ITT: fa/tg/uys argue about science they don't understand in terms they hope the opposition doesn't know and try to burst each others' dream bubbles because of edgy "if it's cool it'll never happen" logic rather than any good reason

>>28980626
Impossible to tell because space combat is useless with the current understanding of the universe.

Actual space combat requires technology at a level we cannot predict, so it's basically impossible to tell how it would really work out. Just about any style of space combat you can think of can be explained if you assume a certain set of discoveries and inventions are made.

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The outer edge of a warp bubble will be impenetrable to any machine constructed out of matter; the only way to breach it will be to collide it with another warp bubble of similar size, causing the two to merge.

As a result of this, ships will be equipped with arms so they can punch each other once they get close enough.

>>28980709
What the hell was going through Jene's head when he purchased a space-axe?

>>28980709

I find this somewhat unlikely.

Although space battles are unlikely, there's no saying that they won't happen. The usual scenario will probably be planet sieges though, much like how castle sieges was the way of conquest during earlier eras in humanity's history

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>>28980729

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>>28980626

For starters, large scale battles with manned fighters will never be a thing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't hand wave that because it's fucking cool.

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OK, look.

Realistic space combat would be a lot like submarine vs submarine combat. Each ship would be doing its best to not be sighted, while sighting the opponent and destroying them. It would probably be very tense, but not exciting at all.

That said, there's pretty much no reason it would happen. Getting to space is expensive. Staying in space is dangerous. Space is also very big. There are a lot of potential places to go, you don't need to see anyone if you really just go far enough away.

If you manage to contrive a reason for space combat to take place, you're probably asking for science fiction space combat. Science fiction space combat is varied: from grappling robots, to massive fleets of thousands of ships duking it out, to small-scale-fighter vs fighter combat. Which one(s) happen largely depends on what you're trying to emulate.

If you want to have WWII-style fighter plane dogfights IN SPACE, you'd go with the fighters. If you want naval fleet combat IN SPACE, you'd go with ships duking it out. If you want noble warriors dancing the dance of death IN SPACE, you go with Gundam combat.

What you choose depends on what you want, and there's plenty of examples for all of those.

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>>28980779
I think that covers most bases, so enjoy this sci-fi space artwork. Source is /tg/.

And remember, "realistic" space combat is unlikely and probably boring, so if you're going to have it:
a) have a reason for it
b) decide what you want it to look like, because in your magical realm, it can be anything you imagine

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At a certain level, sci-fi space combat is just this, really.

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>>28980779

Actually, since it's rather hard to hide in space, wouldn't it be more likely that a "massed guns" strategy would be the most likely to occur?

Win the fight by having more guns present than the other guy in order to make him surrender peacefully. Then you move on to the next planet and make them surrender peacefully.

>>28980779

That answer is completely irrelevant to the OP, though. It's like answering HURR WHY DON'T YOU JUST PLAY FATE when someone asks about a problem in D&D.

>>28980626
Well. Stealth is nearly impossible in space, at least if you have to cross any significant chunk of space. Mostly I figure it'll be a combination of missiles, drones, and hyper-kinetic projectiles.

>>28980758
Okay,I see this on /tg/ all the time, and my google-fu always fails me. What's it from?

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>>28980729
Same thing as when he painted it red.

>>28980882

No idea. Random picture in my folder. I probably picked it up from a thread myself.

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>>28980837
It depends on what kind of combat you're talking about. Ship-to-ship, it's likely going to be "who has better electromagnetic camouflage, and who has better ability to detect EM signatures." Submarines and stealth bombers work this way. You can design optical camouflage (this kind of tech exists today), not give off any radio signals, mask your heat emissions, and be silent on radar.

Ship-to-planet combat is probably going to be "just smash rocks into it" or "nuke it from orbit."

Planet-to-ship would probably be stupid because the ships have a massive high ground advantage. Launching anything upwards is going to be noisy and expensive, and if there's an appreciable atmosphere, any kind of laser weapons won't work.

>>28980863
I disagree with the stealth comment, but the rest seems about right.

>>28980854
Real-life space combat is a phrase that doesn't make much sense, because space combat is retarded. You need a motivation for it, and there really isn't any. "Realistic" or hard-science space combat is probably what OP meant, but it's definitely not as exciting as sci-fi combat.

>>28980916
How are you going to mask heat emissions? There's only so much stuff that emits heat in space. I'm not saying space is cold, only that the radiation level of space is fairly consistent, so you're gonna be fairly noticeable shitting out engine exhaust. It's not like you can pump it anywhere - there's no matter that would make convection work.

>>28980916
Of course there's a reason for space combat. To get a vessel full of nukes over an enemy planet and keep it in orbit.

>>28980932

Well, couldn't you just drift with a solar sail when you want to keep "quiet"?

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>>28980779
>That said, there's pretty much no reason it would happen. Getting to space is expensive. Staying in space is dangerous. Space is also very big. There are a lot of potential places to go, you don't need to see anyone if you really just go far enough away.

To our petty civilization probably. Once upon a time, early cities can even barely conceive of the concept of a country, with borders extending for miles as opposed to "the city walls + surrounding farmland."

But civilizations that can span stars can probably afford to do so easily.

An armed spessship comes into a system at a very high speed, aiming to slingshot around the local star or a gas giant, or to engage further retroburning to stop at a predetermined point in the system.

After a couple of days, long-range scanning detects a foreign (to the system) object, computers spessgoogle it and calculate it to be somewhat likely to be a spessship or a lump of rock and/or ice.

Captain decides to wait for better ID or make an emergency burn to throw off a potential enemy's aim. Remaining propellant and G-potential are calculated, entire crew is put on alert, off-duty crew sleeps in anti-G pods.

Five days later the object is ID'd to be a 95% likely to be an enemy ship. Both ships have already been calculated to cross within an AU. All weapons are "warmed up", and captain decides to either wait, fire, and/or maneuver.

15 days later the enemy ship fires. Based on available data, probability calculations, and gut feelings on the composition of the enemy's "broadside", Captain decides on point-defense, no burn.
8 hours later, point-defense enganges incoming fire, all of which is neutralized two hours after that.

Remaining propellant gives Captain doubt, but at roughly 1.5 au, decides on a two-stage attack and a high-G burn.
Ship fires a small "broadside", waits 7 hours, adjust for enemy ship's medium-G burn, fires full broadside (only minimum defensive capability remains), crew in anti-G pods, high-G burn.
Crew comes out of pods, waits 6 hours, confirms kill.

Months later ship docks with almost zero propellant. Captain is awarded medal for levelheadedness under extreme pressure, crew gets some promotions and commendations.

Ships gets sent to shipyard for evaluation and either scrapping or hull repairs due to space dust induced wear and tear.

>>28980976
You're still going to have to run life support. Sensors. Maintenance programs. Drifting blind in space is a terrible idea.

And it won't take much heat at all to be producing noticeably unusual heat for a random space object.

It could conceivably work in a debris field where there might be other mechanical, heat-producing objects, but it's just not practical for combat.

>>28980882
>>28980896
Akumetsu.

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>>28980932
Turn off your engines, and insulate your ship. I can't claim to have studied enough physics to have an extensive grasp of thermal radiation and emissivity, but it stands to reason that if you can optically mask the external layer of your ship, you can redistribute the heat around the outside of your ship to match the thermal radiation from nearby objects (i.e. you'd be "see-through"). If there's something like a star, you'd just absorb the EM waves on one side, and emit them on the other.

If someone wants to explain the physics of why this wouldn't work, that's probably in order. I don't really know.

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By the time anyone can seriously think about the prospect, I think diamond will have overtaken metal as the go-to construction material. Mechanically the ships will be very fragile because of this, a guy with a pickaxe could probably break the ship in half, but the thermal properties mean the entire ship can be used as a heatsink and radiator, as well as being transparent to a lot of common laser frequencies. Obviously you can't weld diamond plates together, so the ship would have to be a single-piece construction, probably grown using CVD or a similar process.

>>28981026

>muh magic nanotechnology

>>28980987

>Intercept course
>Broadsides

Been reading David Webber recently? If not, you might want to. Honor Harrington series, aka Hornblower in space, with missiles instead of cannonballs

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>>28980987
Sounds about right.

