Warfare IN SPAAAAAAACE!

Two or three minutes? Let's assume the attackers are getting pretty close and orbit at a distance of 10000km. (which is low orbit, far below GPS satellites) Even if a missile could go straight up, covering nothing but this distance (which it can't) that require it to go at an average mach 160 to get there in three minutes. Let's say we have a hypersonic missile going at mach 10, and let's ignore the time it needs to reach that speed. That one's going to take close to an hour to reach those ships. Plenty of time to shoot it down. And even if you make it a kinetic impact missile, all that's required to stop it is taking out the motor, while kinetic impactors heading planet-side will still keep falling (and completely vaporizing the chunk of metal that makes up the warhead is extremely difficult). No need to bother with nukes if you're bombarding from orbit. A largish kinetic impactor can have the power of a nuke, while conveniently all that energy is already downward directed kinetic energy. Orbital bombardment is pretty much bunker-busting by nature. The real tricky part is designing impactors that have low enough density so they actually dump most of their energy on the surface but not so low they burn up during descent. If you're trying to reach bunkers, just use tungsten darts, they're perfect for descent because they're dense and have high melting point, and they'll cause small very deep craters. A 5 ton projectile will dig you a 30-100m crater in rock that's only a few times as wide as it is deep. A couple of those will get any bunker. Heck, to put it in perspective, you can bring a dozen of those instead of a single tank. Not even considering fuel, ammo, crew and supplies and life support for the crew.

edited 31st Oct '12 5:39:57 AM by McKitten

I was assuming LEO (not about 500 km) when I said that.

I haven't abandoned the topic. The data vampires ate a post when my service provider took the local networks down for maintenance. I didn't notice until I hit send and got no page. I hit the back button and got the same thing. Should have copy pasted it into a document editor.

I will have to go back re-read and rewrite.

Who watches the watchmen?

Hmm, but where are we at in this conversation anyway? The first page had someone state "weapons will depend on the technology available and societies using them" and then it appears to have abandoned within posts of that to have everyone picture the future their own way and thus THEIR version of technology is the correct one.

I also noticed someone challenged people to come up with a criticism of Atomic Rocket's physics and it's quite easy. We've anti-air missiles that can down fighters for a hundredth the cost (not including the really expensive pilot). Everybody still uses fighter-jets. So the challenge, given current evidence, is to prove that space fighters somehow make this situation different. There's a wide range of options available for space fighters with some of the most immediately obvious being: providing patrol points beyond your sensor range, providing coverage for large celestial objects such as planets or large asteroids, sniffing out traps that are "cold" (ie. unmanned and whatnot) and so on. Their options increase with more exotic technology. A missile is just a missile, you only fire it at what you can see.

For occupation of a planet, it's very simple. You don't put boots on the ground, you don't take the planet. People overstate grand gestures of violence. You know what nuking cities does? Makes people fight to the death. The Imperial Japanese razed Nanjing and raped/killed everyone inside of it in 1937, what did the Chinese do? Immediately surrender? No it ignited the greatest resistance ever and they fought to the death if need be. They were resisting less when the Japanese were less brutal. Brutality doesn't cause people to surrender. Nor does shock and awe.

For genocidal wars, if you've anything other than two factions, a genocidal war is basically "kill me off" strategy in the long-term. Morality doesn't exist to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, it exists because humans are piss poor at calculating long term negative consequences. A genocidal war against a tough opponents seems okay now until you're being annihilated later on by a third faction due to your poor choices.

For defences, a planet has definitely more options than an invading fleet but what defences it has is going to be incredibly variable within any multi-system empire. Just imagine. Would you put thirty heavy duty missile batteries with a solar system wide detection grid and a bunch of stand-by starships at some backwater farm planet with barely a hundred million people? On the other hand, would you built a ground-based space elevator/equivalent at one of your primary core worlds and not put five layers of point defence to down incoming kinetic/nuclear weapons that might hit it, in addition to whatever other defences that could exist?

Another thing to consider is munitions. Any particular military target doesn't just sit pretty waiting for warheads to hit it. There's likely to be ground forces and point defences, we'll ignore the space fleet because we'll assume it's been defeated or forced to withdraw from combat. Then you try to hit it with some kind of weapon (beam, kinetic, missile whatever), what's the chance of hitting it? Not sure. Anti-missile point defence has around a 30% chance to "down" targets, with a lower percentage to eliminate targets (necessary for incoming kinetic attacks), which is probably more around the 10% (I'm running off of non-lab CIWS data that I've read, their lab tests had incredible accuracy that couldn't be replicated in the real world because actual missiles have anti-anti-missile systems :P). We could, however, load up a bunch of anti-missile systems around something particular valuable (like a command base) and then lower the to-hit chance of incoming missiles to 1%. Therefore you have to fire, on average, 100 nukes at it to take it out. A ship might hold say 300 warheads, and you might have a fleet of 1000 ships. So you can take down upwards to 3000 planetary targets, assuming everything is a 1% to-hit chance and you suffer no losses.

I think there's a simplification here of turning everything black and white. Just because there's an anti-missile system somewhere doesn't mean "oh missiles are now totally useless". It's just lowering their effectiveness.

edited 1st Nov '12 10:34:17 PM by breadloaf

Firstly, there is no 'sensor range' in space, only a point at which definite signatures become uncertain, and since for any planet the sensors could easily be something akin to Hubble, your sensor range could be very large indeed. Also, I'm not sure how fighters, which have a maximum mission duration of perhaps 10 hours tops are going to be that useful for pickets, you'd need something that could go for days or weeks without having to return to base.

What sort of coverage? Military coverage? A vessel that has tiny sensors, none-too-brilliant weapons and a short duration? Really?

Do it with drones and you don't even risk losing the pilot.

And a drone is a fighter sans the dead-weight of the pilot and all his support, and also without the limitations on the number of Gs it can pull in manoeuvres.

Strange, IIRC the Warsaw Ghetto uprising cost the Germans quite a bit despite having boots on the ground.

Nor does an outnumbered and outgunned force who's unfamiliar with the terrain they're fighting in. If you land troops without first extorting a surrender, all you're doing is handing the locals hostages and free intelligence.

Part of the reason I hadn't made another post is Kitten dropped out repeated arguments we had just gone over and did a double post. Then there was still Matt II's stuff.

I am not even done rereading. Too many distractions. Which is why it is taking so long to try and drudge up a decent reply. Kind of quote box over saturated.

Matt II: Armed intruders are not free. Also there are more effective ways to coerce then straight violence. Like taking what they need physically hostage. Say the main production and processing for food and water. The ship building yard, anything that processes star ship fuel.

In wars of ideals there may be other tangible assets that have a high intangible value that gives you more flexible leverage. Outright destruction may spurn fiercer resistance but sitting on and controlling direct access to it.

Commando teams, infiltrators, and other sneaky types would be invaluable in assisting in taking any planet side target. As the old saying goes. A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords at dawn.

