Different Space Battles

How about we come up with different space age battle tactics?

I'll start off with one...

Two space fleets are of roughly equal strength. They're squaring off by hiding on opposite sides of a planet to block line of sight from one another. They can lob missiles and fighter craft at each other but they can never be sure if they want to risk a full battle because if they lose... they lose big.

Is either fleet capable of firing missiles that can use the gravitational pull of the planet to curve around it and hit whatever's on the other side? If so, maybe they could use this knowledge of orbital curvature to carpet-bomb the other side of the planet, then have the fleet break orbit so the missiles that didn't hit anything won't swerve back and hit them. (Or perhaps put the missiles on a timer such that they detonate once they reach the other side and hopefully catch something in the blast radius.)

edited 19th Jul '11 1:00:42 PM by SpacemanStrife

I leave it open for anything to happen. Like ground based batteries with orbital ships to support them. Or satellites with the orbiting fleets with anti-ballistic systems to blow away incoming projectiles.

^^^ Welcome to the Battle of Midway In Space!

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

That's way too little detail to provide a response. What kind of weapons are we talking here, for starters? How about defenses?

Of course you can use gravity to assist in slinging a missle (or a few hundred) around. You just need to know the ballpark of where the opposing fleet is, so you can put the missiles into an orbital path that will get them there. Do a first stage burn to put them on the proper path, and they coast most of the way. Finally, when they get to within line of sight, they fire off their remaining fuel (or a second stage) and go into terminal homing phase and they can expend their remaining fuel reserves getting set up for a collision path.

Naturally, nothing stopping the other side from doing that. I'd want to keep a lot of point-defense type of ships close to my big ships, and I'd lob off a crap-ton of missiles at once in an effort to overwhelm the opposing point defenses.

I'd consider taking my fleet to a much lower orbit so that, if they tried something like that to me, I can not have the bulk of my forces in the same ballpark as their incoming missiles. Chances are, missiles woudl have limited fuel reserves for doing such a massive correcting burn to compensate for my shifted position. The drawback to that is that I would orbit the planet a lot faster and in short order, I'd be visible to the opposing fleet, and direct-fire engagements would commence shortly after that. Risky move.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I'd like the following please:

1)Weapons available.

2)Sensor capabilities.

3)FTL of the verse.

3a) Top non-FTL speed/accel if applicapble and classification.

4)Shields and other defense capabilities.

Fight smart, not fair.

Okay I'll set some parameters then to create a more focused discussion...

1) Weapons available is everything from direct beam weapons to guided missiles but also projectile weapons and so on, I'm thinking like 100-200 years of weapons development.

2) Sensor capabilities is all the usual stuff of today from radar to optical telescopes. You have sufficient computational ability to rapidly scan the skies without human intervention.

3) FTL can be used anywhere, generally it is like moving FTL as if you were breaking the laws of physics (but let's just presume you are not and it's due to a special effect)

4) non-FTL acceleration can push a ship up 400 m/s^2 when the crew is sitting in specialised liquid containers (meaning they aren't manning the ship), otherwise around 100 m/s^2, and due to technology for shielding against micro meteorites and other space dust debris, max speed tops out at around 200 000 m/s to 300 000 m/s

5) No star trek like shielding, but you have heavy hull armour that can withstand some direct rail gun blasts and non-armour piercing nuclear warheads. Radiation shielding is quite heavy. Military ships usually place crew in the middle of the ship inside a bunker, so there's plenty of armour between them and dangerous weapons from outside. You have plenty of point defence such as laser grids and whatnot. You can lay static minefields, or dynamic minefields. You can have satellites on planets. There's also fightercraft (automated fighter craft is available given the technology, it's as good as fighter pilots of the 21st century).

My missiles would be a dynamic minefield, on a one-way trip, then. Fire them off, locate targets, go terminal, bang.