>>28981051
>CVD
>nanotechnology

>>28981074

I was referring to the line about diamond being the commonest building material. He didn't outright say it, but people who do usually also believe the future would be full of magical nanomachines that do anything. Those two stupid ideas go hand in hand, probably because of that steampunk book.

>>28980779
>Realistic space combat would be a lot like submarine vs submarine combat. Each ship would be doing its best to not be sighted, while sighting the opponent and destroying them. It would probably be very tense, but not exciting at all.

Except not, because your engines burn would glow like a motherfucking torch in a dark room. Want realistic? Pack as many missiles into a cluster as you can, add a cheap-ass booster to the pack and a control computer, launch it in it's thousands at the enemy planet or fleet. The enemy will be doing the same too. Cheap, effective, and with no downside of wasting space for life support.

>>28981061
No, I have not been reading Webber, and I think I'll rather just right out watch me Hornblower box set. Before or after Sharpe, obviously.

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>>28981109
Somehow that just makes it more boring. More Michael Bay, but pointless and boring.

And then you end up with a debris field.

What a waste of resources.

>>28981123

Didn't you know >>28980648

Boring means realistic

>>28981104
You obviously missed the line about the ships being very fragile because of what they're made of. When I say go-to construction material, I'm talking specifically in the context of space combat, which is mostly going to involve flying nuclear reactors designed only to function in a zero-gravity vacuum.

>>28981123

>And then you end up with a debris field.
Considering all those missiles would have velocity to start with, they'd just explode if hit all around, or burn in the atmosphere of the target planet. Either way, they might form a "field" in the same way three grains of sand on a floor form a field.


And yes, it'd be incredibly boring. But hey, OP wanted realistic, not fun.

>>28980995

Yeah, but those programs are unlikely to create even a fraction of the heat a pair of roaring engines will.

And you're not gonna bullshit me into thinking that we're going to have precise enough instruments to discover the relatively minuscule amounts of heat emitted from "life support" and "computers" in the vastness of space.

As for "drifting blind", you're hardly drifting blind if you've already calculated your path. What are you gonna crash into? A planet?

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>>28981132
No, no, I've already accepted that it's boring, it's just that it was a little bit more exciting in my head than what was presented.

I mean, how can you really compare to magical humanoid articulated robots sword-dueling in space?

>>28981149
Depends on how many missiles get launched, I suppose. Yeah, it would be pretty small.

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If you know roughly where someone is going to be looking from, you could always point a heatshield towards their sensors.

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>long distance Missiles
>Viable
>Drones
>Viable

Long distance Missiles will be identified and neutralized by counter-missiles by planetary governments who have an advantage in resources.

Unless we got an AI advanced enough to replace a manned crew (in which case, isn't the space ship "manned" anyway? It's just that the "man" is a synthetic lifeform), you're not going to have drones either, since you're unlikely to control them efficiently over extreme distances.

Space combat will be more like picture related, I promise.

>>28981155
I dunno, billions and billions of small space objects? The immense amount of debris and detritus that's going to have accumulated around anywhere worth going? Fast-moving, low-mass meteorites?

>>28981198
Now, this is believable.

Although it could fuck up in a lot of interesting ways. But I like the idea of ships constantly waggling their dishes to try and disappear from view long enough for the kill shot.

>>28981200
god damn animes are hilarious

>>28981203

So in other words, you don't know and you're making up shit?

>>28981215
Of course one could ask "why is there a black spot without anything, even background radiation there?" and shoot it just on purpose...

>>28981222
I'm saying that there's a ton of shit in space that could fuck up your day. Any rock with sufficient velocity could wobble in and blow you to bits.

I'm saying the answer to your question is 'literally fucking anything, because space is unimaginably vast and no computer is going to perfectly calculate every moving object that might kill you'.

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>>28981239
Match the background radiation intentionally.

Also, firing any weapons would give your position away.

>>28981245
>Any rock with sufficient velocity could wobble in and blow you to bits.


It could. Space however is so vast this seems very unlikely.

>>28981239
Yeah, this is the biggest problem

If you try to hide ALL your radiation, the other guy is gonna go 'hey what the fuck, there's never NOTHING'. So you'd have to rely on the other guy's doubt and try to mask just enough radiation to pretend you're not important.

>>28981249
>Also, firing any weapons would give your position away.

So? I'm constantly burning manouvering thrusters to minimize hitting chance unlike you silly "shielded" pleb.

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>>28981278
At that point it becomes "can you shoot down all of my heat-seeking warheads?"

So, we're just back to missle spam again.

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That's it for me.

Enjoy your space combat, whatever it ends up being.

>>28981268
Even in that case the heat shield will never be colder than background temperature without active cooling.

If I wanted to see if someone was using that trick, what I would do is fire off a nuke in the general direction and look for any reflected radiation.

Gotta agree with the 'too future to comprehend' crowd on this one. Our current scientific and technological understanding barely hints at the possibility of colonizing other worlds or outer space for any significant time, much less having means and reasons to fight up there in what should be a post scarcity world.

But if you want some good, semi-hard scifi space combat, here's a good short story:
http://pastebin.com/pnmb0i1j

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>>28980626
It's dangerous to go alone; Take this!
>http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crossindex.php

>>28981015
The crew would get cooked if they tried to keep all the waste heat in. There might be some heatsink solutions but i doubt that even those would be enough to keep the ship from glowing against the background radiation. At some point they would neet to eject the heatsink though.

That brings up one possible tactic conserning possible space battle: Shoot the radiators!

>>28981252
Yeah, but the guy didn't ask 'what am I likely to crash into'

He asked 'what COULD I crash into'

And the answer is thus, 'damn near anything'

>>28981324
If you can shoot the radiators, might as well shoot the ship.

>>28981329

Ah, but you missed the bit where the question was rhetorical since the answer is "fucking nothing, because space is pretty fucking empty"

>>28981342
Except when it isn't.

>>28981342
Except when it isn't. Which is just often enough to murder the guy who goes 'oh sure I'll just slingshot around the galaxy with my sensors off'

>>28981324
>>28981335
Keep in mind we're talking about this with CURRENT technology and science...

We're basically talking about making a tank with steam engines...
>it would be too big!
>it would need water
>what if the water tank was hit?
>etc.

Just keep these limitations in mind and have a way to explain them...
>heat not a problem because of Generator "X"

>>28981297
Indeed we are. It always comes down to missile spam in the end until you invent some sort of handwavium that pretty much all sci-fi uses to make space combat interesting.

>>28981355
To be honest, he has a pretty decent chance of actually not hitting anything anyway. Granted it's still stupid, but hey, if comets can go blind and just rely on gravity to not whack into things...

>>28981360
>Keep in mind we're talking about this with CURRENT technology and science.
With current technology and science, getting weapons into space is pointless and prohibitively expensive.

What are you going to shoot at, anyway? What's your target? Another ship? What would destroying the ship accomplish? It would make more sense to destroy whatever it was that supplies and maintains the ship.

With only current tech and science in mind, destroying a space ship is like destroying an expensive high-maintenance fragile steam-powered tank. Just destroy it's resupply base and call it good.

>>28981387
And at some point the propulsion systems needed to make things interesting become so powerfull that they would be weapons of apocalypse in themselfs.

>>28981405
Oh sure

It's just still a dumb idea, because it only takes one fuck-up for it to turn out to be a catastrophic fuck-up.

>>28981416
Oh yeah, you also need some kind of power generation or storage that's capable of sustaining that propulsion.

Why aren't spaceships ever designed to resist streams of charged particles, like the solar winds? A sort of space-modified aerodynamic effect. Such a design would reduce the amount of radioactive shielding necessary, reducing the mass of the ship and making it faster, yes?

But instead, spaceships are designed either for Earth-based aerodynamics, or Rule of Cool.

See Gurps: Transhuman Space

Spaceships are lumbering behemoths, with velocities so much greater than acceleration that they can't really evade or dodge shit. Not that you can dodge or hide in space anyway, particularly when enemies use weapons moving at the speed of light (lasers, particle accelerators).

You and the enemy speed towards one another, attempting to fry any surface electronics\radiators with lasers while minimizing the surface area and maximizing the armor you point towards the enemy. If you survive it to close range without getting disabled or overheating, you launch guided kinetic kill munitions with your coilgun and attempt to fuck them with a 'shotgun blast' of tungsten rods. The relative velocity of your approach means that the projectiles punch through their pathetic armor and tear massive holes in the hull. Meanwhile particle accelerator fire is frying the electronics and giving everyone a healthy dose of rads.