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Ok managed to scavenge a decent chunk of the post that was saved but I lost all the work I did after the save. I had two more decently sized sections and more links and quote boxes. Honestly I don't want to go through all that effort to find and retype everything again. If there are errors sod it I am tired of battling the electronic gremlins.

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Something the Op should have asked or mentioned for the discussion is how hard vs how soft on the Moh's scale we were aiming for. That would have helped us settle into certain limits with reason.

You guys so sure about no war? Also see those links in the Introduction. They lead to Ricks posts..

There are also other alternatives to conventional lift off.

more non-rocket launch options

Some of these propulsion methods are positively insane.

Conventional Space weapons gives us some interesting options Missiles are nasty once they are in space.

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Mckitten: Because I doubt you actually sat down and did a honest thorough reading of both Atomic Rockets and Rocket Punk Manifesto you likely cherry picked what you wanted and conveniently ignored the rest. Since you like to claim Atomic Rockets such a great source here is a simple exercise. Go to Atomic Rockets and go to their space combat section. Can you tell me who has the top set of links? That's right Rick. The very first link is his comments on the gravity well. Now go to the seal of approval section for Atomic Rockets. Scroll down. That's right. Rick again. Atomic Rockets has this this to say I am going to take all this to mean your offhand dismissal as sour grapes that he pokes holes in your favorite theory. Unless you can show me something contrary to that I am going to take Rick's discussions as being very reasonable and relatively sound.

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Between Atomic Rockets and Rocket Punk Manifesto it is quite clear that even if you have high orbit you are not invincible. The planet is not invincible either but then again in general the planet has more leeway for damage then a starship.

Yes a star ship is a threat but not necessarily ZOMG WE ARE ALL DOOMED!

Lofting anything into Low Earth Orbit is much easier then a lot of people make it out to be.

Even our smallest rocket lifter in service the Delta II (much smaller then a Saturn V) can lift 5,960 - 13,440 lb to LEO. The bueaty of it is a kinetic weapon doesn't have to use all that mass to kill a space ship. You can pack smaller packages and likely multiples of them. The bigger the rocket the more thrust to mass ratio we have to push our weapon load into space.

Also remember you do not need any crews for unmanned weapons. Lots more room for useful weapon mass. That is using what we have today. We have lifters that can carry much more weight into orbit then the Delta II. Lofting something like a torch ship, the torch ship laughs at your delta v requirements. Go visit Atomic Rockets Page on this.

The effectiveness of Orbit to surface kinetic weapons is not effective as has been made out to be. At least anything a single ship could reasonably carry for serious space and space to surface combat.

Courtesy of the Project Thor weapon system. That is a 8 Ton Aerodynamic projectile fired from LEO moving at over 3 km per second. That is a projectile with a rocket kicker firing it into the gravity well.It is designed to be reasonably accurate, survive re-entry, and not lose too much velocity due to air friction. Notice the total estimated yield is 11.5 tons. Powerful but not overwhelmingly powerful. You are still going to need a fairly hefty projectile to achieve serious destruction. The mass for the projectiles eats into your ships precious maximum mass limit. If you use any additional launch assistance that is even more mass.

Now with both sides with the same tech and energy weapons and kinetic weapons they both are effectively going to stale mate each other. Both can fire at the other long before the ship even gets to orbit, both can use various forms of tech to help detect, deflect/destroy ballistics etc.

Things to consider.

• The ship is smaller then a planet. The ship is going to stand out against the backdrop of space on the approach and even in orbit.
• The ship can maneuver. The planet cannot. The ship is realistically going to have limited maneuver fuel mass for jinking and dealing with necessary orbital adjustments.
• The planet has the capacity significantly more expendable assets of all varieties then the ship. If the ship has a living crew this compounds the issue. Also any expendable munitions are going to be noticeably limited. The planet can easily stock up on exponentially more of these then the ship.

• The ship can only carry limited mass. The ship has mass of it's hull, whatever it uses for fuel, whatever is pushing it, maneuver thrusters, fuel for those thrusters, all the systems to make all of that run, any mass for weapons and supporting gear, that is quite a bit of mass. Mass for navigation and sensing. If you have any live crew at all that is mass for the people to be in spaces, life support, food, water, and anything else they could possibly need.

Or we can say this. You need a lot of gas, for the ass, to push the mass. Fuel sources are very important. The more mass the more of it you need and the more of it you burn pushing said mass at any appreciable velocities.

• The planet doesn't need to push itself just weapons into space.
• The weapons lofted into orbit at a ship need less mass to do serious damage then the ship needs to hurl at the planet to hurt the planet noticeably.
• It is easier to target a singular object in orbit that is giving off all sorts of emissions from just being a space ship. The planet surface is going to provide a serious challenge for the ship to sort through all the feedback from ground clutter alone.

The ship would be very easy to detect with passive detection, the ship would likely need active detection to find ground targets specifically.

Both are going to have limits on precision but the ship needs to be more precise to hit a specific ground target from orbit. The planet only has the ship to hit.

Both could fire cloud of projectiles at a target and noticeably increase odds of a hit but the planet has the significant advantage. The ship needs the larger projectiles to do appreciable damage and has very limited stores compared to a planet. The planet can just as easily lob a swarm of projectiles from different points on it's surface that the ship can not directly interdict. The ship cannot feasibly contest the entire orbit. The chances of the ship stopping every shot drops drastically with every projectile. Technology for mass and rapid launches is used today with ICBM's. Multiple types of ICBM's leave the atmosphere then launch a re-entry vehicle. Some are even capable of entering LEO. Current treaties mean the weapons are either retired or currently in storage. However these planets likely don't care about such treaties.

When we start talking Grey goo (the all consuming nanos) or RKV's your starting to get into some more absurd territory. For nano machines, what powers them, what controls, how do they move, how long do they last, how do they make more of themselves. Answering these questions is really not that easy. For RKV's accelerating mass at even fractions of the speed of light requires extreme amounts of energy. Also launching something across the depths of space at those speeds does not guarantee the projectile will not hit something along the way.

Now seizing a planet even setting foot on it is certainly a serious undertaking. But it is possible. In the above scenario that is just one ship. Still something to fuss over. Now how about a whole flotilla worth of ships? Yeah things start changing the more ships you throw at the target.

As for "cost" I doubt the cost of the various tech in the future will be measured in any way we are familiar with it and likely value will be derived from the materials as in how much of it do you need to make. Barter and trade are more likely. Maintainign a multi-planet banking system without a rapid form of transaction would be tricky. Also frequently advances in tech tend to make things cheaper in the long run. For us now it is still expensive but then again we are still using our current models of single nations building single launch platforms and space vehicles.

I am certain we will find any number of semi-valid or outright silly reasons for a war but it will be different. War as we know it will likely change and shift to something we would not recognize now due to the changes in tech, society, and other factors we can not possibly imagine.

edited 2nd Nov '12 1:15:47 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Against at enemy that can mass divisions or even corps to your piddly brigade? Remember Mogadishu? The US still lost despite overwhelming superiority of arms. Sure you can threaten to blow up your target (if you have one) But if you'd wanted to do that you could have done it from orbit.

