Submission + - What would REAL space combat look like? 13
c0mpliant writes: Me and two friends of mine were up until the wee hours of the morning at the weekend debating what REAL space combat would look like. I've spent the days looking it up online from a few sources and there doesn't seem to be any general concensus. So I thought I'd ask a community of peers what they think it would look like. Give our current technology and potential future technology, what shape would any future space battlefield look like? Would capital ships rule the day, cruisers, fighters and bombers or would it be a mix of all?
Well (Score:2)
First of all, ranges involved : real space-combat would occur at extreme ranges, limited by the capabilities of the weapon systems for course correction. (if lasers were the main weapon, then "effective range" would be the point at which a randomly dodging spacecraft cannot move enough to dodge before light reaches it)
There would be no human crew about the warships. More durable but still sentient life would crew the ships.
There would not be fighters because interception would be trivial since computer ai
Re: (Score:2)
"There would not be stealth, because any spaceship that is maneuvering MUST produce waste heat, impossible to disguise against the bitter cold of 3 kelvin background temperature."
While most of your post seems well-reasoned, this is not. Compressed gas does not create waste heat on expansion, and it has long been proven to be a viable means of maneuvering.
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Ok maybe I should have prefaced it with "any spacecraft with a working weapon system and a non-negligible amount of Isp for it's engines".
Any decent, high Isp engine involves accelerating the propellant to the highest exit velocities practical. There are various ways to accomplish this, but all of them will produce waste heat.
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Compressed gas, on the other hand, will not result in an appreciable change in velocity. The bigger thrusters even on the space shuttle all use a reacting fuel mixture that most assuredly releases lots of heat. (I think it's a monopropellant)
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A lot depends on what you mean by "maneuvering". If you're talking attitude adjustments and minor changes of velocity and direction, I call that "maneuvering". If you are talking about substantial
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If you're attempting to intercept someone over vast distances and engage them with weapons, then you need to be able to make a large enough delta V change to actually reach them. Remember what I mentioned about space being 3 dimensional? If you try to "sneak up" the slow way, you'll never reach them. They only have to adjust course a tiny bit and you'll miss by enormous distances. (tiny being a relative term. I would assume that in the future the standard rocket fuel will be antimatter)
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Granted, any major course change is going to have to be done with main engines anyway, and those will produce heat. I'm not arguing about that. And I did not say anything about "sneaking up the slow way".
But YOU also have to recognize that any major course corrections are going to be made at a considerable distance from the "target". Maybe even on the other side of the planet. Which renders your "sneaking up the slow way" argument irrelevant.
SI
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Antimatter is existing technology. We have prototype methods that would be able to create antimatter in large quantities with high efficiency. (using very large free electron lasers. The ones we have built now can only make anti-electrons, but bigger ones are just engineering). As you are aware, the incredible energy density means that very little of the mass of the ship needs to be thrown away as propellant if you were doing maneuvering in our solar system. (obviously, an interstellar trip would requi
You would not see it coming (Score:1)
Conventional weapons are out of the question; more than likely you will see electro magnetic weapons, collapsing and manipulation of gravitational fields. In that case when one has weapons of such magnitude, collapsing a planet or star is not really that difficult. I also feel this goes back to the age old question of Matter and Anti Matter.
Me thinks... (Score:2)
...you've already lost the picture by taking a navy that operates on a ball of water and projecting its assets into space.
the difference abouy space war is... (Score:2)
In space there's no cover. You can't hide anywhere.
That leads to two divergent solutions 1) something very hard to hit (i.e small, agile, so little heavy armor) 2) something easy to hit but hard to damage (something big, densely armored, so very heavy).
Given that its very expensive to get even small amounts of heavy armor into space because of the weight, I predict swarms of very small, lightweight and agile robots will be the way ahead.
They will probably have no armor to speak of, use plasma engines, and
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One could send up a load of ultra thin, ultra high tensile strength sand bags pack them with broken up asteroids, then strap them in an arrangement around a vessel...
Of course, the higher mass means a higher fuel cost to maneuver, and fuel is heavy and expensive. However, since mass is the main issue, and configurations dont have to be hydro/aerodynamic, spaced armor will be a huge factor. A layer of sturdy ceramic and alloy plates surrounding the vessel meters away from the hull would prevent damage from c