I suspect it's mostly going to be a missiles and lasers battle at a few light-seconds, without fighters (sticking a human in a drone adds a lot of weight, and making a drone reusable isn't cheap in itself).
I think it depends an awful lot on the specifics of how various technologies develop. A viable strategy has to be cost-effective and geared towards countering the strategies of your enemies, so it's kind of an emergent thing. I freely admit I don't know enough about the current technologies or space physics to make a realistic judgement about how things are likely to evolve, though.
In my main sci-fi setting, battles are mostly based on delivering nuclear warheads to the enemy with drones, while preventing their drones from getting through using lasers and energy pulses. Almost all of the tactics are handled by A.I.s operating at speeds and levels of tactical depth way beyond anything a human could manage, micromanaging each individual drone, each piloted by an independent genius-level AI. The bigger ships are basically massive factories geared towards producing more drones and drone-factories, and one of the main functions of 'winning' battles is access to the battlefield scrap for raw materials. There's also a primitive form of FTL that's too dangerous and poorly-understood for everyday travel but can be useful for getting a risky jump on the enemy or making such a mess of local space-time that the probability of explosive systems failure approaches 1 and the enemy AI has to spontaneously invent new branches of physics to deal with all the unexpected complications.
edited 29th Oct '12 11:49:49 AM by Kesteven
gloamingbrood.tumblr.com MSPA: The Superpower Lottery
Eye'm the cutest!
I reject the notion that there will not be starfighters in space. We've had some killer AA defenses pop up on Earth and it didn't do in the classic dive bomber or air superiority fighter.
The same will happen in space. Manned fighters are an inevitability and advantage. Why advantage? Drones lose control when the master unit goes down (and no military in their right mind will build fully autonomous drones), manned fighters have no such limitation. They also have the advantage of judgment calls. What if the target you send fighters against is found to be a civilian craft? A drone may simply fire before its ever realized. A human pilot might figure something's wrong e.g. the target isn't evading or trying to counterattack and double check if they got the target right. Thirdly, it's cheaper from a production level. The control and targeting systems of a space drone would cost multiple times the same cost for human pilots because you have to factor in a million more variables than on Earth.
Also, I object to the notion that warfare will devolve into light-seconds or AU sized battles and ranges. Long range standoff warfare has existed on Earth for 50 years and yet NOT ONCE has standoff warfare been employed as the standard doctrine. Air to air warfare despite having long range missiles like the AIM-54 Phoenix around for 45 years has rarely engaged another aircraft beyond 20 km. Even that is infrequent compared to 10 km or less. (Which is Sidewinder range.) Land warfare has had missiles and rockets that can fire for hundreds of kilometers but those are rarely if ever employed, especially at maximum ranges.
All those have one thing in common: Lack of visual/detection. The same happens in space. Unlike what Atomic Rocket would have you believe there is no such thing as an omniscient sensor system or that firing up the engines for a 15 second burn will light you up like a Christmas tree to every sensor system within 3 AU of you. (And that's ignoring the pesky detail of sensors only traveling at the speed of light if we stick to super super hard sci-fi.) You do not "glow" like a sore thumb just being out there. Hell we've missed STARS before on thermal sweeps of the sky. Stars aka some of the hottest known objects in the Universe. If we can miss a star on a thermal sweep, we'll easily miss a ship.
Weapons wise, I'd expect missiles to be one of the primary armaments but far from the sole armament. The Battle of Latakia in 1973 DESTROYED (in more than one way) the idea of missile-only anything and military planners have been accounting for that since then and will account for it in the future. I'd expect guns would make a huge comeback since they have unlimited range unlike lasers and plasma, do not require fuel like missiles (assuming unguided and non-Rocket Assisted Projectiles), and are cheaper than anything. Hell guns were to date the first and ONLY weapon ever deployed to space, the largest being 23mm twin cannon on the Almaz. Meaning we're more likely to see ships built more like Baltimore class heavy cruisers or Iowa class (pre-1980) battleships than Osa II missile boats or Kirov class battlecruisers.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
We already did the fighter/drone fighter thing a while back.