I love it.

>>28981469
You answered your own question there, man.

Because spaceship designs are based on science-fiction, not science.

>>28981414
>What are you going to shoot at, anyway?
Miners, pirates, ships trying to take your helium-3
>What's your target?
Same as usual...
>Another ship?
why not?
>What would destroying the ship accomplish?
Asked every person in history on every war...

>It would make more sense to destroy whatever it was that supplies and maintains the ship.
That too, it's always been like that anyway.
>With only current tech and science in mind, destroying a space ship is like destroying an expensive high-maintenance fragile steam-powered tank. Just destroy it's resupply base and call it good.

In my opinion both would happen anyway. You talk about 'tanks'... They've destroyed whole freeways, mines, fuel depots, railways, etc.

But you'll have to do both... You can't ignore the spaceships going for your own "resupply bases"

Slightly OT: I need ideas/inspiration for the kind of ship a technologically advanced Lamia-like race might construct.

I'm trying to make a custom race for Starbound and need to settle on a ship design

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>>28981416
I have a character based on this principle. Nobody thinks twice about his thing being "really fucking impossibly fast".

And then I hose them with his exhaust plume.

>>28981737
So your character is the Flash except he kills people by farting on them?
Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

>>28981739
Yes.

But seriously.

The wet navy battleship Iowa had 16-inch guns. They fired shells which massed about 2000 pounds (907 kg), carried a charge of 145 pounds (54 kg) of high explosive, and traveled at about 820 meters per second. By the kinetic equation above, they contained about 3.0e8 joules of kinetic energy. There are about 4.184e6 joules per kilogram of TNT (which is different from the value used in Rick Robinson's equation, if this annoys you, take it up with him) so the explosive charge contains about 2.3e8 joules of energy.

This means one 16-inch shell does about 3.0e8+2.3e8 = 5.3e8 joules of damage.

Floyd has spent the last 8.6 boring months in the good scoutship Peek-A-Boo, traveling from Mars to Earth in a hohmann orbit. Suddenly he notices a convoy raider from the Asteroid Revolutionary Navy accelerating from low Earth orbit into a Martian hohmann transfer orbit.

Unfortunately for Floyd, scoutships are unarmed. But since the two ships are traveling in opposite directions at a fair speed, anything Floyd can throw at the raider will be good for quite a few Ricks. How massive an object will Floyd have to hurl in order to inflict the same damage as a 16-inch shell?

For the raider to leave LEO and enter Earth Escape orbit takes about 3.17 km/s. To leave Earth Escape and enter Mars Hohmann orbit takes 2.95 km/s. So the raider has about 6.12 km/s relative to Earth.

Since Floyd is on the opposite leg of an Earth-Mars hohmann, he is also doing 6.12 km/s relative to Earth, but with an opposite vector. So relative to the raider, Floyd moving at 6.12 + 6.12 = 12.24 km/s.

Ke = 0.5 * M * V2

therefore

M = Ke / (0.5 * V2)

Ke = 5.3e8 joules and V = 12,240 m/s so M = 7.08 kg (about 15 pounds). A 15 pound object will do as much damage as a 16-inch shell.

Sneaky the cat watches with bright interest as a space-suited Floyd carries the cat's litterbox into the airlock, and empties it into the path of the raider.

See
>>28981312

>>28981249
Source, if you'd be so kind?

>>28981801
15lbs of kitty litter? How big is this cat?
This equation is completely bogus and loses immersion.

Seriously though, Battletech actually has rules for these sorts of relativistic encounters. It goes something like this, "take the record sheets for both ships, and put them in a shredder. The one that shreds the slowest wins."

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>>28981801
>>28982478
Right. Because if going for combat designs one would not particularity account for this very scenario and not have some kind of early warning systems on approaching vectors on ones course and would not have interceptors out there to deflect such stupid shit.


In regards to space battles we are theorizing about it while our scientific understanding is in comparison to the debate still insisting that heavier than air flight is impossible.

So yeah, id rather not consider projectrho the end all and be all of realistic space combat, considering we do not have a human presence beyond our own fucking orbit.

>>28980626

Read this OP.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php

>>28982858
Perhaps we could just imagine anything we want then in the vacuum of future physics.

The logic is just specious, is all I'm trying to point out. You can either have a discussion about realistic (as in, this is what is plausible in the realm of science) combat or we can imagine dimensional space shields and hyperspace inertial arrays in which anything we want flys (also fun).

"Interceptors" or no, a few square miles of uranium BBs being impacted/hurled at a relativistic velocity is going to cause problems for anything that doesn't have magic space armor.

...or as science anon pointed out, the product of some fairly prodigious house cats.

Consider space combat, as we understand it now, would be akin to two bullets fired from opposite sides of the earth trying to destroy each other as they pass.

>>28980733
>planet sieges
I don't see this working in any way. A castle siege works because a castle has a limited food supply. A planet's food supply can last a lot longer than an army.

>>28983408
This.

Thread

>>28983611
And just a few pounds of explosives detonating in face of that uranium would divert it by tens of meters from the impact point, enough for a space ship not to care.

>>28983768

You need to open a hole the size of your ship in the sheet of BB... That's a lot of explosives and a very small gap to manuever (which your enemy will fire weapons at).

Space combat is always about "how can I make my opponent's actions predictable while leaving mine chaotic and random?"

Area denial is king.

This is why I like stories with a warp or hyper space; I can break the rules there and still have people concerned about real space issues.

>>28981239
But since a heatshield costs much less than a ship, it's no longer difficult to build decoys.

>>28983906
Just paint your ship black. Seeing non-luminous things in space is really freaking hard.

>>28983947

>Implying that wouldn't light up your ship like a christmas tree in IR

>>28983961
>implying it would
Perhaps.
It doesn't even need to be black, anything that doesn't emit light will be hard to see in space. It's why we can't see planets and brown dwarf stars and all that dark matter

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Let's say planet A sets up a colony on planet B. The colony on planet B mines resources for itself and planet A which has used up a large amount of its own resources. The colony grows and expands to the point that it can raise and sustain it's own fighting force. These colonists get upset with a government multi AU away telling them what to do so they declare independence. Planet A is now cut off from crucial resources and dispatches forces to reclaim the planet.

Unless the fleet wants to waste an insane amount of fuel getting to planet B it will have to travel along a specific and very predictable flight path. Planet B detects this fleet and dispatches its own forces to engage. Planet A does not want the resources on planet B destroyed, nor will any long range munitions have the fuel or quantity to make it to planet B and past any orbital defenses. So ships from Fleet A will have to engage ships from Fleet B.

I don't know enough about orbital mechanics to tell where fleet B will choose to engage fleet A. Intercepting Fleet A midway through their journey then turning around to return will take too much fuel, but the fleet wants to keep the invaders as far away from the planet as possible. They may chose to Enter orbit around a nearby moon and ambush fleet A as it passes.

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>>28984012
Actual combat would be similar to >>28980987
Distance would be measured in light seconds, primary weapons would be lasers, missiles do not have the fuel or accuracy to function at these ranges. Ship A and Ship B will identify each other at the same time, each seeing the other as they were one second earlier. It takes one second for the computer on ship A to plot a firing solution where ship B will be. It takes one second for a beam to reach its target. Total battle time is two seconds from ship A's perspective, three from ship B's. The computer on ship B knows this and so will be making minor course corrections to avoid the incoming beam while plotting a firing solution for ship A which is also making course corrections. No ship can keep the same course for more than three seconds.

Ship design will be based around forward facing weapons, small cross sections, and thrusters for horizontal and vertical movement.

Ships engaging each other may be unmanned, however over extreme distances control over these ships will be slowed by signal delay and this would be extremely harmful in large scale battles where human decision making is required over computer calculations. However some ships in fleet A will have to be manned since they still need a ground force to take planet B.

>>28984031
Don't forget the long-range BB shotgun. Depending on range and how tightly you can maintain the cone, BBs in a rail gun would be devistating.

>>28984012
>Unless the fleet wants to waste an insane amount of fuel getting to planet B it will have to travel along a specific and very predictable flight path
Probably making it a very viable tactic to just toss some debris in the way.

> nor will any long range munitions have the fuel or quantity to make it to planet B and past any orbital defenses
Why would a mining base have orbital defences? What kind of orbital defences even exist?

The fuel thing is just ridiculous. The difference between a guided missile and a drone ship is whether it's one use or not. This means there's less design constraints on the missile (Brakes? Fuck that.) And as such we can get a longer range out of those.

>>28984031
>No ship can keep the same course for more than three seconds.

This means the effective accuracy of lasers at this range will be pretty fucking shit. It takes time for a laser to burn through things, especially if we keep the power output within some kind of sane range.

>missiles do not have the fuel or accuracy to function at these ranges
A missile on the other hand can adjust its own course as it goes, thus enabling decent accuracy basically anywhere there could be a ship to shoot at.

The fuel consumption depends on how the trajectories of the launching ship and the target match up. But as long as you're prepared to blow some cash on this you can make missiles with better fuel capacity than your ships (take a ship, strip out life support and all such nonsense, add more fuel tanks, done).

>>28983984
Everything short of black holes actually does emit light (usually around the IR spectrum). Hell, the very universe itself is glowing in the microwave range. That we can't so planets, brown dwarves etc with this is just because our telescopes aren't that good yet, and they are very, very. very far away. (I'll get abck to you on dark matter as soon as we have a clue what the bloody fuck that is, but it's probably sub atomic particles of some sort.) Spotting a spaceship a few light minutes away will be a lot easier, and should end up practically possible long before we send a man to Alpha Centauri.

And then you light up your main engine, blasting a huge plume of plasma into the void behind you... We could probably build sensors to pick that up from half an AU away already, immediately telling us your ship's direction,a acceleration, mass, and the current engine output. No one has though, because there's no hostile spaceships to look for.

>>28984031
Ships can't maneuver all the time, because propellant is limited. Also, G-forces will fuck shit up. And/or propellant-economical engines will be slow to accelerate.

Also, beams dissipate over distance. Missiles are launched by means that affect the ships trajectory the least, and an initial charge accelerates the missile after which it simply cruises silent as there is no air resistance or gravity to affect the trajectory, and all remaining propellant is used for precision adjustment.

Moreover, depending on technology, spessships are likely stuck on a rigid trajectory with delicately preplanned slingshots due to propellant limitations.

The result of combat will likely be decided even weeks before shots are actually fired, "combat" lasting potentially several weeks most of which is nothing but waiting and calculating, and ships might not even have enough munitions for more than one or two serious engagements.

>>28984237
>toss some debris in the way.
You know how hard it is to hit something in space? The answer is very.

>>28984249
Yeah, I know all about black body emitters. And you're right, at this point in the future IR detection will probably be a lot better than it is.
It's not just distance though. Try spotting a comet before it gets close to the sun, or fucking Jupiter when the sun isn't in the same direction as us. In order for a body to emit light there needs to be light incident on it, even in the IR and UV spectra.
As for Dark Matter, subatomic particles are unlikely because there's so fucking much of the stuff you'd need loads of particles. It's likely to be something mundane and non-luminous.

Also, you don't fire your engines in deep space, that's plain silly. There's no need for engines once you're on target, momentum will take you all the way there.

If you want a realistic view of objects in space play Kerbal Space program. It's orbital mechanics and interplanetary journeys are very nice beginner level space shizzle.

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It won't be ran by the Navy.

>>28984012
The hell is that?

I want one.

>>28984525
From the look of it I'd say that's a programmable matter prototype. You get lots of them together and the electromagnets on the sides let them stack into shapes.

>>28984031
This is the shape of warfare on a high technological level, assuming sufficiently powerful laser, propellants, and sensors. Assuming neither of the two adversaries is technologically limited, it will resolve in the light seconds range by lasers, simply because nothing else can accurately touch an evading space ship at these distances. It is the very limit we will quickly encounter once we make into space.

>>28984237
>>28984389
You're not wrong, you're just assuming a - very - technologically limited opponent. By technologically limited, I mean chemical reactors, limited sensors, the kind of chemical lasers we can actually make right now. In fact, you're assuming a space ship made with the technology actually available, in the beginning of the 21th century.

Yes, assuming a technologically dumb opponent, space combat will be very different. But in one or two thousand years, when we'll know better, we'll be going into light seconds laser range. Because physic.

>Also, G-forces will fuck shit up. And/or propellant-economical engines will be slow to accelerate.
At these distances and speed, one G in one random direction for one second is largely enough to evade successfully. Not easy on machine nor human, but feasible.

>>28984566
If we're talking about accelerating a few meters at a time, I think a propellantless engine is technically possible. A ship could carry a set of reaction masses held on telescopic booms and extend or retract the booms to move the ship. Obviously the center of mass can't be moved by doing this but if the center of volume is moved then the ship can be made harder to hit.

>>28981026
Due to extensive research done by the University of Pittsburgh, diamond has been confirmed as the hardest metal known to man. The research is as follows. Pocket-protected scientists built a wall of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed. They then built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles an hour into the wall, and the wall came out fine. They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors. They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond traveling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours. They rammed a wall of metal into a 400 mile per hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted the earth's orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurtling towards mid-western Prussia at 400 billion miles per hour. They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused two wayward airplanes to lose track of their bearings, and make a fatal crash with two buildings in downtown New York. They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive. Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall traveling at miles per iron, and the result proved without a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known to man.

>>28980626
Okay, don't have much time. But basically, space combat would probably be physical projectiles at the current stage. If we ever get to the point where we can launch things at a signifigant percentage of the speed of light for cheeply enough, you can believe those things are going to end up being weapons of choice.

>>28983663

This "projectrho /thread" thing is a cancer that's killing all the space combat discussions. Just thought I'd mention that.

>>28984728
>http://www.e6cvd.com/cvd/page.jsp?pageid=405
Diamond, in all its forms, transmits from the ultraviolet through the visible and infrared regions. Its characteristics are such that it is the only material that offers a wide far-infrared (8-14 um) transmission range combined with high strength and excellent resistance to thermal shock, scratching and erosion. Coupled with this, diamond offers good performance as a window for microwave, visible and ultraviolet radiation.

It can be heated or cooled at rates that would cause other optical materials to fail due to thermal shock. The extremely low thermal expansion coefficient and the high thermal conductivity combine to give diamond with the lowest thermo-optic distortion of any infrared optical material1. Unlike other thermal shock resistant materials, such as sapphire or gallium phosphide, it is also transparent in the far infrared.

>>28984525
Airforce reusable orbital launch vehicle that has made a few "test" flights. It's one of the few things out there that conspiracy theorists have a lot to work with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect

A far from unfeasible concept for a spaceship drive that wouldn't expel any exhaust. No, that's not the same as a reactionless drive, nor does it break the laws of thermodynamics in any way. Read it up.

Assuming that it's possible, that means that there exists a system that could:

1. Drive spaceships in a significant percentage of the speed of light
2. Possibly be used as a faster than light warp drive
3. Create an "energy shield" around the spaceship as a side effect of its operation
4. Be used to create artificial gravity inside the ship without spinning it
5. Have a far smaller IR signature

Basically this is (possibly) the key to having Star Trek spaceships.

>>28984858
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_effect
>all that [citation needed]

There's no evidence for this effect to even be a thing, don't bank on it m8.

Even if the effect was proven, you still need an energy source to make it work. It's like the people who bang on about alcubierre drives without paying attention to it.

>>28981737
God I love known Space.

For those of you not in the Know, the Kzinti were a race evolved from plains cats and had developed gravity manipulation long before humanity had. They were still bound by light speed, but their ships used reactionless drives which were more efficient, better at turning, and generally all round better than reaction drives (A reaction drive functions on the basis of newton's laws. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you send super heated fuel out the back of your ship, you push the ship in the opposite direction with equal force that you threw your fuel out the back). Reactionless drives broke newton's laws and allowed movement without equal and opposite force, making them easier to manuever and more cost efficient.

The technology was based on gravity manipulation, and also gave their vessels internal gravity.

All of this meant that they could safely fire really BIG guns without harming the crew with the recoil or slowing themselves down.

Humans had no such advantage and had forgotten war almost entirely by the time they ran into the Kzinti. But they were still using reaction drives (specifically giant fucking laser beams that had a slow but constant acceleration allowing them to reach high percentages of the speed of light over long periods of time).

The Kzinti had all but forgotten about reaction drives, and humanity was the first wide spread interstellar race they had run into. The others they had enslaved and/or reduced to food animals had mostly not left their home solar systems.

