Future Warfare

[Vertigo]

ram scoops work by putting out a huge 'scoop' either physical or magnetic which collects all the tiny amounts of matter in space and uses them as reaction mass. The act of catching them is what creates the drag. The question is purely whether one can throw them out the back faster than the speed you caught them. If you can then your aggregate force is positive and you have acceleration. Note that you have to get up to a pretty high speed first before the ram scoop becomes practical. And once up to high speeds it does not take a lot of matter in space to create drag. And believe me if you have double digit g's acceleration on an interstellar voyage you are going to get up to seriously high speeds (relativistic even) and you are going to have some serious drag.

I'm afraid I still have to disagree. If you are defending a strategic site of some sort (planet, space station, wormhole etc.) then you will almost certainly have some fixed defences and those weapons will typically be bigger than what can be carried practically on a spaceship. If you are attacking such an installation the one thing you absolutely would not do is slow down to give those defences an easy shot at you. Your only real advantage over the fixed defences is your manoeuvrability and you aren't going to make it easy for them.

On the other hand your targeting is going to be relatively easy, fully controlled by computer, and that computer knowing about each duck and dive you might do, it could quite easily target the fixed installations whereas they, not knowing before hand how you are going to duck and dive would be at a disadvantage. And the mobile defences would want to be on the move for the same reasons. I guess the main question is how fast and if someone is shooting at me I sure as heck would keep moving just as fast as I can, leaving my automated weaponry to compensate.

Actually if we are talking in system battles I would imagine you are more likely to lob missiles at each other from behind some cover like a planet. I've never understood why so many space battles seem to need to 'aim' their missiles at a visible enemy; smart, stealthy missiles would do all that for you.

Whilst on the topic of weapons I would personally expect laser (or laser type) weapons to be more effective than missiles for space battles. By the time a missiles reaches you there's a good chance you might have destroyed it, confused it or dodged it. With laser you get no time to do any of those things. Also the inverse square law hardly applies to these devices. That law refers to a point source where all the energy is dissipating over an ever increasing sphere. Lasers are very tight beams of energy (near as dammit parallel) so the only thing that would limit their range (within reason*) is the amount of matter in space that might absorb/reflect the energy.

*obviously it is never going to be perfectly parallel so over interstellar distances it would diminish. Though it's worth noting that only artificial radiation in this form is ever likely to be detectable at interstellar distances. I believe our 'normal' tv and radio signals coming from point sources are only detectable out to about a light day or two. And that is also why we can still receive signals from Voyager even though its transmitter is only 23 watts.

 

[Bowler1]

Can't we all just get along?

Bowler1 takes a god given opportunity to pop Spiegal with his RAY GUN.


I still think speed could be a problem here Vertigo mate. Simply scattering dust and debris into the area this fast moving fleet will pass through would eventually wear down/overload their shields giving the defenders a wonderful firework show (as the ships break up) and the shortest war in history.

 

[Darkchild130]

Minefields. Or as bowler says, debris.
Say goodbye to your speed.
Liquid/ gas based counter measures, say goodbye to your lasers' effectiveness.

 

[Bowler1]

Liquid/ gas based counter measures, say goodbye to your lasers' effectiveness.

Don't tell anyone about the last one or my RAY GUNS won't be worth the battery packs they come with.

 

[Darkchild130]

Batteries? Pah, in the future we have ULTRA CAPACITORS!

 

[Vertigo]

Minefields. Or as bowler says, debris.
Say goodbye to your speed.
Liquid/ gas based counter measures, say goodbye to your lasers' effectiveness.

Far too much space out there for minefields to be effective. Think how many mines you would need just to cover the Earth effectively even in LEO; it boggles the mind. And if you are thinking of exploding the mines on close approach rather than contact that's not going to work very well in vacuum unless the mine is sufficiently HUGE to do damage through fragmentation.

You would also need horrendously large amounts of liquid or gas as it would disperse incredibly fast. The same with debris; it would take huge amounts to be significant (I'm not talking relativistic speeds) and such debris would be a nightmare to your own forces to clear up afterwards (assuming you win).

 

[Darkchild130]

Who cares about clearing up afterwards, the objective is to win. And who cares if you don't have enough mines, minefields are area denial weapons and deterrents, the mere fact that they are there is enough for them to be effective.
You would slow down because you don't want to hit them, not because you have hit them.

Still not thinking like a soldier. This is a combat thread after all.

