
Essay on Realistic Space Combat - Tomte
http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-on-realistic-space-combat-i-wrote.131056/
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Tloewald
The problem with "realistic" space combat is deciding what you're going to be
"realistic" about. The writer dismisses the possibility that the civilization
is going to be willing to spend "months" traveling around a star system, and
so immediately starts off with a bunch of fanciful drive designs that have
enormous impacts on ground assumptions.

In general, we really can't discuss FTL options with the word "realistic" in
mind, so we're discussing STL. I'd suggest that in a single system STL setting
chances are people will accept slow travel because it's much easier to build a
safe, inexpensive transport system that takes months to send people from place
to place.

Here's the bottom line -- communications will be at lightspeed, travel will be
automated. What do you care if you're sitting in a space capsule traveling to
Mars at 300,000km/h (and thus taking quite some time to get there) if you can
work, play, communicate with loved ones, and enjoy "feelies" while in transit.

The key takeaway from musings like this is that, at the extreme, Newtonian
space combat is very very weird, and will probably be very different from what
we might expect depending on the technical details -- which are unknowable.
And bear in mind that the article simply assumes _symmetrical_ combat. What if
the two sides have different technology stacks?

I should note the article also assumes spaceships with crews launching
missiles. Why bother? Your space fleet would simply comprise missiles.

I thoroughly recommend Arthur C. Clarke's _Earthlight_ in terms of fictional
treatment of futurist space warfare (but it's asymmetrical).

~~~
DennisP
Maybe the conflict between delta-v and acceleration leads to missiles.
Interplanetary spacecraft are high delta-v, which makes them poor at evasive
maneuvering. Missiles are high acceleration. For an intercept you use the
spaceship for most of the delta-v, and let the missiles overcome last-minute
evasive maneuvers.

~~~
Tloewald
It seems like a stretch to me. Accelerating a whole big valuable spaceship
just to help a missile reach its target seems like a bad idea. Instead just
build missiles with a boost stage.

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hackband
Interesting analysis, however it complete misses the current trend military
aviation of using unmanned aircraft. Why bother with heavy life support
systems when a carefully crafted combat autopilot will do? It just needs to
understand a mission profile and some orbital mechanics basically. Also, what
would be the incentive of investing in large, vulnerable warships instead of
large numbers of inexpensive drones which could even double as kinetic
missiles?

~~~
rrss1122
It doesn't completely miss those points, it covers them actually.

"The fighter is probably nothing more than a glorified chemical-fueled missile
anyway, no more sophisticated in principle than the missiles you already
expend by the dozen. You can at least double its effective range by replacing
the pilot with a computer and turning it into a disposable missile bus (I say
at least because the computer will probably mass a lot less than the pilot and
the life support systems necessary to sustain him). It may be able to
accelerate faster too, since it’s now freed from the restriction of having to
not kill the pilot with bone-crushing sustained G forces."

Also this:

"This means that, unlike in many pop SF depictions, warship crews will
probably be quite small. Human beings require a lot of supporting mass in
supplies, life support, and crew quarters, so spacecraft in general will
probably be heavily automated. A warship will probably basically be a can full
of weaponry on top of a big fuel tank, with the crew controlling the thing
from a small habitat module. The crew will effectively be command crew; there
to tell the machines what to do, not to micromanage the operations of the
ship. You’ll probably have a small core crew to fly the ship, a few damage
control technicians, and maybe a medic or two. Serving on one will be more
like serving on a WWII U-boat than anything else."

Makes me think you actually didn't read it.

~~~
wmf
But why even have manned warships at all? Why not control everything from home
base?

~~~
rrss1122
Best reason I could think of is just the sheer size of space. Say we have a
fleet guarding Earth from the edge of the solar system, by edge I mean at or
near the heliopause. Consider that at that distance, it takes home base,
Earth, 10 hours to relay commands to warships at the edge of the solar system.
If you have one "mothership" with manned crew stationed with the automated
fleet though, that crew can control an automated fleet and respond to changes
in real time, making the fleet better able to respond to threats.