Visit Atomic Rockets they have a good section on space combat but occasionally lack imagination on potential applications as weapons or military utility of some items.
edited 29th Oct '12 6:16:17 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
State of Mind
I'm kind of amused that I've heard this statement several times by completely unrelated people.
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim
Well, not that surprising if you think about it: it's really the only criticism you can level against their conclusions if you don't like them. The physics of the various scenarios are carefully considered and, more importantly, explained in great detail, so any incorrect fact or calculation would be very easy to spot. So if someone wants to show errors, they'd either have to demonstrate the actual data that is in error, point out the precise location where there's a mistake in the calculations, or resort to handwaving. Usually, they can't actually find anything wrong, so all that's left is to say "But they didn't think of X"
That being said, there's of course still lots of space (haha) for speculation. The precise balance and use of lasers, charged particle beams, missiles, kinetic weapons, nukes, etc. is a very complex system that can be quite a bit of fun to talk about, and depends heavily on all of the technological parameters in space from how advanced missile targeting AI is to how expensive ships and ammunition can be.
On the other hand, there are of course also things that are flat out ridiculous and belong only in the realm of space opera (most of the typical space operate nonsense originates from authors picking some period of historical warfare and then recreating that. With laser guns in space. Starwars does Midway & Britain in WW 2, weber takes the age of sail, etc.). Plasma-guns for example are pure nonsense (that's like trying to improve a handgun by making it shoot liquid lead). Space fighters, despite being popular, are one of the things that are plain silly, space physics just don't work for the concept of a carrier launching fighters, no matter what their respective sizes and armaments. Similarly, space pirates or boarding operations are silly unless all circumstances are specifically engineered to allow it. The worst of all are probably planetary invasions where some invader show up with a big fleet in orbit, to then land ground forces and wage a traditional land war. (yes, that's sillier even than space fighters).
edited 29th Oct '12 6:24:11 PM by McKitten
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
One we have already covered this.
Two Even atomic rockets points out feasible ways space fighters could be used and points to other peoples interpretations on them. The best canidate is a form of drones which are kind of a bastard child between drone and missile armed with specific weapons.
Three The ground war and planetary invasion was shown to be plausible especially if your after something intact on the ground. Smoldering craters tend to be less useful then the object that once shared the same space. You can't capture realestate, buildings, people, harvested resources etc from orbit. You have to send something or someone to do it. The only time a ground war is silly is if you looking to kill everything and move on.
Who watches the watchmen?
State of Mind
If you really want something on the planet. Or just want the planet period, then you're going to want boots in the ground. What if you're taking an extended period to stay in the system? Could you count in surviving on whatever supplies you brought with you, or constantly having to have more delivered from a friendly base for you?
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim
Eye'm the cutest!
The same was once said of aerial supremacy. Vietnam said otherwise.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
State of Mind
That actually reminds me, there might be political reasons for actually occupying the planet.
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
It's possible to have practical space fighters. By immersing the pilot in breathing liquid you can overcome the normal acceleration limits of the human body. Unfortunately this technology doesn't scale up very well. Flooding the cabin negates the advantages and a suit would be difficult to walk in. A fighter, however, doesn't require the pilot to move much. As such you can have a very maneuverable manned fighter.
Engagement range will have less to do with the nature of your gun and far more to do with the mechanical tolerances of your artillery. If you're a hairsbreath off then you've missed the target by several kilometers. This is why missile work. Because you CAN engage at light second ranges and expect to hit a target. Granted, there is lots of things the target can do about that but the fact is that a missile is the only threat at extreme ranges. Ballistic armaments will haves to settle for hundreds of kilometers of range.