It wouldn't take much to create a particle type defensive measure dense enough to defeat weaponised lasers. Super fine aluminium or whatever, used like a smokescreen. Or as a directional field, fire it like a shotgun in the direction of the enemy ship, negating his lasers while you instantly follow up with barrages of solid projectiles. If they are moving so fast as you say, they won't be able to manoeuvre fast enough to get a clear shot. It would probably take a lot less effort to develop than the lasers themselves.
Missiles fired from railguns are a way more viable option for offensive weapons.

 

[Bowler1]

Soldiers - why use soldiers? Robots will do just fine and robot ships don't count when they hit the gas/pebble/foil cloud and get destroyed. All you'd need are a few to get through and it's curtains for your soldiers.


I'm still not with Vertigo's fast bypass as the be all, but it does have merit.


Here's one to upset the apple cart. Self replication. You send out a cloud of weapons and what not and my robots take this mass and grow. You blow one up and the following robot buddies grab the mass from the weapon and the destroyed robot and make three new robots. So every time you shoot my crazy robots, they grow and keep on coming.


I'm having this capacitor - ever lasting RAY GUNS.... My dream. Everyone else's nightmare.

 

[JoanDrake]

It may seem odd to recommend an anime in regard to this, but I suggest that you watch the first half of "Bodaceous Space Pirates" in this connection.
Now I know what you are thinking - silly kid's cartoon - not worth watching. But do. If you have only read old fashioned space opera, then the very modern-looking space engagements in this, full of electronic cyber-warfare against unseen enemies, will be a total revelation.

Another thought - space warfare, as well as turning out to be highly electronic, might be highly asymmetric, with terrorists damaging vulnerable spacecraft via internal or external means, leaving their frustrated enemies wondering who to punish, or how to put a stop to it. Sure, you could bombard a planet, or blow up a space habitat, but what good will that do you?

All-out warfare between rival planetary civilisations is possible in theory, but given the potential for MAD, how likely is it? The US and USSR could have more or less destroyed each other, but didn't. Old-fashioned all-out war between states is becoming rarer and rarer these days. It's all civil war and terrorism now.

Isn't that the way war is actually developing now? There's less and less concentration on big artillery and immense troop movements and more and more effort and money being put into small groups of extremely well equipped elites. Possibly the whole idea of future space warfare will be getting one very well armed super soldier into an enemy's vital area

Batteries? Pah, in the future we have ULTRA CAPACITORS!

Soldiers - why use soldiers? Robots will do just fine and robot ships don't count when they hit the gas/pebble/foil cloud and get destroyed. All you'd need are a few to get through and it's curtains for your soldiers.


I'm still not with Vertigo's fast bypass as the be all, but it does have merit.


Here's one to upset the apple cart. Self replication. You send out a cloud of weapons and what not and my robots take this mass and grow. You blow one up and the following robot buddies grab the mass from the weapon and the destroyed robot and make three new robots. So every time you shoot my crazy robots, they grow and keep on coming.


I'm having this capacitor - ever lasting RAY GUNS.... My dream. Everyone else's nightmare.

The one absolute advantage of any kind of repeating ray gun is you don't have to carry all that bulky ammunition. Modern movies get around this by having even WWII soldiers carry submachine guns that must be firing 1 mm or less sized bullets. In reality a Thompson even with a full drum magazine, (which I don't think were used in WWII) only fires for a few seconds at full auto and then has to be changed

 

[Vertigo]

Anyone conducting a real war cares a great deal about clearing up afterwards. This isn't just a few ruined building that can be bulldozed away. But an entire area of space that is likely to be un-navigable and will be a major problem to clear up. We're already hitting this problem now and no one has any realistic solution for clearing up. There've been ideas but no really practical ones yet. It's no use conquering a place if you can't then exploit it. It's no use saving a place from conquering if you can no longer operate from it. Any commander that does not consider the aftermath of their war is more useful to the enemy than to themselves. I do think like a soldier!

Re mines: I reiterate, in a 3 dimensional space the number of mines needed to be effective would be simply huge you have to completely surround the area to be protected otherwise your enemy simply goes around, over or under. I just cannot see mines as effective in space battles. The one place they might be useful is in space that must be traversed, for example immediately outside something like a wormhole.