The Kzinti depended on telepaths to read the minds of the crew members on ships and tell if the ships were armed and if so what with. So they kept reading the minds of the humans on board, who had forgotten about 'weapons' and thought of the giant fucking lasers on their ships as engines, and told their captains "completely unarmed"

>>28984995

And then their ships would get a face full of photons with enough energy to accelerate a ship to near light speed.

Which brings us to the Kzinti lesson.

"A reaction drive is a weapon in equal proportion to its efficiency as a drive"

EG: The better your reaction drive is at pushing your ship around, the better it is at fucking shit up.

>>28984858
Okay. I couldn't get through any of that.

How is that effect supposedly produced? And why does it create the other effects?

For example, what is the 'energy shield'?

>>28984992
>alcubierre drives
actually they found a way to lower the energy requirements drastically to the point where it would actually be feasible. You wouldn't need something like an atom smasher form earth to jupiter to gain enough energy to power one.

The trouble is that they require negative mass to function. And if negative mass exists at all, then it would only be found in the places deep between stars, and probably would be incredibly hard to gather up since the theorized properties of it would me that it was repulsed by and repulsed actual matter from itself. (eg: it'd be like trying to touch the same poles of a magnet to one another without being able to hold both magnets)

>>28980626
Real-life space combat, circa 2013:
-air-to-space anti-satellite missiles
-kamikaze satellites
-ad hoc armament fits (autocannons, possibly air-to-air missiles) to manned or unmanned satellites
That's pretty much it for, say, a conflict that started tomorrow.

Could we make a massive Archimedes death ray mirror system in space for super laser defense systems?

>>28985125
Yes. We could. But it'd be more efficient to throw rocks at people.

The reason? Because most space ships would be shielded from that sort of thing in the first place, and chemical reactions could probably produce a more powerfully coherent beam of light to do actual damage.

>>28984839
What?

>>28985093
That's the thing. Sure, an alcubierre drive -might- work, but even if the theory was 100% true negative energy does not exist and so we have no means to fuel one. It's like saying "I have a box that turns everything inside it into burgers! All I need is burgeronium, an element with no scientific basis!"

>>28985059
Roughly speaking, changing the internal energy of an accelerating object can, according to the theory, produce a transient change in the mass of an object that's proportional to the rate at which energy is added to the object. Drive it hard enough and the mass fluctuations exceed the rest mass of the object.

I'll be the first to admit it sounds far out, but experimental evidence so far is at least plausible.

>>28980820
Sajuuk?

>>28981249
Actually, I think you could fire most types of weapons without giving yourself away. Missiles could be launched away from your ship with coldgas thrusters or mechanical systems, like a giant crossbow. With sufficient cooling, a laser could presumably be fired without emitting any waste heat towards the enemy; same with railguns, although railguns might require additional electromagnetic shielding to prevent the electromagnetic field generated by firing from being detected.

>>28980626
>ITT: how would real life space combat look like?
Like naval battles. You can fit a lot more missiles than fighters in a given space, and they don't have demands like pilots and their necessities, fuel, replacement parts, etc. In the space it takes to fit one fighter and everything required to keep it operational, you could have hundreds of missiles and several launchers. Even with a 1% hitrate, it's still more efficient to use missiles.

So a space battle would be two capital ships launching thousands of missiles at each other, and countermeasures and point defense weapons shooting down incoming missiles on both sides. Whoever takes two or three hits first loses.

>>28985124
Well kamikaze satelites are just a bad fucking idea.

All it'll take is a few of those going off and escaping our atmosphere would be suicidally dangerous.

Of course, we could probably use something to clear out brief 'pockets' in the cloud.

>>28985180
Negative mass DOES have a scientific base. The mathematics for it's existence make sense, but it has almost no observational or experimental proof. It's one step above blackholes. Which we have circumstancial observational evidence for their existence, and the mathematics work out, but otherwise they remain a theory because we can't actually find the other telltale signs for their existence (the best we got is star systems making IMPOSSIBLY tight turns in orbit around something invisible. But no hawkings radiation from them. So yeah.)

Also the guy DOES have a patent on machines that create the effect, which is fairly impressive. The Patent office usually turns down patents that break the traditional laws of physics out of hand unless they have really solid working examples as proof.

>>28985199

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng3li-OCWuA

>>28981641
The same types of ships everyone else uses, but with differently shaped chairs?
Form follows function, after all, and physics are the same everywhere.

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>>28980987
Pretty much this.

Pic related: "Real" space battleship that we could have built in the 60s if we had the balls.

>>28985239

I want space combat in my setting to be like this

>>28985161
I don't think you understand how massive I'm thinking.

>>28984031
>primary weapons would be lasers, missiles do not have the fuel or accuracy to function at these ranges
A missile fires once and then continues at whatever speed it's at until it nears its target and has to make adjustments.

Light spreads out and backscatters off space dust until it's completely harmless. Not to mention that it takes an immense amount of energy for lasers to do damage even under ideal conditions.

>>28985228
>Negative mass DOES have a scientific base
>In theoretical physics, negative mass is a hypothetical concept of matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −2 kg. Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties, stemming from the ambiguity as to whether attraction should refer to force or the oppositely oriented acceleration for negative mass. It is used in certain speculative theories, such as on the construction of wormholes. The closest known real representative of such exotic matter is a region of pseudo-negative pressure density produced by the Casimir effect.

Having a patent on something means nothing, I'm sorry, even if they do turn down stuff that doesn't work. I wouldn't call it evidence.

>>28984237
For debris to be deadly it will have to be moving at a significantly different velocity then the target. The larger amount of debris the more propellant you will need, and if you're launching enough to actually have a significant chance of hitting the target (a) you just clogged one of the few pathways that ensure fuel effecency, making it hazardous for your own ships to move through the area (b) you just wasted propellant which could have been used on a missile which can actually guide itself to the target.

However missiles in general are flawed because at the distances we're talking about you're not only going to need a shit ton of fuel for corse corrections, but at these speeds there will be very little room for those corrections, if the enemy maneuvers enough (since it's a ship they should have adequate fuel) then it becomes even more difficult.

>more missiles
then you have to limit the amount of propellant on each missile so the ship is not over burdened. Lasers however are much harder to avoid since they travel at the speed of light.

A ten mile wide ball bearing with a kilometer and a half thick armor covered in missile ports and filled with missile fabbers scoop up junk and makes more missiles. I want a troy.

>>28981469
Because nothing you just said made sense.

There are magnetic sail designs that would work on the solar wind, however. They actually hold our best chance of reaching other stars without FTL.

>>28985204
>two or three hits
I'm reasonably certain it would take just one.

>>28985228
Depends on the orbit, the target, etc. - and if you use a nuclear bomb in the kamikaze satellite, you may be able to guarantee destruction of most or all fragments.

>>28985244
Except we wouldn't have had the balls any more, on account of cancer, no pusher-plate tests had been conducted using nuclear explosions, and we didn't really have any need to lift thousands of tons of payload into orbit at a time..

Why not gibe ship missiles AI and make jihadi missiles. They want to kill your enemy by blowing themselves up in their faces.

>>28985325
Oh I certainly agree. I'm just saying that I give it more credibility than say, a perpetual motion device. Not MUCH more credibility, but I'm not going to just toss it out of hand.

>>28985387
So use it as thrusters in space.

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>>28985171
It's a relaunchable drone that has been on a few missions into orbit. It was initially built by NASA but co-opted by the navy/airforce. One of such missions was all but confirmed to be something completely "off the books" having and delivered an unspecified cargo.

In all likelihood it was a spy satellite.

Which shouldn't surprise many. The Space Shuttle was used for such things too. But having less first hand witnesses has its bonuses, even if they can't exactly keep it all under wraps.

>>28985387
>and we didn't really have any need to lift thousands of tons of payload into orbit at a time..

We always have the need to lift thousands of tons of payload into orbit. Almost all problems with manned space travel would be solved if it was just a TINY bit easier to lift things into orbit.

>>28985418
Not tossing things out of hand has a fine line, but you're right not to in some cases. The moment someone says "faster than light" however, I usually do.

