors or something of the sort that could provide enormous amounts of energy. along with the fact that they could also support massive sheilds/armor.

sure alot of small ships could out manuver and accelerate a large ship but attack would be little more then harrasment.

 

This is a totally different discussion than the old one, which discussed submarine-like tactics and stealth. Fascinating how a few years change things.

 

the large ship could mount big reactors, but again, it has to cool them, from the surface. that would require alot of surface area, and the surface area is directly vulnerable to fire. you'd also have to take into account the massive heat transfer capabilites a ship would need to get all that heat to the surface of the ship. a large reactor piping heat a long way to the surface of the ship (assuming the reactor is nestled safely in the center of a ship, and not near the ship's hull, making it vulnerable to fire) would need either a very effective/damage sensitive system, or a beefed up, oversized cooling system. one would be very vulnerable to damage, the other would take up space and weigh more.

i never heard of a meson gun, but it makes sense. even if you only fired a light beam (ridiculously small ammount of mass), you could time it to materialize WITHIN a ship, bypassing armor and repelling systems. find out where the reactor/engine is in a ship and you have yourself a one-hit-win.