What sort of velocities can you consider reasonable for railguns? Once you get over a certain speed (I ferget), than the projectile packs enough energy to make it equivalent to high explosives. Fire off a heavy enough projectile at that kind of speed, and I can't rightly imagine most armor being able to take that kind of blow, unless you have layers of armor - a thin metallic plate set a bit off from the main hull, to break up an incoming round, and lots of not-dense material beyond that to soak up the round. Probably need to have lots of water tanks and stuff (doubles as radiation shielding, too) between the outer and inner hull.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

There isn't such a thing.

Railguns, as a design, go up to arbitrary impact energies, but a projectile that's too fast will simply pass straight through the target with minimal damage.

My tactic would be repeated Picard maneuvers as fast as the drive allows me to.

edited 20th Jul '11 11:11:39 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I'm giving leeway for metallurgy to improve to give us something we didn't expect to be able to build today. There's no pressure wave from a nuke so actually it's not as bad as it sounds but you'll probably spin wildly out of control and soak too much radiation from a direct nuclear hit. I don't want the armour to be "steel + 1".

We'll bump it up to automatic railguns which by itself is already an indication of metallurgy far beyond what we are currently capable of doing.

For Picard maneuver how might the dynamic change with whole fleets, or fighting near gravity wells?

There's no pressure wave from a nuke in a vacuum. A direct hit, or near-direct-hit is not a vacuum, and will send a very large amount of energy through your hull. Most of it will be vaporized hull, but you'll also get some distortion from heat expansion of the solids.

Re: Picard maneuvers, it's a Game-Breaker if you follow Relativity, because warp drive is effective as You Already Changed the Past Time Travel. I don't know well it works in gravity wells; is the FTL drive of this setting affected by them?

edited 20th Jul '11 11:42:55 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

In this case no time travel, I do try to avoid it for plot purposes. Afterall, FTL is usually an acceptable break from reality. Gravity wells don't affect FTL in this setting but if you slam yourself into a planet you do so at the speed you were going at conventionally.

Most of the nuclear warheads in my setting are shaped charges to blow through armouring, so a direct hit is debilitating in any case. So we can presume that the armour is protection mostly from non-direct "impacts".

I was thinking something of missile barrages combined with picard maneuvers, alongside decoys so you're not sure where to shoot and which missiles are real.

edited 20th Jul '11 12:00:22 PM by breadloaf

Ah, relativistic bombs. Slap a decent engine on a ship, get it spun up real good, slam it into a planet. Don't even need a warhead.

The problem with decoys is that they won't act like a proper ship. Yeah, you can spoof it with active sensor emissions (radar signals, thermal output, stuf like that) but if you want it to change course, the engine output signature will be off, if you're using some form of reaction drive.

I'd be more willing to put money into Electronic Warfare (EW) and related things in order to scramble up missile sensors, than to rely on hard decoys.

edited 20th Jul '11 12:26:48 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Okay, how well can you tie your sensors to your point defense? If the answer is "really really well" missiles are a hell of a lot more useless. The exception being laser missiles.

I don't think nukes work quite the way you thing, they're mostly a high intensity EM blast, which causes a temperature spike and fluid dynamics takes over. A shaped nuclear charge would have a greater effective range if pointed at the the ship. Significantly greater range if you wanted to turn them into the aforementioned laser missiles.

I'd recommend adding micro-maneuvering systems to you projectiles. It won't up the accuracy too much, but it will definitely improve them. Unless they're shortrange weapons.

I'd like more detail on the FTL. Does it enable superluminal KKV or the like? Also, how accurate is it, can I plop a nuke into my opponents bridge?

Fight smart, not fair.

Earth normal escape velocity is 13 km/s. I suspect your numbers might be way too low for the precaution. (Your number roughly rounds to a 900 miles per hour acceleration rate.)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

That's a decent acceleration. You'd reach escape velocity in a few minutes, which is pretty impressive. breadloaf said that FTL is usable anywhere, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch that it's used for that sort of thing.

Fight smart, not fair.

Decent yes, but as far as I'm aware it is not on the inertia scale of "crew must be People In A Jar Of Gel".

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I think it is. I believe 9 G's is the upper limit of what the (average) human body can handle without assistance of some kind. I think current astronauts handle 13ish (quoting from memory). 40 G's is well above the limit of what I'd expect people to handle.

Edit: a quick trip to The Other Wiki shows I was far off, it's 3 G's for a space shuttle launch.

edited 20th Jul '11 9:23:10 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Yeah, I'm talking acceleration not velocity. One is the differential of the other.

FTL requires a component roughly the width/length of a small bedroom and the height of around 2-3 storeys. It's also costly so unfortunately you can't slap that onto a nuke without it costing the equivalent of 250 million dollars per shot. It's not cheap and ships don't land on planets (normally) but there are reuseable drop pods and mobile space elevator systems. FTL doesn't speed up your ship, so even if you FTL into enemies, the best you can do is ram them at the speed you were going at conventionally and direction you were moving, conventionally, meaning that if you ram ships into planets you're basically saying "I'm ramming my 10 billion dollar carrier into an enemy". It doesn't help at all against the atmosphere or other debris. That said, ramming a 100 000 ton ship at 250 000 m/s would probably devastate a planet, FTL or not.

I do however, have FTL interdiction fields in the same setting, just to avoid some exceedingly excessive use of FTL for the purposes of ramming.

Decoy missiles are basically ECM pods you fire off using whatever it can to confuse enemy sensors, they're aren't meant to be just a missile missing a warhead (as that would be rather expensive).

I'll ignore the FTL portion for now. Harder to deal with.

What size planet is this hypothetical engagement happening at? Are both fleets outfitted for an extended period away from base facilities (as in, are auxiliary replenishment ships in attendance), or are the fleets comprised only of combatants operating on just whatever provisions they happen to have on board?

The amount of time they can stay on station matters. Barring actually lobbing rounds at each other to force the engagement, one or the other fleet might sufer attrition due to hitting some sort of consumable limit. I'd imagine that the cost of keeping a warship on station for awhile would be high - buring up fuel, spare parts, consumables, reactor fuel, reaction mass, whatever, and all for no gain except to show the flag. The fleet that has replenishment ships and other auxiliaries close by has more supplies and such to waste on this endeavor.

Okay, that out of the way, I'd imagine that each fleet would want to reconnitor the enemy to determine if they're still orbiting the other side of the planet. Couple of ways to do this. Sneak out a small probe to do an eliptical orbit from the fleet to the other side of the planet, and have it transmit coded data based off of what it sees. Might have to fire off a number of them to ensure adequate sensor coverage. Even a simple 200-pound satelite should be able to pick up a cluster of ships at several thousands of miles out. The tricky part is ensuring that yoru probe's data traffic isn't detected. Even if you can't crack the signal, you'll eventually triangulate the location of the probe, maybe work out its orbit, and you might be able to extrpolate where it came from. If you have real god crypto gear, you might even crack the signal and then you'll really know something is afoot.

The other option to reconnitoring the enemy is to not hide the fact that you're doing it. Send a small manned ship blaring away noisily and put some eyeballs into the area of interest. The drawback is that you risk it getting shot at, but maybe if neither side is willing to open fire first and escalate things... you might get away with this.

So, how comitted are these two forces in regards to killing one another? Is this a hot war or cold?

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I have several different conflicts in mind and they're all hot.

• Two space fleets in a solar system but not near any particular planet for their initial engagement
• Two space fleets in orbit of an earth-type planet
• A space fleet versus a defended planet (which they need to take over, not blow away) and collateral damage is a huge image problem

What's the speed/precision limits on the FTL drive?

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

If you have good FTL precision, then it's really all about plotting your arrival points well in relation to your opponent.

Nous restons ici.

Breadloaf: Why would they tangle with one another on the first instance? there's nothing to fight over in deep space, unless this is a fly-by - I mean, two fleets heading for different destinations happen to get close enough to one another to exchange blows briefly. But that assumes no FTL.

Second example, yeah. As per my earlier wall of text.

Third example, the planet wins. It has unlimited heat sinks, lots of ground to soak up damage, and fleet detection is as simple as having some low-end satelites and good optics.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.