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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9201: Apr 13th 2019 at 5:36:26 PM

It can be assumed that realistic space combat will mostly take place over very, very long distances, so precise aiming would be extremely important (self-guided munitions excepted, of course). Fast aiming, not so much, although there's no reason you can't have a mix of the two. Fixed weapons aimed by turning the ship, turreted weapons for point defense, and a mix of flywheels and thrusters for precise and fast maneuvering, respectively.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 13th 2019 at 8:38:10 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
TuefelHundenIV Night Clerk of the Apacalypse. from Doomsday Facility Corner Store. Since: Aug, 2009 Relationship Status: I'd need a PowerPoint presentation
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
#9202: Apr 13th 2019 at 6:04:05 PM

Makes sense to me.

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EchoingSilence Since: Jun, 2013
#9203: Apr 13th 2019 at 6:56:04 PM

The thing about the Expanse is, torpedos are all self guided, so that's why they are fixed forward... or upward. Railguns are typically on turrets or mounted along the spine.

DeMarquis Who Am I? from Hell, USA Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Buried in snow, waiting for spring
Who Am I?
#9204: Apr 13th 2019 at 6:58:24 PM

And lasers have mirrors and lenses that can be adjusted for precise aiming.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#9205: Apr 13th 2019 at 7:13:04 PM

The thing about very long distances is that after a certain point, the intercept window gets too big.

New Survey coming this weekend!
EchoingSilence Since: Jun, 2013
#9206: Apr 13th 2019 at 8:14:32 PM

Close Combat in the Expanse is also incredibly rare but often fought with PD Cs instead of torpedos, perhaps a max safe distance deal there.

archonspeaks Since: Jun, 2013
#9207: Apr 14th 2019 at 6:21:51 AM

The author pretty much admitted that he only included close combat for dramatic flair. With the stated range of even the shortest-ranged weapons in that setting you’d probably never even see another ship. Even their PDCs could easily engage a target well outside of human eyeball range, though they’re meant for missile interception and not combat.

Edited by archonspeaks on Apr 14th 2019 at 6:22:09 AM

They should have sent a poet.
EchoingSilence Since: Jun, 2013
#9208: Apr 14th 2019 at 7:25:33 AM

Railguns are really the CQC use weapon, they got good stopping power but nowhere near enough range as missiles.

archonspeaks Since: Jun, 2013
#9209: Apr 14th 2019 at 7:49:42 AM

I mean, by a certain definition of “CQC”. Railguns engage at several thousand kilometers or more. I believe 1000km is actually stated to be their minimum suggested engagement range.

Edited by archonspeaks on Apr 14th 2019 at 7:55:22 AM

They should have sent a poet.
EchoingSilence Since: Jun, 2013
#9210: Apr 14th 2019 at 8:15:48 AM

Considering space is big, CQC might as well be 100km, what does this make using Point defense then, knife range?

archonspeaks Since: Jun, 2013
#9211: Apr 14th 2019 at 8:48:01 AM

That’s just not a range space combat would occur at. You can see and engage an enemy too far out to ever close that close.

At least in the Expanse the PDCs are really only for missile interception. The rounds they use aren’t suitable for inflicting serious damage on enemy ships.

Edited by archonspeaks on Apr 14th 2019 at 8:49:37 AM

They should have sent a poet.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9212: Apr 14th 2019 at 9:09:25 AM

As with all other warfare tactics, it depends on the kind of weapon being used.

  • You can't dodge a laser (at ranges less than a light-second or so, anyway), but you can disperse or diffract the energy so it doesn't do significant damage.
  • You may or may not be able to dodge a projectile weapon (like a railgun) but shooting it down is near impossible, so your choices are having enough mobility to make it hard to aim, or having enough armor to resist the impact.
  • Guided weapons like missiles can be defeated by countermeasures or point defense, since you can prevent them from exploding, interfere with their guidance, or make them explode far enough away to do no harm.
  • With fighter-based munitions (assuming your setting uses space fighters), you can apply any of the above tactics to defeating their weapons, or defeat the fighters themselves before they can fire.
  • There is no practical way to defeat RKKVs (aside from not being in the way of one), so you need to hope you aren't in a setting that employs them.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 14th 2019 at 12:11:03 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Belisaurius Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts from Big Blue Nowhere Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Having tea with Cthulhu
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
#9213: Apr 15th 2019 at 6:45:32 AM

You could plausibly defeat an RKV with a KKV but you'd need to know where the RKV is and where it's going ahead of time.

Basically, RK Vs would need to be kept secret until launch.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9214: Apr 15th 2019 at 6:52:44 AM

An RKKV, by definition, is all but impossible to detect. By the time the light from it reaches your sensors, it's already too late to dodge or intercept. You would have to anticipate the launch somehow. That said, absent absurd sci-fi tech, it would have to be accelerated over a significant distance to achieve the desired velocity, during which time you could presumably detect the energy expended to do so.

Well, I suppose it depends on exactly how fast it's going. At 5% or 10% of the speed of light, it's at least hypothetically possible to do something before it hits you, depending on your detection envelope. At 25% or more, nope.

Math: At one light-second (~300,000 km), you have the following reaction times (ignoring relativistic time dilation for the sake of simplicity):

  • .05 c: 19 seconds
  • .10 c: 9 seconds
  • .25 c: 3 seconds
  • .5 c: 1 second

Assuming you can intercept the projectile, you'd need relativistic energy of your own to change its course significantly, never mind stop it entirely. I suppose getting hit by a cloud of plasma at .05 c would be slightly less harmful than a solid projectile at .05 c, but not by much.

I'm thinking about how you would detect an RKKV in-flight, and it's not simple. Radar might work, but the velocity of the projectile makes a firing solution extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It wouldn't be emitting much energy of its own unless it's residual from the launch process... although if it's moving faster than .1 c, impacts with diffuse particles might heat it up enough to be detectable.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 15th 2019 at 10:08:03 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Belisaurius Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts from Big Blue Nowhere Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Having tea with Cthulhu
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
#9215: Apr 15th 2019 at 7:17:31 AM

@Fighteer But what if you knew where it was before it launched and had KK Vs launched to intercept while the RKV is still accelerating?

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9216: Apr 15th 2019 at 7:23:16 AM

Well, yeah, you can do that. I even mentioned it in my post. But the same could be said of any launch platform, relativistic or otherwise. The main difference with RKKVs is that the platform would have to be incredibly big, and of course it would be defended, so your KKVs would have to get past whatever fixed or forward defenses are set up to protect the launcher from exactly this sort of countermeasure.

Given even remotely realistic technology, RKKVs would be the sort of thing you deploy against planets or large fixed installations that have no ability to maneuver out of the way, and you'd launch them from far, far away: like outside the solar system.

The Breakthrough Starshot program that we're currently trying to put together to send probes to other stars is, ironically, the same sort of technology that could be used to launch RKKVs. Deploy your projectiles with conventional rockets, then use powerful lasers to accelerate them. Once they achieve the desired velocity, they could jettison the sails and coast towards their targets. Of course, equipping a starship (or even a fleet of starships) with a 100 GW laser array would be challenging.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 15th 2019 at 10:34:50 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Corvidae It's a bird. from Somewhere Else Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
It's a bird.
#9217: Apr 15th 2019 at 8:06:03 AM

Well, yeah, you can do that. I even mentioned it in my post. But the same could be said of any launch platform, relativistic or otherwise. The main difference with RKK Vs is that the platform would have to be incredibly big, and of course it would be defended, so your KK Vs would have to get past whatever fixed or forward defenses are set up to protect the launcher from exactly this sort of countermeasure.

This sounds pretty familiar... tongue

and you'd launch them from far, far away: like outside the solar system.

If you could somehow detect them at that range, that would potentially give you at least a few hours of reaction time even at the highest speed you mentioned. That still doesn't imply that you'd actually be able to stop them of course, but it's at least something, right?

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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9218: Apr 15th 2019 at 8:09:34 AM

[up] The Death Star's superlaser is technically an RKKV. evil grin

And yes, detecting the launch would be at least hypothetically possible, especially given the energy that would be expended, but that doesn't make stopping the attack any easier. About the only thing I could see working would be a counter-RKKV, such as a planetary or fixed installation launch system with a similar laser-boost setup, and the intercept solution would be unbelievably challenging.

If you assume technological parity, it's plausible that both sides could have this capability, and it would be easier to maintain fixed planetary defenses than to send an RKKV-capable starship or starship fleet from one star system to another.

A Type 2 civilization with access to Dyson Swarm levels of power would find it relatively easy to construct such defenses. Indeed, this would be a serious stand-off threat to anyone approaching them with hostile intent. "Come near our solar system and get obliterated by relativistic projectiles."

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 15th 2019 at 11:15:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
DeMarquis Who Am I? from Hell, USA Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Buried in snow, waiting for spring
Who Am I?
#9219: Apr 15th 2019 at 3:30:21 PM

One scenario in which visual range combat might not only be possible, but typical, is in orbit around a planetary body or large space station. If noncombatants are around, and one or both sides are unwilling to endanger them, then getting very close to your target in order to ensure postive target identification and a certain hit may be the best option available.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9220: Apr 17th 2019 at 11:47:55 AM

I had another thought for intercepting RKKVs: Kugelblitz black holes. Put an event horizon in front of something and it doesn't matter how fast it's going. That said, if you have enough energy to deploy black holes as defenses against interplanetary-scale weapons, you are at least Type 2 if not higher. Also, they would make terrifying offensive weapons.

Of course, the energy requirement goes beyond merely fantastic into the realm of the absurd. Per this Quora topic, to make a black hole the size of a water molecule would require 1.66 × 10^34 Joules, or 100 million times more energy than the Sun outputs in a second. In fact, it's roughly 100 times the gravitational binding energy of Earth. You could fire 100 Death Star superlasers for that much energy.

A more reasonable Kugelblitz, with merely a second's worth of solar output (3.8 × 10^26 J), is about 1/100th the width of a proton. I would need to look up or do the math on the gravitational flux of such a phenomenon. My understanding is that it would actually be exothermic due to Hawking radiation; such black holes have been hypothesized as power sources for future spacecraft. That wouldn't make it very good at stopping an RKKV.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2019 at 3:02:53 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
AFP Since: Mar, 2010
#9221: Apr 18th 2019 at 2:26:18 AM

Going back to the question on mounting weapons pointed in multiple arcs to minimize the need to turn the ship to bring weapons to bear: In the history of wet-water navies, various weapons arrangements have been used, to include ones that tried to cover multiple arcs with multiple emplacements. In the age of sail this was pretty much mandatory for any sizable ship (hard to turn a sailing ship at will, since you're being propelled by the wind), but as steam power matured you saw more and more turreted weapons. As late as the early 20th century, you'd see warships that put the biggest guns in turrets and smaller guns in broadside mounts and pintle mounts. A great example you can see today is the Japanese museum ship Mikasa.

The earlier Dreadnoughts did away with a lot of that, putting their main battery entirely in turrets, but it took a while to work out just how to arrange the turrets. Many WWI-vintage warships would have turrets on both sides of the superstructure, allowing the ship to fire broadsides in either direction as well as theoretically giving them a potent chase armament (in practice, they rarely fired the guns fore and aft because with steam engines, it was relatively trivial to just turn the entire ship to bring a broadside to bear). Later warship designs simplified things by putting all of the main battery on the centerline so they could fire left or right, with superfiring turrets (turrets stacked over turrets) still giving them the option to throw a lot of hate at enemies fore or aft, while also reducing the turrets' footprint. Some earlier examples of this, like the USS Texas, have the odd turret in the middle of the superstructure, unable to fire fore or aft at all, but able to reach out and touch someone to port or starboard with equal-opportunity.

Later designs, like the Iowa-class, went for smaller numbers of turrets packing larger numbers of bigger guns. Iowa and her sisters carried a main battery of only nine guns, but they were nine very big guns paired with a very accurate fire control system pairing a sophisticated analog computer with a connected radar system. Of course, even these ships still had smaller weapons in a porcupine arrangement, since even a Fast Battleship had no realistic hope of out-turning smaller, faster, swarming enemies such as destroyers, torpedo boats, and airplanes (which would of course never catch on). Later refits to the Iowas would remove a lot of these defensive guns and replace them with assorted missile launchers which could honestly be fired in whatever direction and still mostly work.

Modern missile warships fire all of their missiles in the same direction out of simplicity (straight up, then pivot towards the party), with a small number of point-defense systems mounted wherever they seem to fit best.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9222: Apr 18th 2019 at 8:08:43 AM

I'd imagine that one major reason for turreted weapons on naval vessels is that you can achieve much finer aiming precision with the turret motors than you can by steering the vessel itself. This would not be a factor in space. Instead, it'd be a trade-off of mass vs. energy. It takes more power to turn the whole ship than it does to turn a turret, but putting weapons in turrets adds both mass and complexity. Turrets can also aim independently.

Regarding missiles, in space you don't have to fight gravity to get them into the air, and you also don't have air to provide lift and steering. Once deployed, a missile could rotate to its desired trajectory and propel itself to the target, but to give the missile the best possible range, you'd want to give it an initial kick in the right direction. This implies rotating the ship (or the missile launcher) to face the target and using a magnetic (or mechanical) launch system to provide that initial velocity for "free".

The missile also can't go too fast, or it won't have enough thrust (or fuel) to perform terminal guidance.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2019 at 11:15:14 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#9223: Apr 18th 2019 at 9:03:14 AM

And doesn't have to worry about that pesky little thing called air resistance.

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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9224: Apr 18th 2019 at 9:22:57 AM

True. I've often speculated that missiles in long-range space combat (using technology that we either currently have or can reasonably predict) wouldn't boost all the way to their targets, but would instead perform initial acceleration into an intercept course, coast until they are within range, then enter a terminal guidance phase. This would carry the advantage of making them much harder to detect until the very last minute.

You would construct such missiles using the same principles as a two-stage rocket. One stage for initial boost, which is discarded after use, and a final stage to deliver the payload, which could perform tighter maneuvers since it doesn't have to drag around the mass of the booster. Indeed, this is how a lot of modern missiles work already.

For bonus points, consider the difference in this scenario between a missile and a mine. The answer is: not much. In the one case it goes to you and in the other case you go to it, but according to Newtonian physics those are the exact same thing. There could even be quite a long delay between launch of a missile and its terminal deployment, and you could set up defense in depth by forcing the enemy to approach fixed points through a cloud of these weapons.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 18th 2019 at 12:26:37 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
EchoingSilence Since: Jun, 2013
#9225: Apr 18th 2019 at 9:24:38 AM

Now if we have epstein drives and torch drives then constant acceleration isn't a issue anymore.


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