>>28985499
Well we already know FTL is actually possible. A device that can push radio waves to faster than light speeds has already been invented. In a couple of years it'll probably revolutionize the communications industry, not because it can send radio waves faster than the speed of light, but because as a side effect it produces an incredibly strong signal, so it could make satellite based wifi an actual thing.

http://www.universetoday.com/33752/

That thing is real, is pretty much approved by the scientific community, and shatters Einstein's Cage. So FTL is possible to a greater or lesser extent already.

>>28985542
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2004/jul/29/table-top-synchrotron-defies-convention

now, there is reasonable skepticism in the thing. But hey, the fact that other scientists aren't calling them completely insane is a pretty big step forward.

So I guess we'll see in the coming years ehn?

>>28985542
>>28985569
If I'm reading this right, the polarisation of the waves is traveling faster than light, not the waves themselves. I don't know to what extent that is permitted by relativity.

>>28985748
Since we can detect the polarization of light, it still counts as an ansible.

Phenomena like this have been known in electrical engineering for a while - there's even a few designs for waveguides that would send their signal backwards in time.

It is generally considered impolite and a bit embarassing to look into these things, and often bad for your career.

>>28985786
I don't like it. Mainly because I don't understand it, but there you go.

I'm not going to refute it though, the report looks legit even if the news articles linking to it are full of crap.

>>28985455
That's pretty sweet, I guess the chances of getting one as a paper weight are nil then.

>>28985852
It's a little complicated, but essentially sending a signal through a waveguide past the "cutoff frequency" results in the equations giving you an imaginary propagation velocity. These waves decay exponentially over a short distance, but they still actually propagate. And depending on how you deal with the fact that they're moving at imaginary velocity, you can finagle them into giving you superluminal travel times or even negative travel time.

I'd guess that this is using a similar method.

>>28985964

The thing about fully realistic combat of any type is that it's boring outside a few people who study it in depth and/or like lots of complexity of that type. Realistic medieval combat is boring if your goal is to have an adventure where you kill dudes instead of dying of an dysentery after an indecisive seige. Realistic industrial age warfare is boring if you want to shoot people rather then get randomly blown to bits by artillery or IEDs or some other impersonal death-dealing device. Etc. These are often fascinating subjects to speculate on, but in all cases actually shit to involve yourself in, and not terribly engaging to play out. Reality optimizing for doing your homework; games optimize for depth and engagement.

Also: I think the idea of "space warships" is inherently flawed on a lot of levels, and leads to debates that don't make a ton of sense - like the 'submarines vs bombers vs capital ships' debate.

>>28985542
>>28985569
It's not true FTL, since it can't relay information faster than c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Phase_velocities_above_c

>>28985374
It depends on how large the warhead is and how much shielding the target has. I imagine that the lower mass of a smaller warhead would make it more maneuverable, and more smaller warheads would have a better chance of making it past defensive weapons.

Just look at naval battles today. Anything large and well-armored can easily limp home after taking a single torpedo. Spaceships can have substantially more armor for a given size since they don't have to worry about buoyancy.

>>28980810
Isn't that a Lensmen book cover?

>>28990848
Looks like it's by this guy: http://www.amazon.com/The-John-Berkey-Paper-Tiger/dp/1843401223

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>>28988784
>Spaceships can have substantially more armor for a given size since they don't have to worry about buoyancy

They do however have to worry about MASS. Every kilogram of armor will require even more fuel to move it. People really need to stop talking about spaceship sizes when it's mass that's important.

>>28981083
Dat HIND-style cockpit

boner activated

>>28990914
They conflate mass with volume.

Space ships don't really give a shit about volume, but mass is a big deal.

Thanks, Tsiolkovsky.

>>28990914
10 tons of armor on a kilometer-long spaceship would be weaker than tissue paper and wouldn't contain a vacuum, much less absorb an impact from a weapon. Ten tons of armor on a spaceship the size of a truck could take a serious beating. Volume is entirely relevant in this case.

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>>28992043
Well, volume and mass do interact in strange ways.

A larger object will have more surface area, but the overall ratio of surface area to total volume will go down. Also some shapes are more efficient when it comes to surface area than others.

This is important because the structure of the spacecraft, will have mass. More surface area means you need more armor. The shape which has the most internal volume with the least surface area is a sphere, but it's also a really inconvenient shape to work with. As a result most real spacecraft are made out of cylinder shapes.

Boxes are the opposite, More surface area per volume, but also a really easy shape to stack things together.

>>28992403
That same 10 tons of armor would provide much better protection to a sphere than a cube, provided both were the same volume. It's a matter of surface area.

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>>28980626
>>ITT: how would real life space combat look like?

>>28992888
>246 survivors in life pods
>implying our AI masters would need meatbags operating their space armadas

0/10, immersion ruined

>>28992515
Spheres are terrible for equipment placement. Plus they maximize the cross section in every direction. Thin cylinder or box, if you're going to armor it then armor the side that faces the enemy.

>>28992994
True, like I said it's complicated. But if you want to contain a volume with the least amount of material and the most amount of pressure, use a sphere, or failing that a cylinder.

>>28985280
UNG would be win.

Freespace is the best space combat game/simulator I've ever played.

Have you guys seen the trailer for the indie game No Man's Sky?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s

Having not read the thread but wanting to contribute to the discussion...

Combat in space would be more comparable to the airborne theater than marine combat found planetside. The reason for this would be the arrangement of the combatants; you would be placing your spaceships on the X, Y, and Z axises rather than just X and Y as you would in aquatic ship-to-ship combat. So the formations found in space combat would be very complex and require a lot of coordination to execute.

Additionally you wouldn't be restricted by gravity altering the trajectory and velocity (and therefore accuracy) of projectiles unless you were operating near a gravity-producing structure like a planet, moon, black hole, or something similar. So let's say you're using ballistics weapons like the technology we have now. Targeting enemy ships would be not necessarily easier or more difficult than doing so planetside, but you would have to account for different things likes the placement of your opponent and where they will be rather than where they are, considering the time it would take a projectile to travel. Self-targeting "smart" projectiles would make this a lot easier.

Additionally the arrangement of ships would be much different than those used in planetside warfare. Traditionally command posts are placed on an exposed bridge with lots of windows for commanders to observe everything firsthand. Continuing this in space combat would be suicidal. Given the accuracy of weapons in space and the great danger of hull breach, it would be wisest to have the command bridge held deep within the ship and protected by multiple levels of armored plating compartmentalized to keep from vacuuming the entire ship when a section is exposed. A variety of cameras and digital viewscreens could be used to observe the spaces inside and outside of the ship.

>>28993962
The sheer scale of spaceships is also somewhat under-appreciated. They wouldn't be limited by rules like gravity, weight, or material scarcity. Because of this you could build spaceships as large as you want so long as they are never expected to enter an atmosphere - they wouldn't have to worry about weighting themselves down and the material wealth found in asteroids is almost more than we can grasp right now. So your imagination is your limit. The continued development of 3D printing and automated construction drones would only make this easier to accomplish. Theoretically you could base ship-building factories in asteroid fields with drones mining the asteroids, transporting them to the construction site, and refining them into materials to build the spaceship from a preplanned pattern. This could be repeated almost endlessly.

So in summary space warfare would probably take place across great distances with carefully-planned ballistics weapons launched from huge spaceships built to handle a beating. It'd be like a cross between chess and Master and Commander in space.

>>28980916

>>Mask your heat

without disturbing propulsion

>>Cooling

Without displacing heat

Shiggity Diggity, you dont even hard science do you.

>>28981278

which means the entire thing becomes a game of who can calculate a killy solution before the light cone of their solution would leave their enemy with enough time to come up with a counter solution.

space battles will be won with timetravel and non causal communication aka ansibles.

>>28980626
>ITT: how would real life space combat look like?
Really boring and shitty which is why I prefer to ditch realism when it comes to space combat.

>>28981414
ignoring enemy ships

enemy ships dropping shit tons of tungsten poles on your cities, hitting like atom bombs.

>>y.. y... you could have stoped this anon, if only you joined the space navy.

>>28981482

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.

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>>28994282

>>28985364

You do realize that theirs a point where solar winds stop and its only about 1.1 distance away from the sun where 1 is recognized boundry of our solarsytem?

Sorry sun, Solar sails could be used in system but will never take you to alpha centuari.

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>>28981278

That's actually where the "heat-shield" comes in handy; You shoot off flares, a fuck tone of chaff, sandcasters etc... swing the shield inbetween you and your enemy, adjust your attitude stealthily using an internal set of gyroscopes, then hard burn in a direction your enemy can't predict until their lightcone catches up to your burn.

It's admittedly more a light cruiser type of thing that can't as easily outdraw or out maneuver (size in space for the most part = more fuel to waste on evasive maneuvers) a proper battleship maneuver, but it's the sort of thing that can give a little ship that minute chance to get one good hard shot off at its opponent without getting wasted in reply.

Space battles default to a sniper fight between two expert marksmen on a salt flat with no cover. ANYTHING that makes it hard to be hit is useful, it's just a matter of the mass of whatever cool device you're using not weighing you down too much to make you shit in otherways.

>>28994479
That's why you build REALLY BIG solar powered lasers to push the solar sail ships. As an added bonus these lasers can also destroy fleets or devastate planets if you point them at anything other than a solar sail.

>>28994479
Yeah, you're going to lose momentum once you stop being accelerated, too. Because that's how physics works.

The whole idea of a solar sail is to use the sun to accelerate you "for free" and then just coast on inertia.

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>>28995035
Even so, you won't be going very fast by the time you get out of range. UNLESS you have a laser pushing you as >>28994890 pointed out.

Photon drives/sails have the best impulse ever, but the thrust sucks because lol photons.

The ISV venture star from AVATAD actually used laser propulsion for the acceleration stage, and only used it's engines for the deceleration (and the other way around on the return trip)

>>28993674

I've been burned by too many games like it to get hyped, but I'll keep an eye on it.

>Long range missiles!
>"no, irrelevant thanks to anti-missile defenses"
>long range missiles that had anti-anti-missile defenses

And then fighters were born.

>>28996973
Long range missiles are not irrelevant thanks to anti-missile defenses, whoever said that is an idiot.

Sure anti-missile defenses MIGHT save your life, or they might also overheat, run out of ammo, or just turn the incoming missile into a hyper-velocity could of debris that still turns your ship into swiss cheese.

Just quick question here.

Wouldn't "high powered" lasers be the most effective weapon in outerspace? See'ing as it has next to no travel time unless combat is taking place at immense distances. Where basically you just do your best to dodge the shots while actively trying to gauge where the enemy will be say a minute from now?

>>28997120
They are the most effective weapon until they start to melt. Remember heat dissipation is hard, you need big radiators, and extending those radiators will prevent you from making evasive maneuvers. So while lasers are some of the most powerful weapons offensively and defensively, using them indiscriminately will put you in danger.

Missiles on the other hand, fire away. The more you shoot, the lighter you will get, which will make it easier to take evasive maneuvers.

>>28997232

So basically you want a limited Firing of lasers alongside a fucking spam of missiles?

I like it....

I like it a lot.

Now would the crew be making evasive maneuvers for instance or would we slave that decision making over to an AI for instance?

Space combat is terrifying yet fun to think about.

Archived for posterity.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/28980626/

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>>28997280
Well there are two kinds of evasive maneuvers. One is random course corrections every few seconds to prevent lucky laser hits. The other is to evade kinetic energy weapons and debris.

The former might depend on an automated algorithm which is kept secret (crack the code and you will be able to predict the enemy ship's movements) the other is a more case by case basis.

I'd say most likely it would be computer controlled, but with a human crew sitting in acceleration pods giving the AI permission to discharge weapons and making high level tactical dissensions.

Ships that have a human crew will have a slight edge over remote controlled or semi autonomous ones because they won't have to worry about light lag. A fully automated ship is only a good idea if you trust AI completely.

>>28980779
>probably be very tense, but not exciting at all.

I call bullshit.

If you make it right, that'll have anyone on the edge of their seats.

Men sit at computers bathed in red light. Their eyes follow little green blips on monitors; pupils trailing and snapping to flashing numbers and flickering lights. There's a razor at the ship's jugular, and if they stir the air the wrong way it'll cut. Every man trusts every other not to fail. An off-duty officer stands at one of the only port windows, staring into space. A gas giant rolls gently below; it's hydrogen atmosphere mixing in eddies and formless clouds. The officer hasn't noticed: his hand is clenched so tight his nails are digging into his palm. And the men at their stations down below haven't noticed it, but they're sweating.
Fifteen minutes pass. Nothing. The men at the stations still scan interfaces; flick buttons; they're walking a wire as thin as an atom. Perspiration. It drips, following the channel of this man's wrinkles. If he wiped it away with the back of his hand, they'd all die. And this little bead of sweat flows, flows, flows down his face.

He blinks. Sweat got into his eye; it was always such a bother when he was running. Wait, he thinks, is that line of code supposed to be there? I must have missed something, he thinks, that's erroneous...

The off-duty officer sees it out of the port window for an instant. A bright flash, like a firecracker, done in an instant. He's blinded instantly, of course.
Blood trickles down his forearm from the gashes on his hand; his hand is splayed open in a frozen terror, but his eyes are still dull.

The enemy captain looks at a readout: A near-direct hit; some 21 confirmed kills; Congratulations, Officer Mark! Congratulations on this success, we can't wait to see you back on Io, we'll have at Triton by next week.

>>28997750

No stealth in etc.

>>28980626
Will try to find a PDF that talks about it, that I had, but will post some stuff while I try to find.

1-"Force Shields" are unrealistic
2-You wiill not hide in space, because heat from engines and from the stuff needed to make you survive will show where you are, this because space is cold and empty.
2.1-Also you will need sensors to detect stuff and not hit on them
3-If you accelerate you will continue doing so, until you desacerelate in the opossite direction
4-To turn you need to use engines and not like planes where you can just turn
5-Weapons will do high damage because of something I forgot


Battle will be like cars with guns battling at night at a flat iceterrain. Those cars are painted with floruescent paint

>>28980626
Assuming Interplanetary combat: it only takes place at orbital insertion points. PDF shoots out of the lunar orbit zone and into a high arc in an attempt to cross the incoming enemy vector. Invader can't maneuver a lot or else miss his insertion, but also wants to minimize contact with defenses, that means multiple coordinated insertions from multiple inbound vecotrs which means controlling multiplep lanets and several years to decades of planning and preparatory movement while attempting to cloak your invasion fleet(s) as commercial trafficking. Defenses want to maximize their intercepts and, hopefully, dissuade all inbound vectors and divert them into a simple slingshot transfer over an insertion orbit to land ground forces and aerospace assets; that means watching trends in commercial shipping lanes and using lots of SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, and HUMINT, and predictive software to figure out how many ships you need to intercept which inbounds and when. Those high-arcing intercept vectors by the defenders are going to take a good deal of time to fall back into regular orbits, so they cannot afford to launch everything and must hold some forces in an orbital reserve in the worst case that one or multiple inbounds do make it through the intercept, or even if the intercepts miss (a bad one might return the defenders back home in time to be met by freshly supplied invaders waiting in the gravity well).

Once inside lunar orbit, invaders want to minimize defending aerospace assets, ships, satellites, launch facilities, etc while preserving known and visible supply depots, so expect lots of hit-and-run airstrikes and, if feasible and accurate enough, orbital bombardments.
>note that "accurate enough" means "won't damage collateral deemed irreplaceable", this could mean civilian centers and probably includes a majority of them, however, a desperate invader really only needs to prioritize engineering, manufacturing, launch, and supply centers.

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>>28999423
Once you're inside lunar orbit, if offensive launchers and lasers have an effective range of even one-half of a light second, it'll be a rapid, bloody, no-holds slugfest in which almost everyone and their brother will be in range of.

>Why? you ask.

The Earth's Moon is just Barely one light-second away.

Now imagine where static/geostationary and free-moving defenders will be moving to intercept
>the middle of that one lightsecond orbital band

Now imagine where invading forces are hurtling to in an effort to launch their craft and weapons
>the middle of that one lightsecond orbital band

Barring line-of-sight engagement, 90% of anything will be in range of 90% of everything else with very little but decoys and crippled remains to act as cover and only a ship's active ECM to provoke flaws in offensive moves.

A fleet will, if defending, consist mostly of EW craft and heavy-gun vessels; invaders will serve the primary function of 1) aerospace and ground forces launch, 2) supply and C3 functions, 3) orbital bombardment/show-of-force and contain a more eclectic variety of combat roles. Defending forces will be further augmented by roles suited to counter those know to be deployed by invaders, WHICH, since maneuvers before the invasion may take months or even many years to pull off without tipping their hand (and leaving their own worlds vulnerable to counter-attack), may have changed quite significantly depending on the cost of R&D, construction, training, and logistics on new vessels

the inserted file is the closest I've come to making this type of scenario both playable and enjoyable

>>28999423
Assuming single planet or "Earth-Sphere" the fighting doesn't go past low-orbit rapid insertion vehicles and satellite-crashing; big ships are too infeasible at this scale.

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>>28999102
>5 high damage
that's one flavor, the ideal armor is either a whipple shield made of layers to fragment and absorb things like micro-meteoroids and railgun warheads, or against lasers and rays and stuff something with a high vaporisation to weight ratio like Carbon, one of the lightest optimal choices, Steel which is heavier, or Boron which is fucking excellent if you have the dosh to pay for it and enough to armor your vessel

Depending on your size, redundancies, crew training, and how much armor your reaction drives can tote around on patrols across known space, a ship could hypothetically be a very tough target.

Also, FTL is unrealistic as are high-efficiency STL drives, but both are necessary if you want anything interesting done, so are generally overlooked - similarly long-range newtonian vectors are great, but portraying them in the thick of fighting tends to get difficult so again, it is often overlooked in favor of narrative and cinematics. IMHO, so long as you at least attempt to match cinematic maneuvers and maneuverability to newtonian simulationism, you're doing the community a service.

>4 engines to turn
nah, mate, spinning a gyro inside the hull can make you rotate with only mechnical/electrical energy expenditure and preservation of mass - and we all know how precious mass is on a spaceship - gyros can be slow though, then again, everything is slow in space

>EVERYTHING IS SLOW IN SPACE
probably the most important point anyone can ever make about space combat realism

>>28999487
covert-ops when

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>>28999673
>>28999102
one more thing, space is not cold, only particle can have temperature, a vacuum is defined as a lack of particles in any given space; space has an extremely large volume of vacuum

also, you can hypothetically freeze one side of an object while the other roasts under a nearby sun and you internally overheat from homeostatic processes - YAY RADIATION

>>28981109
But we still have the infantryman's dilemma.

In order to hold and make use of any territory, it must have men or men-like things put upon it to ensure orderly process of that location's utility.

Even when we have missile buses killing everything in orbit, we still need a way to get boots on the ground.

Ground worth taking begets a need to transport men to take it.

Thus begets manned vessels.

Thus begets space combat more exciting than subs and electronic counter measure counter counter missiles.

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>>28999752
If we need boots on the ground send the fleet, but dammit if we need those bastards gone and send the nukes.

>>28994282
Original script had this:
"I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been Offworld and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion...I've felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!"
Rutger Hauer rewrote that into awesome.

Why do people think that no stealth in space means space combat will be boring?

It just means it will be like chess instead of poker, or tag instead of hide and seek. You try and guess what your opponent will do next (or is doing right now because of light lag) instead of trying and guessing where he is.

>>28980626
>ctrl+f space fighter
>Only one result

Good.

We have been over this so many times it is tiring.

First of all one cannot predict future technology with any fucking accuracy, so even the most insane guess work has a chance to come to pass.


Secondly if we do assume what we know now holds true it would be like submarine combat in space, except at even greater ranges be utterly boring to watch.

>>29002723

We've been over this at least enough times to know that submarine warfare is the last thing it'd look like

>>28983648
Not if you bombard it's farmland with relativistic projectiles.

They would likely hide deep enough in the crust of the planet they could live off the heat for a while, of course they would still have to pump the heat back to live, and eventually they would run out of energy. Of course that could take a while if they have advanced forms of energy production, which could lead to food production.

But if you are sending a fleet over to subjugate a planet, unless you have warp drive or some other magic shit, it wasn't like you aren't already in it for the long haul.

>>28999102
You can always pump heat.

What you(or the author) is not mentioniong is that the way you would be detected against the, (what is it 3k background heat?) is if you are radiating more than that out, to remedy this you just need to pump or divert the heat to a direction where the enemy cannot read it.

Although to be honest I don't think you could do that to the degree necessary for perfect heat capture, and even then collisions with the few atoms of hydrogen and helium everywhere would heat you up as well.

Whatever.

>>29002854
Heating from contact with the interstellar medium is so small as to be nonexistent, even at high relativistic velocities.

>>29002753
Challenge: create a setting in which space combat resembles ancient Greek hoplite warfare.

>>28994043

STEALTH /= TOTAL INVISIBILITY

All the arguments about "you can't have stealth in space" is based of a fundamentally flawed conception of stealth. The point is not to make yourself invisible. Anything can be found with enough time and/or energy.
All you need is something that gives you just slightly more time to react than the other guy and kill him first, even if it's measurable only in seconds.

>>29003096

Spaceships have virtually impenetrable shields, but only covering the front of their cylindrical structures. Meanwhile, the structure itself is powerful enough that the only way to damage it is via a weapon running through the entire length of the spaceship, fired from the front - but which cannot fire through the shield. You have to drop the shield momentarily to fire the gun, and naturally, you'll want to do so when the enemy is presenting the largest silhouette possible to you. Space fleets are thus made up of huge masses of cylinders with the exact same facing creating a "shield wall", with each individual ship trying to carefully time their shield drop and shot so they can get at the enemy and break down a part of their "wall", all the while both walls maneuver around each other trying to flank.

>>28980674

Space combat is "equip gun and fire, fire engines to counter the thrust and move around"

It's not hard, its very simple. Weapons are much more stronger than "armor", and distances are irrevelant - to actually fight you need to be within less than a lightsecond anyway, around 40,000KM or so, with our current weapons tech.

>>28981155

Life support makes a FUCKTON OF HEAT, Humans burn up shit fast, and we're discovering meteors, cold meteors, at 10meters big at most, with current planet based tech.

Hiding in space is IMPOSSIBLE.

>>28993674
Freespace 1 and 2 are amazing. Love the open source mods, silent threat reborn, all that.

I know it, they're following me...watching that opening scene when I was younger blew my little mind.

>>29003195

The role of fighters would be to get around the shield wall and hit the spaceships in the vulnerable back.

>>29003279

amen.

>>29003096

Duh, just use the shields from Dune, that way ships have to bump up against each other's shields and stab through slowly at each other.

Of course, having said that, the EE Doc Smit story "Galactic Patrol" basically opens with a ship designed to kill one of the most heavily shielded pirate ships in the galaxy... and it did that by getting so close it could press the barrel of a cannon against the pirate's shields and then detonating THE MOST POWERFUL CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVE EVER DEVELOPED (this being a story written a decade or two before Hiroshima) to punch through the shields.

Of course this is also a sci fi story with "Space Axes" (which are literally called that, and have a laser gun in the axe's haft) and dragons.

(and then a few books later the galactic patrol apply the Mass Effect Field... I mean, they render some planets "inert" which makes them effectively weightless and fly around at FTL speeds, and use planets to crush enemy ships by positioning them above and below the ships and then "de-inerting" them which causes them to regain their original mass and inertia and smash into each other. EE Smith was really a man born before Studio Gainax's time...)

>>28980764
actually, as >>28980674 points out that's impossible to tell.

Will we even BE all fleshy by the time we do that stuff? And if we are, might it be the same kind of biomatter being used to make the ships?

Not only might they be 'manned' to the extent that people will have been adapted to that by then, or fuck, we might even BE the ships.

>>28994041
They can, however, involve miniaturization, mass, inertia or, even with systems that negate the latter two, energy scaling.

There's also the amount of materials used... not necessarily due to scarcity, but because of how much you have at a given interval of time, and what you can do with it. Bigger is not always absolutely and irrevocably better, otherwise we wouldn't take out armored vehicles with man-portable weaponry, large ships with aircraft a hundredth their size and mass, or people with tiny bullets.

For every Deathstar, there may very well be an R-9 perfectly capable of dealing a killing blow to it.

>>28996014
name five

>>28999102
Can we just drop the whole "science says there is no stealth in space because stealth means total undetectability like rogues in WoW and sensors unlike stealth technology will become totally omniscient and there's no such thing as interference, jamming, space is empty and has nothing to hide behind and everything will always emit so much heat which travels at FTL speeds that's higher than the background radiation levels so we can see you before you even turn your engines on as a result, so space combat will be between giant ships, without ever any tactics, it's all about the biggest generator" crap? It's getting rather old.