Re the lasers, if they are weaponised they will simply vapourise any chaff in their way. If a load of aluminium chaff is sufficient to stop them then they are clearly not powerful enough to do damage to a hull. If they're powerful enough to do damage to a hull then anything short of a hull in their way will only be there for a micro second. Remember a weaponised laser would be designed to melt through armoured hull plating, maybe even superconducting plating (though I've always been sceptical about applying super conductors on such a large scale), they wouldn't even notice a load of chaff. Such chaff is effective at dispersing/confusing low power radar or sighting lasers, not much more.

And incidentally when you fire your missile at me, I just take it out with my laser or else I just change course. Even if I'm travelling fast space battles will inevitably be conducted at considerable distance giving me plenty of time to dodge or destroy your missiles (which incidentally make your vessels bigger and heavier and so slower and less manoeuvrable and very dependent upon supply of munitions).

Bowler I agree the fast pass approach certainly wouldn't be the 'be all' but it would be my preferred approach certainly for ship to ship combat.

 

[Darkchild130]

Anyone conducting a real war cares a great deal about clearing up afterwards. This isn't just a few ruined building that can be bulldozed away. But an entire area of space that is likely to be un-navigable and will be a major problem to clear up. We're already hitting this problem now and no one has any realistic solution for clearing up. There've been ideas but no really practical ones yet. It's no use conquering a place if you can't then exploit it. It's no use saving a place from conquering if you can no longer operate from it. Any commander that does not consider the aftermath of their war is more useful to the enemy than to themselves. I do think like a soldier!

Name a war that has been conducted with minimising damage as a priority, bearing in mind the last couple have been mere counter insurgency operations, and we pretty much tore the **** out of those places. Soldiers don't care about stuff like that, we care about achieving objectives. I say we, because I am one.

Re mines: I reiterate, in a 3 dimensional space the number of mines needed to be effective would be simply huge you have to completely surround the area to be protected otherwise your enemy simply goes around, over or under. I just cannot see mines as effective in space battles. The one place they might be useful is in space that must be traversed, for example immediately outside something like a wormhole.

And when you make your enemy go around over or under you funnel their movement and your fire covers the gaps. Thanks for reiterating my point about area denial. The knowledge of the existence of a minefield alone makes it serve it's purpose.

Re the lasers, if they are weaponised they will simply vapourise any chaff in their way. If a load of aluminium chaff is sufficient to stop them then they are clearly not powerful enough to do damage to a hull. If they're powerful enough to do damage to a hull then anything short of a hull in their way will only be there for a micro second. Remember a weaponised laser would be designed to melt through armoured hull plating, maybe even superconducting plating (though I've always been sceptical about applying super conductors on such a large scale), they wouldn't even notice a load of chaff. Such chaff is effective at dispersing/confusing low power radar or sighting lasers, not much more.

A weaponised laser would need a power source so large it would negate any weight savings you are assuming. Direct energy weapons on that magnitude are not anywhere near being realised, whereas projectile weaponry of all kinds have been around for ages, it is a simple matter to improve. Remember this thread is limited to the next hundred years or so. We haven't even figured out functioning super capacitors yet, and space flight hasn't really advanced much in 40 odd years. Far more practical to use existing weapons than pour money into something that can be stopped by heavy smoke. That's how weapons development works, and is why there is not currently any serious efforts being put into weaponised lasers. And the ones being developed to shoot down missiles are about as far away from a weaponised laser as a bow to a rifle.

And incidentally when you fire your missile at me, I just take it out with my laser or else I just change course. Even if I'm travelling fast space battles will inevitably be conducted at considerable distance giving me plenty of time to dodge or destroy your missiles (which incidentally make your vessels bigger and heavier and so slower and less manoeuvrable and very dependent upon supply of munitions).

Ships would fight with logistical chains in place, like any other war. Your ship with its magic all powerful laser needs spare parts too. It also might need a separate power plant to power the laser, which would weigh a lot. A ship designed for war would carry enough ammo to last months, in a straight up fight this point is moot.

Bowler I agree the fast pass approach certainly wouldn't be the 'be all' but it would be my preferred approach certainly for ship to ship combat.

The idea that commanders care about clearing up afterwards is quite simply ludicrous. People flattened compounds and villages every day with air strikes for years in afghan, and those were the homes of people that weren't even our enemies!

 

[Bowler1]

Anyone conducting a real war cares a great deal about clearing up afterwards.

Iraq, Bush and Blair. Assad and Syria. Hitler and Germany. War is emotion. War is unpredictable. Total war is fighting for today and worrying about the cost tomorrow, if you have one. Sensible decision making goes out the window when desperate and fighting for life. My logical Spock like friend, let emotion take you.