Most cities however, do no, they rely on power and water at the very least, and there are numerous ways to take those out up to and including destroying the city with a nuke.

It takes time though, and if the enemy is sitting out a couple of thousand miles, it's going to take a number of minutes for anything to reach them, thus they'll probably see that coming.

Right. A B61 has a yield of up to 340 kt (Mod 7), despite being only 11' 4" long, 13" in diameter and weighing only 700 pounds. As for straight kinetic weapons, sure they're not as powerful, but they're easily powerful enough to take out such targets as ships, trains, water-tanks etc.

Because of course cities require radar to find. Get real, even if they can't hit specific infrastructure, cities aren't too hard to spot. Try it yourself with Google maps (satellite view with labels turned off), most decent cities stand out even at medium zoom.

A city is a big target.

The planet has to fight its own gravity to his the ship, the ship's job is mad easier by that same gravity.

And suggesting that a single ship will be involved in a siege/blockade is stupid, no sensible commander would attempt such an action without enough ships to give reasonable cover over the whole planet.

And how many would be capable of getting such payloads out to 1,000 kn, or 2,000? And how many missiles would survive the journey (the ships will see them, and will fire back if they can, probably with low-yield nukes).

True, but not all of the power has to come from the vehicle itself, if you're firing from say Mars towards earth you'll pick up energy along the way from solar gravity.

But the same danger applies to any vehicle, including a spaceship.

Really? When Alexander attacked at Darius at the Battle of Issus was that not an attempt at a decapitation strike? Were the Mongol's tactics so different from Blitzkrieg? Grand tactics haven't changed that much, what has changed is the scale of the battlefield.

My condolences. I recommend Opera, it saves text box contents, so you can hit the back button and your input will be saved.

Eh no, that is not criticism on the basis of physics. That is simply extrapolation from history, or present, as it were. For which that very good analogy up-thread applies, about helicopter-battleships trading broadsides in air-battles. For space fighters to be useful, they'd have to have some sort of role to fill. But they're useless as weapons carriers because they'd actually reduce weapons range, not extent it and they're useless as scouts because sensors don't work that way in space. To show that they're not useless, one would either have to come up with some other role they're best suited to fill, or show some error in the physics and demonstrate they're not useless for the previous roles. In space, you see everything. And the whole point of a missile is that it has it's own sensors. If people are willing to fight to the death, you don't take the planet, period. No-one disagrees that you need personnel on the ground for occupation, the argument is that fighting a war on the ground to gain the planet is nonsense. Either the planet surrenders, after which you can put an occupation force down, which will only have to deal with irregular forces (although these may still be too much) or there is simply no way you going to get anything other than rubble. Fighting against a motivated last stand on the ground is no better than bombing everything from orbit. It is worse, because you'll lose lots of your own troops in the process. Doesn't work that way. The biggest vulnerability of a planet is not even it's own gravity well, it's the fact that it's a stationary target. Immovable defensive positions practically never work out against an enemy that can operate otherwise unopposed. An invading fleet would not stupidly launch missiles at a stationary target hoping to overcome the point defences with sheer mass. They'd study it and exploit weaknesses to take it down. Anything from towing a large asteroid on a crash-course, to using sandcasters at high speeds to supercooling railgun projectiles so they're invisible is an option. Stationary defences don't work out against an enemy who has time to hang back at a safe distance and think. And you think having people dirtside threaenting to blow up these facilties will take them more hostage than a fleet in orbit threatening to blow them up? Only if it is easier to reach your target with the dagger. It's useful if it allows you to circumvent defences thus directly reaching a valuable target. It's pointless when you can destroy anything you want at the press of a button. So? you think he's Jesus now? Even smart people make mistakes. Take it however you want, he did not poke any holes. He points out the existence of missiles, as if that somehow were an argument in itself. It's like enumerating all the various ways a knife can be used to kill you, and then claiming this is an argument that a gun does not offer a huge advantage over a knife. He offers no solution to problem caused by the gravity well, merely talks as if the fact that you can get missiles into low orbit means you could inflict as much damage to an attacking fleet as they can to you. Ah, so as long as you're not completely invincible, the fight could go either way? That aside though, yes, in high orbit a fleet actually is invincible. It doesn't matter that the planetary defenders can theoretically cover the distance. There's a big difference between placing a satellite in orbit, and actually hitting something that doesn't wish to be hit. Missiles crawling out of a gravity well are easy to avoid, and even easier to shoot down. And forget about low orbit. There's no reason for any fleet to get that close. Not only doe that put them unnecessarily close to any weapons on the planet, it actually reduces the gravity boost their own weapons get. 3km/s is not escape velocity, it's what you get when you drop payload from a very low orbiting satellite. At 10 km/s you get ten times the energy. And that's before considering launching the payload with more than a little push. Mass doesn't really matter. There's lots of asteroids floating around a solar system. You can produce all the slugs you want on-site. I'm sorry, but you appear to not quite understand what "orbit" means. You can orbit a lightsecond out if you want to be safe. You'll be in good company. I'm sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever. You think a small, moving target is easier to hit than a large stationary one, because of what? The large target has trees for cover? Once found, the ground target is dead, accuracy is pin-point, the only defence is never being noticed in the first place. Again i'm getting the impression you don't quite know what orbit means. Launching from different points on the earth's surface is meaningless. The earth's diameter is 12000km. Orbit at 12000km distance and there's only a 60° conical approach path where missiles can come from. Orbit at 100000km distance and it's 7°. None of our ICB Ms have even close to sufficient range to threaten an orbiting fleet, but that's not entirely on-point since we're talking hypothetical future conflict with opponents with equal but unspecified technology.

edited 2nd Nov '12 6:32:45 AM by McKitten

I will be back to the discussion on Monday. Today is maintance and testing. Tomorrow is clean up work on both the wiki and writing procject. Sunday is my downtime and I have the Soft X-Com Enemy unkown waiting for some serious attention.

Speaking of Hard scifi- We should find some good examples of hard sci-fi stories with space combat and ask them to be put in the Op. Mote in God's Eye, Foot Fall, Gravities Rainbow, Even the Galactic Marines series by Ian Douglas gets going in some hard sci-fi stuff. Any other suggestions we can pm to the op or a mod?

Who watches the watchmen?

Tuefel, most works like those are only classified as hard sci fi because they were reasonably "hard" in their own times. Pretty much all classic hard sci fi has been hit by Science Marches On. Hard.

Regarding your point about how RKVs are ridiculous, the ability of a civilization to travel across interstellar space in reasonable amounts of time with reasonably accuracy, assuming there's no shortcut (FTL), implicitly means that it can also produce a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. In fact, an RKV is basically an interstellar space vehicle that skips the deceleration phase of transit, meaning it's substantially cheaper, relatively speaking, then sending ships, and vastly more economical than sending ships laden with soldiers.

If high percentage of c interstellar travel is impossible, then interstellar war is even less plausible.