Orbital bombardment may not be entirely unopposed. Star ships are under restrictions of heat, weight, recoil, and supplies. A ground based battery is under no such limitation and can be made much more powerful and numerous than any space based weapon system.
edited 29th Oct '12 9:40:48 PM by Belisaurius
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Yes fighters are still feasible. Unlike a missile you can arm a fighter multiple times. A missile you can only shoot once. Fighters can also carry missiles and other weapons as needed. In a pinch a fighter can become a KKV. Added benefit of fighters is that the weapons they carry are not expending fuel if they are things like missiles. The fighter does that for them. They can use whatever fuel they have for limited maneuver, evasion, and straight acceleration rather then just trying to reach the target. The fighter can also fly to a different point fire at a different angle then return. If it is a missile or other fueled projectile it would have to burn fuel to make the change. Unlike a disposable missile or carrier the fighter goes back and gets more weapons and does it again.
Unmanned fighters being the preferred option. Now I doubt we will see something like the Battle of Midway but we would more likely see situations like the Battle of Britain. The fighters are used in closer range engagements to intercept smaller vessels, drones, and other fighters.
Even better a feasible and realistic scenarios for fighters with reasonable possibility of manned fighters and/or drones
Also check the comments quite a few make additional points. Also makes good cases for boarding ships. Other things to consider boarding a ship with personnel or drones drones can net you survivors, scavenged supplies, and intel. Bam easy reason to board a ship. Now it might not be like the days of the old sail you are likely going to want to make sure the other side can't really fight back much but you have a set of feasible reasons to want and board another ship.
That is great you have the orbital. But you still want something ground side your going to have to go down and get it if they are not going to ship it up to you.
Your chances of taking it intact are much greater if you move ground side then trying to not use too much fire power and destroy what you want by accident. Not only are any assets sent ground side going to have smaller scale weapons but any damage or destruction done is a lot less likely to be as severe as a hit by any form of orbital strike. The folks ground side have the option of waiting you out they are not as limited by consumables as your ship. The faster you get what you need and likely leave the better off you are. If they don't give it you have to take it. Simple as that and no way to get around it.
Not going to fight a ground war you say? You are if you want something ground side. Especially if they won't give it to you. Your shit out of luck if they shoved it under a mountain with multiple entrances and exits.
Also on the orbital superiority that is only so long as there is nothing to contest you. I will remind you of Mr. Murphy's laws. "If the enemy is in range so are you." It is both reasonable and feasible for anyone with the tech to send ships on long space voyages to have the ability to loft a large variety of weapons fire from planet surface to orbit. Or loft ships or weapons from the other side of the planet to come at you from there.
Here simple set of questions to ask for ground combat. We are going to assume that whatever the people in orbit are after is generally worth the effort and have the possible assets to go after it.
- Is it portable/pilotable or is it fixed?
- Can a team of personnel fly down and hijack or get it?
- Does it have to be raided or held to get the benefit of it?
- Do you know where it is on the planet?
- Will they give it to you through negotiations or coercion?
- Will firing on any ground targets possibly damage it?
- Can the other side defend it?
Pretty much all of these questions lead to you having to go down to the planet and possibly engage in ground combat to get what you want off the planet surface.
Who watches the watchmen?
But then again, it takes more fuel to move a figher and missiles than just missiles. Load the missiles with the fuel that the fighter would have used and you end up with missiles that both can do any of the maneuvers the figher would have done and still have more fuel in them then they whould have if realised from said figher. You also don't waste any fuel on bringing stuff back. The carrier also waste space on fighers that could be used for missiles and other weapons.
There is still reason to use fighers/drones but saving fuel isn't one of them. One reason to to use drones is to hide what kind of payload they have and how many. Like if you send 30 missiles against a target the enemy will have time to calculate their trajectories, guess where they are going to be the next second and destroy them with their lasers. But if it is 10 drones the enemy have no idea how to prioritise the targets. And with the extra armor(shield or whatever) it might take four times as long to destroy a drone compared to missiles. With drones the missile could also be made smaller and stealthier as they need less fuel.
edited 30th Oct '12 2:23:57 AM by m8e
On the space fighters issue, AR provides a short but succinct statement deriding it:
Imagine a speculative fiction writer back in the Victorian era, such as Jules Verne. Say they wanted to write a novel about the far future, when heavier than air flight had been invented, and the age of Aerial Combat had arrived.