~~~
ncallaway
Though, for redundancy purposes, you probably want to have some percentage of
the fleet consist of manned motherships.

Otherwise, a single outage could take the whole fleet down.

~~~
zhengyi13
Why not Ships, at that point (of the Banksian sort)?

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hipsters_unite
> "Space combat will be rather like air combat: largely a matter of one hit
> kills." > "space battles will be in essence drive-by shootings. The
> combatants will plunge towards each other at dozens or hundreds of km/s and
> hit each other as hard as they can as they pass by each other. If both sides
> are lucky enough to have survivors they may turn back towards each other and
> try for another pass in a few hours, days, or weeks."

Combat like this was described in Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War'[0], IIRC.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War)

~~~
angersock
Probably the best military science fiction novel written--I'd even edge it
over _Starship Troopers_.

Particularly sad are the descriptions of drones that follow a ship for months,
years, and nail it right as it is pulling into port. :(

~~~
Tomte
I really liked the book (review in German: [http://www.2uo.de/the-forever-
war/](http://www.2uo.de/the-forever-war/)), but the ending was a bit too
unbelievable for me.

~~~
aluhut
I had the feeling the end was rushed. Like the author stopped developing the
story at some point and just gave it some end. So he went for a
"hollywoodesque" end. I can live with that and since the follow up books seem
to be bad, it's better then a crappy open end advertising part 2.

~~~
ghaff
Haldeman is the somewhat unusual case for me where he wrote that one book
which is solidly in my top SF list and he's never written anything else that
I've found to be compelling or memorable.

~~~
aluhut
This was my first but that is what I've heard from people whos opinion I trust
also.

Most of the time I even read books good authors wrote in completely different
genres just because they were good (Simmons for example). Even if I usually
don't like the genre, the books are still good. On the bad side there is Neal
Stephenson...I tried so hard to find the reason why so many like him...

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JulianMorrison
I think the author is wrong on visibility. Put simply: things in space are
very far away and hence visually small. You have to be looking in exactly the
right place. Finding things when you know where they are is easy. Poking
around randomly for things you might have missed is hard. Compare: the effort
to find earth-crossing asteroids - objects that like a hostile ship are dark,
drifting, and small.

~~~
patmcc
>>>objects that like a hostile ship are dark, drifting, and small

Dark on the visible light spectrum, sure. But if you have active engines or
live crew (or both), you will be _much_ warmer than space-at-large. Asteroids
are tricky because they're dark AND cold.

~~~
falcolas
This is one aspect of Mass Effect's lore that I particularly enjoyed. They
took heat into account when building the the Normandy - a stealth frigate.

It's a "stealth" ship because of two major things. Its hull's ability to
deflect or absorb radar waves, and its heating/cooling exchange which was
built in such a way that it can absorb heat into internal heat sinks for a
limited amount of time, while cooling the exterior and engine emissions in
order to reduce IR emissions.

With the stealth systems functional, you would have to find it by sight, which
is hard to do.

They even discussed how the simplest way to disable many civilian craft was to
disable their external emissive heat exchangers, since without them you
couldn't run your engines for fear of cooking everyone inside. Warships had
"tiger stripes" to limit the effect of losing one emissive surface would have
on the ship's effectiveness. They also had methods of dumping massive loads of
heat by ejecting molten salt (with an magic^w magnetic field collecting the
cooled salt near the tail of the craft).

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onion2k
Fascinating stuff. I suspect there's a missing possibility on the weapons
front though - huge numbers of small kinetic bullets going very, very fast. As
the essay points out, you'll be able to spot the enemy from a huge distance.
If you point your ship at them, accelerate to a very high velocity and then
release millions of objects out of the front the giant cloud of bullets would
carry on in a straight line towards them. So long as the other ship doesn't
know that you've done it and change course it'll straight in to your weapon.

Image throwing a bag of sand at someone running at you. That sort of thing.