Furthermore, an invading fleet doesn't need to be remotely near the enemy planet to attack it, and once they've neutralized any defending ships, they're free to sit several astronomical units away and fire at the planet with kinetic weapons, possibly even with an RKV, or if the system happens to have an asteroid belt, accelerate asteroids into it.

edited 2nd Nov '12 10:02:58 PM by Archereon

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The Moon Is A Harst Mistress

And if you want some extra punch, fill a ship with rock and turn the deceleration stage into a further acceleration one.

Interplanetary might still be possible though, given a large enough population out on say Mars.

Assuming you do want something on a planet (or want to destroy something specific, like humans, without really touching the rest of it), just throwing rocks at it isn't a great idea, you could easily land a rock somewhere you don't want one to land.

edited 3rd Nov '12 12:10:21 AM by MattII

I don't think we're saying anybody gets to go to another solar system without FTL, otherwise the economies don't work any more. We can probably ignore that problem because it would just make everything else not work.

For sensors "don't work that way in space", I'm unsure of what you mean. Space has a lower background noise than Earth (roughly 3 K versus 300 K), which is so much lower that actually the noise of the sensor is the limiting factor. Technology doesn't change magically. You've longer sensor ranges. It is not "infinite" range as you seem to espouse. There is a range at which an object at a particular temperature will not be emitting enough radiation for your sensor to detect beyond its internal temperature (and I'm assuming you're talking about a passive sensor since you're talking about super long ranges). There's a lot of asteroids we can't see right now because they're too cold or too small. Most ships are far smaller than asteroids and fightercraft even smaller. Regardless, it wouldn't be surprising for fightercraft to detect larger craft before they can be seen. I think you seem to be making up how it works.

The use of drones depends on how advanced your AI is and whether it beats the decision making power of a human. It's not as simple as "go out there, find a target and lob missiles at it". I don't think anybody here is appreciating how f-king difficult it is to code an artificial intelligence that can even move around obstacles. So yeah, there's plenty of reasons not to use drones. Drones are only used when you already know where your enemy is and you want to risk less.

Also, fightercraft have a large range for its operating time because it depends on delta-v, not some set time. Considering how advanced we're talking, life support systems aboard a fightercraft (which to an extent already exist on existing fightercraft) is probably going to be more than ten hours. That seems rather low given all our scrubber tech and miniaturization that we've already achieved.

Furthermore, I don't think anybody here appreciates military tactics or strategy at all and make very large statements about everything. Would you send a cruiser against an enemy cruiser? The answer is normally no, unless you outnumber your enemy 6 to 1. You'd typically try, in all cases, to risk less than your enemy in order to secure a numerical advantage, even if you are fighting a war of attrition. You want to take down an enemy cruiser? Risk a half dozen fighters that is say a tenth the cost.

A static planet does have problems with being a stationary target but it does not mean an attacker has impunity with actions. If it were the case that one side somehow has absolutely nothing and the other side has everything then this is basically saying that a far superior force can win against a much smaller force. You can't sit there and try to crash asteroids or set up big guns unless the other guy somehow already suffered catastrophic losses. You try to put rockets on an asteroid? You get hit by a fighter raid. You do some supercooled projectile trick, the other side is doing something too. If only one side is ever doing anything, then yes, probably that side would win because for whatever reason, the defender is an idiot.

Taking a planet has to be a combined approach. Given the wide array of technology and options that exist, it's just a grand undertaking to do it. You have to have ships in orbit, boots on the ground and everything in-between. You have to secure the military bases, defeat the military, eliminate their space fleet or defeat and somehow force a surrender. How you might do that is incredibly variable, but in very few cases does genocide ever get you what you want. And I have no idea what the Warsaw uprising comment was supposed to mean. I said that being brutal costs you soldiers, and you showed me a situation in which being brutal costed an occupying force significant resources. Did you mean something else?

It just depends on the kind of political structures and economies are in play. Young space societies that have plenty of asteroids, low lift capacity to orbit and a lot of landlocked people will be very different from a mature space society that has most of its asteroids already stripped mined so they're worth more than gold, and plenty of objects already in space. Advanced infrastructure combined with engineering knowhow and the political structures running them don't spew out of someone's ass, they take centuries to build, attacking forces may not be that open to just burning it all. For losing populations, it depends on the kind of loyalty they hold to the government, how much they're willing to fight to the death, how brutal the attackers are and what kind of changes they might expect.

For instance, if the ability to control large disparate planets is to be like nobility running around a large empire, then planets switching rulers every ten years isn't a big deal. Take out the space fleet, blow up a few terrestrial armies and hey the population goes "Otay, guess we pay taxes to King Douchebag instead of King Dickwad now." If your societies are more democratic or at least more participatory, more nationalist and whatnot, then maybe your wars are exceptionally brutal. Or perhaps they are mature democracies capable of constant FTL communication and the intermingling leads to a lessening of the severity of war. Sure there's wars but after enough damage is done, people tire of it and peace favouring one side slightly is signed. Something more like the Early Modern time period where you traded away a piece of a province for piece after fifty thousand soldiers of yours die to Napoleon.

edited 3rd Nov '12 12:15:20 AM by breadloaf

Really? You have a mission-duration of 10 hours, that's probably not even out to the orbit of the moon, and from there' you're expecting a 6-inch telescope to have anything like the same resolution as say the Hubble?

Ooh, is it as difficult as building an autopilot?

Or when you want a craft to go out for more than 10-12 hours.

Pilot fatigue.

Hm, because the cruiser, with better sensors, weapons and defences is going to be such an easy target. You realise that a ship capable of taking those six fighters (or a dozen maybe, given enough to ensure you have six operational) is probably going to be as big and expensive as that cruiser, and less well defended?

Again, pilot fatigue, I'm going to be setting those asteroids out from a long way away.

Yeah, with a smaller, less well trained force the Poles managed to give the Germans a good deal of trouble. Now multiply the Poles by 10 times, and equip them with the same weapons as the Germans and you're beginning to get close to what a "boots on the ground" force will face. The fact is, if you haven't already received a surrender before you sent troops down you're going to get a surrender in sending them down.

edited 3rd Nov '12 12:33:16 AM by MattII

I would presume that we would be utilising radio and infrared electromagnetic range. I also presume that you are not using active sensors which have ranges that are exceptionally low, even in space, where 10-12 hour mission range is sufficient to justify the use of fightercraft entirely without question. For passive sensors the ranges are below 1.5 AU, presuming your largest ships are battleships. There was no stated speed for craft, so if you want 10-12 hour range, I guess you'll just have to extrapolate based on that.

The point of the use of carriers is that you aren't risking your carrier in battle. A cruiser being able to take down six fightercraft is actually quite amazing. These days, a cruiser could be downed by a single fightercraft if it's not careful.