They might take the dramatic and comfortable metaphor of sea-going frigates and battleships and transporting it intact into the aerial environment. Held aloft by dozens of helicopter blades, the battleships of the air would ponderously maneuver, trying to "cross the T" with the enemy aerial dreadnoughts.
See how silly it sounds? Well, combat spacecraft behaving like fighter aircraft is just as silly. In both cases a metaphor is being forced into a situation where it does not work.
edited 30th Oct '12 2:54:38 AM by MattII
Exitus Acta Probat
Probably the best "missile" for space combat would be a small projectile attached to a solar sail, accelerated by a ship-mounted laser. Since the projectile doesn't need to carry any fuel or engines, it can be made cheaper and smaller than a regular missiles, allowing them to be deployed en masse and makign each individual projectile harder to hit. The combination of the projectile's small size and the immense amount of power a capital ship mounted laser could generate would allow them to be accelerated to extremely high speeds, at which point having an actual payload would be redundant. Accelerated to high enough speed, a simple solid metal block will hit with the force of a nuclear bomb.
Let's do a little back of envelope calculation. Let's say our fighter has 4 units of fuel, measured in delta-V. We'll measure units this way instead of in weight, because the last kg of fuel the fighter burns will accelerate it harder (because it is now lighter) than the first it burned. So for considering movement, we divide the fuel into parts providing equal speed, not parts of equal weight.
So, let's ignore manoeuvring and just consider the distances it has to cover. The first fuel unit gets burned accelerating the fighter up to travelling speed. It can then drift an unlimited distance to reach it's target (ignoring life support). Before reaching its target it will have to burn another unit of fuel to slow down again so it doesn't overshoot it's target. Yes, the target might have been moving away so it won't need to slow as much, but it might also have been closing in, so let's go with the middle path for now.
After the actual fight, (the fuel consumption of which we'll also ignore) it has to accelerate back again to the carrier, and break again to land. If it stays dead in space after the fight and has the carrier pick it up, it could save two units of fuel. Bit of a gamble, because if they lose, the fighters wouldn't be able to flee.
Now consider a missile instead. Let's pick one of equal weight to the fighter so our fuel units stay the same. Basically, we just take the fighter and use it as a throwaway missile bus. The first unit of fuel can be used to accelerate up to speed. Instead of drifting it can use the second as well. And the third and fourth. Because it doesn't have to break and return, the missile has four times the usable fuel of the fighter, which in space translates to four times the range. Range is determined by the time it takes to arrive at the target and maximum speed of the fighter/missile. The target can accelerate away from the missile (or fighter), and if the missile (or fighter) has used up all fuel before reaching the target, it got away. It can either dodge, or in the worst case, even accelerate to a higher speed than the now drifting missile/fighter.
So, a fighter of equal weight to a throwaway missile bus actually cuts the effective range by three quarters, instead of extending it. Which pretty much kills the concept of space fighters, and that long before we go into considerations of efficiency of lugging around humans, space used on the carrier, humans in high-g combat and all other problems.
When considering whether space fighters (or any sort of equipment) is viable, it is not enough to compare it with something else and point out advantages and disadvantages. I can compare a missile to a washing machine and find those (the missile really doesn't deal well with wine stains). Three steps are necessary: a) Figure out what sort of job a space fighter is supposed to do. b) Determine that this is a job that actually needs to be done regularly enough to have a special vehicle for it. c) And most importantly: determine that a space fighter is actually the best choice to get that job done.
Sure space fighter have advantages over big ships and missiles and washing machines. But where they fail is step c), there is nothing a space fighter actually can do, that can't be done better by something else.