(I once discussed space terrorism with someone - they suggested a good way to
hold the world to ransom would be to threaten to fly a spaceship full of sand
out of the atmosphere, slingshot it around the moon, and slowly sprinkle the
sand out the back effectively making it impossible to put anything in orbit
again if the world didn't meet your demands.)

~~~
jcromartie
If there were any sort of treaties around space combat in the future, I think
one of them would be a blanket ban on dumb kinetic weapons.

Only outlaws (terrorists, rogue states) would use machine-guns in space.

~~~
mrec
If there's any sort of space combat in the future, there's going to be a very
large number of "dumb kinetic weapons" as a result, whatever "official"
weapons you're using. Shrapnel.

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Symmetry
Interesting, but I think Atomic Rockets does it better:
[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/)

~~~
icegreentea
Gah! I was about to post this. I remember reading that when I was in
highschool. It certainly put a damper on some of my imagination... or at least
made me far more aware of what was fantasy and is (hard) science fiction.

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ISV_Damocles
The author of this ought to read a plot summary of 2312:
[http://www.amazon.com/2312-Kim-Stanley-
Robinson/dp/031609811...](http://www.amazon.com/2312-Kim-Stanley-
Robinson/dp/0316098116)

In that book, a colony on Mercury is attacked through the use of several
billion _pebbles_ that were flung into the solar system in a calculated way
such that they all converge on the colony several years later and the kinetic
energy they gained going down the gravity well combined with the sheer mass is
a devastating attack and totally undetectable (a single pebble would just burn
up in an atmosphere or be a consideration in colony design on an atmosphere-
less planet like Mercury, so why monitor it? Billions of them would form a
destructive plasma cloud if aimed at Earth or simply a kinetic energy weapon
against Mercury).

Further, the author discounted kinetic energy weapons too easily. A rail gun
in space would not have to worry about air resistance limiting the range or
impact magnitude of the rail slug, and so would be a very effective weapon in
ship-to-ship combat (or more likely, railgun installations on satellites aimed
at the intruding ship).

Taken together, I think space warfare wouldn't involve ships as we know it at
all. It would be planets firing at each other similar to ICBMs between
countries today, with drone-like mobile weapons platforms _with stealth_ that
are launched as part of commercial launches and placed via gravity slingshots
(and so can be as cold as space until an activation signal is sent to it,
allowing stealth tech to actually work). These would be placed near potential
enemies and probably allies alike, and would be used both offensively and
defensively: if an enemy makes an open attack, they would target the attack
itself, if they attack, it would reduce the potential response time, though it
could not be as significant in magnitude as a massive attack launched from the
planetary surface.

(Warning: The book is really not a good first one to read from Kim Stanley
Robinson, as it explores some of the more esoteric elements of the Mars
Trilogy even further, with a focus more on how technologies of _all_ types,
especially bioengineering and artificial intelligence, would affect societal
norms, and is far enough away from our current norms that it'd probably "gross
out" people ill-prepared for it. Better to read the Mars Trilogy first and
follow the line of reasoning that produces the kind of society in 2312, I
think.)

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scrumper
This was very interesting and well thought out.

I thought of another attack vector: systems disruption - hacking, if you like.
It has the advantage of working at the speed of light (so being easy to aim),
energy efficient, and relatively hard to defend against.

At the crude end of the spectrum we have blanket 'denial' attacks: flooding
the enemy ship with huge amounts of EM radiation aimed at knocking something
important out. Idea here is that while lasers do much the same, they work
simply by melting the hull. Using other frequencies may present the
opportunity to selectively overload important systems, zap internal
electronics, or disrupt sensitive and hard to shield components like targeting
sensors.

More refined approaches might involve penetrating shipboard networks using the
enemy space navy's command & control infrastructure. There's no need to
describe the arms race of exploits & countermeasures which would result.

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Zigurd
There is a fundamental problem imagining space "combat" in that cheap WMD-ish
"space junk" weapons that deny access to space would dominate any space war
scenario due to the likely asymmetry of war in space. That's going to be true
for the next few centuries.

Interstellar travel implies access to plant-scorching amounts of energy, and
that, again, puts warfare into MAD WMD territory right off the bat. War will