Alright, I'll explain further on AI. Stochastic testing models for autopilot systems only capture basic events and are currently incapable of doing much more than that. It's why we still need pilots in the air. Any number of issues, such as storms, major turbulence, catastrophic failures, are still not handled. We can deal with those one by one but I'll describe a much better example that talks about the issues with AI. (You might also want to look at problems with targeting systems)

I'll give you an example of the problems of having automated craft. They ran a simulation battle of an F-35 against Su-27 to prove the worth of an F-35. Simulation said 1 F-35 downed 6 Su-27. It met specifications. Then they used real pilots. The Su-27 pilots quickly realised the F-35 had a low fuel capacity compared to the Su-27 so they always hanged out of combat range until the very end when the F-35 needed to refuel and then denied it access to in-air refuelling leading to massive F-35 losses that barely downed any Su-27 at all. That's the kind of difference a human and a crappy automated system makes.

The issue here is that the advanced AI you're talking about leads to questions as to why other technology didn't get developed. AI requires expensive hardware but what about super-fast learning for humans? If pilots didn't need to be trained, then their cost drops dramatically and then you can use cheaper fightercraft against expensive automated drones. You seem to think life support is expensive. It is like a thousandth, if not less, than the cost of complex hardware to run superhuman level AI.

There's no reason why you can't have both drones and fightercraft. I don't see why we must limit our technology if all of it exists. Drones can make long distance pokes, fighter pilots can make do with more detailed tasks.

While we can state a cruiser has more weapons and such as a fightercraft, it starts to stretch the imagination that it is somehow capable of magically defeating anything and everything smaller than it. There's only so many things a cruiser can possibly do and whatever it does do, means it is incapable of doing something else. In which case you use different weapons against it. If it's busy outfitting itself entirely with anti-fighter weapons, you hit it with an anti-cruiser cruiser. If it's outfitted for everything, then it does everything worse. Everything is a trade-off and it's not possible to have these supposed jack-of-all-trade starships you're talking about without the other side having the ability to build equivalent cost countermeasures. There's no guarantee either side would win, I mean, otherwise the world would be very different, but completely blacklisting something as general as "fightercraft" is odd.

For the example of the Polish, I had specifically stated that being brutal caused resistance and you have, for a second time, completely ignored that. I laid out a variety of situations that could occur due to social, economical or political reasons and you've basically not looked at any but one. Your society appears to be an immature, young, space-age society, with lots of fresh resources and asteroids with low political cohesion between the various foreign entities and unified planetary populaces living in what seems to be one-world-empires (with nationalist regimes of a moderate to high participatory nature).

edited 3rd Nov '12 1:11:20 AM by breadloaf

Really? Is there somehow something preventing me from launching missiles at the same range as you're launching fighters?

These days cruisers get a warning of a few tens of miles, and fighters are pretty manouverable. In space, a cruise has no horizon to artificially shorten it radar range, and fighters have much more limited manoeuvrability due to having no atmosphere.

Since right now our fastest advancements are in computers, I expect A.I.s to be plenty smart enough to deal with most situations by the time interstellar travel comes along. Also, ever heard of remote piloting? Just because a pilot isn't sitting in the drone, doesn't mean it's relying entirely on its own processor.

Because a supercomputer is unable to keep track of a dozen or so, targets moving comparatively slowly?

Hm, because you can't possible make a missile that has a dialable warhead that can explode both on impact (for cruisers), and at a set location (for fighters).

I don't know, a VLS array provides a lot of flexibility.

Fighters will be bigger and slower than missiles, so any cruiser that has even a hope of taking out dozens of incoming missiles will laugh at a few fighters.

Maybe you could then state a time when trying a peaceful takeover of a sovereign state worked.

Maybe you could state something that doesn't involve FTL that is somehow more likely to work. BTW mature is a relative term, the US is mature, but it supports plenty of dictatorial states and has overthrown a few democratic ones. Also, a mature democratic state will not necessarily have mined out all its asteroids, since many will prove to be of little value, having little in the way of metal or ice. These won't be particularly good for say hurling at planets, but they'll do. Besides, surely a mature civilisation won't desire war anyway, they'll merely try to negotiate for what they want.

The whole point of fighters is range extension but among the various reasons is that you don't know where the carrier is to fire your missiles.

As stated before sensor range is not infinite, so yes there is a horizon, it's the extent to which you cannot see anything. Infrared sensors do not passively detect objects at arbitrarily long distances. There is a definite range. Stop pretending there is infinite range. The range is roughly 1.5 AU for detecting a large battleship. It goes much lower for detecting fightercraft. There are numbers here, we can work with those to come up with reasonable engine speeds, missile speeds etc.

You've named various technologies and you've named various roles they can be placed within but you are not putting them all in the same picture. Proximity blast warheads are what you'd use in all cases (including on Earth). In any case, they wouldn't be close enough today to be taken out by a single missile. That would be an incredibly strange fighter formation.

The detection range today is actually pretty much the whole planet. We just don't know which satellites are going to get knocked offline when a war between two major nation states will occur today. Also radar ranges are on the order of hundreds of km, not tens of km, we use all sorts of interesting techniques to increase detection range. But that really isn't the point.

Anti-fighter technology is not the same as anti-missile technology and they don't operate in the same way. I'm not clear on why you keep talking about anti-missile tech as being the same as anti-aircraft tech.

Variable yield warheads means you have to use anti-capital warheads against fightercraft which is inefficient. There's no clear indication of instant success by a cruiser using this technology. In fact, what I meant was that anti-fighter cruisers would have more missiles all of lower yield in order to be able to fire more times at incoming fighter sorties. The expected use for fighters is to discover targets and then decide how to engage, not to be simple missile buses. We don't normally use fighters today as merely missile buses but as creating threats. We have cruise missiles to perform precision strikes at long distances if we don't expect any sort of problems.

Depending on whether you have FTL communication determines whether you have remote controlled drones (and also the cost/size of FTL communication). Remember you have light-speed delay on commands which would make "I got killed by lag" much more of a reality if commands take minutes. This ignores issues with jamming (depends on how your technology works whether jamming is possible) and signal error processing. The last two are manageable but would lower effectiveness of remote craft.

Plus given the example I gave with the Su-27 versus the F-35, the level of AI capable of performing what those Su-27 pilots did is really quite amazing. I know there's a certain level of expectation among laymen that AI could "easily" achieve such performance in a few decades, the reality is that people in the industry aren't sure you can achieve it within the century. It's also competing against technologies for faster education and whatnot, in which case, if humans are cheap, who cares about AI. Remember, the difference between a cheap fighter and an expensive fighter can be very large. China's Su-27 models cost thirty million a piece. USA's F-35 model costs in excess of 180 million a piece. Even if your automated fightercraft defeats manned ones, it still has to meet cost expectations and I don't think you fully appreciate the possible cost differences for complicated technology versus slightly less complicated technology. Supercomputers don't grow on trees (you know a typical programmer's workstation these days can cost upwards to 10k?)

Conflict does not have to be a choice between being Nazis (literally in your example) and performing a "peaceful takeover". Throughout the hundreds of conflicts throughout history, the brutality in them have been incredibly variable. Armies might lose on the battlefield and you end up paying tribute to the winning side. Napoleon might come over and crush your army and you sign away half a province. The Swedish Deluge after the Commonwealth lost their war. The constant conflicts of the Romans and Persians typically traded over provinces back and forth over the centuries.

How war plays out is much more complicated than you seem to indicate. And yes maturity is relative but it's an adjective to describe what is happening. For instance, notice how you stated that "well not all asteroids are going to be useful for industry but then the ones left over are mostly crap and aren't good for lobbing at planets either", then you already have an interesting difference; mature space societies with few asteroids won't be as prone to using that sort of kinetic weapon. They've other options, of course, but that one appears severely limited.

edited 3rd Nov '12 2:49:45 AM by breadloaf

No, i merely appreciate the differences of vacuum physics, which completely rule out any sort of viability for scouts. If you don't know why, i'll explain. Sensors in space don't have ranges, they have resolution. Distance on it's own is completely meaningless. Because space is a vacuum, signals do not degrade over distance, as they do in an atmosphere. Because space is empty, signals have no maximum range to the horizon, or barriers that stop them. The only thing that matter is resolution, if something is far enough away or too cold to provide a signal that your sensor can resolve from background noise, then you can't see it. If you get closer, yes you'll get a better signal. Following the inverse square law, if you half the distance you'll get a signal that's four times as strong. However if you simply double the diameter of the lens on your sensor, you get the very same result. On earth, you can't do it, because the more air the signal passes through, the more it is degraded. Just imagine foggy day, getting closer allows you to see something, while using binoculars will just give you a larger picture of the fog. That's why scouts make sense on earth, but in space it is far better to simply use bigger sensors. Bigger sensors, don't require time to get closer to the target, aren't closer to the enemy's weapons, don't require fuel, engines, life support, a pilot or communications systems. And most of all, larger sensors can cover every direction by simply turning them that way, while a scout would need to systematically travel the whole surface of a huge sphere to provide cover in more than one direction. For all the few reasons there are to have separate sensor platforms, i.e. triangulation if you only have one ship for some reason, spotting missiles with shielded drives, or even getting all-around coverage on a planet before you're close yourself, the job is much better done by a simple sensor satellite, i.e. a missile with a telescope as payload, than a fighter craft. The fighter is lugging around tons of stuff it doesn't need for the job, from humans (or A.I.s) to guns.

Drones are just as useless as fighters. The problem is that having your combat ship carry a large number of independent small ships is a stupid concept in space, the individual size or the pilot of the ships doesn't really matter. The environment simply doesn't make it useful, just as there are no land-based carriers&fighters or submarine carriers&fighter. The model makes sense in the specific context of a water based carrier and air based fighters, but is not some genius idea that's useful always and everywhere. The problem is that most people simply keep thinking in terms of carrier ships and fighter planes as if the fact that you can have very large and very small space ships would make them analogous. But they're actually both spaceships, just big and small ones, they're not ships vs planes. And they waste that dV, whereas a missile of comparable size gets more than four times the range. Having your weapons carried by a fighter on a planet extends their range. Doing the same in space reduces it. Numerical superiority alone is meaningless. You want to send a superior force. Sending six kodiaks against a single cruise is a bad idea. If that cruiser is of comparable size to the ship that carried those six fighters, then it will have more and heavier weapons than the fighters combined, (bigger sensors are a given anyway) and they'll get killed. After which, even if they managed to damage the cruiser, it can run down the now helpless carrier.

This is the basic problem that makes space fighters idiotic. It's not that fighters don't stand a chance against point defence, or can't pull high-g manoeuvres or carry life-support, or divide your forces. Those are all elements of the problem, but not the core. The core is this: fighters are useless. And that is quite literally, there is no use for which fighters are the best tool. Everything you might want to do with a fighter can be done much better by something else. All the other problems you could get around. If point defence is dangerous, you could think about improving their survivability or avoiding engagement, etc. All that makes sense as long as you have a pressing reason to send fighters against point defences in the first place. But the only reason to have space fighters is if you can't afford to build anything bigger. And even that is a limited argument, because a swarm of fighters is no cheaper than a single bigger ship, so it only makes sense in very small numbers. Say you've got ten places to cover at once, so you'll build twenty fighters instead of twenty large ships, but if you've got just one spot where you'll deploy them, a couple of large ships are better than a swarm of twenty fighters.

This is just hand-waving again. The planet has some very very large disadvantages compared to the attacking fleet, and any argument that wishes to show that these disadvantages aren't a big problem needs to provide solutions to those specific things. Not just state that the defenders will be doing "something". Well, the attackers will be doing "something" too, and the attacker's something gets help from the gravity well and immovability of the planet, while the planet's something has to fight against both, thus the attackers something wins. You appear to underestimate the sheer amount of stuff that's floating around in space. The asteroid belt alone may be small compared to planet, but it is huge compared to the amount of material a culture mines. And the oort cloud might be quite distance out from the habitable zone, but if you've got ships capable of interstellar travel that's not an issue.

There is no hard limit to sensor ranges in space, see above. No, even these days that's exceedingly unlikely. The fighter might score a kill with a single hit, but that's always been the case since the invention of nukes. But even today's anti-missile defences are quite hard to overcome, and a single fighter would have to get an extremely lucky shot in to get a hit with the few weapons he carriers. He'll also almost certainly be shot down, unless he uses cruise missiles from beyond the horizon, in which case, 2-4 cruise missiles attacking a cruise have no chance of scoring a hit. Hypersonic missiles that are becoming popular might change that, though probably only for while. Until they become common enough that defences against them are being developed. There's nothing magical about it. It's been that way in history for quite a while before, and will happen again if the conditions are right. In scenarios such as WW 1 navies, or space, you're talking mostly about ships directly engaging each other with long-range missiles. And that means the big ship almost always wins because it has larger sensor range, has larger weapons range, and has overall more and larger weapons. The typical advantages of small ships, manoeuvrability and speed, even if they did apply in space (which they don't), have no meaning in such battles. Take a look at the battle of Jutland for example. You don't outmanoeuvre a ship if you're exchanging shots at 15km. All your higher speed allows you to do is determine the range of battle yourself, i.e. you can catch up run away and the slower enemy can't do anything about it. But for the actual fighting, it doesn't mean a lot. You still can't dodge the shots, you cannot get into a blind spot, formations are meaningless if ships can fire over each other, etc. In situations like this, the bigger ships simply wins. It can shoot first because it has better range, it will shoot more accurate because it has bigger sensors, it will hit harder because it has bigger guns, and it can take more damage because it simply is bigger (although that last one doesn't apply with contact nuke-hits, even spaceships with nukes might just score glancing blows). It's not a physical law that's set in stone, but you don't build your own fleet to have a significant systemic disadvantage and then hope you'll always be the exception to the rule. Of course there are countermeasures, that's the problem with fighting a technologically equal foe, everything you can do he can do himself and also counter. You'll have to hope for numerical superiority and better tactical and strategical positioning. But that doesn't mean one side couldn't harm itself by making bad design choices. If you think about it, you'll find that what's really odd is taking a highly specialized situation, i.e. surface-ship carriers with turbine-probelled fighters with roket-propelled weapons, and then thinking that this is some generally applicable concept that would be useful in any other environment, when experience actually shows that a military design that works in one environment practically never works in any other. That's why there's no flying tanks or battleships on tracks(Or legs. Although that would be awesome. Incredibly stupid and incredibly awesome).