The downside is that a missile like that will not have a lot of manoeuvring capability, or at least not compared to its acceleration from the remote laser. So it's either only useful as a replacement for guns, or you'll need to stick another missile on top (but that will still be better than a normal ship-launched missile). And of course, it's not quite fire-and-forget.
edited 30th Oct '12 3:50:05 AM by McKitten
But you really think if you send in the space marines you'll manage to take intact whatever is in that mountain? If you have an enemy that is determined enough to fight a last stand against such odds, you'll get nothing. Even if the fight doesn't turn everything into scrap, odds are the last one of them is going to blow up whatever it is you want. If they haven't already destroyed it and are hoping you'll go away figuring the fight's not worth it anymore.
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
fighters will likely play a secondary role in space combat but possibly a far greater one in orbital combat. In open space fighters will loiter just outside of the effective range of enemy point defense. Mostly, the relay sensor data to larger ships and stay out of the line of fire. A point defense system is a fairly large and extensive system. It has to be in order to cover 360 by 360 degrees. As such, it's inevitably going to loose sections of coverage due to battle damage. Fighters can then sneak in through holes in the sensor and weapon coverage and engage the enemy from within the pd sphere.
An orbital battery can't cover an entire planet alone. The planet kinda gets in the way. As such an invasion force can land in a place not covered by anti orbital batteries or eliminate one battery and take the rest with ground forces
If we're talking about 'hard' sci-fi, then none of this orbital bombardment/planetary invasions stuff is likely to happen: even within the solar system, waging war between, say, Earth and a moon of Saturn is going to be prohibitively expensive.
The most likely type of 'war' would involve near-Earth space-colonies, and the goal would be to capture the expensive, delicate solar arrays with a few guys with guns, rather than destroying things with KK Vs or lasers or whatever. Or, possibly, a part of a worldwide war, where space superiority would become the logical extension of air superiority.
If we're talking 'soft' sci-fi, then of course the strategies would be shaped by whatever ftl and other space magic you are invoking.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
edited 30th Oct '12 8:10:10 AM by McKitten
Actual scouts make no sense, but there could be something analogous in putting extra sensors out to the side, to better scan space (taking advantage of parallax effects).
Not that that requires manned fighters.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Mc Kitten; One last time because you don't get it. It doesn't matter how much fire power you can drop or how accurately. Dropping things like Kinetic munitions have bigger foot prints then you give them credit for and cause a lot of damage especially if dropped from orbit. No where have I said death star like, that is your exaggeration not mine. Any time you start using artillery or weapons that deliver a lot of force or energy, like ship to ship weapons would, on something like a series of ground targets you might want for any reason you run the risk of damaging or destroying it by accident.
If they are not going to simply give you want you want you are going to have to go down and take it, period. There is no other option. And yes Murphy's law still applies from surface to orbit. They can just as easily shoot back. Read the latest Rocket Punk Manifesto post on Blockades from Space. Even they point out planets are likely to have surface to Orbit weapons or can loft weapons into orbit that could seriously ruin an orbiting ships day. Won't matter if your after a batch of supplies, command center, space port, or a group of people. They can always make you expend the effort to come and get it and expend effort to fight you for it on the ground.
The notion that just because someone can shoot at you that you can't shoot back is silly. If you can loft a ship that can move across a galaxy you can loft weapons, other ships, satellites etc. Also the notion that if you merely threaten someone they will automatically give you want you want this is ignorant of human behavior and military tactics in general and is silly.
Attacking a heavily populated planet would be crazy. They would have well established industry and very likely are able to fight back. Your chances of merely bullying them into what you want are pretty slim. If you really badly want something on the surface your going to need to take it. If you go after say colonies instead with much smaller populations you have a better chance of coercion working but even that is not a guarantee.
If they are not willing to give it and your not willing to take it, you might as well go home.
Who watches the watchmen?
Reading the power armor thread and saw this come up, then I noticed this topic seems to pop up frequently in sci-fi threads. So here is a thread dedicated to space combat!
Lets see what everyone is thinking about ships blowing each other up! About giant rocks being flung about the solar system! About lasers and missiles criss-crossing each other on the way to their targets! About space forts, starfighters, Wave Motion Guns, all that jazz!
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim