High Speed Pursuit and Shootout at Warpspeeds

This has been a question I've had brewing for a while cause one of my stories has a warpspeed pursuit through space with an armada trying to chase down and stop a world destroying behemoth. What sort of problems could arise and how would the participants be able to deal with them?

edited 17th Jun '14 2:09:16 AM by SandJosieph

Soukou no Strain handles that pretty well. It's been a while since I've seen it but I seem to remember something about maneuvering and superior speed being more important than firepower: combatants are moving very close to lightspeed and trying to fire directly ahead will result in the shots "falling back" and hitting yourself due to relativity making it require exponentially more power to accelerate even closer to lightspeed. Therefore, the optimal angle to attack from is directly in front of your enemy, as it allows you to blast them with impunity.

It really, really depends on how your "warp speed" works. Are you talking about Alcubierre-style warp? Then your ships aren't actually moving any faster than light so you don't have to worry about dilation effects and weapons would work normally inside the warp "bubble", but your shots would start to behave very strangely at the boundary to uncompressed space. With enough computing power it may be possible to calculate firing solutions through the distortion effect, but it'd probably be a major obstacle anyway. If you use a hyperspace-type model, things should be fine as long as both attacker and target are within the same frame of reference. Again, in a hyperspace scenario, nobody actually ever moves faster than light.

If you are somehow actually going faster than light, well...may the ghost of Einstein have mercy on your soul because you just did Very Bad Things to causality and what happens next is going to be anybody's guess :P.

OK, what about the effect of passing large celestial bodies? Would the sudden shift of gravity cause some problems?

No. There would be no shift. Space is really, really frickin empty. Point in a random direction and go as fast as you can and not only will you never run into anything, you'll never even get close enough to anything to see it with a naked eye (stars excepted for obvious reasons). Unless the pursuit is being steered intentionally close to celestial bodies, they're a non-issue. And even if that is the case, the pursuer still has the option to evade them, the size of any objects in space (even stars) is to small to matter. Imagine the typical car chase, and the pursuer has to swerve to evade a grain of sand on the road. Not going to delay him very much.

edited 17th Jun '14 4:12:43 PM by mckitten

It might become a factor if you end up passing through the solar system instead of stopping at it. However, you're going to be passing through at such speeds that any gravitational influence wouldn't bare mentioning.

Huh, I was thinking even at such great speeds any sudden shift in trajectories would send ships millions of miles apart. Like if the ship being chased flew towards a black hole but steers away at the last moment, causing a pursuing ship to be caught briefly in the gravity well of the black hole. I would imagine even a tiny shift in the pursuing ship's trajectory could send it millions of miles off course.

Normally yes but gravity is an over time effect, the more time you spend near an object the more it affects you. If the time you spend near a star system is measured in femto-seconds then the gravity simply doesn't have time to affect your course in a meaningful way.

Oh you might end up a million miles off your mark but this is space. Millions of miles is spitting distance.

May or may not help: If you want a visual reference, Star Trek Into Darkness does this, although Inverted.