Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
One of the current trends is the emergng commercialization of space, space travel, space tourism, and satelite launches.
Who watches the watchmen?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
True enough. Lets hope that works out. That sort of private capability can help drive development.
Who watches the watchmen?
Even if neither work the Falcon 9 is already second only to the Proton in terms of price-per-kg/payload.
The same was said of flight so long ago. In the 1920s air travel was something only the rich and governments/militaries could afford. After World War II, commercial flight rapidly became so cheap and available that by 1970 it had destroyed the previously indomitable passenger rail system.
The same will happen to space travel.
Considering the rate that scientific understanding and engineering prowess are growing, I'd say that we can only accurately predict maybe fifty years ahead. In a hundred years I see no reason why humanity would not have cracked FTL travel. remember that our scientific progress is now accelerating and may continue to do so. However, this is drifting from the point.
Where were we? Ah, yes. Capturing key colony worlds. You can't assume that anything important is going to be left undefended. England's navy is what allowed it to rule over so many colonies to begin with. That navy was protecting and supporting the colonies.
Nor would you expect a planet to not be self-sufficient hence the ineffectiveness of blockades. Sure a particular world might not be building warships or nuclear weapons but they will have food, fuel and enough industry to build weapons for a conventional ground war or the ability to hurl shit back into space at orbital vessels.
And that assumes the world has negligible to low military presence inherently.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
If the planet only has itself vs a space armada that suddenly shows up they are not really going to be able to do much to stop them.
Unless you have some ships of your own to help protect a system it would be kind of hard to hold out for very long. Also any planet that is just relying on itself instead of having the helping hand of incoming goods, people, and other items will not grow as quickly as one that has all of those.
When you have the extra money, extra materials, people etc you don't have to tap into your own resources for growth and or maintenance to try and support a military body. Even a ground force would benefit from an influx of trade goods including a trade in military arms and technology.
Finished goods are more likely to be the preferred item heading into a planet unless a planetary economy specializes in processing raw materials into finished goods in general.
Who watches the watchmen?
Oh wow. I love this topic so I was going to read the entire thread from start to finish, but @$%&! Some of those posts are long! I LOVE YOU TROPERS!
I can see colony worlds changing hands very quickly and repeatedly in the scenarios being set up here. An armada appears above a colony world, declares it conquered, takes off leaving a few ships to defend, the original owners appear, blow the skeleton crews out of thee sky, leave a few defenders for the liberated planet...
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Speaking of realistic futures NASA has apparently unveiled a possible plan that involves another manned mission to the moon to build a moon base. The purpose being to support a mission to the asteroid belt in 2025 which in turn may help support a manned mission to mars at a future date.
Keep in mind that U.S. competitor China is also looking to put a man on the moon in roughly that time frame.
Who watches the watchmen?
Well another aspect of taking a key colony world is that there's a high chance of gas giants in the system. Assuming you have quick-refinery ships, you might be able to grab some amount of fuel depending on the shifting control of space. It'd depend on supply lines, munitions and so on. In all likelihood, once you move in politics past the point of Early Modern-ish politics, taking systems gets more and more difficult politically speaking because the local populace becomes more and more hostile to a change in leadership.
I don't mind the relatively size difference comparison using an atmospheric-fighter and a space-fighter, because we have very little to go on, but the presumption is that you waste a lot of fuel with fighters in order to keep your prized mixed fleet safe. Most naval battles are not likely to be "I move in my fleet to take out your fleet" because the amount you are risking is too high for single battles. You're more likely to be shifting small components and making "raids" or "sorties" against one another. When you see spot a cruiser, whether you use a drone scout, a sensor probe, or it's picked up on your defensive solar net of satellites (or offensive satellites), you have to pick and choose what you send against it. In most usual cases you want to risk the least amount needed to score a kill and prepare for a possible counter attack.
For taking a planet, we'd have to decide on the political integrity of the world versus the military resources that can be flung against it. I think that when you're fighting a war at that scale, a few dozen nukes against a planet is probably not a significant war crime. Levelling urban centres and massacring people on the other hand would be seen as atrocities. But, the attackers, if they can, want to make beachheads and then land more and more troops on the world.
Sure, for a planet of say 6 billion, you'll probably need on the order of 15-20 million well armed infantry to take it. How long would that take to ship in? We'll have to assume we have FTL (afterall, we'd probably have assumed this to have a war in the first place), troop barges and the round-trip time between worlds. We should also think about that if it's a multi-system empire versus another multi-system empire, troop barges could number in the 100s and thus ship hundreds of thousands of soldiers onto a world within the first days and then across the next few months ship 10s of millions of troops onto the planet.