Heehee.

 

[Vertigo]

I still disagree (and I was a soldier by the way as well - too old now). The soldier on the ground doesn't tend to care, which can be a major pain for the top commanders. If the destruction hampers your movements then it's bad - stop and think for a minute about how much effort is made to capture bridges and, yes, the dilemma was always that you wanted to destroy the bridge to stop enemy movements but wanted it intact to permit your own movements. Here your debris field will effectively stop all movement in the space around your objective.

I guess it all depends on what your intentions are. If you just want to destroy them then, sure, you don't care. If you want to exploit the planet you might as well go home now. Modern surface warfare will simply not translate; with tracked vehicles and helicopters you can get around pretty much any destruction you unleash on the ground. If you fill space with debris there's simply nowhere for anyone to go around.

re the mines; you are still thinking in two dimensions. There will always be an awful lot more space around the minefield (unless you have sufficient resources to fill the entire system with mines!!!!) which makes it the opposite of funnelling. Mines are generally used in conjunction with the surrounding landscape which will naturally funnel people to where you've put them. There is no landscape to do that funnelling in space. It's just not going to work.

I accept the one hundred year limitation in the thread and yes my energy weapons idea is looking a lot further out than that if I'm honest. And yes you will almost certainly need fusion before you achieve that. But then I think you'll need fusion before any military space vehicle is even remotely practical.

I agree you need a logistical chain but the smaller you can make that the better.

 

[sozme]

In the "near future" extra-planetary war will be between groups of humans based in the Solar System. It will be about the rights of those on other planets/moons/asteroids to govern their own affairs. It will pit the massive resources of the home planet against the gravity advantage of the few humans who will live offworld.

Even if we manage to colonise a few star systems -- which may be possible toward the end of the 400 year timescale -- I don't think interstellar war is on the cards.

Hello Mr. Corey

 

[Darkchild130]

We'll if I'm honest, I doubt we will be fighting big space battle within a century, so all my ideas probably are wrong. It will probably be defence installations around the earth, moon and mars (let's face it we're not going anywhere else soon) and any combat will still focus on land battles.

I guess the main effort will be on deployment methods of troops/vehicles/drones from orbit, and tactics surrounding securing "beach heads" to support said deployment.

 

[Vertigo]

Here I agree completely For the foreseeable future space warfare is, I suspect, going to be just way too expensive, beyond satellites and shooting at those satellites from the ground (with missiles )!

 

[JonH]

Hello Mr. Corey

Sorry. I saw a film of that name with Tony Curtis, but I doubt that's what you are talking about.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Harry Harrison, Homeworld Series
The character is shown old Hollywood Space battle after arriving on the Rebel space ship and laughs at the stupidity.
I'll not spoil it for anyone that hasn't read the series. I read the trilogy in reverse order due to order I got them. The books standalone quite well.

 

[Spiegal]

I was thinking, to what extent do you guys think a man portable air defense system would be effective against spacecraft in low earth orbit? I remember in Elysium when Kruger (what a guy) fired a suitcase missile at a dropship heading towards the space station.

I would have thought it would rely on surveillance satellites orbiting the planet to relay targeting data to the launcher but in a hundred years maybe the whole unit could be miniaturised into a system that is entirely transported by an infantryman. In fact great strides have been made in ground based radar capable of detecting debris in orbit that is between one and ten centimetres in diameter.

Even now a single soldier can carry a warhead capable of defeating the strongest tank armour leading them to be increasingly reliant on active defence.

With a single soldier capable of launching an incredibly powerful warhead how would this affect a ground invasion from orbit?

In my opinion I would launch drop pods for the first wave, with fragmenting airframes for radar countermeasures (credit goes to Starship troopers) followed by dropships to bring in other equipment and provide transport when large areas of the ground had been pacified by friendly forces.

 

[Vertigo]

The problem wouldn't be the warhead but the fuel. Off the top of my head I think the problem would be producing a portable missile that has sufficient fuel to reach Low Earth Orbit. Current man portable ground to air missiles are designed for normal flight altitudes so maybe will go up to 10-20km (actually I think most man portable system only have about a 5km range). Low Earth Orbit is from 160km to 2,000km so that is ten plus times farther and would require much more fuel. If we come up with a much more efficient fuel then maybe, otherwise I doubt it.