This thread moves way too fast.

No there isn't. What factor do you imagine places a hard limit on sensor range? In space it is, and even on earth it already is in some parts. The point is that fighters are just big, slow missiles. Short-range anti-missile weapons don't generally work, but not because they couldn't hit or kill a fighter but because fighters don't get that close. But point-defence missiles work well enough against any flying target, fighter or missile.

The sensors will always have a limited resolution. It might be huge but at some point stuff will get smaller than one pixel. You could make the sensors bigger but then you use space/mass that could be used for something else. It also possible to narrow down the field of view but then it takes more time to do a 360°/360° sweep.

Yes, i already said that the limit is resolution, not distance. But none of that is a hard limit. Bigger sensors mean longer ranges, and it will always be easier to make a sensor bigger, than to stick it on a fighter and drag it closer. If you think bigger mass for bigger sensors is a problem, consider all the mass the fighter takes up. And it doesn't even extend sensor range while it isn't deployed.

You need to account for propagation delay Kitten. The longer the range the longer the reply. At cosmic distances you can be waiting quite a while by which point your sensor data is hopelessly out of date compared to realtime.

Take for example tracking a ship near Mars from Earth. Using radio frequency sensors you have a minimum 25 minute delay before you even get a first contact ping on a sensor sweep. In that time the ship could have already descended to Mars' surface, hit a burn and left or crossed behind the planet and is no longer visible to standard realistic sensor systems.

There's no way to shorten tracking times and the power and resolution required to accurately track small objects at any kind of cosmic distance like that is appallingly large. Such that you'd have to devote a Nimitz-class carrier worth of mass just to sensor systems. (Go look at some radio telescope observatory sites, many of them if you smash all the dishes and structures together are bigger than pretty much any mobile craft ever built or proposed. And those are often of the resolution solely capable of tracking large cosmic bodies like superplanets, stars or other otherwise large cosmic phenomena.)

Scouts wouldn't help that, though, since they'd be sending their own 'hey guys here's the target!' signal at the same speed as the signals would propagate from the target.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

So in effect I'm blind to the approach of a very large ship, but you're not? A carrier is likely going to be bigger than a cruiser, so logically I should see you before you see me.

Except that it's not an actual line, there will be a point at which I start having trouble discerning exactly what you are, and one where I am totally unable to do so, but they'll be a good way apart, thus, it's not what you'd call a horizon.

That's my 'notice something odd' range maybe, but once I know you're out there, I'm going to be paying a lot of attention, and a VLA focussed on one target is much more accurate than a VLA trying to find targets across the entire sky.

And? A F-15C weighs 28,000 pounds empty, is 63' 9" long and has a wingspan of 42' 10". A RIM-66 weights 1,558 pounds and is 15' 6" long and has a wingspan (once fired) of 3' 6". Comparably, I can afford to fire several missiles for every fighter, because my missiles don't need to support a pilot, and don't have to travel as far.

Because missiles in a space warfare setting will act like smaller faster fighters, thus anything designed to shoot down a missile at a decent range will be able to do the same to a fighter.

No? I expect a W-54 warhead would be fairly capable of hurting both targets.

Less chance of hitting a fighter dead, so a bigger warhead gives a bit of proximity allowance, and if the missile fits in a VLS I can still carry a hell of a lot more of them than you can of fighters.

And a drone couldn't do the same thing because?

Except that a fighter can't operate light-minutes from it's carrier either, so that point is moot, unless you want to risk "I fell asleep at the controls".

Are we working with a desktop here, or with a 200kg supercomputer (ie, a computer weighing the same as your pilot and cockpit)?

So computers are expensive, big whoop. A fighter today requires something like 1000 tons of support to operate at sea (The USS Ronald Reagan displaces more than 100,000 tons, but carries only 90 aircraft), you can't tell me that's cheap.

Actually that's the maximum, if Mars is on the other side of the sun, it can get as low as 5 minutes when Mars and Earth are on the same side of the sun.

Here is the kind of analysis I would expect for space warfare.

AEGIS Cruiser costs roughly over a billion dollars and has a role significantly placed in the interception of incoming aircraft and missiles. It's roughly capable of tracking around a dozen missile targets (I believe). It has two VLS capable of carrying up to 122 missiles of various types. It weighs about 9500 tonnes.

We could convert a comparable amount of "mass" into a spacecraft. Let's say we have a space cruiser built for anti-aircraft purposes. We'll use the "same" costs merely for relative purposes, since we'll be rather unsure of the actual absolute costs of spacecraft.

It'll have the following capabilities:

• Passive infrared sensors with an internal temperature that is supercooled by liquid nitrogen, comparable performance to WISE detector (operates on infrared frequency)
• Resolution capability comparable to the Very Large Array reduced down magically somehow, in order to achieve a 350 000 km resolution range to see a single pixel for a 300m x 100m x 100m object, positive identification is more in the 200 000 km range
• It will carry a complete of 150 varied missiles, 75 are low-yield anti-missile missiles, 75 are variable yield nuclear missiles up to 10 kT with an automated launch system that is capable of changing the yield of the nukes
• It has one CIWS-style anti-missile point defence system with a 30% intercept chance for a single target, 10% chance to eliminate an incoming target, the ship can use micro-thrusters to rotate to orient itself against incoming targets, but it takes a few seconds
• 10 000 tonnes mass, 100 m x 20 m x 20 m, complement of roughly 50 crew (I've reduced it assuming computers do a lot more work, otherwise it'd be more like 400)
• Target tracking system that can track around 40 targets at once

Estimated cost 1 billion space bucks.

Possible approaching enemies:

Simple Missile:

• Fired in a particular direction will correct course upon finding a target and fly straight towards it
• Single yield warhead of 10 kT, one hit capable of mission-kill of a capital size ship

Estimated cost (based on today's precision guided missiles) roughly $1 million space bucks.

Complicated Missile:

• Capable of bypassing short-range point defence, reduces our cruiser's point defence interception chance to 10% with a 3% elimination rate
• Single yield warhead of 10 kT, one hit capable of mission-kill of a capital size ship

Estimated cost roughly $10 million space bucks.

Low-grade Fightercraft:

• Capable of carrying upwards to 6 missiles, variable yield with computerised launch system that can vary the yield, each upwards to 10 kT in strength
• Single point defence, fighter can rotate quickly with microthrusters and have computerised defence systems (such as flares and decoys for incoming missiles), we'll say that the fighter is similar to the cruiser, 30% chance to intercept with a 10% chance to eliminate the projectile
• Low-grade stealth added, surface emissitivity is reduced to about 0.05, we say it has a 200 m^2 cross-sectional area facing our detector, given the capabilities of WISE, likely at best detection at 0.07356 AU to see a single heat dot

Estimated cost roughly $35 million space bucks (based on today's low-grade fightercraft with limited stealth)

High-grade Stealth Fightercraft:

• Roughly the same weapon systems as the low-grade craft
• Better stealth factor reducing emission signature

Estimated cost roughly $120 million space bucks (based on today's shipped and built stealth fightercraft)

Extended Range Missile Pod (Retrievable):

• About the same size as a fightercraft, no return capability but can be later retrieved after the battle finishes
• A small VLS attached carries upwards to 20 missiles anti-capital ship missiles (10 kT) or 60 small anti-fighter missiles

Estimated cost roughly $180 million space bucks (based on the cost of taking a fighter craft reforming it into a cube and loading a bunch of missiles into it)

Extended Range Missile Pod (Non-Retrievable)

• Same thing as the other missile pod except that it's like caseless munition in that it disintegrates as it fires

Estimated cost roughly $150 million space bucks (the only thing cheaper is the hull is crappier)

Cold Unmanned Missile Trap

• You just leave it somewhere it has a sensor with an automated trigger the fires on positively identifying enemy ships
• Positive identification range is low due to the small size of the trap, we'll pretend that it is something in the range of 150 000 km for a cruiser and roughly 0.5 AU for for first heat dot detection
• A small VLS attached to it holds 10 missiles, or 20 anti-fighter missiles

Estimated cost is almost entirely due to the missiles, so we'll give it a cost of a low-grade fightercraft plus a bunch of cheap missiles and so $40-$50 million space bucks

---

Looking at ranges:

Carrier

• Likely detected at a range of about 0.6 AU for heat dot, positive identification likely at 300 000 km

Cruiser

• Perhaps detected at a range of about 0.3 AU for heat dot, positive identification likely at 150 000 km

Fightercraft

• Likely detected at a range of about 0.07 AU for heat dot, positive identification likely at 35 000 km.

Cold objects

• Likely heat/identification will be about the same range, so 35 000 km perhaps? Hard to say how cold unmanned traps can be.

---

Kill Chance Combos

Scenario: Carrier moves into system parks at 1 AU range. Fighter sorties are launched with supply buoys attached to extend mission range and time. After six days, a fighter sortie manages to move within 0.3 AU of a cruiser sized target. Dot is detected, pilots are alerted and they get to manning their fightercraft (they were sleeping otherwise). They move in for positive identification.

At 0.2 AU, movement pattern data suggests artificial object but at this distance, identification of target is not possible. Distance is reduced to 0.07 AU at which point the cruiser detects heat dots on sensor, identification unknown but given the distance at which they are picked up, they are potentially fightercraft. The cruiser goes into high alert and goes into "yellow" mode.

Given the significantly decreased distance, the fightercraft now move into spread pattern, just in case it is an enemy cruiser. They approach dead-on, from above, below, the sides and so on, maximising the angles of approach. They create six angles of approach against the cruiser.

Distance reduced to 150 000 km. Positive identification of enemy cruiser. All fighters begin missile volley. Thirty six high-grade precision munitions are launched at the cruiser, fightercraft veer away.

Cruiser detects targets are moving away after creating a spread pattern. Rules of engagement allows them to fire back if they feel threatened. The captain makes the call and confirms weapons hot and fires away. For 90%+ chance for downing a fightercraft, two missiles per fighter is fired. A total of twelve anti-fighter missiles are fired away at a distance of 150 000 km at the heat dots.

Missiles have closed distance on the cruiser down to below 5000 km. Confirmed enemy missiles incoming, high confidence in determining they are anti-capital ships with 10 kT warheads. Counter-measures deployed. Roughly half of the missiles are correctly facing the anti-missile defences, while the other half are not. Anti-missile missiles are fired with 30% interception chance, all 75 anti-missile missiles are launched. Each with a 30% chance of downing one of the 36 incoming missiles. Letting even one through would severely disable the cruiser and put it out of service for the battle. If a missile gets through the anti-missile missiles, they have to contend with the point-defence. Point defence has a 30% chance to intercept and disable the warhead, 10% chance to stop the missile from smacking into the ship. Each incoming missile has a roughly 34.3% chance to hit (assuming 2 anti-missile missiles are intercepting it and the laser point defence has a 30% chance of knocking it out). At this chance combination it appears the cruiser is basically totally screwed. (I might want to rework numbers for the point defence and stuff)

For each fighter they have two missiles tailing it. With two missiles, 30% chance to take down with point defence, they have 91% to die in a radiation shockwave from a proximity blast. These guys are basically pretty much screwed unless they're able to deploy more counter measures.

Cost difference.

The cruiser was something on the order of one billion space bucks, plus the 150 missiles will cost at least 150 million space bucks. A crew complement of 50, likely each cost on the order of 50 million space bucks to train.

The fightercraft were running for six days, continuous sorties, we'll estimate daily running operation costs of at least a million space bucks. Six fighter craft for six days is roughly 36 million. Six fighter pilots will cost 50 million space bucks a piece... actually they're pilots so let's double to 100 million each. The low-end fightercraft cost 35 million space bucks a piece, and a slew of 36 missiles will run about 36 million space bucks.

Kill chance estimation: both sides totally eliminated.

---

Scenario: Carrier FTL jumps into system and is accidentally detected on long range sensor buoys. Cruiser picks up heat dot at 0.4 AU, carrier has yet to detect cruiser. Cruiser stays at distance to monitor, raises alarm level to "yellow".

Carrier begins first fighter sortie run, in the wrong direction. At 0.4 AU, the cruiser is unable to see the fightercraft show up. First day, no action is taken by either ship.

Cruiser is suspicious of stationary object, movement pattern suggests non-civilian craft. Cruiser captain makes a call to positively identify before engaging. A sensor buoy is launched directly at target to identify it. The buoy is detected by the carrier at 2 million km, sending the ship into high alert but trajectory of the buoy was purposely changed to reduce the chance of the cruiser position being compromised (it's still sitting at 0.4 AU). At 350 000 km, positive identification of enemy carrier.

Carrier is scrambling to recall fightercraft from its sortie. Cruiser captain makes the call, launches a full complement of missiles. We'll say ten anti-capital missiles, fully capable of overwhelming the carrier's defensive capabilities. Cruiser begins back-away movement to avoid counter-attack.

Fighter sortie is unable to return in time, carrier is destroyed.

Cost estimation is well in favour of cruiser.

---

More complex scenarios? Mixed fleets with cruisers armed with mixed VLS, cruisers with solely anti-missile VLS, carriers for fighter sorties, point-defence ships loaded to the brim with laser point-defence...

Calculations get fairly complicated now.

edited 3rd Nov '12 1:13:05 PM by breadloaf

You seem very willing to undercut costs for the fighters, I mean the F-15C costs $30 million in '98 dollars, have no stealth, and only a forward-facing cannon. Likewise, I'm definitely going to be mounting more than 1 CIWS turret, maybe 6+. Also, you haven't figured in the $4-5 billion carrier which your fighters will need to get anywhere significant.

I'm also edgy about those detection ranges what size object were you expecting to detect at those ranges (a fighter is tiny, and a cruiser still probably much smaller than a carrier)?

edited 3rd Nov '12 11:55:04 AM by MattII