Also, I did not mean that fighters are invisible but that detecting them is difficult. I had pointed out the range differences in detection and we've not really established any sort of engine velocity. It could be anywhere between 40 000 m/s (like it is today) to 300 000 m/s (a 6.5x improvement is not really all that impressive given another 100 years).
edited 8th Nov '12 9:53:35 PM by breadloaf
Turnaround may be optional depending on the tactics. A hit and run mission would benefit from not decelerating until after the engagement.
But a raid that isn't successful, or is only partially so it probably going to cost you many of your fighters. Of course you could send them off in a direction that isn't directly at the enemy, then they lob their missiles in from an unexpected location.
Welcome to the Battle of Midway.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
I think part of the advantage of the fighters will be to both draw fire and attack from Approaches different then their parent ship. Their projectiles may be smaller then what the parent ship launches but if they are firing kinetics the projeciles smaller size may help make it harder to detect accurately and target effeciently with PD. That and adding to the number of approaches any pd system has to cover may help increase the chance of a hit from othe projectiles getting through.
Of course that is a lot of mights and maybes.
Also they don't have to move in the same directions in relation to the parent ship or any missiles or other munitions it may launch. The fighters can launch their own missiles and either turn back or take another directional tangent in relation to the enemy.
I would opt for use of drones in general because then you could leave fighters in space and pick them up afterwords.
Who watches the watchmen?
Of course, if you so wanted, you could send missiles off on indirect courses too.
That's a lot harder to do though. Remember the missile itself has its own finite fuel supply producing a hard limit on the amount of course corrections it can do. A fighter has less limitation than that in that the fighter can fire missiles of its own from a direction different than expected. And those missiles will have fresh fuel supplies at launch not half-to-totally exhausted.
And? A booster solves most of those problems.
Huh... Got to mull over this for a bit.
Okay, the primary advantage of fighters is that they can act of their own volition. The flight could just hang out there collecting data, take pot shots at strays, engage support ships or troop barges, make a dedicated attack on a given ship, or even decide that they're walking into a trap and scram. A dedicated missile or drone could do any given task more effectively but probably can't do all the possible tasks and definitely can't be trusted to decide which one is most appropriate at the moment.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Acutally I would say fighters are little more then glorified guided boosters meant to deliver a weapon to a more ideal launch point and preserve the weapons more valuable fuel mass for minor corrections, evasion, and hard acceleration. The so called missile/weapon bus.
Drone can likely do all the same things as the fighter the question becomes is it ai or remote controlled. If you have FTL comm speeds you can use them out to impressive ranges. If you have advanced smart AI that is capable of flexible and free thought and is reliable that is in itself powerful tool. The human pilot option is at best a precursor measure compared to those two options and will not have the same range capabilities by comparison.
A missile that does all that will need more fuel and gear mass in general. Might be great for knock out punches but it is likely to have a larger target profile then a missile that doesn't use as much mass.
Honestly I don't see anything we could consider a fighter being used in a manner we are familiar with now. Atomic Rockets had a link to a really good example of what I am talking about. i am currently behind a filter but I will dig it up later.
edited 9th Nov '12 6:32:02 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Also, the the fighter is probably best used for calling fire, rather than making attacks itself.
edited 9th Nov '12 7:03:07 PM by MattII
I could. Point defense of orbital, planetary, shipborne assets and interdiction missions. That and screening runs. Launch a salvo of missiles and a flight of fighters at the same time. Point defenses will only be competent enough to engage one or the other effectively, spreading out between both ensures a lot more ordnance is getting through. (Same principle in sea based missile defense. Either target the aerial launch platforms with SM-2/SM-3 missiles or the missiles themselves but you can't do both at the same time with the same effectiveness as going after solely one.) That and fighters are more likely to carry countermeasures to make the enemy expend more missiles and other ammunition than necessary to drive them back.
Meaning the fighters can draw off the first counterattack deploy their countermeasures and return fire. Then the initial barrage approaches and closes the interception window while the enemy ship engages the fighters. Or vice versa. The fighters carry missiles to kill the ship but the main barrage of missiles is a distraction so the fighters can get in position to fire themselves.
^ And then there's the fact both Science and Technology march on. In 100 years we may find space travel is almost as casual as taking a trip across town.
Hell depending on how much gets done in the not too distant future it might be 50 years. We went from flying 100 yards and no further on our very first heavier than air flight to putting men on the Moon in about 65 years, what's to say the same won't happen to space travel if somebody or something (corporation, government, military, N.G.O./N.G.O. Superpower) really put their mind to it?