be short, genocidal, and boring in a realistic vision of the future.

Hard science fiction inevitably leaves behind many aspects of today's life,
including current and merely extrapolated ideas of warfare and military power.
That's what makes it interesting and difficult. That's also what makes pseudo-
hard science fiction unsatisfying.

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niels_olson
Space is absolutely huge. Scarcity of resources is a trivial problem compared
to travel. That is, the odds of a finding a commercially viable alternative
source of whatever element or small molecule or even habitable systems is
wildly less expensive than war. Why bother fighting? The only consideration
would be a situation where one civilization is so overwhelmingly more
powerful, the annihilation of the weaker is trivial, like stepping on an
anthill. Except the odds of your foot ever landing on an anthill approaches
nil.

Don't cross the street to get your ass kicked.

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logfromblammo
The essay mentions deploying cheap infrared detectors in a variety of orbits,
to eliminate stealth.

Well, each of those detectors is also a space mine and/or missile. Wrap them
in black velvet. Make their power supply a dual-purpose radioisotope battery
and nuclear bomb. Space combat essentially becomes swarms of exploding robots
trying to destroy each other, such that the attacker can get a relativistic
kinetic missile to the significant target without being intercepted and
deflected.

There are no capital ships, no fighters, no scouts, or anything of the sort.
You just have clouds of smart missiles trying to influence the targeting of
the planet-killing rock.

Also, where were the "sand shotguns"? It's fine to consider missile swarms
that overwhelm your target's missile defenses, but if you throw a trillion
micrometeorites at your opponent, he's going to have a bad time. Besides that,
it is also reaction mass, usable for maneuvering your own vessel.

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hartator
I think the article miss a big point: why war it will be?

In term of definition of objectives mainly. If the objective is to exterminate
another civilization, why not just launch an infinite number of small vessels
that will crash on planets, space station and space ships? If it's controlled
by an IA, who cares? the only thing which will matter will be economical
sustainability.

if the objective is to take control of a planet or a solar system, you are
going to need big vessels, troops and other SF concepts. But I don't think
anyone will care to take control of population. They might care about
ressources and installation. Everything is so fragile, that it wont make any
sense to try to gain control of it, the odds that every will be value-less at
the end of the fight are simply to high!

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modoc
I was really impressed by The Lost Fleet's detailed exploration of space
combat -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet)

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omikun2
I agree with the notion of unmanned drones as missiles. Launch a few dozen of
those in orbit and activate them when needed. In interplanetary situations, I
see launching missiles days if not weeks before actual orbit intersection, so
acceleration is not a factor, but rather it will all depend on your available
delta-v. I think playing with Kerbal Space Program will give you a better
intuition in addition to combing through atomic rockets.

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sand500
One thing that wasn't addressed was space junk accumulating around planets
because spaceships were blowing each other up. Unless the ships have really
think armour or shields, planets would not the place to have space battles.

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andrewflnr
An interesting scene I ran across in the novel _Leviathan Wakes_ was two
planets' miltaries trying to get control of asteroids suitable for dropping on
each other's heads. That felt credible to me.

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gaius
_There is one exception I can think of: a Q-ship. You take a merchant ship,
fill its hold with missiles, and put launchers and other weaponry under hidden
blow-away panels on its hull. Of course, it’ll probably have significantly
inferior performance to a real warship, since it has a merchant ship’s engines
and hull. And it’ll only work once or twice, until the enemy starts demanding
merchant ships submit to inspections before they get within weapons range of
their important facilities._

Once is enough. The Soviets annexed Czechoslovakia with civilian airliners on
scheduled flights full of heavily armed, bloodthirsty Spetsnaz. Once you get a
foothold you can bring in reinforcements at your leisure.

~~~
eunoia
I believe a Q-ship refers specifically to the use of fake merchant ships to
draw would be attackers in and destroy them with the element of surprise.
Would the Soviet/Czechoslovakia strategy be more aptly described as a Trojan
Horse?

